What the Gospels Meant

Garry Wills is a historian and the author of the New York Times bestsellers What Jesus Meant, Papal Sin, Why I Am a Catholic, and Why Priests?, among others. A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and other publications, Wills is a Pulitzer Prize winner and a professor emeritus at Northwestern University. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERPraise for What the Gospels Meant:   “Full of riches . . . Wills brings to bear the skills that have justly brought him renown as America’s greatest public intellectual: encyclopedic erudition, concise prose and a polyglot’s gift for ancient languages. . . . This introduces . . . biblical scholarship as a whole to a wide audience of readers hungry for a sophisticated account of those eternally curious texts.”—Chicago Tribune  “What readers will find here is an engaging look at the Gospels, informed by the best biblical scholarship, as well as by Wills’s own faith. . . . This eminently readable volume . . . underscores the attributes of each narrative to highlight truths more crucial than whether there were four discrete Evangelists.”—The New York Times Book Review  “Wills’s scholarship . . . is impeccable, placing the gospels within their original cultural and religious context . . . A book that offers profound spiritual and historical insight in an accessible and intriguing format.”—BookPage  “Poetic, penetrating, and moving. General readers and scholars alike will profit from Mr. Wills’s basic contention, that reason and faith are not antinomies.”—The New York Sun  “An engrossingly concise sequel to his Paul book. Wills . . . shows that [the Gospels are] theological statements, applying Jesus to the different situations confronting each writer’s community.”—The Boston Globe  “Readers willing to have their impressions about these texts challenged by an erudite scholar will find this to be fascinating and worthwhile reading.”—Publishers Weekly  “A remarkable achievement—a learned yet eminently readable and provocative exploration of the four small books that reveal most of what’s known about the life and death of Jesus.”—Los Angeles Times