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

by N.T. Wright

Jews do not characteristically describe the nature of Judaism in terms of ‘beliefs’.

Nevertheless, it is not difficult to show, as many writers have done, that within the varieties of Judaism there is a set of basic beliefs which are more or less common to all groups, and that there are various consequent beliefs which, though they bear a family likeness to one another across the groups, exhibit more variety.

To call Judaism ‘a faith’ is actually, in one sense, a piece of Christian cultural imperialism, imagining that because Christianity thinks of itself as a ‘faith’ other peoples do the same. Judaism characteristically thinks of itself as a way, a halakah, a life-path, a way of being-in-the-world.

First, as a matter of phenomenological analysis, it is simply the case that underlying worldviews are more fundamental than even the most ingrained habits of life.

Jesus, I shall argue, redefined the hope of Israel in such a way as to call in question the normal interpretation of Jewish belief; Paul, seeing the hope thus redefined in practice around Jesus, completed in principle the task of the redefinition of belief.

There is one god, who made the entire universe, and this god is in covenant with Israel.13 He has chosen her for a purpose: she is to be the light of the world.14 Faced with national crisis (and the story of second-temple Judaism is, as we have seen, one of semi-permanent crisis), this twin belief, monotheism and election, committed any Jew who thought about it for a moment to a further belief: YHWH, as the creator and covenant god, was irrevocably committed to further action of some sort in history, which would bring about the end of Israel’s desolation and the vindication of his true people. Monotheism and election lead to eschatology, and eschatology means the renewal of the covenant.

Again and again in the Pentateuch, the psalms, the prophets, and the subsequent writings which derive from them, the claim is made that the creator of the entire universe has chosen to live uniquely on a small ridge called Mount Zion, near the eastern edge of the Judaean hill-country. The sheer absurdity of this claim, from the standpoint of any other worldview (not least that of Enlightenment philosophy), is staggering. The fact that Assyria, Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Egypt again, Syria and now Rome had made implicit and explicit mockery of the idea did not shake this conviction, but only intensified it. This was what Jewish monotheism looked like on the ground. It was not a philosophical or metaphysical analysis of the inner being of a god, or the god. It was the unshakeable belief that the one god who made the world was Israel’s god, and that he would defend his hill against all attackers or usurpers.

To begin with, creational monotheism rules out henotheism, the belief that there are indeed other gods, but that Israel will worship only her own god. It is a matter of debate whether, and if so for how long, the ancestors of first-century Jews had held some such belief.

‘I will make Adam first,’ says Israel’s god in the midrash on Genesis, ‘and if he goes astray I will send Abraham to sort it all out.’34 The creator calls a people through whom, somehow, he will act decisively within his creation, to eliminate evil from it and to restore order, justice and peace. Central to this ongoing plan of action, then, is the call of Israel. When the creator acts to restore and heal his

world, he will do so through this people.

Within our discussion of monotheism, however, we must notice at once the effect of adding ‘covenantal’ to ‘creational’ and ‘providential’ as modifiers of ‘monotheism’. This move shifts the large theological question, of the coexistence of a creator god and an evil world, on to a different plane. The question is no longer a static one, as though the world simply existed in a settled state; it is dynamic and relational. If there is an answer to the problem of evil it will include divine action within history, more specifically, within the history of the world as it has been affected by evil. Abraham’s people are to be the means of undoing primeval sin and its consequences. This belief is a basic assumption throughout the Jewish literature of our period. And one thing that it finally rules out is any suggestion of radical dualism. Evil exists; it is real, potent, and dangerous; but it does not have the last word. The creator actually uses evil to cleanse and purge his creation and his people.

several of the things which are asserted to be ‘dualistic’ are perfectly normal features of most if not all biblical theology, and we must make a careful distinction between that which the great majority of Jews accepted as normal and that with which some, exceptionally, flirted. I propose therefore that, to begin with, we refer to ‘dualities’, rather than ‘dualisms’, and save the latter term for certain specific dualities.

1. Theological/ontological duality.

2. Theological/cosmological duality.

3. Moral duality.

4. Eschatological duality.

5. Theological/moral duality.

6. Cosmological duality.

7. Anthropological duality.

8. Epistemological duality.

9. Sectarian duality.

10. Psychological duality.

Virtually all second-temple Jews, with the possible exception only of the aristocracy, believed that they were living in a ‘present age’ which was a time of sorrow and exile, and which would be succeeded by an ‘age to come’ in which wrongs would be righted and Israel’s god would set up his kingdom (type 4).

