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

by N.T. Wright

Finally, we may simply note the comment on Genesis quoted earlier from the rabbinic midrash: Abraham is to restore what Adam has done.92 Just as the theme of ‘covenant’ is everywhere present though not always stated, so the Israel-Adam link, which simply focuses the meaning of the covenant, seems to have been woven so thoroughly into Jewish thought and writing that it emerges in one form or another practically everywhere we look.

Nowhere in the so-called post-exilic literature is there any passage corresponding to 1 Kings 8:10f., according to which, when Solomon’s temple had been finished, ‘a cloud filled the house of YHWH, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of YHWH filled the house of YHWH’. Instead, Israel clung to the promises that one day the Shekinah, the glorious presence of her god, would return at last: Listen! Your sentinels lift up their voices, together they sing for joy, for in plain sight they see the return of YHWH to Zion.

This problem is often seen in the later biblical and second-temple literature in terms of the covenant faithfulness (tsedaqah, ‘righteousness’) of Israel’s god—a topic which becomes exceedingly important in the study of Pauline theology. The question of the righteousness of god, as expressed by Jews in this period, can be stated as follows: when and how would Israel’s god act to fulfil his covenant promises?109 The solutions on offer fell into a fairly regular pattern within the ‘apocalyptic’ writings. They can be set out as follows:

It should be clear from this that the idea of ‘god’s righteousness’ was inextricably bound up with the idea of the covenant.115 These beliefs, which grew naturally out of the combination of monotheism and election, led to the characteristic shape of second-temple Jewish eschatology. Monotheism and election thus result in what has been appropriately called ‘restoration eschatology’.116 Not until YHWH acted decisively to change things and restore the fortunes of his people would the exile be at an end. At the present time, the covenant people themselves were riddled with corruption, still undeserving of redemption. One major result was that Judaism always contained a tradition of fierce criticism-from-within, which stretched back to Moses and the early prophets. Such criticisms were a regular and classic feature of Judaism, and their appropriation by John the Baptist and Jesus (and, arguably, the early church) is paradoxically a sign, not of rejection of Judaism and all that it stood for, but of fidelity to one of Judaism’s central traditions.

according to what inner rationale was the killing of animals or birds thought to effect the atonement and forgiveness which those who did it clearly believed it did effect? It cannot be thought that it effected purification, since purification was a necessary preliminary to the offering of sacrifice. And if it is the case that sacrifices are simply a convenient occasion for the really effective act of atonement, which is repentance and confession, that still does not explain why sacrifices themselves have any meaning at all.124 In the nature of the case, this is not necessarily something that would be explicitly articulated by those taking part; it is more something to be discerned by the wise sociologist or philosopher of religion from the study of the overall pattern of observances. It seems, to put the matter in general terms, as though the sacrificial system functioned as a regular pointer back to the great acts of redemption such as the exodus, and equally as a pointer forward to the great redemption still to come. Since it spoke of Israel’s reconciliation with her god, it could thus function as a cyclical reminder of a historical or historical/eschatological phenomenon.

the sacrificial system functioned as a way of enacting and institutionalizing one aspect of the worldview which we have already studied: the belief that Israel’s covenant god would restore the fortunes of his people, creating them as his true redeemed humanity; and that what he would thus do for the nation as a whole he would also do for individuals within the nation. Of course, as so many writers have pointed out recently, this was not effected automatically.127 It was held to depend, at least in part, on the attitude of the individual: one had to repent.

repentance and sacrifice were part of the means by which Jews maintained their status as the covenant people, enabling Jews to stay within the boundaries when they might in theory have been excluded.

If the exile itself was seen as a ‘death’, and therefore return from exile as a ‘resurrection’, it is not a long step to see the death of Israel as in some sense sacrificial, so that the exile becomes not simply a time when she languishes in Babylon, serving a forlorn sentence in a foreign land, but actually a time through which the sin she has committed is expiated. The exile, it seems, was to be seen both as a punishment for the nation in its wickedness, and as in some sense a vocation to a righteous bearing of sin and evil. This step was taken explicitly in the fourth of the Servant Songs in Isaiah 40–55 (52:13–53:12).

