Reading Wright, JVG, Chapter 1
Jesus Then and Now
At last I arrive at my goal, which is to read and blog through the chapters in N. T. Wright’s magnificent work, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996). This is the second volume of his Christian Origins and the Question of God series, currently made up of four volumes in five books (Paul is split into two books). At the outset of this reading journey, I had noted JVG was my primary focus, but having read JVG the first time before The New Testament and the People of God (NTPG), it was obvious to me NTPG is a necessary read first; thus, it was important to walk through it here prior to JVG. This is my third time through JVG and I am looking forward to a much deeper analysis of the book by writing on it. And so let us begin in the first chapter (pp. 3-27).
How simple was the Christianity of my youth! It was refreshingly naïve. Perhaps expected—a child thinks as a child—but adulthood requires those childish things to be put away. I’m not sure the church does its people a service by avoiding the ‘adult’ things; it certainly makes the transition from child to adulthood that much more difficult (not to mention the lack of adult things for the adults). It should come as no surprise that some don’t remain Christian, because they have been woefully unprepared and when the scorching heat arrives, they wither and die.
I had always assumed that the material contained in the Gospels were stories of what actually occurred in real history. Imagine my surprise discovering that a large number of Biblical scholars do not think the material in the Gospels are actual history, but rather an invention of the early church in the first century. Of course, it was to be expected that people that doubts about the miracles, and the central miracle of all, that of the resurrection, but doubts surrounding even the basic stories!? These scholars make Doubting Thomas look like a paragon of faith.
Enter the split between “the Christ of faith” versus “the historical Jesus.” The Gospels, the critical scholars will argue, present a “Christ of faith,” but that is hardly—indeed, most definitely not—historical. The New Testament does theology, not history. We must keep them separate. And countering this view underlies the argument of Wright’s book, in which he argues instead, “that rigorous history… and rigorous theology… belong together, and never more so than in discussion of Jesus.” (p. 8)
Although various reasons exist for the separation, one of the more profound observations Wright makes is what reformation Christianity focused on. “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?’” (p. 14, my emphasis) In short, the result of his life (salvation, justification, grace, etc.) mattered to the reformers far more than his history. Whoa! Then along come the skeptics to attack the history.
Wright takes us on a brief tour of the “Quests for the Historical Jesus.” (pp. 13-27) Note the precondition for the early Quests is that the Jesus presented in the Gospels can’t possibly be the real Jesus; we must “find” the historical him. One may wonder why this is relevant or important for the church—this is important because the (skeptical) ideas from these Quests are underneath much of the present doubts (and bad ideas) about the Bible today! It is also why so much of church today skips or dodges the historical.
Like (the original) Indiana Jones series, there are three Quests,* although the first two are not ‘successful.’ These Quests overlap and the second and third are ongoing.
The first Quest, let’s call it Raiders of the Lost Jesus, runs from about 1774-1901, and contains figures such as Lessing, Reimarus, Strauss, and Wrede. Wright argues that this began “as an explicitly anti-theological, anti-Christian, anti-dogmatic movement.” (p. 17) We get a picture of Jesus as a failed Jewish reformer (revolutionary), an odd looking prophet that has a remarkable likeness to that of a 19th-century-German liberal. In short, this Quest, like the second, creates the Jesus they are looking for (and rejecting that which they do not want).
There is a no-quest period in the first half of the 20th century because our brave raiders were flattened by a scholar named Schweitzer, who “demolished the ‘Old Quest’ so successfully.” (p. 21) He argued Jesus must be understood in terms of apocalyptic Judaism. But scholars during this period seemed to take the view that a historical Jesus couldn’t be found; so effective was Schweitzer’s demolition of the old Quest. (Bultmann is a major figure in this period.) Rather than a history of Jesus, the Gospels reveal the developments of the first century church. Wright observes that the split between a view in which we can know little about Jesus versus an apocalyptic Jesus continues to this day.
The second Quest, following the 1950s, is ‘begun’ by Kasemann, who argued for a more historical Jesus, but he argued for an apocalyptic Jesus. However, it is limited by the same assumptions (anti-miracle) and emphasizes, like the reformers, “The purpose of Jesus’ life was to say things, to teach great truths in a timeless fashion.” (p. 24, emphasis original) The events are secondary. Wright will say more about this Quest in the next chapter.
The third Quest is addressed in chapter 3 and Wright is a major part of this one (in fact, he is the originator of its title). I will call it The Past Crusade, for reasons that will become clear, although briefly, it seeks to put Jesus in his historical Jewish first-century context.
Next time we will dig more deeply into chapter 2 on the second Quest.
Update: I added more comments in the next post on this chapter to help fill in some gaps, as well as a chart of the three quests.
*Another helpful resource on these Quests is Bock’s book, Studying the Historical Jesus.
Chapter 1: Jesus Then and Now
Chapter 2: Heavy Traffic on Wredebahn: The ‘New Quest’ Renewed
Chapter 3: Back to the Future: The ‘Third Quest’
Chapter 4: Prodigals and Paradigms
Chapter 5: The Praxis of a Prophet
Chapter 6: Stories of the Kingdom (1): Announcement
Chapter 7: Stories of the Kingdom (2)
Chapter 8: Stories of the Kingdom (3): Judgment and Vindication
Chapter 9: Symbol and Controversy
Chapter 10: The Questions of the Kingdom
Chapter 11: Jesus and Israel: The Meaning of Messiahship
Chapter 12: The Reasons for Jesus’ Crucifixion
Chapter 13: The Return of the King
Chapter 14: Results