Meditations on the Life of Christ became a medieval best-seller toward the end of the thirteenth century. Interestingly, scholars are still uncertain as to who is the author of this influential work. It was formerly believed that St. Bonaventure was the author, but now, many believe it may have been Giovanni de’ Cauli. Giovanni was a Franciscan friar who hailed from Tuscany, and he wrote the Meditations to assist a nun of his sister order of the Poor Clares with her spiritual advancement. He retold the story of the life of Jesus using not only the gospels, but also “an array of other medieval authorities” (90). These extra-canonical texts include the Lives of the Desert Fathers, Jacob of Voragine’s Golden Legend, which is a collection of the lives of a variety of saints, the sermons and various letters of Bernard of Clairvaux, the Glossa ordinaria, a vast biblical explication, the Historica scholastica by Peter Comestor, and Christian pilgrim accounts of their travels to the Holy Land. While the Meditations was originally written in Latin intended for a Poor Clares nun, it was soon translated into several European vernaculars, and spread quickly across the continent. The influence and popularity of this work was so profound that it has come to be known as the fifth gospel. Many of the details in this work that are not present in the New Testament, including Jesus and John the Baptist playing together as children, have been the subject of much Christian art and influential in Franciscan spirituality.

The Meditations differ from the four canonical gospels in that they encourage the reader to have as personal an experience as possible when imagining the suffering of Jesus. The author may be trying to highlight the human side of Jesus Christ, hammering home to the reader the belief that Jesus did experience immense pain and true suffering. Some Christian dissidents, including the Gnostics, believed that Jesus did not feel any pain while inhabiting a human body, and they even produced artwork that depicted him on the cross laughing at his crucifiers. By attempting to personalize the experiences of Jesus, the author hopes to dispel the idea that Jesus was not fully human. He asks the reader to “think how they take him … and furiously cast him on the cross” (97). The author likely hopes that his stories will cause his readers to more fully understand the reality (as he perceived it) that Jesus took on all the sins of humanity, and following, they may accept Him as their savior.