In Christ and through Christ God has revealed himself fully to mankind and has definitively drawn close to it. Although written three decades after Life of Christ first appeared, these words of Pope St. John Paul II could very well stand as its epigraph. Diligently attending to the Gospel sequences, Fulton J. Sheen expands and enlivens the narrative to illuminate the central truth of the Incarnation. Namely, that in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, God has shown Himself to man-and man to himself-in every time and place, without limitation. Life of Christ also features Sheen’s customary timeliness, offering a rebuke and correction of the two defining atheistic systems of modernity: the one which takes up the Cross but denies Christ, reducing it to a harsh, unloving discipline; the other which accepts Christ but rejects his Cross, making the Gospel merely a brotherhood without tears. Following Christ’s ministry through to its culmination in the Paschal Mystery, Sheen shows how God desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.

The fruit of more than twenty-five years of devoted research and writing, Life of Christ succeeds as few books have in uniting labor and love. The result is a beam of light that illuminates the mystery of life, suffering, and death-the light of Christ, which shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.