The Challenge of Jesus

By N. T. Wright

The Challenge of Jesus makes the arguments laid out in Jesus and the Victory of God accessible to lay readers. Bestselling author and theologian N.T.Wright does more than just rehash these arguments: he adds a discussion of the resurrection, and addresses the prickly problem of relevance.

In the first six chapters of The Challenge of Jesus, Wright tackles many of the questions of the historical Jesus debate. He then moves on to address how all these historical-cum-theological issues are significant for Christians living in a postmodern world. The Challenge of Jesus is ideal for those beginning academic studies or just wanting to go deeper with their Christology and understanding of the person and work of Christ.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Release date: May 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9780281073870

N. T. Wright

N. T. Wright is the former Bishop of Durham in the Church of England and one of the world’s leading Bible scholars. He serves as the chair of New Testament and Early Christianity at the School of Divinity at the University of St. Andrews as well as Senior Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford University. He has been featured on ABC News, Dateline, The Colbert Report, and Fresh Air. Wright is the award-winning author of many books, including Paul: A Biography, Simply Christian, Surprised by Hope, The Day the Revolution Began, Simply Jesus, After You Believe, and Scripture and the Authority of God.

Book preview

The Challenge of Jesus

Second Edition

N. T. Wright

For Simon Kingston,

publisher and friend

Contents

Preface to the Second Edition

Preface to the First Edition

1 The Challenge of Studying Jesus

2 The Challenge of the Kingdom

3 The Challenge of the Symbols

4 The Crucified Messiah

5 Jesus and God

6 The Challenge of Easter

7 Walking to Emmaus in a Postmodern World

8 The Light of the World

Notes

Index

Preface to the Second Edition

Jesus continues to challenge us all in various ways. When I wrote the original lectures on which this book was based, in something of a hurry for the conference in January 1999, I never imagined the twists and turns that would be taken in the scholarly world, in the popular Christian world, and in the wider world of the dangerous twenty-first century that was about to dawn. Let me say something about each of these. I remain convinced that the picture I sketched of Jesus, and of the challenge he presents to those who follow him in today’s world, makes good sense both historically, theologically and practically. But new things have happened nonetheless.

In the world of scholarship, things have not stood still. Though I have been working in other areas, in the life of the Church and the study of St Paul, three areas of continuing discussion have nonetheless caught my eye.

First, there has been the Temple. When I began research, few people either at the scholarly or the popular level were discussing the relationship between Jesus and the Temple. Geza Vermes, in his famous Jesus the Jew, did not think Jesus’ Temple-action merited much attention. Ed Sanders changed all that in his Jesus and Judaism, making the same incident central; but even Sanders did not, it seems, appreciate just how extraordinary Jesus’ claims actually were. The Temple, after all, was supposedly the place where heaven and earth met and did business. For many modern Christians, the Temple has appeared as simply a rather grand church-like structure: a place of worship, but not really the microcosm, the ‘little world’ in which heaven and earth were contained in a tiny space. Since that is the language Christians often use about incarnation, we should perhaps pay more attention to Jesus’ engagement with the Temple, and his implicit claim to upstage or even replace it, in terms of his implicit claim about himself. Of course, the early Christians continued to meet and worship in the Jerusalem Temple. It was not, so to speak, a straight swap. But by Paul’s day they already thought of their new movement (as Qumran had done before them) as in some sense a new Temple.

The second theme I have continued to explore relates closely to this. In Jesus and the Victory of God, and then briefly in The Challenge of Jesus, I suggested that one way to grasp Jesus’ self-understanding was in terms of the ancient Jewish belief that Israel’s God,

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, had long promised to return in glorious presence to Jerusalem, and indeed to the Temple. Nowhere in second-Temple literature do we find anyone saying that this had in fact happened. The Gospels, however, frame their story of Jesus in exactly that way. Mark opens with quotations from Malachi and Isaiah which are explicitly about getting ready for

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’s return. John’s prologue climaxes with a verse that resonates with the coming of the divine glory into the tabernacle in Exodus 40, into Solomon’s Temple in 1 Kings 8, and into the prophesied new Temple in Ezekiel 43. The more I have studied this theme the more I have come to think that it is central to most if not all New Testament Christology. And I think it was central to the understanding of Jesus himself.

