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

by N.T. Wright

After his resurrection, Jesus, like Moses, goes up the mountain and departs from his people, leaving them with a commission to go in and possess the land, that is, the entire world (28:16–20). And, if my suggestion is correct, Matthew has woven this covenantal choice into the very structure of his gospel, portraying it as the choice set before his contemporaries by Jesus, and thereby himself setting the same choice before the church of his own day. There is a way by which Israel can be rescued from her exile, can receive the promised forgiveness of sins rather than the ultimate curse. It is the way of following Jesus. Those who come by this way are not a new Israel, as though created suddenly from nothing. They are the true descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Matthew’s plot and structure presuppose the entire Jewish story-line to date. They claim to be bringing about that of which Moses spoke in Deuteronomy 30. They are not simply a collection of types, historical precedents arbitrarily repeated. They claim to be the continuation and proper completion of the whole history itself. Jesus, for Matthew, is both the new David and the new Moses, but also something more.

I suggest that the model which best describes what he was doing is the much-misunderstood category of apocalyptic. That is where mysteries are propounded and revealed, where secrets unavailable elsewhere find their paradoxical elaboration.

Some have argued that Mark was ‘deeply anti-apocalyptic’;74 others, that he was writing precisely that: an apocalypse.75 I agree with neither assessment, because both are, to my mind, based on a misreading of what ‘apocalyptic’ actually is, either as a literary genre or as a way of viewing the world.

Mark, supremely among the gospels, highlights the notion of a secret to be penetrated, of a mystery to be explored and grasped. From this point of view, Mack is quite right: the whole book, not only chapter 13, is ‘apocalyptic’.79

The gospel subverts the normal Jewish apocalyptic tellings of Israel’s story, not by renouncing the ideas and literary modes of apocalyptic, but by redirecting its central thrust.

Mark 4:1–20 is, ironically, one of the most obvious, and at the same time most neglected, examples of ‘apocalyptic’ writing anywhere in the New Testament.

Instead of telling the story of Israel as a whole by means of apocalyptic imagery, he has told the story of Jesus telling the story of Israel by such means. To this extent the book is, as it were, a meta-apocalypse.

But the deepest level at which Mark is to be considered an apocalypse is the level for which these two passages, Mark 4 and 13, are simply signs and symptoms.

Mark’s whole telling of the story of Jesus is designed to function as an apocalypse. The reader is constantly invited by the gospel as a whole to do what the disciples are invited to do in the parable-chapter, that is, to come closer and discover the inner secret behind the strange outer story.

The coming of the kingdom does not mean the great vindication of Jerusalem, the glorification of the Temple, the real return from exile envisaged by the prophets and their faithful readers. It means, rather, the desolation of Jerusalem, the destruction of the Temple, and the vindication of Jesus and his people.

Mark has written a Christian apocalypse, in which the events of Jesus’ life—so clearly events of Jesus’ life that the work shares the characteristics of a Hellenistic bios—form the vital theatre in which Israel’s history reaches its moment of ‘apocalyptic’ crisis. From then on, true, that history is to be re-evaluated. But once again, as with Luke and Matthew, it is clear that Mark’s story only makes sense if we presuppose as its backdrop this whole history of Israel, apocalyptically conceived.

Jewish monotheism has been used in recent years, illegitimately in my view, as an argument against an early high christology. What it really cuts against at this point is the dualism that separates Israel’s god from his world as though he were not its creator and redeemer.

But let us suppose that (within a context of first-century Jewish belief that the covenant god was to intervene within the course of history to deliver his people from their oppression and exile) Jesus had done and said certain things which led people, in however muddled a fashion, to believe that somehow their god was achieving this purpose in and through his work. In such a case, the beginnings of post-resurrection belief in the saving significance of his death, articulated first as the rescue of Israel from exile, is far more credible.

The resurrection thus vindicates what Jesus was already believed to be; it cannot be the sole cause of that belief which sprang up around it.

