[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 argues that there was essential continuity among
early Jesus stories. He argues that there was a central narrative mythos that
early Christians held. He further argues that this narrative, despite diversity
in communities, was largely the same. He argues that early Christians unanimously
saw Jesus as the fulfillment and climax of the story of Israel’s history of
salvation. He does this in large swaths by discussion first the “basic narratives”
of the New Testament itself in chapter 13 and form critically into pre-gospel
material in chapter 14. The value in these chapters is that it shows how fluid
such a picture can be presented given the content of material for the early
Church. The challenge is that this picture, like all pictures like it, bring a
necessary level of ambiguity that balances on the fringe between the blatantly
obvious and the wild speculation. Wright is a wonderful case study as he does
both of those things. To argue that Jesus was considered a turning point in
Jewish history is blatantly obvious; however, to argue that such an obvious
fact was the single cord that united all Jesus groups to be essentially “the
same” moves into the wild speculation.
Wright rightly suggests that one thing early Christians did
was to create and repeat stories. Wright also correctly points out that plenty
of religious and philosophical groups did not do this in the first century:
The early Christians were story-tellers. There were plenty of philosophies
on offer in the ancient world whose commitment to stories was less obvious than
theirs (though no doubt equally capable of being teased out by a persistent
modern narratologist). The writings of the Stoics, for example, consist far
more of maxims and isolated obiter dicta,
with only the occasional short story, either anecdote or parable, thrown in
by way of illustration. With the early Christians, I shall argue throughout
this and the next chapter, stories were visibly and obviously an essential part
of what they were and did.[1]
Wright, as one might recall, has seen the issue of “story”
or what in religious studies circles is better known as mythos as fundamental to the early Jesus movement and its
worldview.
Given that the early Christians used mythos in order to
establish identity, Wright, in these two chapters, attempts to ask the
fundamental question – if they told stories, what was the “essential story”
that they told? Wright is attempting to discover the “heart” of the Jesus
movement. Wright, much like many Christians, is happy to admit that there is
diversity, but still amidst this diversity, wants to suggest a kind of unity.
He wants there to be an essential “story” that overrides all the differences
and makes the early movement one thing. He can be found doing this by using a
term I try to avoid – early “Christians.” In the earliest going, it is usually
assumed that there is not one organized religious center, but instead there are
a variety of Christianities that were at least independent of one another and
probably competing with one another.
To Wright’s credit, when he searches for this unity, he
recognizes that the sources we have are biased and suggest variety rather than
unity. He admits that to understand that story one needs to consider the early Christian
sources. These sources require interpretation:
We need to study the early
Christian stories in themselves in order to find out about Jesus; but only when
we presuppose something about Jesus can we study those stories in their full
depth.[2]
Wright is admirably honest – he agrees that the sources we
have for Jesus and the early church are “insider” documents that one needs to
interpret with a hermeneutic to understand them.
To address this issue, he first marches through the main sources
of early Christianity. He begins with the Gospel of Luke (by comparing it to
Josephus) and argues that at its heart, the gospel presents a story of the
fulfillment of the Jewish worldview (albeit in the form of a Hellenistic
biography):
And in both [Luke and Josephus]
there is a longer purpose waiting to be uncovered, a purpose which encompasses
the message of judgment and salvation for Israel.[3]
Luke is telling the story of Jesus as the fulfillment, the completion, of
the story of David and his kingdom.[4]
Whether this is the precise theme of Luke or not can be
disputed, however, that one of the key themes of Luke is the fulfillment of
Israel’s hopes is certainly accurate. Wright further shows that Matthew’s
interest could be characterized in a similar way:
It is therefore vital that we
recognize Matthew’s blend of genres, as we recognized Luke’s earlier. There is,
once more, no doubt that Matthew has written the story of Jesus as a
Hellenistic-style bios, a biography.
But that the same time he has told it as the continuation and climax of the
story of Israel, with the implicit understanding that this story is the close
to the story of the world. And if this is so, there can be no doubt, either,
that he intends it to be read both as
instruction for this church of his day and
as history.[5]
Here Wright suggests that both Matthew and Luke have
essential continuity on this point. He argues that Mark has this same idea with
essential continuity:
All three synoptic gospels, we have
seen, share a common pattern behind their wide divergences. All tell the story
of Jesus, and especially that of his cross, not as an oddity, a one-off
biography of strange doings, or a sudden irruption of divine power into
history, but as the end of a much longer story, the story of Israel, which in
turn is the focal point of the story of the creator and the world. What is
more, they are telling this complex story, not simply for antiquarian or
theological interest, but in such a way as to make it the foundation-story, the
historical ‘founding myth,’ for their communities, communities whose very
existence depended on their being called by the same god to carry on the same
story in its new phase.[6]
The continuity present between the Jewish worldview of
Matthew, Mark, and Luke could be challenged, but it certainly is something that
could be argued.
