I have heard of Garry Wills before, in fact, I believe I read What the Koran Meant and that was also by this author. What Jesus Meant subverted my expectations. From the title, I expected the book to be about focusing on Jesus teaching you to love your neighbor or respect God or something. Rather than that, the author claims that this is not a scholarly work, but is instead a devotional of sorts. He examines the tiniest references to what Jesus said in the Gospels and beyond, expanding on the Bible with outside sources and knowledge of what it would have been like as a Jew during the times of Jesus.

Since the childhood and formative years of Jesus are not documented and there are no corroborating bits of evidence of Jesus’ life and times, all we have to go on is conjecture. The author discusses the languages Jesus and friends would have spoken in various situations, adding their histories and so on. Jesus is generally made out to be a jerk in my opinion. Sure he heals people, but he does so at the expense of his familial ties. His mission is just that important. His family even worries that he might have joined a cult. The author takes care to put the word cult in quotes, as though this is some sort of higher calling different from a cult.

The first thing we hear about Jesus in the Bible is his birth of course, but then we also get to hear about him coming out of the desert as a weird prophet character. He ‘studied’ under John the Baptist and met with the Devil. The Devil wants to tempt Jesus for some reason, appealing to his human side. This book also discusses things we can’t possibly have knowledge of. For instance, what did Jesus look like? Was he a fine specimen of a man or a lanky waif? Would that matter in the long and short of things? The book even points out that Jesus was against organized religion, making all the pomp and circumstance surrounding Christianity even stranger to me. Then again, people make religions, gods do not do so.

This book gave me a lot to think about, but it also reminded me of being in Grade School. It was quite short, but I couldn’t finish it. After the first few chapters, I got the gist of the book and didn’t feel like finishing it.

A friend's priest recommended I should pick up some Gary Wills' books (a Catholic author and historian)and I am glad he did. 'What Jesus Meant' is the first Wills book I have read, but it most certainly won't be the last. Wills takes the Gospels and breaks them down contextually...to what those words and actions meant during the time of Christ, instead of what they mean to us today. He talked about how Jesus and his followers would have spoken a more pidgin kind of Greek than what was translated. He broke down where Jesus would've been in society and how religion and society worked during this time. It was all very interesting to me. He talked about Jesus as a man who disliked the hierarchy of religion and was working to break down said structure, and that after he died, his followers for years still worked within that structure - no one was better than anyone else; men and women were equal; different races were equal; different cultures were equal. It reminds me of how far we have come from what seemed to be Jesus' main message. Wills doesn't blame the church or others for where religion now finds itself, but challenges us to look beyond the words we have heard over and over again to what they really meant.

wonderful

This book is worth your time. It is inspiring. And requires careful concentration. However it is well worth your time.

I love this book. I thought it was beautifully written and captured the essence of Jesus's message in a way that is thoroughly relevant to contemporary times. I can't help but wonder if Pope Benedict XVI (among other non-Catholic Christian leaders, but especially the Pope) read it, and if he did, what he thought. The Afterword let each of us off the hook, though, for our (innocent?) misdeeds...(i was reminded, again, of Jesus's words from the cross, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do...") Saint Augustine's observation that the highest human faculty is love, higher even than the intellect per Plato and Aristotle, is a wonderful idea to which i wish all people could rededicate themselves to.

you know i came back 9 years after the first time i read this and i think i'm bumping it up to five stars. i think my favorite part is when garry wills relates the time his nun-frightened young son asked him if he (the son) was going to hell, and gary wills describes his own being as "without an ounce of heroism" and simply tells his kid "i don't know, but if you are, i am too" which strikes me as unheroic but also profoundly honest, which is a kind of heroism. anyway i dunno if anyone reads these blabs i put on here and i suspect that if the answer is yes those anyones are even less curious about my personal views on salvation but if you are jesus-curious but struggling to get over the dumb stuff humans decorate jesus with/decorate with jesus, let garry wills, a non-dumb human, talk to you for a minute.

After reading Garry Wills' What Paul Meant, I though it made sense to go back and read his earlier What Jesus Meant. It struck me as less persuasive, perhaps because the topic is much more deeply developed in this case. The book is for a general audience, which means that you won't find footnotes and citations. The problem with that is that the general reader is not likely to be able to discern where Wills is making a statement of opinion rather than a statement of fact. So, for example, when he refers to a first-century fresco showing six women in a Eucharistic celebration; he fails to mention that both the dating and gender are disputed.
But the writing is solid, and Wills accomplished what he set put to do: put forward his image of Jesus. You may not agree with it in whole or in part, but it is an exercise that is valuable for both the author and the reader. We each have an image of Jesus, and it is useful to see those of others; Benedict XVI offers his own Jesus of Nazareth in similar fashion.
I find the scriptural understanding on which Wills' image is built to be a bit naive. He picks and chooses from each gospel as well as several letters, but never considers one of these authors' image of Jesus in it's won right, and never addresses the fact that they differ. Still, Wills presents an image of Jesus that comes organically from the gospels and challenges the Church and anyone who offers a docile presentation of Jesus. It's a good read, but just like What Paul Meant, it can't ne the only book you trad on the subject, or you'll get an incomplete picture.

