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

by N.T. Wright

To the relativist’s response, that this will seem very arrogant, Christian theology will reply that it can do no other. If it is not a claim about the whole of reality, seen and unseen, it is nothing.

It is not a set of private aesthetic judgments upon reality, with a ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ clause attached. Even the relativist, after all, believes that relativism is universally true, and sometimes seeks to propagate that belief with missionary zeal. Christian theology only does what all other worldviews and their ancillary belief-systems do: it claims to be talking about reality as a whole.

The story is about a creator and his creation, about humans made in this creator’s image and given tasks to perform, about the rebellion of humans and the dissonance of creation at every level, and particularly about the creator’s acting, through Israel and climactically through Jesus, to rescue his creation from its ensuing plight. The story continues with the creator acting by his own spirit within the world to bring it towards the restoration which is his intended goal for it.

(1) Who are we? We are humans, made in the image of the creator. We have responsibilities that come with this status. We are not fundamentally determined by race, gender, social class, geographical location; nor are we simply pawns in a determinist game. (2) Where are we? We are in a good and beautiful, though transient, world, the creation of the god in whose image we are made. We are not in an alien world, as the Gnostic imagines; nor in a cosmos to which we owe allegiance as to a god, as the pantheist would suggest. (3) What is wrong? Humanity has rebelled against the creator. This rebellion reflects a cosmic dislocation between the creator and the creation, and the world is consequently out of tune with its created intention. A Christian worldview rejects dualisms which associate evil with createdness or physicality; equally, it rejects monisms that analyse evil simply in terms of some humans not being fully in tune with their environment. Its analysis of evil is more subtle and far-reaching. It likewise rejects as the whole truth all partial analyses, such as those of Marx or Freud, which elevate half-truths to the status of the whole truth.19 (4) What is the solution? The creator has acted, is acting, and will act within his creation to deal with the weight of evil set up by human rebellion, and to bring his world to the end for which it was made, namely that it should resonate fully with his own presence and glory. This action, of course, is focused upon Jesus and t...

In much post-Enlightenment thinking, for instance, many ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ Christians have shared the belief that the answers to (3) and (4) had to do with the problem of physicality and the means of escaping into a pure spiritual sphere.

The Israelites retold the story of creation and fall. Jesus retold, in parable and symbol, the story of Israel. The evangelists retold, in complex and multifaceted ways, the story of Jesus.

The church inherits, at the end of the story, the task of restoring to the owner the fruits of the vineyard.

Second, I suggest that the question assumes what needs to be demonstrated, i.e. that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus really does have such a climactic sense as to leave no room for any further work.

The main feature of first-century Judaism, within Palestine at least, was neither a static sense of a religion to which one adhered, nor a private sphere of religion into which one escaped, but a total worldview, embracing all aspects of reality, and coming to sharp focus in a sense of longing and expectation, of recognition that the present state of affairs had not yet (to put it mildly) seen the full realization of the purposes of the covenant god for his people.

The Jewish people of the first century, like all peoples, told themselves stories which encapsulated their worldview. One of the major differences between them and some other cultures, however, was that their controlling stories had to do with actual events in history: they were waiting for the last chapter in their story to begin.

Many ‘Christian’ readings of the gospels have screened out the political overtones of Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom; a fresh examination of the Jewish background will put that straight.

In fact (this is the fourth point), first-century Judaism and Christianity have a central worldview-feature in common: the sense of a story now reaching its climax. And, most importantly, it is the same story. It is the story of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; of Moses and the prophets; of David, Solomon, and the monarchy of Israel; and especially of exile and restoration—or rather, of puzzlement as to whether the exile was really over or not.

One of Stoicism’s major competitors, the philosophy of Epicurus, moved in a different direction: the gods exist, but they live a life of blessedness removed from the world inhabited by humans. Epicureanism, at the theological level, thus offers a kind of proto-Deism.22

Religion, culture and politics were not sharply divided in the ancient world. One practised one’s religion either as a member of a private club, such as a mystery cult, or as part of the formal requirements of the state, or quite likely both.

In such a context, we should not be surprised that the Jews were regarded as atheists.26 That, one may surmise, was probably the reaction of the Roman general Pompey when he entered the Holy of Holies in the late autumn of 63 BC and found no image there.

This Hellenistic cultural setting formed a perpetual cultural and religious threat to the Jews, every bit as powerful as the political one (and actually not distinguishable from it to the naked eye at the time, but only to the atomistic analysis of modern Western thought-forms).

Antiochus decided (this was not an odd thing to do at that period) to ensure their loyalty by changing the function and direction of their central religious symbol, so that it ceased to make them think independently and turned them in the direction of service to himself. He took over the Temple on December 25, 167 BC. Deliberately desecrating it so that Jews would no longer think of it as the place where they were reaffirmed as a unique people, he established worship of himself there instead.