Exile itself is to be understood as a sacrifice. This understanding of Israel’s own sufferings, or those of a representative or group, as somehow redemptive, effective to deliver the rest of the nation from the time of the divine wrath, is picked up most clearly in the language attributed to the Maccabaean martyrs: For we are suffering because of our own sins. And if our living Lord is angry for a little while, to rebuke and discipline us, he will again be reconciled with his own servants … I, like my brothers, give up body and life for the laws of our ancestors, appealing to God to show mercy soon to our nation and by trials and plagues to make you [i.e. Antiochus Epiphanes] confess that he alone is God, and through me and my brothers to bring to an end the wrath of the Almighty that has justly fallen on our whole nation.130

You know, O God, that though I might have saved myself, I am dying in burning torments for the sake of the law. Be merciful to your people, and let our punishment suffice for them. Make my blood their purification, and take my life in exchange for theirs.131 These, then, who have been consecrated for the sake of God, are honoured, not only with this honour, but also by the fact that because of them our enemies did not rule over our nation, the tyrant was punished, and the homeland purified—they having become, as it were, a ransom for the sin of our nation. And through the blood of those devout ones and their death as an atoning sacrifice, divine Providence preserved Israel that previously had been mistreated.132

The annual pilgrimages were not simply times when a multitude of individual Jews restored their individual relationships with their god; they were occasions of national celebration, and reaffirmation of national (i.e. political and social, as well as ‘religious’) hope.

there was most likely a sense that the sacrificial ritual itself dramatically enacted the movement of judgment and salvation, exile and restoration, death and resurrection for which Israel longed. The maintenance, and evident popularity, of the cult thus demonstrated not just the strength of individual piety but the fervour of national expectation.

The basis of the eager expectation that fomented discontent and fuelled revolution was not merely frustration with the inequalities of the Roman imperial system, but the fact that this frustration was set within the context of Jewish monotheism, election and eschatology. The covenant god would act once more, bringing to birth the ‘coming age’, ha‘olam ha-ba’, which would replace the ‘present age’, ha‘olam ha-zeh, the age of misery, bondage, sorrow and exile.

Eschatological messianism <~Jewish covenantal monotheism+political oppression

When applied to literature, the word usually denotes a particular form, that of the reported vision and (sometimes) its interpretation. Claims are made for these visions: they are divine revelations, disclosing (hence ‘apocalyptic’, from the Greek for ‘revelation’ or ‘disclosure’) states of affairs not ordinarily made known to humans.3 Sometimes these visions concern the progress of history, more specifically, the history of Israel; sometimes they focus on otherworldly journeys; sometimes they combine both.

The different layers of meaning in vision-literature of this type thus demand to be heard in their full polyphony, not flattened out into a single level of meaning. If this had been noted a century ago, biblical scholarship could have been spared many false trails.

Apocalyptic language uses complex and highly coloured metaphors in order to describe one event in terms of another, thus bringing out the perceived ‘meaning’ of the first.

Within the context of creational and covenantal monotheism, apocalyptic language makes excellent sense. Indeed, it is not easy to see what better language-system could have been chosen to articulate Israel’s hope and invest it with its full perceived significance.

Of great influence here has been the view of Albert Schweitzer, that Jews of the first century expected the physical world to be brought to an end.15 Schweitzer envisaged this event as being a common Jewish expectation, involving the arrival on earth of a divine messianic figure.

I have come to the view that the critique of Schweitzer launched by Caird, Glasson, Borg and others is on target.16 Sometimes, no doubt, extraordinary natural phenomena were both expected, witnessed and interpreted within a grid of belief which enabled some to see them as signs and portents.

The ‘kingdom of god’ has nothing to do with the world itself coming to an end. That makes no sense either of the basic Jewish worldview or of the texts in which the Jewish hope is expressed.

Far more important to the first-century Jew than questions of space, time and literal cosmology were the key issues of Temple, Land, and Torah, of race, economy and justice. When Israel’s god acted, Jews would be restored to their ancestral rights and would practice their ancestral religion, with the rest of the world looking on in awe, and/or making pilgrimages to Zion, and/or being ground to powder under Jewish feet.

This meant that ‘apocalyptic’ could be seen as far closer to Gnosticism than was really warranted by the evidence (see below); that it could be uprooted from its context as part of Israel’s national expectation; and that it could thus function as a history-of-religions explanation for (say) Pauline theology, in a way which allowed quite a bit of the previous theory, that of derivation from Gnosticism, to remain in place.18 That is why, no doubt, an insistence on the ‘imminent expectation’ of the end of the space-time world plays a vital and non-negotiable part in some such readings of the New Testament.19 There is, I suggest, no good evidence to suggest anything so extraordinary as the view which Schweitzer and his followers espoused. As good creational monotheists, mainline Jews were not hoping to escape from the present universe into some Platonic realm of eternal bliss enjoyed by disembodied souls after the end of the space-time universe.

