Chasing Jesus

Every once in a while, a book finds its way into your life through a story that makes reading it feel a little more meaningful from the beginning.

Chasing Jesus was recommended to me by a friend who read it during his incarceration after giving his life to Christ. I decided to take his recommendation, and I couldn’t be more thankful that I did.

As someone who already loves Jesus Christ, I didn’t begin this book looking for a reason to believe in Him. But by the time I finished it, I walked away feeling even more firmly rooted in that belief.

Before I tell you what this book did to me, though, you need to understand what its author set out to do.

Dr. Ron Charles describes Chasing Jesus as the result of a research journey spanning more than four decades. His goal was to investigate the historical life of Jesus beyond what is recorded in the Gospels, traveling throughout the world and studying historical sources alongside the biblical accounts.

What fascinated me was the way Charles describes his approach changing as that research progressed.

He explains that he initially approached the life of Jesus using the chronology he had always understood. But as he studied the Gospel accounts more closely, he began encountering chronological questions and apparent inconsistencies that he could not reconcile with his assumptions.

So he decided to start over.

Rather than beginning with what he believed the timeline should be, Charles says he returned to the four Gospels, studied them closely alongside one another, and then compared what he found with historical documentation—including Roman history and writings from Christians and non-Christians in the centuries following the crucifixion.

I appreciated something about that tremendously.

He wasn’t describing a search in which every discovery was comfortable. Charles writes about encountering material that supported his understanding of the Gospels as well as material that challenged it. And although his research ultimately strengthened his confidence in the Gospel accounts, he is also careful to acknowledge that his proposed chronology is not something he considers beyond revision. As new information becomes available, his understanding may change.

That willingness to search without pretending to already possess every answer was one of the things I found most compelling about this book.

And then there were the discoveries themselves.

There were moments when I stopped reading because I genuinely had to process what I had just read. Some of Charles’s conclusions I wasn’t sure I wanted to believe. Others left me completely fascinated. His discussion reaches beyond the familiar Gospel narratives into other historical traditions and accounts surrounding Jesus’s life, ministry, and death.

Some of those passages were incredible to read.

Others broke my heart.

The descriptions surrounding the crucifixion, in particular, affected me more deeply than I expected. The additional detail Charles presents made something I have known about for years feel painfully vivid. I cried reading it.

I’m tearing up again writing about it now.

And perhaps that is why this book meant so much to me. It wasn’t simply a collection of historical arguments or an attempt to rearrange dates on a timeline. For me, reading about one man’s decades-long pursuit of the historical Jesus continually brought me back to the Jesus I already knew through my faith.

There is a verse I haven’t been able to separate from this book since finishing it:

“You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.” — Jeremiah 29:13 (ESV)

Forty-three years of searching.

Traveling. Reading. Comparing. Questioning. Discovering things that were comforting and things that were difficult.

Chasing Jesus.

And for me, reading about that search only made me want to know Him more.

Storykeeper’s Verdict: A Story Worth Keeping.

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