Whoever he was or was not, whoever he thought he was, whoever he has become in the memories of men since and will go on becoming for as long as men remember him - exalted, sentimentalized, debunked, made and remade to the measure of each generation's desire, dread, indifference - he was a man once, whatever else he may have been. And he had a man's face, a human face...With part of ourselves I think we might avoid meeting his real eyes, if such a meeting were possible, the way that at certain moments we avoid meeting our own real eyes in mirrors because for better or worse they threaten to tell us more than we want to know.
-Originally published in The Faces of Jesus
