Today I’m going to continue sharing some thoughts on my reading of Tom Wright’s Simply Jesus. This is the third post in what seems to have become a bit of a series.
In the first post (here), I looked at the main thrust of the first chapter, in which Wright explains how Jesus’ first century audience mostly missed the point because they were looking for a different kind of king than the humble servant Jesus actually was. In the second post (here), I focused on one key point from the very short second chapter, which is that the notion of the “kingdom of God” as Jesus understood and talked about it was far more radical and expansive in scope than many thought – and than many still think today.
Today our focus is on chapters 3 and 4, in which Wright’s main goal, it seems to me, is to explain why understanding Jesus as he actually was is a difficult task. Any historical figure, if we are to have a proper understanding of their life and work, must be understood within the context in which they lived and worked. That is as true of someone who lived in the past fifty years as it is of someone who lived two thousand years ago. But the task is obviously more difficult the longer ago that figure lived, because we are that much more removed in time from, and thus that much less familiar with, the social, political, religious and cultural factors that combined to create the environment in which they lived.
Skipping ahead to chapter 4, Wright sets about laying out two key contextual elements that made up the historical context into which Jesus was born: Roman might and oppression on the one hand, and unfulfilled Jewish hopes of a messiah to deliver and vindicate Israel on the other. Wright uses the analogy of a “perfect storm” to describe how these factors combined to create a socio-political tinderbox into which Jesus came as a lighted match.
But I actually want to back up to chapter 3, in which Wright lays out what he calls two “myths” about Jesus that persist today. In fact, not only do they persist, but they tend to shape how most of us think about Jesus, and in so shaping our thinking, they actually obscure the reality of who Jesus was and what he was about.
The first of these myths is what Wright calls “the high-pressure system of conservative Christianity”:
Here we find the classic Western myth about Jesus, which is still believed by millions around the world. In this myth, a supernatural being called ‘God’ has a supernatural son whom he sends, virgin-born, into our world, despite the fact that it’s not his natural habitat, so that he can rescue people out of this world by dying in their place. As a sign of his otherwise secret divine identity, this ‘son’ does all kinds of extraordinary and otherwise impossible ‘miracles’, crowing them all by rising from the dead and returning to ‘heaven’, where he waits to welcome his faithful followers after their deaths. In the Catholic version of this classic Western myth, Jesus calls his close friend Peter to found the church; anyone who wants to be with Jesus, here or hereafter, must join Peter’s movement. In the Protestant version, Jesus commissions his followers to write the New Testament, which reveals the absolute truth about Jesus and, once more, how to get to heaven.
Now, before you dismiss all of the above as a caricature, think about how much of it you unquestioningly believe, or have at one time believed. I know for me it sums up pretty well how I saw the whole question of God, Jesus and faith for a very long time.
Wright goes on to set out the second great myth about Jesus (excuse the length, but it’s necessary in order to have a complete understanding of what he’s getting at):
The second myth, prevalent in the sceptical ‘westerly wind’ of our perfect storm, is the new classic modernist myth, which is widely believed in secular society and in several mainstream churches too. In this new myth of Christian origins, Jesus was just an ordinary man, a good first-century Jew, conceived and born in the ordinary way. He was a remarkable preacher and teacher, but he probably didn’t do all those ‘miracles’. Some people seem to have felt better after meeting him, but that was about it. He certainly didn’t think he would die for the sins of the world. He was simply trying to teach people to live differently, to love one another, to be kind to old ladies, small children and (that blessed postmodern category) the ‘marginalized’. He was talking about God, not about himself. The idea of being a supernatural ‘son of God’ never occurred to him; he’d have been horrified to hear such a thing and even more to have had a ‘church’ founded in his memory.
He certainly didn’t rise from the dead; yes, his followers, feeling that his work would continue, used careless language that seemed to imply that that’s what happened, but of course it didn’t. Then these followers began to tell stories about him that snowballed into legends, which then sprouted fresh interpretations. The ‘gospels’ we now have in the Bible are the product of that free-floating — and perhaps self-serving — inventive process. They tell us a lot about the new aims and agendas of the early ‘Christians’ and about how they settled down and adapted the original message of Jesus to different circumstances. But if we want to find out about Jesus himself, we have to work our way back through the fog of subsequent hero-worship and, above all, through the process by which he was ‘divinized’. We might even need to call on some of the ‘other gospels’, the ones that boring old orthodox Christianity left out of its ‘canon’.
Note that these two myths are not necessarily opposite extremes; what Wright is not doing is setting up a dichotomy. There is a danger that we might take refuge in the first as a defence against the second. And that, Wright argues, is pretty much exactly what has happened down the ages, and continues to happen today.
The real question, as Wright points out, is this: was Jesus the son of God, or wasn’t he? The challenge Wright sets himself is to try to unravel and answer that question without being drawn in by the gravitational pull of one of these two powerful and enduring myths about Jesus. He goes on to explain why historical study of Jesus and his environment is critical (emphasis added):
[…] we have to reconstruct the setting in which what Jesus did and said made the sense it did, so much sense that some thought he was God’s Messiah and others thought he had to be killed at once. If we don’t make the effort to do this reconstruction, we will, without a shadow of doubt, assume that what Jesus did and said makes the sense it might have made in some other context — perhaps our own. That has happened again and again. I believe that this kind of easy-going anachronism is almost as corrosive to genuine Christian faith as scepticism itself.
Put simply, if we don’t do the leg-work to find out what Jesus’ life and message meant to those who saw and heard it first hand, we’re more or less guaranteed to make mistakes about what Jesus actually taught and embodied. Of course, not all of us have the ability to conduct the kind of in-depth historical and theological analysis that Wright is calling for. But I, for one, am deeply grateful that we have people like Wright to take on this task for us. What worries me — and I think it worries Wright to, as the final sentence in the above quote attests — is that so many Christians seem to think that none of this really matters, that seeking to understand Jesus as he actually was, in the context in which he lived and taught, is merely a distraction to the real goal of knowing Jesus as he is today. But if you believe that Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever, then you must also believe that he is today as he was two thousand years ago in first century Palestine.
I want to know Jesus today, but I want to know him as he is. I don’t want to believe in a myth about him, however enduring, or in my own self-constructed image of what I think he ought to be saying and meaning. That’s why the subject of this post, and of Wright’s whole endeavour in Simply Jesus, matters very greatly to me. I hope it does to you too.
