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

by N.T. Wright

The philosophical tricks by which authorial intention has been dismissed from the reckoning are in the last analysis no more impressive than the well-known mathematical trick which keeps the hare in permanent pursuit.

There is little agreement between structuralists as to what will count as the deep structure of a passage or book, and how we might know when we had found it.

as the Reformers argued, though there may indeed be a sensus plenior to Holy Writ, it is difficult to tell the difference between that and the projection on to the text of a theological idea or belief acquired by some other means. If one then appeals to the ‘literal sense’ as the control, has one really learnt anything new from a passage by the plenior method?

so far, deconstructionism in all its strange glory has not yet really burst upon the world of New Testament studies, and so falls strictly outside our purposes here.

The devout predecessor of deconstructionism is that reading of the text which insists that what the Bible says to me, now, is the be-all and end-all of its meaning; a reading which does not want to know about the intention of the evangelist, the life of the early church, or even about what Jesus was actually like. There are some strange bedfellows in the world of literary epistemology.

What we need, I suggest, is a critical-realist account of the phenomenon of reading, in all its parts.35 To one side we can see the positivist or the naïve realist, who move so smoothly along the line from reader to text to author to referent that they are unaware of the snakes in the grass at every step; to the other side we can see the reductionist who, stopping to look at the snakes, is swallowed up by them and proceeds no further. Avoiding both these paths, I suggest that we must articulate a theory which locates the entire phenomenon of text-reading within an account of the storied and relational nature of human consciousness.

even deconstructionists themselves write texts which they want others to read to discover what they, the deconstructionists, intend to say.

What we need, then, is a theory of reading which, at the reader/text stage, will do justice both to the fact that the reader is a particular human being and to the fact that the text is an entity on its own, not a plastic substance to be moulded to the reader’s whim. It must also do justice, at the text/author stage, both to the fact that the author intended certain things, and that the text may well contain in addition other things—echoes, evocations, structures, and the like—which were not present to the author’s mind, and of course may well not be present to the reader’s mind. We need a both-and theory of reading, not an either-or one.

Similarly, we need a theory which will do justice, still at the text/author stage, both to the fact that texts, including biblical texts, do not normally represent the whole of the author’s mind, even that bit to which they come closest, and to the fact that they nevertheless do normally tell us, and in principle tell us truly, quite a bit about him or her.

Finally, we need to recognize, at the author/event stage, both that authors do not write without a point of view (they are humans, and look at things in particular ways and from particular angles) and that they really can speak and write about events and objects (in the full sense of event and object exp...

hermeneutic of love.

‘love’ will mean ‘attention’: the readiness to let the other be the other, the willingness to grow and change in oneself in relation to the other.

First, we can affirm both that the text does have a particular viewpoint from which everything is seen, and at the same time that the reader’s reading is not mere ‘neutral observation’.

Second, we can affirm both that the text has a certain life of its own, and that the author had intentions of which we can in principle gain at least some knowledge.

Third, we can affirm both that the actions or objects described may well be, in principle, actions and objects in the public world, and that the author was looking at them from a p...

What I am advocating is a critical realism—though I would prefer to describe it as an epistemology or hermeneutic of love—as the only sort of theory which will do justice to the complex nature of texts in general, of history in general, and of the gospels in particular.

human writing is best conceived as the articulation of worldviews, or, better still, the telling of stories which bring worldviews into articulation.

Drawing on the speech-act theory propounded by Searle, and the philosophical arguments of Wolterstorff, Habermas and above all Wittgenstein, Thiselton argues convincingly that for a great many speech-acts there is a vital and non-negotiable element, which consists of the ‘fit’ between what is said and events in the extra-linguistic world.

Within the contexts of the story (this comes out clearest in Luke, but is implicit in Matthew and Mark as well) the means by which the owner (Israel’s god) will come himself and destroy the tenants will turn out to be military action taken by Rome. This prepares the way, within the larger narrative of the gospels, for the denunciation of the Temple and the prophecy of its downfall (Mark 13 and parallels).

The parable, like most of Jesus’ parables, tells the story of Israel—that is, it sets out the Jewish worldview in the regular appropriate manner—but gives it a startling new twist.

Once we grasp the storied structure of worldviews in general, and of the Jewish worldview in particular, we are in possession of a tool which, though not often used thus, can help us to grasp what was at stake in the debates between first-century Judaism and first-century Christianity.

It was, at a much more fundamental level, a controversy about different tellings of the story of Israel’s god, his people, and the world.

The word ‘history’ is regularly used in two quite different but related ways, to refer to (1) actual happenings in the real world and (2) what people write about actual happenings in the real world.

To confuse these two meanings, history-as-events and history-as-writing-about-events, as is often done, provides scope for a good deal of frustrating misunderstanding. I shall be focusing attention for much of this chapter on the latter,

history, I shall argue, is neither ‘bare facts’ nor ‘subjective interpretations’, but is rather the meaningful narrative of events and intentions.

Intention is inescapable, especially when you try to avoid it.

