Part 2

What Jesus Meant
by Garry Wills

(Page 2 of 3)

For two years, Jesus slipped through all the traps set for him. He moved like a fish in the sea of his lower-class fellows. He kept on the move, in the countryside. If I think of a music to be heard in the background of his restless mission, it is the scurrying agitato that opens Khachaturian's violin concerto. He went into cities as into alien territory. He was a man of the margins, never quite fitting in, always "out of context." He sought the wilderness, the mountaintop. He gave the slip even to his followers (Mk 7.24). The puzzled disciples trotted behind, trying to make sense of what seemed to them inexplicable, squabbling among themselves about what he was up to. It would never have occurred to them to wear a WWJD bracelet.

Jesus ghosted in and out of people's lives, blessing and cursing, curing and condemning. If he was not God, he was a standing blasphemy against God. The last thing he can be considered is a "gentle Jesus meek and mild." To quote Chesterton again:

We have all heard people say a hundred times over, for they seem never to tire of saying it, that the Jesus of the New Testament is indeed a most merciful and humane lover of humanity, but that the Church has hidden this human character in repellent dogmas and stiffened it with ecclesiastical terrors till it has taken on an inhuman character. This is, I venture to repeat, very nearly the reverse of the truth. The truth is that it is the image of Christ in the churches that is almost entirely mild and merciful. It is the image of Christ in the gospels that is a good many other things as well. The figure in the gospels does indeed utter in words of almost heart-breaking beauty his pity for our broken hearts. But they are very far from being the only sort of words that he utters. ... There is something appalling, something that makes the blood run cold, in the idea of having a statue of Christ in wrath. There is something insupportable even to the imagination in the idea of turning the corner of a street or coming out into the spaces of a marketplace, to meet the petrifying petrifaction of that figure as it turned upon a generation of vipers, or that face as it looked at the face of a hypocrite. ... [The gospel story] is full of sudden gestures evidently significant except that we hardly know what they signify; of enigmatic silences; of ironical replies. The outbreaks of wrath, like storms above our atmosphere, do not seem to break out exactly where we should expect them, but to follow some higher weather chart of their own. The Peter whom popular Church teaching presents is very rightly the Peter to whom Christ said in forgiveness, "Feed my lambs." He is not the Peter upon whom Christ turned as if he were the devil, crying in that obscure wrath, "Get thee behind me, Satan." Christ lamented with nothing but love and pity over Jerusalem which was to murder him. We do not know what strange spiritual atmosphere or spiritual insight led him to sink Bethsaida lower in the pit than Sodom.

The Jesus of the gospels is scandalous, and one of those scandalized was Thomas Jefferson. He was so offended by the miracles and the curses, by the devils assailing and defeated, that he created his own more acceptable Jesus, excising all those parts of the gospels that he considered unworthy of a wise man's story. The result, cleansed of all the supernatural hocus-pocus, is the tale of a good man, a very good man, perhaps the best of good men therefore a man who would not pretend to work miracles, to wrestle with demons, or to have unique access to God the Father. Jefferson's revised New Testament is not only much shorter than the real one but much duller. Nothing unexpected occurs in it. There is, for instance, no Resurrection. Jefferson's Jesus is shorn of his paradoxes and left with platitudes. He is a man of his time, or even ahead of his time, but not outside time, whereas the Jesus of the gospels is both temporal and above time. As Chesterton concludes:

There is more of the wisdom that is one with surprise in any simple person, full of the sensitiveness of simplicity, who should expect the grass to wither and the birds to drop dead out of the air, when a strolling carpenter's apprentice said calmly and almost carelessly, like one looking over his shoulder: "Before Abraham was, I am."

Needless to say, that verse (Jn 8.58) is excised by Jefferson. His mild humanitarian moralizer is not allowed to say anything shocking, challenging, or obscure. Devils and miracles are not the only things to go. So are passages like this:

"Think not I come imposing peace to earth. I come bringing not peace but a sword. I bring conflict between a man and his father, a daughter and her mother, a wife and her mother-in-law a man's foes will be found in his own home. One who loves father or mother before me does not deserve me. One who loves son or daughter before me does not deserve me. And anyone who does not take up a cross and tread in my footsteps does not deserve me. The man protective of his life will lose it, but the one casting life away on my account will preserve it." (Mt 10.34-39)

Jefferson's extraction of the "real" gospel from the traditional one a task he called as easy as "finding diamonds in dunghills" has been taken up in recent years by a team that finds the task more difficult, but productive of much the same result. This team of scholars calls itself the Jesus Seminar, and it prints a Bible that sets apart by different colors the "authentic" sayings or deeds of Jesus and the sayings invented by the evangelists or their sources. Though these experts use linguistic and historical tests for qualifying the diamonds in their dunghill, they work from a Jeffersonian assumption that anything odd or dangerous or supernatural is prima facie suspect. That disqualifies the Resurrection from the outset. The Seminar's founder, Robert Funk, agreed with Jefferson that Jesus was "a secular sage," and the team trims the gospels even more thoroughly than Jefferson did. One whole gospel, John, has no authentic saying (Jefferson liked quite a lot of John). Most of Mark (usually counted the most authentic gospel, since it is the earliest) also falls by the wayside, along with the last three and a half chapters of Matthew. Luke, as the most "humanist gospel," comes off best, but overall the Seminar retains fewer than a fifth of the gospel acts of Jesus and fewer than a fifth of his words.

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" which is not as far as it might at first glance seem from Jefferson's view of him as the last sit-down Stoic sage.

© 2006 Viking, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Garry Wills is one of the most respected writers on religion today. He is the author of Saint Augustine's Childhood, Saint Augustine's Memory, and Saint Augustine's Sin, the first three volumes in this series, as well as the Penguin Lives biography Saint Augustine. His other books include "Negro President": Jefferson and the Slave Power, Why I Am a Catholic, Papal Sin, and Lincoln at Gettysburg, which won the Pulitzer Prize.