The New Testament and the People of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God Book 1)

by N.T. Wright

One reason for allowing the material to expand in this way is the frustrating brevity of so many one-volume, or even two-volume, ‘New Testament theologies’ in the present century. To compress the discussion of the parables, or of justification, into two or three pages is actually not much use either to the ordinary reader or to the advancement of scholarship.

At the opposite extreme from the brief overall survey is the fragmentation which exists in so much of the discipline, whereby people spend entire professional careers specializing in one sub-area, and never try to draw together the threads of wider hypotheses.

I hope, then, to offer a consistent hypothesis on the origin of Christianity, with particular relation to Jesus, Paul and the gospels, which will set out new ways of understanding major movements and thought-patterns, and suggest new lines that exegesis can follow up.

There are five matters of linguistic usage on which I must comment, and either apologize for or, perhaps, explain why apology should be unnecessary. First, I normally refer to Jesus as ‘Jesus’, not simply ‘Christ’, as did many older writers.

It is because Messiahship is itself in question throughout the gospel story, and the task of the historian is to see things as far as possible through the eyes of the people of the time. In particular, it may serve as a reminder that ‘Christ’ is a title with a specific, and quite limited, meaning (see the discussions in volumes 2 and 3). It was not of itself a ‘divine’ title, however much it has been used as such in Christian circles, and was not in earliest Christianity reducible to a mere proper name.

Second, I have frequently used ‘god’ instead of ‘God’.

The modern usage, without the article and with a capital, seems to me actually dangerous. This usage, which sometimes amounts to regarding ‘God’ as the proper name of the Deity, rather than as essentially a common noun, implies that all users of the word are monotheists and, within that, that all monotheists believe in the same god. Both these propositions seem to me self-evidently untrue.

I have often preferred either to refer to Israel’s god by the biblical name, YHWH (notwithstanding debates about the use of this name within second-temple Judaism), or, in phrases designed to remind us of what or who we are talking about, to speak of ‘the creator’, ‘the covenant god’ or ‘Israel’s god’.

Third, some people get cross if they see the usage BC and AD in reference to dates before and after the birth of Jesus, since they take it as a sign of Christian imperialism. Others are irritated if they see Christians using the increasingly popular ‘neutral’ alternatives BCE (‘Before the Common Era’) and CE (‘Common Era’), because it seems either patronizing or spineless.

Fourth, we meet the currently vexed question of the gender of language about ‘God’, or gods.

Fifth, I shall constantly need to refer to that part of the Middle East in which the gospel events are set.

A word must be said here about the category of ‘story’, which I have found myself using increasingly frequently.

I am well aware that some will regard my use of it as faddish, and it is of course true that ‘story’ is a central feature of postmodern criticism, with its rejection of the anti-traditional, anti-story attitude of the Enlightenment. But I do not wish, in using this category, to buy wholesale into postmodernism itself. On the contrary: whereas postmodernism sometimes uses ‘story’ as a means whereby one may talk about something other than space-time reality, I have tried to integrate it within the ‘critical-realist’ epistemology expounded in Part II, and to use it as a way forward in history and theology as well as literary study.

There are those who, having seized power a century or two ago, and occupying many major fortresses (eminent chairs, well-known publishing houses, and so forth), insist that the New Testament be read in a thoroughgoing historical way, without inflicting on it the burden of being theologically normative.

There are, on the other side, those who have shown just as much determination in resisting the advance of the new regime. Some still regard the New Testament as a sort of magic book, whose ‘meaning’ has little to do with what the first-century authors intended, and a lot to do with how some particular contemporary group has been accustomed to hear in it a call to a particular sort of spirituality or lifestyle.

Both sides, in fact, are arguably defending comparatively modern positions: post-Enlightenment rationalism on the one hand, anti-Enlightenment supernaturalism on the other. Both sides need to reckon with the fact that there might be other alternatives, that the either-or imposed in the eighteenth century might be false.

It must be read with as little distortion as possible, and with as much sensitivity as possible to its different levels of meaning. It must be read so that the stories, and the Story, which it tells can be heard as stories, not as rambling ways of declaring unstoried ‘ideas’. It must be read without the assumption that we already know what it is going to say, and without the arrogance that assumes that ‘we’—whichever group that might be—already have ancestral rights over this or that passage, book, or writer. And, for full appropriateness, it must be read in such a way as to set in motion the drama which it suggests.

