The Christian History Devotional: 365 Readings & Prayers to Deepen & Inspire Your Faith by J. Stephen Lang

Author:J. Stephen Lang
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Christian Life, Christianity, Religion, Christian Church, Devotional, History
ISBN: 9781400204335
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2012-12-03T22:00:00+00:00

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Prayer: Father, thank you for the many blessings you have bestowed on us. Make us good citizens while we remember that our ultimate allegiance is to you. Amen.

July 5 · JESUS FOR MEN

News about him spread through the whole countryside.

LUKE 4:14

1967: What do Betty Crocker and Jesus of Nazareth have in common? Both were important to an advertising executive and congressman named Bruce Barton who created the advertising icon Betty Crocker and in 1925 published one of the best-selling books of the century, The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus.

Born in 1886, Barton in 1919 founded an advertising agency in New York which he headed until his retirement in 1961. He also served two terms as a congressman. He was a prolific writer, and in 1925 published his best-known— and most controversial—book in which he aimed to show that the Jesus of the Gospels was the greatest salesman who ever walked the earth.

The Man Nobody Knows opens with a description of a small boy in Sunday school, unimpressed by the meek and gentle Jesus he sees in his church’s artwork. He finds some of the Old Testament heroes, such as the vigorous David, very inspiring, but he has only been exposed to an effeminate Jesus. Barton was on to something: Christian art has emphasized Jesus as the meek sufferer, yet the men who followed him—tough, working-class men like Peter—had to have seen something vital and inspiring in the man before they called him Master. Barton paints Jesus as a thoroughly masculine man, physically strong, forceful, a “salesman” in the sense that the message of God’s kingdom had to be “sold” to a world in need of salvation.

Critics, including many Christians, said the book was self-serving, that Barton the ad huckster had created a Jesus in his own image. Perhaps there was some truth to this. But the huge sales of the book suggest that Barton had struck a chord with many readers who were moved by the image of a Jesus who overflowed with charisma.

Barton died on July 5, 1967, having influenced both the advertising world and the religious world.

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