Part I: Introduction

Wright identifies four methods of reading the New Testament: pre-critical, historical, theological, and postmodern (7-9). Each developed as a corrective to the perceived failings of the method that preceded.

A particular problem emerges from this sequence, however: ‘the tension between a reading that seeks to be in some sense normatively Christian and that which seeks to be faithful to history’ (9). Christians have not dealt with this tension especially well. On the one hand, what has been conceived as a defence of orthodox Christianity against Enlightenment rationalism may in fact be merely the defence of a pre-critical worldview that is “no more specifically ‘Christian’ than any other”. On the other, we have failed to understand how the Enlightenment critique of Christianity may lead to the recovery of authenticity:

Here is the paradox that lies at the heart of this whole project. Although the Enlightenment began as, among other things, a critique of orthodox Christianity, it can function, and in many ways has functioned, as a means of recalling Christianity to genuine history, to its necessary roots. Much Christianity is afraid of history, frightened that if we really find out what hap­pened in the first century our faith will collapse. But without historical enquiry there is no check on Christianity’s propensity to remake Jesus, never mind the Christian god, in its own image. Equally, much Christianity is afraid of scholarly learning, and in so far as the Enlightenment programme was an intellectual venture, Christianity has responded with the simplicities of faith (10).

Wright proposes an approach to reading the New Testament that combines the three methods: the pre-critical emphasis on the authority of the biblical text; the Enlightenment interest in history and theology; and the postmodern concern with the relationship between the reader and the text (11-28).

Part II: Tools for the task

A critical-realist theory of knowledge

The basic argument I shall advance in this Part of the book is that the prob­lem of knowledge itself, and the three branches of it that form our particular concern, can all be clarified by seeing them in the light of a detailed analysis of the worldviews which form the grid through which humans, both individually and in social groupings, perceive all of reality. In particular, one of the key fea­tures of all worldviews is the element of story. This is of vital importance not least in relation to the New Testament and early Christianity, but this is in fact a symptom of a universal phenomenon. ‘Story’, I shall argue, can help us in the first instance to articulate a critical-realist epistemology, and can then be put to wider uses in the study of literature, history and theology (32).

Wright sets out his ‘critical-realist epistemology’ as distinct from positivism, on the one hand, and phenomenalism, on the other. These alternative theories of how we know things are broadly ‘the optimistic and pessimistic versions of the Enlightenment epistemological project’. Positivism asserts that there are at least some things ‘about which we can have definite knowledge’ (32). Phenomenalism is less confident about our knowledge of the external world: all we can know for certain are the sensations of the knowing subject (34-35).

Over against both of these positions, I propose a form of critical realism. This is a way of describing the process of ‘knowing’ that acknowledges the reality of the thing known, as something other than the knower (hence ‘realism’), while also fully acknowledging that the only access we have to this reality lies along the spiralling path of appropriate dialogue or conversation between the knower and the thing known (hence ‘critical’). This path leads to critical reflection on the products of our enquiry into ‘reality’, so that our assertions about ‘reality’ acknowledge their own provisionality. Knowledge, in other words, although in principle concerning realities independent of the knower, is never itself independent of the knower (35).

This dependence of knowledge upon the knower is a matter not merely of the individual’s point of view: it also brings into play both the worldview and the community or social context of the perceiver. Wright stresses, therefore, that ‘critical realism… sees the knowledge of particulars as taking place within the larger framework of the story or worldview which forms the basis of the observer’s way of being in the world’ (37). He goes on to argue at some length that stories are constitutive of our worldviews and of human life generally (38-44). He concludes that a critical-realist theory of knowledge i) is essentially relational, and in that respect overcomes the traditional dualism of subjective and objective knowledge; ii) “acknowledges the essentially ‘storied’ nature of human knowing, thinking and living, within the larger model of worldviews and their component parts” (45).

Literature, story and the articulation of worldviews (47-80)

Wright next attempts to describe a ‘critical-realist account of the phenomenon of reading’ (61). He takes the view that conservative models of reading the Bible which emphasize the immediate personal relevance of the text to the reader and ignore the historical dimension are, ironically, little different from postmodern approaches:

The devout predecessor of deconstructionism is that reading of the text which insists that what the Bible says to me, now, is the be-all and end-all of its meaning; a reading which does not want to know about the intention of the evangelist, the life of the early church, or even about what Jesus was actually like. There are some strange bedfellows in the world of literary epistemology (60).

The critical-realist position is differentiated from the positivist or naïve realist stance, on the one hand, which assumes that the text stands in a straightforward relationship to the world, and the reductionist stance, on the other, which entirely disallows the common-sense assumption that the text expresses the thoughts of its author and refers to objects in the real world. At this point Wright suggests a rather surprising solution to the problem of reference: a hermeneutic of love. Just as love ‘affirms the reality and otherness of the beloved’ rather than attempt to ‘collapse the beloved into terms of itself’, a hermeneutic of love ‘means that the text can be listened to on its own terms, without being reduced to the scale of what the reader can or cannot understand at the moment’ (64).

A theory of literature is required that secures both the public or historical relevance of the text and the dynamic of private or personal address. We examine the text ‘in all its historical otherness to ourselves as well as all its transtemporal relatedness to ourselves, and being aware of the complex relation that exists between those two things’. The importance of the public dimension lies particularly in the fact that by means of the ‘historical otherness’ of the text a worldview is brought to birth. ‘By reading it historically, I can detect that it was always intended as a subversive story, undermining a current worldview and attempting to replace it with another. By reading it with my own ears open, I realize that it may subvert my worldview too’ (67).

At this point Wright briefly introduces structuralist analyses of narrative (Propp, Greimas), arguing that such approaches force us to attend more carefully to the story that is being told (69-77). He suggests that the basic charge that the early church levelled against Judaism was a failure to listen to the story of the Old Testament. More importantly: ‘It might also be suggested that a similar failure on the part of contemporary Christians is widespread, and is moreover at the root of a great deal of misunderstanding of the Christian tradition in general and the gospels in particular’ (70). To address the question of Christian origins, in Wright’s view, is fundamentally to engage in the discernment and analysis of first-century stories and of their relation to the larger stories and worldviews of which they form a part (78-79).

