The New Testament and the People of God

NT Wright, Tom Wright

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780281066216
• eBook ISBN: 9780281066223
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

Twenty years on from its original appearance, this ground-breaking first volume in N. T. Wright's magisterial series, 'Christian Origins and the Question of God', still stands as a major point of reference for students of the New Testament and early Christianity. This latest impression has been completely reset to make Wright's elegant and engrossing text more readable. 'The sweep of Wright's project as a whole is breathtaking. It is impossible to give a fair assessment of his achievement without sounding grandiose: no New Testament scholar since Bultmann has even attempted - let alone achieved - such an innovative and comprehensive account of New Testament history and theology.' Richard B. Hays

Part One

Introduction

Chapter One

CHRISTIAN ORIGINS AND THE NEW TESTAMENT

1. Introduction

The land of Israel is a small country. You can walk its length, north to south, in a few days, and from its central mountains you can see its lateral boundaries, the sea to the west and the river to the east. But it has had an importance out of all proportion to its size. Empires have fought over it. Every forty-four years out of the last four thousand, on average, an army has marched through it, whether to conquer it, to rescue it from someone else, to use it as a neutral battleground on which to fight a different enemy, or to take advantage of it as the natural route for getting somewhere else to fight there instead.¹ There are many places which, once beautiful, are now battered and mangled with the legacies of war. And yet it has remained a beautiful land, still producing grapes and figs, milk and honey.

The New Testament has not been around as long as the land of Israel, but in other ways there are remarkable parallels. It is a small book, smaller than anybody else’s holy book, small enough to be read through in a day or two. But it has had an importance belied by its slim appearance. It has again and again been a battleground for warring armies. Sometimes they have come to plunder its treasures for their own use, or to annex bits of its territory as part of a larger empire in need of a few extra strategic mountains, especially holy ones. Sometimes they have come to fight their private battles on neutral territory, finding in the debates about a book or a passage a convenient place to stage a war which is really between two worldviews or philosophies, themselves comparatively unrelated to the New Testament and its concerns. There are many places whose fragile beauty has been trampled by heavy-footed exegetes in search of a Greek root, a quick sermon, or a political slogan. And yet it has remained a powerful and evocative book, full of delicacy and majesty, tears and laughter.

What ought one to do with the New Testament? We may take it for granted that it will be no good trying to prevent its still being used as a battleground. No border fences would be strong enough to keep out the philosophers, the philologists, the politicians and the casual tourists; nor should we erect them if they were. There are many who have come to pilfer and have stayed to be pilgrims. To place all or part of this book within a sacred enclosure would be to invite a dominical rebuke: my house is to be a house of prayer for all the nations. Past attempts to keep it for one group only—the take-over bids by the scholars and the pietists, the fundamentalists and the armchair social workers—have ended with unseemly battles, the equivalent of the sad struggle for the control of Holy Places in the land of Israel. This book is a book of wisdom for all peoples, but we have made it a den of scholarship, or of a narrow, hard and exclusive piety.

There have been two groups, broadly, who have tried to inherit this territory for themselves, to make this book their own preserve. Like the two major claimants to the land of Israel in our own day, each contains some who are committed to the entire removal of the other from the land, though each also contains many who persist in searching for compromise solutions. We must understand something of both positions if we are to appreciate the overall task before us, let alone the smaller tasks (the study of Jesus, Paul and the gospels in particular) that fall within it.

There are those who, having seized power a century or two ago, and occupying many major fortresses (eminent chairs, well-known publishing houses, and so forth), insist that the New Testament be read in a thoroughgoing historical way, without inflicting on it the burden of being theologically normative. We must find out the original meanings of the texts, and set them out as carefully as we can, irrespective of the feelings of those who thought that a particular passage belonged to them and meant something different. There is sometimes an arrogance about this claim to power. Building on the apparent strength of history, and able to demonstrate the inadequacies of the simple way of life which preceded them, such scholars have set up concrete gun-stations where before there were vineyards, and they patrol the streets to harass those who insist on the old simplistic ways.

