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http://select.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/books/
March 12, 2006
'What Jesus Meant,' by Garry Wills
The Radical
Review by JON MEACHAM
GENTLE and fierce, kind and rude, human and divine, Jesus of Nazareth is at once the most confounding and consequential figure in Western history. Time itself is divided before him and after him. For two millenniums the image of Jesus has been a maker and a mirror of the manners and morals from age to age; his name has been invoked to justify the greatest good and the darkest evil.
Countless souls have claimed a personal relationship with him; the incumbent president of the United States says Jesus saved him from a life of drift and drink. In a debate during the 2000 Republican primary campaign, George W. Bush was asked to name the philosopher-thinker most important to him. "Christ," he replied, "because he changed my heart." Pressed to explain for those voters trying to grasp what he meant, Bush demurred. "Well, if they don't know, it's going to be hard to explain," he said. "When you turn your heart and your life over to Christ, when you accept Christ as the Savior, it changes your heart. It changes your life. And that's what happened to me."
The fact that something is difficult to explain is no reason not to try, however, for to ascribe transformative powers to God without exploring the origins and nature of those powers reduces mystery to magic. Any grasp of the Christian faith begins with the Bible, which, unfortunately, is often read in a resolutely secular or dogmatically religious way. Skeptics tend to consider Jesus solely as a teacher of morals, not a worker of miracles. (Thomas Jefferson, for one, went through the Gospels with a razor, excising anything that suggested the supernatural.) Meanwhile, many conservative Christians would have us take the four evangelists' accounts as inerrant, as though the New Testament were an Associated Press bulletin about the first decades of first-century Judea.
For many of us, whether we believe or disbelieve, neither course is particularly satisfying. In his fascinating new book, "What Jesus Meant," Garry Wills offers a sensible middle way. (As a Catholic, albeit a controversial and critical one, he might object to the use of Anglican imagery to characterize his work, but if the cassock fits. . . .)
"To read the Gospels in the spirit with which they were written, it is not enough to ask what Jesus did or said," Wills writes. "We must ask what Jesus meant by his strange words and deeds." Or, more precisely, what the Gospel authors meant; as the Gospel of John acknowledges, the scriptures were composed "that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing ye might have life through his name."
Given that the Jesus who comes down to us does so through the hands of those who believed in him, Wills rejects the familiar distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. If the first Christians had not been radically transformed by the Resurrection if Jesus had simply been a passing mystical figure amid the theological turbulence of the Judaism of the day then you and I would not be thinking about or reading about Jesus at all.
"Trying to find a construct, 'the historical Jesus,' is not like finding diamonds in a dunghill, but like finding New York City at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean," Wills says. "It is a mixing of categories, or rather of wholly different worlds of discourse. The only Jesus we have is the Jesus of faith. If you reject the faith, there is no reason to trust anything the Gospels say."
At the same time, if you accept the faith, there is no reason to trust everything the Gospels say, either. Jesus, Wills thinks, "intended to reveal the Father to us, and to show that he is the only-begotten Son of that Father. What he signified is always more challenging than we expect, more outrageous, more egregious." Wills's small volume 143 pages is like a long, rich conversation with a learned friend and is, Wills writes, a devotional exercise, not a scholarly one. His is a kind of devotion, though, that engages heart and mind, to the ultimate benefit of both.
The Jesus Wills finds is not one who would easily take his place amid the faithful at a 21st-century American megachurch, or at Benedict XVI's Vatican. The popular Christian question "What would Jesus do?" is not an especially useful one, Wills notes, for Jesus did many things we would not, and should not, do. Should Christians, Wills asks, "like Jesus, forbid a man from attending his own father's funeral . . . or tell others to hate their parents? . . . Are they justified in telling others, 'I come not imposing peace, I impose not peace but the sword' . . . ? Or 'I am come to throw fire on the earth' . . . ?" Such moments in the Gospels, Wills writes, "were acts meant to show that he is not just like us, that he has higher rights and powers, that he has an authority as arbitrary as God's in the Book of Job. He is a divine mystery walking among men."
Jesus was neither a politician nor a prelate, and this book's most significant contribution may lie in its reminder that faith is far too important to be considered solely, or even mainly, in political or ecclesiastical terms. Skeptical of the papacy and of many Catholic traditions, Wills convincingly shows that Jesus was a radical whose essential message to love one another totally and unconditionally is fundamentally at odds with the impulses of those living in a fallen world. Jesus left sundry examples of how one should live not for power but for the poor, not for fame but for forgiveness. But it was God's own unconditional love for this fallen world of ours that led him to do the unimaginable to save it: he sacrificed his own son. The Passion makes the greatest sense for readers if it is seen as the culmination and ultimate expression of what Jesus had been saying and doing in his few years of public life. "Father, forgive them," the dying Jesus says from the cross; the Resurrection on the third day, Wills says, bears out the words in the Song of Songs "love is as strong as death."
Drawing on the wonderful scholarship of N. T. Wright, the late Raymond Brown and others, Wills makes a trenchant case for why Jesus' earliest followers believed in their Lord's physical resurrection. If the tomb had not been empty, the authorities could have shut down the early Christians rather easily by dragging out Jesus' bones; they had, after all, gone to all the trouble to execute him, and the only plausible explanation for the disciples' transformation from scattered and scared to fierce preachers and martyrs is that they came to believe Jesus had in fact risen from the dead and began, at last, to understand what he had been saying to them all along. So what was what is the ultimate meaning of Jesus? The question will be with us always, even to the end of the age. But we do know this: One cannot read his story without seeing that there is no life without love.
Jon Meacham is the managing editor of Newsweek. His book "American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation" will be published in April.