Most Jews would have held that heaven and earth, though themselves distinct, both reveal the divine glory; humans, though thoroughly at home in the space-time universe, are also open to the world of heaven, to the presence and influence of the divine. Worship and prayer are not attempts to reach across a void, but the conscious opening of human life to the god-dimension which is ever-present.

within sectarian Judaism, we notice the following trends within the types of duality already listed: 1. There is a noticeable increase in speculation about heavenly beings other than the one god;

2. The mainline Jewish distinction between the creator and the world is accentuated, with an abhorrence of the self and its cleaving to the dust of the earth;

3. It naturally follows from this that the normal distinction between good and evil is highlighted and sharpened;

4. Eschatological duality was also accentuated.

5. There is a tendency towards a sharp divide between the power of light and the power of darkness.

6. This creates a context within which moves towards the normal Hellenistic dualism of material/spiritual become likely, linking the mainline Jewish duality of good and evil with the mainline Greek dualism of physical and non-physical: this is exemplified in the practice of extreme asceticism;

7, 10. Within this, it becomes easier to embrace the corresponding anthropological dualism of body and spirit, as happens in Philo.

8. A vital part of sectarian life is the belief in special revelation, whether through dreams, visions, or prophecies, or through new interpretations of scripture (whether legal or prophetic).

Nevertheless, underlying almost all these variations is the belief, which I suggest is central to Judaism in this period, that evil is not an essential part of creation, but is the result of a distortion within a basically good created order. As a result of this distortion, humans have lost the glory of the creator, that is, the wise stewardship of creation. Israel’s vocation is to be the agent of the creator god in restoring to the world that which it has lost.

the question of how to maintain Israel’s identity and vocation within the pagan world became, in theological terms, the question of how to retain one’s hold on creational, providential and covenantal monotheism without denying the presence and radical nature of evil within the creation.

When the form that evil took was very concrete—when evil marched through Palestine in army boots, exacted heavy taxes, and crucified young hotheads who tried to resist—then the evil angels who corrupted the good world were very easily identified as the angels who controlled the pagan nations, and the pagans themselves could be safely labelled as children of darkness. If, instead, one was sitting in Rome on a comfortable pension, with leisure and assistance to study and write, it was easy to underemphasize the covenant, and treat it as one more interesting set of local customs such as any ethnographer might collect. Between these two extremes, tending either towards dualism or towards assimilation, most Jews lived out their theological, as well as their day-to-day, lives.

Language about supernatural agencies other than the one god has to do, rather, with the theological problem of how to hold together providence (with covenant as a special case of providence) and a belief in a transcendent god. Unless this god is to collapse back into being a mere absentee landlord, in which case providence and covenant go by the board, or unless he ceases to be in any meaningful sense transcendent, moving instead towards pantheism or paganism, one is bound to develop, and second-temple Jews did develop, ways of speaking about the divine action in the world which attempt to do justice to these different poles of belief. Thus it is that language about angels, about the Shekinah or ‘presence’ of Israel’s god, about Torah, about Wisdom, about the Logos—all of these make their appearances, not as mere fantasy or speculative metaphysics, but as varied (and not always equally successful) attempts to perform a necessary theological task.

Within the most fiercely monotheistic of Jewish circles throughout our period—from the Maccabaean revolt to Bar-Kochba—there is no suggestion that ‘monotheism’, or praying the Shema, had anything to do with the numerical analysis of the inner being of Israel’s god himself. It had everything to do with the two-pronged fight against paganism and dualism. Indeed, we find strong evidence during this period of Jewish groups and individuals who, speculating on the meaning of some difficult passages in scripture (Daniel 7, for example, or Genesis 1), suggested that the divine being might encompass a plurality.60 Philo could speculate about the Logos as, effectively, a second divine being;61 the Similitudes of Enoch might portray the Son of Man/Messiah as an eternal divine being;62 but none of these show any awareness that they are transgressing normal Jewish monotheism. Nor are they. The oneness of Israel’s god, the creator, was never an analysis of this god’s inner existence, but always a polemical doctrine over against paganism and dualism. It was only with the rise of Christianity, and arguably under the influence both of polemical constraint and Hellenizing philosophy, that Jews in the second and subsequent centuries reinterpreted ‘monotheism’ as ‘the numerical oneness of the divine being’.

