Yancey offers a new and different perspective on the life of Christ and his work - his teaching, his miracles, his death and resurrection - and ultimately, who he was and why he came. Relating the gospel events to the world we live in today, The Jesus I Never Knew gives a moving and refreshing portrait of the central figure of history. With a willingness to tackle difficult questions, Yancey looks at the radical words of this itinerant Jewish carpenter and asks whether we are taking him seriously enough in our own day and age.
From the manger in Bethlehem to the cross in Jerusalem, Yancey presents a complex character who generates questions as well as answers; a disturbing and exhilarating Jesus who wants to radically transform our lives and stretch our faith.
The Jesus I Never Knew uncovers a Jesus who is brilliant, creative, challenging, fearless, compassionate, unpredictable and ultimately satisfying. This honest book will help the reader discover a different Jesus from the Sunday school figure, the sweetly smiling Victorian Savior, and all the cultural cliches that have tamed Jesus and kept him in comfortable religious boxes.
According to Yancey, "No one who meets Jesus ever stays the same. In the end, I found the process of writing this book to be a great act of faith-strengthening. Jesus has rocked my own preconceptions and has made me ask hard questions about why those of us who bear his name don't do a better job of following him."
Winner of the 1996 Gold Medallion Christian Book of the Year Award.
"There is no writer in the evangelical world that I admire and appreciate more." - Billy Graham
"This is the best book about Jesus I have ever read, probably the best book about Jesus in the whole century. Yancey gently took away my blinders and blazed the trail through my own doubting fears, pious know-it-all, and critical balderdash until I saw the Savior anew and thought I heard him ask me, 'Now who do you say that I am?' and I understood the question as I never had before." - Lewis B. Smedes, Fuller Theological Seminary, Author of Forgive and Forget
"Yancey's flair for honest, vivid, well-informed down-to-earthness gives piercing power to these broodings on the gospel facts about Jesus Christ. In a day when novel ideas about Jesus are all the rage, Yancey's pages offer major help for seeing the Savior as he really was." - James I. Packer, Regent College, Author of Knowing God
"When we look hard into God's Word, we always learn something new about Jesus. Thanks, Philip, for pointing the way in your new book." - Joni Eareckson Tada, President, JAF Ministries
"In The Jesus I Never Knew, Philip Yancey is both more personal and more focused on Jesus than perhaps he has ever been before. Jesus becomes, under his faithful eye, human and divine and powerfully present, in the text of Scripture and in our lives. It is Yancey's progression from a view of our Lord too narrow for the full promises of the Bible to a presence both broad and blessed--which is the genuine gift of this book." - Walter Wangerin, Jr., Author of Ragman and Other Cries of Faith