https://www.scribd.com/document/388495117/Endo-Shusaku-Life-of-Jesus-Paulist-1973
A Life of Jesus
Shūsaku Endō, Richard Schuchert (Translator)
3.87
455 ratings65 reviews
A simple and powerful retelling of the life of Christ as seen through the eyes of a Japanese novelist. +
GenresTheologyReligionChristianityFictionJapanSpiritualityLiterature
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192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1973
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Shūsaku Endō351 books854 followers
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Shusaku Endo (遠藤周作), born in Tokyo in 1923, was raised by his mother and an aunt in Kobe where he converted to Roman Catholicism at the age of eleven. At Tokyo's Keio University he majored in French literature, graduating BA in 1949, before furthering his studies in French Catholic literature at the University of Lyon in France between 1950 and 1953. A major theme running through his books, which have been translated into many languages, including English, French, Russian and Swedish, is the failure of Japanese soil to nurture the growth of Christianity. Before his death in 1996, Endo was the recipient of a number of outstanding Japanese literary awards: the Akutagawa Prize, Mainichi Cultural Prize, Shincho Prize, and Tanizaki Prize.
(from the backcover of Volcano).
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3.87
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5 stars
Mark
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November 1, 2012
'All the same, and I have said it again and again, my own position remains what i have already set forth in drawing a distinction between a fact and a truth in the Bible. In this case too, the Bethlehem nativity might not be a fact, but for me it is the truth'
This paragraph comes on the final page of this life of Christ by Shusaku Endo a japanese catholic novelist or maybe that is a catholic japanese novelist or maybe again a japanese novelist who happened to be a catholic. I belabour the point because i think this is at the heart of Endo's work. He was a man proud of his heritage and sought to find a way of bringing the two into some form of co-operation. This book is a part of that attempt.
Endo the novelist creates an emminently readable account of the life of Jesus in which he imagines the figure of Christ walking and preaching and sharing his ultimately rejected creed of love above all things. He speculates and illustrates and shines his own particular light on that time in our history.
'heartbreaking loneliness carved his face in lines that made him look older than his years, and still the disciples failed to understand.'
This use by Endo of his imagination is supremely effective and cleverly ties in with little anomalies of detail that we have in the scriptures.
Endo the catholic forgets that not all his readers will be as familiar with scripture and the history of religion and prophecy as he is and therefore he assumes a good deal of prior knowledge which as a result might make the book rather obscure for many readers.
Endo the japanese intellectual, seeking to educate and ally heritages and cultures becomes very repetitive as he again and again attempts to lay groundwork for future relflection. This can be annoying as the drip drip drip occurs not just in chapters divided by many pages but in pages divided by just a few paragraphs.
On a number of occasions he recognizes his repetitive streak; 'as i have said many times' is actually a phrase which he writes many times. Is this humour? I don't think so no, just poor editing. You do not get the impression that Endo re-read much and perhaps allowed inspiration to cloud judgement a number of times here.
His oft repeated phrase with which I, as a believer would wholeheartedly agree, probably would not convince many outside of belief for obvious reasons.
'Faith far and away transcends the trivialities of non-essential fact, and because in the depths of their hearts the believers of that generation wished them so, the scenes are therefore true '.
This is one of the major difficulties with the book it seems to me. If he was writing it so as to share his own faith then his opinions and visions sparkle and shine from the page and i think the book is a lovely entry into this writer's mind but if he is attempting to bring others nearer to a sense of God rather than enabling them to see his own faith journey then i think it would fall down; simply because it is too much based on nothing more than his novelists mindset.
Having said all that i found it a fascinating off centre view which serves to shed light on this person who has had and indeed continues to have a profound affect in the lives of millions of people. Many years ago I remember reading Kazantzakis' book 'The Last Temptation of Christ' and being struck by the different light it shed on the person of Christ for me. It was not that of the traditionally accepted orthodox view but that served to enrich my ideas simply because it reminded me of how ridiculous it would be for us to assume we had Jesus sorted, that we could claim we had discovered and understood everything there was to discover or understand about Him. Endo's book, to a lesser extent, does much the same.
His account of Jesus' arrest and trial is an interesting exercise in imagination and re-construction and though Endo continually points out it is just that, it serves to enliven and re-invigorate a picture which, for the believer, can too easily become 'samey' and dry.
His final chapter though, entitled 'the Question', is the one i found most fascinating and inspiring. Endo asks the simple question 'How were a cowardly, traitrous bunch of gobshites....I paraphrase....transformed into men of courage and inspiration ? Was it by guilt, their own insight or something momentously electrifying which turned everything previously held upside down ?
He is a Christian himself so you can probably guess his explanation. The chapter would not convert or change the opinion of someone who does not believe in resurrection into believing but as i read i genuinely do not think that was his intention.
This is a paragraph i found so lovely about halfway through the book.
'The God of love, the love of God -the words come easy. The most difficult thing is to bear witness in some tangible way to the truth of the words. In many cases love is actually powerless.Love has in itself no immediate tangible benefits. We are therefore hard put to find where the love of God can be, hidden behind tangible realities which rather suggest that God does not exist, or that He never speaks, or that He is angry'.