History and the first century (81-120)

A critical-realist theory of history recognizes, first, that history is always constructed from a particular point of view. ‘All history… consists of a spiral of knowledge, a long-drawn-out process of interaction between interpreter and source material’ (86). Wright makes some comments here about the capacity of ancient historians to differentiate facts from the interpretation or distortion of facts (84-85). But this does not mean, secondly, that there can be no factual basis for history. A critical-realist approach must take into account the impact of perspective and bias on the recording of events, but we are not, for that reason, obliged to assume that the events described did not actually take place (88-92).

Wright then considers the long-standing reluctance on the part of scholars to read the gospel narratives as authentic history. He suggests some reasons for this: i) there is the natural distrust of miracle stories; ii) many critical methods ‘were devised not in order to do history but in order not to do history: in order, rather, to maintain a careful and perhaps pious silence when unsure where the history might lead’; and iii) there has been a concern that contingent historical events cannot have universal relevance (92-95). Wright argues against this position that ‘it is appropriate for humans in general to listen to stories other than those by which they habitually order their lives, and to ask themselves whether those other stories ourght not to be allowed to subvert their usual ones’. This appeal is not addressed only to the modernist sceptic: it is often precisely the ordinary old-fashioned conservative or fundamentalist Christian ‘who needs to be open to the possibilities of ways of reading the New Testament, and ways of understanding who Jesus actually was, which will call his or her previous stories into serious question’ (97).

In the next section Wright examines how hypothesis and verification function within an appropriate historical method and how they may be applied in the case of New Testament history (98-109). His central contention here is that in the field of the historical study of Jesus scholarship has reached the point where we may assert a coherent hypothesis that accommodates all the data about Jesus and so is able to make sense of the gospels ‘as they stand’ (106-107).

Finally, to the idea that history is knowledge of what happened we must add three further levels of historical understanding. First, history must encompass human intentionality: we are concerned not only with the ‘outside’ of an event but also the ‘inside’ (109-112). Secondly, the task of the historian is not merely to record isolated facts but to describe the narrative that connects and makes sense of the facts: ‘a great many people within the guild of New Testament specialists have written very little history as such’ (113). Finally, we may inquire as to the meaning of historical events. ‘The meaning of an event, which… is basically an acted story, is its place, or its perceived place, within a sequence of events, which contribute to a more fundamental story; and fundamental stories are of course one of the constituent features of worldviews’ (116).

Theology, authority and the New Testament (121-144)

Wright summarizes the aim of this chapter: ‘to suggest what might be involved in a ‘theological’ reading that does not bypass the ‘literary’ and ‘historical’ readings, but rather enhances them; and to explore one possible model of letting this composite reading function as normative or authoritative’ (121).

After some general remarks on worldview and theology (122-131) Wright addresses the question of how to do ‘a specifically Christian theology’, which must include a normative element: not only what is believed but also what ought to be believed (131). He describes two traditional approaches: one which attempts to systematize ‘timeless truths or propositions’, another which ‘seeks actively to engage with current concerns in the world, whether through confrontation or integration’. Wright proposes, instead, a ‘narrative theology’ with a strong historical orientation (132) on the basis of the preceding analysis of how worldviews work:

i) Christian theology tells a coherent story about a creator and his creation;

ii) this story provides a set of answers to four central worldview questions: Who are we? Where are we? What is wrong? What is the solution?

iii) the worldview ‘has been given expression in a variety of socio-cultural symbols, both artifacts and cultural events’;

iv) the Christian worldview ‘gives rise to a particular type of praxis, a particular mode of being-in-the-world’ (132-134.

In the last section Wright proposes a rather creative model for a normative biblical theology. He rejects both a pre-critical ‘biblicistic proof-texting, as inconsistent with the nature of the texts’ and the modernistic dissociation of descriptive and normative readings of the Bible. Instead he argues for a narrative model for linking what is and what ought to be:

Suppose there exists a Shakespeare play, most of whose fifth act has been lost. The first four acts provide, let us suppose, such a remarkable wealth of characterization, such a crescendo of excitement within the plot, that it is generally agreed that the play ought to be staged. Nevertheless, it is felt inappropriate actually to write a fifth act once and for all: it would freeze the play into one form, and commit Shakespeare as it were to being prospectively responsible for work not in fact his own. Better, it might be felt, to give the key parts to highly trained, sensitive and experienced Shakespearian actors, who would immerse themselves in the first four acts, and in the language and cul­ture of Shakespeare and his time, and who would then be told to work out a fifth act for themselves (140).

A good fifth act will show a proper final development, not merely a repetition, of what went before. Nevertheless, there will be a rightness, a fittingness, about certain actions and speeches, about certain final moves in the drama, which will in one sense be self-authenticating, and in another gain authentication from their coherence with, their making sense of, the ‘authoritative’ previous text (141).

He takes the argument a step further by suggesting that the first four acts correspond to creation, fall, Israel, Jesus; the writing of the New Testament constitutes the first scene of the fifth act and provides hints (Rom.8; 1 Cor.15; parts of Revelation) as to how the play should end.

To sum up: I am proposing a notion of ‘authority’ which is not simply vested in the New Testament, or in ‘New Testament theology’, nor simply in ‘early Christian history’ and the like, conceived positivistically, but in the creator god himself, and this god’s story with the world, seen as focused on the story of Israel and thence on the story of Jesus, as told and retold in the Old and New Testaments, and as still requiring completion. This is a far more complex notion of authority than those usually tossed around in theological discourse. That is, arguably, what we need if we are to break through the log-jams caused by regular over-simplifications (143).

