The Words of Jesus – reflections on a Phyllis Tickle Interview

Last updated on: May 10, 2008 at 1:27 am by missionchrist

The Words of Jesus – reflections on a Phyllis Tickle Interview 2008-05-10T01:27:00-04:00 missionchrist

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Alright I’m actually pretty excited now. I’ve been a great admirer of Phyllis Tickle for some time now, but have yet to read her latest published work, The Words of Jesus. I did however take a few pages in using the search inside feature on amazon.com, I also read an interesting interview with Phyllis on the book and I must say both of these things have me a bit excited, and nervous.

What the book does is simply remove all but the words of Jesus from the Bible. Or I suppose another way of looking at it is compiles all the word of Jesus into one place. The words are organized in such a way that you read all of Jesus’ words to a particular audience together (crowds, disciples, etc).

In her interview Phyllis articulates well the feeling I felt as I read through the selections I found online when she says, “You do lose the guru. You would never confuse this man with Mahatma Ghandi or the Prophet [Muhammad]. You lose any sense of the guru and you lose any sense of the sweet child, holy, meek and mild. You lose the stereotypes. This man is God incarnate. He claims it, he speaks it. It is as if Sinai is moving among us, speaking its own Torah with no Moses. It is Sinai on legs.”

I recommend some of you should give the full interview a read. Another highlight from interview is as follows, “[In reading the book I] came to hear him first instead of visualizing him. Another one of the preconceptions we bring – one of the problems with Roman and Protestant Christianity is we have been willing to visaulize and pictorialize the divinity. It distorts [the divinity], no question. If you come to this as a Roman Catholic or a Protestant, you have in your head a visual image of Jesus – whatever it is, you’ve got one. You come to the words through a picture. Now there is no picture. The voice is so overwhelming that it shatters all the pictures. The heard Jesus is inside you, not something outside you. I say in the reflections it is a great deal like being inside a room instead of outside it and seeing through a window what is going on in there. The second thing is his personality – that he is this persona that is stark and, well, godly. He is not some wandering carpenter who went for a new job. All of that is gone. What you’ve got is what probably made the children of Israel cringe and say don’t let us see this. Also, he says I have not come to destroy the law but to fulfill the law. He is an actualist, a biblical actualist, not a literalist. He condemns that. And he is not a metaphorist. He says this thing is what this thing is – period. It is the holiness in it, it is the soul in it that is its actuality and you cannot confine it. He says, it is here and I am it. The claiming of it is so much more dramatic this way.”

So what we basically have is a new way to look at Jesus that is quite similar to the hypothetical Gospel of Q, or the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. Is this a good idea?

Much of what Jesus did was in his actions, and not in his words. He heals without any having any words docuented, prays and is not recorded, and dies with few words. In the earliest manuscripts of Mark his resurrection is even recorded without a single word of Jesus mentioned. The words of Jesus do not give us a complete picture, which is why I wonder how this book will influence people.

Personally I look forward to getting my hands on a copy and taking it in completely, but I do wonder what you all think,

Is a book that records only Jesus’ words a good thing??

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