Jesus, Paul and the People of God

A Theological Dialogue With N. T. Wright

Nicholas Perrin

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780281067954
• eBook ISBN: 9780281067060
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Some of the world's leading New Testament scholars come together to assess Tom Wright's contribution to New Testament studies and to suggest new directions for investigation. The book includes two new essays by Tom Wright on the themes of historical Jesus studies and the life of the Church, and Pauline studies and the life of the Church. Top contributors including: Richard Hays, Marianne Meye Thompson, Kevin Vanhoozer, Jeremy Begbie, Marksu Bockmuehl and others.

PART ONE

JESUS AND THE PEOPLE OF GOD

1

Jesus and the Victory of God Meets the Gospel of John

MARIANNE MEYE THOMPSON

JESUS AND THE VICTORY OF GOD, N. T. WRIGHT’S biggest book on Jesus—although neither his only book on Jesus nor his biggest book overall—has already been the subject of a full-length “critical assessment,” published by InterVarsity Press.¹ So far as I can tell, none of the contributors to that volume offers any substantive comment on the topic of the Gospel of John in Jesus and the Victory of God (JVG). And so the organizers of this conference apparently deemed that it was time for JVG to meet the Gospel of John. I pondered briefly whether the topic—“Jesus and the Victory of God meets the Gospel of John”—had in view the clash of the titans, where the two parties would “meet” to determine a winner, or whether what was anticipated was the long-awaited introduction of two parties, heretofore inexplicably unacquainted. Either of these sorts of meetings would frankly be more interesting than the third option—a committee meeting—in which these two titans would meet to hammer out some sort of compromise document that robbed each of their genius and spirit and left no one eager for more.

Assuming that what we are after is a conversation, and neither a showdown nor a compromise, I have divided my paper into three main parts. First, I will discuss the issue of the relative absence of the Gospel of John from the pages of JVG, and set that phenomenon in the larger context of the quest for the historical Jesus. Next, drawing on some intriguing comments made by Wright in other writings that would allow John a larger role in studies of Jesus, we will bring John and JVG into dialogue at a few points. Here we will see that, on the whole, the Jesus of JVG would often be quite at home in the Gospel of John—and vice versa. Finally, I will focus on one particularly noteworthy feature of JVG’s presentation of Jesus, namely, the argument that Jesus saw himself as replacing the temple or the temple system. And here I will suggest that John has somewhat more substantive disagreements with JVG.

THE GOSPEL OF JOHN IN JESUS AND THE VICTORY OF GOD

Let us begin, then, with the role of the Gospel of John in JVG. To put not too fine a point on it, in JVG Wright does not make use of, quote or discuss passages from the Gospel of John in any way that explicitly determines his conclusions or his portrayal of Jesus. The Gospel of John is not a source, or not explicitly a source, for JVG and its depiction of the aims of Jesus. Wright explains the relative absence of John from the discussion with the following comment: “The debate to which I wish to contribute in this book has been conducted almost entirely in terms of the synoptic tradition.”² In this regard, JVG follows in the footsteps of virtually all studies of the historical Jesus since the publication of David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus: Critically Examined.³ Under Strauss’s critical scrutiny, the historicity of material in all the Gospels was examined and often found wanting, the Johannine discourses and narratives above all; according to Strauss they lacked verisimilitude and concentrated too much on Jesus himself.⁴ The narratives were dogmatically shaped, appealing frequently to supernatural causation for explanations of events in Jesus’ life.⁵ John simply could not serve as a source for the historical Jesus. Ever since Strauss, the quest of the historical Jesus has been essentially a quest for the Synoptic Jesus.

Jesus and the Victory of God also gives us a portrait of the Synoptic Jesus; that is, the Jesus of the threefold and not fourfold Gospel canon. There are references to John here and there in JVG, but while all the references to John in the Scripture index of JVG run to just slightly over one column, the references to Luke and to Matthew take up over nine columns each. No space is given in JVG to discussion of any distinctly Johannine episode or discourse, as there is, for example, to the parable of the prodigal son, which figures significantly in Wright’s reconstruction of Jesus’ aims. There are some minor exceptions. In a discussion of Jesus’ appearance before Pilate, evidence from John bolsters the historical authenticity of the Gospels’ collective portrait of Pilate as “weak, vacillating,” and “bullying,” and as eager to remain Caesar’s friend.⁶

But JVG does not differ significantly from other recent studies of Jesus in its overall treatment of John. The ratio of the references of John to the Synoptic Gospels found in JVG is about the same as in Dominic Crossan’s The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant or E. P. Sanders’s The Historical Figure of Jesus. Interestingly, in The New Testament and the People of God, the ratio of references of Luke to John is about 1:1. In that earlier work Wright treats the Gospel of John in the section titled “Stories in Early Christianity,” a section that also includes discussion of each of the three Synoptic Gospels, Paul and Hebrews. Here there are a number of remarks relevant to our current discussion.

First, “everyone knows that John is a very different sort of book to Luke, Matthew and Mark.”⁷ But, second, when compared to a reconstructed Q source, or to the gospels of Thomas or Peter, John “comes out at least as much like the Synoptics as unlike.”⁸ And, third, John’s Gospel is “more obviously than the synoptic Gospels … a story about Jesus and the Jewish people of his day.”⁹ Elsewhere, the introduction to John for Everyone accounts for the distinctive character of John as follows: “[John] gives the appearance of being written by someone who was a very close friend of Jesus, and who spent the rest of his life mulling over, more and more deeply, what Jesus had done and said and achieved, praying it through from every angle, and helping others to understand it.”¹⁰ It would be promising to probe the relationship of two of these statements about John—namely, that it is more obviously a story about John’s own day, and that it is the result of a close friend’s long and deep reflection on Jesus’ life. If together they accurately capture John’s approach, they also suggest that this approach differs significantly from that taken in JVG. For John, knowing Jesus would not entail going “back there” but bringing Jesus forward. John presents an understanding of the Jesus who both was and is, and he does so in light of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, through the words and thoughts of the one who bore witness to him.

