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.

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.

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.

i feel bad for gary's priest.

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.

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.

Read Garry Wills' related book, What the Gospels Meant. It is much better.

Biography of a low caste radical

Some good thoughts, but a little odd. Loved the emphasis on Jesus as decidedly non-political and his treatment of atonement as avoiding an angry caricature of God. Sometimes I wonder if labeling a book “meditations” is an excuse for not actually developing a thesis.

This 142-page devotional work offers a compelling explication of Jesus' message and his significance, firmly grounded in the Gospels from which Wills quotes extensively. Its eight chapters emphasize Jesus' spiritual radicalism. The chapter on the beginning of Jesus' public ministry, for example, centers around several examples of Jesus rejecting every category of "unclean" person defined by Jewish law and custom. Wills argues that a major component of Jesus' ministry was to extend God's love, compassion, and mercy to the "outcasts" of the world and to denounce the multitude of external purity standards used to exclude and shun people. Bringing Jesus' message into the present day, Wills notes the numerous "Christian" attempts to cast homosexuals as contemporary unclean pariahs, and comments:

"Is there any doubt where Jesus would have stood in these episodes - where, in his mystical members, he was standing then? He was with the gay man, not with his haters."

Wills' argument is equally powerful in his chapter on "The Radical Jesus," where he documents Jesus' consistent condemnation of wealth, power, and exploitation as forms of idolatry that promote inequality and misery. Jesus combined a radical egalitarianism with a steadfast dedication to nonviolence, yet Wills is careful to point out that all of this was in service to non-political ends, for Jesus had no political agenda on earth. Nevertheless, the very spiritual demands he made of his followers and of all those who received his message made him a threat to both religious and secular authorities in his day, and he spent most of his life in constant danger.

Perhaps the most interesting chapters, however, are "Against Religion" and "Heaven's Reign," where Wills makes a strong case that Jesus did not establish a new church through his life and ministry but rather recast religious practice in a manner that made it accessible to all. Jesus preached that God sought reconciliation rather than sacrifice and a direct relationship for salvation rather than a hierarchy of ecclesiastical authority. Wills discusses Jesus' arguments about the Sabbath and the Temple to support his claims that Jesus had no interest in a new church, and Wills finds no evidence that Jesus supported a formal priesthood either, let alone an episcopacy. Instead, he explained to his followers that he would be present in the smallest of gatherings in his name, where all would be equal before God and in their relations with each other.

Wills carries this theme forward in his account of Jesus' death and resurrection, noting as other Christian writers have that Jesus announced through his person the arrival of God's reign on earth and its realization over time, something Jesus' followers have struggled with ever since.

I strongly recommend Wills' book to anyone with an interest in the life and message of Jesus. Although Wills concludes that "what Jesus meant is clearly laid out in the gospels," the Jesus we meet in these pages may be quite different from the one we have received through the various churches and contemporary religious figures who claim to profess his message today. Wills himself is a devout Roman Catholic, but as he makes clear through the book he has very serious reservations about the Church in our time. In addition to its value for individual reading, "What Jesus Meant" is also an excellent tract for religious study groups, as its arguments are likely to stimulate much discussion and debate.

Wow. Simply put, this book is a gift. For those searching for clues to the truly radical and universe-upending teachings of Jesus Christ, and what those teachings mean for the individual follower, this small volume is colossal in its impact. I plan on reading his "What Paul Meant" and his new volume in the series, "What the Gospels Meant," as well. Wills comes across as one who ardently loves Jesus. He's not a fundamentalist nutbag who preaches hate. He comes from a humble place, searching to fully understand what Jesus commanded us all to do as His followers. A beautiful and sobering book.

Did you ever wonder about the discrepancy between what others have said about Jesus, and what Jesus actually said?

Talk about finding a needle in a haystack of statements that reaches to the Moon!

But that's the Herculean task that Garry Willis undertakes in WHAT JESUS MEANT.

Willis' own background is Catholic, and he does reserve some digs (towards the end of his book) for one of the past popes. The one whose name starts with a B and was the only pope to retire, rather than die his way out of the Vatican. [OK, I'm teasing a little bit, it was Benedict XVI].

Other than this, I (as a former Catholic) didn't detect a drop of religious bias in Willis' book.

As a matter of fact, when it comes to religion, Willis is quite insistent that if Jesus walked inside the vast majority of churches today (at least in Western culture), he wouldn't recognize most of what they are doing or preaching as aligning with his teachings.

Among the points that Willis makes are:
. Jesus never meant to start an organized religion,
. Jesus never meant to establish a separation among his followers between laity and clergy
. Jesus would be appalled at any alliance between his followers and a political party
. Jesus was more interested in social justice and love than power and politics
. Jesus upset the religious leaders of his day and would probably upset most of today's religious leaders.

In particular, I appreciated what Willis had to say about Communion (aka Holy Communion, The Lord's Supper). In short, Willis sees Communion as primarily a celebratory invitation, a meal, and not a sacrifice.

Willis makes the point: "So Jesus' eating in his appearances after the Resurrection is a proleptic and partial anticipation of the feast that awaits us [at the Second Coming of Jesus]... It is a mystical communing with his comrades in the basic image of the afterlife. People often wonder how they should imagine life after death. Jesus used the imagery of the scriptures, presenting it as a great welcoming banquet."

As for the motivation behind Jesus' agreeing to be crucified, Willis writes: "If you want to know why Jesus died, the best place to look for an explanation is in John's account of the Last Supper, in the long passage called the Last Discourse [starting in chapter 14 of John's gospel]. This does not speak of divine anger to be allayed by sacrifice. It talks, over and over, of divine love entering into the human darkness and turning it to light."

It is love, says Willis that is the most important element in Jesus' life and teachings.

Willis concludes: "Jesus' followers have the obligation that rests on all men and women to seek justice based on the dignity of every human being... But heaven's reign makes deeper and broader demands, the demands not only of justice but of love."