What happens in chapter 1 of The Jesus I Never Knew?

The popular Christian book The Jesus I Never Knew by Philip Yancey attempts to explain the life, accomplishments, and impact of Jesus in a simple way that readers can easily understand and relate to. Chapter 1 of the book is titled "The Jesus I Thought I Knew."

Yancey starts by explaining the common conception of Jesus that he and many other Christians received in Sunday school. In most paintings and illustrations, Jesus is pictured as handsome, white, and shining with benevolent light. Later in a Bible college, Yancey and other students learned of a more cosmic Jesus that is the focal point of the world. Even so, his teachers urged students to develop a "personal relationship with Jesus Christ." Instead, says Yancey, Jesus became more remote for him in that part of his life. Still later, as the worship of Jesus became popular during the hippy movement, Yancey saw the hypocrisy of Bible school administrators who forbade long hair and beards, whereas Jesus himself is always pictured as having long hair and a beard.

In 1971, writes Yancey, he saw the film The Gospel According to St. Matthew, which depicts Jesus as a man of power, a revolutionary, and a troublemaker; in other words, he was a person "who would have been kicked out of Bible colleges and rejected by most churches." Yancey, at the time a young journalist, was forced to reevaluate what Jesus meant to him personally.

Yancey then emphasizes the importance of Jesus in modern culture. The calendar is split in half according to his birth date. People use his name as a curse word. His historical impact is immense. Still, Yancey explains that he is writing the book not because Jesus is famous but rather to explore his own doubts. It is difficult to have faith in someone you cannot directly see. To complicate the picture, everyone who approaches Jesus sees him from their own unique perspective and the perspective of their culture. This makes answering the question of "Who was Jesus?" extremely difficult.

To write this book, Yancey studied countless books about Jesus in libraries and watched a vast collection of films based on Jesus' life. However, he writes that "the more I studied Jesus, the more difficult it became to pigeon-hole him." He adds:

Jesus was a human being, a Jew in Galilee with a name and a family, a person who was in a way just like everyone else. Yet in another way he was something different than anyone who had ever lived on earth before.

To sum up, Yancey uses the first chapter of The Jesus I Never Knew to introduce readers to what he is going to do in the rest of the book. His intention is to explore the life of Jesus from the perspective of the doubts that trouble him as well as the viewpoints of those who in the past have attempted to explain him.

What occurs in chapter 2 of Philip Yancey's The Jesus I Never Knew?

The title of chapter 2 of The Jesus I Never Knew by Philip Yancey is "Birth: The Visited Planet." In it, Yancey discusses the birth of Jesus in the light of the gospel accounts, history, Christian authors and scholars, and his own interpretations.

Yancey begins the chapter by noting that Christmas cards depict the birth of Jesus in numerous fanciful ways, but he finds that the gospel stories are quite different. There was nothing sentimental about the real first Christmas, in which a teenage girl was miraculous impregnated "without ever having had sex," traveled to another town, then gave birth to the world's savior in a barn. Mary is always shown as calm and holy, but when the angel first appeared to her, she was troubled and frightened. According to Jewish law, a pregnant unwed mother could be stoned to death. When Joseph hears about it, at first he wants to quietly end their betrothal, but an angel convinces him to change his mind. Mary must have had great courage to go ahead with the pregnancy. Yancey shares quotes from C.S. Lewis and Malcolm Muggeridge to back up this assessment.

Yancey follows this with a summary of the historical situation at the time. Caesar Augustus ruled Rome, and Herod the Great was the local ruler. Herod was a murderous madman, and though the slaughter of the infants at the time of Jesus' birth is not recorded historically, it is in keeping with Herod's character. As a result of Herod's threat, Jesus "spent his infancy hidden in Egypt as a refugee" before moving to Nazareth with his family.

Yancey then points out that the Biblical accounts describe Jesus in terms not often associated with a deity. He had a humble birth in a stable, people did not fear to approach him, he was an underdog rather than a powerful person, and he was courageous in laying aside the power of his godhood to come to Earth in a position of such helplessness.

The chapter closes with a look at the Christmas story as presented in chapter 12 of the book of Revelation. In this account, a woman clothed with the sun is about to give birth, and an "enormous red dragon" waits to devour the infant. The woman manages to flee with her child, and "all-out cosmic war begins." Yancey ends with a view of two angels contemplating the universe by author J.B. Phillip. They point out that in all the vast universe, Jesus chose to come to the insignificant planet Earth. His love in doing this is "the key to understanding Christmas."