Читать книгу He Who Returned - Martin Fieber - Страница 6

“Jesus didn’t even really ever live“, an acquaintance recently said to me. I was baffled.

“Where do you get that idea?”, I asked him.

“He was just a good marketing instrument of the Church“, was his immediate reply.

This reply shocked me. Yes, many people doubt whether Jesus ever lived, and just as many have no idea what to do with the person of Jesus. Even I felt the same way until a couple of years ago, although I had always viewed Jesus as a historical personality and had to believe in his teachings. But he was simply too far away for me and my life. He was not tangible, a kind of Superman who could walk on water and turn water into wine. This huge distance between him and my normal life caused me to be afraid, and I felt small and unworthy. I still had so many faults, while Jesus was even able to raise the dead! How could God love me in my miserable condition? For years such thoughts and conflicts of conscience tortured me.

But this suffering also led to a source of motivation. A question arose in me: How strong must the personality of Jesus have been, how authentic must his teachings have been, that nearly 2000 years later around a billion people worldwide prayed to him?

But this too, was again problematic: people prayed to Jesus as a God. And this did not in any way help me to feel closer to Jesus. Just as one of my former, somewhat fanatically inclined neighbors had instructed me: “Martin, Jesus is God. And only if you accept him as your God will you ever have a chance at a window room in heaven.”

But for me Jesus was never God, though he obviously spoke of God and he always gave me the impression that he had a very good connection to God. So good, that he had special, often beyond human powers. But I did not know anything more than that about Jesus.

But how was Jesus as a person? There is hardly anything transmitted about him as a person. Who was Jesus really? How was he as a child? How did he feel? How did he live? And exactly for this reason, because I knew too little about the historical person Jesus, he fascinated me more and more with each year.

And one day, many years later, my wish came true: I wanted to truly understand Jesus. I wanted to understand his times, also the faith which is the foundation of today’s so-called Christianity. I wanted to describe the life of the human being Jesus, I wanted to get to know him better by recording his life from my point of view. I wanted to lose my fear and my pain. But I still was afraid that a miracle would have to occur for that to happen.

It took nine years until, from the idea of the novel and much research finally the printed work was completed. And the miracle happened: Christ the master became my pal, the high-flyer Jesus became my friend, the intangible hero became my friend, and Jesus became a normal human being. His vast soul now shows itself clearly to me.

May this novel bring you closer to the human being Jesus: Jesus, the most glorified and hated, in short the most misunderstood person in the history of humankind. A few connections and incidents may be unknown to you, perhaps even seem impossible or even ridiculous at first. But at the beginning of the twentieth century there also were not any computers, with whose help this book came to be.

May this novel bring you closer to the human being Jesus, in case he has not already won your heart with his naturalness. May this book also let the miracle happen in your heart, that closed doors may be opened in your life. May Jesus Christ also become your pal, friend and brother.

I wish you much joy in immersing yourself in a world which you certainly have not experienced like this before. God bless you and have a good time.

Your

Martin Fieber

In a few chapters of this book words occur which should not be chosen in your normal language use. However the times of old were very direct especially in the culture of the Greeks and people at times used vulgar expressions. I have already adjusted the language considerably, however wanted to maintain a certain authentic character.

The italic paragraphs at the end of the individual chapters express the thoughts that Jesus Christ entrusted to his diary.