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Editorial
The Editors

Christians believe that Jesus Christ is "true God and true man". Or do they? Do they really believe in the Incarnation in the fullest meaning of the word, or do they perhaps have a conception of the divinity of Christ which cloaks over rather than reveals the down4o-earth humanity of the man who was Jesus?

The aim of this bulletin is to help our readers in their search for an ever deeper understanding of this humanity. To do so it is necessary to discover as much as possible about the various factors which shaped the personality and destiny of Christ. We need to know about the family, the people, the nation into whose midst he was born — their culture, their religion, their practices and customs. In a word, we need to recognize that Jesus lived and died a Jew, as much a product of his times and mentality as we are of ours.

The biblical movement in our times has awakened a desire for a biblical spirituality. How would a Christian go about a search for such a spirituality? We would suggest that the simplest, as also the deepest, method would be a search for the spirituality of Jesus himself. He would reflect on Sacred Scripture in order to discover what was the faith experience of Christ — how did he, as a Jew, relate to the God who is his Father and ours.

His religious experience was that of his own Jewish people — a people to whom God revealed himself in the concrete reality of their lives, with whom he made a covenant, fashioning them into a nation, giving them a land. We find the essence of Jesus' prayer, too, in the Bible — the Shema Israel, the psalms, the canticles. We remember that he came before the Father not only through the spirituality of his people as we find it recorded in the pages of the Bible, the written tradition, but also through the oral tradition which grew up to meet the changing circumstances of life after the return from the Babylonian exile and which later on became enshrined in the pages of the Talmud.

In this search for an appreciation of the milieu in which Jesus grew up, legitimate and necessary as it is, we are warned against the dangers of a too facile approach. Questions are asked in these pages which challenge the Christian reader to go beyond the facts about Jesus to the deeper realities which these facts reveal. Above all he is led to reflect on his faith in Jesus as universal Lord — a faith beyond, but not separated from, his Incarnation in the Jewish people.