John’s Gospel thus proceeds differently from JVG, whose stated purpose is to “answer certain specific questions” about Jesus, namely, what were his aims? In focusing on the question, what were Jesus’ aims? Jesus and the Victory of God echoes the title and approach of Ben Meyer’s The Aims of Jesus, itself recalling the section on the aims of Jesus in H. S. Reimarus’s posthumously published Fragments, a work often designated as signaling the beginning of the quest of the historical Jesus. Reimarus argued that Jesus announced a “speedy worldly deliverance,” and that Jesus saw himself as the “worldly deliverer of Israel.”¹¹ But when Jesus failed to deliver Israel, the disciples invented “the new system of a suffering spiritual Savior.” Needless to say, Reimarus thought that the answer to the question, What was Jesus up to? would be devastating to Christian faith, since the historical figure of Jesus would be shown to be radically different from the Jesus of the church or the Gospels. The ditch is broad and ugly indeed between Jesus and the Gospels, between what Jesus said and did, and what the church reported him to have said and done: what Jesus intended he did not accomplish, and what the church claimed he accomplished, Jesus himself did not intend. The resurrection of Jesus could equally be shown to be an invention of the church. From beginning to end, Christianity is based on and perpetrates a fraud. If taken seriously, study of the historical Jesus would—or should—destroy the Christian faith.

No wonder that Wright calls Reimarus “the great iconoclast.”¹² Reimarus wants the real Jesus of history, the Jesus without dogma, without the church, Jesus wie er eigentlich gewesen (as he actually was).¹³ In The Challenge of Jesus, Wright wrote this about Reimarus:

Reimarus challenged [Christian dogma] in the name of history… . I believe that Reimarus’s question was necessary… . The fact that Reimarus gave his own question an answer that is historically unsustainable does not mean he did not ask the right questions. Who was Jesus, and what did he accomplish?¹⁴

Thus Wright takes up the challenge implicit in Reimarus’s questions and work, demonstrating what Leander Keck once wrote, “It is not overstating the case to claim that all historical study of Jesus is a critical appropriation of [Reimarus’s] view or a debate with it.”¹⁵ Jesus and the Victory of God is an implicit debate with Reimarus. It takes Reimarus’s questions as its agenda, believing it absolutely crucial that Christian faith arise from and be based on “Jesus’ mind set, aims and beliefs prior to the crucifixion.”¹⁶ We might then also note that in JVG the “history” of this “historical Jesus” ends on Good Friday, and his aims are essentially accomplished at that time.

Now, following the publication of The Resurrection of the Son of God, surely no one will deny the importance that Wright assigns to the resurrection for understanding early Christian history and theology. Nevertheless, it seems that the “Jesus” presented in JVG is still the Jesus without Easter. As E. P. Sanders puts it at the end of The Historical Figure of Jesus, “The resurrection is not, strictly speaking, part of the story of the historical Jesus, but rather belongs to the aftermath of his life.”¹⁷ This may be another reason for the omission of the Gospel of John from JVG, as well as from other studies of Jesus: rarely is John regarded as presenting “Jesus’ mind set, aims and beliefs prior to the crucifixion”—that, and nothing more.

Instead the Fourth Evangelist arguably presents an account of Jesus that, all the way through, rolls the results of what happened into the causes of those events, and the substance of things that Jesus said and did, along with the acclamations and confessions of Scripture and human witnesses, into Jesus’ self-conscious identity. If in the Synoptic Gospels Jesus’ identity is slowly unfolded throughout the narrative, to be known cumulatively and vindicated in the resurrection, so that the whole becomes the sum of its parts and more than the sum of those parts, then in John the whole of Jesus’ identity already appears in nearly every part of the narrative. In John, Jesus is known from the end. John might well find the project of JVG—to know “Jesus’ mind set, aims and beliefs prior to the crucifixion”—to be an odd project. It is not, as Sanders puts it, that the resurrection is the aftermath of Jesus’ life, but that what happened through the resurrection, and in the aftermath of the resurrection, is simply part of who Jesus is and what his life was all about. To a large extent, this conviction makes the Gospel of John what it is, and Jesus who he is in the Gospel of John. The Jesus who laid down his life is also the Jesus who took it up again, the one who is resurrection and life. If he is not living, then this statement cannot be true. Because there is no Jesus without the resurrection, there is no historical Jesus without the resurrection.

THE JOHANNINE JESUS IN JESUS AND THE VICTORY OF GOD

And yet the plot thickens. At the end of Jesus and the Restoration of Israel, a collection of essays discussing and responding to JVG, Wright includes this reply to Luke Timothy Johnson’s question regarding the absence of John from JVG:

My explanation for why John plays little part in the book remains thin (JVG xvi), though not as thin as Johnson implies. I was contributing to a complex debate in which the Synoptics were the main subject matter. I do think, however, that to rule John out altogether a priori as a historical source is a mistake. Nobody in the current debate seems to read C. H. Dodd or Percy Gardner-Smith or even J. A. T. Robinson, let alone to engage with them; rather they rest content with century-old shibboleths about the nonhistorical nature of John. If I am even half right about the Jesus of the Synoptic tradition, … this old scholarly tradition is ripe for reconsidera...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title page
• Imprint
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part one: Jesus and the people of god
• Part two: Paul and the People of God
• Contributors
• Subject search items
• Scripture search items