The Last Thirty Days of Christ

"The Last Thirty Days of Christ," by Sadakichi Hartmann, purports to be a kind of lost gospel-the Diary of Lebbeus, also known as Thaddeus. It tells, with a combination of realism and romanticism, the story of the last days of Christ as they might have appeared to a fisherman of limited intelligence. The treatment is frankly rationalistic. In this sense, the book has something in common with Renan and Strauss. "My aim in this work," Mr. Hartmann says, "was primarily to write a readable and interesting book, and to portray Christ as a Man, robust and healthy, of inborn purity, of marvelous intuition, strangely magnetic in thought and action, a great visionary, who moved like a pillar of light through the grayness of life." -"Current Opinion," Volume 69