What the Gospels Meant [Paperback]

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!

I utterly loved both of Wills's other books on the New Testament -- WHAT JESUS MEANT and WHAT PAUL MEANT -- and I suppose it would be accurate to say that I merely liked this one. There is no question that I learned a good deal, but it simply wasn't crystallizing like those other two, bringing together all that was marvelous and debunking all the widespread misconceptions concerning Jesus and Paul. Wills is best when he is defending his perception against others. Here he is more in the way of an instructor, for while most Christians have some notion or both Jesus and Paul -- whether well or poorly formed -- few have very specific notions of what each of the gospels is like. I think most readers of the NT, with the exception of those in seminary or divinity school, tend to mix the four together, blending them all together. I'm not sure that most are aware that the nativity scenes are not present in all four gospels.

Speaking of seminary and divinity school (I attended both, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary for a year before the right wing ideologues got a hold of it and Yale Divinity School after that), while attending both I developed a profound esteem for the late Raymond E. Brown, whose commentary on John and books on the death and birth of Jesus stand at the pinnacle of New Testament scholarship. Today no one thinks twice upon seeing a Biblical commentary written by a Roman Catholic scholar, but only a couple of generations ago such a thing was unheard of. It was only after Vatican II that Catholic Biblical scholars embraced the critical study of the Bible. No scholar did more to invigorate such studies within Catholicism as Brown. Anyone reading this will quickly discern how deeply indebted Wills is to Raymond Brown. This debt is indicated from the outset. The dedication page reads "To Raymond Brown, devout scholar." Then a couple of pages later the Key to Citations page lists five works that are referred to by brief citation; four of them are by Brown.

If this implies that Wills book is somewhat derivative from Brown's work, I do not mean this as a bad thing. Brown himself wrote for scholars. Bringing some of Brown's insights to general readers in hardly a bad thing. Nor is everything in the book derived from Brown. Wills is obviously a careful and diligent reader of the Bible. If Brown is his guide in many things, the final result is very much the product of Wills's own mind.

No doubt anyone who is not already an advanced scholar of the New Testament (a designation that unfortunately would not exclude most Christian ministers) will profit from this book. It does, however, have a far narrower audience than Wills's Jesus and Paul books. I have recommended both of those books to friends. Wills's views on Jesus are very similar to my own (I wanted to cheer in the passages where he debunks any notion that Jesus could be taken as a religious or moral teacher without all the god talk, since the main thing he wanted to teach was that he was god). And I've long thought that Paul took way too much flak for things he never said nor taught. So if you ask, who comprises the potential audience for those two books, the answer is easy: anyone who wants to know more about Jesus and Paul. And since those are two of the dominant figures in Western history, regardless of how you feel about Jesus being god, anyone who wants to know anything about his or her culture. But who is the audience for this book? Well, anyone who wants to know more about the ways the Gospels differ from one another. But that is a smaller audience than the Jesus and Paul books. I certainly would hesitate before recommending it to anyone who didn't want to go beneath the surface. It could well be used by church Bible study groups with profit, since most ministers have a truly weak understanding of the Bible (sorry if that sounds negative, but one problem I've had trying to find churches to attend is finding ministers who knew much about the Bible).

So, if you read Wills's Jesus and Paul books and would like more, definitely give this a try. If you have read neither of those books, read them before this one.

Regardless of your religious views, this is a beautiful book. Wills looks at each gospel and puts much into historical context: Mark, the first, was not so much a book for the ages as one dealing with immediate local concerns of the faithful, and lays open the rift between the siblings of Christ and other Church members. The writing on Matthew and the Beatitudes and the Antitheses is some of the strongest in the book, with Wills driving home the point that the message of Christ was built on one's intentions and internal integrity and not on one's adherence to external forms and coventional thinking. Good take on the Golden Rule, where he shows how Quakers used it to argue against salvery, as well as on the Prodigal son from Luke, which is something I have never undertsood or agreed with until reading Wills's comments,which puts it into the historical context of the struggle between Jew and Gentile to claim and direct the early movement. You also get a sense of Christ's compassion for women. And although he does not mention the Buddha, you can't help, for all the world, not to see how the teachings of the Buddha and Christ are twisted together like a pretzel.