Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

by N.T. Wright

The book then falls, more or less, into three parts. Part One consists of the first five chapters, in which I try to explain what the key questions are, why they matter, and why we today find them difficult to answer.

Then, in the central part of the book, Part Two (Chapters 6–14), I try, as simply as I can, to say what I think Jesus’s public career was all about, what he was trying to accomplish, and how he went about it.

This is absolutely necessary, because first-century Jews thought very differently from the way we do now—and, indeed, from the ways in which other first-century people such as the Greeks and the Romans thought. We have to make a real effort to see things from a first-century Jewish point of view, if we are to understand what Jesus was all about.

Part Three of the book consists of one long final chapter, which could be entitled, “So What?” In other words, what does it all mean for us now? I sketch four ways in which people today have tried to understand the contemporary relevance of Jesus’s inauguration of God’s kingdom, and allow them to enter into discussion with one another.

we were asking him, “Who do you say that you are?” Rice and Lloyd Webber didn’t give an answer. That wasn’t their aim. I often point out to students that they come to a university not to learn the answers, but to discover the right questions. The same was true of Superstar. And the question it asked was, I am convinced, right and proper. It’s not the only question about Jesus, not the only question we should ask of Jesus, but it’s utterly appropriate in its own way. And necessary. Unless you ask this question (“Are you who they say you are?”), your “Jesus” risks disappearing like a hot-air balloon off into the mists of fantasy. This problem remains enormously important.

Did he really say that? Did he really do that? What did it mean? There were plenty of voices around to say he hadn’t said it, he didn’t really do it, and that the only “meaning” is that the church is a big confidence trick. If I was going to preach and, for that matter, if I was going to counsel people to trust Jesus and get to know him for themselves, I couldn’t do it with integrity unless I had faced the hard questions for myself.

You see, the reason Jesus wasn’t the sort of king people had wanted in his own day is—to anticipate our conclusion—that he was the true king, but they had become used to the ordinary, shabby, second-rate sort.

It is time, I believe, to recognize not only who Jesus was in his own day, despite his contemporaries’ failure to recognize him, but also who he is, and will be, for our own. “He came to what was his own,” wrote one of his greatest early followers, “and his own people did not accept him” (John 1:11). That puzzle continues.

This book is written in the belief that the question of Jesus—who he really was, what he really did, what it means, and why it matters—remains hugely important in every area, not only in personal life, but also in political life, not only in “religion” or “spirituality,” but also in such spheres of human endeavor as worldview, culture, justice, beauty, ecology, friendship, scholarship, and sex.

From complete obscurity Jesus suddenly came to public attention in the late 20s of the first century, when he was around thirty years old. Virtually everything we know about him as a figure of history is crammed into a short space of time; it’s not easy to tell if it lasted one, two, or three years, but pretty certainly it wasn’t any longer. He was then picked up by the authorities in Jerusalem and, after some kind of trial or trials, executed on the charge of being a would-be rebel leader, a “king of the Jews.” Like many thousands of young Jews in that period, he died by crucifixion, a horrible method of killing designed to torture the victim as long as possible. It happened at Passover-time, most likely in AD 30 or possibly 33.

We can try to get, not “behind” the gospels, as some sneeringly suggest is the purpose of historical research, but inside them, to discover the Jesus they’ve been telling us about all along, but whom we had managed to screen out. That will occupy the bulk of the book.

He is the same, declared another wise early Christian writer, “yesterday, today and forever” (Heb. 13:8). This book is mostly about the “yesterday,” not least because that’s the part many today simply don’t know. But toward the end of the book I shall deal a little with the “tomorrow” part (what will Jesus be in God’s ultimate future?) and suggest ways in which this combination of “yesterday” and “tomorrow” might condition us to think and behave differently in relation to Jesus “today.”

