The Gospel Truths

In his most recent book, “What the Gospels Meant” (Viking, 224 pages, $24.95), Garry Wills completes a trilogy, capping off “What Jesus Meant” and “What Paul Meant,” both published in 2006. All three books are informed, lucid, and accessible to general readers, but the last is the most poetic, penetrating, and moving.In “What Jesus Meant,” Mr. Wills gave us a Jesus who is more open to outcasts than the Vatican is today, and, in “What Paul Meant,” he presented a Paul who does not deserve his reputation — still popular among Christian fundamentalists — as an inveterate enemy of Judaism. These earlier portraits are gracefully presented, but there is a static quality involved in locating these two great teachers in relation to what are, after all, long-established traditions of understanding Jesus and Paul. When it comes to the Gospels, however, Mr. Wills had no ready-made answers available to explain what makes each of them distinctive, and his recourse to his own instincts in his most recent book gives it added power and spontaneity.To be sure, Mr. Wills has profited from recent scholarship, above all that of the late Raymond E. Brown, to whom the volume is dedicated. Anyone familiar with Brown’s work will instantly appreciate how carefully Mr. Wills has read Brown, and how deeply he has delved into the poetics of each of the Gospels on his own.Archaeological and historical research has long dominated public interest in the Christian Bible. Headlines have been grabbed in the past 20 years, for example, by the discovery of the tomb of the high priest under whom Jesus was executed, and by the possibility that Jesus’s birth was in Bethlehem of Galilee, rather than the site far to the south that is venerated today. Anything that can shed light on Jesus’s birth and death obviously carries deep implications. But scholars have focused more concentrated attention on the ways in which the Gospels were composed. Mr. Wills has followed that discussion, and appreciates how scholarship has traced the development of oral traditions, “a communal treasury of memories prayed over, taught, shared in the gatherings, given form in an oral culture” prior to the editing of the Gospels. Even readers familiar with this process and its analysis will enjoy Mr. Wills’s feel for the poetics of this gradual composition, a feel that is sadly lacking in technical scholarship.Viewing each Gospel whole, as a distillation of oral traditions in a theologically crafted vessel, Mr. Wills vividly conveys the distinctive personalities and purposes of these writings. “A persecuted community with internal division and conflict” produced Mark, the earliest of the Gospels, he writes. Addressing the pain felt by early Christians, both that coming from outside and that inflicted from within, Mark’s Gospel offers a narrative that conveys a communal conviction that “the Messianic community not only suffered because it was like Jesus. It was Jesus.” That is as direct and cogent a statement of Mark’s message as can be found today, whether in popular or scholarly writing.Matthew is clearly more a work of instruction, focused on the teaching of Jesus, while Luke’s Gospel (together with the Book of Acts, its companion volume) targets the task of reconciling Jesus’s followers into a single body. In order to deal with both Matthew and Luke as attempts to shape their readers’ understanding of Jesus, and not just straight reports, Mr. Wills has to deal head-on with the issue of how historical the narratives of Jesus’s birth are, or are not, since only Matthew and Luke speak of the Nativity, and they do so in accounts that diverge widely.Mr. Wills is characteristically direct, but also sensitive to issues of devotion, in explaining that Matthew and Luke present completely independent portrayals of Jesus’s birth that cannot be reconciled, and that neither is grounded in simple fact. Rather, these accounts are oral legends shaped for theological purposes, in which historical data appear only sporadically. In a brave statement of a consensus that few scholars dare to express clearly, Mr. Wills says that even the presentation of Jesus’s resurrection contains elements of “folklore.” He treats John’s Gospel as a mystical or Gnostic work, which emphasizes how believers join spiritually with Jesus, who mediates his divinity to them. This provides a fitting conclusion to Mr. Wills’s survey, because he is able to show that, although John and the other Gospels are not written for historical purposes, in their theological expressions of who Jesus was and how believers are linked to them, they include historical reminiscences.In concluding his book with further praise of Raymond Brown, Mr. Wills finds a positive way to defend his own position as an interpreter. Instead of criticizing Christian fundamentalists and the Vatican, as he did in his previous two books, he offers a positive example of the interpretative stance that he does not want to see lost in modern Catholicism. He ends his book by saying that the Gospels should be read “with the reverence they derive from and address, and yet with the intelligence God gave us to help us find him.”The powerful simplicity of that perspective shines through this elegant book as a whole. It remains with the reader, even as he or she might question some findings that are too confidently stated in this book. Mark, for example, is scarcely as Jewish a work as Mr. Wills claims; it is anachronistic to put Jesus into the persistent opposition to Moses in which Wills places him; describing Gnostics as “an elite and snobbish company” is clever, but jejune. Nonetheless, general readers and scholars alike will profit from considering Mr. Wills’s basic contention, that reason and faith are not antinomies; reason’s capacity to identify what should be doubted complements faith’s power to find what can be relied upon. Mr. Wills invites critical readers, and the poetics of his book invites considered disagreement, as well as appreciation.Mr. Chilton’s most recent book, “Abraham’s Curse: The Roots of Violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam,” is available from Doubleday.

The Gospel Truths

The Gospel Truths

More from the New York Sun

Unbeknownst to Zelensky, Trump Announces Ceasefire Between Russia and Ukraine on Energy Infrastructure

Bessent Berates Warren in Caustic Letter, Accuses Top Democrat and Staff of Financial Illiteracy

Beats Changes Its Tune

Saudi Arabia Weighs Options After 12 Civilians Killed, 309 Travelers Injured in Houthi Attack on Riyadh Airport

New ‘Carrie’ Raises the Question: When Every Villain Gets a Backstory, What Becomes of Evil?

The Gridiron Crusader: How Mike Ditka Transformed Chicago Football and American Politics

Democrats Gain Ground as Voter Discontent Deepens Ahead of Midterms

Populism, Ascendant Globally, Looks Poised for a Setback in America on November 3

More from the New York Sun

Unbeknownst to Zelensky, Trump Announces Ceasefire Between Russia and Ukraine on Energy Infrastructure

Bessent Berates Warren in Caustic Letter, Accuses Top Democrat and Staff of Financial Illiteracy

Beats Changes Its Tune

Saudi Arabia Weighs Options After 12 Civilians Killed, 309 Travelers Injured in Houthi Attack on Riyadh Airport

New ‘Carrie’ Raises the Question: When Every Villain Gets a Backstory, What Becomes of Evil?

The Gridiron Crusader: How Mike Ditka Transformed Chicago Football and American Politics

Democrats Gain Ground as Voter Discontent Deepens Ahead of Midterms

Populism, Ascendant Globally, Looks Poised for a Setback in America on November 3