Within the literary form of standard apocalyptic writings, then, we have found a linguistic convention, which traces its roots without difficulty back to classical prophecy: complex, many-layered and often biblical imagery is used and re-used to invest the space-time events of Israel’s past, present and future with their full theological significance.

One of the hardest questions about apocalyptic is whether any given writer actually experienced the visions he records, or whether he is simply employing a literary genre as a vivid and dramatic form of writing.

We may therefore postulate, with some hope of being on target historically, a continuum of experience that gave rise to the writing of apocalypses. At one end of the scale are the full-blown mystics. At the other are those who write about socio-political events in colourful metaphor. In between, there were most likely pious Jews who, without dramatic visionary experiences, nevertheless wrote from a full and devout belief and longing, in words highly charged with religious emotion.

On all counts, apocalyptic can function, and we may suppose was intended to function, as the subversive literature of oppressed groups—whether or not it was inspired by out-and-out mysticism, or by good literary technique.

Precisely because apocalyptic writing ventured into two dubious areas, mystical speculation and political subversion, many ordinary Jews would have regarded it with suspicion or distaste. As with the Qumran Scrolls, we cannot assume that because we possess a first-century text everyone in the first century possessed it too. The apocalyptic writings do not automatically reveal ‘what all Jews thought’; they provide evidence for possible directions that Jewish thought could take, under certain specific circumstances.

The language of metaphysical representation is a way of ensuring that the earthly events (puzzling and worrying though they may seem) are in fact bound up with the heavenly dimension, and thus invested both with a significance which may not appear on the surface and with a clear hope for a future that goes beyond what could be predicted from socio-political observation.

Because the heavenly and the earthly realm belong closely with one another—which is a way of asserting the presence of the creator god within his creation and in the midst of his people—it makes theological sense to think of penetrating the mysteries of the heavenly realm and emerging with information that would relate to the earthly realm. Granted this metaphysical belief, and granted the prophetic penchant for visionary images of various kinds, it is easy to see how a literary form could spring up which would sometimes make use of the metaphysical correspondence between the earthly and the heavenly, and sometimes not (the monsters of Daniel 7 were not, I think, supposed to be actual creatures in the supernatural, any more than in the natural, realm). Nor did this equation leave sociological representation out of consideration entirely.

With these distinctions in mind, we may now go further, and suggest a contextual reading of Daniel 7 which shows, I think, the extreme probability that those who read this (very popular) chapter in the first century would have seen its meaning first and foremost in terms of the vindication of Israel after her suffering at the hands of the pagans.

the parallels we have seen between chapter 7 and chapters 1–6 encourage me to assert that in chapter 7 at least, whatever may be the case later on, the natural way of reading the vision is to see the ‘one like the son of man’ as ‘representing’ (in the literary, not the sociological or metaphysical, sense) the ‘people of the saints of the most high’. That is to say, the vision is about the suffering of Israel at the hands of the pagans—more especially, of one pagan monarch in particular, presumably Antiochus Epiphanes—and her coming vindication when the one god reveals himself to be her god and destroys her enemies.

It belongs to the apocalyptic genre that the meaning of the vision should be unfolded step by step (if necessary), not that the meaning should actually change from one unfolding to the next. It is thus perfectly proper to allow the fullest, final statement (v. 27) to be determinative for the earlier ones; and the addition of ‘people’ to ‘saints of the most high’ at this point can therefore safely be taken as an indication that this was the reference always intended.40

The more oppressed a group perceives itself to be, the more it will want to calculate when liberation will dawn. But that there is a divine plan, which, though often opaque, is working its way out in history and will one day demonstrate the justice of all its workings—this is believed by the biblical writers, the wisdom literature, the Maccabaean martyrs, the writers of the Scrolls, Josephus, and almost everyone else one can think of in the period. It is not a sign that apocalyptic literature has gone out on a limb; merely, that it sometimes has a different way of expressing itself, a way which can be seen to arise not least from its particular socio-cultural situation.

