LECTURES ON THE POPE'S BOOK ABOUT JESUS OF NAZARETH

VATICAN CITY, 29 NOV 2011 (VIS) - The Vatican Publishing House is organising a series of lectures to promote Benedict XVI's book: "Jesus of Nazareth. From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection". One of these took place yesterday in the Italian University of Messina where the main address was given by Bishop Enrico Dal Covolo S.D.B., rector of the Pontifical Lateran University.

  Bishop Dal Covolo explained that, while the Pope's first book on Jesus of Nazareth covered His public life beginning with His Baptism in the Jordan, the second is dedicated to the last few days of His earthly existence, until the resurrection.

  "This disproportion", said the Bishop, "helps us to understand immediately that the passion, death and resurrection are not simply the epilogue of Jesus' life. They are what gives meaning to all the rest. It is from the crucified and risen Christ that the entire narrative of His life is illuminated". Likewise "the accounts of His passion and death, though they come last in the Gospels, are the oldest and most detailed of the oral and written traditions".

  The book starts from the premise that "if scholarly exegesis is not to exhaust itself in constantly new hypotheses, becoming theologically irrelevant, it must take a methodological step forward and see itself once again as a theological discipline, without abandoning its historical character".

  "The road along which the Pope takes us", said Bishop Dal Covolo, "leads us to meditate upon the 'hour' of Jesus, His 'lifting up'; in other words, upon the inseparable moment of death-resurrection".

  The book "is the work of a lifetime, in which both the method used and the contents ... draw nourishment from a deep-rooted and mature love for Christ. In the final analysis, the leitmotif of the work is intimate friendship with Jesus, a theme which the Pope himself personifies as both witness and theologian. Indeed, true knowledge of Jesus - for Pope Benedict just as for the Beloved Disciple - comes from resting on His heart".
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