Customer Reviews

What Jesus Meant

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Garry Wills is a historian specializing in the first 100 years of America (see "Lincoln At Gettysburg"-1992 and "Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence"-1994 among his other works). He is also a practicing Catholic who has written about "Saint Augustine" (1999) and "The Rosary" (2005) and other works about Christianity. His newest endeavor, "What Jesus Meant" explores what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

This slender volume can be read at one sitting but will cause the reader to ponder the author's title. Many Christians forget that Jesus hung out with society's outcasts of his day, had few possessions, was apolitical, and yet his radical message of love and redemption, healing the sick/raising the dead and challenging the religious structure of his day contributed to his crucifixation. Image Jesus among us today: eating with prostitutes, AIDS victims and drug abusers: claiming no party affiliation; condeming the wealthy; and challenging the rigidity of the institutional Church while calling the reader to give up all your possessions to follow Him. Mr. Wills writes as a believer to explain the faith while accepting the historical Jesus. For the reader who desires to move beyond Mr. Wills' brief introduction to Jesus, please read any of the works by either John Meier (especially his three volumes entitled "A Marginal Jew"), Ray Brown ("The Death of the Messiah") or Gunther Bornkamm ("Jesus of Nazareth").

I very much enjoyed this book. It's a quick but thought-provoking read, and I plan to re-read it in the near future. In part because of his expertise in Koine, the original language of the New Testament, Wills is able to breathe life and provide insight into many well-known Biblical passages.

The viewpoint is from that of a devout believer. As I was reading Wills's book, I was also reading "Mere Christianity", by C.S. Lewis, and I was struck by the similarity in outlook of the two authors. Although I recognize that some of the passages critical of church hierarchy in general and Pope Benedict XVI in particular will ruffle some feathers, Wills did not seem to stray from Scripture or interject modern political sensibilities into the Christian message. In fact, the hypocrisy of attempting to use Jesus' message for worldly purposes is one of the book's major themes.

"What Jesus Meant" would be a good companion volume for anyone who is working through the New Testament.

Those who would align Jesus with today's poltical right or political left (and there are both) may not like this book. They may well brand it heresy...But those of us who think Jesus was not a political figure in the sense of today's thinking will find it well worth the read. Much of modern religion tries to compartmentalize Jesus to espouse their preconceived notions. Thus the title of the book: "What Jesus Meant" It could be subtitled "What Jesus REALLY Meant!" A reader who approaches this book with an open mind and a sincere search for knowledge and truth will find this to be a valuable read. Those who come with preconceived notions of their own infalibility will be threatened by it. Read it. Think. That is part "working out" one's faith.

There's never any question, when reading one of Garry Wills' books, that the reader is promised a terrific ride.

"What Jesus Meant" is less one of Wills' patented scholarly works than a devotional one. He, like many contemporary Christians (many of whom find no place within Churches) has an obsessive need to get close to Jesus. This book is an attempt to cut through the gauze of our misplaced certainty about Christ to look at him with fresh eyes. More often than his critics would contend, Wills presents a Jesus that is probably as close as we can ever come to the enigmatic man whom two billion Christian s call Lord.

Wills hooked me from the first page. His depiction of Koine Greek - the language of the New Testament - as a kind of pidgin language, missing the connectives and articles of classical Greek -- was captivating, if not entirely convincing. It was fascinating to imagine Christ and Pilate struggling to converse in a kind of "You Kingee Jews?" broken Greek that would have caused laughter to their educated contemporaries. Wills gives a few examples of his own word-for-word scriptural translations that seem very rough indeed. Most of his other examples, however, are much less rough, making me wonder whether he was making too much of this thesis.

Wills turns to the Jesus story with the same hit-or miss blend of brilliance and improbability that he used with Koine Greek.

Wills is as unhappy with just about everybody. He dislikes the scholars of the Jesus Seminar and has little use with traditional images of Christ provided by the Churches, especially his own Roman Catholic Church. The former group, Wills says, "tames the real, radical Jesus, cutting him down to their size." Hear, hear. But the Churches have swathed Jesus in such a cocoon of divinity, otherworldliness and innocuousness that his radical message cannot escape. To Wills' immense credit, he recognizes that the only Jesus we have is the Jesus of faith, transmitted to us through the conduit of the teaching of the apostles and the early Church. One great insight is to remind us that the apostles never say more about the historical Jesus than he actually was. They always say less. Understanding that the apostles could never fully capture the essence of their encounter with Christ is an important key to the gospels. These books, faced with the challenge of depicting the God-man, relied on stories whose message was not in the narrative vehicles used to tell the story, but in what the stories meant. For Wills then, as for many modern bible scholars, the greater truth is not the details of (for instance) who visited whom on the first Christmas, but in what the Nativity stories say about Christ as being a nobody from nowhere, put on the run by power from the start.

