Garry Wills - a Catholic American tells us about the Jesus he knows

just started reading this Garry Wills book, "What Jesus Meant." . He is a Catholic some of whose writings and other pronouncements are, in some part, a critique of American politics and American Christianity (including his own Catholic Church), and the unholy blending of the two.

This book is about Jesus and so far any criticism of the church is on the oblique side of the ledger. You may not like the portrait he paints but he is thought-provoking.


Garry Wills is professor emeritus of history at Northwestern University USA - follow this link to a site that will tell you more about him. "http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/wills_garry.html"


Some quotes from something he wrote that's on line a the New York Post.... (see link below)

"The Jesus of the Gospels is not a great ethical teacher like Socrates, our leading humanitarian. He is an apocalyptic figure who steps outside the boundaries of normal morality to signal that the Father's judgment is breaking into history. His miracles were not acts of charity but eschatological signs — accepting the unclean, promising heavenly rewards, making last things first."

"It was blasphemous to say... that God made George Bush president in 2000, when a majority of Americans did not vote for him. It would not remove the blasphemy for Democrats to imply that God wants Bush not to be president. Jesus should not be recruited as a campaign aide. To trivialize the mystery of Jesus is not to serve the Gospels."

"Some may think that removing Jesus from politics would mean removing morality from politics. They think we would all be better off if we took up the slogan *"What would Jesus do?"

"The institutional Jesus of the Republicans has no similarity to the Gospel figure. Neither will any institutional Jesus of the Democrats".


ref: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/opinion/09wills.html

or http://www.here-now.org/shows/2006/03/20060314_2.asp
(a radio interview with Gary Wills for which you will need realplayer (you can download it for free- just google it).

His book (and I've not read much of it yet) is very readable and an interesting perspective on Jesus. I don't get any great sense of Jesus' continuity with the O.T. and the prophets from Mr Wills as I have with NT Wright. Wills speaks of the historical Jesus as a construct, and then seems to put that Jesus aside, and then examines what the Gospels say about Jesus and what Jesus says within the Gospels. He makes no attempt to re-construct the construct though he does quote Wright in a couple of places.

His translations of the the Gospel passages he refers to are interesting, even arresting. He doesn't us any one of the translations available to we mere mortals, but rather does his own translations directly for the Greek (and Aramaic?).

Hope someone out there finds this interesting. Email me if you do! Maybe I'll feed you some more stuff about/from the book as I go.


Richard

*Emmylou Harris wants to promote "What would Bob (Dylan) Do?" especially among songwriters