The Praxis of a Prophet; Or, Why Jesus probably did have a beard and carry a big stick

That's what prophets do, right? Although my great great great grandfather, a German Lutheran pastor, once wrote a theological treatise about beards and concluded that they were bad, not least because if you got the communion wine after lots of bearded people their dirty moustaches had made it taste sour. Did I tell that story already? It's really my only good theological ancestor story, so I wheel it out pretty regularly.

Anyway, chapter 5 of Jesus and the Victory of God. Wright points out the things that 'most everyone agrees on, whatever they think of Jesus: he was born about 4 BC, grew in the Galilean town of Nazareth, speaking Aramaic, some Hebrew, and probably at least a smattering of Greek. Around AD 28 he went public, and his work was originally connected with that of John the Baptist. He told everyone to repent, and announced the kingdom of Israel's god, telling a lot of parables along the way. He travelled round Galilean villages announcing his message and performing miracles like healings and exorcisms (obviously not everyone agrees they were miracles, but y'know, some stuff happened involving sick people), and ate dinner with all sorts of people. He had some followers, including 12 special disciples, and the things he said and did, especially one thing he did in the Temple, annoyed at least some other Jewish groups, particularly the high priests and their posse. Partly because of this, he got handed over to the Romans and crucified, which was what usually happened to insurrectionists (Pete Rollins, take note). But what does all this tell us about what Jesus was up to?

First-century Palestine was heaving at the cringes with a raggedy bunch of various types of prophet. Some prophets were powerful and educated, some hung around with weird sects, some had no friends, and some had huge gangs of followers. Some announced salvation; some announced impending doom. Some tried to lead uprisings against the Romans; others told people to get the hell out while they still could. Some were basically terrorists (and remember that a terrorist is basically just a violent person without any official power rather than a violent person with an army to command); others weren't violent at all.

John the baptist was one of many prophets. He was well-known in the late '20s, warning Israel of impending judgement, and getting into trouble for being a bit more political than King Herod felt comforable with. But he also baptised people for the forgiveness of sins, which implied that they didn't need the temple to have their sins forgiven; so the Temple authorities weren't fans either. Jesus clearly saw John as an important figure at the beginning of his own ministry. Jesus himself was like John the Baptist, only more so: announcing a prophetic message, inaugurating a renewal movement, and annoying the temple hierarchy.

At least at the start of his ministry, Jesus travelled around Galilean villages, avoiding the bigger towns and cities. He explained what he was doing in terms of the reconstitution of Israel. And since he went to lots of different villages, he probably said similar things in each of them; if he told a parable once, he probably told it several times, which Wright thinks goes some way to explain the variation between the different gospel accounts. The parables he told set out his agenda for Israel: what the convenant people should be doing at this point in their history. Jesus used parables because if he'd explicitly said what his parables implied, he would have gotten himself killed even earlier than he did. Jesus also warned of impending judgement that was coming on Israel if they didn't repent, threatening disaster and, specifically, the desctruction of the Temple. This isn't just ooby-dooby prediction, as if Jesus were a fortune teller: it didn't take a genius to see that if the people of Israel kept stepping on the Romans' toes, eventually there would be reprisals. Jesus also healed people, and his healings didn't just make people better, they also made unclean people clean, welcoming them back to full membership in God's people. And the nature miracles seem to hint at the idea that if Israel was restored, then the whole of creation would be restored along with her.

Prodigals, Paradigms, and Proof that Christianity was right all along

Wright starts off chapter four of Jesus and the Victory of God with a re-reading of the prodigal son. Really, he argues, it's a retelling of the story of Israel. The prodigal son is Israel, who went off into exile in a pagan country, ended up a slave, and then returned home. Wright says that lots of Jews in first-century Palestine thought that they were still spiritually in exile: sure, they were back in Israel, but under Roman rule. This wasn't what redemption looked like.

Wright says that the fundamental message of Jesus' ministry was this: Israel is being restored, but it doesn't look the way they expected it to look. It doesn't look like a new political order, kicking out the Romans and putting a new, properly Jewish king on the throne instead of the Romans' puppet rulers. It doesn't look like the restoration of the Temple to its former glory; actually it doesn't seem to involve the Temple at all. Instead, it looks like Jesus: a scruffy prophet from the countryside who hangs out with tax collectors and sinners. Don't like it? Fine, but that puts you on the side of the older son in the parable: the side of the Jews who didn't go into exile and resent the ones who return. It puts you on the side of the Samaritans. Jesus is the homecoming party, and everyone is invited to the feast. Jesus is the one through whom Israel's God is restoring his people.

