Jesus and the Victory of God Quotes

“if it is true that Jesus ultimately fits no known pattern within the first century,51 it is more or less bound to be true that he fits none within the twentieth.”
― N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God

“First-century Jews looked forward to a public event … in and through which their god would reveal to all the world that he was not just a local, tribal deity, but the creator and sovereign of all … The early Christians … looked back to an event in and through which, they claimed, Israel’s god had done exactly that.”
― N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God

“The trial scene, which we have already studied from several angles, now comes into complete focus. At stake was the whole career of Jesus, climaxing in his journey to Jerusalem, which itself exploded in his action in the Temple, and was further explained by his Last Supper. The trial opened, as it was bound to do, with the question about the Temple. Jesus had claimed authority over it, authority indeed to declare its destruction. This could only be because he believed himself to be the Messiah? Yes, answered Jesus: and you will see me vindicated, enthroned at the right hand of Power.114 The whole sequence belongs together precisely as a whole. The final answer drew into one statement the significance of the journey to Jerusalem, the Temple-action, and the implicit messianic claim. Together they said that Jesus, not the Temple, was the clue to, and the location of, the presence of Israel’s god with his people.115 Sociologically, this represented a highly radical Galilean protest against Jerusalem. Politically, it constituted a direct challenge to Caiaphas’ power-base and his whole position—and, of course, to those of Caesar and Pilate. Theologically, it was either true or it was blasphemous. Caiaphas wasted no time considering the former possibility.”
― N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God

“Israel’s god dwelt (in principle; and he would do so again) in the Temple; his tabernacling presence (‘Shekinah’) functioned as had the pillar of cloud and fire in the wilderness. He revealed himself and his will through Torah; for some rabbis at least, when one studied Torah it was as though one was in the Temple itself.”
― N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God

“Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem, climaxing in his actions in the Temple and the upper room, and undertaken in full recognition of the likely consequences, was intended to function like Ezekiel lying on his side or Jeremiah smashing his pot. The prophet’s action embodied the reality. Jesus went to Jerusalem in order to embody the third and last element of the coming of the kingdom. He was not content to announce that YHWH was returning to Zion. He intended to enact, symbolize and personify that climactic event.”
― N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God

“In a peasant society, where familial relations provided one’s basic identity, it was shocking in the extreme. In first-century Jewish culture, for which the sense of familial and racial loyalty was a basic symbol of the prevailing worldview, it cannot but have been devastating.135 Jesus was proposing to treat his followers as a surrogate family. This had a substantial positive result: Jesus intended his followers to inherit all the closeness and mutual obligations that belonged with family membership in that close-knit, family-based society. It also carried fairly clear negative consequences in that society: to be a member of one family meant sitting loose to membership in any other. Hence the remarkable demands for Jesus’ followers to ‘hate’ father, mother, siblings, spouse and children—and even their own selves.136 This was not just extraordinarily challenging at a personal level; it was deeply subversive at a social, cultural, religious and political level, as we shall see in due course.”
― N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God

“More satisfactory by far, at the level of history, is to say with Gerhard Lohfink that Jesus did not intend to found a church because there already was one, namely the people of Israel itself. Jesus’ intention was therefore to reform Israel, not to found a different community altogether.”
― N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God

“Did Jesus intend to found a ‘church’? The question is hopeless. Of course he didn’t; of course he did. The way the oft-repeated question puts it is impossibly anachronistic: it makes Jesus sound like a pioneer evangelist of the nineteenth century, throwing previous denominations to the winds and building his own tin tabernacle. Worse, it implies, almost with a sneer, that Jesus could hardly have envisaged the church as we know it today, or even as it has been for most of the last two thousand years; and that therefore the church stands condemned, untrue to the founder’s intentions.”
― N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God

“It is individualism and collectivism that cancel each other out; properly understood, the corporate and the personal reinforce one another.4”
― N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God

“Second, I have taken it for granted that Jesus of Nazareth existed. Some writers feel a need to justify this assumption at length against people who try from time to time to deny it. It would be easier, frankly, to believe that Tiberius Caesar, Jesus’ contemporary, was a figment of the imagination than to believe that there never was such a person as Jesus. Those who persist in denying this obvious point will probably not want to read a book like this anyway.”
― N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God

“There were no other groups in the ancient world going around claiming to be the human race.”
― N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God

“My proposal, then, as the way of making sense of all the data before me, is that Jesus believed it was his god-given vocation to identify with the rebel cause, the kingdom-cause, when at last that identification could not be misunderstood as endorsement.”
― N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God