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

by N.T. Wright

Talking about someone new being in charge was dangerous talk in Jesus’s day, and it’s dangerous talk still. Someone behaving as if they possess some kind of authority is an obvious threat to established rulers and other power brokers. Perhaps that’s why, particularly in the last two or three hundred years, this side of Jesus hasn’t been explored too much. 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?

This is a better explanation of my own religious search in the past five years than I have been able to explain on my own! What are the real implications of tearing down the barriers we've errected to create the world in which we live? What happens if we accept the Jesus really meant what he said, even when it contradicts our norms and causes our seperate spheres to bleed into eachother? What if it dashes our compartmentalization into pieces? What can we learn from Christ if we're willing to do this?