The Surprising Genius of Jesus E-Book

Peter J. Williams

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

How the Story of the Prodigal Son Illuminates Jesus's Genius  When someone thinks of Jesus, "genius" is not likely the first word that comes to mind. But when studied in detail, Jesus's teachings and interactions with others combined high levels of knowledge and insight, verbal skill, and simplicity—showing his genius.  In The Surprising Genius of Jesus, Peter J. Williams examines the story of the prodigal son in Luke 15 to show the genius, creativity, and wisdom of Jesus's teachings. He used simple but powerful stories to confront the Pharisees and scribes of the day, drawing on his knowledge of the Jewish Scriptures to teach his audience through complex layers and themes. Williams challenges those who question whether Jesus really was the source of the parables recorded in the Gospels, pointing readers to the truth of who Jesus is and why that matters for them today.  - Clear and Insightful: Accessible for general readers with in-depth footnotes for those wanting to learn more - Biblical: Comprehensive, interscriptural analysis of the story of the prodigal son  - Written by Peter J. Williams: Author of Can We Trust the Gospels? and principal of Tyndale House, Cambridge

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“This fascinating study shows how Jesus’s parables, such as that of the prodigal son, are not only powerful stories but also treasure troves of suggestive allusions to the Old Testament. Although short, this book contains a wealth of wisdom to give today’s readers insight into Luke’s parables, thereby helping them understand more of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. A gripping and illuminating read!”

Simon Gathercole, Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity, University of Cambridge

“In this thought-provoking and compelling book, Peter J. Williams digs under the topsoil of the parables attributed to Jesus in the Gospels and helps us see both how expertly these stories integrate Old Testament allusions and how all the evidence points back to Jesus of Nazareth himself as their Creator.”

Rebecca McLaughlin, author, Confronting Jesus: 9 Encounters with the Hero of the Gospels

“Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son is a masterpiece in the history of story-telling. Not only does it make a powerful impact on people of all cultures, it is intricately and poetically composed and rife with allusions to Old Testament narratives, especially about Jacob and Esau. Other parables demonstrate these same characteristics. Whoever composed them deserved to be called a genius, and Jesus (rather than one of his followers) is the best candidate for that individual. The Surprising Genius of Jesus, though a little book, is chock-full of observations about Jesus’s teaching that should make readers admire him even more than they may already do.”

Craig L. Blomberg, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of New Testament, Denver Seminary

“A study at once scholarly and gripping of a man who was—whatever else you may believe him to have been—clearly the most brilliant and influential short-story teller of all time.”

Tom Holland, Presenter, Making History; author, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“A fascinating, provocative, and important book that presents a compelling and persuasive case.”

Justin Meggitt, Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religion and Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge

“Whoever came up with the parable of the prodigal son must have had a forensic knowledge and deep understanding of the Old Testament, as well as an unrivaled ability to connect with simple people and confound and outwit the superintelligent. The one who said those words knew what he was doing—his intentions and claims are made very clear to whoever will take them seriously. Peter J. Williams’s excellent and very readable book is unique in considering the shocking wisdom of Jesus’s teaching, and it presents Jesus as accessible to everyone yet wise enough to confound even the intellectuals.”

Tim Farron, Member of Parliament, United Kingdom

The Surprising Genius of Jesus

The Surprising Genius of Jesus

What the Gospels Reveal about the Greatest Teacher

Peter J. Williams

The Surprising Genius of Jesus: What the Gospels Reveal about the Greatest Teacher

Copyright © 2023 by Peter J. Williams

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Figure 1, in chapter 2, an image of manuscript Or. 4445, folio 23v, from the Pentateuch, is used by permission of the British Library. © British Library Board. All rights reserved / Bridgeman Images.

Cover design: Micah Lanier

Cover image: © British Library Board (Or. 4445), Shutterstock, Unsplash

First printing 2023

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are the author’s own translation or are lightly adapted from the ESV.

Scripture quotations marked ESV are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated into any other language.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-8836-5 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-8839-6 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-8837-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Williams, Peter J., 1970– author.

Title: The surprising genius of Jesus : what the gospels reveal about the greatest teacher / Peter Williams.

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022041818 (print) | LCCN 2022041819 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433588365 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781433588372 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433588396 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Bible. Luke XV, 11–32—Criticism, interpretation, etc. | Prodigal son (Parable)

Classification: LCC BT378.P8 W545 2023 (print) | LCC BT378.P8 (ebook) | DDC 226.8/06—dc23/eng/20230505

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022041818

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022041819

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2023-09-28 12:53:01 PM

Contents

Introduction

1  A Brilliant Story

2  Connecting with Genesis

3  More Stories Inspired by the Old Testament

4  Was Jesus the Genius?

5  Much More Than a Storyteller

General Index

Scripture Index

Ancient Sources Index

Preface

This is a book about the cleverness of Jesus. It argues both that clever teaching is attributed to Jesus and that Jesus actually said those clever things. My hope is that readers who are Christians come away with a renewed awe at the depth of Jesus’s words and that any who are not Christians see Jesus’s genius and recognize that he must be more than merely an extraordinarily gifted teacher. Much of this book is about one passage—Luke 15:11–32—and about how it is a brilliant story, reflecting the mind of a genius. For an application of the meaning of that text for today, I cannot recommend highly enough Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith (New York: Dutton, 2008).

