Bible Gateway Blog

When you read the Gospels, do you struggle to understand what Jesus really meant when he taught counter-cultural life lessons and penetrating parables? So did bestselling author Andrew Klavan until he had a profound encounter with Jesus and discovered a fresh understanding of the Gospels by reading the words of Jesus through the life and work of writers such as William Wordsworth, John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Shelley.

Bible Gateway interviewed Andrew Klavan (@andrewklavan) about his book, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England’s Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus (Zondervan, 2022).

You write that you became a Christian as an adult. What drew you to Jesus and how is becoming a Christian as an adult different than as a child?

Andrew Klavan: As I detail in my memoir The Great Good Thing (Thomas Nelson, 2016), I grew up Jewish and the idea of taking Jesus seriously as the Word made flesh as in John 1:14 never occurred to me. But as an aspiring writer who wanted to educate himself in Western literature, I began to realize that the poet William Blake was right when he said the Bible is the “Great Code of Art,” the center of all Western thought and creation. So at 15, I read the Gospel According to St. Luke, simply as literary research. It took 35 years of thought and reflection before I understood I couldn’t make sense of the world as I understood it without taking the Gospels as truth rather than fiction. It was a long journey but it has at least one advantage over being a “cradle Christian.” I’ve explored all the really good arguments for non-belief and know why I rejected them.

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