Part III: First century Judaism within the Greco-Roman world

The third part of the book consists of a survey of first century Judaism. Rather than summarize this very detailed historical overview of historical setting, social groupings, worldview, beliefs, and eschatological expectations, I will simply highlight what appear to be the most salient observations.

The developing diversity

Wright defends himself against the charge that he is reading Christian ideas or modes of thought back into Judaism by pointing out, among other things, that this project will have the effect of correcting certain Christian misconceptions: “Many ‘Christian’ readings of the gospels have screened out the political overtones of Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom; a fresh examination of the Jewish background will put that straight’ (149). He insists that first century Judaism and Christianity have a central worldview-feature in common: ‘the sense of a story now reaching its climax. And, most importantly, it is the same story. It is the story… especially of exile and restoration – or rather, of puzzlement as to whether the exile was really over or not…. It is here that fundamental continuity is to be sought; and this legitimates the attempt to study Judaism in such a way as to shed light on emerging Christianity’ (150).

The impact of the Maccabean crisis (167-164 BC) on Jewish identity and life is highlighted (158, 167), not least because it was the prototypical revolt against oppression:

From our review of the historical situation in the previous chapter it appears that the pressing needs of most Jews of the period had to do with liberation – from oppression, from debt, from Rome. Other issues, I suggest, were regularly seen in this light. The hope of Israel, and of most special-interest groups within Israel, was not for post mortem disembodied bliss, but for a national liberation that would fulfil the expectations aroused by the memory, and regular celebration, of the exodus, and, nearer at hand, of the Maccabaean victory. Hope focused on the coming of the kingdom of Israel’s god (169-170).

This leads to a survey of the main groupings within first-century Judaism (170-214): movements of revolt against Rome; the Pharisees; the Essenes; priests, aristocrats and Sadducees; and ‘ordinary Jews’. While this section is of general importance inasmuch as it describes the immediate religious and political context within which we must make sense of the story about Jesus, two particular emphases stand out. The first is the now quite well established view (associated especially with Sanders) that Pharisaic religion was not ‘the system of self-salvation so often anachronistically ascribed to them by Christians who knew little about the first century but a lot about the Pelagian controversy’ (189). ‘Their goals were the honour of Israel’s god, the following of his covenant charter, and the pursuit of the full promised redemption of Israel.’ Secondly, the point is made that within the context of first-century Jewish belief the idea of resurrection had more to do with the hope of national restoration than with speculation about life after death for the individual (200, 211).

Story, symbol, praxis: Israel’s worldview

Chapter eight considers how story, symbol and praxis together constitute Israel’s worldview. Wright argues that the great story of the Hebrew scriptures would have been read in the second-temple period as ‘a story in search of a conclusion’ (217). ‘This ending would have to incorporate the full liberation and redemption of Israel, an event which had not happened as long as Israel was being oppressed, a prisoner in her own land.’ How fundamental this was to the Jewish worldview is demonstrated by the fact that the inconclusiveness of Israel’s story expressed itself not only through narrative but also through religious symbolism and praxis. Of particular importance in this regard was Torah observation. Wright again insists that at issue here is not some legalistically motivated attempt to earn salvation but the overriding need to ‘maintain their god-given distinctiveness over against the pagan nations’ (237). He underlines the significance of this distinction for New Testament theology:

This conclusion, as we shall see later, is a point of peculiar significance for understanding both Jesus’ controversies and Pauline theology. The ‘works of Torah’ were not a legalist’s ladder, up which one climbed to earn the divine favour, but were the badges that one wore as the marks of identity, of belong­ing to the chosen people in the present, and hence the all-important signs, to oneself and one’s neighbours, that one belonged to the company who would be vindicated when the covenant god acted to redeem his people. They were the present signs of future vindication. This was how ‘the works of Torah’ func­tioned within the belief, and the hope, of Jews and particularly of Pharisees (238).

The beliefs of Israel

The Jewish worldview was constructed around a narrative core that consisted of three basic elements: monotheism, election and eschatology:

There is one god, who made the entire universe, and this god is in covenant with Israel. He has chosen her for a purpose: she is to be the light of the world. Faced with national crisis (and the story of second-temple Judaism is, as we have seen, one of semi-permanent crisis), this twin belief, monotheism and election, com­mitted any Jew who thought about it for a moment to a further belief: YHWH, as the creator and covenant god, was irrevocably committed to further action of some sort in history, which would bring about the end of Israel’s desolation and the vindication of his true people. Monotheism and election lead to eschatology, and eschatology means the renewal of the covenant (247).

Monotheism: first-century Jewish monotheism is creational, providential, and most importantly covenantal, because this is the means by which the problem of evil is addressed: ‘The creator calls a people through whom, somehow, he will act decisively within his creation, to eliminate evil from it and to restore order, justice and peace’ (251-252). Jewish belief in monotheism had nothing to do with ‘the numerical analysis of the inner being of Israel’s god himself. It had everything to do with the two-pronged fight against paganism and dualism’ (259).

Election and covenant: covenant theology functions on three levels: i) the creator ‘has not been thwarted irrevocably by the rebellion of his creation, but has called into being a people through whom he will work to restore his creation’; ii) Israel’s own sufferings are the consequence of infidelity to the covenant but holds that ‘our god will remain faithful and will restore us’; and iii) the sufferings and sins of individual Jews are met with forgiveness and restoration (260). Wright also maintains that ‘Israel’s covenantal vocation caused her to think of herself as the creator’s true humanity’ (262). But the implications of this belief for Israel’s relation to the nations are ambiguous. On the one hand, Israel was to be a light to the nations (cf. Is.49:6): ‘When Zion becomes what her god intends her to become, the Gentiles will come in and hear the word of YHWH.’ On the other, when Israel was oppressed by the nations, the thought is more that of resisting and destroying the forces that oppose the true god and his people (267).