Where Wright begins to stretch the concept is when he
applies the same to Paul, Hebrews, and the Gospel of John. Consider the
following three passages where Wright presents Paul, Hebrews, and John in
continuity with the synoptics:
This survey of Paul is, of course,
woefully incomplete. There is much which is here left for another occasion. But
I hope it is sufficient to demonstrate at least a strong case for saying that,
at one fixed point in the early years of Christianity, the story which was
being told has substantially the same shape as the story which we observed in
Luke, Matthew and Mark. It is the Israel-story, fulfilled, subverted and
transformed by the Jesus-story, and now subverting the world’s stories. In its
new form, it generates and sustains a symbolic universe, in which the writers
of epistles and gospels alike understand themselves and their readers as
living: the world in which this fulfilled Israel-drama is now moving toward its
closure, its still unreaching ending.[7]
Hebrews focuses on the Temple cult
rather than on more general theological or practical issues, but the underlying
story corresponds to what we found in the synoptics and Paul. Jesus has brought
Israel’s story to its paradoxical climax.[8]
This is the story of Jesus told as the true, and redeeming, story
of the creator and the cosmos. John’s gospel, through and through, tells the
recognizably Jewish story of Israel and the world, but, like Paul and the
synoptics in their diverse ways, draws the eye onto Jesus as the fulfillment,
and hence the subversion, of that story.[9]
Very few scholars of early Christianity would agree that
Paul, Hebrews, and John had the same fundamental theology as the synoptics.
The argument that their theology is different but their
essential “story” is the same can create a sense of continuity, but only in the
most vague terms possible. The idea that followers of the Jesus movement
considered Jesus as having been (even if it is unimportant now) the Jewish
Messiah is simply to suggest that the groups following Jesus were actually
following Jesus. What each figure believes about the significance of Jesus’
actions as the messiah are vastly different. Wright’s presentation here is
quite helpful because it presents a common motif that is found within Christian
interpretation of the developing Jesus movements – the grasp for continuity by
means of making such a wide ranging vague theme that most all texts could agree
in some sense.
Wright then goes one step farther and attempts to perform
form-critical studies of the New Testament texts to identify earlier stages of
the Jesus movement. Wright accurately points out the challenges of form
criticism but the essential necessity of it. While form criticism can surely be
challenged for its inherent ambiguity (which things are forms and which are
not?), Wright suggests that at this point, there have not been sufficient
alternate explanations and form criticism is the best method we have available:
“The critics of form criticism have not, to my knowledge, offered a serious
alternative model of how the early church told its stories.”[10]
While Wright could be criticized for using form criticism, for this paper, it
is a helpful enough category to allow his argument to continue.
The challenge is not so much the fact that Wright uses form
criticism, the challenge is that he seems to use it because of its inherent ambiguity. He wants to use it to apply his
hypothesis to the data of the New Testament. He argues against early proponents
of form criticism (particularly Bultmann) by suggesting that his hypothesis was
not one that had to be accepted:
A second misunderstanding, once
that one is out o the way, is the assumption that the discipline of
form-criticism necessarily belongs with one particular hypothesis about the
origin and development of the early church.[11]
While Wright is certainly correct that Bultmann’s hypothesis
is not certain, one will note that he does not oppose the application of a
hypothesis to interpret the text. Instead, he revels in it.
Wright argues that his hypothesis of the Jewish form of
earliest Christianity makes the best sense to create the Christian “story:”
The case needs to be spelled out
for seeing the whole of the first generation of Christianity as essentially
Jewish in form, however subversive of actual Judaism it was in content. If
Jesus was Jewish, and thought and acted within a world of Jewish expectations
and understandings of history; if Paul did the same; if the synoptic
evangelists and even John retold the Jewish story so as to bring it to its
climax with Jesus; and if even in the second century, even out in the pagan
world, Christianity still bore the same stamp – then it seems highly likely a
priori that the early tellings of stories about Jesus would also carry the same
form. What we need, and have never had in the history of the discipline, is a
hypothesis that would show at least the possibility of a Jewish form-criticism of the synoptic tradition, a reading of the
stories which did justice to the high probability that their earliest form was
Jewish, and that Hellenistic features may be sign of later development.[12]
Here Wright has taken the opportunity to introduce his own
assumptive claims into the text.
It is not surprising that Wright has used a Jewish worldview
as the basis for the story of Jesus. By all rights, anyone who wants to
seriously consider the historical Jesus should start from a Jewish worldview.
The problem is that he has tried to do too much and in so doing does very
little. Had he made this argument simply for the study of the historical Jesus
in his second volume, there would be relatively little objection. The problem is
that he tries to say that such a view is held in all of the earliest sources about Jesus. If there is one thing that
can be known about the documents discussing Jesus is that they all do not agree on anything. The only
way they could possibly agree would be if the framework provided was so vague
as simply to say “Jesus was Jesus.” That is essentially what Wright has done –
he has tied everything together in a way that is irrefutable, but also
unremarkable. Somehow, it is true, early followers of Jesus did follow him and
recognized that he lived in the first century and was considered the Jewish
Messiah. However, that might be as far the congruence goes.
Wright’s analysis is remarkably common. He is so interested
in harmonizing “the story” he focuses on the harmonization and what can be lost
in that harmonization is the unique elements of each gospel. The books of the New
Testament were not written to agree with one another. The authors of the books
did not know others were being written, much less that they would be collated
together. Instead, the books were written to be used independently for community
members to gain meaning and identity. When these become harmonized in a “lowest
common denominator” fashion, reasonable question can be asked as to the real
value that is left.
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