The first priest that Garry Wills takes aim at isn’t a man in a clerical collar. It’s Christ.

A significant proportion of the book is spent disputing Jesus’s lineage as a priest in the order of Melchizedek (as laid out in the Letter to the Hebrews), but Wills isn’t trying to strip Jesus of titles. He means to recast Jesus in a role he respects more—not a priest, but a Jewish prophet. Quoth Wills:

Jesus was a radical Jewish prophet. And like many Jewish prophets, he was against the Jewish ruling structures of his time… “the classical prophets,” as they were called, were normally harsh critics of ritual that was only ritual… Prophets were originally God’s messengers, called to rebuke those who were forgetting or defying his commands.

One of Christ’s most striking acts in this tradition is His cleansing of the temple. He overturns the corrupt structures that stand between the people and God. But Christ doesn’t come to reform the intermediaries; he comes to replace them and transfigure them.

Prophets recur in the Old Testament. Ezekiel followed Jeremiah who followed Isaiah, all sent to the people of Israel to bring her people back into the proper relationship with God. Man is fallen, and our tendency toward moral entropy means we constantly forget or neglect God. But in the Christian tradition, no prophet followed Christ. Without the regulatory function of prophet as critic, we rely on something else to remain in communion with God. In Wills’s tradition—the Catholic tradition—our safeguard is Communion in the Eucharist, transubstantiated by the priests who stand in persona Christi.