On his opening page, systematic theologian Thomas Weinandy recounts how, after beginning to work on a one-volume systematic theology, he discerned in prayer that the Lord was calling him “to write a theological or doctrinal commentary on the New Testament” (xv). Jesus Becoming Jesus, on the Synoptic Gospels, is the beginning of what may become a multivolume commentary. It focuses primarily on issues of Christology and Trinitarian theology, with occasional excursions into ecclesiology and sacramental theology (Jesus’ moral teaching receives little attention). Weinandy only rarely raises historical-critical issues and intentionally did not read any commentaries in preparing this book. He does not cite commentaries in his text, nor does he cite other systematic theologians. The sources of the book are the biblical text, the author himself with his theological formation, and “hopefully, the light of the Holy Spirit” (xviii). The book is best regarded as both a biblical commentary and a theological treatise.

For the most part, Weinandy's commentary is intratextual. When Weinandy takes up a gospel text, he pays close attention not only to the text at hand but also to related gospel passages, to other parts of the New Testament, and especially to Old Testament antecedents: “The Old Testament … is the hermeneutical key to understanding Jesus and his salvific work” (429). Thus he responds to Vatican II's injunction in Dei Verbum to read any biblical text as part of a canonical whole. Likewise in accordance with Dei Verbum, Weinandy reads the biblical text through the lens of the faith of the Catholic tradition, especially the Trinitarian and Christological doctrines of the early councils, treating them, as the church does, as true statements of the meaning of the biblical texts.

These features are important for a reading of the Gospels as the word of God, but at times Weinandy leaves historical questions too far behind. He does not read the Gospels in a fundamentalist way, but he tends to slide too quickly from what makes sense within the story to what happened in history. A modern reader cannot avoid asking, “Did it really happen that way?” Does the fact that Jesus quotes Psalm 22 in Matthew's version of the crucifixion authorize us to take the whole of Psalm 22 as a glimpse into Jesus’ consciousness on the cross (372–80)? Can we really take Elizabeth as the first doctor of the church (25) or 2 Peter 1:16-18 as an eyewitness account of the transfiguration (228)? Similarly, Weinandy tries too hard to harmonize divergent gospel stories, for instance worrying about a seeming contradiction between the wise men bringing myrrh and Jesus’ corpse not being anointed in the Synoptics, or merging Simon the Pharisee in Luke's anointing story with Simon the leper in Matthew and Mark into an unlikely “leper Pharisee” (295).

As a theological treatise, Jesus Becoming Jesus centers in the concept of act. Weinandy here draws on the Thomistic tradition and on his own previous work in Christology and Trinitarian theology, notably Does God Change? (1985) and The Father's Spirit of Sonship (1995). Scarcely a page passes without use of “enact.” This rich term can mean simply to perform, or to bring into being by performing (as a legislature enacts a law), or to actualize in a philosophical sense to move from potency into act. Jesus becomes Jesus (“YHWH saves” [Mt 1:21]), the savior, by enacting what he is from the time of his conception. “Jesus becomes Jesus only through the saving actions, which are definitively enacted through his saving death and resurrection and find their full completion when Jesus comes in glory at the end of time” (465). God's revelation comes primarily through his saving acts, only secondarily through the words of scripture. And to be a God who reveals himself in acts entails, Weinandy argues in a conclusion, that God is Trinity. “God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit reveal through acts … because they are eternally mutually co-inhering perichoretic acts,” who “can reveal themselves only in the manner in which they exist” (469).

In his foreword, John Cavadini states that Weinandy's book represents the kind of exegesis that is appropriate for seminarians and undergraduates in Catholic universities. But the book itself is too difficult for anyone but theologians—and sometimes for anyone at all: “The Son's exclusive knowing of his Father is within the same ontological act of his being fathered by the Father as the Father's Son, for in being ontologically fathered by his Father, and so being known by the Father, the Son simultaneously knows his Father as the one in whom he is ontologically fathered” (195). Though Jesus Becoming Jesus is often illuminating and it offers new insight into such difficult questions as Jesus’ consciousness of his divine identity, it ultimately fails to engage the central hermeneutical task of our time, to integrate the historical-critical and doctrinal traditions of exegesis, as Dei Verbum urges (§12).