Part 3

What Jesus Meant
by Garry Wills

(Page 3 of 3)

Of course, the sayings that meet with the Seminar's approval were preserved by the Christian communities whose contribution is discounted. Jesus as a person does not exist outside the gospels, and the only reason he exists there is because of their authors' faith in the Resurrection. Trying to find a construct, "the historical Jesus," is not like finding diamonds in a dunghill, but like finding New York City at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. It is a mixing of categories, or rather of wholly different worlds of discourse. The only Jesus we have is the Jesus of faith. If you reject the faith, there is no reason to trust anything the gospels say. The Jesus of the gospels is the Jesus preached, who is the Jesus resurrected. Belief in his continuing activity in the members of his mystical body is the basis of Christian belief in the gospels. If that is unbelievable to anyone, then why should that person bother with him? The flat cutout figure they are left with is not a more profound philosopher than Plato, a better storyteller than Mark Twain, or a more bitingly ascetical figure than Epictetus (the only ancient philosopher Jefferson admired). If his claims are no higher than theirs, then those claims amount to nothing.

With certain religious figures, the original story that reaches us does not begin with literal facts that are later "embellished," as the Seminarists put it. The first reports spreading from such figures are all a blaze of holiness and miracle. That is as true of Saint Francis as of the Baal Shem Tov. It is their impact on the faith of others that makes these men noticeable in the first place. Miracles, as it were, work themselves around such men. Jesus is the preeminent example of this. The fact that he seems like other wonder-working holy men Apollonius of Tyana, for instance does not mean that he is an imitation of them. Rather, they are a reaching out toward him. They are a hunger and he the food. They are an ache, he the easement. As Chesterton said, his story resembles the great myths of mankind because he is the fulfillment of the myths. When someone said that other stories tell of God's voice coming from heaven, and so does the scene of Christ's baptism, therefore his story must be just like the other ones, Chesterton asked, "From what place could a voice of God come, from the coal cellar?"

In the case of Jesus, the first blaze of wonder and miracle is registered in the letters of Paul, which preceded the gospels by a quarter to half of a century. The Seminarists treat the gospels as if they were just a distortion of the "real" sayings of Jesus that preceded them. But what preceded them in fact was the testimony of Paul, who already preached the divinity of Christ, his descent from the Father, his saving death and Resurrection. Nor can we say that he invented something different from the gospels, as if they were already in existence. He is passing on what was given to him in the Christian community (1 Cor 15.3). We know this is the case because he quotes hymns of the community that preceded his letters, including this one:

He, having the divine nature from the outset, thinking it no usurpation to be held God's equal, emptied himself out into the nature of a slave, becoming like to man. And in man's shape he lowered himself, so obedient as to die, by a death on the cross. For this God has exalted him, favored his name over all names, that at the name of Jesus all knees shall bend above the earth, upon the earth, and below the earth, and every tongue shall acknowledge that Jesus is the Lord Christ, to the glory of God the Father. (Phil 2.6-11)

The proclamation of divinity is not something "added on" later. It is the very thing to which all later explanations are added. The gospels, following on this profession of an active and shared faith, trace the theological implications of that faith, and cite Jesus' words only in the context of that belief, the only context that exists for them. So this book will accept what Jesus meant as conveyed to us by what the gospels mean. It will treat the Jesus of faith, since there is no other. The "historical Jesus" does not exist for us. Romano Guardini put the matter well in his book on the psychology of Jesus:

Were we in a position to disregard all [later] accounts and gain an immediate impression of Jesus Christ as he was on earth, we would not be confronted by a "simple" historical Jesus, but by a figure of devastating greatness and incomprehensibility. Progress in the representation of the portrait of Christ does not mean that something was being added to what was proclaimed; it means that we are witnessing the unfolding step by step of that which "was from the beginning." ... If we could get back to the "original," that is, if we could work our way back to the picture of Christ as it existed before it had been turned over in the apostles' minds or elaborated by their preaching, before it had been assimilated by the corporate life of the faithful, we could find a figure of Christ even more colossal and incomprehensible than any conveyed by even the most daring statements of St. Paul or St. John. ... The statements of the apostles are guides to him which never quite do justice to the fullness of his divine-human natures. The apostles never state more about the historical Jesus than he actually was; it is always less.

To accept the gospels as an authentic account of what Jesus meant should not make us revert from the new fundamentalism to the old one, treating everything in the gospels as literally true in a later sense of historical truth. The gospels express the ineffable in the language appropriate for the task, a language inherited from the Jewish scriptures. Luke's gospel, for instance, spells out the meaning of Christ's Incarnation in the poetic forms of divine birth, because he and his fellows knew that this is what the Christ event meant. To believe in the gospels is to take everything in them as meant, though at various levels of symbolization. To read the gospels reverently is to keep asking, through all such symbols, what Jesus means. That is my purpose here.

This is not a scholarly book but a devotional one. It is a profession of faith a reasoning faith, I hope, and reasonable; what Saint Anselm called "faith out on quest to know" (fides quaerens intellectum). In writing it, I had in mind certain devotional treatments of Jesus written by fellow Catholics especially those by Gilbert Chesterton (The Everlasting Man), François Mauriac (Life of Jesus), Romano Guardini (The Human Christ), and Shusaku Endo (A Life of Jesus). These men were not scripture scholars, just firm believers who read the gospels carefully, with the insights their own faith gave them. Endo consciously imitated Mauriac, and I have tried to follow the lead of both men; but each of the writers mentioned, in his own way, helped me see the radicalism of the gospels. Mauriac also brought home to me this humbling truth:

No doubt a life of Jesus should be written on one's knees, with a feeling of unworthiness great enough to make the pen drop from the hand. A sinner should blush for his temerity in undertaking such a work. Or, as a greater guide avowed, "I am not up to the task of touching his sandal" (Mt 3.11).

© 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.