The Meditations on the Life of Christ appeared at the end of the thirteenth century. The piece was originally thought to be written by St. Bonaventure, the true authorship is still not completely known, but was eventually attributed to Giovanni de’ Cauli. Giovanni was a Franciscan friar whose original audience was a nun at a sister order of Poor Clares. His intention for writing was to deepen the spirituality of the reader. His work is a compiled summary of the passions of Christ. Although it was originally written in Latin for a nun at Poor Clares, it was soon translated into various languages and became very popular across the continent. His work was so popular it was often referred to as ‘the fifth Gospel’.  The piece included sources from the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. As well as some more emotionally rooted documents like the Lives of Desert Fathers, Golden Legend, and other stories of martyrs and those who took a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

The inclusion of these extracanonical sources provides an emotional aspect that is not as obviously present in the original four Gospels. While some of the gospel show Jesus’ humanity more than others, the Meditations on the Life of Christ displays this much more. This story that Giovanni tells gives a less superficial picture of what happened to Jesus at each hour, and shows the humanity of Jesus which gives the nuns and monks a greater spiritual appreciation for their prayers at each hour associated to the timeline of Jesus’ death. The piece that Giovanni wrote was to give a deeper sense of spirituality and he did this through the emotions expressed by Jesus and his companions.  In fact the emotional aspect seems to have been included not only to provide the reader an emotional connection to the events, but also to expel any heretical groups that thought Jesus to not be fully man and fully God. This inclusion of emotion allows the reader to see Christ as a vulnerable human that suffers, as all human beings do, rather than just a spirit that cannot experience agony. This fact that he was fully human gives us, as humans, a deeper meaning to his suffering and death.