I shall now attempt to show the way in which covenant theology, especially in the second-temple period, functions as the answer which was offered to the problem of evil in its various forms. I shall argue the following threefold case.

(1) At the large-scale level, Jewish covenant theology claims that the creator has not been thwarted irrevocably by the rebellion of his creation, but has called into being a people through whom he will work to restore his creation.

(2) At a smaller-scale level, Israel’s own sufferings, which create problems within covenant theology itself (‘If our god is sovereign, why are we suffering?’), are answered from within the same covenantal doctrine:

(3) At the individual level, which can only be isolated from the other two at the cost of potential distortion, the sufferings and sins of individual Jews may be seen in the light of the continual provision of forgiveness and restoration,

All of these are thus part of the second major doctrine of Judaism, which stands alongside monotheism and gives it more precise definition. The technical term for this doctrine is election. The creator god has found a way of restoring his world: he has chosen a people through whom he will act. Monotheism and election, together with the eschatology which they entail, form the fundamental structure of Jewish ‘basic belief’, the theological side of the worldview we studied in the previous chapter.

as Sanders has shown quite conclusively—so conclusively that one wonders how any other view could ever have been taken—covenantal ideas were totally common and regular at this time.63 The basis of the covenant was of course the set of promises to the patriarchs (set out particularly in Genesis 12, 15, 17, 22, etc.), chief among which was ‘blessing’, whose overtones concerned especially the Land and its prosperity.

Significantly, these chapters envisage the curse not just as a possibility but as a certainty. Moses, within this text, knows that Israel is going to turn away from YHWH (28:15–68; 29:16–28; 31:16–21, 27, 29), and provides for this contingency: the ultimate curse will be exile (quite logically, since the promised land is the place of blessing), but after exile will come covenant renewal, the circumcision of the heart, the return to the Land, the perfect keeping of Torah (30:1–10).

It was the covenant which meant that Israel’s oppression was seen as a theological as well as a practical problem, and which determined the shape which solutions to that problem would have to take. It was the covenant that drove some to ‘zeal’ for Torah, others to military action, others to monastic-style piety. The covenant raised, and helped to answer, the question as to who really belonged to Israel. Covenant theology was the air breathed by the Judaism of this period.

Israel’s covenantal vocation caused her to think of herself as the creator’s true humanity.

Thus, at major turning-points in the story75—Abraham’s call, his circumcision, the offering of Isaac, the transition from Abraham to Isaac and from Isaac to Jacob, and in the sojourn in Egypt—the narrative quietly insists that Abraham and his progeny inherit the role of Adam and Eve. There are, interestingly, two differences which emerge in the shape of this role. The command (‘be fruitful …’) has turned into a promise (‘I will make you fruitful …’),76 and possession of the land of Canaan, together with supremacy over enemies, has taken the place of Adam’s dominion over nature.

The prophets who look ahead to the restoration of Jerusalem and the rebuilding of the temple see in this event the refounding of the Garden of Eden; Ezekiel envisages rivers flowing out to water and heal the rest of the world,79 Zephaniah imagines the nations looking on in admiration as YHWH restores the fortunes of his people,80 and Zechariah (who imitates Ezekiel’s idea of the rivers) sees the restoration of Jerusalem as the signal for YHWH to become king over all the world, so that the nations will come to Jerusalem to keep the Jewish festivals.81 Thus, in the literature which urged the exiled people to look forward to the coming age when all would be restored, the future glory of the land is described in terms borrowed from paradise-imagery; Israel after restoration will be like a new creation, with the people once again being fruitful and multiplying in her own land.

Now comes the crucial move: in the intertestamental period ‘Wisdom’ was identified with Torah. Those who possessed and tried to keep Torah were therefore the true humanity: it was they who would be exalted to the place where humanity belonged, under the creator and over the creation.84 In one particular tradition, that of Ben-Sirach, this theme was focused on the high priest and the Temple cult in particular. The high priest ruling over Israel is like Adam ruling over all creation; even his vestments were, according to one version of the tradition, the self-same garments which the creator had made for Adam.

This emphasis on Israel as the truly human people may have contributed towards the Qumran purity regulations. If the true Israel is to be the genuine humanity, anyone who has physical blemishes, indicating that his humanity is less than perfect, cannot be enrolled as a member of the inner circle.