Jesus puzzled people then, and he puzzles us still. There are three reasons for this. The first reason for our being puzzled is that, for most of us, Jesus’s world is a strange, foreign country. I don’t mean just the Middle East, a major international trouble spot then as now. I mean that people in his day and in his country thought differently. They looked at the world differently. They told different stories to explain who they were and what they were up to. We do not habitually think, look, and tell stories in the way they did. We have to get inside that world if the sense Jesus made then is going to make sense to us now.

second is that Jesus’s God is strange to us. That idea may itself seem odd. Isn’t God simply God? Isn’t it just a matter of whether you believe in God or not? No. The word “God” and its various equivalents in other languages, ancient and modern, may mean “the supreme or ultimate reality” or “a being or object believed to have more than natural attributes and powers and to require human worship.” Those are, actually, the two basic definitions offered by Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. But a brief study of the world’s great religions, including those of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Indians, and Chinese, or for that matter a glance at the different religious movements in the Western world over the last few centuries, will show that there are many different views of what this “supreme or ultimate reality” is like. It isn’t enough to ask whether someone believes or does not believe in “God.” The key question is which God we’re talking about.

get inside Jesus’s world. And, as we do so, we need to try to catch a glimpse of what he meant when he spoke of God. These are two of the key puzzles.

Throughout his short public career Jesus spoke and acted as if he was in charge. Jesus did things people didn’t think you were allowed to do, and he explained them by saying he had the right to do them. He wasn’t, after all, merely a teacher, though of course he was that too—in fact, one of the greatest teachers the world has ever known. He spoke and acted as more than a teacher. He behaved as if he had the right, and even the duty, to take over, to sort things out, to make his country and perhaps even the wider world a different place. He behaved suspiciously like someone trying to start a political party or a revolutionary movement. He called together a tight and symbolically charged group of associates (in his world, the number twelve meant only one thing: the new Israel, the new people of God). And it wasn’t very long before his closest followers told him that they thought he really was in charge, or ought to be. He was the king they’d all been waiting for. If we look for a parallel in today’s world, we won’t find it so much in the rise of a new “religious” teacher or leader as in the emergence of a charismatic, dynamic politician whose friends are encouraging him to run for president—and who gives every appearance of having what it takes to sort everything out when he gets there.

Our culture has become used to thinking of Jesus as a “religious” figure rather than a “political” one. We have seen those two categories as watertight compartments, to be kept strictly separate. But it wasn’t like that for Jesus and others of his time. What would happen if we took the risk of going back into his world, into his vision of God, and asking, “Suppose it really is true?” What would it look like, in other words, if Jesus not only was in charge then, but is in charge today as well?

If the western wind here stands for the rationalistic skepticism of the last two hundred years and the high-pressure system to the north stands for the “conservative” Christian reaction to that sneering modernist denial, what is the tropical hurricane? We’ll come to that presently. For the moment, let’s examine these first two storm systems a bit more closely.

If you are an American, you will guess that a lot of people taking the “skeptical” position vote Democrat, and a lot of people taking the “trusting” position vote Republican.

Unlikely though it seems, I think that is exactly what has happened. In a complicated, confused, and dangerous world, anything will serve as a guardrail for people blundering along in the dark. We oversimplify complex problems. We bundle up very different social and political issues into two packages, and with a sigh of relief—now at least we know who we are, where we stand!—we declare ourselves to be in favor of this package and against that one.

Actually, the skeptics, who take grim comfort from the apparent decline of many mainline churches, don’t often focus on Jesus himself. They have far softer targets to aim at (badly behaved clergy, for a start). But if they do mention Jesus, they tend to dismiss him with a wave of the hand. Just a first-century fanatic whose wild-eyed followers turned him into a god. Or, damning him with faint praise, just a mild-mannered first-century moralist, one of many great teachers down through the ages. Those are the internal dynamics of the western wind, the howling gale of contemporary skepticism.

