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| What the Gospels Meant | 
 enlarge | Author: Garry Wills
Publisher: Viking Adult
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  20 reviews
Sales Rank: 12453
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.6 x 1
ISBN: 0670018716
Dewey Decimal Number: 226.06
EAN: 9780670018710
ASIN: 0670018716
Publication Date: February 14, 2008
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| Customer Reviews:
Gospel studies 101 March 11, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
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).
 Meaning within meaning April 5, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
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.
 Wouldn't a better title have been "What the Gospels Mean?" April 1, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
A must-read for any Church or Bible study group May 30, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Although I have been reading Christian nonfiction and biblical commentary for a couple years now, I actively avoided reading Gary Wills 'What X, Y, Z Meant' series. I feared he would be another neo-evangelical with a infantile understanding of the Bible, its traditions and history. I was dead wrong. Gary Wills is nearly the polar opposite of a Max Lucado, Rick Warren and other similarly popular Christian authors. Wills is a true scholar, a lifelong student of the Bible who is widely read and incredibly itelligent. More importantly, he conveys his knowledge of the Gospels with a clarity and cogency to rival Elizabeth Johnson.
What the Gospels Meant owes much to late-New Testament scholar Raymond Brown. So much so, the book is dedicated to Fr. Brown and borrows much of his material from his studies of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. In a brisk 200-pages, Wills explains the distinctions between the various gospel-traditions (i.e. Synoptic and Johanine) and why they are there. The book is certainly not a plot summary of four distinct and rick works of ancient Christian tradition. It is a deeper analysis and understanding of what a serious student of the New Testament should take heed of while reading. There are good reasons for the evalgalists differing accounts of Christ's final words on the cross. There is a deeper meaning to the various parables than what we are told in homilies and sermons every Sunday. What the Gospels Meant is worthy of being placed in the "must-read" category of any church group or Bible study seeking to learn more about those precious books describing the life of Jesus.
Another Thought Provoking Triumph June 3, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
So far in this series of books, Garry Wills has goaded our brains into comtemplating What Jesus Meant and What Paul Meant. In examining the Gospels, both the Synoptics and John, Wills moves chronologically farther away from the historical Jesus and more into the young church's interpretation of his words and deeds. The important part of this scholarship is the relation of the gospel's Jesus and the character and needs of each individual congregation addressed by Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John. This is interpretation uncluttered by church teachings. Surely anyone wishing an accessible, readable book on early Christianity could benefit from this volume.
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