The Between blog reviews Malcolm Muggeridge’s artistic portrait of Jesus.
Jesus, The Man Who Lives by Malcolm Muggeridge (Creed & Culture Books, 2026)
Melanie McDonagh’s Converts is a fascinating account of Catholic converts in the twentieth century from amongst artists, writers and intellectuals. Although, Malcolm Muggeridge was a later convert and doesn’t feature in McDonagh’s book, he was nevertheless part of that significant movement of the Spirit and was probably the first of those eminent Catholic converts that I read in any depth.
In the 1970s and ‘80s, as a young Evangelical Christian, I read a lot of Muggeridge’s books alongside the likes of Francis Schaeffer and Hans Rookmaaker. My interest was primarily with those who related Christian faith to wider issues albeit, at the time, within a relatively conservative framework. My bookcases still house copies of Jesus Rediscovered, Something Beautiful for God, A Third Testament, Christ and the Media, Chronicles of Wasted Time, and In a Valley of this Restless Mind, but not, surprisingly, Jesus, the Man Who Lives. It may be that, as books were harder to come by at that time and available funds were lower, I thought that by reading Jesus Rediscovered I had already encountered Muggeridge’s key ideas when it came to Jesus.
While that would not have been entirely inaccurate, what I would have missed out on at the time was, in the words of Sally Muggeridge (Malcolm’s niece), a skilfully constructed ‘portrait of Jesus’ ‘from the perspective of an artist’. Muggeridge was, first and foremost, a great writer in his ‘uniquely free journalistic style’ which meant that he ‘engaged in conversation with his reader’. He possessed the gift of composing memorable phrases – ‘God Incarnate was Jesus, and Jesus Resurrected was God’ – while also being adept at the interweaving of engaged commentary with journalistic description and the apposite piling up of similes in ways that overwhelm emotionally and aesthetically. All these skills came into play in this intriguing profile of Christ, his incarnation, death and resurrection.
Read the full article in the Between blog.
