[This is an ongoing project that is analyzing N.T. Wright’s
5 volume series, Christian Origins and the Question of God. This series is
widely read and bridges the gap between the academic and devotional world. It
is therefore worthy to be carefully analyzed so that all readers can understand
his key points while at the same time gaining a critical eye to some of his
rather bold claims. This series of posts are concerning volume 1 – The New Testament and the People of God.]
N.T. Wright’s last chapter on Judaism is about the hope of
Israel – what they expected in the future and how they imagined improvement in
their lives. In order to do this, Wright focuses solely on the genre of
apocalypses in the second temple period (and its immediate aftermath). While
Wright is too atomistic in focusing the hope of Israel solely in the
apocalyptic, his goal of explaining apocalypses as a genre to a Christian
audience is largely successful. He attempts to convince Christian readers to
read apocalypses as a genre and to avoid literalistic readings as he sees in a
variety of ways. In that narrow focus, he does well. However, Wright does not
explain the primary purpose of apocalypses for the social group as a form of
theodicy. Further, Wright does not dialogue with the foremost scholar on Jewish
apocalypticism – John Collins – and as such, misses a few major points.
Wright’s analysis is once again helpful because he dares to put on paper what
many Christians generally hold. The analysis of his work therefore is of much
heuristic value for Christians.
First, Wright argues that most all Jews in the first century
expected that their life was not ideal and that there was at least a vague hope
for some kind of major change. Wright
argues that most all thought something needed to change:
There may have been some Jews,
perhaps those wielding obvious power, who were happy to play down the
possibility of radical change; but most were hoping, some fervently, for a new
turn in Israel’s fortunes. If there is one creator god and, and Israel is his
people, then this god must act sooner or later to restore her fortunes. Israel
is still in a state of ‘exile’, and this must be put right. The symbols of
covenant life will be restored, because the covenant will be renewed: the
Temple will be rebuilt, the Land cleansed, the Torah kept perfectly by a
new-covenant people with renewed hearts.[1]
Here Wright is absolutely correct – most all Jews were not
happy with their situation. They were an occupied nation. Further, they were
forced to live alongside a wide variety of ‘foreigners’ (the quote marks are
set to note that many of these people had actually lived there as long as they
had). Jews therefore hoped for something more closely akin to what they knew to
be their role in the world.
Wright focuses on one of the ways that said hope could be
expressed – apocalyptic ideas. He discusses apocalyptic in the following way:
When applied to literature, the
word [apocalyptic] usually denotes a particular form, that of the reported vision and (sometimes) its
interpretation. Claims are made for these visions: they are divine revelations,
disclosing (hence ‘apocalyptic’, for the Greek for ‘revelation’ or
‘disclosure’) states of affairs not ordinarily made known to humans. Sometimes
these visions concern the progress of history, more specifically, the history
of Israel; sometimes they focus on otherworldly journeys; sometimes they
combine both.[2]
These apocalyptic ideas, as Wright points out are special
revelations given to particular figures. However, Wright’s characterization is
too general – apocalypses have more characteristic than simply being revealed
directly from God. If this were the case, then all the prophets of the Hebrew
Bible would have been ‘apocalyptic’ when in reality usually only the book of
Daniel is considered an apocalypse.
Wright does correctly show that what was revealed had to do
with understanding current events from a new perspective. He argues that
apocalypses tended to give meaning to current events:
The different modes of speech invest the reality referred to with
increasing layers of meaning. Statements about events are regularly invested in
this way with all kinds of nuances and overtones, designed to bring out the significance
and meaning of the events, to help people see them from the inside as well as
the outside. In a culture where events concerning Israel were believed to
concern the creator god as well, language had to be found which could both refer to events within Israel’s
history and invest them with the full
significance which, within that worldview, they possessed.[3]
He rightly argues that the primary model of the apocalypse
was to reconsider known events – to see them from a different perspective.
However, his discussion is confusing. He does not show what seeing “history
from the inside” means. It is more than simply a revelation, it is usually seen
as “God’s perspective” – showing humans what history “truly” is.
Wright then focuses interestingly on the connection between
heaven and earth in apocalyptic thought. He argues that apocalypses try to show
the unity of these things and try to avoid a major disjunct between the two:
There is a third sense of
‘representation’, which will cause yet more confusion unless it is unearthed
and clarified. In the mainline Jewish worldview, according to which the
heavenly and the earthly realms are distinct but closely intertwined (instead
of either being held apart, as in Epicureanism, or fused into one, as in
pantheism), the belief emerges that heavenly beings, often angels, are the
counterparts or ‘representatives’ of earthly beings, often nations or
individuals.[4]
Wright sees as the most fundamental element of the
apocalyptic this close connection between heaven and earth. He further explains
that it is this interconnectivity that allows Jews to think of God as
consistent:
This examination of
‘representation’ within apocalyptic literature helps to explain, I think, why
the genre is what it is. Because the heavenly and the earthly realm belong
closely with one another – which is a way of asserting the presence of the
creator god within his creation and in the midst of his heavenly realm and
emerging with information that would relate to the earthly realm and emerging
with information that would relate to the earthly realm.[5]
Wright argues that what makes apocalypses a helpful genre is
the way that they can connect heaven and earth. This allows for a very involved
god in history while at the same time showing how god could remain who he is
given that the people of Israel do not have the land.
