What the Gospels Meant | Garry Wills | ANOTHER commentary on the gospels?!? Ah, but this one is...

What the Gospels Meant | Garry Wills | Meaning within meaning

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What the Gospels M...

	What the Gospels Meant Garry Wills Viking Adult, 2008 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 22 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

ANOTHER commentary on the gospels?!? Ah, but this one is worth reading...

The four gospels have been dissected, scrutinized, and exegeted for the better part of 18 centuries. (Some would argue that, in the last two centuries, they've also been vivisected!) Thousands of volumes have been written on them. A simple amazon search of the word "gospels" reveals nearly 167,000 items alone.

That's why it's hard for me to get excited whenever yet another commentary appears. But Garry Wills' What the Gospels Meant is in a class of its own, as readers of his previous books might well expect.

Wills argues that the four gospels need to be read as forms of prayer, "meditations on the meaning of Jesus in the light of Sacred History as recorded in the Sacred Writings" (p. 7). As such, the gospels are (1) continuations of the sacred scriptures of the Hebrews and (2) accounts of Christ's indwelling in the Christian community. (Wills argues that the notion of the community of faith as the mystical Body of Christ is a quite early one, asserted by Paul in his baptismal hymn in Galatians 3.) Read individually, the gospels are on-the-ground "reports" from specific Christian communities. Read together, they constitute creed.

Wills examines the four gospels by focusing on the specific message and tone unique to each. None of the basics of what he has to say will surprise anyone who knows a bit about the New Testament. Mark, whom Augustine called Matthew's pedisequus et breviator ("drudge and condenser"), writes in less than elegant Greek and emphasizes the suffering of the persecuted Messiah and the community of his followers. Matthew is the great teacher, who neatly (and sometimes pedantically) collects Jesus' sayings (including the Sermon on the Mount) and connects them in with sacred scripture and prophecy. In a way, Matthew is the first Christian exegete. Luke is the compassionate gospelist who emphasizes Jesus' solidarity with the outcast and reconciliation between Gentile and Jew. How bitterly ironic, then, that Jesus is himself cast out by the powers-that-be. Finally, John is the mystical gospelist who preaches the Body of Christ and focuses on the Light within and without. John's gospel is a history of the interior community.

Again, nothing terribly surprising here. Wills writes with such elegance and easy erudition, however, that his discussion, however familiar it may be, is a delightful read. But what really makes his book worth reading are his wonderful translations.

Wills objects to what he calls the "prettified Bible English of most translations," arguing that it fails to capture the "telegraphic character" of the koine Greek. His own translations seek to remain loyal the "muscular and awkwardly eloquent" tone of the original, and they're startlingly insightful and evocative, making it impossible to read too-familiar scriptural passages with our usual jaded eyes. Take, for example, Will's rendering of the prologue to John's gospel (p. 159):

At the origin was the Word
and the word faced God,
and the Word was God;
this faced God at the origin.
Through him all things came to exist,
and without him nothing that exists existed.
What existed in him was vivifying,
and the vivification was alight to men,
and the light shone into the darkness,
and the darkness did not cope with it.

Or the Beatitudes from Matthew's Sermon on the Mount (pp. 77-78):

Happy the poor in their own mind,
since heaven's reign belongs to them.
Happy the sad,
since they shall be consoled.
Happy those who yield,
since they shall acquire the earth.
Happy those who hunger and thirst to see right prevail,
since they will eat and drink their full.
Happy those taking pity on others,
since they will be pitied.
Happy those who are pure within,
since they will see God.
Happy those who bring peace to others,
since they will be named God's sons.
Happy those who are punished for their virtue,
since heaven's reign belongs to them.

Great stuff, for those with eyes to see and ears to listen!

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Meaning within meaning

One of our ranking intellectuals beyond a doubt, Garry Wills has produced a concise, pithy book providing us with insights into how to read and understand the Gospels. He discusses origins, accuracy, contradictions, validity, and multiple sources. Moreover, since he is often personally translating from the original Greek, his book is not derivative, and he is clear about the other authors he does rely on. I found that the book is of tremendous help in understanding the timing, differing views, and significant agreement about events which have only been recorded through oral tradition prior to these four writers. It helped me to understand the profound impact of Jesus during his lifetime on earth much better, and to understand the Gospels within the framework of the times and the authors' lives.