Wills' most controversial conclusions revolve around his contention that Jesus did not come to start a church or to establish a hierarchy. He goes to great pains to show that the words for hierarchical priesthood are rarely if ever present in the New Testament. He returns again and again to Christ's cleansing of the temple. He takes that action, with good reason, as Christ's rejection of hierarchies and sacrificial systems that ossify truth and reduce the encounter with God into an efficient system. Yet Wills seems to forget that we are not Jesus. To imagine a movement based on religious anarchy, as Wills sees Jesus trying to do, seems mad. And yet the alternative, a self-sustaining priesthood that seems at odds with its founder, is often the result.

Wills is repulsed by the inevitable errors of priesthoods, which "keep on creating categories of the unclean" that were clearly anathema to Jesus himself. Jesus broke down barriers, eating with the unclean, the sinful and the turncoat. Yet maddeningly, his followers can't help turning away their own "unclean" from the altar.

What to do with Wills? Clearly, such a tortured seeker after Christ must have a place in our Churches. And while Wills's Jesus is the most persuasive of the many Jesuses one encounters on the page or on the screen, he cannot be sustained in a world bounded by time and custom. It may be that we are doomed to ever break out of one shell of Jesusolatry after another until the Parousia. While Wills's book ultimately fails to definitively provide the answer to "What Jesus Meant," there is much in it of the faithful disciple and of the Master who is the disciple's goal. The book is full of counter-intuitive insights (Jesus as physically frail?) that shock us into examining our own assumption and biases. And as such, caveats and all, Wills' work cannot be dismissed.

Who and what was Jesus? What did he teach? What were his intentions? There are nearly as many answers to these questions as there are people answering them and the reviews here reflect that diversity. I have been a passionate reader of the New Testament since high school and have reflected on the life of Jesus and debated its meaning both with myself and my friends since junior high. Raised Southern Baptist, I was taught to read the New Testament for myself and not merely at the direction of others and even my time in divinity school (the nondenominational Yale Divinity School) made me trust others more than myself. I was delighted in reading this book to find very much the Jesus that I also encountered in reading the New Testament. Like Wills, I have been horrified at the domestication and puritanizing of Jesus by organized religion. I was delighted in reading this book to find ably described the Jesus of faith that I also had found.

Of course, that a Baptist and a Catholic can find the same Jesus can possibly only occur of the Catholic isn't a very compliant one, and many of the reviews here express the dismay some readers have felt in reading so many views in opposition to the Roman Catholic tradition. I have no problem with this because it has always been obvious to me that Jesus detested religious ritual and ceremony, established no priesthood or hierarchical clergy, and certainly never established anything like the papacy. I was fascinated, however, to find Wills holding positions similar to my own on a host of issues. He apparently has as low an opinion of the papacy I do (I hail from Little Rock, Arkansas, home of one of the two cardinals opposed to the dogma of papal infallibility in the late 19th century). I have not read Wills's book on why he is a Catholic. I am curious to do so. I would very much like to know why he remains a Catholic when his views concerning Christ and his teachings seem so thoroughly in line with Protestantism.

The Jesus that Wills sees is not a very proper Jesus. He would probably be expelled from Bob Jones University because he spent all his time with unsavory individuals. As Wills indicates, today he would probably avoid protestant ministers, Catholic bishops, and especially televangelists like Pat Robertson. Instead, if he were to appear suddenly in America he would probably be found surrounded by the destitute and poor, gays and drug users, people on welfare, immigrants, the mentally ill, the homeless, and Muslims. These were his people. He constantly expressed his dislike of the wealthy, the self-righteous, the morally judgmental, the deeply religious, and those who divided society into desirable and undesirable elements. I think Wills reading of Jesus' wonderful inclusiveness is wonderfully true to the New Testament. Jesus was obsessed with those who had suffered the most at the hands of proper society and I think it is this aspect of his life that makes so many people read THE GRAPES OF WRATH's Tom Joad as a Jesus figure. Wills sees in the Jesus of faith as found in the New Testament a profoundly compassionate, caring, loving individual. All of his condemnations were directed at the rich and those who used religion to marginalize wrongdoers.

I also completely agree with Wills in his refusal to minimize the explicitly religious aspects of the Jesus of faith. C. S. Lewis in MERE CHRISTIANITY argues that those people who want to reduce Jesus from Son of God to a mere moral teacher are simply wrong. Jesus, Lewis argues, is either God Incarnate or a madman. There is no third possibility. Wills would completely agree with this, and echoes Paul when he wrote that if Jesus be not risen from the dead then Christians are of all individuals the most to be pitied. I completely agree with his detestation of the Jesus Seminar, which is some of the most egregious academic silliness I have ever encountered. The project of the Jesus Seminar tells no one anything whatsoever about Jesus, but a great deal about the people who are trying to construct a tame, boring, uninteresting, dull Jesus. [I strongly recommend two books by NT scholar Luke Timothy Johnson, like Wills a Catholic, on Jesus, THE LIVING JESUS, which presents a portrait complementary to Wills's, and THE REAL JESUS, which is a exceedingly well-reasoned attack on the pretensions of the Jesus Seminary.) Wills simply has no patience with any accretions to the Gospel depiction of Jesus, whether they stem from organized religion or academic game playing.