When I say that these two stories are “myths,” I mean it in the following way. A “myth” in this strict sense is a story that purports to be in some sense “historical” and that encapsulates and reinforces the strongly held beliefs of the community that tells it. Serious “myths” are regularly expressed not only in narrative, but also in symbol and action. Much of the life of the broadly “conservative” Western church acts out the first myth. Much of the life of “liberal” Christianity, on the one hand, and of the wider secular world, on the other, acts out the second. Both are very, very powerful stories. They have shaped the lives of millions, and they still do. But they are both, in this sense, myths. Neither of them will stand up to full-on, hard-edged, no-nonsense historical scrutiny. Or, for that matter, theological scrutiny.

The third element is the sheer historical complexity of speaking about Jesus. The world of first-century Palestinian Judaism—his world—was complex and dense in itself. Anyone who has tried to understand today’s Middle Eastern problems can be assured that life was every bit as complicated in the first century as it is now.

The gospels are highly detailed; one of the problems of writing the present book has been trying to decide what to leave out. They are clearly written from particular (pro-Jesus) points of view. But, unlike today’s historian studying JFK in his actual context, we have simply a history book written forty or fifty years later (by Josephus, an aristocratic Jew who went over to the Roman side in the war of AD 66–70) and a scattering of other material, bits and pieces, tracts, coins, letters, and so forth. Out of these very disparate sources 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.

Hence the perfect storm of present-day discussion. I have on my desk as I write two brand-new books about Jesus, one written by the pope himself and another by a well-known English skeptic. Both are learned, sophisticated, engaging. They cannot both be true. Behind me are twenty shelves of books about Jesus and the gospels written over the last two hundred years. They cannot all be true either. What are we to do?

But if we are to do real history, we have to allow people in other times and other places to be radically different from us—even though, in order to do history at all, we have to exercise disciplined imagination and try as best we can to relate to those very different people. It’s a challenge. But it’s one I believe we can meet. What matters, I have become convinced, is that we need to understand how worldviews work.

Understanding how worldviews work is critical to sort out the skeptical, conservative, and historical views of Jesus

The worldview of post-Enlightenment Europe and North America was determined, often enough, to see Jesus as a religious teacher and leader offering a personal spirituality and ethic and a heavenly hope. It had no intention of seeing him as someone who was claiming to be in charge of the world; some might say that the “methods” of supposedly “historical scholarship” were designed, whether accidentally or not, to screen out that possibility altogether. This doesn’t mean that those “methods”—the study of the sources, the forms of the early Jesus stories, the motives of the gospel writers—have nothing to say. On the contrary, they have a great deal to say. But there comes a time when it may be appropriate to stand back, having heard it all, and to have another shot at saying, “Actually, I think this was what was going on.” This, I think, is one of those times. So if we are going to approach Jesus himself in a fresh way and ask the right questions instead of the wrong ones, we need to get our minds and imaginations into Jesus’s own day by examining another “perfect storm,” the one into which Jesus himself was walking. What were the winds that gathered speed just then, rushing in upon him from various directions? What did it mean for him to be caught in the eye of this storm? As he rode into Jerusalem that fateful spring day, what did he think he was doing?

long and bloody civil war from which one winner emerged, Caesar’s adopted son, Octavian. He took the title “Augustus,” which means “majestic” or “worthy of honor.” This, along with “Caesar,” became the name or title of his successors as well. He declared that his adoptive father, Julius, had indeed become divine; this meant that he, Augustus Octavian Caesar, was now officially “son of god,” “son of the divine Julius.” If you’d asked anybody in the Roman Empire, from Germany to Egypt, from Spain to Syria, who the “son of god” might be, the obvious answer, the politically correct answer, would have been “Octavian.”

“Augustus Tiberius Caesar, son of the Divine Augustus.” On the reverse is a picture of Tiberius dressed as a priest, with the title PONTIFEX MAXIMUS. It was a coin like this one that they showed to Jesus of Nazareth, a day or two after he had ridden into Jerusalem, when they asked him whether or not they should pay tribute to Caesar. “Son of God”? “Chief Priest”? He was in the eye of the storm.

