'For Christ's sake - pressing the refresh button on the life of Jesus' presents Christ as someone completely different from the familiar figure we are used to. This Jesus did not perform miracles, did not walk on water, and did not rise from the dead. But what he did do was something much more significant: he was able to lead people into a experience of the place where he said God lived, inside each person. Recent scholarship into early Christianity has caused a ferment of new ideas and theories, but now it has run out of steam, because this one hidden ingredient has not been recognized, let alone understood. In uncovering this new understanding, 'For Christ's Sake' is possibly the most controversial book about Jesus ever written. Beside its central theme, 'For Christ's Sake - pressing the refresh button on the life of Jesus' demonstrates how the original view of Jesus' work and teachings, unquestionably accepted by his disciples, flourished for several generations until weakened by its growing distance from the teacher and persecuted by the new church, it faded from view. It looks at the relationship of Jesus with his disciples, especially Mary Magdalene, casting new light on the possibility that she was his partner. It considers the role of John the Baptist as Jesus' mentor and forerunner, and, after the crucifixion, how Paul continued the 'inner experience' teaching while laying the foundations for the new 'church'. The book examines the Dead Sea Scrolls and finds uncanny similarities, not previously brought to public attention, between the beliefs and practices they reveal and those of Jesus and early Christianity. And we compare Jesus with teachers from other traditions, including Buddha, Krishna and Lao Tzu, suggesting that they all taught variations of the same theme. The Gnostic gospels are surveyed, to see how later generations of followers of the inner experience of Jesus tried, and eventually failed, to maintain the flame of the original teaching. Finally the book considers the role of religion in today's world, and assesses how the time might be right for a 'new Christianity' to emerge, devoid of miraculous content but with a more authentic understanding of Jesus' message. Reviews so far from the worlds of journalism, academia and literature have called 'For Christ's Sake' 'fascinating', 'exciting', 'compulsive', 'persuasive' and 'thought-provoking', with an 'easy-read lightness of tone'.
Glenville Whittaker was born in 1943 in Manchester, England. Raised first in the northern industrial town of Rochdale and then in the Victorian coastal resort of Southport, he studied history as an open scholar at Oxford University, and became interested at an early age in the various aspects of spiritual life and the search for inner experience. Much of his life has been spent working and developing understandings in these areas. Now semi-retired, he lives and works in Brighton on the south coast of England.