Covenant and eschatology: here we come to the central argument that Jews of the second-temple period, despite the physical return of the people to the land and the rebuilding of the temple, regarded themselves as being still in ‘exile’. The present age, therefore, remained an ‘age of wrath’: ‘until the Gentiles are put in their place and Israel, and the Temple, fully restored, the exile is not really over, and the blessings promised by the prophets are still to take place’ (270). This problem is often defined in second-temple literature in terms of the covenant faithfulness (ie. ‘righteousness’, tsedaqah) of god: ‘when and how would Israel’s god act to fulfil his covenant promises?’ Wright underlines the extreme importance of this formulation of the problem for Paul’s theology.

The biblical prophets consistently articulate a two-fold motif: ‘Israel’s exile is the result of her own sin, idolatry and apostasy, and the problem will be solved by YHWH’s dealing with the sin and thus restoring his people to their inheritance.’ It must be emphasized, therefore, that to the first-century Jew the phrase ‘forgiveness of sins’ would most naturally apply to the nation as a whole, not to the individual. Wright argues that the sacrificial system should be understood ‘as a way of enacting and institutionalizing… the belief that Israel’s covenant god would restore the fortunes of his people’ (275). He then suggests that the national experience of exile may be interpreted not only as punishment but also as a sacrifice, a ‘righteous bearing of sin and evil’. The quite common belief that a period of intense suffering (‘birthpangs’) would precede the inauguration of the new age should also be brought into view here: ‘Israel will pass through intense and climactic suffering; after this she will be forgiven, and then and thus the world will be healed’ (278).

The hope of Israel

Wright begins by considering the nature of apocalyptic writing. The most important observation is that Jewish apocalyptic language cannot be read in ‘a crassly literalistic way’ to signify the end of the world; rather the ‘metaphorical language of apocalyptic invests history with theological meaning’ (284). ‘Far more important to the first-century Jew than questions of space, time and literal cosmology were the key issues of Temple, Land, and Torah, of race, economy and justice’ (285). The result of the literalist reading, which has dominated both modern popular Christian thought and modern New Testament scholarship, is a ‘dualistic belief in the unredeemableness of the present physical world’ that is in fact closer to Gnosticism than to biblical apocalyptic.

Central to Jewish apocalyptic literature is Daniel 7. Wright argues that ‘those who read this (very popular) chapter in the first century would have seen its meaning first and foremost in terms of the vindication of Israel after her suffering at the hands of the pagans’ (292). In other words, the ‘Son of man’ would generally have been understood as a representative figure only in a literary sense. The interpretive context is provided by Daniel 1-6: ‘Pagan pressure for Jews to compromise their ancestral religion must be resisted: the kingdoms of the world will finally give way to the everlasting kingdom of the one true god, and when that happens Jews who had held firm will themselves be vindicated’ (294).

In the context of first-century Jewish expectation ‘salvation’ is to be understood not as the enjoyment of a non-physical, ‘spiritual’ bliss following the destruction of the space-time universe but as national restoration. ‘The age to come, the end of Israel’s exile, was therefore seen as the inauguration of a new covenant between Israel and her god’ (301). This restoration is part of what it meant for Israel’s god to become king (307).

From a survey of Jewish beliefs regarding the messiah six conclusions are drawn: i) expectation was focused primarily on the nation; ii) under certain circumstances this expectation could be narrowed to a particular individual; iii) in this case the portrait of the individual messiah could be redrawn to fit the situation or person involved; iv) the main task of the messiah was ‘the liberation of Israel, and her reinstatement as the true people of the creator god’; v) the messiah will be the agent of Israel’s god, not an independent transcendent figure; and vi) there was no expectation that the messiah would suffer (319-320).

Wright argues that belief in resurrection arose in conjunction with ‘struggle to maintain obedience to Israel’s ancestral laws in the face of persecution…; it is what will happen after the great tribulation’ (331). But this belief also functions metaphorically as an expression of the hope of eventual national renewal following the continuing experience of exile. “As such, ‘resurrection’ was not simply a pious hope about new life for dead people. It carried with it all that was associated with the return from exile itself: forgiveness of sins, the re-establishment of Israel as the true humanity of the covenant god, and the renewal of all creation” (332).

Finally, in a similar fashion, the word ‘salvation’ is defined as the gift of Israel’s god to the whole people; individual Jews would find their own salvation within the context of national liberation and restoration, through membership of the covenant community. ‘The first-century question of soteriology then becomes: what are the badges of membership that mark one out in the group that is to be saved, vindicated, raised to life (in the case of members already dead) or exalted to power (in the case of those still alive)?’ (335).

Part IV: The first Christian century

In the fourth part of the book Wright outlines a history of the early church – a ‘quest for the kerygmatic church’ analogous to the well-established programme of a ‘quest for the historical Jesus. He begins by plotting a spectrum of scholarly opinions regarding the constitution of early Christianity: at one end of the scale, there is the view that the early church quickly became a Hellenistic movement (also incorporating Gnosticism); at the other, the view that the church emerged as ‘a Jewish messianic sect, going out into the world with the news that the god of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had now revealed himself savingly for all the world in the Jewish Messiah, Jesus’ (344). Currently the debate is quite finely balanced. ‘Many scholars are now of the opinion that the main problem in describing the origin of Christianity is to account fully both for the thorough Jewishness of the movement and for the break with Judaism that had come about at least by the middle of the second century.’

Wright sets out nine historical fixed points, in reverse chronological order, for an investigation of the development of the early church up to the middle of the second century: i) the martyrdom of Polycarp around AD 155/6; ii) Pliny’s letter to Trajan between AD 110 and 114 regarding the treatment of the illegal sect of Christians; iii) the letters of Ignatius written during his journey to Rome to face martyrdom under Trajan (AD 110-117); iv) the interrogation of certain blood-relatives of Jesus by Domitian around AD 90, recounted by Hegesippus and record in Eusebius’ History; v) the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70; vi) Nero’s scapegoating of Christians in Rome after the great fire in AD 64; vii) the stoning of ‘James, the brother of Jesus who was called the Christ’ in AD 62, recorded by Josephus; viii) the activity of Paul in the first half of the 50s; and ix) Suetonius’ evidence for the expulsion of the Jews from Rome because of ‘continuous disturbances a the instigation of Chrestus’ around AD 49.