As far back as we can trace their ancient scriptures—what Christians call the Old Testament—the Jewish people and their ancestors had believed, or had been told by their prophets to believe, that their story was going somewhere, that it had a goal in mind. Despite many setbacks and disappointments, their God would make sure they reached the goal at last.

was celebrated annually at Passover and in other festivals too. But the Exodus, in turn, looked back farther, to the divine call to the original patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Their story in turn looked back farther still, to the mysterious but powerful story of creation itself, when Israel’s God had brought his beautiful, ordered, and living creation out of the primal waters of chaos. The God who brought order out of chaos and who brought his enslaved people out of Egypt would do it again. Creation and covenant: God made the world, God called Israel to be his people, and God would remake his world in order to rescue his people Israel. Every time the Jewish people told the story (and they told it often), that was what they were thinking and hoping and praying for. It was this hope, this story that generated the second great storm wind, the powerful high-pressure system, into whose path Jesus of Nazareth decided to walk. And, eventually, to ride a donkey.

And that, with the first name changed to suit different circumstances (Caesar? Herod?), is the message you would have heard in Jesus’s day. These two themes—the great evil empire and the coming royal deliverer—look back partly to the Exodus itself, when Moses delivered Israel from Pharaoh’s Egypt.

For “Hitler,” then, also read “Babylon.” Other disasters had come crashing down on the Israelites. But easily the worst was when the Babylonians captured Jerusalem in the early sixth century BC, decimated the royal family, smashed the Temple to bits, and carried away its treasures, dragging off most of the population into an exile from which few would ever return. It was like Egypt all over again: enslavement in a foreign land.

God had promised to come back, to return to his people in power and glory, to establish his kingdom on earth as in heaven. The Jewish people always hoped that this would simply underwrite their national aspirations; he was, after all, their God. They wanted a divine hurricane simply to reinforce their already overheated high-pressure system. But the prophets, up to and including John the Baptist, had always warned that God’s coming in power and in person would be entirely on his own terms, with his own purpose—and that his own people would be as much under judgment as anyone, if their aspirations didn’t coincide with God’s. Jesus not only believed that this was another of those moments where the true, prophetic vision of the divine hurricane would clash with the current national mood.

Jesus sings, hauntingly, the lines that make clear that there is a radical difference between the national aspiration, as voiced by the Zealots, and the divine purpose. Neither Simon nor the crowds nor the other disciples nor Jerusalem itself have any idea what power is. They don’t understand what glory is. They simply haven’t a clue. So he continues with the warning, which, in all our sources, he went on to enact in a dramatic symbol. Jerusalem itself was going to be thrown down, stone by stone.

Here, then, is the third element in the first-century perfect storm: the strange, unpredictable, and highly dangerous divine element. The wind of God. This is God’s moment, declares Jesus, and you were looking the other way. Your dreams of national liberation, leading you into head-on confrontation with Rome, were not God’s dreams. God called Israel, so that through Israel he might redeem the world; but Israel itself needs redeeming as well. Hence God comes to Israel riding on a donkey, in fulfillment of Zechariah’s prophecy of the coming peaceful kingdom, announcing judgment on the system and the city that have turned their vocation in upon themselves and going off to take the weight of the world’s evil and hostility onto himself, so that by dying under them he might exhaust their power.

The divine hurricane sweeps in from the ocean, and to accomplish its purpose it must meet, head-on, the cruel western wind of pagan empire and the high-octane high-pressure system of national aspiration. Jesus seizes the moment, the Passover moment, the Exodus moment,

The claim being made in the stories of Jesus is that this was the perfect storm. This was where the hurricane of divine love met the cold might of empire and the overheated aspiration of Israel. Only when we reflect on that combination do we begin to understand the meaning of Jesus’s death.

