The Surprising Genius of Jesus

A Review of Peter J. Williams latest book.

Peter J. Williams' book, The Surprising Genius of Jesus is a slim volume, easily read in an afternoon or over a weekend, yet its massive insights will leave you pondering the parables of Jesus for many hours more. 

The length of the book actually serves to enhance the main point of the book itself. True genius is not about how many words you can say, but about how much information you can convey through them.  

When we consider people who are geniuses, people tend to think of artists like Leonardo, Bach, and Beethoven, or “intellectual” thinkers and philosophers like Plato & Aristotle. In comparison to the latter group, the Biblical counterpart who most often comes to mind is not Jesus, but the Apostle Paul.

What Williams points out is that Jesus’s parables contain a depth of information packaged in a way to reach multiple audiences simultaneously, cutting to the core of the issue for each audience in the briefest terms possible. 

The main focus of the book is on what he refers to as the parable of the two sons, often called the prodigal son, in Luke 15. While this is Jesus’ longest story, it still remains quite short, taking only about 2 ½ minutes to recite, well within the current limits of a Tik Tok video. Considering this brevity, a book of 144 pages seems like quite a lengthy exposition, yet each page of Williams book highlights references to other passages within the story that deserve hours of further consideration.

Much of the teaching content he points to comes from Kenneth Bailey, who has written several books on this and other parables, and points to the very close parallels with accounts from Genesis. But Williams' unique insight points us to the method which Jesus is using, a method that compresses virtually the whole book of Genesis into one short story, and gives us an interpretive lens through which we can reexamine those stories with fresh eyes and ears.  

The later chapters point to the consistency of these methods in the other parables of Jesus, highlighting that these parables all came from the same mind. This evidence provides a healthy push back toward critical scholarship that tends to question the authenticity of the words of Jesus by attributing His words to the gospel writers. 

A simple summation of the problem is that Jesus is often overlooked as a genius thinker because His methodology breaks down the barrier between the intellectual capacity of the listener and that of the speaker. His teachings have a much lower barrier of entry than those of the philosophers. We tend to focus on the moral and narrative layers that speak to the uneducated portion of the audience (the tax collectors and sinners) while failing to notice the scriptural references that are aimed at the scribes and the Pharisees. 

The question then remains, why do we hold philosophical teachers in such high regard, while dismissing Jesus? Perhaps the answer is because our own intellects are too low! We are impressed by thinkers who have a reputation of being difficult to understand. When people finally grasp (or believe they grasp) the teachings of Plato, Aristotle, or latter day thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, they tend to act as religious converts. With their eyes finally open to the world as it is meant to be seen, they proselytize for the acceptance of their master’s teaching, rejecting the unbelievers, and pitying the fools who cannot grasp the obvious. They have discovered a frame that allows them to dismiss whatever creeps beyond its borders.

The philosopher of antiquity, as well as their theological and philosophical descendants, all wrote lengthy works covering a wide array of topics. We regard their prolificity as part of their genius. We admire the progression from thought to thought. It is a sign of an active mind, minds that change and react to new arguments, synthesizing the new information into a system that brings chaos into order. What the philosopher cannot give us is a final word; they knew they could always be proven wrong, a point sometimes missed by their disciples.

In contrast, Jesus wrote down no words of his own, and the stories and teachings we have are brief. Yet He spoke “as who had authority”¹ unlike the scribes in attendance - in many places He gave us final words. This leads to more comparisons with prophetic speakers who claim to speak on behalf of God. We do not consider such speakers to be geniuses, they are simply conduits for the divine, and the test of time judges the validity of their words.

But Jesus’ words do not simply come into existence from the void. They are full of references to the Hebrew Scriptures, often layered in a deep fashion. This is a contrast to the parables of other Rabbis, who would use scripture to explain the parable, but rarely if ever nest the references in the story itself. Here we see the source of His “Authority”, in the most literal sense. 

The missing writings of Jesus, the systematic works of his philosophical genius are found in the Hebrew Scriptures; His authority in interpretation comes from His divine authorship. Jesus makes such claims of authorship directly, but His teachings and parables provide the evidence to back up these claims. 

“Arguably, the connections of the story of the two sons with Genesis are so frequent that a literary critic who did not know the order in which things were written might more easily explain Genesis as an expansion of Luke 15 than explain Luke 15 as being based on Genesis.”²

Jesus repeatedly shows an intimate knowledge of scripture in His words that is still being unpacked to this day. 

