Gary Wills, What
Jesus Meant. Viking, 2006.
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
As is
by now to be expected, conservative books on Jesus sooner or later take
the obligatory swipe at the Jesus Seminar. Roman Catholic Gary Wills is
no exception. Early on he aims his pot shot:
This
is the new fundamentalism. It believes in the literal sense of the Bible
– it just reduces the Bible to what it can take as literal quotation
from Jesus. Though some people have called the Jesus Seminarists
radical, they are actually very conservative. They tame the real
radical, Jesus, cutting him down to their own size. Robert Funk called
Jesus “the first Jewish stand-up comic.” (p. xxv)
For one thing, Wills quotes
Funk as the voice of the Seminar when in fact that particular proposal,
to style Jesus a stand-up comic, was voted down by the Fellows. Apart
from that, let me be candid and admit a small element of truth in what
Wills says: sometimes the Seminar’s discussions of how to reshape church
life and liturgy in light of their resultant Jesus do strike me as an
effort to reinvent Unitarianism. For all Westar’s sensitivity to the
arts, I think we sometimes miss the music of the larger gospel
tradition. But then that is not the primary point of the Jesus Seminar.
The principle task is one of historical reconstruction. And that is
really Wills’s gripe. Like his co-religionist, Luke Timothy Johnson,
Wills thinks nobody has any business trying to reconstruct the
historical Jesus. For him, the whole endeavor is ill-advised because
foredoomed.
“Trying to find a
construct, ‘the historical Jesus’ … is a mixing of categories, or rather
of wholly different worlds of discourse. The only Jesus we have is the
Jesus of faith” (p. xxvi). “So this book… will treat the Jesus of faith,
since there is no other. The ‘historical Jesus’ does not exist for us”
(p. xxviii). What is the problem? Again like Johnson, Wills does not
deny that there may in fact have been a Jesus who would not match the
Jesus of faith in all particulars. He just thinks such a figure is
unavailable to us (I agree). And in any case, Wills thinks, a historical
Jesus would not be nearly as impressive as the canonical Jesus of the
creeds, which is the one he likes. Thus the title of this book is a
trick. “What Jesus Meant” might seem to suggest an exposition of Jesus’
own message, but properly, given Wills’ initial caveats, it ought to
denote: “the Significance of Jesus.” That is fair, though in that case,
his disdainful words about the work of the Jesus Seminar seem not only
spiteful but altogether beside the point. It is like an artist hissing
at a draftsman. A fashion designer jeering at a physiologist.
Unlike Evangelical
apologists of the N.T. Wright/Ben Witherington ilk, Wills does not even
deny that the historical Jesus has been irreparably obscured by legend.
Though he damns the Jesus Seminar for daring to say the gospels have
been “embellished,” a word he sneers at, Wills admits that Jesus is lost
in the bonfire of the legends as soon as we see him. That blaze is the
first thing we see of him, as is equally true of the Baal Shem Tov and
Saint Francis of Assisi. But, Wills judges, those legends are all
“true.” They have the “meaning” of Jesus right. (Or at least we have to
suppose they do, since Wills repudiates in principle any criterion by
which to measure any distance between the real thing and the
interpretations of it.) I believe Wills has made the mistake Nietzsche
warned against when he said that the lack of truth does not entitle us
to label our fictions “true,” which we might want to do since they’re
all we have left. No, if we do that, we will soon forget and start
mistaking our fictions for genuine fact. And that is exactly what Wills
does throughout this book.
No sooner does he disavow
any aim of scholarly historiography in favor of writing “a devotional
book” than he begins a book-length string of historical inference and
reconstruction. He has jumped at once from one of his discourse worlds
into another. For instance, Wills psychoanalyzes Jesus:
The
frequently emphasized hostility he experienced from his own family helps
us understand the shocking ease with which Jesus could later say, “If
one coming to me does not hate his father and his mother [etc.] he
cannot be my follower” (Luke 14.26). For members of his own family such
an attitude was itself hateful. They could not see why he put on airs,
went a different way, learned things beyond them, spent time on Hebrew
texts that that only scholars could deal with, neglecting (no doubt) the
family business of cabinetmaking (p. 6)
Does Wills not realize that
he is drawing historical and psychological inferences about characters
who are mentioned in the text only in passing? He is speculating on the
probabilities of what “really happened” behind the text, for the text
reports none of these attitudes, motives, injured feelings, much less
whether Jesus studied Hebrew or ducked his duties in the shop. Wills’s
ostensible view of the faith-Jesus and the nature of the gospel should
not allow him such indulgences.
