"I have tried to present the Jesus of the Gospels as the real Jesus, as the historical Jesus in the true sense," he wrote. "Yes, it really happened. Jesus is not a myth. He is a man made of flesh and blood, a totally real presence in history."
The book seemed in part to be aimed at refuting accounts of Jesus like that in The Da Vinci Code, which presented him as a mortal who married and stressing his divine role rather than that of a social reformer.
But despite the pope's past battles against liberation theology, he does portray social justice as central to Jesus' message.
RSS