All knowing and understanding has to do with reflection on the part of human beings: all knowledge comes via somebody’s perceptions and reflections.

in reality what we call ‘facts’ always belong in a context of response, perception, and interaction—a process which is both complex and continuing.

It is not the ancients who were deceived about the nature of history, living in a pre-modern age and not knowing what critical thought consisted of. It is we who, in the Enlightenment’s rejection of reliance on auctores, ‘authorities’ in a multiple sense, have come to imagine ourselves to be the first to see the difference between subjects and objects, and so have both misjudged our forebears and deceived ourselves.

The myth of uninterpreted history functions precisely as a myth in much modern discourse—that is, it expresses an ideal state of affairs which we imagine erroneously to exist, and which influences the way we think and speak.

There are two areas of special historical concern for the student of the New Testament.

First, the study of ancient Judaism has long been bedevilled by a reading which ‘knew’, in advance, that Judaism was the wrong sort of religion, the dark backdrop to the glorious light of the gospel.

Second, and similarly, the study of early Christianity has for generations been dogged by the need that most writers have felt to organize the material in a theologically desirable way, squeezing the data into a quite spurious shape.

If simplicity (of a spurious kind) has ruled for too long, producing the Myth of a Gloomy Judaism or the Myth of a Fresh-Faced Early Christianity, it is time that unsorted data were given a fresh hearing. But there is a counter-myth present here too, the Myth of Objective Data or of Presuppositionless History, and the purpose of my present argument is to challenge it: there is in fact no such thing as ‘mere history’.

all history is interpreted history.

All interpretation is historically-situated interpretation.

If being a mathematician might entitle somebody to a hearing on the subject of numbers, being a Christian might mean that someone should be given a hearing on the subject of Jesus.

‘Intellectual honesty consists not in forcing an impossible neutrality, but in admitting that neutrality is not possible.’

Bultmann, within his neo-Kantian philosophical heritage, was anxious about seeming to talk of objects or events other than by talking of them in relation to the observer. He therefore insisted (among other things) on doing theology by doing anthropology, following Feuerbach in collapsing god-talk into man-talk.

If we reject this or that event, we must do so on quite other grounds from those regularly advanced or hinted at, namely that the evangelists are not ‘neutral’, that their work reveals their own theology rather than anything about Jesus.22 We might apply the same point to the vexed question of Pauline theology. The discovery that Paul was addressing a particular situation, and looking at it in a particular light, is frequently hailed as indicating that the passage in question is therefore purely situational, and does not express or embody a basic theology, or worldview. This is simply bad logic. It is a false either-or, typical of the traps into which biblical scholarship regularly falls.

the answer to the question ‘what is a historical question?’ is not ‘a question about mere facts’.23 History is primarily the history of human beings, and it attempts to plot, uncover, and understand from the inside the interplay of human intentions and motivations present within a given field of initial investigation.

Attempts to split off two levels of questions (first we ask when, where and by whom a book was written, then we ask what it says) are actually absurd, for all their popularity. In order to address either set of questions we must integrate it with the other. This will require that we produce historical hypotheses which take into account the complexities of human motivation, which in turn need an exploration of the worldviews and mindsets of the communities and individuals involved.

All accounts involve ‘interpretation’; the question is whether this interpretation discloses the totality of the event, opening it up in all its actuality and meaning, or whether it squashes it out of shape, closing down its actuality and meaning.

Accounts of strange happenings in any culture or tradition are of course subject to legendary accretions. But one cannot rule out a priori the possibility of things occurring in ways not normally expected, since to do so would be to begin from the fixed point that a particular worldview, namely the eighteenth-century rationalist one, or its twentieth-century positivist successor, is correct in postulating that the universe is simply a ‘closed continuum’ of cause and effect.

How can any scientific enquiry not allow for the possibility that its own worldview might be incorrect?

Scientism is, fundamentally, unscientific.

‘history’ ought to mean more than this, namely the meaningful narrative of events and intentions;

We must therefore challenge several of the assumptions which have commonly been made about history in general and the gospels in particular. First, we must reject the idea, common since Reimarus, that ‘real’ history will undermine the ‘interpretative’ and particularly the ‘theological’ elements in the gospels.

It could just be that at the end of the day some ‘interpretation’—or perhaps more than one—might after all bring out as well as seems possible the full significance of the events. To rule out such a possibility a priori would be an odd way of striving after ‘objectivity’. History does not rule out theology; indeed, in the broadest sense of ‘theology’ it actually requires it.

Christian theology requires history.

Second, as the mirror-image of this point, we must insist that the gospels, though they are (as redaction-criticism has emphasized) theological through and through, are not for that reason any the less historical.

Third, we must note in a preliminary way (we shall return to the point later) the multiple possibilities inherent in the word ‘meaning’ as applied to history. At its basic level, the ‘meaning’ of history may be held to lie in the intentionalities of the characters concerned

At another level, ‘meaning’ may be held to lie in the contemporary relevance or consequence of the events.

At yet another level, ‘meaning’ may be attributed to events on the grounds that they reveal the divine intention, and thus speak powerfully, whether to the ancient or the modern world, pagan as well as Jewish or Christian, of the nature and/or purposes of ‘God’, or a god.