Wright says that the best test for whether the gospel accounts are true is to see whether it's similar but not the same as the Judaism of the time, and similar but not the same as the early Church. He offers five basic hypotheses:

a) Jesus made sense in the context of first century Judaism;

b) he thought he was regrouping Israel around himself, and that this regrouping of Israel really was the proper return from exile, and as such was a challenge to the Jews who thought that everything was focused on the temple;

c) these ideas were exactly the sort of thing you'd say if you wanted to make everyone hate you: the Pharisees, the Temple authorities, and the Romans;

d) but if Jesus had just been killed, that would have been it: he would have failed. Only if he was vindicated in some way would it make sense to think that he had been right all along and that the Gentiles should be welcomed into the kingdom;

e) if this is what happened, it would make sense for Luke to write the sort of gospel he did in fact write.

The New New New Quest

Don't worry, I hasn't forgotten about my series on N T Wright. We're up to chapter 3 now, woop! This one's all about The Right Way to do biblical scholarship. Wright counts himself amongst what's known as the Third Quest, because he thinks that they're proper historians. They spend a lot of time reading first century sources, especially the Jewish ones, focus on the question of what Jesus did to make himself unpopular (popular?) enough to be crucified, and assume that the early church were actually pretty profoundly shaped by what Jesus said and did. Which all sounds pretty uncontroversial, so you might want to bear in mind the possibility that Wright is treating non-Third Quest scholars unfairly. I'll say this, though: anyone who thinks we can reconstruct not only Q but the stages of the development of Q is an idiot.

Wright says the Third Quest have five major questions, all of which are part of answering the bigger question: how do we account for the fact that, by AD 110, there was a large, growing, diverse and enthusiastic international movement which claimed to have been founded by Jesus? The five sub-questions are as follows:

How does Jesus fit into Judaism? Either he's so Jewish you can't imagine how he founded a new religion; so Christian you can't believe he was really Jewish, or somewhere in the middle: Jewish with a twist. Sounds like a flavoured water. So Jesus used Jewish language and ideas to challenge Judaism, and because Judaism at the time was theological, political and social, so was Jesus. Jewish theological expectations were bound up with politics and ideas about the fate of Israel as a political state. It's the politics that give us some idea why Jesus might've been crucified in the end.

What were Jesus' aims? Probably something to do with the kingdom of God. But did he intend to die in Jerusalem? Did he intend to found a church?

Why did Jesus die? Obviously the Romans were persuaded that he was up to no good. But who persuaded them?

How and why did the early church begin? Jesus wasn't the first prophet to end up getting killed. But mostly when the prophet died, their followers, y'know, stopped following them. Why didn't Jesus' followers admit defeat?

Why are the Gospels what they are? The gospels are a new, weird genre, not quite like anything that had been written before. Why?

There's also, says Wright, a sixth question: what does all this mean for the contemporary church and the contemporary world? However much New Testament historians pretend they're being neutral, there's always some theological position in there somewhere. In addition, contemporary awareness that anti-Semitism means that people are wary of saying anything that might suggest that Jesus was criticising the Judaism of his time. No one wants to do a Mel Gibson.

The New New Quest

In chapter 2 of Jesus and the Victory of God, Wright does a survey of more recent attempts to find the historical Jesus. Sadly, there's no mention of cannabis Jesus; those scholarly efforts Wright considers worthy of consideration include:

The Jesus Seminar: they get together, argue about whether half a sentence from a gospel is authentic or not, and then use different coloured balls to vote about it (there's a dirty joke in there somewhere but I haven't found it yet). I still half-believe that someone made them up as a joke about the excesses of 'historical' biblical scholarship, but apparently they really do exist, though Wright doesn't think that their scholarship is worth much.

Burton L. Mack: So, Matthew and Luke both seem to have got a lot of their material from Mark (you can tell because they use the exact same words to tell the exact same stories). But they also seem to have some other material in common which doesn't appear in Mark, so some people have suggested (logically enough) that they had a common source: Q. Less obviously, some people have argued that their shared source was a single document – contentious, but fair enough. Burton Mack thinks that not only can we recreate Q, but we can also work out which bits of Q were written first and which bits were added on later. If historical criticism generally is like building skyscrapers on jelly, this is like building the Empire State building on top of cream, which you've layered onto custard, which in turn rests upon a bed of jelly spooned lovingly over a nest of sponge fingers and raspberries. I'd eat it, but I don't buy it.