Wright’s view interesting and is very helpful for his
seeming audience of people who read apocalypses literalistically – expecting
actual beasts rising out of the sea, etc. He wants to try and dispel the Left Behind crowd who have very modern
ideas about the book of Revelation in the New Testament. One point he makes,
for instance, is that there is no expectation that anyone would be moving to a
different place and living in a different world – the world was very much
permanent and was not going to be destroyed:
The ‘kingdom of god’ has nothing
to do with the world itself coming to an end. That makes no sense either of the
basic Jewish worldview or of the texts in which the Jewish hope is expressed.
It was after all the Stoics, not the first-century Jews, who characteristically
believed that the world would be dissolved in fire. (This has the amusing
corollary that scholars have thought of such an expectation as a Jewish oddity
which the church grew out of as it left Judaism behind, whereas in fact it
seems to be a pagan oddity that the church grew into as it left Judaism behind
– and which, perhaps, some Jews moved toward as they despaired of the old
national hope and turned towards inner or mystical hope instead.)[6]
He has this kind of fundamentalist audience in mind and he
attacks their views directly.
What Wright does not do as well is to address the whole of
the “hope of Israel.” He argues completely in the realm of the apocalyptic – which
most Christians do. However, he has defined an “apocalypse” so broadly that any
mystical thing is an apocalyptic experience. That allows him to make the term
universal. However, the standard definition of an apocalypse is presented by
John and Adele Collins to be far more specific than that:
A genre of revelatory literature
with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an
otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality
which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and
spatial insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.[7]
To interpret present, the earthly
circumstances in light of the supernatural world and of the future, and to
influence both the understanding and the behavior of the audience by means of
divine authority.[8]
These two definitions which work together well, show both
the method – to disclose a transcendent reality by seeing all time and all
space as they truly are - and the goal – to understand the present. The idea
might be presented in the following way:
The image[9]
shows what an apocalypse does – shows to the people on earth right now what
life means by disclosing the whole of reality – both the past and the future as
well as the whole of the spiritual estate – both above and below. An
apocalypse, then, discusses the whole of existence. That element was mostly
missing in Wright’s analysis.
Far more troubling is Wright’s lack of discussing the
primary goal of an apocalypse: theodicy. The primary group who read apocalypses
is a people who are oppressed. Wright implied this throughout the text, but
never discussed it. The reason that the suffering are the ones who use
apocalypses is because they are the ones who desire a theodicy – an explanation for why things are going so
poorly. What an apocalypse does better than many other genres is explains why they are living in such a
mean estate. A far more secondary goal would be to expect that such an estate
is going to change.
Wright, like most Christians, mistakes the priorities of
importance in an apocalypse. Many Jews did not truly expect that things were
going to change in their own lifetime. Some certainly did, but many did not –
particularly those who lived after the revolt. Further, if these revolutionaries
were the only ones who were using apocalypses, one would have expected them to
no longer be relevant to the majority of Jewry after the Bar Kochba revolt
(much less Christians). The reason is that the actual focus on the radical
social and political change was secondary
to the explanatory problem of
meaning in theodicy. The primary goal of an apocalypse is to define who “we”
are and why our life is not
fulfilling our expectations. The apocalypse provides a way to show that in the grand scheme of things if we
consider things from God’s perspective,
then our seeming suffering is not actually a problem – it is only a problem
because we can’t see the plan of everything.
Finally, Wright, again like many Christians, does not
appreciate one of the largest problems that Judaism faced – not so much a political
problem as much as a social one – the problem of identity remaining “one people”
when they were living in such diversity geographically. This is one major
element that apocalypses tried to address – because they were cosmic, they
included all Jews everywhere and considered them as one
people.
Wright’s analysis of Judaism on the whole is very typical of
Christian characterizations of Judaism. However, it matters that readers of the
New Testament take the time to truly understand Judaism – even when it does not
seem to apply to the New Testament – because if one wants to truly understand
Jesus and Paul, then one needs to consider the elements of Judaism that they
address as well as the elements they do
not address. Very frequently – particularly with Paul – silence on issues
is just as important as what he directly addresses in order to understand the
theological point and innovation.
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