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

by N.T. Wright

How can we know if we are on the right track?

the Jesus whom I study historically is the Jesus I worship as part of the threefold unity of the one God.

writing about Jesus has never been a matter simply of pastoral and homiletic intent; the Jesus whom I preach is the Jesus who lived and died as a real human being in first-century Palestine.

(When someone asked Augustine what God was doing before creation, he replied that God was making hell for people who ask silly questions.)

Is our sense of Jesus as a presence, disturbing but also healing, confronting but also comforting, simply a figment of our imagination? Was Freud right to see it as just a projection of our inner desires? Was Marx right to say that it was just a way of keeping the hungry masses quiet? Was Nietzsche right to say that Jesus taught a wimpish religion that has sapped the energy of humankind ever since? 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atheists right to say that God himself is a delusion, that Christianity is based on a multiple mistake, that it’s all out of date, bad for your health, massively disproved, socially disastrous, and ridiculously incoherent?

We in the churches use these stories for various obvious things: little moralizing sermons on how to behave in the coming week, aids to prayer and meditation, extra padding for a theological picture largely constructed from elsewhere. The gospels, like my computer, have every right to feel frustrated. Their full potential remains unrealized.

Plenty of books offer just that: a cut-down-to-size Jesus, Jesus as a great moral teacher or religious leader, a great man but nothing more.

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.

They were looking for a builder to construct the home they thought they wanted, but he was the architect, coming with a new plan that would give them everything they needed, but within quite a new framework. They were looking for a singer to sing the song they had been humming for a long time, but he was the composer, bringing them a new song to which the old songs they knew would form, at best, the background music. 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!

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.

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.

if the first reason for the puzzle is that Jesus’s world is strange to us, the second is that Jesus’s God is strange to us.

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,

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).

But not long after his death his associates started to claim that he was now in charge, for real. And they started to act as if it was true. This isn’t about “religion” in the sense the Western world has imagined for over two hundred years. This is about everything: life, art, the universe, justice, death, money. It’s about politics, philosophy, culture, and being human.

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?

The winds are howling around you, you can hardly hear yourself think, and you suspect that neither side can hear too well either. It’s a dialogue of the deaf.

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. And we make life uncomfortable for anyone who wants to sit loose, to see things differently.

Here we find the classic Western Christian myth about Jesus, which is still believed by millions around the world. In this myth, a supernatural being called “God” has a supernatural “son” whom he sends, virgin-born, into our world, despite the fact that it’s not his natural habitat, so that he can rescue people out of this world by dying in their place. 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.

(Already I hear that wind getting up. “What d’you mean it’s a myth? Don’t you believe that? Are you one of those dangerous liberals after all? Aren’t you a bishop?” Okay, okay, I hear you. Please wait. Patience is a Christian virtue.)

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.” Some people seem to have felt better after meeting him, but that was about it. He certainly didn’t think he would die for the sins of the world. He was simply trying to teach people to live differently, to love one another, to be kind to old ladies, small children, and (that blessed postmodern category) the “

(At this point I hear the other wind rattling the window panes. “And you don’t believe that? Don’t you realize that the gospels are full of later invention and interpretation? Are you one of those right-wing fundamentalist fanatics who think that all of that stuff just happened the way it says in the gospels? Which stone have you been living under for the last two hundred years?” All right, all right, I hear you too. If you’re representing the world of sweet reasonableness, then calm down and take the argument one step at a time.)

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.

The underlying problem with both these myths is that they pose the question in the wrong place.