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

by N.T. Wright

The relevance of this autobiographical remark for the present topic should, I think, be clear: writing about Jesus has never been, for me, a matter simply of “neutral” historical study (actually, there is no such thing, whatever the topic, but we’ll leave that aside for the moment); the Jesus whom I study historically is the Jesus I worship as part of the threefold unity of the one God.

In fact, if we try to give a “simple” answer, we may well oversimplify matters and end up just being quizzical. (When someone asked Augustine what God was doing before creation, he replied that God was making hell for people who ask silly questions.) Simplicity is a great virtue, but oversimplification can actually be a vice, a sign of laziness.

I could just say, “Just start reading the gospels and try to follow Jesus,” and that might do the trick, like telling the traveler just to head west and south and hope for the best.

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.

From this there emerges a sense, which is central to the New Testament itself, that Jesus’s way of running the world here and now is, however surprisingly, through his followers. The heart of their life is Spirit-led worship, through which they are constituted and energized as “the body of Christ.”

Western culture bounced back at Jesus the question with which he had teased his own followers. Instead of “Who do you say that I am?” we were asking him, “Who do you say that you are?”

And—since those three gentlemen are now a venerable part of the cultural landscape in their own right—are today’s shrill atheists right to say that God himself is a delusion, that Christianity is based on a multiple mistake, that it’s all out of date, bad for your health, massively disproved, socially disastrous, and ridiculously incoherent?

Why should I avoid the challenge of the real Jesus? Every time I opened the gospels and thought about my next sermon, I was faced with questions.

If my computer were a person, it would feel frustrated and grossly undervalued, its full potential nowhere near realized. We are, I believe, in that position today when we read the stories of Jesus in the gospels.

The gospels, like my computer, have every right to feel frustrated. Their full potential remains unrealized. Worse, Jesus himself has every right to feel frustrated.

Jesus—the Jesus we might discover if we really looked!—is larger, more disturbing, more urgent than we—than the church!—had ever imagined.

We have reduced the kingdom of God to private piety, the victory of the cross to comfort for the conscience, and Easter itself to a happy, escapist ending after a sad, dark tale. Piety, conscience, and ultimate happiness are important, but not nearly as important as Jesus himself.

He was the king, all right, but he had come to redefine kingship itself around his own work, his own mission, his own fate.

We want a “religious” leader, not a king! We want someone to save our souls, not rule our world! Or, if we want a king, someone to take charge of our world, what we want is someone to implement the policies we already embrace, just as Jesus’s contemporaries did. But if Christians don’t get Jesus right, what chance is there that other people will bother much with him?

Jesus of Nazareth was a figure of history. That’s where we have to start.

His later life indicates that, like many Jewish boys, he was from an early age taught to read Israel’s ancient scriptures, and that by adulthood he knew them inside out and had drawn his own conclusions as to what they meant.

Jesus himself wrote nothing, so far as we know. The sources we have for his public career—the four gospels in the New Testament—are dense, complex, and multilayered. They are works of art (of a sort) in their own right.

Jesus is unavoidable.

(In fact, we know more about him than we do about most other people from the ancient world; but even some who wrote about him at the time admitted that they were only scratching the surface.)

We have to get inside that world if the sense Jesus made then is going to make sense to us now.

They would have seen the son’s action as putting a curse on the father, saying, in effect, “I wish you were dead.” That gives the whole story a different flavor. You can’t assume that things worked in those days the way they work now.

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. Part of the reason why Jesus puzzled the people of his day was that he was talking about “God” most of the time, but what he was saying both did and did not make sense in relation to the “God” his hearers had been thinking of.

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).

This is about everything: life, art, the universe, justice, death, money. It’s about politics, philosophy, culture, and being human. It’s about a God who is so much bigger than the “God” of ordinary modern “religion” that it’s hardly possible to think of the two in the same breath.

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.

Can it really be the case that our judgment about who to vote for and what policies are best for a country and for the world can be mapped so easily onto questions of whether or not to believe a strange set of stories from the first century?

That’s the small, narrow world from which (whew!) the healthy skepticism of the modern world has rescued them. So, for many Americans today, and others elsewhere too, Jesus is part of the tight little world, closed and closed-minded, from which they have thankfully escaped.

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.

impression is that the “Jesus” who gets caught in the cross fire of these cultural wars may be considerably less than the Jesus we actually find in the pages of the early Christian writings—and in real, first-century history itself.

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.

First, “Did it all happen or didn’t it?” This is the plain, blunt question of a typical eighteenth-century Westerner. No frills, no metaphors, no interpretation, just “facts.”

But what about meaning?

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.

They cannot all be true either. What are we to do?

if we find a certain idea difficult or puzzling, how could they (poor, pre-Enlightenment souls!) possibly have gotten their minds around it?

We, today, are eager to ask certain questions (for instance, “Do heaven and hell exist, and how can I get to the first and avoid the second?”); and so we assume, too readily, that people in Jesus’s day were eager to ask those questions as well, meaning pretty much the same by them as we do now.

That doesn’t mean it’s horribly theoretical or abstract. It only means that most people, most of the time, live more complex lives than we often realize.

What sources did these books use, and how can we evaluate them historically? What non-Christian sources are there for Jesus? (Answer: a reference in the Jewish historian Josephus, a reference in the Roman historian Tacitus, and one possible allusion in a more scurrilous Roman writer, Suetonius.)

The way you treat the sources will reflect the way you already understand Jesus, just as the way you understand Jesus will reflect the way you understand the sources.

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.

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?

And it is to Jerusalem that we have to go to understand Jesus of Nazareth. That’s where the real perfect storm took place.

I think his friends told that story not only because it was striking and dramatic in itself, but because they saw in it something of the larger story they were struggling to tell: the story of a man in the eye of the storm, the storm of history and culture, of politics and piety, a man who seemed to be asleep in the middle of it all, but who then stood up and told the wind and the waves to stop.

The gale blowing steadily from the far west was the new social, political, and (not least) military reality of the day. The new superpower. The name on everyone’s lips, the reality on everyone’s minds. Rome.

Rome had had tyrants many centuries before and was proud to have rid itself of them.

But with Julius Caesar all that changed. “Caesar” was simply his family name, but Julius made it a royal title from that day on (the words “Kaiser” and “Tsar” are variations on “Caesar”).

But this threw Rome into a 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.”

Nobody knows which child Virgil was referring to, but the point is clear: the new age, for which we have waited for a millennium, is now here at last through the peaceful and joyful rule of Augustus Caesar.

“Good news! We have an Emperor! Justice, Peace, Security, and Prosperity are ours forever! The Son of God has become King of the World!”