Endo's point was that the whole of Jesus' ministry was putting that difficulty centre stage and answering it by His life, death and continued action of faith in His father. Once again, I do not think it would convince anyone who was not already convinced but it is a sincere reflection. It puts different shading on the story as if a two dimensional picture suddenly has the third dimension added and light and shade enhances and changes a previously well known and perhaps overly familiar canvas.
I for one, as a believer, found it moving and thought provoking and therefore a goodread
autobiography-biography catholic-novelists spirituality
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Dhanaraj Rajan
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November 3, 2019
I am confused between three and four stars for this book.
The reason: If you see it as a simple biography of a religious leader/a great spiritual figure written by a secular person, this can be rated with four stars. If you, like myself a believer, read it as a spiritual nourishment, you may rate it with three stars.
Here, Shusaku Endo the novelist shines more. He is trying to get into the skin of the disciples and is more interested in giving a coherent narration of the life of Jesus. That seems to be his intention. He wants to write a brief biography of Jesus for his countrymen. He wants to present Jesus as the loving mother who suffers with her children in their suffering. This is in line with the Japanese (Eastern) sensibilities. The Father figure portrayed by the Western Christendom is not applicable for the Japanese. In fact, it can be revolting.
In presenting Jesus as the Mother, the reflections and narrations are revealing. I liked for example how Jesus held the philosophy of Love and how he wanted it to be preached everywhere. The idea - God of Love and Love of god - was relatively new and a revolutionary idea for the Jews of Jesus' time and Endo's creative imagination in equating Galilee (place of Jesus) with Love of God and Judea (desert) with the idea of God of vengeance. Basing himself on this premise, he interprets the many miracles stories and other significant episodes. I particularly liked his treatment of the episode relating the sinful woman washing the feet of Jesus. ("The tears were enough. God rejoiced to welcome her: Your tears are enough. Don't weep anymore. As for me, I understand how unhappy you have been. ... Whoever loves much will be forgiven much.")
The episodes relating to the arrest of Jesus and the interrogations carried out in the Sanhedrin, before Pilate and in the presence of Herod Antipas are written in a thrilling fashion. The novelist Endo emerges with his full attire here. The way he had re-imagined and re-constructed certain events is very ...... (for lack of words) interesting. The reflection on Resurrection (the final chapter) is alone worth the money for the book.
As I said earlier, this is more a biography meant to push the fellow Japanese to read the Gospels or may be to inform the life of Jesus in a way appealing to them than a biography to nourish you spiritually. There are pages and paragraphs that can enrich your spiritual life. But it may not be the main focus.
P.S. I am a Shusaku Endo fan. I love all that he writes. And when you see your favourite novelists writing about Jesus, how can you restrain yourself from reading it. Sometimes they disappoint. But Endo has not disappointed me here.
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Brennan
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January 19, 2023
Endo wrote this book with his fellow Japanese in mind, as an introduction to the life (and passion) of Jesus. If anyone wondered how Endo came to his understanding of Jesus as the maternal, weak, ineffectual character in Silence, his reasoning is here.
Endo is not a traditional Catholic. Christianity's resonance for him hardly lies in the miraculous intervention or revelation of God. He presumes most of the miracle accounts to be folktales added in by the Gospel writers to speak to the "miraculous" nature of Jesus' life. For Endo, Jesus' power is contingent on his absolute helplessness: his submission to God and desire to love all, especially those who despised and betrayed him.
While I diverge with Endo on many points, several parts of the book illuminated the Gospels in novel ways. One, I had never taken seriously just how misunderstood Jesus was, how lonely his ministry must have been. He spent his whole life with those around him believing and hoping that he was something/one that he was not. If anyone understood him, it was the handful of faithful women at his crucifixion. Jesus was, in a sense, utterly alone in the world.
Two, Endo takes a "soft" view of Judas, but he does this by taking a harder view of all the disciples. For Endo, every one of the disciples is just as traitorous as Judas, if not more cowardly for the sheepish way they abandon him in his hour of need. Judas' unique fault is that he has hidden himself from the mercy of Jesus--after his betrayal, he fails to realize that Jesus welcomes him back.
Finally, Endo visted Israel/Palestine more than once during his life. He knows the landscape, the climate, and that allows him to depict Jesus' life with immense detail. No one can deny Endo's historical and geographical knowledge.
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dely
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January 12, 2020
Mi è stato regalato per Natale da un amico (prete) e chissà perché pensavo fosse un romanzo, invece è un saggio. Parla veramente della vita di Gesù, però da un punto di vista "giapponese". Nel senso che il Cristianesimo non ha mai attecchito in Giappone perché alcune cose cozzano con la mentalità e la spiritualità giapponese. L'autore ha quindi pensato di scrivere di Gesù in modo tale che possa essere capito e accettato dai giapponesi. Sembra quasi un'introduzione a Gesù per chi non lo conoscesse ancora.
