Jesus And The Victory Of God: Christian Origins And The Question Of God, Volume 2 [Paperback]

Wright's approach has many virtues. He is intimately familiar with an incredible amount of scholarly literature on the subject, and refers to it in a way that is always thoughtful. He seldom arbitrarily discards evidence merely because it doesn't fit his theory, as many do. His favorite critical device is what he calls the principle of "double similarity, double disimilarity." He shows that, while most of the synoptic material makes sense both within the Jewish community, and as the template for the new Christian religion, it also differs from both traditions in ways that strongly suggest the marks of individuality, that neither ordinary Jews nor Christians would have invented for Jesus.

This is a helpful approach, in my opinion, though not so unique as Wright seems to think. Readers with literary or psychological sensitivity have been making similiar, less systematic but sometimes even more insightful, observations for a long time. See, for example, G. K. Chesterton (Everlasting Man), Philip Yancey (The Jesus I Never Knew), M. Scott Peck, Per Beskow (Strange Tales About Jesus) or C. S. Lewis (Fernseeds and Elephants -- an essay Wright scoffs at, but that grows in my estimation the more I read of modern Biblical criticism). I think any reader can discern the unique style of Jesus in the Gospels. To a certain extent, Wright is just approaching the unique character of Jesus' sayings in a more formal, and less intuitive, manner.

As a scholar who studies the (often amazing) ways in which Christianity fulfills Asian cultures, I especially appreciated Wright's deep insights into the relationship between the Jewish tradition and the life of Christ. Wright argues that these elements were not retroactively inserted in the narrative, but most probably derive directly from Jesus. I don't recall that Wright places much emphasis on it, but in a sense, much of the argument here could be summarized by Jesus' statement: "Don't think I have come to do away with the Law and the Prophets . . . I have come to fulfill them." I believe that applies to more than Jewish culture, but that is another story.

The greatest drawback of this book is that Wright takes himself and his colleagues too seriously, in my opinion. When Wright says, "All agree that Jesus began his public work in the context of John's baptism," he means, "all we scholars." The fact that billions of other readers usually come to the same conclusion, is, to Wright, irrelevent. The same, when he tells us, "It is apparent that the authors of the synoptic gospels intended to write about Jesus, not just their own churches and theologies," (really!) that "one of the chief gains" of the last 20 years of scholarship has been to link the crucifixion of Jesus to his cleansing of the temple, (my grandma could have told them that) and that when Jesus cursed the fig tree, he was acting out a parable against the Jewish religious rulers. Biblical scholars resemble the emperor's fashion experts, who, after decades of involved debate, and several fads in nudity, make the astonishing discovery that the emperor has no clothes. They pat themselves on their backs and complement one another for their brilliance, as the little boy, who first made the observation decades before, rocks in his chair in a retirement home nearby.

Chesterton said, one of the ways to get home is to stay there. Wright allows that Biblical criticism is taking a more circuitous route, (he himself uses the metaphor of the Prodigal Son), and he almost makes me think the view along the way might be worth it. But if he choses to lecture about the layout of the family farm when he returns, he ought to acknowledge that some of his hearers have been on that ground for a while already. Wright seems less kind to his conservative Christian "elder brethren" than to younger (separated) brethren still sowing wild oats in the far country of historical speculation. This attitude troubles me.

After hundreds of pages of argument, Wright rather abruptly asserts that "Jesus did not know he was God," at least not as one knows one "ate an orange an hour ago." He thinks such self-knowledge would be unbecomingly "supernatural." (Though he doesn't quibble with multiplied loaves or the resurrection.) At this point one gets the feeling that Wright's conclusion (or guess) is based less on historical evidence (which, as another reader points out below, ought to include John, Paul, and other Jewish Christians), but on a desire to keep a souvenir from the far country -- perhaps to show other scholars. Or maybe he just doesn't want to sound too conventional -- publish novelties ("discoveries") or off with your academic head. In any case, one wonders if his own dogmatically expressed opinion about Jesus' sub-divine mode of consciousness itself has a supernatural origin. He offers no other sources, in this case.

There seem to be two ways to "see" Jesus. One is the scholar's approach, which is that of blind men touching an elephant -- each connecting with that which communicates, with special vividness, a focused reality. The other method is that of the unwashed masses, who see the whole, though dimly at times, as through a fog. To see Christ as he is, yet without reductionism, has not proven an easy task for anyone. I do not know if it is the holiest, wisest, humblest, or just the most desperate, who come closest. Wright shows that, if a blind man touches the elephant in enough places, and takes scholarly theories for the narrow simplifications that they tend to be, he may begin a fairly recognizable and systematic mapping of the shape before us, which, in the end, may help see the elephant once again. It is a brilliant and insightful work. And, I am beginning to think, one very patient elephant, to put up with modern criticism, and not step on anyone.

Pardon the long review. The book is longer. Be warned....

