Chapter 5: Jesus and God
Having looked at Jesus’ understanding of what it means to be the Messiah, the immediate follow-up comes down on theological lines: was Jesus God and did he know he was God? In the present time, we have clearly drawn a connection between the two, but is this conclusion reasonable in a first century Jewish context?
Of course, to get to that point, we must first figure out what “God” meant in a first century Jewish context. It does not take much to recognize that we should expect that the concept of God has changed with time and various types of philosophical thought. Of course, to enter into a discussion of how and why these differences exist would fill volumes, so Wright sidesteps the whole conversation and merely presents the Jewish understanding of God:
“Classic Jewish monotheism thus came to believe that (a) there was one God, who created heaven and earth, and who remained in close and dynamic relation with his creation; and that (b) this God had called Israel to be his special people.”
These pieces of theology were revealed through history, and were reinforced by the various feasts and other remembrances. These are simply things that God did, and God is understood through these actions that he has taken. It’s very much a teaching by symbol and analogy.
In addition to this concept, we need to add some extra ideas specific to Jesus’ time. “First, there was the expectation of the return of YHWH to Zion after his abandonment of Jerusalem at the time of the exile. Second, there was the tradition of the enthronement of YHWH, and of one who somehow shared that throne” (103). The second point is a bit nebulous, and its history is not traced out in this book. Of course, we can understand that it did exist, as this Messiah-concept was clearly present in Jesus’ time.
Apparently, this concept was a bit vague to the Jews as well, as that agent had a range of forms at various points in history. But as a result of these various forms, we can at least conclude that there were many ideas floating around, and that the possibility existed for this figure to be somehow divine without it being a violation of Jewish monotheism. His point here is to reject the idea that the concept of Jesus being divine is rooted in Jewish thought, not some brand new idea that Jesus introduced (thus rooting Jesus completely within Jewish thought and not as a completely aberrant theological figure).
This takes us to the question of where the worship of Jesus as God actually began. But before he answers this question (and this is a recurring theme in his writing style – he will introduce a question and take his time answering it), he points out three false understandings. It is false that the concept of “Messiah” already had divine connotations to it. There were other potential Messiahs in Jesus’ time, and there is no evidence that none of them (except one) had any claim of divinity. Second, we cannot draw divine meaning out of the phrase “son of God” since that phrase refers back to the Messiah, which did not have any claim of divinity. The third is that the resurrection was proof of Jesus’ divinity. As pointed out before, resurrection wasn’t even enough to establish Messiah-ship, so why would it be used to establish something even larger?
(I’m reminded of Acts 23, where Paul starts a fight between the Sadducees and the Pharisees over the expectation of a future resurrection. So this clearly points to the idea that resurrection wasn’t anything so far out of the ordinary that it had God-like properties about it.)
We do need to recognize that the resurrection did have an impact on the disciples’ belief, but it was a connecting-of-the-dots and certification of that Jesus was the Messiah. The jump to the idea that this was an act of God himself is made through a prophecy of David, when he is speaking to YHWH about building a house for Him. By this point in history, the phrasing in 2 Samuel 7:12, “I will raise your a seed after you, who will sit on your throne” implied a resurrection*.
(* Apparently, the original Jewish did not have this connotation, but in the Septuagint it does. There’s an interesting side thought about the Jewish way of understanding scriptures through re-interpretation and re-formulation of old passages because this is the opposite of how we might hold responsible interpretation of the Bible. A careful Biblical application can only follow from a careful understanding of the original writer’s meaning. This prevents us from manipulating Bible verses to suit our ends. However, since Jewish thought revolved more around narratives than declaratives, it would seem that they would be more open to such adaptations of scripture, so long as it is consistent with the overall picture of who God is. I don’t know much about this sort of thing, but it vaguely makes sense, which means that I’m speculating a whole lot and could be completely wrong.)