As with the history of first-century Judaism, Wright proposes to begin not with particular writings but with the elements that made up the early Christian worldview: praxis, symbols, questions and answers, and, most importantly, the characteristic stories told by early Christians (358).

Under praxis he examines mission, sacrament (baptism and eucharist), worship with reference not only to God but also to Jesus, ‘a strong and clear ethical code’, the non-performance of animal sacrifices, and a willingness to suffer martyrdom for the sake of Christ (359-365). The early Christians constructed their world view around rather subversive alternatives to the regular symbols of both Judaism and paganism: the highly offensive symbol of the cross, supplemented by the symbolic status of Christian martyrs; mission to the whole world in place of the Land and ethnic identity in the Israel’s symbolic universe; the person of Jesus instead of the temple – a transfer of symbolism that “was forcing them to articulate the meaning of the word ‘god’ itself in a new way”; creeds and baptismal confessions as the new ‘badges of community’ membership instead of circumcision, kosher laws, and sabbath (365-369). Early Christians also, naturally, had a different set of answers to the four worldview questions (369-370): Who are we? Where are we? What is wrong? What is the solution?

Stories in early Christianity fall into two categories: large and small. Wright first considers the large stories told by the major writers of the New Testament: the Gospel writers, Paul, and the author of Hebrews. The central contention here is that in each case the overarching story about Israel is retold and subverted. So, for example:

Paul’s theology can… be plotted most accurately and fully on the basis that it represents his rethinking, in the light of Jesus and the divine spirit, of the fundamental Jewish beliefs: monotheism (of the creational and covenantal sort), election, and eschatology. This theology was integrated with the rethought narrative world at every point (407).

Much of chapter 14, which considers the place of smaller stories within early Christianity, has to do with the description of an appropriate method of form-critical analysis especially in reaction to the traditional form-critical assumption that the stories in the Gospels “reflected the life of the early church rather than the life of Jesus, in that the early church invented (perhaps under the guidance of the ‘spirit of Jesus’) sayings of Jesus to address problems in their own day’ (421). There are also some important remarks here about the nature of ‘mythological’ language: ‘the language of myth, and eschatological myths in particular (the sea, the fabulous monsters, etc.), are used in the biblical literature as complex metaphor systems to denote historical events and to invest them with their theological significance’ (425). Wright also addresses here the question of the sayings sources, Q and the Gospel of Thomas, and refutes the modern hypothesis (cf. Kloppenborg, Downing, Mack, Crossan) which asserts that Q and Thomas bear witness to a primitive conception of Jesus as ‘a teacher of aphoristic, quasi-Gnostic, quasi-Cynic wisdom’ (437).

Part four concludes with a ‘preliminary sketch’ of the early Christians:

Aims: the motivating force behind early Christian mission is found in ‘the central belief and hope of Judaism interpreted in the light of Jesus’. Added to this belief that Israel had now been redeemed and that, therefore, the time of the Gentiles had come, was the experience of the divine spirit:

…the overwhelming sense of being sustained and driven on by a new kind of inner motivation, which they could only attribute to the outpouring of the divine spirit, compelled the early Christians to the conclusion that the strange events concerning Jesus that they had witnessed really did constitute the fulfilment of Israel’s covenant expecta­tions, really were the end of exile and the beginning of the ‘age to come’ for which Israel had longed (446).

By themselves, however, this new belief and new experience were not enough to account historically for the development of early Christianity. We must also take into consideration the context of the new community within which belief and experience functioned.

Community and definition: community is defined in the first place sacramentally by baptism and eucharist, both of which ‘draw the eye up to the most striking feature of the life of the early community: the worship of Jesus’ (448). This worship was not ‘a sign that the communtiy was moving away from creational or covenantal monotheism, but rather a sign of a radical reinterpretation within that monotheism’. The common life of the church, centred sacramentally on Jesus, ‘functioned from the first in terms of an alternative family’. It also entailed a ‘new socio-political orientation’, which meant that the church was somewhat alienated from Jewish and pagan society and inevitably suffered persecution.

Development and variety: Wright identifies a number of axes along which early Christian diversity was expressed: various aspects of Jewish-Gentile diversity; salvation-historical continuity with Israel or an ahistorical faith with a ‘vertical eschatology’; flexible or fixed forms of ministry; literalist or metaphorical interpretations of apocalyptic imagery; low christology or high christology; the cross made central or marginal to a doctrine of salvation; charismatic enthusiasts or ‘early catholics’ (455). What held this diversity together was that the early Christians told consistent form of Israel’s story ‘which reached its climax in Jesus and which then issued in their spirit-given new life and task’ (456).

Theology: ‘Early Christianity was monotheistic in the sense in which Judaism was monotheistic and paganism was not; that is, the early Christians embraced creational, covenantal and hence eschatological monotheism’ (457). The doctrine necessarily entails two central dualities: of the creator and the creation, and of good and evil. The early Christians addressed these themes on the basis of the Jewish sources, but they consistently reorganized them around the fixed points of Jesus and the spirit. So for example, to the question, How is the creator active within the creation? they gave the answer: ‘this creator god had acted specifically and climactically in Jesus, and was now acting through his own spirit in a new, Jesus-related way’. To the question, How is the creator dealing with evil within his creation? they reaffirmed the original answer, which was that God intended to address the problem of evil through Israel, with two amendments: first, that through Jesus God had dealt with the problem of the evil that was within Israel; and secondly, that it was the people of Jesus, as a ‘continuation of Israel in a new situation’, who were to ‘fulfil Israel’s vocation on behalf of the world’ (458). Finally, the church took over the Jewish doctrine of salvation and transposed it to a law court setting so that it becomes fundamentally a question of the ‘righteousness of God’.