Ever afterwards, the same prophets had promised that he would one day return. He would come back to Mount Zion, to the holy city, to the Temple, to Jerusalem. “The Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple” (Mal. 1). “The glory of YHWH will be revealed, and all people shall see it together” (Isa. 40:5). “Your sentinels lift up their voices, together they sing for joy; for in plain sight they see the return of YHWH to Zion” (52:8). On and on go the promises, resonating through the minds and hearts and prayers of Israelites, of the Jewish people, of the Jerusalemites, of the pilgrims. Of Jesus of Nazareth.

The point is this. At exactly the time when Jesus was growing up, there was a movement—call it a political movement, a religious movement, or (as Josephus calls it) a “philosophy”—that said that it was time for God alone to be king. The people were waiting for the cyclone. They were praying for it. Did they know what it would mean?

Theocracy! Yes, that’s what they wanted—as long as it was the right God doing the ruling. As Bob Dylan once said, “‘I am the Lord thy God’ is a fine saying, as long as it’s the right person who’s saying it.”

But, at last, Saul died in battle against the Philistines. He had failed in the main royal task of defeating the national enemy.

David, of course, made big mistakes, as did his successors. The story of his reign shows the cracks starting to appear that would ruin the kingdom of his successors bit by bit, starting with the splitting off of the northern kingdom and ending with the devastation of Jerusalem itself and the shameful and horrific exile.

David had decided he wanted to build a house for his God, a great Temple, so that the God who had lived among his people in the tabernacle would now live with them permanently. This permanent dwelling would be the focal point of the city, which would thereby be established forever as the capital city of God’s people: Jerusalem. The city at the center of the earth.

There is a sense in which it isn’t an either/or choice, either God or David. Somehow it seems to be both. This is the point at which we can understand only too well how it was that the Israelite people of old, and the Jewish people of Jesus’s day, could very easily forget that their national dream and God’s purposes for them might actually be two quite different things. The prophets existed to remind them of the fact; but prophets were easy to ignore or forget. Or kill.

We notice a constant triple theme in these songs. First, Israel’s God is celebrated as king especially in Jerusalem, in his home in the Temple. Second, when Israel’s God is enthroned as “king,” the nations are brought under his rule. Israel rejoices, but all the other nations will be included as well—sometimes, it seems, so that they may be punished for all their wickedness, particularly their oppression of Israel, but sometimes too so that they may be brought in to share the life of God’s people and join in with Israel’s praise of the one God. Indeed, the whole of creation will join in the celebration. Third, when God is king, the result is proper justice, real equity, the removal of all corruption and oppression.

In Psalms we see the three expectations of a God who is king of Israel, which were pent up demands placed on Jesus

an extraordinary passage in which YHWH, the true shepherd of Israel, is contrasted with the human rulers who have failed in their task of looking after the “sheep,” Israel: Mortal, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel: prophesy, and say to them—to the shepherds: Thus says the Lord YHWH: Ah, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them. So they were scattered, because there was no shepherd; and scattered, they became food for all the wild animals. My sheep were scattered, they wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill; my sheep were scattered over all the face of the earth, with no one to search or seek for them. . . . For thus says the Lord YHWH: I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness. . . . I will feed them with good pasture, and the mountain heights of Israel shall be their pasture; there they shall lie down in good grazing land, and they shall f...

This could hardly be clearer. The human “shepherds” have been a dismal failure; only YHWH himself will now do. He and he alone will give the “sheep”—the people of Israel—what they need and what the other shepherds have so obviously not given them.

Somehow, when God is king, “David” (i.e., the coming king from David’s family) will be king. These will not cancel one another out. When we read, among the stories of Jesus, hints and promises about a shepherd who cares for the sheep, these are the resonances we should be picking up.

(Ps. 2:1–2, 4–9) Here we have it. YHWH is in charge and will establish his own rule over the rest of the world from his throne in Zion. But he will do this through his “anointed,” through the one he calls “my son.”