More particularly, if the resurrection was believed to be part of that complex of events through which the covenant god would restore the fortunes of his people, any telling of a ‘resurrection’ story about Jesus could only make sense in a context of telling Israel’s story in the form of Jesus’ story.

The gospel of the early church, of Paul, of the evangelists, is that the promises of the Jewish scriptures had come true in the resurrection. That is why Paul and others keep insisting that Jesus’ death and resurrection happened ‘according to the scriptures’, or in fulfilment of them.96

the point of such ideas is that Israel’s scriptures as a whole tell of the covenant; of the exile as the result of Israel’s god punishing his people for their sins; and of the great ‘return’ that will happen when that dark period is finally over and done. What the early church is saying, when telling the story of Jesus’ resurrection and announcing it to the world as the summons to obedient faith, is that the history of, and promises to, Israel had come true in Jesus, that in his death he had taken the exile as far as it could go, and that in his resurrection he had inaugurated the real return from that real exile.

to announce the resurrection, and to do so (in shorthand) ‘according to the scriptures’, is to tell Israel’s story in the form of Jesus’ story.

they tell the story of Jesus in such a way as to convey the belief that this story is the climax of Israel’s story. They therefore have the form of the story of Israel, now reworked in terms of a single human life. Since, then, Israel’s story has been embodied in one man, the gospels have also the form of what we must call quasi-biography.

the gospels are at least biographies. But they are more than that. They are, in fact, Jewish-style biographies, designed to show the quintessence of Israel’s story played out in a single life. Their nearest analogue at that level is the martyr-literature, where the focus of attention is not on the date of someone’s birth or the colour of their hair, but on their fidelity to YHWH, their consequent suffering, and their hope of vindication.

The gospels are therefore the story of Jesus told as the history of Israel in miniature: the ‘typology’ which is observed here and there by critics is simply a function of this larger purpose of the evangelists.

Matthew gives us, in his first five chapters, a Genesis (1:1), an Exodus (2:15), and a Deuteronomy (5–7); he then gives us a royal and prophetic ministry, and finally an exile (the cross) and restoration (the resurrection).

They are the Israel-story told as biography, modified in the direction of the secular genre (Luke especially shows evidence of this) but without using the secular genre as either the base or the goal. That is the grain of truth in the old critical contention that the gospels were not biographies. This explains, better than any other solution, both the similarities and the remaining differences between the gospels and their secular analogues.100

The question remains, however: is this way of telling the story an innovation, sprung on Christianity at the start of the second generation? Has Mark, no less than Matthew or Luke, ‘historicized’ a message that originally had little or nothing to do with history, let alone the history and expectations of Israel? That was the major argument of Bultmann and his school.

Within all his letters, though particularly in Romans and Galatians, we discover a larger implicit narrative, which stands out clearly as the true referential sequence behind the poetic sequence demanded by the different rhetorical needs of the various letters.

Paul presupposes this story even when he does not expound it directly, and it is arguable that we can only understand the more limited narrative worlds of the different letters if we locate them at their appropriate points within this overall story-world, and indeed within the symbolic universe that accompanies it.108 The story begins with the creation of the world by the one god, a good and wise god. So far, so Jewish, though Paul does not say, as 4 Ezra would later, that the world was made for the sake of Israel.109 It continues, equally Jewishly, with the creation and fall of Adam and Eve, as the eponymous parents of all humankind. Skipping over Noah, Paul’s story highlights Abraham, whom he sees, in company with Jewish tradition,110 as the beginning of the divine answer to the problem of Adam.

again Paul subverts the normal Jewish telling of the story, since he insists that this process of narrowing down the promise-bearing family continues on beyond Jacob.112

For an orthodox Jew, then as now, Torah was the great gift which signalled Israel’s special status and vocation. For Paul this remains true, but with a dark twist: the special status and vocation is that Torah should convict Israel of sin, so that Israel should be cast away in order that the world might be redeemed.113 All that Torah does within Israel, even to the best of its adherents, is to convict them of their sharing in Adam’s sin, so that the highest they can attain to is the level—the irony is heavy at this point—of the best of the pagan philosophers.114

