Jesus Speaks: Author Frees His Words for a New Look

by Kimberly Winston, Religion BookLine -- Publishers Weekly, 1/16/2008

In The Words of Jesus: A Gospel of the Sayings of Our Lord (Jossey-Bass, Feb.; reviewed in PW Dec. 3), author Phyllis Tickle strips Jesus of the context and the narrative surrounding his words, leaving only the "red-letter" text of the New Testament. The result, which Tickle calls "a sayings gospel," reveals startling things about this figure many people—including the author—thought they knew.

RBL: What do you gain by separating the words of Jesus from the rest of the Gospels?

Tickle: When you take away the narrative and the contextual pacing, you get power—rata-tat-tat. It is almost like being in front of a machine gun. The more subtle thing is that the reader has always had an intellectual overlay to the Gospels. You say, "I am reading Luke, so I am reading the gentile take on what Jesus said." But when you remove the author and the narrative, you realize the core is exposed much more cleanly.

RBL: What do you lose?

Tickle: We took the manuscript to a focus group at the Episcopal cathedral in Memphis and they had this period of anger and skepticism. Some of them admitted they didn't like him very much because he ceases to be the caring shepherd and he becomes something very dramatic. You lose the guru. And you lose any sense of the sweet child, holy, meek and mild. You lose the stereotypes. This man is God incarnate. It is as if Sinai is moving among us, speaking its own Torah with no Moses. It is Sinai on legs.

RBL: What did this process teach you about Jesus?

Tickle: I came to hear him first instead of visualizing him. One of the preconceptions we bring as Roman or Protestant Christians is that we visualize the divinity. Now there is no picture because the voice is so overwhelming that it shatters all the pictures. It also showed me his personality—that he is stark and, well, godly. He is not some wandering carpenter who went for a new job. What you've got is what probably made the children of Israel cringe.

RBL: How do you hope readers will use this book?

Tickle: I hope they will read it with some sense of amazement—and very slowly. It overwhelms you. You can be stripped naked of all the preconceptions and the conditions that you have come to the scriptures dressed in or anaesthetized in and meet here, stark naked, who and what your God is.