One of the central points in Wills's book is that Jesus was a completely nonpolitical individual who was not in the least intent on setting up a religious kingdom on earth. In other words, Jesus was not a theocrat, an important thing to keep in mind in an age where people influenced by Christian Reconstructionism like Pat Robertson ahistorically insist that America is or ought to be a Christian nation. Wills would argue to the degree that a nation is "Christian," it is to that degree opposed to the teachings of Jesus. Wills argues equally that neither did Jesus have a leftwing political agenda. Wills is, of course, a well-known political leftist. I largely agree with Wills here, but I would argue that Jesus' teachings, while they don't point towards establishing a religious order, do make the holding of certain political positions un-Christian. While I don't think Jesus would embrace a Democratic political agenda, I can't imagine he would be sparing of today's right-wing agenda, which is not only judgmental in a way that he constantly condemned, but favors policies favoring the wealthy and seems to endorse economic greed as an acceptable social and moral value. In other words, I think that the teachings of Jesus exclude most of the values and moral attitudes that under gird today's political and religious right. But there is no question that Wills is correct in holding that Jesus had no explicit political agenda. His goal was to redeem people, not to establish a political realm or a political party.

One of the finest things about this book is Wills's own translations of passages fromthe New Testament. As he points out in the preface, the koine Greek in which the NT was composed is quite rough-hewed. Translations have a tendency to prettify the Greek original. I don't suppose he has the time to produce a complete translation of the New Testament, but I regret that he doesn't.

I'll confess that Garry Wills is one of my favorite writers. Although I completely lack his academic prowess, I have always felt he was a kindred spirit. I have long striven in vain to write books of my own (I'm working on two at the moment that will probably go unfinished like the last four or five) and a friend who knows that I've struggled unsuccessfully with finishing what I start asked me who I would most like to emulate in the kinds of books I wrote. I replied Garry Wills, for the following reasons. First, while he has a solid grounding in early American constitutional history, he is beyond that a generalist, moving on from Jefferson and the Federalist Papers to write on Lincoln, Reagan, Venice, and John Wayne. While I have studied philosophical ethics and the work of Kierkegaard in depth, I also am a generalist. Like Wills, I lean far to the left politically. Also like Wills, though academically inclined and a political leftist, I am a Christian and hold very orthodox beliefs on most doctrines. It isn't necessary that there be anyone else in the world with positions close to your own, but it is nice when there are. And because this book is on a subject so very important to me, I am especially grateful to him for writing this wonderful exposition of the teachings of Jesus.

"The only Jesus we have is the Jesus of faith." Without faith, there is no reason to trust anything the Gospels say, but with faith, we trust the Gospel in all that is meant. Gary Wills, in his thought-provoking "What Jesus Meant," attempts to spell out what Jesus meant by reviewing the Gospel life of Jesus at all its various levels of symbolization. Fundamentalists who view the Gospels literally may find Will's book disturbing.

Wills is clear that this is not a scholarly work but a devotional work following St. Anselm's "faith out on a quest to know."

The book is organized in chronological order of Jesus' life - The Hidden Years, The Work Begins, The Radical Jesus, Against Religion, Heaven's Reign, Descent into Hell, The Death of God, and the Life of God.

Will's interpretation of what the Gospels tell us about Jesus and what Jesus meant is supported by scripture and the insights of others (St. Augustine, G.K. Chesterton, and more). Some notable highlights include;

* "Christ was certainly not a Christian."
* Jesus of the gospels is scandalous.
* Jesus was an extremist. Love is the test. Love is everything. It is radical love, exigent, searing, terrifying. It is an awesome test of love that Jesus brings to bear on our lives. The church's later treatment of the gospels is one long effort to rescue Jesus from His extremism.
* The most striking, resented, and dangerous of Jesus' activities was his opposition to religion as that was understood in his time. This is what led to his death. He called authentic only the religion of the heart, the inner purity and union with the father that he achieved and was able to share with his followers.
* Jesus was sent to express, vindicate, and extend the Father's love.
* Jesus entered into the full tragedy of humanity, its bewildered helplessness, its shame, its sense of inadequacy and despair.
* Jesus does not come to do a human favor, but to declare His authority over life and death.
* Heaven's reign is Himself, the avenue of access to the Father. He partly opened up that access on earth, but the process will be complete only in the Father's bosom when history ends.

