VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI has rejected the idea of Jesus as a political revolutionary and insisted that violent revolution must never be carried out in God’s name in a new book being released Thursday.
“Jesus of Nazareth – Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection,” is the second installment of Benedict’s planned trilogy on Jesus.
Already, 1.2 million copies have been printed in seven languages, and reprints of 100,000 more are planned for the Italian editions and 50,000 German.
In the book, Benedict exonerates the Jews as a people for Christ’s death. He also insists that Jesus never advocated violent revolution, saying “the cruel consequences of religiously motivated violence are only too evident to us all.”
