Jesus Victory of God V2: Christian Origins And The Question Of God

CHRISTIAN ORIGINS AND THE QUESTION OF GOD

Volume Two

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JESUS

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AND THE

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VICTORY OF GOD

N. T. Wright

First published in Great Britain

Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge

36 Causton Street

London SW1P 4ST

Copyright © Nicholas Thomas Wright 1996

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

SPCK does not necessarily endorse the individual views contained in its publications.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN-13: 978-0-281-04717-8; ISBN-10: 0-281-04717-0 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-281-05053-6; ISBN-10: 0-281-05053-8 (cased)

for M.E.A.W.

CONTENTS

Preface

PART I        Introduction

1  Jesus Then and Now

1. Angels, Giants and Jigsaws

2. Procedure

3. The ‘Quests’ and their Usefulness

(i) Jesus Through History

(ii) The Rise of the Critical Movement: from Reimarus to Schweitzer

(iii) No Quest to New Quest: Schweitzer to Schillebeeckx

(iv) Two Hundred Years of Questing

2  Heavy Traffic on the Wredebahn: The ‘New Quest’ Renewed?

1. Introduction

2. The ‘Jesus Seminar’

3. Burton L. Mack (and the Question of Q)

4. J. Dominic Crossan

(i) Introduction

(ii) Basic Features

(iii) Historical Reconstruction of Jesus

(iv) The Early Church

5. Jesus the Cynic?

6. Marcus J. Borg

7. Conclusion: the New ‘New Quest’

3  Back to the Future: The ‘Third Quest’

1. Breaking out of the Straitjacket

2. The Questions

(i) How does Jesus fit into Judaism?

(ii) What were Jesus’ Aims?

(iii) Why did Jesus die?

(iv) How and Why did the Early Church Begin?

(v) Why are the Gospels what they Are?

(vi) The Five Questions Together

(vii) The Sixth Question: Agenda and Theology

3. Conclusion: Future Directions of the Third Quest

4  Prodigals and Paradigms

1. Jews, Peasants and Prodigals

2. From Parable to Paradigm

(i) Towards a Hypothesis

(ii) Of the Telling of Stories

(iii) Worldviews and Mindsets

PART II        Profile of a Prophet

5  The Praxis of a Prophet

1. Jesus’ Career in Outline

2. Jesus’ Context

(i) First-Century Judaism

(ii) Bandits, Peasants and Revolt

(iii) John the Baptist

3. Jesus as ‘Oracular’ and ‘Leadership’ Prophet

4. A Prophet Mighty in Word and Deed

(i) Jesus as a ‘Leadership’ Prophet

(ii) An Itinerant Prophet

(iii) Mighty in Word

(a) Authority and the Kingdom

(b) Parables

(c) Oracles of Judgment

(iv) Mighty in Deed

(a) Introduction

(b) ‘Mighty Works’: Interpretation

5. More Than a Prophet?

6  Stories of the Kingdom (1): Announcement

1. Introduction

2. Contexts

(i) The Jewish Hope

(a) Eschatology

(b) A Non-Apocalyptic Kingdom?

(ii) The Christian Reappropriation

(iii) The Kingdom in recent Scholarship

3. Kingdom Redefined: The Announcement

(i) Introduction: Summary Announcements

(ii) Stories of Israel’s Paradoxical History

(a) Introduction

(b) The Sower

(c) Other Parables of Israel’s Story

4. Conclusion: Announcing the Kingdom

7  Stories of the Kingdom (2): Invitation, Welcome, Challenge and Summons

1. Introduction: The Open-Ended Story

2. Invitation: The Call to Repent and Believe

(i) Repentance

(ii) Belief

3. Welcome: Sinners and Forgiveness

(i) Who are the Sinners?

(ii) The Forgiveness of Sins

4. Challenge: The Call to Live as the New Covenant People

(i) Introduction: Community and Praxis

(ii) New Covenant, New Community

(iii) New Covenant, New Praxis

(a) Introduction

(b) The Renewed Heart

(c) The Sermon on the Mount

(d) The Lord’s Prayer

(e) Jubilee: Forgiveness of Debts

(f) Revolution, Politics, Community and Theology

5. Summons: The Call to be Jesus’ Helpers and Associates

(i) The Summons to Follow Jesus

(ii) The ‘Rich Young Ruler’

(iii) The Summons to Assist in the Proclamation of the Kingdom

(iv) The Summons to Take up the Cross and Follow Jesus

(v) The Great Commandment and the Good Samaritan

6. Many Will Come From East and West

7. The True Wisdom

8. Conclusion: The Renewed People of God

8  Stories of the Kingdom (3): Judgment and Vindication

1. Introduction

2. The Coming Great Disaster

(i) Introduction

(ii) John the Baptist

(iii) General Warnings of Judgment on Israel

(iv) Warnings of Imminent Judgment on ‘This Generation’

(v) Warnings of Judgment on Jerusalem and the Temple

3. Assurance of Vindication

4. Mark 13 and Parallels: The Coming Destruction and Vindication

(i) Introduction

(ii) The Fall of Jerusalem

(iii) The Start of the ‘Woes’, and the Trials of the Disciples

(iv) Specific Signs of Emergency

(v) The Vindication of the Son of Man

(vi) Noah, Lot and the Son of Man

5. Conclusion: Judgment and Vindication

9  Symbol and Controversy

1. Introduction: Kingdom, Symbol, Controversy

(i) The Problem of Symbols

(ii) Controversy about Controversy

2. Symbols of Israel’s Identity: Sabbath, Food, Nation, Land

(i) Introduction: Context and Agendas

(ii) Sabbath

(iii) Food

(iv) Nation and Family

(v) Possessions

3. Symbols of Israel’s Identity: The Temple

(i) Introduction

(ii) The Temple and its Significance

(iii) Jesus’ Action in the Temple

4. Jesus’ Symbols of the Kingdom

(i) Introduction: Symbols of ‘Return’

(ii) Restored Land, Restored People

(iii) The Redefined Family

(iv) The Redefined Torah

(v) The Rebuilt Temple

(vi) The Symbolic Focus

5. Jesus ‘Leading the People Astray’?

10  The Questions of the Kingdom

 1. Introduction

 2. Who Are We?

 3. Where Are We?

 4. What’s Wrong?

(i) Introduction

(ii) The Real Enemy Identified: not Rome, but the Satan

(a) The Beelzebul Controversy

(b) Who is to be Feared?

(c) The Seven Other Demons

(d) The Initial Victory

(iii) The Enemy Relocated: Israel and the Satan

(iv) Conclusion: Jesus’ Analysis of the Problem

5. What’s the Solution?

6. What Time is it?

7. The Prophet and the Kingdom

PART III        The Aims and Beliefs of Jesus

11  Jesus and Israel: The Meaning of Messiahship

1. Introduction

2. Messiahship in Judaism and Early Christianity

(i) Messiahship in the Jewish World of Jesus’ Day

(ii) Messiahship in Early Christianity

3. Jesus and Kingship: Events in Jerusalem

(i) Introduction

(ii) The Temple-Action

(iii) Royal Riddles

(a) Destroy and Rebuild

(b) Say to this Mountain …

(c) John the Baptist

(d) Tenants, Servants, Son and Stone

(e) Tribute to Caesar

(f) David’s Lord and David’s Son

(g) Royal Riddles: Jesus and the Evangelists

(iv) Temple, Messiah and Son of Man

(a) Temple Destroyed, Jesus Vindicated

(b) Jesus on Trial

4. Messiahship as the Secret of Jesus’ Prophetic Ministry

(i) Caesarea Philippi

(ii) Messianic Praxis in the Early Ministry

(iii) Messianic Sayings in the Early Ministry

(iv) A Messianic Beginning to the Ministry?

(v) A Prophetic/Messianic Ministry

5. Conclusion: Jesus and the Return from Exile

12  The Reasons for Jesus’ Crucifixion

 1. Introduction

 2. The Roman Charge

 3. The Jewish Charge

 4. The Intention of Jesus (1): The Key Symbol

(i) Introduction

(ii) The Last Supper: Symbol and Significance

(a) Introduction

(b) Last Supper and Passover

(c) From Symbol to Word

(d) Conclusion

5. The Intention of Jesus (2): The Sayings and the Symbol

(i) Introduction

(ii) The Riddles of the Cross

(a) The Rejected Son

(b) The Great Commandment

(c) Anointing for Burial

(d) The Green Tree and the Dry

(e) The Hen and the Chickens

(f) The Baptism and the Cup

(g) Riddles and Authenticity

(iii) Predictions of the Passion

6. The Intention of Jesus (3): Eschatological Redemption in Judaism

(i) Introduction

(ii) The Controlling Story: Exile and Restoration

(iii) The First Sub-Plot: The Messianic Woes

(iv) The Second Sub-Plot: Specific or Individual Suffering

(v) ‘According to the Scriptures’

(vi) Conclusion: Jesus’ Jewish Context

7. The Intention of Jesus (4): The Strange Victory

(i) Introduction

(ii) Proposal: Eschatology and the Cross

(iii) The Cross and the Scriptures

(iv) The Messianic Task

(v) The Victory of God

(vi) Conclusion

13  The Return of the King

 1. Introduction

 2. The Jewish World of Meaning

(i) The Hope of YHWH’s Return

(ii) Sharing the Throne of God

(iii) Symbols for God and God’s Activity

 3. Jesus’ Riddles of Return and Exaltation

(i) Stories of YHWH’S Return to Zion

(a) Introduction

(b) Talents and Pounds

(c) Other Stories of the Return of YHWH

(ii) Riddles of Exaltation

(iii) Conclusion

 4. Vocation Foreshadowed

 5. Conclusion

PART IV   Conclusion

14  Results

Appendix: ‘Kingdom of God’ in Early Christian Literature

Bibliography

Abbreviations

A   Primary Sources

B   Secondary Literature

Indexes

A   Index of Ancient Sources

1.   Old Testament

2.   Apocrypha

3.   Pseudepigrapha

4.   Qumran

5.   Josephus

6.   Philo

7.   Rabbinic Works

8.   New Testament

9.   Other Early Christian and/or Gnostic Works

10. Pagan Sources

11. Persian Texts

B   Index of Modern Authors

C   Index of Selected Topics

PREFACE

I

‘The historian of the first century … cannot shrink from the question of Jesus.’ That was the conclusion I came to near the end of the first volume in this series, on whose shoulders the present work rests all its weight.¹ I argued that the study of first-century Judaism and first-century Christianity forces us to raise certain specific questions about Jesus: who was he? what were his aims? why did he die? and why did early Christianity begin in the way that it did? The present book is my attempt to answer the first three of these questions, and to point towards an answer to the fourth.

I am still sometimes embarrassed when people ask me what the present book is about, and I say ‘Jesus’. It seems pretentious. How can anyone have anything new to say about Jesus without being a crank or a maverick, or, worse, making Jesus himself into one? I have come to believe that these questions about Jesus are vital, central, and as yet not fully answered; and that a clearly worked out historical method, and a fresh reading of first-century Judaism and Christianity, will point us in the right direction.

Questions about Jesus possess, I believe, enormous intrinsic interest, no matter what the standpoint of the questioner. They are worth asking, whether one is a historian, a philosopher, a theologian, a cultural critic, or simply someone interested in the human condition with all its joys and sorrows, its high and low points, its perils and possibilities. But there is no point pretending that such questions are not also of very specific relevance for those who profess some sort of Christian faith. A recent survey of the Church of England, discussing the manifold reasons why people do not go to church, comments wryly:

Part of the reason is simply a lack of belief that the death of Christ was the turning-point of history … It all seems less and less likely to be true, the more you discover about those maniacs in the first century who were expecting a Messiah and getting ready for the end of the world.²

Unless one can at least address this question, one might as well give up and go home. The same point is made from a different angle by the veteran philosopher of religion John Hick.³ What you say about Jesus affects your entire worldview. If you see Jesus differently, everything changes. Turn this small rudder, and the whole ship will change tack. To put it bluntly: what if the maniacs turned out to be right?

There are some, of course, who would rather not mix up history and faith. I shall have quite a bit to say about this dilemma as the book progresses. For the moment it is enough to say that I come to this work as a practising historian and as a practising Christian, and that my experience of both worlds suggests—to put it no stronger—that neither of them need feel compromised by intimate association with the other.

II

In one sense, I have been working on this book on and off for most of my life. Serious thought began, however, when I was invited in 1978 to give a lecture in Cambridge on ‘The Gospel in the Gospels’. The topic was not just impossibly vast; I did not understand it. I had no real answer, then, to the question of how Jesus’ whole life, not just his death on the cross in isolation, was somehow ‘gospel’. Fifteen subsequent years of teaching in Cambridge, Montreal and Oxford have convinced me that this question, and the detailed sub-questions which go with it, are worth asking; and that answers are available, if we keep to the high road of historical enquiry and refuse to be sidetracked into the superficially more attractive country lanes of much modern gospel study, where we are often brought to a halt by the hermeneutical equivalent of a hay-waggon or a herd of sheep.

Further stimulus to persevere with the historical task has come from the new wave of scholarly Jesus-studies which I describe in Part I. I invented the phrase ‘Third Quest’ to denote one particular type of contemporary Jesus-research, namely, that which regards Jesus as an eschatological prophet announcing the long-awaited kingdom, and which undertakes serious historiography around that point (see chapter 3). Some writers have used the phrase subsequently to denote all current study of Jesus, but I see no need to abandon my original sharper meaning. It is to colleagues within this branch of the ‘Quest’ that I owe most in terms of signposts towards the solutions I propose. At the same time, those Jesus-scholars who pursue very different lines of enquiry (described in chapter 2) have forced me to articulate much more clearly than I would otherwise have had to do why I disagree with them, and I am genuinely grateful for this, as also for emphases and nuances which they rightly highlight and which I and others might otherwise have missed.

All writers about Jesus have to live with the old jibe that the historian is inclined to see his or her own face at the bottom of a deep well and mistake it for the face of Jesus. I have to say that the face I describe in this book always was, and still remains, disturbingly unlike my own. I have not tried to make Jesus in the image either of a university lecturer or of an Anglican priest; he continues to challenge and disturb both of those worlds and those who live in them, myself included. This does not mean, of course, that the portrait is thereby validated; only that it is not a self-portrait. I wish it were.

This book argues, in fact, for conclusions which were quite simply not in view from the start of the exercise. Nor were they worked out even early on in the process of teaching, or even when, thinking I had settled them, I began to write. At every stage I found myself coming face to face with historical problems, and (since I could not abandon my basic Christian beliefs without becoming a totally different person) with the question of how, if at all, history and belief might cohere. In the process, my view of Jesus within his historical context has substantially developed and changed. So, inevitably, has my understanding of what Christianity itself actually is, and the nature of my belief in it. This process, which continues, is neither easy nor comfortable. (Again, this does not validate the conclusions, but merely refutes the suggestion that they were in view from the start.)

The book inevitably carries overtones of current situations in the land where the story of Jesus is set, where I was staying in 1989 when I wrote the first draft. From my room I could hear distant gunfire; on the street one could sense Jewish anxiety and Palestinian frustration in about equal measure. To have a riot dispersed with tear gas outside my window while I was writing the chapter on the cross gave me, to say the least, food for thought. To watch the events of late 1995 and early 1996 while rewriting it for the last time was no less painful. The multiple ambiguities and tensions of that beautiful country are now forever bound up in my mind with the subject-matter of the book itself, as is perhaps appropriate. If what I write could help in any way towards the establishment of justice and peace there, or indeed anywhere else, I would be deeply grateful.

III

Seven small points, and one not so small. First, I have continued to use the lower case ‘g’ in ‘god’, and to refer to Jesus as ‘Jesus’ rather than ‘Christ’. The reasons for this are explained in the Preface of NTPG (xivf.).

Second, I have taken it for granted that Jesus of Nazareth existed. Some writers feel a need to justify this assumption at length against people who try from time to time to deny it. It would be easier, frankly, to believe that Tiberius Caesar, Jesus’ contemporary, was a figment of the imagination than to believe that there never was such a person as Jesus. Those who persist in denying this obvious point will probably not want to read a book like this anyway.

Third, this book is largely based on the synoptic gospels. What about John?⁴ Someone who spends most of his time studying Paul and the synoptics, rather than John, may come to feel like an Alpine climber who from time to time hears tales of the Himalayas. I am aware that there is a large range of mountains still waiting for me; aware, too, that they may offer views, prospects and of course risks yet more breathtaking than the ones I habitually climb. I hope I shall be spared to explore them in due course, and I beg the indulgence of those who wish that a guidebook to the Alps had included their senior cousins as well. However, the debate to which I wish to contribute in this book has been conducted almost entirely in terms of the synoptic tradition. Even if, in the long term, this is judged a weakness, it sets a limit for which readers of an already long book may perhaps be grateful.

Fourth, what I said about secondary literature in the Preface to NTPG is even more the case here. The huge quantity of contemporary writing about Jesus and the gospels means that any serious attempt to engage in dialogue with even a small proportion of it would result in a hopeless morass of footnotes. One must choose one’s conversation partners, referring to others only where necessary for the argument. If one were to try even to ‘catch up’ with everything that had been written at the time of going to press, one would put off for ever going to press. I apologize to those colleagues whose work I have not been able to discuss in detail.

Fifth, there is a problem of scale which I have not really attempted to solve. In some cases a particular saying has snatched a few pages all to itself, while elsewhere a whole complex episode has had to make do with the same or less. The only alternative would have been to give the saying less than it seemed to need within that particular argument, or perhaps to swell the discussion of the episode into a young monograph. Perhaps, like vineyard owners, authors may choose to pay the same wages to those who appear to deserve differently, or vice versa. The argument as a whole has, I think, a certain proportion, but some of its parts do not. That is just the way it is.

Sixth, a word about method. In reading the sayings of Jesus, we must of course guard against over-exegesis. Under-exegesis, though, is also risky, sometimes even more so. Historical exegesis is not simply a matter of laying out the lexicographical meanings of words and sentences. It involves exploring the resonances those words and sentences would have had in their contexts. Like anthropologists learning a language and a culture simultaneously, we have to be prepared to hear more in a word or phrase than could be caught by a dictionary equivalent. A small saying can function like a spyglass through which one can glimpse a large and turbulent world. To object to this exercise, whether through pedantry or positivism, is like protesting that houses, fields and ships cannot be contained within the physical body of a telescope.

Seventh, the book does not attempt to follow the synoptic accounts of Jesus’ life straight through, but rather arranges the material by themes. This involves a certain amount of repetition: the parable of the wicked tenants (for instance) is discussed at different points in connection with different issues. The alternative would, of course, involve another sort of repetition: one would (for instance) constantly be saying similar things about the ‘kingdom of god’ in connection with yet another group of texts. Each chapter is therefore meant to function like a transparent layer laid over a basic map or picture. The eventual aim is that the underlying picture, set out at the start of Part II, should be seen through all the layers at once, even though for the sake of clarity they must of course be added one by one.

Eighth, I argued in NTPG that most first-century Jews would have seen themselves as still, in all sorts of senses, ‘in exile’.⁵ This is not an idiosyncratic view, as the notes there make clear; and many colleagues, in person and in their writings, have encouraged me to persist.⁶ Nevertheless, some have remained unconvinced. Without wishing to labour the point further, I would ask critics to face the question: would any serious-thinking first-century Jew claim that the promises of Isaiah 40–66, or of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, or Zechariah, had been fulfilled? That the power and domination of paganism had been broken? That YHWH had already returned to Zion? That the covenant had been renewed, and Israel’s sins forgiven? That the long-awaited ‘new exodus’ had happened? That the second Temple was the true, final and perfect one? Or—in other words—that the exile was really over? The closest we come, I think, is the grandiose biblical language used in 1 Maccabees 3:3–9 to refer to the victory of Judas Maccabaeus. Various books of the period explicitly question or challenge the adequacy, or even the god-givenness, of the second Temple.⁷ The writings at Qumran see the sect as the secret advance guard of the real return from exile, which of course implies that the rest of Israel is exiled still.

The point of all this is not that the exile functioned in this period as an example, an illustration from the past of the way in which YHWH might perhaps work; nor was it just an idea, a type or image that might have been useful in formulating a soteriology that ‘really’ consisted in something else. The point is that Jewish eschatology in the second-Temple period focused on the hope that that which had happened in the Babylonian exile, the triumph of paganism over Israel because of her sins, was still the dominant state of affairs, but would at last be undone. Ironically, at this point one normal would-be Christian viewpoint—that the Bible contains proof-texts for a timeless and non-historical system of salvation—has combined with the non-eschatological viewpoint of the post-135 rabbis to mislead those who come from either tradition of reading. If we are to be historians of Jesus’ own period we must think our way back from those subsequent rereadings to the very historically concrete worldview of the second-Temple period itself. This whole point of view is presupposed in what follows, and it will, I think, be very substantially supported by the excellent sense it makes of a good deal of the tradition about Jesus. I must stress, in particular, that when I say ‘end of exile’ and similar things I am not attempting to reduce everything to a single theme. Rather, I use the phrase as a shorthand, wishing thereby to draw attention to the richly textured and many-layered second-Temple Jewish expectation that Israel’s god would once again act within her history.