The popular Christian question “What would Jesus do?” is not an especially useful one, Wills notes, for Jesus did many things we would not, and should not, do. Should Christian believers today, Wills asks, “like Jesus, forbid a man from attending his own father’s funeral… or tell others to hate their parents?… Are they justified in telling others, ‘I come not imposing peace, I impose not peace but the sword’…? Or ‘I am come to throw fire on the earth’…?” Such moments in the Gospels, Wills writes, “were acts meant to show that he is not just like us, that he has higher rights and powers… [as] a divine mystery walking among men.”
– John Meachum reviewing Garry Wills’s book What Jesus Meant
“We must ask what Jesus meant by his strange words and deeds. In other words, if we focus on what Jesus said without determining what He meant in his original context, we run the risk of misquoting Jesus even when quoting His words.”
– Brian McLaren Everything Must Change