J. Dominic Crossan: Crossan talks about the system of 'patronage', common in the Greco-Roman world at the time of Jesus. It was basically a really formal system of nepotism, and unless you had friends in high places, you didn't have any power. He argues that Jesus sets out to subvert this system: he kept moving around so no one would see him as a patron and claim to mediate between him and the normal people; and by healing and eating with outcasts Jesus was trying to subvert the social ordering of things. But Wright thinks that Crossan overlooks Jesus' Jewishness, and so misses the really important points. He can't explain why Jesus got himself killed, or why the early church should have seen his death as significant.

Jesus the Cynic?: Cynics were popular philosophers in the Roman world at the time of Jesus, and they basically thought that society sucked and people should know that it sucked. They went around begging with long hair and scruffy clothes, and made sarky comments in the cinema. Some people have argued that Jesus was a Cynic: fine, says Wright, but there were loads of Cynics: why should this one have founded a new world religion?

Marcus J. Borg: Borg argues that Jesus' teachings had political, social, and theological themes; that he prophesied the destruction, by Rome, of Jerusalem and the Temple. But he doesn't think Jesus was the son of God, and doesn't think Jesus expected to found the Church, so Wright isn't satisfied by his work (though I think they're actually buddies, which is sweet).

So, all in all, Wright thinks there is lots of interesting stuff in the New New Quest, but also some major flaws: they priorities the sayings of Jesus over the stories about what Jesus did; they don't pay enough attention to Jesus' Jewishness; they don't think that Jesus expected to be crucified, and they don't think that there was really all that much relationship between Jesus life and teachings and the early church. So what's the answer? Wright thinks it lies in the Third Quest - that's the New New New Quest - and that's what he deals with in chapter 3, and what we'll deal with in the next instalment.

Jelly Jesus

NT Wright's Jesus and the Victory of God starts with an overview of the history of modern biblical scholarship. Since some guy called Reimarus wrote some book in the 18th century, huge amounts of time and energy and almost countless books have been devoted to using 'modern historical critical tools' to try to dig out the 'real' Jesus from the gospel accounts. The idea was that the biblical accounts of Jesus' life were later distortions of history written by people who had their own theological agendas to push and weren't all that concerned to give an accurate representation of Jesus. Modern biblical scholars set out to provide a neutral, scientific alternative (hah!). They used tools like comparing different ancient manuscripts to the existing gospel accounts, comparing gospel accounts too each other, and trying by various complicated and often ludicrous means to work out which bits were genuine and which bits were fake. I will always love NT Wright for arguing, essentially, that an awful lot of recent New Testament scholarship is bollocks: vast theoretical edifices built on the shakiest of foundations, like skyscrapers built on jelly.

Still, it's worth knowing a bit about the broad trends of thought within gospel scholarship, especially if you want to make more sensible arguments about the gospels. Wright thinks that the problems began with the Reformation (and I'm totally happy for us to blame Luther), where the Reformers were so obsessed with propositional truth that they lost sight of the biblical narrative, so although they thought it was super-important that Jesus died on the cross, they couldn't really give a coherent account of why he spent 33 years or whatever before that being alive.

This is where Reimarus came in. Wright says he was basically out to destroy Christianity. He thought Jesus was a Jewish reformer who got more and more politicised until he went and got himself killed, which should have been recognised as the failure it was. After that, lots of liberal theologians weighed in, offering readings of the Gospels that didn't make them uncomfortable, getting rid of anything that sounded a bit miraculous, or painting Jesus as a 'pale and timeless Galilean', teaching timeless moral truths whilst looking like a worried hippy.

Next came Albert Schweitzer, who thought that the most important thing about Jesus was his apocalypticism, warning of a terrible judgement about to fall on Israel; when the apocalypse didn't show, the early Church was able to rework his teachings into something more universal that could appeal to Gentiles as well as Jews. By the end of the 19th century, there were two main strands of biblical scholarship: the followers of Wrede, who basically thought that the gospels told us a lot about the early church but very little about Jesus; and the followers of Schweitzer, who emphasised Jesus' Jewishness and apocalypticism.

Coming soon: Jesus scholarship in the 20th century.