Meeting Mr. Wright

In the spring of 2006, I took a course on the Gospels that deeply impacted my heart and mind for ministry. It was in this class that I was first introduced to the work of N. T. Wright, slugging my way through Jesus and the Victory of God with wonder and determination. As I discovered new lenses there for understanding the life and mission and Kingdom-proclamation of Jesus, I've never read the Gospels, or the rest of the Bible for that matter, the same way since.

Still studying for my OCE, I came across this review of one section of Jesus and the Victory of God that I wrote for that class:

Wright examines what a Messianic identity would have meant for Jesus and his contemporaries given his historical context, stressing that the title “Messiah” did not connote a “divine or quasi-divine figure” in first-century Judaism. Historically the Messianic mantle was a relatively elastic one that could be tailored to fit the figure of the claimant who donned it. Wright points to three themes common among the disparate Messianic movements of Jesus’ day: Israel’s return from exile, the centrality of the Temple, and the victorious battle against Israel’s enemies. Jesus’ self-understanding as the Messiah is evident, then, in the ways the praxis, stories and symbols of his mission both relate to and radically redefine these themes. In regarding himself as Messiah, Jesus saw himself as the one who “summed up Israel’s vocation and destiny,” the one “in and through whom the real return from exile would come about.” Wright understands the Temple action, for example, as Jesus’ symbolic enactment of his Messianic role as the Temple’s reformer and rebuilder. Similarly, he reads the discourses following the Temple action as “messianic riddles” that function cryptically as Jesus’ explanation of this action and implicitly as a Messianic claim. Wright’s uses this portrait of Jesus’ Messianic identity to explain the details of Jesus’ trial: the importance of the temple accusations, Caiaphas’s question about Jesus’ Messiahship, and especially Jesus’ reference to the Son of Man as a prediction of his own vindication.

Some questions we might ask about Wright’s portrait of the historical Jesus include:

1. Wright’s explanations of the so-called “messianic riddles” are often built around polyvalent readings of allusions to a variety of different texts. At what point do such intricate explanations stretch interpretation beyond plausibility by depending on layers of literary meaning that may or may not have been immediately accessible in the oral context in which these “riddles” were uttered?

2. How can Wright’s portrait of Jesus’ “non-transcendent” Messianic identity be historically continuous with the more “incarnational” Christology that seems to have developed relatively quickly in the early Church (such as we see in Colossians, Hebrews and the Gospel of John)?