I am grateful to the trustees and staff of Tyndale House, Cambridge, for giving me the time to write this book and to many friends who were willing to read this book in a rough draft and offer suggestions for improvement. These readers include Esther Atsen, James Bejon, Keith Bintley, Ezra Brainard, Dr. John Hayward, Miriam Hulley, Dr. Dirk Jongkind, Zachary Klein, Demsin Lachin, David Laing, Dr. Stephen Lloyd, Stephen McCausland, Greg and Jennifer Mayer, Dr. Kaspars Ozoliņš, Toby Payne, Lily Rivers, Cristo Rodriguez, Kathryn Williams (my better half), Tim Williams (a lovely older brother), and Jordan Worley.

Biblical quotations from the English Standard Version are marked ESV. Other biblical quotations are my own translations or are lightly adapted from the ESV.

Introduction

I discovered that I had been unconsciously trained to admire everything about Jesus except his intellectual astuteness.

Kenneth Bailey

Finding the Lost

Over the years thousands of people have been described as geniuses.1Aristotle (384–322 BC), Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791), and Albert Einstein (1879–1955) are among the more famous ones. But the term genius is almost never applied to Jesus of Nazareth.2 Probably about two billion Christians would claim to follow his teachings, which is more than follow the teachings of any other person in history. But most of the Christians I mix with would be more likely to see Jesus’s intelligence as a necessary corollary of his divine nature than to point to specific things he said as examples of remarkable intellect. When Jesus is viewed as a teacher, as Christian philosopher Dallas Willard wryly comments, “Frankly, he is not taken to be a person of much ability.”3

One reason others are seen as geniuses but Jesus is not could be what they have left behind. Aristotle left books of philosophy and analysis; da Vinci, inventions and exquisite paintings; Mozart, sublime music; Einstein, theories that are foundational for modern physics. And Jesus? He never wrote a book. But could we say that he left Christianity behind? The problem is that its art, history, institutions, philosophy, and so on are often regarded as a response to Jesus, not something he himself thought up. At least we can agree that many things under the label of Christianity have nothing at all to do with the teachings of Jesus.

This book argues that Jesus should be considered a genius, not merely because a vast number of people today claim to follow him but also because of the cleverness and wisdom of his teaching. The teaching attributed to him combines impressive factual knowledge with even more impressive depth of insight, coherence, and simplicity. He was literally able to teach two groups with very different knowledge levels simultaneously. Evidence for Jesus’s teaching is found in the four earliest records of Jesus, the four Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It is well worth investing the nine hours or so it takes to read all four of them once. In fact, speaking from experience, I can say that it is rewarding to study them for an entire lifetime. If you have doubts about whether they can be taken as serious historical sources, I invite you to read my short book Can We Trust the Gospels?4

To follow my argument here, you do not need to believe that Jesus said all the things credited to him in the Gospels. All you need to believe is that the sayings attributed to Jesus come from within living memory of him, remembering that even leading skeptical scholars date the Gospels to the first century.5Jesus Christ was executed while Pontius Pilate was the Roman governor of Judea (AD 26–36),6 and if the Gospels were all written by AD 100 (personally, I think they were much earlier), the gap between Jesus and the Gospels is both short enough for them to be thoroughly reliable and long enough for them to be thoroughly unreliable. The length of time alone does not therefore tell us about the degree of their reliability. Only an examination of the Gospels themselves can answer this question.

In the pages that follow, I intend both to show the genius of the words attributed to Jesus in the Gospels and to explore the best explanation for where these clever ideas originated. Was Jesus a rather ordinary teacher with brilliant students who selflessly credited him with their great ideas?7 Or was Jesus a very smart teacher with, coincidentally, smart disciples, and therefore the credit should be shared? Or was Jesus himself the genius, and to the extent that his disciples showed themselves intelligent, they were simply reflecting the greatness of their teacher?

I find the last explanation best, and I want to consider as my central evidence of Jesus’s genius the longest story attributed to him, commonly known as the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32). As we will see, despite its name, the story involving the prodigal son is about two sons, not one. It is set after two related stories about a lost sheep and a lost coin. By focusing on one story, I do not want to suggest that this is the only example of Jesus’s genius—or even the most important one. His creativity and wisdom can be seen in all his teaching, closely examined. But to keep this book short, we examine just one major story in depth while considering other stories more briefly. We will be analyzing only Jesus’s stories and will not even touch on his sermons or dialogues.

The first chapter looks at the cleverness on the surface of the longest story attributed to Jesus. The second examines the cleverness of this story through the way it echoes multiple Old Testament stories. The third investigates other stories attributed to Jesus and shows that they too contain the same sort of use of the Old Testament. The fourth highlights reasons for thinking that the cleverness of all the stories in Luke 15–16 must go back to Jesus himself. The final chapter connects what we have learned with Jesus’s mission as a whole and considers how this challenges us all.

