Our man Jesus

The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of the Man.
By Walter Wink. Fortress,
356 pp., $26.00.

According to Walter Wink, Christian orthodoxy has portrayed Jesus as the omnipotent God in a man-suit. Though this image of a perfect, almost inhuman Christ has dominated two millennia of Christianity, it no longer speaks to many Christians. Is it possible to construct a meaningful alternative Christology that focuses on Jesus' humanity? That is the task Wink sets for himself in The Human Being.

Wink, who is professor of biblical interpretation at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City, writes as one deeply committed to the Jesus tradition. Yet he shares in what he sees as a growing effort to recast the original truths of Christianity in molds that have more appeal for contemporary people. Combining historical-critical analysis with Jungian psychology and a critique of domination, he seeks to replace the myth of the divine Christ with a new liberating myth of the human Jesus.

Wink finds the basis for such a Christology in the enigmatic expression "the son of man," which occurs in the Gospels almost exclusively on the lips of Jesus. Wink translates this literally as "the son of the man," but usually substitutes more generic terms such as "child of the human" or "the human being" to mitigate the male bias. A large part of his book involves an analysis of the passages where this expression occurs in the Bible and other ancient literature.