An instant best-seller in Italy, Vita di Gesù Cristo ("Life of Jesus Christ") was also highly praised by Catholic peer journals worldwide and has never since been out of print. The author, Giuseppe Ricciotti, was an archaeologist and Biblical scholar. After his seminary studies and completing mandatory military service, he was ordained a priest in 1913 and continued his studies at the University of Rome.

During World War I he served as a military chaplain, volunteering for service at the front lines, for which he was later awarded a Silver Medal of Military Valor. After the war, he resumed his studies and graduated in 1919 with a degree in Biblical Studies. During World War II, he took in many refugees at the congregation's Motherhouse the Basilica of St. Peter in Chains.

Excerpt from the Author's Preface: I have studied the ancient fact and not the modem theory, the solidity of the documents and not the flimsiness of any interpretation presently the fashion. The first vague notion of writing this book came to me many years ago in extraordinary circumstances. I had been carried to a field hospital set up in a wood of fir trees in a valley among the Alps.

For some time, I hovered between life and death awaiting my fate, it suddenly came to me that if I should live, I might write a life of Christ; his Gospel, in fact, was on the straw mattress beside me. The thought never left me; it became a kind of spiritual necessity. I have studied the ancient fact and not the modem theory, the solidity of the documents and not the flimsiness of any interpretation presently the fashion. I have even dared to imitate the famous “dispassionateness” of the canonical Evangelists, who have neither an exclamation of joy when Jesus is born nor a word of lament when he dies. It has been my intention, then, to write a critical work.