ARANJUEZ, Spain, JULY 26, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Archbishop Angelo Amato invited readers to delve into Benedict XVI's "Jesus of Nazareth," and there discover the wonder of the face of Christ revealed by the Gospels.
The secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said this Tuesday when speaking about the book at a summer course on the thought of the Pope, organized by the King Juan Carlos University Foundation.
The Salesian archbishop said the Holy Father presents "a living picture of Jesus" in a world where Christ's image is "often so distorted by thousands of different hypotheses that it becomes unrecognizable."
"Delve into the book and read it attentively and discover the wonder of the face of Christ revealed in the Gospel," the archbishop urged.
He said that "Jesus of Nazareth" presents the "Jesus of the Gospels and of the Church, the Jesus that lived on our earth, who makes himself known as the Son of God even before Easter, the Jesus of history and of faith."
The secretary of the doctrinal congregation said that Benedict XVI accomplished an important task of purifying and clarifying contemporary research about Jesus. He said this research has often lost "the Biblical face of the Lord, reducing him to a figure of the past" or considering him to be, at most, "a moral teacher or a revolutionary."
The Vatican official underlined some of the most common erroneous interpretations of Jesus, united by "the basic refusal of the supernatural." But the basis of Christology, he said, is both "the historical validity of the Gospels" and their "biographical nature."
Archbishop Amato said the Pope's objective was to harmonize "history and faith."
"'Fides' without history lacks a foundation; history without 'fides' is insufficient to understand the truth of God in Christ," the archbishop said. "These are the pillars of the truth of Christianity: salvation in history and in faith."
ZE07072606 - 2007-07-26