Wills warns us that Jesus,
as a divine being with all the arbitrariness of Jehovah thundering from
Sinai or belittling Job out of the cyclone, cannot be taken as our
example. He ridicules Al Gore’s favorite slogan, “What would Jesus do?”
because we, as mere mortals, have no business doing the things he did.
For example: “Christian leaders have often rebuked the rebelliousness of
young people by offering them a pastel picture of the young Jesus as a
model of compliance and good behavior” (p. 7). By contrast, Wills says
that in Luke 2:48 Jesus treats his parents with the aloof arbitrariness
of a God who owes nothing to his creatures (p. xv). And yet in no time
Wills is explaining Jesus simply as a different sort of not-uncommon
child: “But there are many indications that Jesus was more like those
restive and resisting children who have all the idealism and absolutism
of youth – young people who chafe against the boundaries of the past and
are panting to explore new horizons” (p. 8). Are these kids gods, too?
Wills doesn’t seem to grasp his own point. Martin Kähler was consistent
where Wills is not. Kähler understood that the Son of God presented in
the stained glass of the gospels is not the sort of entity one can psych
out. It is ludicrous to try to trace out his psychological development,
the influences upon him, what made him tick, etc. If one does that, one
is stepping away from the “Jesus of faith” (what Kähler called “the
historic, biblical Christ”) and whoring after what Kähler dubbed “the
so-called historical Jesus.”
Again, Wills draws the bold
inference that Jesus was initially a member of the sect of John the
Baptist and a fellow-traveler with the Essenes. All this he infers from
the simple statement of the gospels that Jesus underwent the baptism of
John. According to Mark, so did pretty much everybody else in Jerusalem
and all Judea. Were they Essenes, too? Wills is trying to dig beneath
the gospels to explicate the historical figure lying behind them, the
very thing he condemns Funk and the Jesus Seminar (not to mention Thomas
Jefferson) for doing. One might multiply examples. But do you see what
Wills is doing here? He is playing a shell game; he is covering his
tracks. Having disavowed both the possibility that the facts about Jesus
could ever be discovered and the attempt of critical scholars to do it,
Wills is now playing the same game, only without the “criticism” part.
All his faith-talk simply signals he has given himself permission to
take any and every gospel saying and story as literal fact, bearing no
responsibility to do the hard work of sifting the wheat from the tares.
And yet Wills is a
critic of sorts. Like the Jesus Seminar, he whittles away at the raw
materials of the gospels, omitting items that do not fit the picture of
Jesus he prefers to find there. Only whereas critical scholars are
honest enough to admit they are bracketing the texts as “inauthentic”
(another word Wills hates when the Seminar uses it, p. xxv), Wills just
passes over the inconvenient texts in silence. His Jesus is an absolute
pacifist, er, despite that little altercation in the temple. He is
uncompromising in his advocacy of Samaritans and Gentiles and
tax-collectors. Never mind that he is reported to have told his
disciples to steer clear of Gentiles and Samaritans (Matthew 10:5).
Forget that he told us to disdain the excommunicated as if Gentiles or
tax-collectors (Matthew 18:17).
Wills, it turns out, is not
so far from the Seminar when it comes to gospel legends. For instance,
Jesus did not really confront Satan in the desert during a period of
forty days. No, but the story is “true” nonetheless, for Wills, because
it symbolizes the struggles Jesus endured before his public ministry. Or
so Wills the historian of Jesus infers. Just as John Howard Yoder used
to do, Wills argues (fallaciously, I think) that the temptations refer
to the options of winning public support by providing food for the
masses, assuming political power, and becoming the pope of a new
religion. Never mind that exactly the same legend is told of Abraham,
the Buddha, and Zoroaster. Wills laughs off parallel myths with the
pathetic old rationalization that all such myths were pre-Christian
prophetic dreams of Jesus (p. xxvii). But that doesn’t make the story
fact. Oh no. It is apostolic interpretation. I’ve got news for you,
Mr. Wills: one man’s interpretation is another man’s legend.
Did Wills’s personal savior
actually eject demons from people? Maybe not: to call them “possessed”
somehow denoted just that they were excluded as unclean (p. 30). And
Jesus’ ministry of healing? Wills says the great thing was that he
welcomed back the lepers and the dropsical and the menstruating into a
loving social embrace. Is this Gary Wills or John Dominic Crossan—or
Barbara Thiering? Wills is a great allegorizer of gospel narrative.
After a while, the suspicion begins to dawn that Wills is perhaps not so
conservative vis-à-vis miracles as he appears. It sounds almost as if he
really means to echo Bultmann’s dictum that the supernatural, mythic
element of the gospel must be retained but interpreted instead of
merely rejected and subtracted as the older Harnack-type Protestant
Liberals did. Wills mocks the Seminar for jettisoning the resurrection
of Jesus (p. xxv), yet he himself has this to say: “Jesus was
resurrected into us. We walk around living his life after his death. The
Resurrection was not something that happened long ago, in a far place.
