The Life: A Portrait of Jesus had gone through many print runs and spread around the world, but seeing a photograph of a translation from somewhere north of the Black Sea, made me think that it was perhaps time to revisit it. The Life, written with Chris Walley, was a short ‘one-stop’ book on Jesus, has sold very well and I gather, been a blessing to a lot of people. Yet it was published sixteen years ago and the world has changed. Although 2003 may seem like yesterday, it was in fact a very long time ago and our world has moved on. (Where exactly it thinks it’s moving on to is a profound question!)

To jog your memory: in 2003 there was no Facebook or social media, most houses still had bookcases wider than their televisions, people talked to each other instead of staring into little handheld slabs of glass, and uncomfortable facts were not simply dismissed as ‘fake news’.

I observe three big changes since 2003. First, the memory of cultural Christianity has faded further in the Western world; the biblical story has become ever more forgotten and if you were to ask most people about Jesus you would receive very little in the way of accurate information. Second, Christianity has not just simply suffered neglect but also attack. So it is widely assumed the ‘traditional Jesus’ has been proved to be entirely fictional. The third phenomenon is, however, far more positive: in a world that increasingly realises that money and things are the problem not the answer, there is a growing search for spiritual truth and that search is turning minds and hearts in the right direction. The figure of Jesus may be faint and be accused of being illusory but it has not lost its attractiveness.

In the light of these changes Chris and I have reworked what we wrote into a new book called Jesus Christ: The Truth. That subtitle is important: we have sought to portray the truth about Jesus as an historical individual, about who he claimed to be (including, of course, his claim to be the Truth) and about the truth for life that Jesus taught. We have sought to write not just for those outside the church but also inside it. At a time when the Christian faith is being challenged it’s important to make sure that we have got our facts straight about the one on whom our faith rests. The Jesus available for popular consumption is often one so distanced from the real world as to be inaccessible, so artificial as to be inauthentic, and so diluted as to lack all authority. We need to counter that: to speak about the real Jesus, rely on him and share him.

The world may have changed, but Jesus hasn’t.