The Surprising Genius of Jesus: A Review

Peter J. Williams
The Surprising Genius of Jesus
Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2023.

It is wrong to reduce Jesus to a moral teacher or mere philosopher. Jesus was not a words-smith selling word-salads, nor a crank peddling new ideas, nor a sophist showing off his rhetorical verve, nor an intellectualist establishing his own academy. Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, even “Immanuel.” Be that as it may, while Jesus is more than a teacher, he is certainly no less than a teacher, and his teaching remains poignant, powerful, and challenging even today. This is where a new book by Peter J. Williams (Warden of Tyndale House) comes in. His thesis is that Jesus is just as much a genius as Aristotle, Mozart, or Einstein. Jesus’ teaching contains “impressive factual knowledge” along with an “impressive depth of insight, coherence, and simplicity.” For Williams, the Christian revolution that rocked the Roman world and birthed western civilization goes back to the “genius” of Jesus.

Williams takes as “Exhibit A” Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son found in Luke 15:11-32. The genius of Jesus is evident, claims Williams, by virtue of three things in this parable.

First, the sheer cleverness of the parable of the prodigal son itself. The parable is the third of three parables about lost things: lost sheep, lost coin, and then a lost son. These parables serve to defend why Jesus dines with the deplorables, sinners and tax-collectors, much to the consternation and disapproval of the Pharisees and scribes. Williams points out that the story contains brevity and beauty, it creates tension, it mentions family, a farm, famine, pigs, poverty, and a fattened calf. It makes us angry with the ingratitude and indulgence of the younger son, then shocked and surprised by the mercy of his father, and even sympathetic to the anger and jealousy of the older son. Yet, as Williams notes, the story is really about the older son, because he, just like the Pharisees and scribes, refuses to join the celebration that someone lost has been found as in Jesus’s fellowship with sinners. The lost son’s redemption is not the main point, he is but a prop to show the hardheartedness of Jesus’s critics who think they possess “a greater share of God’s favor” – a brilliant narrative bait and switch.

Second, the parable of the prodigal son alludes to and echoes various Old Testament stories. Jesus was no trained scribe, but he was able to weave in allusions and echoes of the Old Testament in ways that might have impressed even them. In particular, Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son rehearses many themes and key motifs from the Book of Genesis. To begin with, there are a number of OT characters who had two sons, most notably Isaac with Esau and Jacob. In fact, Williams points to several parallels between Esau and Jacob and the two brothers in the parable, the most striking is the concern about inheritance. Yet, whereas Esau, who was cheated by Jacob out of his inheritance, reconciled with Jacob, the older brother does not reconcile with his delinquent younger brother. In other words, the scribes and Pharisees are worse than Esau by resenting Jesus for dining with tax-collectors and sinners. Further interesting parallels are drawn with the stories of Cain-Abel, Abraham, Jacob-Laban, Joseph, and Judah. As Williams points out, this type of story-telling which rehearses key scriptural wording and themes anticipates later rabbinic mashalim and are rhetorically powerful to a biblical literate audience who would sense the moral challenge Jesus was making to his critics in his parable of the prodigal son.

In a subsequent chapter, Williams proceeds to show how the same technique of alluding to Old Testament languages, characters, and stories is found in other parables and teaching spread across Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Williams detects in these stories an atmosphere that derives from first-century Palestine as well as betraying the same literary genius at work.

One cannot attribute these works to Luke because, while Luke 15–16 displays thematic repetition and resonance, the author is clearly aware of proto-rabbinic interpretive techniques, semitic idioms, and the workings of daily life in Judea and Galilee, which is not a Greek-speaking Gentile from Asia Minor like Luke the physician. According to Williams:

Jesus’s teachings were transmitted early on in order to recognize that the stories attributed to him in the Gospels show numerous common features and that they are not readily explained as creations by the Gospel writers but are easily explained as the records of a brilliant teacher with a profile that closely matches what we know about Jesus.

Third, the parable of the prodigal son is amazing for how it exemplifies Jesus’s overall mission and message. For Williams, Jesus was more than a religious talent and literary master. His teaching was part of a messianic career, climaxing in his death and resurrection, a career that was part of the story of God’s plan to create and renew the world. Jesus was a genius because, suggests Williams, he came from God and he is God. As Williams concludes:

If the storyteller Jesus Christ is God himself, who made the world, invented language, oversaw history, and then became human to tell us about God and to rescue us from our alienation to him, then his wisdom and genius make sense. And if he is that smart and if he also loved us enough to die to save us, the only sensible thing to do is to accept him unreservedly as our teacher, guide, and Savior.

By way of evaluation, William’s book is an easy read and focuses on details in the parable of the prodigal son that many might just gloss over. The mantra of this age is “Be true to yourself,” which implies that I do not need a teacher, a mentor, a guide, that I already possess all the resources within me to be a moral and mature person. Yet the crucible of life shows that such a prosaic aphorism like “Be true to yourself” will not help us to navigate the complexities of this age, nor help us navigate the moral perils we encounter, and even worse, such a glib mantra is a recipe for narcissism. As an antidote to that, William’s book invites readers to find in Jesus, the teacher, the “only one teacher” worth following according to Matthew (23:8) because his “yoke is easy” and his “burden is light” (11:30). In William’s exposition, the parable of the prodigal son shows Jesus as a brilliant teacher, a genius even, one worth listening to, and even one worthy of our devotion. Jesus is a genius with words because in the end he is the Word of God made flesh.