But again he subverts the Jewish story from within. The end of this exile, and the real ‘return’, are not now future events to be experienced in terms of a cleansed Land, a rebuilt Temple, an intensified Torah. The exile came to its cataclysmic end when Jesus, Israel’s representative Messiah, died outside the walls of Jerusalem, bearing the curse, which consisted of exile at the hands of the pagans, to its utmost limit.115 The return from exile began when Jesus, again as the representative Messiah, emerged from the tomb three days later. As a result, the whole complex of Jewish expectations as to what would happen when the exile finished had come tumbling out in a rush. Israel’s god had poured out his own spirit on all flesh; his word was going out to the nations; he had called into being a new people composed of all races and classes, and both sexes, without distinction.

Because Israel’s story speaks of a creator god who claims all people, all lands, as his own, Paul is able to reach out from within that story and address Jew and Gentile alike. He thus claims that the story of Jesus fulfills the purpose for which the creator god called Abraham in the first place. Although his telling of the story subverted the narrative world of his Jewish contemporaries, his claim was that it actually reinstated the true sense of the covenant promises.

Paul’s theology can, I suggest, be plotted most accurately and fully on the basis that it represents his rethinking, in the light of Jesus and the divine spirit, of the fundamental Jewish beliefs: monotheism (of the creational and covenantal sort), election, and eschatology. This theology was integrated with the rethought narrative world at every point.

What Paul then rejects in 5:16 is not knowledge of the historical Jesus, or the usefulness of such knowledge for theology, but a particular mode of knowing the Messiah. ‘According to the flesh’ (kata sarka) is a regular Pauline phrase denoting, among other things, the status, attitudes and theology of Jews and/or some Jewish Christians.124 The sort of Messiah they had wanted would be one who would affirm and underwrite their national aspirations. Instead, the true Messiah, Jesus, had been obedient to a different messianic vocation, in which the ‘flesh’ dies in order to rise again. The reason Paul knows this is precisely that he knows about Jesus, and claims that he, and none other, is the true Messiah. 2 Corinthians 5:16 thus not only does not deny or reject the possibility or usefulness of knowledge about Jesus, but actually depends on such knowledge for the theological point it is making.

What is not so often seen is that the list of ‘heroes of faith’ in Hebrews 11 is designed to make the same point, by means of its clear subversion of the story in Ben-Sirach 44–50. Instead of the present high priest in the Temple being the point towards which all Israel’s history was tending, it is Jesus, the true High Priest: Hebrews 12:1–3 stands to 11:4–40 as Sirach 50:1–21 does to 44:1–49:16.130

Underneath the poetic sequence of Hebrews, then, lies a clear implicit narrative sequence. The story of the world, and of Israel, has led up to a point, namely, the establishment of the true worship of the true god.131 This has now been achieved, not through the Jerusalem Temple and its high priesthood, but through Jesus. Hebrews focuses on the Temple cult rather than on more general theological or practical issues, but the underlying story corresponds to what we found in the synoptics and Paul. Jesus has brought Israel’s story to its paradoxical climax.132

John, that is, locates the ministry of Jesus in terms of Jewish sacred time, with each festival not only having a specific reference-point in past history but also giving a specific shape to the future expectation of the people. Jesus, it seems, is bringing Israel’s history towards its intended goal.

But there is another passage in Jewish literature, closer to John in time, which is also strongly echoed, and which, it may be suggested, John is intending to subvert with a different retelling of the story:146

‘Wisdom’, the personified breath and word of YHWH, the one created ‘in the beginning’ before all else, and the one through whom, in other closely related passages, all creation was made148—this Wisdom is now to be identified with two other personifications, namely the Shekinah and the Torah. Shekinah is the ‘tabernacling’ presence of YHWH in the Temple of Jerusalem. Torah, of course, is the law given to Moses. When we come back to the Johannine prologue with this passage in mind, the echoes run all through. There is a logos, a ‘word’, present with the creator from the beginning as his self-expression. This logos comes to make its tabernacle with us: the phrase ‘and dwelt among us’ in John 1:14 is in Greek kai eskenosen en hemin, which echoes the language of Sirach 24:8, 10, with skene being both the Greek for ‘tent’ or ‘tabernacle’ and also, interestingly, an apparent cognate of the Hebrew Shekinah itself. The result is that ‘we have beheld his glory’, the glory of the truly human being, who, like Wisdom in another Jewish book, is the ‘unique’ one, monogenes.149

