What Jesus Meant by garry wills

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

Thanks to Goodreader AC, I've become reacquainted with Garry Wills' copacetic combination of rigorous thought and felicitous prose. The Jesus as revealed through the author's careful and probing exegesis bears an appreciable resemblance—at least superficially—to my own personal and more ignorantly acquired understanding of the Son of Man: so that bodes either well for Mr. Sastre or ill for Mr. Wills. n
How, if Jesus was God, could he be deserted by himself? He was both man and God—but fully man. Jesus did not wear merely the outer shell or facial mask of a man. He had to enter into the full tragedy of humanity, its bewildered helplessness, its shame, its sense of inadequacy and despair. That is the meaning of the dark cry from the cross saying that even the Father had abandoned him. To experience all the aspects of human contingency, to plumb those depths, is a way of descending into hell. All that is nondivine in him must leap into oblivion, fully understanding that that is what he does. Only by being completely crushed as a human can he accomplish the utmost in human heroism.
nJesus is just alright with me.

0 0 Reply

AsakaraYoruto

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

Garry Wills' What Jesus Meant represents an extraordinary, very personal, though perhaps non-traditional attempt at understanding who Jesus was and how he has been interpreted over time, by a distinguished scholar, a historian with a background in classical languages.

Beginning with headings such as Christ was not a Christian, Wills contends that "to believe in the gospels is to take everything that Jesus meant, though at various levels of symbolization--to keep asking what Jesus meant."

Wills is very much a believer but hardly in the sense of Thomas Jefferson's secular rendering of "Christ without the miracles"; instead, Wills believes in Christ's miracles, his divinity and "the saving death & resurrection of Christ", while desiring to strip away all of the dogma & trappings that he feels have come to subvert Christ's message.

The author speaks of Jesus the Radical who was "never afraid to speak truth to power or to wealth." In fact, Jesus was apolitical but his original message was to adhere to:

the most egalitarian society then in existence, with Jesus' injunctions to the voluntary community of his followers against acquiring wealth, leading to a kind of Christian communism. To the Jewish priests, Jesus declared that the tax collectors & prostitutes will enter heaven before they do.

In the eyes of Garry Wills, the message of Jesus was that of an extremist, a radical. But the author asks if anyone but radicals can justly claim his name? As an example, Jesus had sympathy for the Samaritans, though they were treated by many Jews as heretics & unclean and their temple at Gerizim burned in 128 BCE.

Religion killed Jesus is Wills' response to who or what killed Jesus. For he was against the formalism of religion of his day & called authentic only "religion of the heart", being against ritual sacrifice & the concept of priesthood. Beyond that, Jesus foresaw the destruction of the temple & the priests who were the most active plotters against him.

In this I am reminded of the quote from the wonderful book, A Tale of Love & Darkness, by the late Amos Oz, who when he asked his uncle who Jesus was, received this response:

Jesus of Nazareth was one of the greatest Jews of all time, a wonderful moralist who loathed the uncircumcised of heart & fought to return Judaism to its original simplicity & wrest it from the power of the hair-splitting rabbis.

Jesus apparently saw himself as the "last priest". In Wills' research, the early church apparently functioned without priests. Instead, there were references to "elders" and the "apostles" merely referenced those sent out to preach the message of Jesus.

Also, Jesus was anti-hierarchical. Peter was head of the twelve but he was also a disciple, not a priest or a bishop. Further, the concept of an "apostolic succession" is a fiction in Wills' telling of what Jesus intended.

Jesus is the fulfillment of myth but not a mythical figure. There is a rather different take on Judas as well. And while Wills suggests that this is not meant to be a scholarly book, the level of scholarship & analysis is ever-present.

While so much of the life of Christ is shrouded in mystery, particularly the "missing years", in this book, Garry Wills causes Jesus to come alive in a rather different manner, illuminated with a mystical aura, deeply influencing those he encountered, going against the grain of his time & of those who had power over it. I have found worth reading and very much worth rereading.

*Within my review are 3 images of the author, the last one taken during a discussion of his book, What the Qur'an Meant, a gathering that I attended.

0 0 Reply

xlis

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

A thoughtful, insightful meditation on what Jesus said and--more important--what he was: the unique, prophetic embodiment of the Divine message of unconditional love.

0 0 Reply

__EyeCandy__

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

i feel bad for gary's priest.

0 0 Reply

Elveeve

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

What Jesus Meant by Garry Wills considers the ubiquitous phrase, “What Would Jesus Do?” citing chapter and verse to make it very clear that what Jesus did do was disrupt the religious orthodoxy and violate the social taboos of his time. This feeling yet scholarly account emphasizes Jesus’ radical message, although it thoroughly divorces religion from politics, and demonstrates the shortcomings of both literalist and liberal doctrine.

0 0 Reply

backfire96

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

A passionate interpretation of Jesus' teachings, life, death, and resurrection. Wills carries the reader forward through the gospels and epistles at a blustering pace. While there were several points that were very enlightening (the Good Samaritan being about purity; the reason Jesus had to die; etc), there's a lot in here that seems common sense, even though we fail to put it into practice. His choice of translation was a bit disorienting, and there are several passage that he uses multiple times to the detriment of his arguments. His ferocious 'take down' of the priesthood is where he truly lost me. It's one thing to argue that priests need to be better and the sacraments more open; it's another thing to argue that priests shouldn't exist at all. An interesting little book; I wouldn't treat it as the end of discussion.

0 0 Reply