Four Faces: A Journey in Search of Jesus the Divine, the Jew, the Rebel, the Sage.

By Mark Tully Ulysses Press, $15, 237 pp.

Mark Tully's text derives from a four-part series he did for BBC television on the search for the authentic meaning of Jesus. The book reflects the excellent BBC format for documentaries of this sort: lots of scenic travel; an urbane host; interviews with various experts; and a timely topic. Tully is obviously well-educated, passionate about his topics, and a probing inquirer. He takes us to India (where he was born and raised) to speak with Christians there, and this allows him to draw some intelligent parallels between Christianity and Hinduism through conversation with Ursula King, an Indologist who is a Christian. He spends time in the Holy Land in the company of the Dominican Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, a formidable scholar, as well as Rabbi David Rosen and Duke University's E.P. Sanders. We hear Richard Horsley on Jesus as rebel and of the reductionist theories of John Dominic Crossan. Jesus the Sage is constructed through both a meditation on early monasticism in Egypt (and the inevitable nexus with gnosticism) and a theory, made popular by a British scholar, that Jesus was like an ancient Cynic wandering teacher.

The good news about this book is that it is immensely readable, and even moving in places. The less good news is that the highly suppositious theories of the various scholars do not add up to a coherent whole. I could not read the versions of Jesus proposed by the various scholars (some connected to the ballyhoo of the "Jesus Seminar") without agreeing with Luke Timothy Johnson's critique that the "Questers" are the left wing of the fundamentalist tradition: Jesus must be a Galilean peasant revolutionary; a Wisdom teacher; an eschatological prophet; a charismatic rabbi; etc.; whereas, in fact, the New Testament portrait(s) of Jesus are too complex and too elusive to narrow down to a single all-embracing snapshot.

In fairness to Tully, he is not reductionist. In fact, he ends by saying that all the portraits he set forth still cannot explain the church and that what matters in the end is the overarching myth of the Resurrection, by which it is even possible today to say "Christ is risen!" In the final analysis, Tully's book is only a "good read," but for that we should be minimally grateful. The introduction is written by that master of "lite" spirituality, Thomas Moore.

Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame.