Interpreting Jesus

Essays on the Gospels

N. T. Wright

• Publisher: Zondervan Academic
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780310098652
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Draws together the most important articles on Jesus and the gospels by distinguished scholar and author N. T. Wright.

Interpreting Jesus puts into one volume the development of Wright's thought on this subject over the last three decades. It collects the essays—written for a wide variety of publications—that led up to his groundbreaking book Jesus and the Victory of God, and it includes such wide-ranging themes as:

• The Biblical Roots of Trinitarian Theology
• The History, Eschatology, and New Creation in John's Gospel
• The Evangelists' Use of the Old Testament as an Implicit Overarching Narrative
• And The Public Meaning of the Gospels

Interpreting Jesus displays Wright's engaging prose, his courage to go where few have gone, and his joy to bridge the work of the academy and the church.

Here is a rich feast for any serious student of the Bible, especially of the New Testament. Detailed, incisive, and exquisitely nuanced exegesis, this collection will reward you with a clearer, deeper, and more informed appreciation of the recent advances in Jesus studies, and their significance for theology today.

Many of the included studies have never been published or were made available only in hard-to-find larger volumes and journals.

1

Towards a Third ‘Quest’? Jesus Then and Now

When I arrived at McGill University, Montreal, in September 1981 as Assistant Professor of New Testament, my main academic work, including my DPhil dissertation, had been on Paul. But I had already been working on various issues to do with the ‘historical Jesus’ – as this and subsequent essays will indicate. In part this was in order to teach undergraduates in Cambridge (1978–81), and in part it was my own fascination. I had come from the study of Ancient History to the study of Theology in 1971, and had been startled at the cheerfully unhistorical approach to the gospels taken by so many scholars at the time. We had read Bultmann, but nobody had explained to us where he was coming from intellectually or culturally; it was assumed that he was an extremely learned German whose ‘findings’ were part of the ‘assured results’ of critical study which it would be intellectual suicide to doubt. The ‘New Quest’, on which more below, appeared to be what it was: an attempt to rearrange the Bultmannian deckchairs on a sinking ship. But in the late 1970s there were signs of a change, and this article notes them. In particular, the work of the late Ben F. Meyer of McMaster University, whom I would get to know as a colleague in the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies, was clearly pointing to a different kind of ‘quest’ from either the pre-Schweitzer or the post-Bultmann movements. The present essay, delivered as a paper at the McGill ‘Doktorklub’ and then published in the Faculty’s in-house journal ARC, was thus the first outing for the idea, which has caught on widely though not always with full understanding, that what we were witnessing was a ‘Third Quest’, not just a ‘new wave’ of study but a new type of history, relying far more on the Jewish sources (marginalized both by Bultmann and by his successors). I recall my friendly colleague Professor Fred Wisse saying, after the Doktorklub meeting, that my paper would send him running back to Bultmann. For me, this was the first small milestone in my journey in the opposite direction.

[20] Karl Barth’s Romans, so the saying goes, fell like a bombshell on the playground of the theologians.¹ The same thing could have been said of Albert Schweitzer’s famous review The Quest of the Historical Jesus.² In neither case has the dust yet settled. I do not intend in this article to rebuild the playground, or to hunt for survivors from the explosions. I want, if anything, to lay a few more detonators.

It is common knowledge that the ‘Quest’, though its epitaph was written by Schweitzer, has refused to lie down and stay dead. Schweitzer himself constructed his famous portrait of Jesus the failed apocalyptic visionary. Bultmann, while working towards his equally famous view that the preaching of Jesus constitutes a presupposition for, rather than a part of, New Testament theology, wrote his Jesus and the Word to portray Jesus as the great preacher of existentialist self-understanding.³ Post-Bultmannian scholars, even while paying lip-service to the dogma that the gospels do not really contain ‘biographical’ data, have continued to write about Jesus, although their work, held together with caveats and alternative possibilities, often looks decidedly shaky. The so-called ‘New Quest of the Historical Jesus’, rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the old one, attempts to combine the Bultmannian premise (that the early church was not interested in the earthly Jesus) with the apparently contradictory result of redaction-criticism, namely, that the writing of Mark is evidence of a desire to ‘earth’ the exalted Christ of the kerygma by identifying him with the Jesus of history.⁴ Meanwhile, scholars in other traditions have continued to write about Jesus, not (to be sure) uncritically, but at least in the belief that we can know several things about him with reasonable certainty. Anthony Harvey’s recent Bampton Lectures, Jesus and the Constraints of History, are an excellent example, as is Ben Meyer’s The Aims of Jesus. The larger works by Schillebeeckx and Dunn⁵ are further evidence of the continuing possibility of serious work not merely on the primitive Christian community in which the gospel materials were transmitted but on Jesus himself.

A proper preliminary task for such work would be an examination of the imposing facade of the dominant paradigm in gospel criticism, and a demonstration that it not only contains cracks and fissures but is actually built on shaky foundations. This alarming news is already being understood in various (and widely differing) quarters.⁶ In the present paper I must be content with a few abbreviated remarks.

First, asking questions about Jesus must be reckoned a valid historical project. Any historian of the first century must face the problem of the rise of Christianity, and any serious historian will not be content to attribute the phenomenon merely to the enthusiasm of a Jewish sect and the brilliance of a wandering missionary and letter-writer. The ‘primitive [21] community’ and Paul are not enough, by themselves, to explain the Christianity of Clement, Ignatius and Polycarp. Something must be said about Jesus.

But how? It is a commonplace of modern scholarship that the gospels are evidence not for Jesus but for the evangelists and/or their sources and/or communities; and this would appear to leave us with only a very few bits of information – the brief, biased accounts in Jewish and pagan sources, and the few sayings and biographical details that even the most radical critics would allow through the net. But (this is my second point) this ‘commonplace’ of scholarship needs to be challenged, as follows.

One of the odd quirks in the history of ideas is that philosophical theories, themselves long out of fashion, continue to beget recognizable offspring in other areas of study. What we are witnessing in the field of gospel criticism is the application to the biblical literature of phenomenalism, the theory that insists on understanding statements about the external world in terms of the speaker’s ‘sense-data’. Ultimately, of course, this movement of thought leads to solipsism. That is one of various good reasons why its force as a serious philosophical option is now largely spent. But it survives in its literary-critical grandchildren: ‘We must take as our starting point the assumption that the Gospels offer us directly information about the theology of the early church and not about the teaching of the historical Jesus’.⁷ ‘Every text is first and foremost evidence for the circumstances in and for which it was composed, and in this respect texts serve as documentary evidence for the time of writing’.⁸

But the only sense in which this ‘assumption’ or ‘analytical principle’ is valid is also a fairly trivial one: that all human writings, including the New Testament, are just that – human writings, not self-created or produced by unmediated divine activity. Wise readers will always take a writer seriously as a person, and even when this is impossible (for example, in reading an anonymous poem) they will at least be aware of a probable context. But in fact (this is the equivalent of the realist’s reply to the phenomenalist) few writers write their lines in order to have readers read between them to discover the writer’s personality or background, and readers who try to do that will almost certainly fail to hear what the writer wanted to say. Worse, the apparent ‘objectivity’ of phenomenalist literary criticism, which gains its strength from the obvious need to understand the viewpoint and bias of a writer, masks a deeper subjectivity: released from the constraints of the prima facie subject-matter, the critic’s imagination is free to create psychological or sociological entities, not infrequently in a dangerously anachronistic form.

A third weakness in the twentieth-century ‘quests’ for Jesus has been the failure to appreciate the original aims of form-criticism itself. For Bultmann, the thing that mattered in the New Testament, the thing worth hunting for, was not the ‘historical Jesus’ but the faith of the early church. Though some of his [22] followers have used form-criticism as a tool to probe back within the tradition towards Jesus himself, it was designed to do, and is of course much better at doing, something different – creating a picture of the primitive community preaching, praying, counselling one another, and so on. That was the ‘normative’ thing. This task is not really part of the quest for the historical Jesus. It is the quest for the kerygmatic church.

It is true that the ‘New Quest’⁹ marks an important step on the road. Käsemann spotted a flaw in Bultmann’s scheme. It was vital, he pointed out, that the Christ of faith should be identified with the human Jesus who died on the cross, since otherwise he would remain a docetic figure, removed from our world. But this means, ultimately, that the writing of gospels is not, after all, evidence for a failure of nerve on the part of the early church, a lapse back into history-faith. The gospel-writers had a good reason, it appears, to be interested in the Jesus of history – as of course scholars outside the narrow Bultmannian tradition had always maintained.¹⁰ Nevertheless, the ‘New Quest’ has not proved itself markedly more successful than the old one, not least perhaps because of this tension or even contradiction within its presuppositions. Recent work¹¹ indicates that scholars from several backgrounds are eager to discover new ways forward, building on the strengths of old models while attempting to eliminate weaknesses. It is in that hope that I offer a few suggestions in the second half of this article.

Many criticisms have been advanced against the ‘criteria of authenticity’ set up by Perrin and Fuller as tests of synoptic material.¹² But even on the most stringent criteria, certain points emerge more or less beyond dispute: that Jesus began his ministry at the time of John’s baptism, that he proclaimed the kingdom of God, that he had a well-earned reputation as a healer and exorcist, that he gathered around him a group of close associates, sometimes kept dubious company, engaged in controversy with the Jewish religious teachers, and that, as a result of this, he was finally crucified ‘under Pontius Pilate’.¹³ In Perrin’s famous sentence, ‘that . . . is all that we can know: it is enough’.¹⁴

But – enough for what? For Perrin’s own (Bultmannian) theological scheme, perhaps, in which anything more than a bare outline of Jesus’ story is too much. But enough, also, for us to know one fact about Jesus which, though almost laughably obvious, is scarcely ever given any prominence at all,¹⁵ while being, I believe, of great significance. It is this: the total ministry of Jesus takes place in the context of the hope of Israel. And that hope was not, in essence, universalizable. It could not be transplanted into other nations or cultures or times. It was, specifically, not a generalized human hope. It was the hope that now, at last, God would act in history to vindicate both his own [23] name and his covenant people Israel. This hope that God would take his power and reign was therefore a hope for national restoration. God would exalt Israel to occupy the role for which the Torah had fitted it, that of being his right-hand nation, ruling over those outside. This hope, variously expressed, was in essence the result of the tension between Israel’s vocation in the Torah and Prophets and the actuality of first-century politics. It is important to note that only in comparatively rare cases did it include specific messianic expectation. Conversely, when such an expectation existed, it was as part of the larger whole, God’s purposes for his chosen race.¹⁶

It was within this context that Jesus appeared, like John, as a prophet, declaring that the time promised of old had now been fulfilled. It is at this point (I believe) that a good deal of Christian reading of the gospels has gone wrong, jumping too quickly, in the interests of contemporary relevance, away from the specifically Jewish context of the ministry and teaching of Jesus. In fact, neither John nor Jesus was preaching a set of ‘timeless truths’. Their message was one of sharp local relevance. Jesus was not sent ‘except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’ (Matthew 15.24; cf. 10.6). The message – of apocalyptic urgency – was not a universalized prediction of the imminent end of the world, but a specific prediction (couched, of course, in appropriate apocalyptic imagery) of what, from a Jewish point of view, would be conceived as the end of th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Towards a Third ‘Quest’? Jesus Then and Now
• 2. Jesus, Israel and the Cross
• 3. ‘Constraints’ and the Jesus of History
• 4. Taking the Text With Her Pleasure: A Post-Post-Modernist Response to J. Dominic Crossan, the Historical Jesus
• 5. Jesus
• 6. Five Gospels But No Gospel: Jesus and the Seminar
• 7. Resurrection In Q?
• 8. Introduction to the Second Edition of B. F. Meyer, the Aims of Jesus
• 9. Kingdom Come: The Public Meaning of the Gospels
• 10. Whence and Whither Historical Jesus Studies In the Life of the Church?
• 11. The Evangelists’ Use of the Old Testament As an Implicit Overarching Narrative
• 12. John, Jesus and ‘The Ruler of This World’: Demonic Politics In the Fourth Gospel?
• 13. Pictures, Stories and the Cross: Where Do the Echoes Lead?
• 14. Son of Man – Lord of the Temple? Gospel Echoes of Psalm 8 and the Ongoing Christological Challenge
• 15. Son of God and Christian Origins
• 16. History, Eschatology, and New Creation In the Fourth Gospel: Early Christian Perspectives On God’s Action In Jesus, With Special Reference to the Prologue of John
• 17. Son of Man and New Creation: The Biblical Roots of Trinitarian Theology
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index of Ancient Sources
• Index of Modern Authors