Thinking Christian

N.T. Wright is an historian of the first century who is convinced the resurrection of Jesus Christ actually happened in history. I have not had opportunity to read his massive The Resurrection of the Son of God. In his shorter — yet provocative — The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is, however, he presents a compact set of reasons for accepting the resurrection as an historical event.

Wright stands in a long series of scholars who have addressed the historicity of the resurrection. “What we have lacked,” though, according to Wright, “has been a serious historical treatment of the subject from a writer firmly anchored within the history of Judaism of the first century.” He does not mean that as an absolute statement: he goes on to present two notable exceptions. His point is that skeptical treatments of the resurrection have been unanchored. They “have tended to be atomistic, to break the tradition down into its earliest hypothetical fragments; like much tradition-historical research they end with as many puzzles as they had at the start.” (Both quotes from p. 129.)

But the inquiry must be based in the real circumstances of the times. Wright says (p. 126),

There is no form of early Christianity known to us—though there are some that have been invented by ingenious scholars—that does not affirm at its heart that after Jesus’ shameful death God raised him to life again. Already by the time of Paul, our earliest written witness, the resurrection of Jesus is not just a single, detached article of faith. It is woven into the very structure of Christian life and thought, informing (among other things) baptism, justification, ethics adn the future hope both for humans and for the cosmos.

In particular, the resurrection is the answer given by all of early Christianity to the question … why did Christianity arise, and why did it take the shape it did? The early Christians themselves reply: we exist because of Jesus’ resurrection.

The resurrection was not a late addition tacked on to the Christian movement to give it some religious or motivational credibility. It was at the core of the earliest affirmations.

Did it really happen? How can we be confident it did? Wright’s answer makes reference to themes he has been discussing throughout the book, so my synopsis here will necessarily be lacking, but I hope I can convey the gist of it. In essence he says that early Christianity without the resurrection is an historical puzzle far more perplexing than any mystery presented by the resurrection itself could be.

Early Christianity was, he writes, a kingdom-of-God movement, a resurrection movement, and a Messianic movement. From our distance these seem commonplace assertions, and if we try we can easily imagine coming up with a set of religious fables to support such thinking. This is why Wright emphasizes the historical setting so strongly, though; for these ways of thinking, in the forms they appeared in early Christianity, were completely foreign to the culture in which Christianity arose.

Jesus in his earthly ministry led what Wright calls a counter-Temple movement. I cannot go into that in detail, but I can at least mention just how counter-cultural that was within a strong and proud Jewish Temple tradition. It would be like a strong and charismatic leader conducting an anti-Constitution movement in America; only more so, because Jesus set himself up as the replacement for Temple religion.

But early Christianity, as a kingdom-of-God movement, was not just counter-Temple, it was counter-Empire. Wright says, “When Paul said ‘Jesus is Lord,’ it is clear that he meant that Caesar was not.” This was not a counter-Empire movement resembling Jewish expectations in any way. Jesus died at the hands of the Romans, who continued to rule over Judea. (By AD 70 they had destroyed the Jews’ holy city of Jerusalem.)

If you had said to some first-century Jews “the kingdom of God is here” and had explained yourself by speaking of a new spiritual experience, a new sense of forgiveness, an exciting reordering of your private religious interiority, they might well have said that they were glad you had had this experience, but why did you refer to it as the kingdom of God?

Finally with respect to the kingdom of God statements in early Christianity, Wright says,

We must as historians postulate a reason to account for this group of first-century Jews who had cherished these [political/military] kingdom-expectations, saying that their expectations had been fulfilled, though not in the way they had imagined. The early Christians themselves with one voice say that the reasons was the bodily resurrection of Jesus.

And that leads us to the second pertinent aspect of early Christianity toward which Wright points: it was a resurrection movement, with a view of resurrection utterly unlike that which had been thought of before. I will go into that in more detail in a future post. Wright’s case for the resurrection is cumulative, and I have presented only a portion of it, but enough for now.

Before ending here, though, and at the risk of starting two different conversations at once, I want to connect this topic to a previous one: who was Jesus, and what was his central message? I have asked that question of visitors here. This now is my condensed answer: he was (and is) the Son of God, the Messiah, the clearest and fullest revelation of God in all of history, the second Person of the Trinity, and thus God in the flesh. His central message, spoken 51 times in the Gospel of Luke alone, was the Kingdom of God: what it is, what it means that God is King, how we can enter into the experience of his kingdom, what it means if we stand outside it in rebellion, and his own position enthroned at the right hand of God the Father.

It was not then, and is not yet, a political kingdom, yet it is a living and loving reality for those who will accept God as king.

Early Christianity recognized it as such. They knew Jesus as King, even after Jesus’ death. Only the resurrection can adequately explain this extraordinary belief.

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Book Review

I should have anticipated it from the title, but N.T. Wright’s The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is presented me with an unexpected personal challenge. Wright is an historian of the New Testament era, and in this book heset out to accomplish two historical purposes. The first was what one might call an attempt at time travel: to help us understand the way first century Israelites would have experienced Jesus among them, and how they would have understood his message. The second purpose was to establish reasons to believe the New Testament accounts—especially of the Resurrection—can be trusted historically.