There are, on the other side, those who have shown just as much determination in resisting the advance of the new regime. Some still regard the New Testament as a sort of magic book, whose ‘meaning’ has little to do with what the first-century authors intended, and a lot to do with how some particular contemporary group has been accustomed to hear in it a call to a particular sort of spirituality or lifestyle. This phenomenon is seen most obviously within fundamentalism, but it is by no means confined to the groups (mostly in the Protestant traditions) for which that word is usually reserved. For some, the New Testament has become simply part of the liturgy, to be chanted, read in short detached snippets, used in public prayer, but not to be studied in and for itself, to be wrestled over in the hope of discovering something one did not already know. It exists, so it seems, to sustain the soul, not to stretch the mind. Such attitudes have responded to arrogance with arrogance, have tried to set up ‘no-go’ areas where the scholarly occupying forces cannot penetrate, have manned barricades with the stones of personal piety, and have bolstered morale with tales of scholarly atrocities.

As so often in the world of day-to-day politics, it is hard to feel that one side is totally right and the other totally wrong. The New Testament is undoubtedly a collection of books written at a particular time and by particular people, and if we were to treat it as though it fell from the sky in the King James Authorized Version, bound in black leather and ‘complete with maps’,² we would be like those in present-day Israel who are content to know nothing about what happened before 1948. We would have forgotten that there was a Bible long before ‘our’ Bible, that St Paul spoke Greek, not seventeenth-century English. On the other hand, to imagine that the religious, theological, and spiritual aspects of the New Testament are all side-issues, and that because there is such a thing as fundamentalism we must avoid it by embracing some sort of reductionism, would be like ignoring the present problems and tensions in the land of Israel on the grounds that the only real issue is the meaning of the book of Joshua. On the one hand, then, we have a justifiable insistence on the importance of history as giving depth and extra dimensions to contemporary awareness; on the other, a justifiable insistence that historical description by itself is incomplete. Both sides, in fact, are arguably defending comparatively modern positions: post-Enlightenment rationalism on the one hand, anti-Enlightenment supernaturalism on the other. Both sides need to reckon with the fact that there might be other alternatives, that the either–or imposed in the eighteenth century might be false.

Other oversimplifications crowd in at this point if we are not careful. Within the armies currently in the field, there are some who owe primary allegiance to older causes. The division between the academic and the popular has roots far deeper than eighteenth-century controversies between history and theology, roots which include, in their different ways, the Montanist, Franciscan, Lollard, Protestant and Quaker movements, and the reactions to them. The squabble between those who conceive of Christianity as basically a matter of outward and physical signs and those who conceive it to be a matter of an inner light is almost perennial; so is the deep mistrust that separates those who advocate simple piety from those who insist that faith must always be ‘seeking understanding’. Fighters from all these wars may well have joined up in the current battles, not necessarily wishing to support the present cause to the limit, but seeing it as the nearest equivalent to their own particular penchant. There are also the equivalents of United Nations observers, those who (in theory at least) come to the New Testament as ‘neutral’ outsiders: these are the literary theorists or the ancient historians, who from time to time survey the battleground and tell the warriors that they are all mistaken. Like their secular analogues, they may sometimes be right, but they may also sometimes get in the way.³

What then ought to be done with this strange and powerful little book? This whole present project is designed to offer a set of answers, which may well prove controversial. But something must be said at this stage in very general terms in the hope of establishing initial, even if superficial, agreement. It is, of course, open to anyone to do what he or she likes with this or any book. A volume of Shakespeare may be used to prop up a table leg, or it may be used as the basis for a philosophical theory. It is not difficult, though, to see that using it as the foundation for dramatic productions of the plays themselves carries more authenticity than either of these (though of course raising further questions about whether a ‘modern dress’ production is more or less appropriate than a ‘period’ one, and so forth). There is a general appropriateness about using Shakespeare as a basis for staging plays which justifies itself without much more argument.

