Jesus, the Son of Man is a collection of short stories which seek to portray Jesus from the point of view of seventy seven people around him, Greeks and Romans, Jews and Persians, both friend and foe. Some are based on actual characters from the New Testament, some are created by Gibran.
For Kahlil Gibran, re-telling the story of Jesus had been the ambition of a lifetime. He had known the story from childhood, when as a poor boy in the Middle East he had been taught by a priest reading the Bible with him. Now in his maturity, and a successful writer in the United States, he wanted tell the story as no one had told it before. With Jesus the Son of Man, he did just that. Set alongside Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, here is ‘The Gospel according to Gibran’.
Gibran’s approach is to allow the reader to see Jesus through the eyes of a large and disparate group of people. Some of these characters will be familiar: we hear from Peter, Mary his mother, Luke, Pontius Pilate, Thomas and Mary Magdalene. But many other characters are new, created by Gibran, including a Jerusalem cobbler, an old Greek shepherd, and the mother of Judas. ‘My son was a good man and upright,” she tells us. “He was tender and kind to me, and he loved his kin and his countrymen.’
What connects these people is the fact that they all have an opinion about Jesus, though no two opinions are the same. ‘The Galilean was a conjuror, and a deceiver,’ says a young priest. But then a woman caught in adultery experienced him in a different way. ‘When Jesus didn’t judge me, I became a woman without a tainted memory, and I was free and my head was no longer bowed.’
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