I found "What Christ Meant" to be an excellent book, opening up my thinking about what Jesus meant as it relates to Christianity today. We have much to learn from finding our way back to what Jesus really meant.

Wills discusses how both liberals and conservatives have tried to misappropriate what Jesus said to advance their causes.

To me it is interesting that, as the role of religion has declined (more in Europe but--to some extent here in the U.S. as well), opportunists have moved in to take advantage of the vacuum to impose their own agendas.

Wills points out the essential and radical elements of Jesus' message: "Here it is. Period. Deal with it."

Clarifying and sobering.

His book is a serious challenge to postmodernists who comfortably and arrogantly assert that Christ's message is whatever we "feel" or "wish" it to be....shading and editing so that it comports with our own biases and defenses.

This book is awesome - a must read. It is in essence a rescue mission to free the true Jesus who has been kidnapped by established churches and politicians in our day. Reading this book is a liberating and affirming experience. As an American Christian who has felt socially and politically bludgeoned by "Christians" in our churches and political offices in the last decade, I read this book with tears in my eyes and joy in my heart for truth does, indeed, set us free. This book should be mandatory reading for anyone who wants to put his/her name on a ballot for office in this country - the message is a message for all mankind no matter what one's "religious affiliation."

Perhaps I liked this short but thought-provoking effort by Mr. Wills more than most readers because...I needed it more. I have been coping rather poorly with a family crisis for 18 months or so, and I am not traditionally religious, although a Christian believer (at least by my own lights.) I found the book by accident on the new book shelf of my local library yesterday, and three hours later I finished it, and felt blessed to have had the experience. Garry Wills is no flaming liberal, but neither is he the kind of conservative church-going Republican we get exposed to on the news on a daily basis. He presents here a Jesus who is divine, who has indeed been resurrected, and who was too radical for today's activists of either the right or the left, for different reasons. I loved the book and recommend it highly to all who are suffering, wondering where they have failed, and what to do next. It won't give you a free pass to new happiness, but it can give you faith that you do not wander alone, and that your unseen companion has the power and the intention of seeing you through your particular darkness. Thanks, Mr. Wills. I needed that.

Wills' book starts off well, in the vein of G.K. Chesterton's heterodox orthodoxy, but soon goes astray. The first false step came when Wills asserted that Jesus was homeless, citing the "foxes have dens" passage but ignoring the many passages that place Jesus' home (and house) in Capernaum.

Another false step comes when he tries to portray Jesus as a physical weakling, citing to Jesus' inability to carry his own cross and to his speedy death on the cross, and reminding the reader that St. Francis was a weakling, too. Jesus probably would never have won the Mr. Olympia contest, but I'm pretty sure he was no weakling. A carpenter working in an age before power tools has to have been a fair physical specimen. Also, in an era where the major mode of transportation was Shanks' mare, everyone was in pretty good physical condition. Jesus had trouble carrying his cross, not because he was weak, but because he had been beaten at least three times: before the sanhedrin, by the Roman soldiers, and by Herod's soldiers. The three beatings and the spear thrust, not wimpiness, hastened his death ahead of the two thieves.

Wills cherry picks his verses, ignores inconvenient verses, and finds Jesus to have advocated almost every single tenet of politically correct post-modern secular society. Questers after the historical Jesus have found him to be many things: a revoutionary, an apocalyptic prophet, a cynic sage, a magician, a clever fraud, and now a New Age Enlightenment guru.

The Jesus Seminar, with whom Wills and I both have major disagreements, gave a relevant caution to all questers after the historical Jesus: beware of finding a Jesus who is too congenial to you. Of course, after sounding this solemn warning, the Jesus Seminar went right out and fell into the very error they warned against. Wills has also fallen into this error. Indeed, it is almost impossible for humans not to fall into this error.

A FOOTNOTE: After writing this review, I went back to re-read the Gospels, and got a lesson in why we almost always seem to see Jesus as we want him to be. We look at him through the distorted lens of preconception. Another reading of the Gospels revealed two preconceptions I brought to this review, one of them shared by Wills. The first preconception: Herod's men beat Jesus. Maybe. Luke only says they treated him with contempt, which may or may not include a beating. Second preconception: Simon of Cyrene carried Jesus' cross because Jesus was unable to carry it. None of the Gospels reports Jesus as being unable to carry his cross. They report that Simon was compelled to carry the cross, but don't say why. Luke hints at another reason. Jesus was required to precede Simon as Simon carried his cross. The title on the cross ("King of the Jews") suggests that Pilate was mocking the Sanhedrin by playing up Jesus' purported status as Messiah. The soldiers had already paid mocking deference to Jesus' kingship. They might have thought it was a great joke to have a "servant" carry the cross for the "King of the Jews", who would be too "noble" to do manual labor.