Jesus, the Man Who Lives

by Malcolm Muggeridge

Vintage, 1975. First Edition, published by Harper & Rowe, this brown linen covered hardcover measures 7 1/2" by 10", 192 pages. Sixteen beautiful color plates illustrate the life of Christ.

Genres: Christianity, Theology, Religion, Faith, Nonfiction, Biography

191 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge was an English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist. During World War II, he was a soldier and a spy. In the aftermath of the war, as a hugely influential London journalist, he converted to Christianity and helped bring Mother Teresa to popular attention in the West. He was also a critic of the sexual revolution and of drug use.

Reviews

[Nicolas Shump · Rating 5 out of 5]

A powerful book. Muggeridge writes with tremendous passion and lucidity. This is an inspiring book because Muggeridge makes faith in Jesus so tangible and compelling. He is cynical and witty at times, but he is also extraordinarily faithful to his Lord and even to his Church. Muggeridge was a convert to Christianity, having been a communist earlier in his life.
The illustrations in the book are nice, if haphazard, but they do form a suitable complement to the text. You cannot finish this work without feeling some reverence, especially if you are a believer. To compare this book to something like W. F. Buckley, Jr's., Nearer My God is to see the difference that substance and tone make. Buckley is a faithful believer in Christianity and Catholicism, but his work is so distant, so reserved that the reader doesn't get a sense of his devout faith. On the other hand, Muggeridge's enthusiasm for Jesus is evident on every page. He is a dazzling stylist, but doesn't allow this to overpower his narrative. I suppose Thomas Howard, another convert and an Anglophile, is comparable, but Howard's style can distract from what he is saying. He's like Updike, the writing and cadences are impeccable, but what is beneath the surface isn't always as impressive. Howard doesn't seem to know when to stop dazzling, but Muggeridge's grace can be disarmingly sparse.

[Roger Price · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though I have read much of Muggeridge, this work may well be his best. Because books too often go out of print, I fear that many today may never know this remarkable intellect, lover of the Lord Jesus, and consummate wordsmith.

[Penny · Rating 5 out of 5]

This excellent book comments on the life of Jesus, combining the gospels into one narrative and letting you join the author in the journey. I have so many sticky notes on pages or paragraphs I will want to read again.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this in a reprint with a 2025 afterword by his niece, the Rev. Sally Muggeridge. While as she says, fewer today recall the fame of this leftist journalist turned sympathetic biographer of Mother Teresa, who covered so much of the last century in its ideological and cultural upheavals, I can attest, having heard him speak in the late 70s (I was a teenager), of his renowned eloquence. His popular take on Jesus plays off the rather puerile (although it has resonance in Nikos Kazantzakas' better-told The Last Temptation of Christ, which merited a mention missed by "St. Mugg.") by D.H. Lawrence late novella The Man Who Died, but with a convert's hope in the endurance of Jesus' message as true, as he alternately retells the Gospels and reflects their mix of relevance and strangeness. It'd make a smart accompaniment to C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, and G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man.

However, Muggeridge eschews the donnish tone of the former and the paradoxical style of the latter. Instead, he's juxtaposing the follies, as he sees the concerns with overpopulation and ecology then current (I happen to think both pressing calamities), sexual indulgence and consumer hedonism (we see how fifty years have proliferated their pursuits), and disbelief in Christianity and disavowal of self-discipline (ditto). It makes for a slightly dated book, but in retrospect, as Rev. Sally appears to hint, her uncle's prognostications appear to have proven prophetic rather than pathetic or bathetic, unfortunately. He's at his sharpest relating how he and his crew were filming in the Holy Land, when he figured out how to depict the three temptings put to Jesus by the devil. It's a masterful exegesis...

Although paraphrasing the scriptures means parts of his narrative bog down by my overfamiliarity with the famous words in KJV cadence, it's a lively meditation, a spirited conversation, and a fitting model for inquiry. I happen to be in my adult life mostly mired in agnostic perspectives towards key beliefs asserted by the evangelists, so I may not be the ideal reviewer. Or maybe so, as hearing Muggeridge render the Holy Spirit as "Comforter" rings truer than other variations on the Paraclete, for instance. It's provocative, moving, only occasionally glib, and a reminder of how intelligence, tact, satire, bluntness, gullibility, celebrity, and honesty contend throughout Muggeridge's long career...

[Jason Blean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Expertly woven together, this book explores the life of Jesus and contrasts it with modern fallacies and escapes into fantasy such as the search for the elixir of eternal life and other ways humankind seeks to avoid facing up to its only certainty, death. The author pulls no punches; the analysis is forensic; it faces some of the objections to the truth of the Gospel of Christ head on and deals with them effectively. The vacuity exposed of modern western life was ahead of its time and remains relevant today, 45 years after its publication. With searing honesty, the life of Christ is examined and questioned and the conclusion that Jesus lives on, changing lives convincing.

[Aaron Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Plenty of great teachers, mystics, martyrs and saints have made their appearance at different times in the world, and lived lives and spoken words full of grace and truth, for which we have every reason to be grateful. Of none of them, however, has the claim been made, and accepted, that they were Incarnate God. In the case of Jesus alone the belief has persisted that when he came into the world God deigned to take on the likeness of a man in order that thenceforth men might be encouraged to aspire after the likeness of God; reaching out from their mortality to His immortality, from their imperfection to His perfection. It is written in the Old Testament that no man may see God and live; at the same time, as Kierkegaard points out, God cannot make Man His equal without transforming him into something more than Man. The only solution was for God to become Man, which He did through the Incarnation in the person of Jesus. Thereby, He set a window in the tiny dark dungeon of the ego in which we all languish, letting in a light, providing a vista, and offering a way of release from the servitude of the flesh and the fury of the will into what St Paul called the glorious liberty of the children of God.”

[Leroy Zumack · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed Muggeridges approach. He recounts Jesus life according to the Gospels. He makes interesting comparisons like, in the garden of gesthemane Jesus hadshown up the fantasy of violence; then when he appeared successively before the Sanhedrin, Pilate and Herod the fantasy of justice. Now in this dreadful masquerade of himself as a ribald king of the Jews,the fantasy of power itself is exposed forever. Page 178. The author has a broad experience speaking of Keats Grecian urns, Augustine and Simone Veil just to name a few. The book moves quickly through Jesus life on earth and his influence. Muggeridge seemed to grasp a lot of the New Testament quickly. Worth your time.

[Marc Washburne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muggeridge was a very good writer. He converted to Christianity under the influence of Hugh Kingsmill and helped to bring Mother Teresa to popular attention in the West.
This book is based on the Life of Christ and reflects the author's understanding of scripture against the backdrop of modern society. This is not a 'quick read' book...you will want to read and reflect over the well written book.

[Shammah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Muggeridge gives you much in all of his writings. This is just another of many books in which we "uncover" more insight into the personhood of Yahshua/Jesus.

[Nate Ahern · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite an occasional unwillingness to accept various facts the gospel writers offer simply as truth, Muggeridge grasps the central glory of Christ remarkably.

[Godwin Iko · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very lucid description of Jesus and His life changing attributes