One question touched on, though not answered by Williams, is how were the words of Jesus transmitted from His speech to the pen of Luke and the other gospel writers? He remarks that is a fascinating question, but not necessary to conclude that Jesus is in fact the mind behind these genius parables.

However, I would like to speculate briefly about this question, and I think that if we truly want to consider Jesus a genius in the traditional sense, the answer could tip the balance. 

As said, the genius of Jesus’ mode of communication is that He spoke to four audiences simultaneously. Of course, it is the nature of public speech that messages are conveyed to many different audiences. The important test is how well the communication is received by those different groups.

The four groups are tax collectors, sinners, scribes, and Pharisees. We know that the tax collectors were able to receive the message of Jesus, notably in the life of Matthew the Apostle, and Zacchaeus. Of sinners, we have many examples, one such being Mary Magdalene. The obvious impact on these groups leads us to overlook what Jesus was trying to accomplish in regard to the other two, a fact Williams' book helps us correct. But how were His words received by the educated and elite?

From the Pharisees, Nicodemus is the most obvious convert prior to the resurrection, while Gamaliel’s advice in Acts 5 suggests that he was of an open mind. There is also evidence that the teachings of Jesus had an effect in swaying the direction of the debates between the schools of Hillel and Shammai among the Pharisees, even if He was not credited as such. 

This leads the final group, the scribes. The verse in Matthew quoted above contrasts the authority of Jesus’ teaching to the way the scripture was taught by the scribes. We need not view this as a bad thing. The scribes were conservative. Conserving the accuracy of the text itself was the chief goal of their profession. We can see this conservative streak in the person of Ezra, arguably the father of their tradition, in his deep concern for the people not to sin with foreign women. 

Their knowledge of the text led them to be honest and humble regarding its interpretation. While the Pharisees operated according to a magisterial tradition, the scribes were loyal to the text itself. To preserve what the text actually said, they would not speculate in matters of ambiguity. It is to this group that many of the observations in Williams' book would have had the greatest impact. 

The specific phrases, most notably “and he kissed him” in Luke 15:20, which is only found in Genesis 33:4, mirrored the unique places in the text where the scribes would place marks to assist in checking the accuracy of their work. 

Jesus’ use of specific phrases makes the story of the two sons a sort of mnemonic key to line up the various stories in Genesis. This means that the scribes would have had a particularly easy time remembering the story. If they didn’t happen to write it down as he spoke, they could have quickly conferred among themselves to check the accuracy of what they heard, and being scribes, they would have had the tools to write it down if not immediately, then shortly thereafter. 

I am not sure to what degree those marks and cues used were common knowledge to all readers of Hebrew at that time, but the specific ones used by Jesus point to someone who knew the method of study used by the copyists of the text themselves. This means that even if the scribes disagreed with Jesus on His interpretation of scripture, they could not dismiss Him as someone who didn’t know what He was talking about. If they truly were loyal to the preservation of the text above a particular ideological interpretation, they should have been thoroughly impressed by Jesus’ crafting of this story. If any of these techniques were ‘trade secrets’ among the scribes, the only explanation for one outside of their guild using them would have been divine revelation.

This points to the notion that, while somewhat speculative, the evidence of Jesus’ true genius; that He was actually able to communicate His message effectively to these various audiences, leading to the goal of repentance and salvation for which He came, may in fact be the existence of the text itself. 

Even the statement that there were scribes in attendance may be read as evidence that Luke spoke to at least one scribe to verify this fact. If so, he may have even seen the notes from that very day. There may not be manuscript evidence to prove this, but the logic vastly reduces the validity of arguments that these teachings were lost or distorted during the intervening years. 

To conclude, why is this book of value to those interested in my own project? The name “tectonic” was of course taken from The Tektōn, Jesus the craftsman. The inspiration for the project was the way that Jesus took ordinary men and discipled them to greatness. While in our own time it is often the training of skilled physical work that is lacking for young men, the goal is the integration of embodied wisdom, so that we can also speak to the whole audience of humanity.

This book shows us that while the educated and elite needed to have their hearts pricked with compassion for the poor and sinful, Jesus was also speaking to train fishermen and tax collectors to become men who could speak before the leaders of society. When we dig deep, we see that the genius of Jesus was not only in communicating to the four disparate groups present on that day, but to every heart and mind who has come across His words - however that message is received. That is a level of genius that can only be properly attributed to the genius behind all others - the creator of the human mind.

1. Matthew 7:29

2. Peter J. Williams, The Surprising Genius of Jesus, Pg. 112