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

by N.T. Wright

Modern western culture, especially in America, has done its best to keep these two figures, the Jesus of history and the Jesus of faith, from ever meeting.

“kingdom of God.” Jesus himself spent quite a bit of time explaining what he meant by this phrase, and I have tried to track those explanations and get to the heart of his meaning.

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.

He didn’t raise an army and ride into battle at its head. He was riding on a donkey. And he was weeping, weeping for the dream that had to die, weeping for the sword that would pierce his supporters to the soul.

Weeping for the kingdom that wasn’t coming as well as for the kingdom that was.

I often point out to students that they come to a university not to learn the answers, but to discover the right questions.

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atheists right to say that God himself is a delusion, that Christianity is based on a multiple mistake, that it’s all out of date,

With Jesus, it’s easy to be complicated and hard to be simple. Part of the difficulty is that Jesus was and is much, much more than people imagine.

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

It is we, the churches, who have been the real reductionists. 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.

But if Christians don’t get Jesus right,

what

chance is there that other people will bother...

If he wasn’t that—if cunning people made him up out of thin air to validate their own new movement, as some have ridiculously suggested—he’s not worth bothering with.

Jesus is mysterious because what we do know—what our evidence encourages us to see as the core of who he was and what he did—is so unlike what we know about anybody else that we are forced to ask, as people evidently did at the time: who, then, is this?

The first reason for our being puzzled is that, for most of us, Jesus’s world is a strange, foreign country. I

the second is that Jesus’s God is strange to us. That idea may itself seem odd. Isn’t God simply God?

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.

But not long after his death his associates started to claim that he was now in charge, for real.

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.

Our culture has become used to thinking of Jesus as a “religious” figure rather than a “political” one.

Behind the three historical puzzles ( Jesus’s world, Jesus’s God, and Jesus’s behavior—acting as if he was in charge) are additional difficulties that, like the elements of a perfect storm, have come together to pose severe challenges for anyone trying to address the questions

about Jesus, let alone to do so simply.

We have to stand up for the truth of the gospels against the blasts of modern skepticism. We can’t let the atheists and the nay-sayers have it all their own way.

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?

we declare ourselves to be in favor of this package and against that one. And we make life uncomfortable for anyone who wants to sit loose, to see things differently. Jesus, as always, gets caught in the middle—along with a good number of his followers.

public wants them to be stifled. We have our dreams of being free, grown-up humans, and we don’t want to bend the knee to anyone, especially that fussy old God or that strange character Jesus!

First, the high-pressure system of conservative Christianity.

As a sign of his otherwise secret divine identity, this “son” does all kinds of extraordinary and otherwise impossible “miracles,” crowning them all by rising from the dead and returning to “heaven,” where he waits to welcome his faithful followers after their deaths.

The second myth, prevalent in the skeptical “western wind” of our perfect storm, is the new classic modernist myth,

In this new myth of Christian origins, Jesus was just an ordinary man, a good first-century Jew, conceived and born in the ordinary way. He was a remarkable preacher and teacher, but he probably didn’t do all those “miracles.”

But if we want to find out about Jesus himself, we have to work our way back through the fog of subsequent hero worship and, above all, through the process by which he was “divinized.”

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.

Facts or no facts. But what about meaning?

so was Jesus the Son of God,

or wasn’t he? And for most people the phrase

“son of God” carries with it all the connotations of that first myth, in which the supernatural being swoo...

The third element is the sheer historical complexity of speaking about Jesus.

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.

We should be grateful to the whole post-Enlightenment movement we loosely call “modernism” for reminding us that they matter, even as we should firmly decline the same movement’s unwarranted restriction of the kinds of answers it is prepared to accept.

We, today, are eager to ask certain questions

and so we assume, too readily, that people in Jesus’s day were eager to ask those questions as well,

What matters, I have become convinced, is that we need to understand how worldviews work.

It only means that most people, most of the time, live more complex lives than we often realize.

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. This isn’t a vicious circle.

How can we tell the story of Jesus in a simple way, when so many elemental forces came rushing together at that point in space and time?

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.

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.”