Garry Wills studied for the priesthood, took his doctorate in the classics, and taught ancient and New Testament Greek at John Hopkins University. I’ve also read his bestsellers What Jesus Meant (book 209) and What Paul Meant (book 210). Book 338 was a Christmas gift.

New Testament translations are by the author. Jewish Scripture is quoted from The New English Bible (Oxford University Press, 1970). Between his Introduction: What Is a Gospel? and his Epilogue: How to Read the Gospels are 12 chapters in four parts for the four canonical Gospels in chronological order. At the beginning of each part are a few pages that summarize the Gospel’s community, what they knew of each other when their Gospel was written, and the central perspective of the Gospel's author(s). Part I is MARK: Report from the Suffering Body of Jesus: Ch 1 is Persecution in Syria; Ch 2 is Messianic Signs; Ch 3 is Mark’s Artistry. Part II is MATTHEW: Report from the Teaching Body of Jesus: Ch 4 is Birth Narrative; Ch 5 is Sermon on the Mount; Ch 6 is Death and Resurrection. Part III is LUKE: Report from the Reconciling Body of Jesus: Ch 7 is Nativity; Ch 8 is A Jesus for Outcasts; Ch 9 is A Healing Death. Part IV is JOHN: Ch 10 is Word into World; Ch 11 is The Inner Life; Ch 12 is Life Out of Death. Garry Wills chose to subtitle each part as a “report” from a community whose primary focus appears in the report’s subtitle. That he covers each Gospel in chapters whose three titles serves to indicate the three aspects he thought to be the most significant ones to highlight in that “report”. But in each part he does indicate differences between that Gospel and another Gospel or Gospels.

Since his Introduction gives his overall Biblical worldview, I quote extensively from it. He argues that “The church was right to consider all of the Gospels as authentic, with the only kind of authenticity they sought or recognized. They are not historically true as that term would be understood today. They are not history at all, as our history is practiced.” …”They culminate an oral preaching process. They use the methods and symbols and theology of the writings that their authors held to be history par excellence – the Sacred History of the Jews, recorded in their Sacred Writings (Graphai, ‘Scripture’). In the oral history behind the Gospels “there were two principles of selectivity – looking forward to the Passion and Resurrection, and looking backwards to the Jewish history, destiny, and legacy.” …”Everything written is an attempt to ‘situate’ Jesus in the entirety of Sacred History.” …”What then is a Gospel? The genre has often been debated. The Gospels are not biographies, or history books, or treatises. Their shape is determined by their uses, by their place in the lives and memories of the early believers.” …”They begin with a ‘high Christology,’ a belief in Jesus’ divinity. Biographical memories are fitted to them only later, when the Gospels get written.” …”As each Gospel was a continuation of the Sacred Writings, so it was a continuation of the life of Jesus being lived in his members.”

From near the end of his Introduction: “My aim here is not to go exhaustively into each episode of every Gospel, but to suggest the goal, method, and style of each evangelist. They write in marketplace (koine) Greek, and in my translations I stay close to the telegraphic character of that language, even to its clumsy connectives, inconsistent tenses, and other infelicities.” …”There is something profoundly misleading in the prettified ‘Bible English’ of most translations, which offer the serene picture of an ideal life, or a set of oracles from on high, or a doctrinal compendium.” …”We have to enter into a gathering very different from a modern church, into an oral culture resonant with echoes from the omnipresent prophets and psalms, into a world more interested in what a tradition means than in what a document says, a world where Jesus was partly hidden but by no means absent.”

I found Ch 5 – The Sermon on the Mount – to be especially informative. In Garry Wills’s translation the Beatitudes (Matt 5:3-10) seem far simpler and much more enlightening than do most other versions: “Jesus begins the Sermon on the Mount with messages of comfort, what was called in antiquity a ‘consolatio’, an address to those afflicted, neglected, or persecuted.

• Happy the poor in their own mind, since heaven’s reign belongs to them.
• Happy the sad, since they shall be consoled.
• Happy those who yield, since they shall acquire the earth.
• Happy those who hunger and thirst to see right prevail, since they will eat and drink their fill.
• Happy those taking pity on others, since they will be pitied.
• Happy those who are pure within, since they will see God.
• Happy those who bring peace to others, since they will be named God’s sons.
• Happy those who are punished for their virtue, since heaven’s reign belongs to them.

He says "These are all paradoxes. They turn expectation and normal values upside down.” Wills briefly, in just five pages, discusses each of these eight verses with insights that, to me, were as deep as those of Eric Kolbell (in his book 168) who used 136 pages to discuss The Beatitudes.

After The Beatitudes Wills discusses six antitheses, Matt 5:21-48, that all begin with the phrase ‘You have heard ……… but I tell you’. The six are anger, adultery, divorce, oaths, nonviolence, and love for enemies. Next he discusses prayer and he translates the Lord’s Prayer in two sentences. The first sentence is three petitions directed at the vindication of God in the final showdown of history. The second sentence is three petitions asking that those who pray to God may be protected through this ordeal. Here is Wills’ translation of the Lord’s Prayer:

• Our Father of the heavens, your title be honored, your reign arrive, your design be fulfilled on earth as in heaven.
• Our meal still to come, grant us today, and clear our moral account with you, as we clear our account with others, and bring us not to the Breaking Point, but wrest us from the Evil One.

Finally he has a section near the end of Ch 5 on ‘Setting priorities’ that begins: “The rest of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 6:19-7:27) uses various teaching devices to set priorities in the light of the eschatological vision of the Lord’s Prayer.”

The Epilogue is quite brief, but he asks and answers two important questions. “Why are there four Gospels? Because Christians living in different situations felt it important to draw on different aspects of Jesus’ life and message. They meditated on the things that were most urgent for them as members of Jesus’ mystical body. They give us four different takes on the central mystery.” …”How to read the Gospels? As a whole, with the reverence they derive from and address, yet with the intelligence God gave us to help us find him.”

Garry Wills ‘take’ and translations of the Gospels are very insightful and great food for thought, even for those who are very familiar with the four Gospels in other translations. (This book never mentions any non-canonical gospels, but it does mention that Q was a source used by Matthew and Luke in addition to Mark and Paul’s letters). A significant difference between this book and his two books What Jesus Meant and What Paul Meant is that here he does not come down hard on the organized religion of Christianity as he explicitly did in these two earlier books. Here he is explicitly critical primarily of other translations of the four Gospels, but he is silent about dogma or organized religion, giving me the distinct impression that his words here are intended for individual Christians, not for Christian communities. One wonders whether these are intentional omissions or if he had a change of mind. For these omissions (and the lack of an index) I can only give this book a lower recommendation than I gave his earlier books. But it is still a very worthwhile read and I recommend it to all.