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Gospel studies 101

With five books on Saint Augustine, and his book Lincoln at Gettysburg (1993) that won the Pulitzer Prize, Garry Wills remains one of our country's most public and outspokenly Christian intellectuals. Today he is Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern University. In a book called What Jesus Meant (2006), Wills tried to recapture the radically subversive life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth: "He 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." In a companion volume called What Paul Meant (2007,) he argued that "what Paul meant was not something other than or contrary to what Jesus meant, but that we can best find out the latter by studying the former. His letters stand closer to Jesus than do any other words in the New Testament."

The present volume obviously forms a trilogy with the first two. Unfortunately, it doesn't offer much more than a similar title. Like the first two volumes, Wills writes on a popular level for a general readership. That's a commendable undertaking for a scholar of his erudition, but in a book so short he does little more than glide across the surface of complex matters. Luke's genealogy and the visit of the magi, for example, get a little over a page, the virgin birth in Matthew about two pages. Each of the beatitudes gets a few sentences. Brevity requires him to skip entirely much of the gospels.

Wills admits, and it's no understatement, that he quotes very generously and almost exclusively from the renowned scholar Raymond Brown. As in his previous two books he makes his own translations from the original Greek in order to recapture the "rough-hewn majesty" and "brutal linguistic earthiness" of the koine Greek in which the Gospel story was originally written, in contrast to the over-familiar and "churchly" idiom of so many translations. Lots of times this works, but at other times he tries too hard, as when he translates the beatitude in Luke 6:22-23, "Happy you whom men hate, and cast out and revile, and blacken your name for the Son of Man's sake. At such a time take heart and be frisky!" Or John 1:14. "And the Word became human flesh and bivouacked with us."

After a short introduction in which he describes the nature of the Gospel material, he devotes three chapters each to Mark (Report from the Suffering Body of Jesus), Matthew (Report from the Teaching Body of Jesus), Luke (Report from the Reconciling Body of Jesus), and John (Report from the Mystical Body of Jesus). His aim, he says, is to "suggest the goal, method, and style of each evangelist." Throughout the book he compares and contrasts the four writers, and corrects them when he sees fit.

Wills repeatedly highlights what he calls the "basic meaning of Jesus" as found in Paul's letter to the Corinthians (15:3-4): "As my first concern, I passed on to you what had been passed on to me, that Messiah died for our sins, in accord with the Sacred Writings, that he was buried, and that he arose on the third day in accord with the Sacred Writings." Such is the "basic announcement" of Christian proclamation, the "nucleus" that gave birth to the Gospels. And we read those Gospels today, he says in the very last sentence of the book, "as a whole, with the reverence they derive from and address, yet with the intelligence God gave us to help us find him" (209).

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A weak and confusing effort from a master

First of all, I would challenge anyone who tried to claim that Garry Wills is a heretic or unfaithful Christian. No one who writes as much about Scripture as he, and with as much passion, could be anything but faithful. That said, I found "What the Gospels Meant" (WTGM) to be the weakest by far of the three volumes in this series, the other two being his insightful study of Paul and his enlightening treatment of Jesus.

Like the gospels of Luke and Matthew, WTGM leans very heavily on two sources -- the exemplary work of Father Raymond Brown and Wills's own idiosyncratic translations of the Greek text of the gospels. Wills attempts nobly to examine the gospels at a level of scrutiny that few dare to attempt. His translations attempt to convey the roughness that could be found in the original writing, especially when it comes to Mark, whose command of Greek is the most meager of all the evangelists. This roughness continues to surprise me, my understanding of Christ's words coming from the translations that have ennobled Mark's pidgin level of literary achievement. If Wills' translation was accurate and sound, it would be a great addition to library of students of Christianity. But then Wills stretches a word too far, and my trust is set back, concerned about hidden agendas. For instance, Wills translates the word "gospel," as "revelation." He translates "faith" as "trust." But while these may be better choices than most translations offer, he does not back up his decisions, either in the text or in footnotes. In an attempt to reach back to Jesus's words, he discards the evangelists' words, which really are the only ones we can count on.

