E-mail a friendGarry Wills
airdate February 28, 2008
Historian Garry Wills is the author of more than 20 books, including What the Gospels Meant, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln at Gettysburg and studies of George Washington, Richard Nixon, the Kennedy family, Ronald Reagan and religion in America. An Atlanta native, Wills studied for the priesthood, earned his PhD in the classics from Yale and taught at Johns Hopkins. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and professor of history emeritus at Northwestern University.
Historian reflects on William F. Buckley Jr.'s life and how he shaped the conservative movement. (1:34)
Garry Wills
Tavis: Garry Wills is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and perennial "New York Times" bestseller whose previous books include "Lincoln at Gettysburg" and "What Jesus Meant." His latest is the third installment of a trilogy about the New Testament called "What the Gospels Meant." Garry Wills, an honor to have you on the program, sir.
Garry Wills: Good to see you.
Tavis: Good to see you. Let me start by asking about some news. Of course, your friend and mentor, the guy who gave you your first job passed away yesterday, William F. Buckley, Jr. Tell me about Mr. Buckley and your relationship with him.
Wills: Oh, that was really a blow to hear that. I knew him for 51 years, I just counted up. What was sad to me is that he died alone. He hated to be alone. He wanted people around him all the time. He was so sociable and egalitarian and when I would be traveling with him we'd be in his hotel or on his boat and he'd say, "Well, I have to write a column now."
I'd say, "Oh, okay, I'll leave." And he said, "Oh, no, stay there." So he'd type a while and then he'd talk a while and then he'd type a while and talk a while. He was like Samuel Johnson in that sense; he always wanted to have people around him. It's an extraordinary thing.
Tavis: What do you think his contribution is, his legacy will be?
Wills: Well, he disciplined the conservative movement. He decouped it and did a very good job of that. We had our disagreements over Vietnam and Iraq, but we got back together again and there was nobody better company. There was nobody more generous. He was extraordinarily generous. He loved to do things for people.
And he always treated everybody with respect. His boat boy, his driver, or a lowly graduate student who wandered into "National Review," which is how I met him in 1957, and he treated me as if I were Jim Burnham or any of those people there. That was always the way he was.
He loved to give things to people. He just recently gave me a wonderful charcoal sketch of Chesterton (unintelligible) by the British cartoonist Lowe. He was a person who had a real warm desire to be with people.
Tavis: I think I know what you mean by this, but I don't want to presume or assume. What did you mean when you said he decouped conservativism?
Wills: Well, he got rid of the anti-Semitic angles and the John Birch angles of the conservative movement as he found it, and he was a person who had a great respect for decency, and there was some indecent stuff (laughs) going on in the conservative movement when he first took it up.
Tavis: What's your sense of - before I move onto the text - your sense of in his waning years what he thought of the conservative movement as we know it today?
Wills: Well, he was always critical of aspects of the movement, and as you know he began to be critical of the Iraq war. I think he didn't like the religious right's fanaticism. There was never anything fanatical about Bill. He was a deeply religious person, but not at all fanatical. So I think he had some problems with the conservatives, as is not surprising.
Tavis: Finally on that, what do you most take, as you look back on your career, distinguished as it has been and continues to be, what do you take from him most important and most precious about your relationship with him?
Wills: Well, just how dear he was, and how kind he was. As I say, we had very sharp disagreements, but he was always respectful and loving, I have to say. Loving.
Tavis: So this new text, "What the Gospels Meant," as I mentioned earlier, is the third in this trilogy. For those who have not read the first two, give me a quick synopsis on the first two and then we'll talk about the third, how it fits in that trilogy.
Wills: Yeah. Well, the first one I quoted from all of the gospels about Jesus, and some people said, "Well, your gospels are all right, but Paul's not so good." And they didn't realize Paul comes first, the gospels come later. But some people said about my first book, "You quote from all four gospels indiscriminately, but some are better than others, some are more trustworthy. Some have greater claims to authenticity."
I argue against that, and I argue that they are all authentic in the only way they wanted to be authentic. They're not history, they're not biography, they're not archival, they don't rely on a birth certificate for Jesus or a transcript of his trial. In fact, they are shaped out of the symbolic language that was theirs, which is the sacred writings of the Jews.
The gospels are totally shaped in their symbols and language on the sacred writings, what they thought of as the Bible. Of course, there was no New Testament and they didn't plan to write one. But Paul, when he said, "What's the most important thing that we have to remember," writing in Corinthians.
He said, "My first priority is to pass on to you what was passed on to me: that Jesus died for our sins and was buried, in accord with the sacred writings, and rose again on the third day, in accord with the sacred writings."
So when they are trying to figure out what the meaning of Jesus is, which puzzled them - they still haven't figured him out when they're writing the gospels, they can't understand why this person is so mysterious, as you would expect a divine person to be - what they did was look at the sacred writings and say, "Is he the messiah? What does that mean?"
