We finish in chapter 14 of Jesus and the Victory of God (pp. 657-62), which concludes the book. Appropriate to his historical task, Wright challenges his readers to read the New Testament through the eyes of history instead of attempting to ‘demythologize’ Jesus, as if we must peel off layers of myth to get back to the kernel of a real Jesus (recall he is participating in the historical Jesus debate). No, Wright has argued, the Gospels present coherent history, in the early first-century second-Temple context. Dead Messiahs are failed Messiahs; this one succeeds because, and the subject of Wright’s third book in the series, The Resurrection of the Son of God. “[T]he resurrection would declare that [Jesus] had in principle succeeded in his task, and that his earlier redefinitions of the coming kingdom had pointed to a further task awaiting his followers, that of implementing what he had achieved.” (p. 660, emphasis original) The way Jesus demonstrates his authority to forgiven sins is to heal a paralytic (Mk. 2:1-12). The way God demonstrates that Jesus really is the Messiah is the resurrection (Ro. 1:1-6). What is the way Christians demonstrate that they really are followers of the Messiah?
JVG is a book I credit with changing the way I think about Christianity, praxis, and even American values. When I first read it in 2019, it altered my ‘worldview.’ Like the stories that Jesus told, intending to break open his listener’s worldview, to alter the stories they told of themselves, reading Wright did that for me. As I have read the New Testament since then, it continues to bear fruit—strange passages now fall into place. And that is one of Wright’s criteria—what counts in evaluating options are hypotheses that get most of the data in, without twisting that data out of proportion. If one’s interpretation has to twist Scripture unnaturally, or read something into it that isn’t there in the context, it must be questioned. Like putting a puzzle together, all the pieces must fit and provide a coherent picture. If you get to the end of the puzzle and have a number of pieces left over, you did it wrong. Trying to force pieces together is doing it wrong as well. This is the delight and difficulty of good Bible study. Getting into the context and trying to understand the author’s meaning is a never-ending task.
As a preview, the next posts will focus on how Wright altered my thinking in:
Understanding the first-century Jewish leaders.
Reading the apocalyptic passages (Mt. 24; Mk. 13) as predictions of 70 AD, not a (future) ‘second coming.’
Seeing how thoroughly Jewish Jesus is—and thus how different his approach is (and thus how that might impact our own).
Major changes to the ideas of nationalism, Americanism, its values, and how the church interacts with it.
As a navigation convenience, I have appended links to each chapter below and updated each chapter’s post with these links.
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