Two comments about this are in order. First, one still meets the old sneer that ‘Jesus talked about God, but the Church talked about Jesus’ – as though this somehow meant that Jesus would have been horrified to hear the strange things his followers would go on to say about him. But this misses the point. Jesus regularly talked about God, about the Father, about God’s Kingdom – precisely in order to explain what he himself was doing and why he was doing it. He really did believe that he was launching the long-awaited ‘Kingdom of God’ on earth as in heaven. And he really did believe it would cost him his life.

Second, however, this does not make me fall back into the opposite idea which one still meets, that Jesus simply walked around ‘knowing he was divine’. If there is a danger of a modern Ebionite view – Jesus just as a very good human being – there is also a danger of modern docetism, where Jesus was so ‘divine’ that he only seemed to be human but wasn’t really so. Here, of course, we have to be careful. I do believe, and have argued in this book, that Jesus went about doing what he did and saying what he said because he really did believe that it was his vocation to embody the healing, rescuing, judging, life-giving and wisdom-bringing arrival of Israel’s long-awaited God. My point is about the sort of knowledge this seems to have been. The scenes in Gethsemane, and on the cross – not to mention the temptation after Jesus’ baptism and its dangerous repetition by Peter at Caesarea Philippi – indicate that Jesus’ awareness of his vocation was just that, a faith-awareness, liable to testing, to challenge and even to doubt. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t real, or that it wasn’t true.

Perhaps I should say that I have a high view of the faith-awareness of vocation. I have been privileged to work with many people as they have wrestled with God’s call on their lives. Often what they say is, ‘I believe that God has called me.’ It is then the Church’s task, receiving their ministry, to declare that God’s people recognize and know the truth of that vocation. That is only a partial analogy, of course, but I hope it may be helpful. This discussion ought at least to remind us that according to the New Testament itself we do not know very clearly who ‘God’ is until we look at Jesus. Too often the Church has assumed it knows exactly who God is (perhaps the high, detached divinity of Deism?), and then has projected on to Jesus a view of what that ‘god’ might look like if he were to become incarnate. According to the New Testament, we find out about God by looking at Jesus, not the other way round.

One of the problems with the ‘standard’ or ‘orthodox’ view (that the main thing about Jesus is that he knew he was divine and wanted to communicate and demonstrate this to people) is that, as I have now come to realize, it can all too easily obscure what this embodied God-of-Israel had come to do. It is possible to look at Jesus, to say, ‘Oh yes, he’s divine’, and assume that this makes one a ‘sound’ Christian, ready and waiting to ‘go to heaven’. But the point of ‘Jesus’ divinity’ is that Jesus really was launching God’s Kingdom on earth as in heaven. I have now come to see it like this: the ‘divinity’ of Jesus is the key in which the music is set, but it is not the tune that is being played. The tune is ‘the Kingdom of God’.

This, too, has been attacked from two angles, and this brings me to my third point of scholarship. In what sense did ‘the Kingdom come’ in the public career of Jesus, and then supremely through his crucifixion and resurrection? Many have pushed back at my exposition of the Kingdom in Jesus’ teaching, insisting once more that he really did expect the world to end, or something like that, within a few years. I have repeatedly argued against this on the grounds of the way that ‘apocalyptic’ language actually works, both in the Jewish world and in early Christian writings. Then comes the divide: some want to say, ‘Jesus promised the end of the world and got it wrong’, and others want to say, ‘Jesus said the Kingdom was coming quickly and he meant the Transfiguration’, or something like that. The latter then sometimes go on to say that the Kingdom won’t come properly and fully until Jesus returns. This, it seems to me, ignores what all four evangelists say, in their own ways: that the crucifixion really was the enthronement of Jesus as ‘the King of the Jews’, and that when Matthew’s risen Jesus claims ‘all authority . . . in heaven and on earth’, this is true to the kingdom-understanding of the whole early Church and of Jesus himself. No doubt this debate will rumble on.

But it is this theme of God’s Kingdom which has had a surprising effect (to me) at the level of less scholarly church life. I have naturally been delighted that many leaders and teachers in traditions other than my own have latched on to my work. I have been invited to Vineyard churches, to ‘emerging’ churches, to various postmodern gatherings of Christians with no label except a general dissatisfaction with what they have found in the churches where they grew up. I have often expressed an amused surprise: what are such people doing flocking around a middle-aged Anglican bishop? The answer seems to be that Jesus’ teaching about the Kingdom of God, which I set out in Jesus and the Victory of God and then again in the present book, has been for such people like a cold drink on a hot day. It’s what they have been waiting for, only they didn’t know it. Again and again I have been told, ‘My church never taught or preached about this, but it is the most relevant thing I’ve heard.’ The Kingdom has been a closed book to many, and I, quite by accident as it were, seem to have prised it open just a little.