We should not forget that early Christianity, claiming the high ground of Israel’s heritage, was first and foremost a movement that defined itself in opposition to paganism, and only secondarily in opposition to mainline Judaism itself.

The event which precipitated all the major trends in first-century Judaism was, as we have seen, the Maccabaean crisis.

But the Maccabaean crisis was also, second, the cause of some of the divisions within Judaism.

How and when Israel’s god would rescue his people were questions whose answers, in reflecting different perceptions of what it meant to be the people of the covenant god, divided one Jewish group from another. It is at this point that we begin to speak, with many modern scholars, of the plural ‘Judaisms’.

The Torah assumed new importance in border territory. As we shall see, it acquired some of the functions and attributes of the Temple itself.2 And the features of Torah which loomed largest were those which functioned specifically and obviously as cultural, social and religious boundary-markers, i.e. sabbath, food-laws and circumcision.

So it was that the maintenance of traditional Torah-based boundary-markers in Galilee, or in the Diaspora, had little to do with a detached theology of post mortem salvation, let alone the earning of such a thing by one’s own religious or moral efforts, and a great deal more to do with the preservation of traditional Jewish identity.

It is not insignificant that when the rebels seized power at the beginning of the war in AD 66 one of their first acts was to burn the records of debts.

From all this we can sense the tensions that ran throughout the Jewish society of Jesus’ and Paul’s day. Any suggestion, even by implication, that Jews led untroubled lives with leisure to discuss the finer points of dogmatic theology must be rejected. Jewish society faced major external threats and major internal problems.

The question, what it might mean to be a good or loyal Jew, had pressing social, economic and political dimensions as well as cultural and theological ones.

The hope of Israel, and of most special-interest groups within Israel, was not for post mortem disembodied bliss, but for a national liberation that would fulfil the expectations aroused by the memory, and regular celebration, of the exodus, and, nearer at hand, of the Maccabaean victory.

This illustrates one main principle of Jewish revolt: the seething unrest which was normally held down tightly by repressive government and brute force could boil over when a power vacuum appeared.

Obviously, a group concerned simply with the internal operation of a private club for the maintenance of its own members’ ritual purity is unlikely to be particularly concerned with major questions of public policy. At the same time, it is quite feasible that the Pharisees held grandiose ambitions about influencing the course of political events, but could not implement them due to their lack of real power.

shall argue (i) (with Sanders) that the Pharisees, though never a Jewish ‘thought-police’ in the first or any other century, did concern themselves with matters wider than private or ritual purity; (ii) (against Sanders) that these concerns often embraced political and revolutionary action, such that the idea of a self-contained Jerusalem-based group with little influence, and not much interest in who was doing what elsewhere, is out of the question; (iii) (between Neusner and Sanders) that the purity codes were a vital part of pre-70 Pharisaism, functioning in close symbolic relationship to the wider political agenda.

Here the most attractive thesis seems to me the following: faced with social, political and cultural ‘pollution’ at the level of national life as a whole, one natural reaction (with a strong sense of ‘natural’) was to concentrate on personal cleanness, to cleanse and purify an area over which one did have control as a compensation for the impossibility of cleansing or purifying an area—the outward and visible political one—over which one had none.

Just as, for the Maccabaean martyrs, refusing to eat pork and refusing to obey the pagan ruler were one and the same thing, so the concern for purity functioned as a means of symbolically enacting that resistance to pagan rule which was nursed secretly and maintained in readiness for revolutionary opportunities, whenever they might be afforded.

Their aim, so far as we can tell, was never simply that of private piety for its own sake. Nor (one need scarcely add) was it the system of self-salvation so often anachronistically ascribed to them by Christians who knew little about the first century but a lot about the Pelagian controversy. Their goals were the honour of Israel’s god, the following of his covenant charter, and the pursuit of the full promised redemption of Israel.

The Pharisaic agenda remained, at this point, what it had always been: to purify Israel by summoning her to return to the true ancestral traditions; to restore Israel to her independent theocratic status; and to be, as a pressure-group, in the vanguard of such movements by the study and practice of Torah.

it should come as no surprise to find hints that the Hillelites tended to be city-dwellers while the Shammaites enjoyed support from rural areas.

Alon suggests143 that the two strains, one pro-zealotry, the other ready to accept Roman rule, arose in the time after the reign of Agrippa I and before the war (i.e. between 44 and 66). He also suggests the existence of a third party in the middle, represented by Simeon ben Gamaliel, who took what Alon regards as the classical Pharisaic position, only joining the armed struggle when there was good opportunity for success and no other alternative.

We have every reason, further, to suppose that with these political concerns went a concern for the maintenance, within and perhaps beyond the group, of certain purity codes.