For instance, the birth narratives, nobody was there and gives us a first-hand account of what happened, but they said, "Well, we know he rose from the dead, because 500 of us saw him," we begin with that. But what did that mean? What did it mean that the messiah was born? And so they'd give a little history of the Jewish promise - the genealogies of Matthew and Luke, stressing different aspects of that promise.
And the language in which they described the birth of the messiah is taken from the sacred writings, the star is the star of Belem from the Book of Numbers. We had a little picture of what the early worship of the followers of Jesus was. In the Acts of the Apostles, when Luke says two disciples went away after the crucifixion downcast, and a stranger joins them and says, "Why are you so sad?" And they say, "We thought that Jesus was the one to come, the messiah.
"And apparently he's not, because he died." And the stranger says, "Don't you know your Moses? Don't you know your prophets?" And he takes them through all of the law and all of the prophets to show that the messiah had to die and rise again. And then they stop at the village they were going to and break bread and they realize the stranger is the risen Jesus.
So that's the Eucharist. But you preceded the Eucharist by reading of the sacred writings, and that's what we have forgotten. When we got the New Testament, we kind of pushed off the old sacred writings.
Tavis: The Old Testament, right.
Wills: Which they never did, of course. Paul preached out of the sacred writings even to gentiles. He said, "You are the seed of Abraham, you're the many nations that he was promised." So he always preached out of the sacred writings. We've forgotten that, but you know who didn't? Abraham Lincoln didn't, and Black Christians in America didn't.
They have always had the sense of Jesus' continuity with the sacred writings, so they have wonderful spirituals about Jesus - "Never Said a Mumbling Word" and "Nobody Knows the Troubles I Seen -" but lots of their spirituals are "The Old Ark's a Mover and a Mover" and we're all riding the ark, we're all going to go to the promised land.
And that sense of a people, of a solidarity and a community was lost by Calvinists in America who were very individualistic. You go off and get saved all by yourself. And Lincoln picked that up from Frederick Douglass and others. The only time he ever called Jesus "savior" was to a group of Black ministers.
So you look at the second inaugural and it's about the whole people have sinned, the whole people are being punished, the whole people have to repent, the whole people will be saved. That's very much what the gospels were saying about the continuity of Jesus with the sacred writings.
Tavis: When you talk about continuity, you argue at the center of this text that to understand these gospels you have to know when they were written and who they were written for.
Wills: Yes, they were written quite late. They didn't need writing because they had the sacred writings. Also, the first believers thought that Jesus was going to come soon because he had fulfilled history. He was the messiah. And so Paul has to write to the Corinthians and say, "No, no, he's not coming tomorrow, don't think that."
So that gave them little incentive to write if there was not going to be a posterity to read what they wrote. Also, it was an oral culture. Writing was very difficult, reading was very difficult. But when they got displaced out of Palestine by persecution and by the Jewish war with the Romans and the temple was destroyed in 70, then the communities were trying to remember their roots.
Remember what it was like in Palestine when they were still there. Christianity had, in fact, spread very rapidly in the Diaspora where there were more Jews than in Palestine, and Paul wrote from there, of course, and all the gospels were written there. And each community has its own problems and its own way of remembering Jesus and its own tradition.
Very strong traditions, because oral cultures can keep an oral tradition with great fidelity, but each one will stress a different aspect of their life being lived in Jesus, because Paul told them "Remember what we all believed in our baptism; that we are all incorporated into Jesus. We are his mystical body, we are his members, so we can't fight each other because member doesn't fight member."
So these are people who are living as prolongations of the life of Jesus and addressing their own particular concerns in the light of that and saying, well, let's remember what Jesus said and how that applies to us today.
Tavis: Let me jump in, I got about a minute and 30 seconds here. Let me ask you right quick what you make of the way so much of the gospel story, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, where the story is told. And by that I mean there are so many of these didactic narratives that we call parables that make up the telling of the gospel. Talk to me about what you make of how these gospels are told, these stories, the way it reads.
Wills: Well as I say, they used the symbolic language of what we call the Old Testament, so when Jesus goes up the mount to deliver the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, Matthew describes that in exactly the same terms of Moses going up the mount to receive the law. And they're saying we know what Jesus said, but what did that mean?
It meant he was doing what Moses did. So the shaping of them, the hymns in them, the creeds in them are all based on Jewish forms, because they were Jews, of course. And salvation comes from the Jews, Paul and Luke and John all say.
Tavis: The new book, it is the third in a trilogy, and I'm not even scratching the surface on it. You'll be fascinated, as I'm sure you have been by this conversation, at what you'll find on the pages of the new book by Garry Wills, "What the Gospels Meant." "What the Gospels Meant." Mr. Wills, nice to have you on and thanks for your reflections on William Buckley, as well.
Wills: Oh, good to be here.
Tavis: Glad to have you here.
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