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Jesus, Paul & the People of God: a Theological Dialogue with N T Wright

Reviewed by Julian Reindorp.

I suspect we have all used Bishop Tom Wright’s excellent New Testament commentaries and we may have read some of his other books. But have we fully understood the radical nature of his methods and his conclusions, and what are the pros and cons to his approach? This book covers all this and more.

It starts from the assumption that “N T Wright is widely regarded as the most influential biblical scholar of the past two decades”. Eight international scholars then review his work under different heads. Finally Tom Wright himself writes concluding sections to the two parts of the book – one on Jesus and the people of God (“whence and whither historical Jesus studies in the life of the church?”), and one on Pauline studies (“whence and whither Pauline studies in the life of the Church?”).

His aim has been to get back to what Ed Sanders describes as ‘proper history'.  “The four Gospels were written to give the readers access to Jesus himself, not simply to the early Christian faith about him. The evidence is overwhelming...the sources tell us more than simply various things about the people who wrote them; they tell us about the things that were actually going on (p.118)”.

His method, described by Richard Hays in the best  and clearest essay in the book, is for the maximum inclusion of the data. Unlike the Jesus seminar with their attempts to build on the 'critically assured' units of tradition, Wright argues for the maximum inclusion of the data. He has tried to make all the pieces of the puzzle fit together as historically factual elements of his reconstruction. “This is one of the reasons that many evangelicals love the book (Jesus and the Victory of God). Conversely it is one of the things that causes many New Testament scholars to regard it with suspicion (p.46)”. The method requires almost total immersion in the New Testament texts and understandings of the contemporary cultural environment, but excludes scholars and writings about any later period. “His highly intuitive leap generates a master hypothesis. The master hypothesis is then perhaps in circular fashion? – evaluated on the basis of its capacity to explain as much of the evidence as possible (p.46)”.

His main conclusions have been offered with great consistency over the last 20 years (he has written over 40 books, and, in The Meaning of Jesus (SPCK 1999), he writes alternate chapters with one of his key 'opponents' and friend, Marcus Borg): Jesus is a Jewish eschatological prophet who comes proclaiming the long awaited coming of God's kingdom, the end of Israel's exile and the return of Yahweh to Zion. Jesus does not just proclaim this message, he embodies it, enacting it in such a way that his journey to Jerusalem actually is the long awaited epistological coming of Israel's God (p.50).

The contributors are all professors in their own field, and largely sympathetic to Wright. Richard Hays writes about the gains and losses of Wright's approach: for instance, his recovery of the political character of the Gospel - “Jesus’ prophetic proclamation of 'the kingdom of God' recovers its properly explosive political meaning (p.53)”.

Sllvia Keesmaat and Brian Walsh, taking up this theme, examine one of Tom Wright’s speeches as Bishop of Durham in the House of Lords during the economic crisis in 2008: “The very rich are doing for the very rich what they have refused to do for the very poor (p.69)”.

In the final section on Paul, Wright notes that “everywhere Paul went there was a riot: everywhere I go as a bishop people serve tea (p.262)”. His conclusion is that “the central symbol of Paul’s world view is the united community...the family for the world, the single family created anew in Jesus Christ from people of every kind (p.265)”. Whatever your view on Tom Wright, there is a great deal packed into this report of a conference held in Wheaton College in 2010 as a kind of festshrift for him. I warmly recommend it.