Pope Benedict XVI yesterday condemned the “cruelty” of capitalism and colonialism in his first book written as pontiff, while at the same time inviting criticism of his views.

The power of the wealthy over the poor is also condemned in the 448-page Jesus of Nazareth, which is described as a personal meditiation on Christ’s teaching that reasserts “bed-rock” Christian values. It reaches bookshops in Italy, Germany and Poland on Monday, the Pope’s 80th birthday. It will be issued in Britain by Bloomsbury and by Doubleday in America on May 15.

In a preface the Pope explains that he has released the first ten chapters of what has become a two-volume work “because I do not know how much time and how much strength I will still be given”.

The book was not intended as an infallible or “magisterial” teaching, so that “anyone is free to contradict me”, he writes. It is viewed as a definitive riposte to a series of books and films that the Vatican says undermine Christianity by using apocryphal writings and legends rather than Scripture to portray Jesus as an historical figure who was not the Son of God.

The Pope also has some theologians in his sights, writing that for decades he has noticed a growing scholarly distinction between the “historical Jesus” and the “Christ of Faith”, a distinction that he says even many Christians now accept.

“I trust the Gospels,” the Pope says. “I wanted to attempt to present the Jesus of the Gospels as the true Jesus, as the historical Jesus in the true sense of the expression. Only if something extraordinary happened, if the figure and words of Jesus radically exceeded all the hopes and expectations of his age, can his Crucifixion and his effectiveness be explained.”

The Pope analyses the Sermon on the Mount and the parables of Jesus, including the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, using them to illustrate that the problems of the modern world cannot be solved by material means alone.

He lambasts the West for creating “a Godless world where all that counts is power and profit” and for “plundering” the Third World. Reflecting on the Good Samaritan and the Commandment to “love your neighbour as yourself”, he says that in today’s globalised society our neighbours are in Africa, “where whole populations have been robbed and pillaged . . . Our way of life, the history in which we are involved, has plundered them and continues to plunder them.”

Instead of bringing God to Third World peoples, the West has exported cynicism and exploitation, including drugs trafficking, people smuggling and sex tourism. The Pope quotes with apparent approval from Karl Marx’s theory of Man’s alienation, while adding that, regrettably, Marx had developed his thoughts only “in the material sphere”, ignoring the spiritual dimension.