Lately I have been looking at Jesus through other people's eyes. Wills' is an interesting head to climb into. He draws a lot of his insights from GK Chesterton and NT Wright - which is fine in my book. He delves into the Greek and offers his own translations as scripture reference - also fine by me. He hones in on Jesus as the alien without a true home ushering in the new temple and the reign of his Father. He offers most of his criticism of WWJD Christianity in his introduction. He has a smattering of criticism for the Catholic church throughout the book - transubstantiation, priesthood, papacy - subjects he elaborates more on in his other books. He is a fan of Anselm, Ambrose and Augustine and this shows in his reading of the Gospels. While I did not sit toe-to-toe with him on his theology; I did walk away from this book with some new insights into "What Jesus Meant." And for that I'm thankful to this offering. I took in the unabridged audio book as read by the author which was also a good way to get a read on Wills intent with this book.

Excellent theology based on Jesus' actual words as quoted in the gospels. The principal point made is that Jesus concentrated on bringing Heaven to Earth and was way too radical for political or even religious categorization. What I have always enjoyed most about the gospels is the way Jesus spoke to power. It got him killed, but he knew that was his mission. Jesus' sheer courage leaps out from the gospels, and this book brings it all out.

I thought I was going to like this book, but it wasn't anything special. Wills offers some cultural background details that might be new information to someone who has only thought Jesus to be a non-historical figure.

The thrust of his presentation, it seems to me, is that Jesus desired and established an alternative path to God. His path was different from, and counter to, the path of ordinary Jews in that it was anti-sacrificial, non-hierarchical, inclusive, and egalitarian. These are standard talking points in today's religious landscape. Nothing earth-shattering is tied in with those claims. Occasionally he spends a page ranting against what Pope Benedict XVI has said or done, but he gets backs on topic after those short detours. Frustratingly, though, Wills insists, over and over again, that Jesus was not a political figure; but that assumption has been contested by everyone from Marcus Borg and J.D. Crossan to John Howard Yoder and N.T. Wright. He seems to advocate a private spirituality that leaves the "powers that be" to continue their operations (ie. "Be nice and share with others and you'll find God mystically living in the personal sphere of your heart.").


Some of the info included:
What language did Jesus speak?
“It was probably among such desert ascetics and scholars, rather than in Pharisaical classes, that Jesus learned Hebrew. This was the learned language of his day. What common folk spoke was the indigenous Aramaic. Their necessary second language in everyday life was 'marketplace Greek,’ the language of the empire that Rome inherited from Alexander’s Greek successors. It was the inability of ordinary Jews to understand Hebrew that made it necessary to translate their scripture into Greek. Jesus would have spoken Greek to Pontius Pilate, since Pilate did not know Aramaic and Jesus did not know Latin. None of the first disciples understood Latin. Jesus did not learn hebrew in his home. Lower-class people like his parents did not commonly know Hebrew. In fact his parents, like almost all the lower class in Palestine (or, for that matter, like most poor people in antiquity), were very likely illiterate. To learn Hebrew and study the Bible texts he had to out to those mystics. It was natural, therefore, for his first recorded association to be with John the Baptist. Repeatedly in the gospels he surprises those around him by his learning, which would show first in his knowledge of Hebrew (Mt 13.54, Mk 1.22, Lk 2.47, Jn 7.15). This was not a knowledge his fisherman followers possessed - though his first mentors in the desert would have had it, and passed it on to him." [Garry Wills, What Jesus Meant, 10).

Was Jesus married?
“If he was ‘about thirty’ when he came before the public, that covers not only his adolescence but his young manhood, the period of (roughly) his twenties. Did Jesus marry in this time? That would have been normal for a young Jewish man, and especially for an observant one. That is why biblical scholars assume that Paul was married in his days as a Pharisee, though he is single again by the time he writes his epistles. His wife could have died, or left him, or been put aside under Jewish law.
But Jesus was not educated as a Pharisee, like Paul. He enters his adult ministry from the radical ascetic movement that was critical of the Jewish establishment. He came from the remote retreats of men like the Essenes and the Baptist - that ‘voice crying from the desert’ (Mk 1.3) - where celibacy was a prized discipline. [Garry Wills, What Jesus Meant, 9:]

Surprisingly good. I share some of the book's insights on my podcast Jesus in Books: http://jesusinbooks.com/scandalous-je...

Absolute blasphemy.

Full review:
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