These debates were conducted over several generations, at various levels. The detailed debates about purity almost certainly carried, for the debaters, echoes of the larger issues, much as a small debating point in contemporary politics will generate heat because all sides know the larger issues which remain unmentioned but powerfully symbolized.

Of the regular praxis of the community, one feature in particular deserves special comment: the community described in the Community Rule (as opposed to that in the Damascus Document) offered no animal sacrifices.189 Building on this, and piecing together the ideology of the movement from hints and statements, we reach the clear conclusion that at least one branch regarded itself not just as the true Israel but as the true Temple.190 The existing Temple might have been ‘cleansed’ by the Maccabaean revolt, but it was still polluted as far as this group was concerned.191

Just as the Pharisees and their putative successors developed an alternative to the Temple, offering ‘spiritual sacrifices’ through prayer, fasting and almsgiving, so the group that practised the Community Rule developed a theology in which Israel’s god had called them into being as an alternative Temple. Their devotion was acceptable in the place of that which was still being offered a few miles away, and a few thousand feet higher up, on Mount Zion itself.

It is quite clear from the content of the group’s devotional literature that this piety and purity were not regarded as ‘earning’ membership, or salvation. They merely expressed it.197 (b) The purity regulations of the group give several indications that they regarded themselves as in some senses analogous to, or on a par with, priests in the Temple.

‘From the Scrolls, we learn that the sect looked forward to a dramatic change in the future, which modern scholars often call “the eschaton” …, which is slightly misleading, since like other Jews the Essenes did not think that the world would end.’200

As we shall see in the next chapter, Abraham was seen as the divine answer to the problem of Adam.

What is the solution? Israel’s hope has been realized; the true god has acted decisively to defeat the pagan gods, and to create a new people, through whom he is to rescue the world from evil. This he has done through the true King, Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, in particular through his death and resurrection. The process of implementing this victory, by means of the same god continuing to act through his own spirit in his people, is not yet complete. One day the King will return to judge the world, and to set up a kingdom which is on a different level to the kingdoms of the present world order. When this happens those who have died as Christians will be raised to a new physical life. The present powers will be forced to acknowledge Jesus as Lord, and justice and peace will triumph at last.44

The highest moment in the story of John is not his prophetic warning of wrath to come, but his baptism of Jesus, the occasion when, according to Luke 3:22, ‘the Holy Spirit descended upon [Jesus] in bodily form like a dove’, and when a voice from heaven announced to him, in words full of Davidic overtones, ‘You are my son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased.’ Within the often-remarked artistry which enables Luke to draw a complete picture with a few strokes of his pen, he has said as clearly as he can that John the Baptist is playing Samuel to Jesus’ David.

Now it must be said clearly that at first sight the coming to life of a single dead body, within the midst of a history which in other respects was proceeding as though nothing had changed, would be, though of course exceedingly striking, quite insufficient to make Jews of the time declare that the longed-for redemption, the eventual release from exile, had in fact occurred.95 Nor, it should be added, would such an event have at once the significance that so many modern scholars have imagined. In the ancient Jewish world, as in the modern Western one, for someone who had been certifiably dead to become visibly alive again would mean that the world was indeed a stranger place than one had imagined; it would not at all justify a claim that the person to whom this odd event had happened was therefore the saviour of the world, the ‘son of god’, or anything else in particular. If, coming closer to the topic, one of the two lestai crucified along with Jesus had been raised to life a few days later, we may suppose it very unlikely that he would have been hailed in any such way, or that anyone would deduce from the event that Israel’s fortunes had now been restored, that the kingdom of Israel’s god was indeed inaugurated, and so forth. This forces us to ask: could the belief that someone had been raised from the dead, whatever precisely was understood by that, have produced the results it did—unless certain things were known, and continued to be known, about the one who had thus b...

If, again, he had simply been a teacher of great timeless moral platitudes, it may be doubtful whether he would have been crucified in the first place; but even if we get over that hurdle, we may be sure that his death, even if followed by a strange resurrection, would not have been understood as his life’s greatest achievement, but rather its sad curtailment. Any resurrection that might be claimed for such a figure would hardly carry the meaning that Israel and the world were now renewed.

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 cross and resurrection, in short, are clearly central to virtually all known forms of early Christianity. But the rise of that early Christian understanding is only comprehensible on the basis that certain things continued to be known, as history, about the one who (among so many others) was crucified outside Jerusalem and who (unlike any others before or since—a fact of some significance) was declared by his followers to be alive shortly afterwards.

Sixth, the evangelists, in telling the story of Jesus as the climax of Israel’s story, are thereby implicitly saying that this story is not the absolute end. It cannot be. It is, rather, that which enables the final end now to come into sight. It is the end of the central section of the story, which brings it into its home straight, though not yet to the finishing-line itself. There is now a further task, that of bringing the world into subjection to its creator, through the redeemed Israel; and this further task is as yet unrealized.

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.