By Henri Daniel-Rops

“Jesus is at once of history and beyond it.” To write a life of Jesus Christ, to chronicle his sayings and his works, to study him in the context of his historical time and place, is not simply to compose a biography. It is to encounter a unique and tremendous mystery: the mystery of the Incarnation, in the words of Henri Daniel-Rops: of “the enigma posed by this man, like one of ourselves, whose words and gestures bring into constant evidence unfathomable forces, by this countenance deformed by agony through which we glimpse the very face of God.” Jesus and His Times makes tangible the momentous first years anno Domini, capturing the climate and culture of Palestine, presenting the characters of Jesus’s disciples and contemporaries, and imbuing the entire narrative with an assured conviction in the power and glory of Jesus Christ and the Church which He established the salvation of the world.

Universally praised upon its original publication in 1954, Jesus and His Times tells the story of the central figure of all humanity, Jesus of Nazareth, from his humble birth in a Bethlehem stable to his glorious resurrection which brought victory over death and eternal life to all who believe in him. To serve as biographer to the only-begotten Son of God is truly an audacious task, requiring a rare combination of fortitude, humility, and talent. This combination Daniel-Rops certainly possessed and capably employed in the writing of Jesus and His Times.

The life of Christ is the supreme explanation and the final standard by which everything is measured, from which history itself takes meaning and justification. (Henri Daniel-Rops)

Henri Daniel-Rops (1901–1965), the nom de plume of Henri Petiot, was a French Catholic historian. His bibliography comprises seventy books—written over a span of just thirty years—and includes Sacred History, Jesus and His Times, and the monumental, ten-volume History of the Church of Christ. He also served as editor for the Twentieth Century Encyclopedia of Catholicism, which consisted of one hundred and fifty volumes. Phenomenally successful in his own time, Daniel-Rops made religious history accessible and popular; in 1955, he was elected to the Académie française and in 1956 he received the Order of St. Gregory from Pope Pius XII.

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Paperback: 300pp.

ISBN: 978-1685954253