The major underlying difference between the Christian and the Jewish views at this point was that the early Christians believed that the verdict had already been announced in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Israel’s god had acted decisively, to demonstrate his covenant faithfulness, to deliver his people from their sins, and to usher in the inaugurated new covenant.

Hope: ‘Precisely because Jesus’ resurrection was the raising of one human being in the middle of the history of exile and misery, not the raising of all righteous human beings to bring the history of exile and misery to an end, there must be a further end in sight.’ This ‘further end’ consists of four elements, each of which is a ‘rereading of Jewish hopes in the light of Jesus and the divine spirit’ (459). i) Jesus will be vindicated as a divine prophet when Jerusalem and the temple are destroyed. ii) The kingdom of Israel’s God will spread into the whole world. iii) Christians believed that Israel’s God would ‘physically recreate those who were his own, at some time and in some space the other side of death’ (460). iv) Finally, there was a expectation of the return of Jesus. This is not the subject of texts which speak of the ‘coming of the son of man on a cloud’, which have to do rather with his vindication through resurrection and exaltation and through the destruction of Jerusalem. The return of Jesus belongs instead to the renewal of the whole created (462).

Part I: Introduction

The book begins by setting in place the two poles of 20^th century New Testament scholarship, Schweitzer and Bultmann, who in radically different ways demonstrated that the fundamental puzzle of the New Testament was an historical one (5).

The legacy of these ‘giants’ has been a split between history and theology that has dominated recent western Christian thought: either the writing of New Testament history is made subservient to theological presuppositions or it is undertaken with the expectation that orthodox theology will be undermined. So write insists:

The underlying argument of this book is that the split is not warranted: that rigorous history (i.e. open-ended investigation of actual events in first-century Palestine) and rigorous theology (i.e. open-ended investigation of what the word ‘god’, and hence the adjective ‘divine’, might actually refer to) belong together, and never more so than in discussion of Jesus. (8)

Wright’s aim, therefore, is to reconnect history and theology – the ‘Jesus of History’ and the ‘Christ of faith’. He likens historical study to the prodigal son of Jesus’ story, who is in the process of being rehabilitated but who is not always welcomed by the various ‘elder brothers’ of Christian orthodoxy (9-10).

Wright then outlines the various ‘quests’ for Jesus that have been undertaken throughout the history of New Testament theology.

1. The primary interest of the reformers was in the death of Jesus as a saving event that, in practice, had very little to do with the historical circumstances of his life: “The reformers had very thorough answers to the question ‘why did Jesus die?’; they did not have nearly such good answers to the question ‘why did Jesus live?’” (14). In short, they were much more interested in theology than in history.

2. The critical movement, beginning with Reimarus (1694-1768), the ‘great iconoclast’, reacted against theological orthodoxy and sketched a supposedly ‘historical’ Jesus in keeping with the ideals of rationalism – a ‘timeless teacher of eternal verities’ (20). For Schweitzer, on the other hand, Jesus could only be understood against the backdrop of a thoroughly Jewish apocalypticism: he believed that God was about to bring the world to an end. ‘When this did not happen, and the great wheel of history refused to turn, he threw himself upon it, was crushed in the process, but succeeded in turning it none the less’ (19).

3. Schweitzer’s critique of the old ‘quest’ for Jesus was so devastating and his own solution so disturbing that New Testament theology again lost its historical nerve and recentred itself around the Christ of faith. Bultmann translated eschatology into existentialism. The ‘personality’ of Jesus could not be recovered from the documents and was in any case irrelevant for theology. The stories found in the gospels, purporting to be historical, were in reality faith-statements about the risen Christ and provided evidence only for the faith of the early church. Moreover, to have any value for the church today, they would have to be stripped of their mythological trappings – demythologized. The next change of tack came with Käsemann’s famous lecture on ‘The problem of the Historical Jesus’ in 1953, in which he argued, in Wright’s words, that ‘if Jesus was not earthed in history then he might be pulled in any direction, might be made the hero of any theological or political programme’ (23). This ‘new quest’, however, has proved less successful than we might have hoped, chiefly because it failed to shake off ‘the outdated view of apocalyptic as meaning simply the expectation of the end of the world, in a crudely literalistic sense’ (24).

Wright concludes that 200 years of research has ‘put the historical question firmly and irrevocably on the theological map, but without providing a definite answer to it’. The great works of modern systematic theology, and especially christology, have indicated the importance of the question of the historical Jesus, but Wright maintains that at no point has ‘the full impact of the historical evidence been allowed to influence very much the dogmatic conclusions reached’ 26).

The ‘New Quest’ renewed: Jesus seminar, Mack, Crossan, Borg

1. Wright regards the ‘Jesus Seminar’, founded by Robert Funk in 1985, as essentially a reinvigoration of ‘post-Bultmannian study of Jesus’ (29). He levels two principle charges against the project. First, it has relied on a positivistic methodology that is ‘quite out of place in serious historical scholarship’. Secondly, ‘the way the system operates… demonstrates simply that a certain swathe of modern American scholarship has opted, largely a priori in terms of the present exercise, for one particular way of understanding who Jesus was and how the early church developed’ 31-32). Wright concludes:

What is afoot, at least in the ‘results’ available thus far, is not the detailed objective study of individual passages, leading up to a new view of Jesus and the early church. It is a particular view of Jesus and the early church, working its way through into a detailed list of sayings that fit with this view. Once this is recognized, it should also be seen that the real task, still awaiting all students of Jesus, is th at of major hypothesis and serious verification, not pseudo-atomistic work on apparently isolated fragments. (33)

2. Burton Mack argues for a two stage development in early Christianity: the Q material in Matthew and Luke casts Jesus as a Cynic sage telling subversive stories; Mark, however, invents a myth about Jesus as the innocent son of God who announces the end of the world, which forms the basis for the later Hellenistic Christ-cult (35-36). Wright suggests that Mack’s rejection of the apocalyptic Jesus had more than a little to do with a widespread academic reaction against Reaganism in the 1980s. He also offers a critique of the Jesus Seminar’s reliance on Q for developing a portrait of Jesus and the relegation of the apocalyptic material in the gospels to a secondary stage of theological reflection (40-44).

