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

by N.T. Wright

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.

It is, I think, hard for people today to imagine what it’s like to live within a long story in this way. The closest we come, perhaps, is the widespread assumption that ever since the rise of the modern Western world we are acting out a story of “progress.”

Despite all the tyrannies of the last century, people today still believe this myth of progress, as evidenced by the numerous proposals you read or hear that begin, “Now that we live in this day and age . . .” or “Now that we live in the twenty-first century . . .” Those phrases signal the presence of some kind of “progressive” agenda.

We have lived with the “progressive” dream for two or three centuries, but the Jews had been living in their great story for, they believed, well over a thousand years.

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.

The Jews lived on the hope that it would happen again.

Understand the Exodus, and you understand a good deal about Judaism. And about Jesus. Jesus chose Passover, the great national festival celebrating the Exodus, to make his crucial move.

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.

“Hitler and the Messiah!” “Hitler and the Messiah!” The great wicked ruler and the coming great deliverer! That was the message I saw then.

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.

Memories of King David and his famous victories over the surrounding pagan nations were kept alive, as prophets promised a coming day when a king from David’s family would bring justice, peace, and prosperity to the whole world.

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.

And now here comes the extraordinary bit, the part of the story many miss out, the twist in the tale responsible for the fact that, by the time the high-pressure system of Jewish history reached the first century, it was already dangerously close to storm force. Though many Jews had, remarkably enough, been brought back from Babylon and by the end of the sixth century had even rebuilt the Temple, there remained a strong sense that this was not yet the real “new Exodus” for which they longed.

The long story of Israel must finally confront the long story of Rome.

The clash of these two stories produced several movements within a couple of hundred years on either side of the time of Jesus.