His apologetic for the Resurrection was a new one to me, creative and (I think) compelling, and I would recommend the book on that basis alone. The first part of the book had a deeper, not entirely comfortable impact on me, though. That is where I will dwell for this review.

Even Christ followers can go off track, Wright says, by misunderstanding the context of Jesus’ times:

We have to make a journey as difficult for us in the in the contemporary Western world as that taken by the Wise Men as they went to Bethlehem. We have to think our way back into someone else’s world, specifically the world of the Old Testament as it was perceived and lived by first-century Jews. That is the world Jesus addressed, the world whose concerns he made his own. Until we know how Jesus’ contemporaries were thinking, it will not just be difficult to understand what he meant by the “Kingdom of God”; it will be totally impossible.

Is he saying Christianity has Jesus all mixed up? No and yes. Wright takes Scripture to be historical; he regards it as trustworthy. The message of Christ in it is true. But most of us probably do not understand quite what he meant by his central message: “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” Like the tables in the Temple, he turned upside-down Jewish expectations regarding the Kingdom. In fact, “repent” in this context (which in the Greek is metanoia, change of mind) did not mean, “stop sinning,” though that would certainly be one effect of what it meant. At a deeper level it meant to change one’s entire way of thinking about the Kingdom of God in the world.

Much of Jesus’ ministry was to overturn the Temple system itself, preparing to establish a new way of relating with God. This was more radical than most of us realize. The Temple was the heart of Israel’s national life, not just its religion. It was the center of power for some Jewish leaders—the ones who would ultimately have him killed.

This is what Wright wants us to see, and to see it through the eyes of a first-century Jew. For me, his time-travel purpose succeeded. He enabled me for a while, to a deeper extent than ever before, to see Jesus as many of his contemporaries must have seen him: the son of a carpenter, youngish, probably not at all outstanding in his physical appearance, walking the countryside with a small group of followers, teaching wisdom, demonstrating truth and love—and leading a revolution that would change not just one nation at its heart, but the whole future history of the world.

But wait. They wouldn’t have seen him as leading a revolution that would change the nation and the world. Not clearly, and certainly not until much later. He would have appeared to them as what I’ve already described: a youngish carpenter’s son, who had taken up the role of a wandering rabbi. We know of him as the leader of an historic revolution. To them, how likely would that have seemed? I’ll come back to that question in a moment.

To be sure, Jesus stood out among rabbis. He performed miracles, including healings, exorcisms, feeding large crowds with little food to start with, and raising the dead. He taught unique wisdom of a life of truth and love, and he taught it from his own authority (Matthew 7:28-29). More remarkably yet, he lived by his own teaching, consistently setting the highest example of how to live a life.

Still, how likely would it seem, to someone watching him teach in the synagogue or debating in the marketplace, that this one youngish (apparent) carpenter’s son, without benefit of microphone, megaphone, or public relations officer, with no head-start by way of family money or reputation, lacking the right degrees from the right schools, and gathering such a strange assortment of followers, would be the one to overturn the whole way God interacted with humans and humans with God?

Wright actually had me thinking for a while, “you know, this is just so implausible.” It wasn’t because he said anything to indicate it might not be true (quite the contrary). It was because I was seeing Jesus, I think, the way many people would have seen him at the time: the youngish carpenter’s son turned into a wandering rabbi with a strange set of followers. He was in those ways a very ordinary man. Israelites at the time thought that when God sent someone to change the world, it would be someone a lot less ordinary-looking, doing something a lot more spectacular. I caught myself thinking, “Yes, that’s how God would have/should have done it. Not this way.”

And then it hit me: it had to be this way.

It had to be this way because of what Jesus came to do, especially in his earthly ministry before the cross. Jesus’ purpose was not to make a spectacle of himself. He even asked people to keep some rather spectacular things quiet for the time being (Mark 8:27-30; Matthew 17:1-9; Mark 3:7-12; Mark 5:21-43). His purpose was to show how to live a life God’s way. More specifically he came to show you and me, and ordinary people everywhere, how we can live life God’s way. As much as possible, he had to do it as an ordinary person, so that we ordinary people could see his example and follow, in our ordinary lives.

Of course he had other purposes besides this: to display the Kingdom of God through his miracles, and ultimately to make it possible through his death and resurrection for us to be reconciled to God and enter the Kingdom with him. His life in those ways was not at all ordinary, and not what we are called to do.

Much of his ministry, though, was about praying and teaching, loving others, affirming the outcast, comforting the hurting, and confronting purveyors of falsehood and hypocrisy. These are things we can do as he did. These are ordinary kinds of things, for ordinary people in God’s Kingdom to do.

To do them as lovingly and consistently as he did—now, that’s far from ordinary. If you haven’t ever done it read the book of Mark or Luke (start at Mark 1 or Luke 1 online if you don’t have a printed version handy). See how extraordinarily he lived out the ordinary things of life.

Pick up a copy of Wright’s book as a companion to your reading, too. Perhaps you’ll see as I did that when God sent someone to change the world, it had to be this way.

The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is by N.T. Wright. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1999. 204 pages including endnotes and index. Amazon price US$12.24.

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