This paragraph from Mr. Wright's next-to-last chapter (pp 652-653) sums up what I consider to be several of his persistent mistakes, in one fell swoop:

"Speaking of Jesus' 'vocation' brings us to quite a different place from some traditional statements of gospel christology. 'Awareness of vocation' is by no means the same thing as Jesus having the sort of 'supernatural' awareness of himself, of Israel's god, and of the relation between the two of them, such as is often envisaged by those who, concerned to maintain a 'high' christology, place it within an eighteenth-century context of implicit Deism where one can maintain Jesus' 'divinity' only by holding some form of doceticism. Jesus did not, in other words, 'know that he was God' in the same way that one knows one is male or female, hungry or thirsty, or that one ate an orange an hour ago. His 'knowledge' was of a more risky, but perhaps more significant sort: like knowing one is loved. One cannot 'prove' it except by living it. Jesus' prophetic vocation thus included within it the vocation to enact, symbolically, the return of YHWH to Zion. His messianic vocation included within it the vocation to attempt certain tasks which, according to scripture, YHWH had reserved for himself. He would take upon himself the role of messianic shepherd, knowing that YHWH had claimed this role as his own. He would perform the saving task which YHWH had said he alone could achieve. He would do what no messenger, no angel, but only the 'arm of YHWH', the presence of Israel's god, could accomplish. As part of his human vocation, grasped in faith, sustained in prayer, tested in confrontation, agonized over in further prayer and doubt, and implemented in action, he believed he had to do and be, for Israel and the world, that which according to scripture only YHWH himself could do and be. He was Israel's Messiah; but there would, in the end, be 'no king but God'."

(Note: in the immediately following paragraph, Mr. Wright suggests that we "forget the pseudo-orthodox attempts to make Jesus of Nazareth conscious of being the second person of the Trinity; forget the arid reductionism that is the mirror-image of that unthinking would-be orthodoxy.")

Let me hit each point here in turn:

a.) I most strongly disagree that any attempt to posit Jesus as conscious of being the second person of the Trinity must be an "unthinking" anything. It may instead be a result of having sifted philosophical impossibilities, possibilities and certainties before going to the texts; but that's what we're all going to do anyway, Mr. Wright included.

b.) I deny that a conscious understanding of deity on Jesus' part requires a nineteenth (or even second)-century conception of docetic Deism--as I think several of the second-century church fathers would agree (their 'traditional' creeds having been instituted partly to fight that)! Mr. Wright rightly rejects the metaphysical mistakes of the Enlightenment revisionist scholars; yet he seems to conclude quite strangely that their mistakes reflected the 'traditional' Christian position! Far from it. It would be like rejecting Manichaeism as metaphysically mistaken, and then misidentifying it as traditional Christian doctrine, to be also rejected.

c.) Jesus, we are told by Mr. Wright, "did not, in other words, 'know that he was God' in the same way that one knows one is male or female, hungry or thirsty, or that one ate an orange an hour ago. His 'knowledge' was of a more risky, but perhaps more significant sort: like knowing one is loved." Jesus' knowledge of what? That he was God? Mr. Wright never quite comes out with that, and I suspect this is because it inevitably leads to the question: If Jesus _was_ God, then why for love of Himself would He persistantly hide that knowledge from Himself? I do not see any advantage at all to God the Father obscuring _always_ from the Incarnate Son the inherent self-knowledge of His state.

d.) Mr. Wright insists that Jesus was a good, first-century Palestinian Jew, deeply monotheistic, with only one relatively minor difference bridging (with proper double similarity/dissimilarity) mainstream Judaism and early Christianity: namely that Jesus believed that he himself would be the means by which God would bring about the new covenant, redeem and free His people, etc. What, _according to Mr. Wright himself_, does this entail? Some rather startling claims:

"...the vocation to attempt certain tasks which, **according to scripture, YHWH had reserved for himself.** He would take upon himself the role of messianic shepherd, **knowing that YHWH had claimed this role as his own.** He would perform the saving task **which YHWH had said he alone could achieve.** He would do what **no messenger, no angel, but only the 'arm of YHWH', the presence of Israel's god, could accomplish.** [...] [H]e believed he had to do and be, for Israel and the world, that **which according to scripture only YHWH himself could do and be.**" [asterisks mine]

Notice the places I've emphasized; and let me state that these positions from Mr. Wright are not unique to this paragraph or that chapter, but slowly increase throughout JVG, particularly in its last quarter.

Now, Mr. Wright in this very same paragraph (much more the rest of the book and its predecessor) wants us, as his readers, to accept that the person who seriously thought this, could think these things _WHILE BEING A LOYALLY MONOTHEISTIC JEW_ and yet not _really_ consider himself to be God!--not the way he would consider himself to be male, or hungry, or having eaten an orange an hour ago.

To me, this is a massive disparity. I do not perceive that _I_ am God Incarnate. If I were nevertheless to arrogate to myself those responsibilities and authorities, would I be _at the same time_ a loyal monotheistic servant of God, of the sort found in 1st Century Palestine?