It is happening now, everywhere on earth” (p. 138). One wonders how N.T.
Wright, to whose silly apologetics for the resurrection Wills gives
half-hearted lip service initially, thinks of that.
And here we find the
greatest irony in a book packed with them: Wills’s Jesus is almost an
identical twin of the Seminar Jesus (except that he also said all the
stuff about himself that we read in John’s gospel). Wills places Jesus
firmly on the side, and in the company of, the marginalized, the
rascals, rogues, whores, madmen, lepers, homosexuals, you name it. Wills
sees Jesus as utterly disdainful of Jewish purity and Sabbath
regulations. In this he goes even farther than the Jesus Seminar. Wills
appears oblivious of the fact that the gospels all depict Jesus arguing
that he is not breaking the Sabbath, only rejecting certain
scribal notions of how to observe it. Wills somehow imagines that Jesus
and his disciples were notorious outcasts because they flouted the
holiness code of Leviticus, touching people with skin disease, bodily
emissions, etc. This is absurd, though a common misconception. Leviticus
never prohibits such contact. It assumes one must touch the dead, the
ill, the menstruating. One incurs ritual pollution as a matter of course
in daily life. And then one does what little things are needful to
restore ritual purity. Jesus does not commit abominations, the
big-ticket items that would have gotten him in trouble: the gospels
don’t have Jesus and the disciples going around having sex with animals
or with each other. Jesus is never shown scarfing down a ham sandwich or
a shrimp cocktail. And when the gospels show him munching a hot dog, it
is always Hebrew National. (Or, even if they don’t show him eating
franks, we may use Wills’s method of inference to suppose that he did.)
Wills’s Jesus was a
feminist who shocked his contemporaries by traveling with women (even
though the text never hints at such scandal—more historical
inference by Wills) and letting them listen to them when they “should”
have been seeing to Sunday dinner. Jesus according to Wills was
absolutely anti-hierarchical and never thought of founding an
institution. The notion of Peter as a priest or a bishop or a pope Wills
finds laughable from the standpoint of “the Jesus of faith.” He aims a
number of barbs against Pope Ratzinger. His Jesus sounds for all the
world like that of Hans Küng (On Being a Christian) and Adolf
Holl (Jesus in Bad Company). He’d never darken the door of a
church and would be shown the door again if he did try to enter.
Though aloof from any
political program, this Jesus insisted that the poor be fed and the
street people be welcomed. If he were here among us today, he would be
leagued with persecuted gays instead of their holier-than-thou
persecutors. How is it possible that Gary Wills and the Jesus Seminar
end up with such similar Jesuses? Wills has already told us, at least
implicitly: certain figures will attract only legends of a type
appropriate to them. Or as Claude Levi-Strauss said, all variants of the
same basic myth will prove amenable to the same structural analyses. The
same deep meanings will survive as the body of text, legend, and lore
multiplies, like DNA regulating and directing new growth, though not
without the occasional mutation.
Wills’s Christianity is
definitely Jesus-centric. What did Jesus mean by the “reign of God”?
Simply himself. He was the presence of the reign of God. Wills does not
seem to find this reductionistic. Wills wants it understood that Jesus
wanted it understood that he was the only path to the Father. And what
does this entail? Not what you might think. Pretty much what Walter
Rauschenbusch said it did in the heyday of the Social Gospel movement:
an egalitarian service to the poor and the outcast. Wills sounds like he
is leading up to some version of orthodoxy but winds up with orthopraxy.
His brief discussion of the atoning death of Jesus finally amounts to
little more than the vacuous (pardon me) Moral Influence Theory of Peter
Abelard: the death of Jesus somehow demonstrates the love of God.
Earlier in the present review I observed that Wills seems to share
Bultmann’s rejection of the old Liberal Protestant approach to gospel
supernaturalism. It should not be abandoned, but rather interpreted.
Well, now Wills himself sounds like an old-time modernist (sorry for
that apparent oxymoron, but one has to use it!). Wills once wrote a book
called Why I Am a Catholic. This new one reads as if the title
were Why I Am Now a Liberal Protestant. It sounds as if Wells’s
pious sneering at the work of the Jesus Seminar may be understood as
political “triangulating.” He would seem to be trying to avert criticism
from more conservative Catholics by saying, “Look, if it’s liberals and
modernists you hate, you’ll find them over there in Santa Rosa! Don’t
look at me!” I wonder if he will fool anyone.