Garry Wills Tells Us What Jesus Meant

It’s not that Garry Wills doesn’t have the gravitas, requisite alphabet behind his name or the scholarship to opine about Jesus. He is adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University. He got a Ph.D. in classics from Yale. He writes about God, the Pope, Roman Catholicism, being a Catholic, St. Augustine, not to mention Abraham Lincoln, and John Wayne. And he has just authored a book titled “What Jesus Meant”. But the Op/Ed piece in the New York Times this morning by Garry Wills, “Christ Among the Partisans”, is irritating. Garry Wills purports to explain Jesus by doing exactly what the men who wrote the New Testament did. Garry Wills has an agenda and uses the stories that have come down to us about Jesus Christ as though they are facts that support his agenda. The Gospels of the New Testament are opinion pieces written at the earliest, 50 years and more after the death of Jesus. And although Wills’ main thesis is that Jesus had no political agenda, the men who wrote the gospels about Jesus certainly did have a political agenda. One of the most oft-repeated quotes attributed to Jesus is “Let Caesar have what belongs to him, and God have what belongs to him" (Matthew 22:21). This quote is used to show that Jesus believed in the separation of religion and state. That may be so. And yet, in the part of the world where Jesus lived and died, religion made the rules. Religion and state were one and the same entity and everything written was written from the perspective that religion called the shots. Garry Wills maintains that Jesus was apolitical because no one knew what he was going to do next. He bases the fact that no one knew what he would do next on the many conflicting and varied stories about Jesus that have come down to us in the Bible. And yet, the stories are conflicting because different men wrote from different perspectives about a man they had never met. And all of these writers had a political agenda. There are a few phrases and parables attributed to Jesus that appear in all four New Testament Gospels. Jesus probably did say something like these few quotes. But most of the quotes Wills uses are in dispute among historians as to whether Jesus said what is claimed he said. In many cases, a man living at the time Jesus lived would not have used the words and locutions it is claimed Jesus used. In other cases, it’s doubted Jesus would have been so arrogant as to say what is claimed he said. What Garry Wills can safely profess is that he absolutely believes in a mythic figure presented in the New Testament as Jesus Christ. Fine. That’s his prerogative. But he cannot claim that the words passed down to us in the Bible were the actual words and beliefs of a man called Jesus Christ who existed in history. Did Jesus say this: “My reign is not of this present order. If my reign were of this present order, my supporters would have fought against my being turned over to the Jews. But my reign is not here" (John 18:36)”? I don’t know and neither does Garry Wills. Wills has a hope. He has a belief. He has a religion. But he does not and cannot know if Christ said it or if the writers of the New Testament just made it up out of whole cloth to advance a religious bias of the time. I am in total agreement with Wills on one thing however: No one knows what Jesus Christ would do in any given circumstance at any given time.