March 12, 2006
'What Jesus Meant,' by Garry Wills
The Radical
Review by JON MEACHAM
GENTLE and fierce, kind and rude, human and divine, Jesus of Nazareth is at once the most confounding and consequential figure in Western history. Time itself is divided before him and after him. For two millenniums the image of Jesus has been a maker and a mirror of the manners and morals from age to age; his name has been invoked to justify the greatest good and the darkest evil.
Countless souls have claimed a personal relationship with him; the incumbent president of the United States says Jesus saved him from a life of drift and drink. In a debate during the 2000 Republican primary campaign, George W. Bush was asked to name the philosopher-thinker most important to him. "Christ," he replied, "because he changed my heart." Pressed to explain for those voters trying to grasp what he meant, Bush demurred. "Well, if they don't know, it's going to be hard to explain," he said. "When you turn your heart and your life over to Christ, when you accept Christ as the Savior, it changes your heart. It changes your life. And that's what happened to me."
The fact that something is difficult to explain is no reason not to try, however, for to ascribe transformative powers to God without exploring the origins and nature of those powers reduces mystery to magic. Any grasp of the Christian faith begins with the Bible, which, unfortunately, is often read in a resolutely secular or dogmatically religious way. Skeptics tend to consider Jesus solely as a teacher of morals, not a worker of miracles. (Thomas Jefferson, for one, went through the Gospels with a razor, excising anything that suggested the supernatural.) Meanwhile, many conservative Christians would have us take the four evangelists' accounts as inerrant, as though the New Testament were an Associated Press bulletin about the first decades of first-century Judea.
For many of us, whether we believe or disbelieve, neither course is particularly satisfying. In his fascinating new book, "What Jesus Meant," Garry Wills offers a sensible middle way. (As a Catholic, albeit a controversial and critical one, he might object to the use of Anglican imagery to characterize his work, but if the cassock fits. . . .)
"To read the Gospels in the spirit with which they were written, it is not enough to ask what Jesus did or said," Wills writes. "We must ask what Jesus meant by his strange words and deeds." Or, more precisely, what the Gospel authors meant; as the Gospel of John acknowledges, the scriptures were composed "that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing ye might have life through his name."
Given that the Jesus who comes down to us does so through the hands of those who believed in him, Wills rejects the familiar distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. If the first Christians had not been radically transformed by the Resurrection if Jesus had simply been a passing mystical figure amid the theological turbulence of the Judaism of the day then you and I would not be thinking about or reading about Jesus at all.
"Trying to find a construct, 'the historical Jesus,' is not like finding diamonds in a dunghill, but like finding New York City at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean," Wills says. "It is a mixing of categories, or rather of wholly different worlds of discourse. The only Jesus we have is the Jesus of faith. If you reject the faith, there is no reason to trust anything the Gospels say."
At the same time, if you accept the faith, there is no reason to trust everything the Gospels say, either. Jesus, Wills thinks, "intended to reveal the Father to us, and to show that he is the only-begotten Son of that Father. What he signified is always more challenging than we expect, more outrageous, more egregious." Wills's small volume 143 pages is like a long, rich conversation with a learned friend and is, Wills writes, a devotional exercise, not a scholarly one. His is a kind of devotion, though, that engages heart and mind, to the ultimate benefit of both.
The Jesus Wills finds is not one who would easily take his place amid the faithful at a 21st-century American megachurch, or at Benedict XVI's Vatican. The popular Christian question "What would Jesus do?" is not an especially useful one, Wills notes, for Jesus did many things we would not, and should not, do. Should Christians, Wills asks, "like Jesus, forbid a man from attending his own father's funeral . . . or tell others to hate their parents? . . . Are they justified in telling others, 'I come not imposing peace, I impose not peace but the sword' . . . ? Or 'I am come to throw fire on the earth' . . . ?" Such moments in the Gospels, Wills writes, "were acts meant to show that he is not just like us, that he has higher rights and powers, that he has an authority as arbitrary as God's in the Book of Job. He is a divine mystery walking among men."
Jesus was neither a politician nor a prelate, and this book's most significant contribution may lie in its reminder that faith is far too important to be considered solely, or even mainly, in political or ecclesiastical terms. Skeptical of the papacy and of many Catholic traditions, Wills convincingly shows that Jesus was a radical whose essential message to love one another totally and unconditionally is fundamentally at odds with the impulses of those living in a fallen world. Jesus left sundry examples of how one should live not for power but for the poor, not for fame but for forgiveness. But it was God's own unconditional love for this fallen world of ours that led him to do the unimaginable to save it: he sacrificed his own son. The Passion makes the greatest sense for readers if it is seen as the culmination and ultimate expression of what Jesus had been saying and doing in his few years of public life. "Father, forgive them," the dying Jesus says from the cross; the Resurrection on the third day, Wills says, bears out the words in the Song of Songs "love is as strong as death."
Drawing on the wonderful scholarship of N. T. Wright, the late Raymond Brown and others, Wills makes a trenchant case for why Jesus' earliest followers believed in their Lord's physical resurrection. If the tomb had not been empty, the authorities could have shut down the early Christians rather easily by dragging out Jesus' bones; they had, after all, gone to all the trouble to execute him, and the only plausible explanation for the disciples' transformation from scattered and scared to fierce preachers and martyrs is that they came to believe Jesus had in fact risen from the dead and began, at last, to understand what he had been saying to them all along. So what was what is the ultimate meaning of Jesus? The question will be with us always, even to the end of the age. But we do know this: One cannot read his story without seeing that there is no life without love.
Jon Meacham is the managing editor of Newsweek. His book "American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation" will be published in April.