3. Wright regards Crossan’s book The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant as a brilliant piece of inventive scholarship but ‘almost entirely wrong’ (44). The heart of Jesus’ activity, according to Crossan, is a highly subversive combination of ‘magic and meal’. On the one hand, miracles were ‘what the Kingdom looked like at the level of political reality’; on the other, the sharing of meals represented ‘a strategy for building or rebuilding peasant community on radically different principles from those of honor and shame, patronage and clientage’ (57-58). Wright’s objection to this vision is not that it gives Jesus’ ministry a social and political slant but that ‘in grasping the way in which Jesus’ programme cut against the normal social expectations of Mediterranean peasant culture, Crossan… has radically and consistently underplayed the specifically Jewish dimension both of the culture itself and of Jesus’ agenda for it’ (58).

4. A section is devoted to the view held widely by proponents of this renewed ‘New Quest’ that the Jesus material has much in common with Cynic philosophy. Wright admits the possibility of a superficial similarity between Christianity and Cynicism but insists that the core of the Jesus tradition is not the timeless challenge of the Cynic but ‘the very specific note that Israel’s god, the creator of the world, is bringing Israel’s and the world’s history to an awesome climax, so that urgent action is called for if Israel is to escape cataclysmic judgment’ (72).

5. Wright locates Marcus Borg between the Jesus Seminar and the “post-Schweitzer ‘Third Quest’”. Borg follows Schweitzer in setting Jesus within Jewish apocalyptic but argues for an historical and political interpretation of apocalyptic language. He depicts Jesus as a rather complex, multilayered figure: religious ecstatic, healer, wisdom teacher, social prophet, and movement founder (76). Wright’s main criticism is that Borg’s Jesus uses the language of eschatology to express ‘the essentially timeless truth that God is always available to human beings, and requires compassion rather than exclusive and oppressive ways of life’ (77).

In conclusion, Wright lists the main weaknesses of the New Quest: i) an over-reliance on the sayings of Jesus; ii) the failure to develop a large historical hypothesis; and iii) a flawed account of Christian origins. He summarizes the difference between the renewed New Quest and the Third Quest:

The ‘Jesus Seminar’ has rejected Jewish eschatology, particularly apocalyptic, as an appropriate con­text for understanding Jesus himself, and in order to do so has declared the Markan narrative a fiction. The ‘Third Quest’, without validating Mark in any simplistic way, has placed Jesus precisely within his Jewish eschatological context, and has found in consequence new avenues of secure historical investigation opening up before it. (81)

The ‘Third Quest’

With the shift to the ‘Third Quest’ certain basic questions arise:

Jesus’ message is evaluated, not for its timeless significance, but for the meaning it must have had for the audience of his own day, who had their minds full of poverty and politics, and would have had little time for theological abstractions or timeless verities. The crucifixion, long recognized as an absolute bedrock in history, is now regularly made the centre of our understanding: what must Jesus have been like if he ended up on a Roman cross? (85)

Wright identifies five major questions that set the agenda for the Third Quest, ‘with a sixth always waiting in the wings’.

1. How does Jesus fit into Judaism? Was he a thoroughly Jewish type, indistinguishable from other figures of his time? Was he quite out-of-place in his culture, an alien? Or does he confront and challenge Judaism, seeking to recover ‘a key part of the Jewish heritage itself’ (93)? This is Borg’s argument: Jesus comes into conflict with the Pharisees ‘not because Judaism is the wrong sort of religion; it is because Israel has forgotten her vocation’. Wright summarizes at this juncture the argument of The New Testament and the People of God about apocalyptic language, which he characterizes as ‘an elaborate metaphor-system for investing historical events with theological significance’ (96). Jesus’ warnings about imminent judgment, therefore, ‘were intended to be taken as denoting (what we would call) socio-political events, seen as the climactic moment in Israel’s history, and, in consequence, as constituting a summons to national repentance’ (97). This has the implication, finally, that Jesus’ theology was thoroughly ‘political’, if by ‘politics’ we mean ‘the concern about the structure and purpose of a historic community’ (Borg).

2. What were Jesus’ aims? The traditional pre-critical view is that ‘Jesus came to die for the sins of the world, and/or to found the church’. The Old Quest, and to a large extent the New Quest, regarded Jesus as essentially a teacher. Most Third Quest writers start with the assumption that Jesus’ purpose had to do with the kingdom. Three questions need to be addressed: i) Did Jesus change his mind at any point in his life? ii) Did he go to Jerusalem with the intention of dying there? iii) Did he believe that he had a special or unique role in the kingdom?

3. Why did Jesus die? Wright carefully differentiates between historical and theological answers to this question and then sets out the range of possible answers to the historical question. He suggests, however, that the Third Quest has tended to focus in particular on Jesus’ attitude towards the temple as a primary reason for his death (108). This sort of investigation, however, does not disqualify the theological question because the theological interpretation (‘Christ died for our sins’) was applied to his death very early in the Christian tradition.

4. How and why did the early church begin? In first century Judaism the execution of a messianic or revolutionary leader usually led to the defeat or disappearance of his followers. This did not happen following the death of Jesus. So the question arises:

why and how did the early disciples, shattered as they had been by the crucifixion of their master, regroup and go out to face persecution for declaring that in him the hope of Israel had quite literally come to life? Why did they then organize themselves and act in the way that they did, and, in particular, why (granted their abiding commitment to Jewish-style monotheism) did they begin very early on to worship Jesus, and to include him in Jewish-style monotheistic formulae? (111)

5. Why are the gospels what they are? This question goes beyond the scope of the current book, but it remains a test of any historical hypothesis about Jesus that it is also able to explain why the gospels are what they are (112-113).

