For Lebanese-American writer and artist, Khalil Gibran, Jesus the Son of Man was the most challenging and cherished of all his works. "My art can find no better resting place than the personality of Jesus. ...He shall always be the supreme figure of all ages and in Him we shall always find mystery, passion, love, imagination, tragedy, beauty, romance and truth."
It was always Gibran's ambition to re-tell the story of Jesus in an unconventional way, to paint a more rounded picture of a spiritual leader he deeply revered and this he did through the eyes of Jesus' contemporaries. He selects some familiar biblical characters, such as Mary Magdalene, Pontius Pilate and John the Baptist and adds a number of fictional ones, among them a cobbler, an astronomer and a philosopher. The seventy-seven voices, presented as short chapters, explore facets of Jesus, Gibran-style, and from these testaments we get a glimpse of how Christ might have been perceived at the time by those around Him.
Jesus the Son of Man is rated by many critics as Gibran's most inspirational work, more so even than The Prophet.