Local author and syndicated columnist David Limbaugh will sign copies of his latest book, “The True Jesus: Uncovering the Divinity of Christ in the Gospels,” at 7 p.m. today at Barnes & Noble in Cape Girardeau.

Limbaugh said his book continues work started in his 2015 volume, “The Emmaus Code,” which was a New York Times bestseller that traced the revelations of Christ in the Old Testament.

“‘The Emmaus Code’ was about finding Jesus in the Old Testament, and it was also a primer, an Old Testament survey or introduction, and I wanted to continue,” he said.

Though he initially intended “The True Jesus” to be a parsing of the entire New Testament, he said he soon realized the New Testament was too large for such a task.

“So I asked my publisher if I could narrow my focus to the Gospels,” he said. “And that’s what I did.”

The book includes contextual history of the time between the Old and New Testaments as well as an examination of the literary qualities of the New Testament.

“I want to give readers a flavor for what the conditions were in Israel at the time Christ entered human history,” he said.

But the book’s purpose is a deeper understanding and appreciation of the figure of Jesus.

“The Jews were expecting the Messiah to be a political or military leader who would deliver them from the oppression of the Roman Empire, and Jesus came not as a military conqueror but as a suffering servant,” he said. “He allowed himself to die for our sins. He allowed himself to be humiliated, tortured and killed instead of conquering them politically, and so this did not fit the Jewish messianic template, so they didn’t understand and did not accept him as the messiah until he came back in his resurrection appearances, and then they began to see.”

If even those who knew Jesus personally could misconstrue his purpose and essential nature, so could modern biblical scholars, Limbaugh said.

“I think there is too much of a tendency in our culture to try to conform Jesus to the popular culture and to make him into something we want to make him instead of conforming ourselves to him,” he said.

“Jesus was fully God and fully man. He wasn’t just a great prophet. He was the living son of God. He didn’t come to bring peace in his first coming, and he says in the Gospels, and I quote him, ‘I didn’t come to bring peace; I’m going to divide brother against brother, mother against father, in-laws against in-laws’ because he represented something not of this world.”

The world rejected Jesus, Limbaugh said, because he stood for something different. But striving for a deeper understanding of Christ is a step toward accepting him, Limbaugh said.

“It’s a difficult message for this modern world and for any world to accept because we’re a broken, fallen world, and we don’t readily accept the message that we need to live up to his standard,” he said. “We can’t do that of course; that’s why we’ve got to, through faith in him, be declared righteous by God.”

Limbaugh said his goal is to introduce readers to the Gospels in the hope of enriching their further readings.

“With the ultimate goal of inspiring readers to read the Gospels for themselves because only there will you encounter the true Jesus. You won’t encounter him directly from a book about him,” he said. “My book is about Jesus, and I think it’s helpful like other books about Jesus and the Bible, but there’s no substitute for reading the Bible itself or reading the Gospels themselves. That’s where you encounter him.”

tgraef@semissourian.com

(573) 388-3627

Pertinent address:

3049 William St., Cape Girardeau, Mo.