About

If it were possible for Jesus to tell his own life story, how would it match up with the versions in the New Testament? Do the Gospels, written long after his alleged death, faithfully recreate his words, his deeds, his background, his personality, his teaching?

Or is there another history, another story that only he could tell?

I, JESUS is a new interpretation, drawn from some of the provocative and challenging theories that have come to light in recent years, setting them against a background of the period and places in which he lived. In the language of contemporary verse, he describes his childhood, his relationship with his parents, and with Mary Magdalene. He explains the role he found himself expected to play, and as a Jew, tells of his growing disaffection with orthodox Judaism, his betrayal to the Romans, his crucifixion and his survival.

In the second half of his life, he takes an important part in the establishment of a breakaway religion, open to anyone wishing to join. But based as it is on the humanitarian principles of love, tolerance and compassion, Jesus suggests he cannot take responsibility for what the human race has chosen to make of it.

Proudly published by Post Pressed

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Reviews

From the Introduction:

“A subject like Jesus cannot be confined to fact. In the past, we had ‘the Christ of faith’, a religious imagining based on stories that were believed only with difficulty to be his actual history....

Rowan, knowing the history very well, has found words that no historian would find, for the personality and thinking of Jesus. I am deeply moved every time I read this poem. ‘History’, as the poem says, ‘is not for the soul’. Here is the soul, in words that speak to more of ourselves than any historical fact can do. They speak to us, not as religious people, but as human people, who will simply recognise another of our own, and be warmed by our similarity to him.”

Barbara Thiering
Sydney
September 2000

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Extract

Take what you will,
from what I tell you.

Take what you need to fill
the empty spaces of your soul,
and let me leave you what I can,
a child, a man, the champion
of a broken cause
that came again,
inspiringly to life.

This was my story,
adapted to whatever race
required my image
to present a likely
recognisable divine,
all hidden in the poetry
and symbols of an age
that needed to extend itself.

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