Q&A with H.L. Hix

 

 

 

H.L. Hix is the author of the new book Teacher's Teachings. His other books include Moral Tales. He is a professor in the Philosophy and Religious Studies Department at the University of Wyoming. 

 

Q: What inspired you to create Teacher’s Teachings?

 

A: In childhood and youth I was socialized into a religious tradition (evangelical fundamentalist protestant Christianity) that valorized four particular gospels. It wasn’t until college that I learned that what that religious tradition had taught me about those four gospels was “manufactured ignorance,” a bunch of hoo-ha. (I didn’t know until college, for instance, that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not the first gospels, and not the only gospels.)

 

That background gave me both a distrust of that religious tradition and its institutions, and a lifelong preoccupation with the gospel. I swapped my place in a pew for a lot of time in library carrels, and Teacher’s Teachings is one result of that trade.

 

Q: The scholar Mary Keller said of the book, “Shorter in length than any of the canonical gospels, it delivers teachings attributed to Jesus with spare precision and contemporary currency.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: It’s perfect! It gets at two of the book’s key features, its brevity and its approach to translation.

 

Teacher’s Teachings is intentionally very short. The most familiar gospels, the four officially recognized by the Church, include various narratives of the life and works of Jesus: birth and childhood stories, stories of miracles, stories of travels and of encounters with others, stories of Jesus’ death, stories of events after Jesus’ death, and so on. 

 

This gospel’s small scale reflects its focus exclusively on Jesus’ teaching. The small scale also fulfills an impulse toward origin, since apparently the very earliest gospels were collections of teachings attributed to Jesus, to which life and work narratives were added in later gospels such as the four that came to be canonized.

 

Teacher’s Teachings does try to live up to the ideals Mary Keller generously imputes to it, precision and currency. The influence of King James is still very strong on contemporary translations of sacred texts in the Christian tradition, but I have tried to “cut out the middleman” and give translations that are more beholden to the original authors’ Greek than to the state of the English language in 1611.

 

Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: The title tries to indicate what is in the book, and what isn’t in it.

 

What is in the book is teachings that have been attributed to Jesus of Nazareth. These include teachings that many readers will be familiar with from the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (for instance, “the beatitudes” and “the Lord’s prayer” and the parable of “the good Samaritan”), along with teachings that other gospels attribute to Jesus.

 

What is not in the book is stories about Jesus. So for instance it includes no miracle narratives: no water into wine, no casting-out of demons, no healing the sick or raising up the dead. Only things that Jesus is reported to have said, not things Jesus is reported to have done.

 

Also not in the book are certain judgments. The title Teacher’s Teachings was carefully chosen to leave to the reader whether these are teachings of a teacher or teachings of the teacher. Are they valuable teachings because Jesus is like, say, Socrates, or because Jesus is not like Socrates? 

 

In this respect, I’m trying not to be like those heavy-on-the-hairspray preachers from my childhood. Teacher’s Teachings gathers into one place otherwise widely-distributed things Jesus is reported to have said, but it tries hard not to push the reader toward a predetermined sense of who Jesus was.

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

 

A: So much public speech today stokes what Shakespeare’s Hamlet calls “the worser part” of ourselves, that I hope Teacher’s Teachings offers readers a respite: some sustenance for the better part of ourselves.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: What’s “on deck” is a co-authored book called Ghost Smoke, forthcoming in 2026 from SMU’s exciting new “Project Poëtica.” The brilliant poet Jonathan Weinert and I have corresponded for years, via old-fashioned paper letters, USPS. 

 

At some point within the last few years these letters turned into letter-poems, and then at a later point we started rewriting them together, as if we were one person trying to pay close attention the way poetry can, the way Elizabeth Bishop does in “The Moose” when she sees fog condensing into droplets on hens’ feathers and on still-growing cabbages.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: You should know how grateful I am for your blog — proof of how rich and full the world of books is.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with H.L. Hix.