[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 2 –
Jesus and the Victory of God.]
Wright’s analysis of the historical Jesus places him firmly
in the fold of an apocalyptic prophet. The role of such a prophet is the
announcement of the kingdom of God. Wright therefore focuses this chapter on
the announcement and its basic message. Wright argues that Jesus’ message was
one that announced that Israel had returned from exile and that God had become
king, but that this return entailed an implicit judgment as well as final
vindication. This argument has much merit, but in it he displays Wright’s
recurring issue – he has a good insight, but he overreaches to try and create a
picture of Jesus which fits what later Christian authors would desire.
First, Wright applies his hermeneutic which he has presented
earlier. He argues that any explanation about Jesus’ kingdom language must fit
with both Jewish ideals and explain what came following in early Christianity:
The recognition of the nature of
the kingdom announcement as part of an assumed larger story enables us to make a preliminary assessment of historicity.
We may remind ourselves that if Jesus’ announcement of the kingdom is to make
historical sense it must make sense both as
something that would be clearly understood within its Jewish context and as the presupposition for the
significantly different resonances of ‘kingdom’ in the early church. At the
same time it would clearly both challenge
some prevailing assumptions with that Jewish context and retain a special focus which would be characteristic only of
Jesus’ career, not of the work of his post-Easter followers.[1]
He argues that the concept of kingdom that Jesus proclaimed
must have been clear to his Jewish audience. Further, it could not be so
foreign to a later Christian audience that they could include this teaching in
their writings. However, such a strict hermeneutic has serious limits – how
many things can reasonably qualify under these categories are relatively
limited. Wright falls into the trap of using this criterion as a way of explaining stories of Jesus rather than
good historical analysis of using this hermeneutic to test data in the gospels
for its historical veracity. It well could explain the stories – but that does
not necessarily mean that it is historical.
Wright’s analysis though, is certainly correct on some
points. First, that Jesus’ message concerning the kingdom of God had to make
some kind of sense to a Jewish audience is convincing. Wright argues that Jesus
changed the story line that was expected, but the story line itself was
certainly comprehensible:
In particular, I intend to
demonstrate two things: first, that when Jesus spoke of the ‘reign’ or
‘kingdom’ of Israel’s god, he was deliberately evoking an entire story-line
that he and his hearers knew quite well; second, that he was retelling this
familiar story in such a way as to subvert and redirect its normal
plot…Israel’s true god was becoming king; Jesus claimed to be his true prophet.
Though this claim was no doubt bold (most who made it did not live very long
afterwards), it was not in any way bizarre or incomprehensible.[2]
Wright is certainly correct here. He does not cite the most
striking evidence that is available to him, however. One should take special
note that in every conversation Jesus has about the kingdom of god, at not one
point (in the synoptic gospels, the Gospel of Thomas, or any other source I am
aware of), does he have to define what
the kingdom of God is. The audience seems to fully know. He often challenges
how it is going to appear and who can be included, but the actual discussion of
it did make sense to a Jewish audience. Wright explains this in relationship to
a “story” or narrative, which is certainly one way that this could be
understood. In any sense, though, it is certainly accurate that first century
Jews did understand Jesus when he made his claims about the kingdom of God.
Where Wright is less on sure ground is that he considers
that first century Judaism saw the kingdom of God as a place where God would be
king. While this is technically correct, it can lead one to a mistake in
understanding. First, consider Wright’s comment about expectation:
The most important thing to
recognize about the first-century Jewish use of kingdom language is that it was
bound up with the hopes and expectations of Israel. ‘Kingdom of god’ was not a
vague phrase, or a cipher with a general religious aura. It had nothing much,
at least in the first instance, to do with what happened to human being after
they died…it was simply a Jewish way of talking about Israel’s god becoming
king.[3]
While this certainly can be said to be accurate, one should
recognize what that expectation was. God’s becoming king was a restorative act to bring the line of David back upon the throne. Most readers
will be shocked by this – how could the restoration of David (clearly not God)
upon the throne to establish Israel as a political entity be “god becoming
king?” Here, Wright has not presented the entire story. There was a way in
which Israel’s human king and God were in cahoots in the monarchy. There was
not a seeming contradiction between Psalm 2:
“I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill”[4]
with Psalm 93:
The LORD is king, he is robed in
majesty; the Lord is robed, he is girded with strength. He has established the
world; it shall never be moved; your throne is established from of old; you are
from everlasting.[5]
In what sense could these two things be united? Because
there was an essential link between the human king and God working from Zion as
depicted in Psalm 20:
The LORD answer you in the day of
trouble! The name of the God of Jacob protect you! May he send you help from
the sanctuary, and give you support from Zion…Now I know that the Lord will
help his anointed…Give victory to the king, Or LORD; answer us when we call.”[6]
The kingship was established beginning with David of uniting
the “political” with the “religious.” This is why David brings the Ark to
Jerusalem, and why Solomon builds the temple there. The entire city of Jerusalem is the sanctuary, and
just as the temple is forever, so also is the king. The two are in essential
continuity and are expected to always be in tandem.[7]
The problem with Wright’s presentation is he seems to want to affirm a
different way that God would become king. He wants to seemingly make it sound
as if God himself would be king and
have no human counterpart at all. While this would fit very well with Christian
belief in Christ, it is very difficult to argue that this would have been standard expectation for first century
Jews. They certainly thought that God would become king – but only in the way
that he had previously been king – through the means of David’s (very human)
line.