Although I've found Mr. Wright's books to be very helpful, I think his somewhat non-traditional conclusions rest on shaky grounds: they require starting with the historical questions first and building the theology afterwards, despite the fact that (as I think Mr. Wright himself pointed out) the interpretation of purported history depends on what we accept philosophically _first_. They require the suppression of John's Gospel (at the very least), for no immediately valid reason except the one Mr. Wright hints at near the beginning of JVG (i.e., considering it along with the synoptics would blow his thesis). They also require that we remember that God and Jesus both are represented as setting up multiple levels of meaning with the same proclamations, and then that we conveniently forget this when it comes time to figure out what certain texts 'mean' and what they don't.

For the most part, Wright uses the synoptic gospels as his primary biblical source of information, with occasional use of John and Acts, and extensive examination of Old Testament text. Wright sees the gospel stories as historically reliable. He arranges the material by themes rather than chronological events. He uses a technique of double similarity with double dissimilarity, where what is believable within first century Judaism and early Christianity, while at the same time enough dissimilar from both in some aspect, is likely to be historically accurate. Wright accounts for the variations in the synoptic stories by convincingly arguing that Jesus used the same stories on several different occasions.

The book is divided into four parts. In the first section, Wright surveys the history, from the nineteenth century to the present, of the quest of the historical Jesus. I feel the first two chapters are the weakest part of the book, and will be the first to date what should otherwise be a long enduring work. Wright seems overly concerned about pointing out the weakness of more liberal scholars, and spends much time critiquing their work. He seems particularly concerned with the works of Crossan, Mack, and the Jesus' Seminar. He attacks their methods of "criteria of authenticity," and their narrow focus on the individual saying of Jesus.

In the third chapter Wright presents some key questions in the study of Jesus and looks at how they are handled within the Third Quest. Answering these questions becomes the task of much of the remainder of the book. The largest section of the book, Profile of a Prophet, Wright shows that Jesus' public image within first century Judaism was that of a prophet, one who proclaimed the coming kingdom of Israel's God. The portrait of Jesus as a prophet fits well with what is known of his public career and praxis. Jesus, like John the Baptist before him, seems to consciously model himself after Elijah. Like John, Jesus issued solemn warnings about imminent judgement. Jesus delivers his prophecies with great authority, often in the form of parables. Wright sees the literary background of the parables as apocalyptic. As such, they were subversive stories told to articulate a new way of being a people of God. Jesus engaged in the characteristically Jewish activity of subversively retelling the basic Jewish story, accommodating them for the new situations. Wright argues that Jewish apocalyptic, for many, did not include the end of the world, but rather a renewed covenant with God was "this-worldly." Key to Wright's thesis, which he argues repeatedly, was that most first century Jews would have seen themselves as still living "in exile." The exile functioned, in the second-Temple period, as an eschatological hope, that the triumph over the pagan occupying rulers of Israel was yet to come. The Jews regarded themselves as still living in exile because of the Roman domination. While they had returned form exile in a geographical sense, the great prophecies of restoration had not yet come true. The coming kingdom of God is the true return from exile. Wright demonstrates that Jesus had prophetically announced that the promised restoration of Israel had started. This restoration was to take place in and through Jesus' ministry. Through Jesus, God is restoring his people.

Wright contends that Jesus proclaimed this return from exile was not to be an armed revolution against the Romans, but a divinely appointed task of leading the Gentiles to worship the one true God. Israel's history is drawing to a climax. Rome was not the enemy of Israel, but Satan, and the true victory was the liberation from sin.

Overall, I found Wright's book enlightening.

At several points throughout the book, Wright uses diagrams, with arrows and words, to illuminate his point. Unfortunately, for me, these did more to confuse me than clarify anything. I found Wright's suggestion that Jesus' death on the cross was for the forgiveness of the nationalistic sin of Israel, and not for individual sin, to be the most disturbing. I feel his case was well made within the synopotics, but it was not the understanding of the early church, and certainly not the understanding of Paul.

Wright's argument that the Second Coming was fulfilled in the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE is unconvincing in light of the rest of the New Testament's understanding, as well as that of the early church (page 341 and elsewhere). Throughout the book, Wright preferred to treat the synoptic text literally, but in the case of Mark 13, he inexplicably prefers the metaphorical approach. The writings of Paul and Revelation have more to say on the subject of the Second Coming, and they would make little sense if the fall of the Temple was all the Second Coming entailed. Wright does not give a rational interpretation the period of forty years that pasted between the death of Jesus and the destruction of the Temple. From our vantage point today, the fall of the Temple did not usher in a new world, one in which evil no longer exist, and certainly not one where God's will was done on earth as in heaven.

I enjoyed most of Wright's book. Wright demonstrates that conservative viewpoints can be taken seriously. He is not a skeptic who reduces the historical Jesus to just a few lines of text. Wright believes that truth exists, and much of it can be recovered by historians. He does this without abandoning the Jesus of faith, as so many biblical historians have done.