First-century Jews certainly believed that their god, being the creator of the world, could and did act in ways for which there was no other obvious explanation. But that he was normally absent, allowing his world and his people to get on with things under their own steam—if there were Jewish writers who believed this, I am unaware of them. The puzzle that faced some writers, namely, why their god was not acting as they wished him to, was solved, as we have seen, in quite other ways, not least through wrestling with the concept of the divine covenant-faithfulness.41

It follows from all this that there is no justification for seeing ‘apocalyptic’ as necessarily speaking of the ‘end of the world’ in a literally cosmic sense. This modern idea has regularly been fuelled by the belief that ‘apocalyptic’ is ‘dualistic’, in a way which we have now seen to be unfounded. The great bulk of apocalyptic writing does not suggest that the space-time universe is evil, and does not look for it to come to an end. An end to the present world order, yes: only such language, as Jeremiah found, could do justice to the terrible events of his day.42 The end of the space-time world, no.

we must insist on a reading which does justice to the literary nature of the works in question; which sets them firmly in their historical context, in which Jews of most shades of opinion looked for their god to act within continuing history; and which grasps the fundamental Jewish worldview and theology, seeing the present world as the normal and regular sphere of divine actions, whether hidden or revealed. Literature, history and theology combine to suggest strongly that we must read most apocalyptic literature, both Jewish and Christian, as a complex metaphor-system which invests space-time reality with its full, that is, its theological, significance.

The present age was a time when the creator god seemed to be hiding his face; the age to come would see the renewal of the created world.

in the comparatively rare places where Messianism is made explicit, it features as one aspect of the much wider and far more frequent expectation of a great reversal within the space-time world, in which Israel would be vindicated and the world at last set back to rights under its true king, Israel’s covenant god.

the ‘salvation’ spoken of in the Jewish sources of this period has to do with rescue from the national enemies, restoration of the national symbols, and a state of shalom in which every man will sit under his vine or fig-tree.49 ‘Salvation’ encapsulates the entire future hope. If there are Christian redefinitions of the word later on, that is another question. For first-century Jews it could only mean the inauguration of the age to come, liberation from Rome, the restoration of the Temple, and the free enjoyment of their own Land.50

The idea of Israel’s god becoming King is to be seen within the context of the whole historical expectation of Israel, dependent (in a people fiercely conscious of the importance of their own traditions) on Old Testament expressions of hope for the universal divine rule.

Sun, moon and stars function within a poem like this as deliberate symbols for the great powers of the world: to speak of them being shaken or dimmed is the kind of language a first-century writer might use quite naturally to express the awesome significance of great political events, such as the terrifying year (AD 68–9) in which four Roman emperors met violent deaths, and a fifth marched from Palestine to claim the throne.

The modern distinction between socio-political events and the ‘transcendent’ dimension can only be related to the first-century Jewish worldview if we realize that the various different sets of language which were available at the time were used to denote the same events.76

These instances show clearly enough the use of ‘kingdom’-language in our period. It was a regular means of expressing the national hope, invoking in its support the belief that Israel’s god was the only god—in other words, using Jewish monotheism and covenant theology in the service of eschatology. Israel’s god would bring to pass the restoration from exile, the renewal of the covenant. Because he was also the creator god, this event could not adequately be described without the use of cosmic imagery. Israel’s victory over the nations, the rebuilding of the Temple, the cleansing of the Land: all these together amounted to nothing short of a new creation, a new Genesis.

This restoration of Israel, celebrated in the regular liturgy, is part of the meaning of her god’s becoming king. Israel herself is the people through whom the king will rule.

One false trail must be marked off at this point. There is not much evidence for a direct connection between the symbol ‘kingdom of god’ and the coming of a Messiah.

the apparent tension of YHWH as King and the Messiah as King does not really arise, mainly because the two are not usually spoken of in the same texts. In any case, as we saw, YHWH’s being King does not mean that Israel will have no rulers at all, but that she will have the right rulers.

Modern scholarship has made one thing quite clear: there was no single, monolithic and uniform ‘messianic expectation’ among first-century Jews.79

Most of the Jewish literature we possess from the period has no reference to a Messiah; a good deal of prominent and powerful writing ignores the theme altogether. Such evidence as there is is scattered and diverse, spread across very different writings with a hint here, a dark saying there, and only occasionally a clear statement about a coming Son of David who would execute YHWH’s wrath on the Gentiles, or rebuild the Temple, or otherwise fulfil Israel’s hopes.

Their conceptions of a coming Messiah were so coloured by their awareness of the failure of the two great wars that we cannot expect much early historical material to have survived unscathed.80 So, despite the confident pronouncements of many generations, both Christian and Jewish, we must conclude initially that we cannot say what, if anything, the average Jew-in-the-market-place believed about a coming Messiah. In the surviving literature, ‘when an individual Messiah is envisaged, his role and character remain vague and undefined’.81

But at the same time the very diversity and unstandardized nature of the evidence suggests that the idea of a Messiah was at least latent in several varieties of Judaism; that it could be called to consciousness if circumstances demanded; and that there were at least some more or less constant factors within the diversity.