Other echoes of Sirach 24 continue throughout John: Jesus is the true vine, the giver of living water.150

Bultmann, classically, thought that by demonstrating this close relation to Sirach he had demonstrated John’s dependence on early Gnostic thought.151 But, however unfashionable the point may be, we must insist on a large difference between the worlds of Jewish wisdom and early Gnosticism.

This is not to say that the Johannine prologue is simply an affirmation, with minor modifications, of the worldview of Sirach. Rather, it must be seen, at least in part, as a subversive retelling of the story of Wisdom. There were other, different, subversive retellings of this story within the broad Jewish tradition. The most striking is 1 Enoch 42, which provides perhaps the starkest cosmic dualism anywhere in Jewish apocalyptic:

But instead of Shekinah and Torah, the Jerusalem Temple and the covenant code, as the places where Wisdom/logos dwells and reveals the divine glory, John says that the logos became flesh, became a human being, became Jesus of Nazareth. Sirach’s positive worldview is reaffirmed, but now deals with the problem that 1 Enoch saw and that Sirach, with its optimism, did not address. ‘We beheld his glory’: for John, the supreme revelation of this glory was on the cross, where the logos died as the good shepherd giving his life for the sheep, as the Passover lamb liberating the people from their slavery.153

Sirach, somewhat loftily, could not envisage a human being ever fully fathoming Wisdom. John sees this Wisdom becoming, fully, a human being. In doing so he is still conscious of writing a new version of Genesis. The climax of the first chapter of Genesis is the creation of the human being in the image of the creator (Genesis 1:26–8). The climax of John’s prologue is the coming to full humanness of the logos, who, in taking on so many of the characteristics of Wisdom, may be assumed also to be the divine image-bearer.154

When Pilate declares to the crowds, ‘Here is the man’, John intends his readers to hear echoes that have been present since the very beginning. Jesus, as the logos having become flesh, is the truly human being.155

Sirach was claiming that Jerusalem and the Torah were the focal points of the entire cosmos, the place where the creator’s own Wisdom had come, uniquely, to dwell. John claims exactly this for Jesus.

The original ending of the book (chapter 20) picks up the prologue at point after point: the light overcomes the darkness of the early morning, the light which is the true life of human beings. To those who receive him, Jesus gives the right to share his status: ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’157 Thomas finally puts into words what the whole book has been sketching out, ever since the prologue spoke of the incarnate logos as ‘the only-begotten god’: ‘My Lord, and my God.’158 The close fit between 1:1–18 and chapter 20 is, indeed, further reason for suggesting that they were composed with each other in mind, rather than the prologue coming from a different source and being attached to the book at a late stage.159

Study of the early history of stories in the gospels has traditionally gone under two names: tradition-criticism (or tradition-history) and form-criticism. The two are sometimes used interchangeably; properly speaking, ‘tradition-criticism’ is the wider term, dealing with all early traditions, while ‘form-criticism’ is the more focused, concentrating on those traditions that have specific and recognizable ‘forms’.

Among the misunderstandings, we may here mention three. First, when form-criticism burst upon the scene in the years after the First World War, it was not designed primarily as a tool to find out about Jesus. In the hands of Rudolf Bultmann in particular, it was a tool to find out about the early church.

Bultmann assumed that we could know certain things about Jesus—not very much, but enough to know that most of the gospel stories could not have taken place as narrated. He therefore looked for possible situations within the early church within which stories like these could have been told to express some aspect of the church’s faith and life.

A second misunderstanding, once that one is out of the way, is the assumption that the discipline of form-criticism necessarily belongs with one particular hypothesis about the origin and development of the early church.