The four ways (pre-critical, historical, theological and postmodern readings) correspond very broadly to three movements within the history of Western culture in the last few centuries. The first belongs to the period before the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century; the second, to the major emphasis of the Enlightenment, sometimes known as ‘modernism’ or ‘modernity’; the third, to a corrective on the second, still from within the Enlightenment worldview; and the fourth to the recent period, in which the Enlightenment worldview has begun to break up under questioning from many sides, and which has become known as ‘postmodern’.

The rootedness of Christianity in history is not negotiable; one cannot escape from the Enlightenment’s critique by saying that history cannot question faith. (At least, attempts to do so, from early Gnosticism to the recent theologian Paul Tillich, have been widely regarded as avoiding rather than addressing the problem.)

Much Christianity is afraid of history, frightened that if we really find out what happened in the first century our faith will collapse. But without historical enquiry there is no check on Christianity’s propensity to remake Jesus, never mind the Christian god, in its own image.

granted that learning without love is sterile and dry, enthusiasm without learning can easily become blind arrogance.

the sharp distinction between the ‘supernatural’ and the ‘rational’ is itself a product of Enlightenment thinking, and to emphasize the ‘supernatural’ at the expense of the ‘rational’ or ‘natural’ is itself to capitulate to the Enlightenment worldview at a deeper level than if we were merely to endorse, rather than marginalize, a post-Enlightenment rationalist programme.

Underneath all these puzzles, I suggest that there are two questions in particular from which we cannot escape. They are: (1) How did Christianity begin, and why did it take the shape that it did? and (2) What does Christianity believe, and does it make sense?

Looking next at the historical set of questions, we find the issues focused on Jesus, Paul and the gospels. (a) Who was Jesus, and was he in any sense responsible for the beginning of ‘Christianity’?

(b) Was Paul the real founder of ‘Christianity’, the corrupter of the original message, or was he the true interpreter of Jesus?

(c) Why are the gospels what they are? Where do they stand in relation to Jesus and Paul?

What is Christian theology? In what way ought it to be the same today as it was in the beginning? Is such continuity even thinkable, let alone possible? What counts as normative Christianity? How do we know? Is there a worldview available to modern human beings which makes sense of the world as we know it and which stands in appropriate and recognizable continuity with the worldview of the early Christians? Should we even be looking for an authoritative statement of what the true faith and life might be, and if so where might we find it? How might it be reproduced in the modern church and world? And, underneath all such questions: what should we mean by the word ‘god’, or ‘God’?

This potential mutual hostility between ‘history’ and ‘theology’ has resulted in the well-known split in New Testament studies, whereby the subject is divided into ‘Introduction’, conceived as a ‘purely historical’ task, and ‘Theology’, conceived less historically and more synthetically.

The present work, then, is an attempt to integrate three tasks often thought to be disparate. There will be times when we shall lean more heavily on questions of one sort rather than another. In a sense, the study of Jesus is first and foremost a matter of history, needing careful ancillary use of literary study of the texts and theological study of implications. I shall describe Jesus from the point of view of historical events which precipitated a theological and literary revolution. In a sense, the study of Paul is a matter of theology, needing careful ancillary historical and literary work. I shall discuss Paul from the point of view of a revolutionary theology which precipitated a historical achievement. In a sense, studying the gospels in their own right is first and foremost a literary task, but it cannot be done without careful attention to the historical and theological setting, context and implications. I shall analyse the gospels from the point of view of a literary achievement which embodied a revolutionary worldview (or several revolutionary worldviews?).

As we have already seen, this historical study must include what may be called early Christian theology; that is, a historical description of the worldviews and belief-systems of professing Christians between, say, 30 and 130 AD.

At the same time, there are several difficulties that this task will encounter. To begin with, it shares the general difficulty of all ancient history: there is not enough material to make a thorough job.

As a result there is always the danger of a vicious circle: part of the aim of historical study of early Christianity is to arrive at a vantage point from which we could survey the whole landscape, including the New Testament; but most of the material for this task is contained within the New Testament itself.

There is the ‘big bang’ theory of Christian origins, according to which true, pure and unadulterated Christianity appeared briefly at the beginning, and has been cooling down and getting itself muddled up ever since.

