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by
N.T. Wright
The gospels, then, were written to invite readers to enter a worldview. In this worldview, there is one god, the creator of the world, who is at work in his world through his chosen people, Israel. Israel’s purpose, say the evangelists, is now complete, and her own long bondage ended, in Jesus. The gospels’ major focus on the death and resurrection of Jesus is not to be explained as the reading back of ‘later Christian theology’ into a story whose ‘biographical’ intent should have kept such reference to a minimum. The evangelists were not downplaying the significance of the life and mission,
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Unlike Jewish tradition, however, Paul insists that the covenant promises to Abraham held out to him not just the land of Israel but the entire kosmos, the world.111
Richard Hays studied some of these passages with the help of Griemas’ analytic method, and reached the conclusion that, even in small formulations such as Galatians 3:13–14 and 4:3–6, we find ‘the presence and shape of a gospel story to which Paul alludes and appeals’.119 The list of such passages could be extended almost indefinitely: simply within Romans, obvious passages include 3:24–6; 4:24–5; 5:6–10; 6:9–10; 7:4; 8:3–4; 10:3–4; 15:3, and 15:7–9.
Among many other ways, I suggest that he does so with his use of the very word Christ. This is not simply, for Paul, a proper name. It is a title which means ‘Messiah’. ‘Messiah’ implies ‘Israel’; to call this Jesus ‘Messiah’ means to claim that Israel’s destiny has reached its fulfilment in him. Any attempt to split off ‘Messiahship’ from Paul’s conception of Jesus is doomed to failure, as I have argued elsewhere.120
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.
one of the most fundamental points of the Jewish narrative world. What the covenant god does in and with Israel is what the creator god is doing in and with the world as a whole.
He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.144 The question of the creator and the kosmos, the world, becomes the question of Jesus and Israel.
However foreign to post-Enlightenment thought it may be to see meaning within history, such language grows naturally out of Israel’s basic monotheistic and covenantal theology.
ugly ditch,
contra Lessing
Baptism is thus a direct link to the history of Israel, particularly to the symbol of the exodus and to the use of that symbol in the claims of a new sect; and a gateway into this quasi-sect through which all alike might enter; and a symbolic and verbal way of tying those two together with specific historical reference to Jesus himself, and to his death and resurrection.
When communities react like this, it can only be because they feel that their very foundations are being shaken.
Mere belief—acceptance of certain propositional statements—is not enough to elicit such violence. People believe all sorts of odd things and are tolerated. When, however, belief is regarded as an index of subversion, everything changes. The fact of widespread persecution, regarded by both pagans and Christians as the normal state of affairs within a century of the beginnings of Christianity, is powerful evidence of the sort of thing that Christianity was, and was perceived to be.
Once we understand how worldviews function, we can see that the Jewish neighbours of early Christians must have regarded them, not as a lover of Monet regards a lover of Picasso, but as a lover of painting regards one who deliberately sets fire to art galleries—and who claims to do so in the service of Art.31
The most likely meaning for these particular ‘apocalyptic’ texts within early Christianity, then, is not the expectation of the return of Jesus, but the proclamation that he had already been vindicated, in his resurrection and exaltation, and that he would be further vindicated when the city which had opposed him, and over which he had pronounced his sternest warnings, would in turn be destroyed.
The New Testament claims to be the subversive story of the creator and the world, and demands to be read as such. Any authority it exercises in the process will be a dynamic, not a static, authority; the New Testament will not impose itself from a great height, and to attempt to use it in that fashion is at once to falsify it. Its claim is less brittle, and, if true, more powerful. It offers itself as the true story, the true myth, the true history of the whole world.