This at once raises the question of what the Kingdom might mean in the early Church, and then again in our own day. When it comes to the early Church, one litmus test is to ask what Jesus meant when he responded to the disciples’ question in Acts 1.6: ‘Lord, is it at this time that you are going to restore the kingdom to Israel?’ Many Christians think that Jesus’ answer (‘It is not for you to know times or seasons . . . but you will receive power, and you will be my witnesses’), is basically ‘No, but. . .’: No, the Kingdom isn’t coming yet, but you in the meantime have a job to do. I think it is basically ‘Yes, but . . .’: Yes, the Kingdom is indeed now well and truly launched, but the job you have to do is not that of the lordly courtiers sitting at my right and my left organizing a kingdom in the normal sense. The job you have to do, in the power of the Spirit, is to go out and bear witness. When God wants to sort out the world, as the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount make clear, he doesn’t send in the tanks. He sends in the meek, the broken, the justice-hungry people, the peacemakers, the pure-heart people and so on. Read Acts and watch them do it. And this, I am convinced, is what Jesus himself had in mind all along. He really did think he was kick-starting God’s Kingdom on earth, but just as he radically redefined the way in which the decisive battle would be won (the cross), so he radically redefined the way in which that victory would be implemented (the servant-vocation). That is what Mark 10.35–45 is all about. The Church has regularly read all this wrong, looking only for ‘atonement’ (‘the son of man came to give his life as a ransom for many’) and failing to see the redefinition of power within which that vital statement is contained (‘the rulers of this age do things one way . . . but we’re going to do it the other way’). I now see this even more clearly than I did 15 years ago. Maybe a taste of the corridors of power in British society has alerted me to the gospel-shaped redefinition of power more than I realized at the time.

And maybe that explains the way I now see the new century in which we live. Nobody imagined, in January 1999, what would happen less than three years later, as planes smashed into buildings and the world changed for ever. The Western world, and the Western Church, was embarrassingly unprepared not just for the terrible and wicked deeds of September 11, 2001 but for the worldview-challenges that it offered. For far too long, Western Christianity had believed, at least implicitly, that religion and politics were two such separate things that one didn’t really need to think too hard about how they might engage with one another. The reaction to the atrocity was then predictable: meet fire with fire. The result of that, in turn, has also been predictable: there is far more unrest in the Middle East, and there are far more terrorists, than there were 15 years ago.

In this strange, dark new world, we urgently need new light. Jesus of Nazareth brought that light a long time ago. The world, and the Church, has found it too dazzling, and we have done our best to cover it up, talking busily about a private spirituality in the present and a ‘heavenly’ salvation in the future. But when Jesus taught us to pray that God’s Kingdom would come, and God’s will would be done, on earth as in heaven, he actually meant it. When he said that all authority had been given him on earth as in heaven, he meant that too. We have scarcely begun to figure out how this ought to work out in practice. But I hope and pray that this little book will be, for some at least, an introduction to what Jesus himself meant by it at the time, and hence an invitation to ponder what he might mean by it today and tomorrow, as he summons us still to be his witnesses to the ends of the earth.

N. T. Wright

St Mary’s College, St Andrews

Preface to the First Edition

I have three concerns throughout this present work. The first is for historical integrity in talking about Jesus. Many Christians have been, frankly, sloppy in their thinking and talking about Jesus, and hence, sadly, in their praying and in their practice of discipleship. We cannot assume that by saying the word ‘Jesus’, still less the word ‘Christ’, we are automatically in touch with the real Jesus who walked and talked in first-century Palestine, the Jesus who, according to the letter to the Hebrews, is the same yesterday, today and for ever. We are not at liberty to manufacture a different Jesus. Nor will it do to suggest that, because we have the Gospels in our New Testaments, we know all we need to about Jesus. As the material presented here will show, and my longer works will reveal in much more detail, Christian traditions have often radically misunderstood the picture of Jesus in those Gospels, and only by hard historical work can we move towards a fuller comprehension of what the Gospels themselves were trying to say.