Still, there is much of value in the book. Wills helps the reader to appreciate the communities that assembled and prompted the writing of the gospels. Mark's community, dealing with Zealot-led persecution; Matthew's more settled community seeking to connect Jesus with his Old Testament roots; John's mature community, riven with internal dissension. Along the way, we hear snippets of current scholarly disputes, such as those questioning Luke's familiarity with Paul, assumed for so long. Too, Wills takes Father Brown's lead in dismissing the idea that John the son of Zebedee, the Beloved Disciple (and author of the gospel of John), and the author of Revelation were the same person. This may come as a shock to some, but once you think about it, it makes sense. Wills also highlights a notion that has fallen out of favor -- that Jesus was an eschatological prophet. Wills places Jesus's parables, e.g., the Parable of the Sower, into an eschatological context that seems convincing. And his explanation of the eschatological nature of the "Our Father," while sketched too quickly, is fairly well rendered.

But Wills -- whether from an overabundance of ego or being in a hurry -- missteps often. For an author writing controversial and even contrary opinions -- Will doesn't give his wilder arguments the chance they deserve. He makes one bold and definitive statements, then lunges on to his next point, seemingly oblivious to the hand grenade now hissing ominionously in his reader's lap. For instance, Wills opines (realistically enough) that the Magnificat and Benedictus were not sung extemporaneously by Mary and Simeon. Fair enough. But his statement that the early Christian community wrote these poetic utterances for a first century version of a Christmas pageant is without basis as far as I know. Other possibilities -- that Mary and Simeon may have uttered something that was later embroidered -- are not considered.

The idea that the Infancy Narratives of Luke and Matthew (actually "Birth Narratives," Wills chides) combines statements of theological truth and historical truth is no longer considered scandalous. But Wills purports to know the evangelists' minds so well that he can state with certainty that Luke included the misdated material about the census under Quirinius to show Jesus as a model citizen of the Roman Empire. But could not Luke have been a sloppy writer/researcher who, needing an excuse to get Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem, heard about a census in the rough timeframe of Jesus's birth and said, "close enough -- I'll throw it in"? But Wills has spoken, and alternatives such as this are rarely considered.

Like many writers before him, Wills knows exactly how crucifixion was carried out. His ideas come from the standard (and incorrect) texts that insist that Jesus was nailed through the wrists, ignoring medical evidence that nailing through the hands was possible and the archeological evidence that nailing through the forearms was practiced, at least on occasion. Most controversially, and I think deeply erroneously, he insists that Mary's physical virginity at the conception of Christ was not " a gynecological or obstetric teaching, but a theological one." (p. 70) It would be one thing to suggest that an overeager Matthew overreached in claiming that Isaiah 7 (the Masoretic mistranslation that states that a "virgin" will give birth to a child) referred to Christ's birth, Wills seems intent on demolishing the undeniable biological fact that Mary was a virgin ( "How can this be when I have not known man?) at the time of the Annunciation. Worse still, Wills quotes Father Brown out of context, using Brown's statement against reading an antisexual bias into Mary's virginity story as an attack on the virginal conception itself. This would be shameful, if not for Wills's evident sincerity of heart.

WTGM is a whirlwind of genius, speculation, insight and ludicrous error. But like the person observing a television image at close range, Wills's close-up examination of the gospels is pixilated and fragmentary, with no sense of the picture he claims to be seeing. It's too bad that he did not slow down just a bit to give his arguments more force, anticipating his enemies' obvious routes of attack. Those familiar with the gospels and the controversies surrounding their creation may glean a few nuggets of wisdom from this book. But for the uneducated and unsophisticated, WTGM is bound to leave them with more questions and less faith.

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Wouldn't a better title have been "What the Gospels Mean?"

No one writes with better style and more authority than Garry Wills. My only problem with these books (What Jesus Meant, What Paul Meant) is that he writes with such certainty that when I disagree his tone strikes me as a bit arch and insulting. He spares no rod with any view he types as fundamentalist, which is troubling and ungenerous. He also makes pronouncements that are easily refutable. For example, he cites the Scofield Study Bible as saying the Lord's Prayer is not Christian. As an owner of a Scofield Study Bible, all I had to do was look to find this as catagorically wrong.
As to the rest of it, he's a wonderful translator of New Testament Greek, but I find these books rather schizophrenic. Wills undoubtedly has zeal and believes in his subject matter, yet he strains to make rationalist explanations of things so as to make these books more modern. For example, trying to explain the nativity narratives of the Gospels and the worldviews of each Gospel in language similar to deconstructionist critics. Yet he will elsewhere talk grandly of the Spirit at work in the lives of the disciples. One wonders why he has trouble accounting works to the Spirit in some places and none in others.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5

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