This paper reviews Jaroslav Pelikan's Jesus Through the Centuries (1985), a chronologically organized study of Jesus as a symbolic and cultural force across two millennia of Western history. The review summarizes Pelikan's chapter-by-chapter treatment of Jesus' evolving roles — from rabbi and king to cosmic symbol and liberator — while noting how Pelikan intertwines theology with political, artistic, and philosophical history. The reviewer also critiques the book's limitations, including its confinement to a Western framework and its failure to interrogate how the image of Jesus has functioned as a tool of social control. The paper concludes that while Pelikan's work is encyclopedic and well-documented, it stops short of offering genuine critical analysis.
The paper demonstrates the technique of critical synthesis: it does not merely summarize each chapter but draws out recurring themes — the malleability of Jesus as a symbol, the political instrumentalization of Christian imagery, and the centrality of the Gregorian calendar — and uses them to build toward a focused critique of the author's blind spots, particularly his Western-centric framework and reluctance to engage with social control.
The review opens with a thesis-framing introduction that identifies Pelikan's purpose and method. It then proceeds chapter by chapter through the book, grouped by era (early Christianity, medieval, Renaissance/Reformation, modern). A distinct evaluative section follows, addressing what Pelikan omits or fails to critique. The paper closes by revisiting Pelikan's stated subtitle to assess whether the book fulfills its own goals. This structure — summary then critique — is a reliable model for academic book reviews at the undergraduate level.
Jaroslav Pelikan investigates the enormous impact Jesus has had on the evolution of Western culture in Jesus Through the Centuries. Although he never fully breaks free from the Christian worldview, Pelikan offers a rich and scholarly chronology of the role Jesus played in Western social, political, economic, philosophical, and artistic history. Divided into eighteen chapters arranged roughly chronologically, the book is an ambitious undertaking. Pelikan treats Jesus as a symbolic figure and historical force, mentioning theology only when necessary to substantiate his main ideas.
The author shows how the name of Jesus Christ has been invoked throughout the past two thousand years to "legitimate political activity" (p. 7). Moreover, Pelikan illustrates the way Jesus evolved from historical figure into a superhuman symbolic power guiding and directing nearly every aspect of human life in the West. He repeatedly returns to the centrality of the Gregorian calendar, which has in fact been adopted worldwide and which points to the remarkably widespread impact Jesus has had through the centuries.
The introduction to Jesus Through the Centuries describes the book's conceptual framework as evoking "The Good, the True, and the Beautiful."
Chapter One, "The Rabbi," elucidates some of the problems with literal interpretations of the New Testament in understanding Jesus' life and times. Here Pelikan emphasizes the time lag between the actual birth and life of Jesus and the historical legacy he left. The New Testament, according to Pelikan, "resembles a set of paintings more closely than it does a photograph" (p. 9). The author therefore differentiates between early Christian tradition and the Christian scriptures, which evolved later. Similarly, Pelikan notes how different and sometimes conflicting translations of scripture affected the titles given to Jesus of Nazareth. His roles as rabbi and prophet have remained salient, but they also depend on cultural context and historical precedent. Finally, Pelikan mentions the enormous influence Paul had on crafting the future of Christian doctrine. Paul was essentially "the one chiefly responsible for the de-Judaization of the gospel" (Pelikan, 1985, p. 18). Jesus has since been invoked to transmit cultural concepts, social norms, political ideologies, and economic systems.
In Chapter 2, "The Turning Point of History," Pelikan examines how Jesus became extricated from his Jewish roots and culture. The most poignant and symbolic evidence of Jesus' turning-point status remains the calendar, organized around a central — if arbitrary — date. "Eventually the very calendar of Europe, which then became the calendar for most of the modern world, evolved into a recognition of the view of the significance of the figure of Jesus as the turning point of history" (p. 32). Chapter 2 treats the first few centuries of the Common Era, and the following several chapters address the birth of Christianity as a world religion.
Chapter 3 examines the "Light of the Gentiles" during the third and fourth centuries of the Common Era. Pelikan points out that messianic mythos already present in the indigenous cultures of Europe and the Middle East facilitated the transmission of Christian doctrine, philosophy, and politics. Jesus as a symbol proved well-suited for cross-cultural transmission, especially throughout the Greco-Roman world. The mingling of early Christian doctrine with Greek philosophy and Roman pagan traditions thus laid the groundwork for the future of the religion.
The subtitle of Jesus Through the Centuries summarizes Pelikan's purpose: to explore Jesus' "place in the history of culture." Organized chronologically from the New Testament to the twentieth century, the book can also be read thematically. In some chapters, for example, the author emphasizes the political and economic impact of Jesus, while in others he more squarely examines the way Christian mysticism has influenced Western culture and history. Pelikan also addresses Western social norms and ideals that have been shaped by Jesus and Christianity.
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