L'autore parla soprattutto della vita umana di Gesù. Ho avuto l'impressione che Shūsaku Endō fosse meno interessato al Gesù dei miracoli (figlio di Dio), ma puntasse di più su Gesù in quanto essere umano che ama il prossimo come una madre ama i propri figli. Mette in luce la dolcezza di Gesù.
L'attenzione dell'autore è rivolta soprattutto al discorso della montagna, al comportamento dei discepoli e degli apostoli (questa è la parte che ho preferito), e alla risurrezione. Alcune cose vengono interpretate in modo, diciamo, originale e poco ortodosso, però tutto sommato è interessante. Il libro è scritto in modo molto semplice e scorrevole, e nelle supposizioni dell'autore si trovano interessanti spunti di riflessione.
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Dany
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August 28, 2020
“What could he do, therefore, to make himself the eternal companion of all those unhappy people? In order to reveal to them the love of God he would have to draw them away from their world of forlorn hopelessness. Jesus knew that poverty and disease in themselves are not the hardest things for people to bear; the hardest to bear are the loneliness and the hopelessness that come with being sick or poor.”
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Charlie Canning
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August 31, 2013
While there are many things to like about Endo Shusaku's A Life of Jesus, the one that stands out is the great love the author has for his subject matter. In the final series of chapters on the passion and death of Christ, Endo writes: "This third act is the climax to the entire Bible, and for a scribbler of novels like me in Japan this particular drama never goes stale, no matter how many times I read it. I never get away from the opinion that the scenes in the passion and death of Jesus, portrayed in the Gospels, are more effective by far than most of the classic tragedies in literature."
Endo's method in his own rendering of "the greatest story ever told" calls to mind the historical novels of the Silk Road by Inoue Yasushi. Because there were so few primary texts to draw from, Inoue traveled to the vast reaches of Western China to meditate on the landscape. This allowed him to fully imagine what the Silk Road was like. Endo did the same in the Holy Land, visiting all the places where Jesus was said to have been, meditating on desert, river, lake and town. The result is an atmospheric life of Christ that adds color and nuance to the Gospels.
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Dale
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March 18, 2019
A Worthy Read
First published in 1973.
Shusaku Endo was a rare thing - a Christian from Japan. He also grew up mostly away from Japan (in China) and spent a considerable amount of his young adult life in France. When he was in Japan, he was different because of his religion. When he was in France, he was different because of his ethnicity.
This re-telling of the Jesus' life emphasizes this idea of being an outsider. Jesus is never want people want him to be. John the Baptist's followers want him to continue to teach like John the Baptist. His early followers want him to perform miracles all of the time. His later followers want him to overthrow the king and drive out the Romans. Meanwhile, Jesus is teaching lessons about love and forgiveness that no one seems to want to hear.
Endo's Jesus is a melancholy man - who wouldn't be when your main message is ignored and everyone wants to you be something you can't be?
Endo chooses to pass over most of the miracle stories of Jesus because ...
Read more at: https://dwdsreviews.blogspot.com/2018...
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Lee
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September 17, 2016
He had some interesting takes on Jesus, I had not heard or thought of before. In general, he is fairly liberal, skeptical of miracles, but also takes a fair amount of the text of the gospels literally. While he does engage in some speculation, he does so drawing upon texts and what is said and not said in them. He shows great familiarity of the four gospels and paints an interesting picture of Jesus drawing upon them and comparing them.
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Zen Cho
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January 6, 2010
Picked this up as a possible gift for a Christian friend and read it because I might as well. I found it quite interesting, though maybe being a Christian Westerner would have made it more surprising? Dunno. Sometimes he gets a bit repetitive about e.g. transformation of Jesus' disciples from no-good cowards into fearless leaders of the church, but he is trying to make a point after all.
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Nathaniel Michael
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March 26, 2022
This was a quaint and touching biography of Jesus with a few unique themes and focuses. I highly recommend Shusaku Endo to others, but not this work. For me, I am seeking to understand Endo's theology and life. This book was helpful for understanding what is going on behind the scenes of Silence and others of his works, but I feel that there are better lives of Jesus both for scholarly endeavors and for more casual devotion.
I will say that for a more skeptical Christian (questioning historical accuracy or possibility of miracles) Endo has some healthy perspectives. Also, his portrait of Jesus would go a long way in undoing chauvinistic and power-focused views of Jesus which plague Evangelicalism. However, he repeats often and has ultimately little to say in this work. It is less artful than his other works because he is at heart a novelist, not a non-fiction writer. Also, he is clearly well read in the critical scholarly field of biblical study, but he brings his knowledge to bear in veiled ways so that one can't quite trace his influences.
As for his thoughts, I found his view of Judas enlightening and his focus on the powerlessness of Jesus to be poignant. His belief that the disciples were questioned before the Sanhedrin and denounced Jesus in exchange for their safety is intriguing and at the very least sends a new ray of understanding on Silence. His understanding of the silence of God is chilling in this book as well. I can only shed tears for Endo, who had such compassion for others that his cry to God for justice and comfort must have been ceaseless.
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