Wright’s emphasis on “story” causes him to emphasize Jesus’
“stories” – namely his parables. Parables are something that are very much
affirmed as historically accurate. The problem is that parables are precisely
those things that defy easy explanation – and according to some – expressed
particularly well by John Dominic Crossan – there may not have been one interpretation.
One of the values of a parable are that there can be many interpretations and
it is probably that there is not a “right” one – instead, they are meant to
foment disagreement among the group. Wright presents this half way by showing
that parables are meant be challenges:
The parables offer not only information,
but challenge; they are stories designed to evoke fresh praxis, to reorder the
symbolic world, to break open current understandings and inculcate fresh
ones…They are stories which both affirm the Jewish expectation and declare that
it is being fulfilled in a radically new fashion.[8]
Jesus did want to
challenge people. However, it is far less clear that this said challenge was
only in the very clear content. Instead, he had unclear content that caused
people to stop and question. He himself says in Mark 4:10-12 that he speaks in
parables so that the outsiders would not understand. He wanted the secrecy and
the intrigue about himself. Wright struggles to address this issue:
This suggests aw ay through the
puzzle of the apparently predestinarian passage in Mark 4.10-12, which seems to
say that Jesus told parables so that people
would not understand him. The problem only arises, in fact, when the historical
context is not taken seriously, and when the vacuum thus created is filled with
a generalized ‘theology’ in which Jesus is either the teacher of timeless
truths or the announcer of impenetrable enigmas. Parables are neither of these.
‘If you have ears, then hear’; if too many people understood too well, the
prophet’s liberty of movement, and perhaps life, may be cut short. Jesus knew
his kingdom-announcement was subversive.[9]
This argument that Jesus spoke in
parables simply because he was concerned about the political consequences does
not make much sense. If Jesus was overly concerned with that problem, he would
not have done hardly any of the things that he did. Instead, the genre should
be taken more seriously as a genre itself that has its own power and potential.
The more troubling side of Wright’s
analysis is that he might be using parables because of their fluidity. They are
a perfect forum for his “double similarity criterion” – they certainly can be understood in a Jewish milieu as
well as leading toward a later development of “kingdom of God” as expressed in the
early Christian church. Because parables can have more than one meaning, it
makes it far easier to satisfy both criteria. The problem here is precisely
what was presented earlier – it is possible to use that model to explain a
parable so it could mean that, but
this is not a good historical analysis that this was the historically verified meaning that hearers would have heard.
Wright’s interest is clear – he wants
to present a Jesus who presents a kingdom language of a return from exile and
that God is now again king. This alone would not be a major problem, the way he
does it through parables, though, can be questioned. He argues that the parable
of the sower presents this clearly:
“The ‘mystery’,
the whole secret plan of Israel’s god, is that this was how his purpose for Israel is to be worked out. He would
come to rescue his people, not in a blaze of triumphant glory, but in the
sowing of seed, the long promised prophetic ‘word’, the god-sent agency though which
Israel and the world would be renewed.[10]
This idea of Israel’s renewal in a
new way is what he sees as the fundamental announcement of Jesus’ proclamation
as the kingdom of God:
Jesus, as we have
seen, claimed in word and deed that the traditional expectation was not being
fulfilled. The new exodus was under way: Israel was not at last returning from
her long exile. All this was happening in and through his own work. Jesus
enacted this announcement in terms of
welcome and warning. He welcomed
those in any kind of need, thereby enacting the story of the return from exile,
of repentance and restoration. All were summoned to celebrate the great
restoration. At the same time, he warned those who presumed upon their
ancestral heritage, and who supposed that the coming kingdom would
automatically vindicate them. If the true Israel was returning from exile, some
might resist. If YHWH was returning to Zion, he would judge those who refused
his rule. The major kingdom-theme of the defeat of evil, of paganism, of
Babylon, is to be located here within Jesus’ proclamation, with a typically
prophetic twist: the critique is sharpest when aimed, not at pagans, but at
Israel herself.[11]
Here Wright has some good points
and in some ways, I do not disagree with much of his reconstruction. What I do
not care for, however, is his methodology which seems to be only presenting
portions of the account in order to make an argument which is, in some senses,
overly amenable to later Christian writings.
[1]
JVG, 226.
[2] Ibid.,
199-200.
[3] Ibid.,
202-203.
[4] Ps. 2:6.
[5] Ps. 93:1-2.
[6] Ps.
20:1-2,6,9.
[7] See Jon D.
Levenson, Sinai & Zion: An Entry Into
the Jewish Bible (San Francisco: Harper SanFrancisco, 1985) for a clear and
accessible approach to this concept.
[8] JVG,
229-230.
[9] Ibid., 237.
[10] Ibid., 238.
[11] Ibid., 243.
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