Review: Jesus and the Victory of God

Jesus and the Victory of God by N.T. Wright
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Finally finished this one! In some respects, particularly towards the beginning, it felt more like a chore to get through this time compared with book 1 of the series, as every time I came back to reading this I’d already forgotten which 19th/20th century ideas were associated with whichever theologian/professor Wright happened to be referring to at a given moment. Of the ones mentioned frequently, the only things I can recall now is that Schweitzer was responsible for claiming that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who believed that the end of the world would happen within a century, and that Bultmann preferred to disregard any historical study of Jesus whatsoever in favor of focusing on the ideas of the New Testament itself. And then something something Borg Crossan Jesus Seminar. (Well okay, so I had to wiki those theologians anyway to write that. Shows how much I actually retained from this book.)

To be frankly honest this book gets a bit repetitive at times even though the story is kind of interesting when you think about it, which is partly why it took me a while to actually get around to finishing it. So to save myself the effort of having to reread the whole thing later, and I guess for anyone else who’s interested but doesn’t actually feel like reading a 700 page theological book, I’ll post a bit of a summary here. But if you have the time, go ahead and read the book anyway. It’s not bad by any means.

So anyway, this book is basically an attempt to discern Jesus’s beliefs and aims primarily through analyzing the Synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke… not so much love for John) and other relevant sources, both historical (Josephus and other historians) and intertextual (passages the gospels reference from the Old Testament, the deuterocanonical books, etc). The methodology used - an analysis of the stories, praxis, symbols, and questions encapsulating Jesus’s worldview - was elaborated in detail in the previous book of this series. But ultimately the point is to engage this study in terms of Jesus’s historical context, and not whatever modern day theological biases or lenses employed by any of the theologians that Wright has criticized in the past, like the ones mentioned in the first paragraph. The first part of this book is essentially a survey of past studies of this sort, and needless to say I didn’t retain much of it, but oh well.

When it actually comes to the main focus of this book, Wright's beliefs are more in line with Schweitzer’s as was mentioned before, except that he redefines the use of apocalyptic language as repurposing exaggerated cosmic imagery to metaphorically describe current and future events in real life as the people perceived them to be. Meaning, those prophets/books using apocalyptic imagery like Daniel and Ezekiel and Zechariah, and ultimately Jesus himself, weren't predicting how the end of the world would happen (as modern-day rapture/second coming/"parousia" obsessed Christians are prone to think... Wright uses that last word a lot), but rather more concretely, events that second Temple Jews and their descendants were anticipating as the resolution to their own storyline. In this case specifically, the return from the Exile, which would happen through the restoration and vindication of the nation of Israel from its enemies by some God-appointed leader who would be called the Messiah, as a sign of God finally returning to his people after centuries of forsaking them.

(As for why they were expecting these things, it’s basically the story of the entire Old Testament of the Bible as a whole. Technically the “return” from the Babylonian Exile had already happened, but as Wright puts it, people didn’t really consider perpetually living under the Roman Empire a real return. They wanted the return of the Kingdom of Israel, like it was back in the glory days of King David and the kings before the Exile. Also, if Wright's knowledge is any indication, the story of the Maccabees from the deuterocanonical books often excluded from the Old Testament had a much larger influence on what was going on than I realized. Should probably read those sometime.)

Of course, given the way that prophecies in the ancient world worked, these events were purposely vague in description and conceptually abstract enough such that how they would actually come about was anyone’s guess. This means that you had a lot of violent political/nationalist anti-Rome movements with some random Jew out of nowhere claiming he was the Messiah foretold, and then some riots and revolts happen and the guy gets crucified by the Romans and then oh wait, never mind. And in the meantime you had the Second Temple of Jerusalem standing in the middle of it all as the symbol around which these movements would concentrate, and other ruling parties of the day like the Pharisees trying to regulate people’s behavior in the meantime, because they saw strict daily adherence to the Torah… or their interpretation of it, anyway, as the means to enact the real return.

And then around comes Jesus, who while fully invested in this story of Israel, sees its resolution in a completely “paradoxical” way, as Wright puts it, subverting all of the Jews' existing stories and symbols. The return from Exile won’t happen in one of the nationalist movements that so many Jews are looking towards, but rather in a humble, peaceful one that requires surrendering nationalistic expectations. Adhering to the Torah and submitting to the Temple is no longer necessary or sufficient for Israel’s revival, as these symbols have failed to fulfill their purpose and are partly responsible for the stagnation of the Jewish faith. The Messiah will not bring about the vindication of Israel through violent political action on a throne, but rather through serving the least of the kingdom- the poor, the ostracized, the unclean, and ultimately through being sacrificed himself in a humiliating execution on a cross. And in rejecting Jesus’s message, Israel itself has become the enemy, the Babylon that was seen in all of the apocalyptic visions of the prophets, and will be punished in time - with the destruction of the Temple itself, which actually did happen in 70 AD. You can decide for yourself whether Jesus actually prophesied that or not.

Naturally, these beliefs infuriate a good number of Jesus’s peers, because in teaching them, and moreover healing the sick and claiming the ability to grant the forgiveness of sins directly, Jesus is effectively replacing the foundational symbols and rituals that God had provided the Israelites… with himself. And that’s basically the textbook definition of blasphemy right there, claiming to do what only God should have the power and right to do. So these Jews find a way to get him executed, and in so doing play right into Jesus’s hands because for some reason Jesus sees his own death as the solution to everyone’s problems- the act needed to vindicate Israel and initiate the return from Exile. And then the resurrection happens, but that subject is left for the next book in the series.

Wright essentially infers these notions about Jesus using the methodology described earlier- analyzing the praxis (healings and miracles committed), stories (parables told and past prophecies referenced), symbols (the triumphal entry into Jerusalem and the Last Supper) and questions (who are we?; where are we?; what’s wrong?) addressed by Jesus during his life ministry, in comparison with those previously addressed by the Jews themselves in the past. He also has his reasons for attributing these directly to Jesus as opposed to having some element of them fabricated either by the early church or one of the gospel writers, but I can't really articulate those well outside of him reasoning why it might make sense for Jesus to actually have those beliefs. It's difficult to say how much of this actually is true historically speaking- in some sense we really will never know- but at the same time, it's hard to deny how sound his arguments seem given what little evidence we do have; Wright even makes an appeal to Occam's Razor here. But that said, I'm just a part of the choir Wright's preaching to here.

Ultimately, all of this might either sound interesting or incredibly long-winded and complicated, except for the fact that Wright somehow feels the need to repeat a lot of the same theoretical ideas over and over again (paradoxical! vindication! redefining the word apocalyptic! not the end of the space-time universe! using cosmic imagery to invest real space-time events with their theological significance! and so on.) to the point where eventually you just get it already and are wondering why there's still 26000 more lines left in this ebook that includes all of the appendices in its pagination, which makes you think that you're only 10% done when it's actually more like 60%.

All this to say, it's nice seeing a concept that I learned about haphazardly over the years be fully explicated in a book by a leading modern-day theologian... but at the same time, I think I'm ready for something new and different now.