Did Jesus see himself as divine?    Since the beginning of the quest for the historical Jesus, scholars have dismissed the idea that Jesus could have identified himself as God. Such high Christology is frequently depicted as an invention of the councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon, centuries later. Yet recent research has shown that the earliest Jewish followers of Jesus already regarded him as divine.    Brant Pitre tackles this paradox in his bold new monograph. Pitre challenges this widespread assumption and makes a robust case that Jesus did consider himself divine. Carefully explicating the Gospels in the context of Second Temple Judaism, Pitre shows how Jesus used riddles, questions, and scriptural allusions to reveal the apocalyptic secret of his divinity. Moreover, Pitre explains how Jesus acts as if he is divine in both the Synoptics and the Gospel of John. Carefully weighing the historical evidence, Pitre argues that the origins of early high Christology can be traced to the historical Jesus’s words and actions.   Jesus and Divine Christology sheds light on long-neglected yet key evidence that the historical Jesus saw himself as divine. Scholars and students of the New Testament—and anyone curious about the Jewish context of early Christianity—will find Pitre’s argument a necessary and provocative corrective to a critically underexamined topic.

At the beginning of the famous encounter between St. Juan Diego and Our Lady of Guadalupe, as Diego ascends Tepeyac Hill, he is suddenly surrounded by beautiful music and wondrous sights, whereupon he asks himself, “Where am I? Could this be the place that our ancestors spoke of ― the Flower World Paradise in the land of heaven?” With these words, St. Juan Diego ties his encounter to an ancient indigenous belief system ― a spiritual floral domain named “Flower World.” This startling history was recently uncovered by anthropologists and archaeologists. In referencing this flowery paradise, Juan Diego opens up a fascinating link dating back to the very cradle of American civilization. Flower World permeated Pan-Mesoamerican culture from its inception, accentuating ancient American man’s yearning for a paradisiacal afterlife saturated with music and beauty. This is expressively reflected in flower song poems of the era, whose primary metaphor is that of a singer calling down flowers from heaven to gather in his tilma so he might share them with lords and princes. This exciting new interpretation of American prehistory lays the groundwork for a prophetical reinterpretation of the Guadalupe narrative. Joseph and Monique Gonzalez shed new light on the astounding events of Our Lady’s appearance at Tepeyac in December 1531. They present a fresh explanation of the roughly ten million indigenous conversions that occurred after the Blessed Mother’s appearance ― considered the single largest Christian conversion event in history. Painstakingly tracing the latest archaeological interpretations of Flower World along with the philosophical ramifications behind the flower songs, the Gonzalezes make a compelling case for the Guadalupe apparition’s being the culmination of thousands of years of evangelical preparation of the people of the Americas. In these enthralling pages, you will Whether the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe was a fabrication to convert the indigenousThat the miraculous tilma is part of a larger network of miraculous artistic expressions and ideasThe five ways Our Lady of Guadalupe attaches herself to ancient traditionsThat the indigenous peoples had limited exposure to the tilmaThe four-petaled flower symbol that connects earth and heavenAn ancient and mysterious poem that mirrors the Guadalupe narrativeThe four pillars of “the bridge of understanding” that paved the way for the GospelsThat the gathered flowers in Juan Diego’s tilma symbolize Jesus as the Path to eternal lifeThis hero’s journey through the centuries is a love letter to the modern world that unveils in a stunning way the reality of God’s salvific plan for the Americas, then and now.

An extraordinary new edition of Frank Sheed's classic work. His masterful account of the life of Christ Jesus stands on its own, but Christ walks again among the pages of this book in a unique way: over 100 illustrations from the French artist James Tissot's outstanding series on the Life of Christ have been carefully selected and chronologically placed. Tissot's dynamic realism, combined with Sheed's lucid prose, make this one of the most beautifully illustrated and profoundly moving lives of Our Lord ever published. Here we meet Christ in his obedience, his compassion, his tears, his joy, his relation to Mary and the disciples, and in his unequalled and unsparing words that mined the depths of reality, and of real lives. We come to know Christ as he touched the lives of each person among the multitudes that followed him, and we realize that he is with us likewise--in each moment of our own lives.