There is the ‘steady development’ hypothesis, according to which theological and practical ideas and agendas develop in straight lines, without twists, turns or second thoughts.

There is the old Tübingen hypothesis, according to which Christianity developed in two parallel and distinct ways, divided by racial background, and then came together in ...

If we must make any distinction here, it is better to think of ‘public’ and ‘private’ tasks, rather than ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’. Yet the positivist element still remains, advocating a value-free and dogma-free historiography as though such a thing were really attainable.

but how is the history of early Christianity to be ‘relevant’ for the present day? At this point there is no agreement, but rather a muddle.

First, many writers of this and some other centuries have seen the religious experience of the early Christians (sometimes including their ‘theology’) as the normative element within Christianity.

Second, if early Christianity is to function in any way as a norm, the process will clearly involve selection—not simply the selection involved in any historical account of anything, but the selection of types of early Christianity according to a pre-arranged evaluative scheme.

Either one must elevate the earliest period on the grounds of its being primitive and therefore purer;22 or one will take a particular type of religion, described according to either its cultural provenance (Jewish or Greek) or its conformity to a theological norm (Pauline Christianity, for instance).23 And this again seems highly problematic: where did these criteria come from?

Finally, what does this scheme do with Jesus? It is residually odd to subsume Jesus under ‘early Christian experience’, or theology, or religion, as though Jesus were simply the first early Christian, whose ‘experience’ of his god might be deemed the most normative.

the simple historical description of early Christianity and its theology cannot by itself be a complete enterprise. It remains, of course, one vital part of the task. We shall see later on that, without it, the attempt to mount a successful reading of the New Testament, let alone a Christian theology, is doomed to failure.

At the practical level, it is bogged down by two things: the apparent arbitrariness, or at least the question-begging nature, of the choice of supposedly normative samples, and the difficulties of abstracting from a first-century context, complete with all its cultural trappings, a picture of this supposedly normative Christianity that would be both adequate for the task and sufficiently transportable to be applied in other cultures and times.29 The historical project, if it is to be successful even in its own terms, must broaden its horizons.

The first half (the description of the theology of the New Testament) forms, of course, a subset of the category we have just been examining: New Testament theology is one part of the theology of early Christianity, and the latter is one part of the total history of early Christianity.

The second half (addressing the modern world on this basis) is more complex, bringing us of course into the sphere commonly, though misleadingly, called ‘hermeneutics’.32 We need to look first at the roots of the question. Why should people think that studying the New Testament would allow a fresh word from their god to be heard?

Would historical exegesis provide the church with the material for its proclamation, or would it provide the problems which that proclamation would have to deal with or skirt around? How can the historical and the normative readings be combined? In other words, is ‘New Testament theology’ in its combined sense a viable proposition?

Two ways of making it viable which have been explored turn out upon examination to be ultimately unsatisfactory. The first, which brings together thinkers from Lessing in the eighteenth century to Bultmann in the twentieth, follows the line indicated above, of doing the historical work in order to move beyond it to an ultimate truth which is beyond space and time, outside history altogether. What then emerges is a timeless message, a timeless truth, or a timeless call to decision. This is the thing we can use today. Such a ‘timeless theology’ is then the real object of the historical quest.

The problem with this programme is that the skin does not peel away so cleanly. It is very difficult to produce a ‘theology’ from the New Testament that is couched in ‘timeless’ categories, and if we succeed in doing so we may justifiably suspect that quite a lot of fruit has been thrown away, still sticking to the discarded skin.

Two outworkings of this method, in twentieth-century scholarship, have been (1) demythologization: the attempt to move away from the culture-specific first-century forms of speech and thought in which the timeless message or call was clothed, and (2) form-criticism: the means of analysing material, which at face value offers historical narratives about Jesus, in such a way as to let it reveal the (supposedly) ‘timeless’ faith of the early church.

Here is a not inconsiderable irony within the Bultmannian agenda, which grows out of Protestant theology, insisting on a message which breaks out of the apparent strait-jacket imposed by history and the law and offers free forgiveness, grace, a new start. In doing so, it still emphasizes the literal sense of scripture, at least in relation to the gospels—but only in order to insist that the literal sense must be transcended if the true voice of scripture is to be heard. The gospels are actually ‘about’ Christian faith in Jesus rather than Jesus himself.