What the Gospels Meant | Garry Wills | Meaning within meaning

What the Gospels Meant | Garry Wills | Worth consuming, because Garry is always interesting...

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What the Gospels M...

	What the Gospels Meant Garry Wills Viking Adult, 2008 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 19 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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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Worth consuming, because Garry is always interesting...

While I liked "What Jesus Meant" better than this effort, Mr. Wills is a fine writer and thinker, and his opinions on the varied purposes of each of the four Gospels are well-considered. He makes points about the intended audience for each, and the possibly varied authorships, and speculates as to why Mark, Matthew, Luke and John each omit some tales about the Life of Jesus while being the sole surviving source of others. If how the Gospels came to be is one of your unsatisfyingly answered questions about early Christianity, this is a good conversation starter.

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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, page 3, 4

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