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The Man Nobody Knows: Bruce Barton's Unconventional Portrayal of Jesus as a Leader, Summaries of Leadership and Team Management

Andrews UniversityLeadership and Team Management

Bruce barton's book, the man nobody knows, published in 1924, offers unique insights into leadership theory and practice through the lens of jesus' life. Barton, a successful advertising executive and congressman, challenged the common perception of jesus as a wimpy dreamer and presented him as a strong, entrepreneurial leader. Barton's interpretation of jesus' leadership qualities, such as conviction, vision, and the ability to recognize hidden capacities in people. Barton's contextualization of jesus' story offers valuable lessons for understanding leadership and its evolution over time.

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THE MAN NOBODY KNOWS
By BRUCE BARTON
Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee (2000)
Paperback, 128 pages
Reviewed by David Rausch, Eleanor Cooper, & James Tucker
The Man Nobody Knows
by Bruce Barton, originally published in
1924, has a great deal to teach us from the perspective of leadership
theory and practice. The word leadership was not in common use when
the book was first published and has taken nearly a century to develop
into the icon word that it is today. Highly controversial at the time it
was written, the book retells the story of Jesus through the author’s
prism as an advertising executive and sales manager.
Bruce Barton founded the advertising agency that promoted the
early giants of American business, such enterprises as General Motors
and General Electric, and he is credited with creating the image of Betty
Crocker to sell products of General Mills, another of his clients.
Associated with the highest level of business and government leaders
in the 1920s, and himself a member of Congress for two terms, Barton is
surprisingly best known for this one small book, which remains in print
today and was one of the best selling books of the 20th century.
In a recent review of the book in the
Washington Post,
Jacoby (2007)
wrote that “this book was an attempt to reclaim the image of Jesus from
those who had portrayed him as a wimpy dreamer of impractical
dreams” (p. 3). Barton (2000) disclaimed the images of Jesus he saw
portrayed on the walls of his Sunday School. He stripped away the
“weak and puny” accretions and presented a tough, entrepreneurial
personality, a man with “muscles hard as iron” (p. 21) and “the voice
and manner of the leader—the personal magnetism which begets loyal-
David Rausch, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga; Eleanor
Cooper is a doctoral candidate at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga; James Tucker, Ph.D., is
a Professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
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THE MAN NOBODY KNOWS

By BRUCE BARTON

Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee (2000) Paperback, 128 pages Reviewed by David Rausch, Eleanor Cooper, & James Tucker

The Man Nobody Knows by Bruce Barton, originally published in 1924, has a great deal to teach us from the perspective of leadership theory and practice. The word leadership was not in common use when the book was first published and has taken nearly a century to develop into the icon word that it is today. Highly controversial at the time it was written, the book retells the story of Jesus through the author’s prism as an advertising executive and sales manager. Bruce Barton founded the advertising agency that promoted the early giants of American business, such enterprises as General Motors and General Electric, and he is credited with creating the image of Betty Crocker to sell products of General Mills, another of his clients. Associated with the highest level of business and government leaders in the 1920s, and himself a member of Congress for two terms, Barton is surprisingly best known for this one small book, which remains in print today and was one of the best selling books of the 20th century. In a recent review of the book in theWashington Post, Jacoby (2007) wrote that “this book was an attempt to reclaim the image of Jesus from those who had portrayed him as a wimpy dreamer of impractical dreams” (p. 3). Barton (2000) disclaimed the images of Jesus he saw portrayed on the walls of his Sunday School. He stripped away the “weak and puny” accretions and presented a tough, entrepreneurial personality, a man with “muscles hard as iron” (p. 21) and “the voice and manner of the leader—the personal magnetism which begets loyal-

David Rausch, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga; Eleanor Cooper is a doctoral candidate at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga; James Tucker, Ph.D., is a Professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

ty and commands respect” (p. 13). Top among the elements that Barton attributes to Jesus’ success as a leader are his “blazing conviction” and his “wonderful power to pick men and to recognize hidden capacities in them” (p. 17). He described a man with vision, consuming sincerity, and overwhelming faith in the work he is called to do. According to Jeff Sharlet (2008), author ofThe Family, Barton believed that “only strong, magnetic men inspire great enthusiasm and build great organizations” (p. 136). In many ways, Barton’s image of Jesus is a projection of himself: positive, aggressive, promoter, organizer, enabler—the kind of leader he’d like to have and to be. As such, it’s an interesting example of con- textualization. To understand this contextualization phenomena, we consider what Hesselgrave wrote inHermeneutics, Inerrancy and the Bible (1984): Contextualization is the process whereby representatives of a religious faith adapt the forms and content of that faith in such a way as to communicate and (usually) commend it to the minds and hearts of a new generation within their own changing culture or to people with other cultural backgrounds. (p. 694) Barton’s interest in communicating from his professional perspec- tive is similar to the way he believed Jesus communicated, using para- bles and cultural illustrations that would relate well to the people he addressed. As Richard Fried wrote in the introduction to Barton’s 2000 edition, “He offered religion with a modern face” (p. ix). Understanding Barton’s (2000) use of contextualization offers an opportunity to look at the leadership lessons, context and theories that might emerge from the text. Take, for example, his retelling the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness:

In the calm of that wilderness there came the majestic conviction which is the very soul of leadership—the faith that his spirit was linked with the Eternal, that God had sent him into the world to do a work which no one else could do, which—if he neglected it— would never be done.... To every man of vision the clear Voice speaks; there is no great leadership where there is no mystic. Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside themselves was superior to circumstance. (p. 13) Barton (2000) used the term “the eternal miracle” to describe that individual experience which is the “awakening of the inner conscious- ness of power” (p. 10). He placed the story of Jesus’ temptation in the

THE JOURNAL OF APPLIED CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP PAGE 71

References

Barton, B. (2000).The man nobody knows. Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee. Hesselgrave, D. (1984). Contextualization and revelational epistemology. In D. Rademacher & R. Preus (Eds.),Hermeneutics, inerrancy and the Bible. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. Jacoby, S. (2007, May 9). On Faith [Review of the bookThe Man Nobody Knows, by B. Barton].The Washington Post. Retrieved from http://newsweek. washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/susan_jacoby/2007/05/the_man_ nobody_knows.html Sharlet, J. (2008).The family: The secret fundamentalism at the heart of American power. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Spears, L., & Lawrence, M. (2004).Practicing servant-leadership: Succeeding through trust, bravery, and forgiveness. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

THE JOURNAL OF APPLIED CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP PAGE 73