I’m simply going to copy the paragraph because I don’t know how to summarize it:
“Read this story now with early Christian eyes, and what do we find? That the Temple, for all its huge importance and centrality within Judaism, was after all a signpost to the reality, and the reality was the resurrected son of David, who was the son of God. God, in other words, is not ultimately to dwell in a human-built Temple, a timber-and-stone house. God will indeed dwell with his people, allowing his glory and mystery to “tabernacle” in their midst, but the most appropriate way for him to do this will not be through a building but through a human being. And the human being in question will be the Messiah, marked out by resurrection. This, I submit, is more or less how the early Christians reasoned. Jesus – and then very quickly Jesus’ people – were now the true Temple, and the actual building in Jerusalem was thereby redundant. We must remind ourselves, crucially, that the Temple was, after all, the central “incarnational” symbol of Judaism. It was standard jewish belief, rooted in Scripture and celebrated in regular festivals and liturgy, that the Temple was the place where heaven and earth actually interlocked, where the living God had promised to be present with his people.”
Do you get it? I don’t, at least not completely. I would say my level of understanding is “it kind of makes sense, I guess.” I’ll take the C grade and move on.
We finally arrive at the attempt to uncover what Jesus understood about himself. The argument is, of course, that Jesus did understand himself in this way, that he was the new Temple and had come to replace the old one. We see this in Jesus’ offering of the forgiveness of sins, that what he was offering that which previously could only have been received at the Temple. Furthermore, this new Temple announced the beginning of a new age, in which God has returned, as the Jews were expecting (though not in the form they were expecting). There are other symbols that are analyzed, but I’ll skip over that part.
The ultimate conclusion is that the concept of the vocation of Messiah, which encompasses all of these things relating to what the Messiah was supposed to do, which was not only suffer on the cross, but to be the ultimate revelation of God himself, and doing that which only God can do, is how Jesus viewed himself. He then goes on to compare the Western orthodoxy picture of Jesus with the first century picture of Jesus. His claim is that our understanding of Jesus is grounded in our understanding of God. That is, we start with a concept of God, and then try to fit Jesus into it. The problem is that this understanding of God is a post-Enlightenment God that is not anything like the God of the first century Jews.
So instead, he invites us to turn the picture around. Start with the picture of the historical Jesus, and use that to inform us about God. If Jesus is God in the flesh, then what better access to the picture of God is there? Wright goes out of his way to inform the reader that he is not rejecting the basic Christian creeds. But he is allowing his theology to be informed by history. When he says “God” he doesn’t think about the modern conception of God, but something much closer to Jesus’ conception of God.
This is an interesting and seemingly reasonable position to take. However, I’m not convinced that he’s right with his criticism when it comes to American Protestantism. From my experiences and observations, it seems that we have quite the opposite problem. We tend to see God in absolutely everything, and Jesus is supposed to be your best friend. This has its own problems, as the ideas we use to create our understanding of Jesus tend not to be rooted in first century Judaism.
I’m reminded of some random conversation I had with a guy when I was at UCSB. He was promoting some sort of vegan diet as part of some larger religious new age-like movement. As we talked, I mentioned that I was a Christian, and he got started talking about Jesus. I don’t remember how we got there, but at some point he asked the question of whether Jesus would walk through a line of ants or delicately step over them. I shrugged, and he went on to talk about how Jesus would never harm any animals at all. To this, I responded that Jesus likely participated in Jewish festivals, which required the slaughtering of various animals, and that it was unreasonable to think that Jesus would manage to be a vegetarian and yet we would not have a shred of evidence to suggest that he engaged in a culturally aberrant behavior. I don’t recall what happened with the rest of that conversation.
I also believe that a lot of American Christian views of Jesus tend to also be a bit disconnected from reality. At the minimum, our visual image of Jesus is rooted in the early renaissance. As far as understanding who Jesus actually was, I think we ended up with a Jesus that didn’t reflect the Old Testament writings. That is, we attempt to create a love-and-grace Jesus that stands against the judgment-and-punishment God of the Old Testament. So rather than using Jesus to help us to understand who God is, it’s as if we use Jesus to try to understand who God isn’t. This appears to be quite problematic, and pulls back on Wright’s primary thesis, that “the continuing historical quest for Jesus is a necessary and nonnegotiable aspect of Christian discipleship.” If Christian discipleship has at its root a deepening understanding of God, then it seems important to readjust this notion of how we understand Jesus in relation to God.