The second concern is for the Christian discipleship that professes to follow the true Jesus. The disciplines of prayer and Bible study need to be rooted again and again in Jesus himself if they are not to become idolatrous or self-serving. We have often muted Jesus’ stark challenge, remaking him in our own image and then wondering why our personal spiritualities have become less than exciting and life-changing. Throughout what follows I hope to be addressing this, at least implicitly. As one person commented to me after a lecture I’d given at a conference, the Jesus whom I describe is an exciting and deeply interesting human being – something that could not always be said for the stained-glass Christ-figure of much Christian imagination, whether in the Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, or evangelical traditions.

Third, I have been particularly concerned to put into the minds, hearts and hands of the next generation of thinking Christians the Jesus-shaped model of, and motivation for, a mission that will transform our world in the power of Jesus’ gospel. Those in the universities and professions of our world who desire to be loyal Christians need to think through afresh the issues of what allegiance to Jesus means in practice. It is not enough to say one’s prayers in private, maintain high personal morality, and then go to work to rebuild the tower of Babel. The substance and structure of the different aspects of our world need to be interrogated in the light of the unique achievement of Jesus and of our commission to be for the world what he was for the Israel of his day.

This final concern explains why, in the last two chapters in particular, I have been at pains to address, albeit briefly, the question of our present cultural climate in the Western world. The loose and sometimes misleading label of ‘postmodernity’ serves as a signpost to many features of our culture that are both disturbing and challenging. Some Christians find this deeply threatening. I believe that the message of Jesus Christ enables us to look these issues in the face, recognizing the ways in which postmodernity has a point to make that we dare not ignore, but insisting that we must now go through it and out the other side into new tasks and possibilities. Just as integrity demands that we think clearly and rigorously about Jesus himself, so it also demands that we think clearly and rigorously about the world in which we follow him today, the world we are called to shape with the loving, transforming message of the gospel.

N. T. Wright

1

The Challenge of Studying Jesus

INTRODUCTION

A friend of mine, lecturing in a theological college in Kenya, introduced his students to ‘The Quest for the Historical Jesus’. This, he said, was a movement of thought and scholarship that, in its earlier forms, was carried on largely in Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He had not gone far into his lecture, explaining this search for Jesus, when one of his students interrupted him. ‘Teacher,’ he said (‘I knew I was in trouble’, my friend commented, ‘as soon as he called me teacher!’), ‘if the Germans have lost Jesus, that is their problem. We have not lost him. We know him. We love him.’

Research into Jesus himself has long been controversial, not least among devout Christians. Several people in the wider Christian world wonder if there is anything new to say about Jesus, and if the attempt to say something fresh is not a denial either of the Church’s traditional teaching or of the sufficiency of Scripture. I want to grasp this nettle right away, and explain why I regard it not just as permissible, but as vitally necessary that we grapple afresh with the question of who Jesus was and therefore who he is. In doing so I in no way want to deny or undermine the knowledge of Jesus of which the Kenyan student spoke, and which is the common experience of the Church down the centuries and across widely differing cultures. I see the historical task, rather, as part of the appropriate activity of knowledge and love, to get to know even better the one whom we claim to know and follow. If even in a human relationship of knowledge and love there can be misunderstandings, false impressions, wrong assumptions, which need to be teased out and dealt with, how much more so when the one to whom we are relating is Jesus himself.

I believe, in fact, that the historical quest for Jesus is a necessary and non-negotiable aspect of Christian discipleship, and that we in our generation have a chance to be renewed in discipleship and mission precisely by means of this quest. I want to explain and justify these beliefs from the outset. There are, however, huge problems and even dangers within the quest, as one would expect from anything that is heavy with potential for the Kingdom of God, and I shall need to deal briefly with these as well.

There are well-known pitfalls in even addressing the subject, and we may as well be clear about them. It is desperately easy, if among like-minded friends, to become complacent. We hear of wild new theories about Jesus. Every month or two some publisher comes up with a blockbuster saying that he was a New Age guru, an Egyptian freemason, or a hippie revolutionary. Every year or two some scholar or group of scholars comes up with a new book, full of imposing footnotes, to tell us that Jesus was a peasant Cynic, a wandering wordsmith, or the preacher of liberal values born out of