What Jesus Meant - Garry Wills
Garry Wills is a Catholic who despises just about everything in the Catholic Church with the exception of Jesus. This book is his attempt to present his own image of Jesus, "a lower-class man speaking the everyday language of his workingmen followers" (xiv). In spite of his suspicions of the Church, he uncritically approaches all four canonical Gospels - Matthew, Mark, Luke, John - as authentic means to learn about Jesus. But learning about Jesus involves more than a woodenly literal reading of the text; it demands that we search the text to know "what Jesus meant by his strange deeds and words" (xviii). When we approach the Gospels in this manner, we find that what Jesus "signified is always more challenging than we expect, more outrageous, more egregious." We discover a Christ who is, in the words of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor "exceptional, vague, and enigmatic" (xviii). Wills condemns the critical Jesus Seminarists: "Though some people have called the Jesus Seminarists radical, they are actually very conservative. They tame the real radical, Jesus, cutting him down to their own size" (xxv). Wills' portrait of Jesus is thoughtful and provocative. His rants against the Catholic Church are a bit overdone, but I can see how they may be helpful to allow people to distinguish between mere religion and Jesus. Religion is not a bad thing when it is a means of manifesting the presence, grace, and love of Christ. However, when it obscures rather than enlightens, it is toxic. For me, the highlights of the book were his rant on how we cannot slavishly imitate Jesus (xv - xxxi) and his letter to the evangelical who believes that a "literal" reading of the Bible provides the answers to everything (33-35).