What might the equivalent be for the New Testament?⁴ That is precisely our question. The New Testament, I suggest, must be read so as to be understood, read within appropriate contexts, within an acoustic which will allow its full overtones to be heard. It must be read with as little distortion as possible, and with as much sensitivity as possible to its different levels of meaning. It must be read so that the stories, and the Story, which it tells can be heard as stories, not as rambling ways of declaring unstoried ‘ideas’. It must be read without the assumption that we already know what it is going to say, and without the arrogance that assumes that ‘we’—whichever group that might be—already have ancestral rights over this or that passage, book, or writer. And, for full appropriateness, it must be read in such a way as to set in motion the drama which it suggests. The present volumes are an attempt to articulate a reading which does justice to these demands.

2. The Task

(i) What to Do with the Wicked Tenants

What, then, is the nature of our task? It may help if we begin with another illustration, again concerning a squabble over territory:

A man planted a vineyard, put a fence round it, dug a pit for the wine press, and built a tower. Then he let it out to tenant farmers, and went abroad. At the appropriate time he sent a servant to the tenants so that he might receive from them some of the fruit of the vineyard. They took him, beat him, and sent him away empty-handed. Again he sent another servant to them; this one they beat over the head and abused. He sent another, and they killed him; then, many others, some of whom they beat, and some of whom they killed. He still had one other, a beloved son; and he sent him last of all to them, saying ‘They will respect my son.’ But those tenants said to one another ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ So they seized him, and killed him and cast him out of the vineyard.

What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others. Have you not read this scripture:

‘The stone which the builders refused has become the cornerstone;

This was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous to our eyes’?⁵

What might we do with a text like this? In order even to see how we might address the question, we have to be aware of the pressures upon us from our surrounding cultural confusion. We live at a time of major changes and swings of mood within Western culture: from modernism to postmodernism; from Enlightenment dualisms to ‘New Age’ pantheisms; from existentialism to new forms of paganism. To make things more confusing, elements of all these and more layers still coexist side by side within the same city, the same family, and sometimes even the same mind and imagination. It is important to be aware that the sorts of questions one asks depend for their perceived force on all sorts of assumptions about the way the world is and the nature of the human task within it. Since there is no prospect of agreement on such questions, the only possibility is to proceed with caution, looking, at least to begin with, in as many directions as reasonably possible.

There are, perhaps, four types of reading that might be offered, which will illustrate four movements within the history of reading the New Testament at which we will presently look in more detail. The four ways (pre-critical, historical, theological and postmodern readings) correspond very broadly to three movements within the history of Western culture in the last few centuries. The first belongs to the period before the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century; the second, to the major emphasis of the Enlightenment, sometimes known as ‘modernism’ or ‘modernity’; the third, to a corrective on the second, still from within the Enlightenment worldview; and the fourth to the recent period, in which the Enlightenment worldview has begun to break up under questioning from many sides, and which has become known as ‘postmodern’.⁶

The first way of reading the parable is that of prayerful Christians who believe the Bible to be Holy Writ, ask few if any questions about what it meant in its historical context, and listen for the voice of God as they read the text. They might, perhaps, see themselves as tenants, needing to be rebuked for their own failure to recognize the Son of God; or, in a context of persecution, they might identify themselves and their church with the prophets who are rejected by the powerful de facto owners, but who will be vindicated at the last. This pre-critical approach aims to take the authoritative status of the text seriously, but would today be criticized on (at least) three grounds, corresponding to the other three ways of reading: it fails to take the text seriously historically, it fails to integr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Imprint
• Dedication
• Table of contents
• Preface
• PART I Introduction
• PART II Tools for the Task
• PART III First-Century Judaism within the Greco-Roman World
• PART IV The First Christian Century
• PART V Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Search items for Ancient Sources
• Search items for Modern Authors
• Search items for Selected Topics