1  As of March 2022, Amazon has over four thousand books in the category of biographies that include the word genius in their title.

2  An exception is the recent motivational book by Erwin Raphael McManus, The Genius of Jesus: The Man Who Changed Everything (New York: Convergent, 2021).

3  Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (London: William Collins, 1998), 1.

4  Peter J. Williams, Can We Trust the Gospels? (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018).

5  Leading scholar and skeptic Bart D. Ehrman says, “Most historians think that Mark was the first of our Gospels to be written, sometime between the mid 60s to early 70s. Matthew and Luke were probably produced some ten or fifteen years later, perhaps around 80 to 85. John was written perhaps ten years after that, in 90 or 95.” Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 43.

6  See Roman historian Tacitus, Annals15.44, for evidence that Christ’s execution occurred while Pilate was governor of Judea. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 18.89, gives Pilate’s tenure in Judea as ten years and his departure shortly before Tiberius died on March 16, AD 37. Thus, whereas Pilate may have governed until the beginning of AD 37, since Jesus was executed at Passover time, which fell in late March or April, the crucifixion must have taken place between AD 26 and AD 36.

7Jesus was early seen as a philosopher. See Jonathan T. Pennington, Jesus the Great Philosopher: Rediscovering the Wisdom Needed for the Good Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2020), 3–8.

1

A Brilliant Story

We begin our treasure hunt by collecting a few of the many nuggets of gold on the uppermost surface of the longest story attributed to Jesus, found in Luke 15:11–32. It is just 388 words long in the Greek original,1 but despite its brevity, it combines beguiling simplicity on the surface with several coherent layers of deeper meaning for a student of the Old Testament.

Though it is usually called the parable of the prodigal son, I call it the story of the two sons, since it is about two sons, not one. I call it a story, not a parable, not to deny that it is a parable but to respect the fact that Luke 15:3 seems to refer to all three stories found in Luke 15 as a single parable. Here is the chapter as a whole:

Now all the tax collectors and sinners were drawing near to hear him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling, saying, “This man receives sinners and eats with them.” And he told them this parable, saying, “What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? And when he has found it, he puts it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he has come home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’ I tell you that thus there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who have no need of repentance.

“Or what woman, having ten drachmas, if she loses one drachma, does not light a lamp and sweep the house and seek diligently until she finds it? And when she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the drachma that I had lost.’ Thus, I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

And he said, “A certain man had two sons. And the younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of possessions that is coming to me.’ And he divided his livelihood between them. And not many days later, the younger son gathered everything and took a journey into a far country, and there he squandered his possessions living dissolutely. And when he had spent everything, there arose a severe famine in that country, and he began to be in need. And he went and attached himself to one of the citizens of that country, and he sent him into his fields to feed pigs. And he was longing to be filled with the pods that the pigs ate, and no one was giving him anything. But coming to himself, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have more than enough bread, but I am perishing here with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants.”’ And he arose and came to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him. And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring out the best robe, and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet. And bring the fattened calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate. For this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ And they began to celebrate. Now his older son was in the field, and when he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called one of the lads and asked what these things meant. And he said to him, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fattened calf, because he has received him back in good health.’ But he was angry and was not willing to go in. And his father came out and entreated him, but he answered his father, ‘Look, all these years I have slaved for you, and I never disobeyed your command, and you never gave me a young goat that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your livelihood with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him!’ And he said to him, ‘Child, you are always with me, and all my things are yours. But it was necessary to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead and is alive again, and he was lost and is found.’”

After the introductory sentence, “A certain man had two sons” (5 Greek words), the story divides between the account of the younger son (239 words) and the older son (144 words).2 As the younger son takes up about 62 percent of the story and the older son a mere 38 percent, it is natural that the whole is often named after the younger son alone.3 The story is a single paragraph in our earliest copy, which reflects the fact that when the storyteller told this story, he did not pause between the sections about the two contrasting sons.4 Yet the content may be read in two sections, each ending with the father saying that the younger son “was dead and is alive again, and he was lost and is found” (Luke 15:24, 32).5 Even though the storyteller does not pause, there is still a clear literary structure.

The story is one of several parables that occur in Luke’s Gospel alone and is part of a series of three stories in Luke 15:

1. The first story tells of one hundred sheep, with one lost and then found.

2. The second tells of ten coins, with one lost and then found.

3. The third tells of two sons, of whom only one is explicitly said to be lost and then found.

Not only are the three stories connected by being about things lost and found, they all contain celebrations and parallel each other, with the first two seeming to be a “warm-up act” for the third. It is not just that the first two stories are much shorter than the third; they also prepare for it since in the first story the sheep gets lost by going away and in the second the coin gets lost at home. The third and final story then tells of the younger son who, like the sheep, gets lost by going away but then of the older son who, like the coin, has not left home. So we have artistry in the three individual stories and also artistry in the way they hang together and enrich each other. The implication of the three stories together is that the older son too is lost.