The sixth question: “How does the Jesus we discover by doing ‘history’ relate to the contemporary church and the world?”. Wright reiterates the point that theology has often regarded historical research as a threat: ‘To put it bluntly, if one locates Jesus in first-century Palestine, one risks the possibility that he might have little to say to twentieth-century Europe, America or anywhere else’ (117). There are two particular areas of interest here. The first is a perceived tendency in modern scholarship to want to correct older ‘anti-semitic’ theologies. The second is the sensitive question of christology: ‘Is it possible to proceed, by way of historical study, to a portrait of Jesus which is sufficient of itself to evoke, or at least legitimate, that worship which Christianity has traditionally offered to him?” (120) The difficulty of reconciling the historical and theological readings of the gospels is illustrated with reference to three writers (Schillebeecks, Harvey, and Witherington) who have not been altogether successful in their attempts to move from the Jesus of history to the Christ of faith.

Wright suggests, in conclusion, that history may result in a new perspective on theology: “when the New Testament writers speak of their encounter with Jesus as an encounter with Israel’s god, they are redefining what ‘god’ (or even ‘God’) means at least as much as they are redefining who Jesus was and is” (123).

Prodigals and paradigms

Wright returns to the parable of the ‘prodigal son’ and makes a remarkable interpretive proposal – that it should be understood fundamentally as ‘the story of Israel, in particular of exile and restoration’ (126). Israel went into exile ‘in a far country’ because of her own folly and is now returning ‘simply because of the fantastically generous, indeed prodigal, love of her god’. (See the commentary for a discussion of this interpretation.) The retelling, however, is subversive in that the ‘real return from exile, including the real resurrection from the dead, is taking place, in an extremely paradoxical fashion, in Jesus’ own ministry’. The parable, according to this reading, encapsulates perfectly the shape of Jesus’ ministry and his place within the story of Israel. By associating with sinners Jesus acts out ‘the great healing, the great restoration, of Israel’; he is ‘reconstituting Israel around himself’ (130-131).

This approach points to a ‘basic hypothesis’ that will address the five questions outlined in the previous section. Wright’s overview of this process is worth quoting at length:

(1) Jesus fits believably into first-century Judaism, retelling its stories in new but thoroughly com­prehensible ways. He speaks and acts, and is perceived to be speaking and acting, prophetically, challenging his hearers to recognize that in him the new thing for which they have longed is, however paradoxically, coming to pass.

(2) He believes himself, much as John the Baptist had done, to be charged with the god-given responsibility of regrouping Israel around him­self. But this regrouping is no longer a preliminary preparation for the return from exile, the coming of the kingdom; it is the return, the redemption, the resurrection from the dead. As a result, it is also a counter-Temple move­ment, and is perceived as such. It also puts Jesus in a different position to John.

(3) For all these reasons, it will arouse hostility. During the course of Jesus’ ministry, this may well come from the Pharisees. If the message is ever to be spoken or acted in Jerusalem itself, hostility will come from the Temple authorities. If the Romans hear of a major renewal movement among the Jews, they too will want to stamp it out.

(4) If this proclamation were to end simply with the shameful death of its proclaimer, that would be that: a beautiful dream, with all the charm, and the brief life-span, of a butterfly. But if it were vindicated after that shameful death, there would be every reason to continue to believe that the kingdom had indeed arrived, in however paradoxical a fashion.

Every reason, too, for the all-embracing wel­come then to be extended in a new way to Gentiles; and (5) for a writer like Luke to retell the original story with an eye to this new, but theologically consistent, setting. Thus, in a nutshell, the parable of the prodigal father points to the hypothesis of the prophetic son: the son, Israel-in-person, who will himself go into the far country, who will take upon himself the shame of Israel’s exile, so that the kingdom may come, the covenant be renewed, and the prodigal welcome of Israel’s god, the creator, be extended to the ends of the earth. (132-133, paragraph breaks added)

Wright moves on to discuss the role of stories in peasant society, drawing especially on the work of Kenneth Bailey and his description of ‘informal and controlled oral traditions’ (134). This is part of his argument against the renewed New Quest: ‘the narrative form is unlikely to be a secondary accretion around an original aphorism: stories are fundamental’ (136).

Finally, in this introductory part of the book, Wright discusses some methodological issues relating to ‘worldviews’ and ‘mindsets’. He describes a cyclical analytical process: a person’s actions and words give rise to a characteristic praxis, in the light of which the actions and words are seen to tell stories, generate and modify symbols, and address the deep questions that all worldviews attempt to answer. This plotting of a person’s worldview/mindset provides the basis for an analysis of beliefs and aims, and of consequent beliefs and intentions, which brings back to the starting point of actions and words (142).

This analytical structure will shape the programme for the remainder of the work:

The aim of the next Part of the book will thus be to plot Jesus’ distinctive mindset within the Jewish worldview of his day. We shall first set out the basic material we know, by more or less common consent, about Jesus; this leads directly to the praxis which his contemporaries regarded as character­istic of him, which we shall study in chapter 5. We shall then examine the stories Jesus told, including of course the parables (chapters 6-8); his attitude towards the symbols of Judaism, and the conflict which this brought about (chapter 9); and the answers he gave to the basic worldview questions (chap­ter 10). Once we have thus completed the four quadrants of the worldview, we will be able, in Part III, to explore the beliefs and aims in which this found particular expression, and so see our way back towards the particular consequent beliefs and intentions which generated the central actions through which his public career gained its particular shape and came to its particular conclusion. In the course of this we will look in particular at Jesus’ own sense of vocation and identity, and his attitude to his own approaching death. (142-143)

Part II: Profile of a prophet

Part III: The aims and beliefs of Jesus