Author Interview
N.T. Wright, author of The Challenge of Jesus
IVP: It seems to me that The Challenge of Jesus introduces readers to your more scholarly work--Jesus and the Victory of God--on a level that your other more popular books on Jesus have not. How would you situate this new book among your several books on Jesus?
N. T. Wright: The Challenge of Jesus is designed to sit about halfway between The Original Jesus (Eerdmans) and Jesus and the Victory of God (Fortress). In other words, it's for someone who wants to get their teeth into the serious issues but who is not yet ready for a 700-page book with lots of footnotes. My hope would be that people will graduate from Challenge to Victory in due course! In addition, Challenge includes more explicit and detailed discussion of Jesus' self-understanding and a whole chapter on the resurrection, which the big book didn't get to (that's for the next volume). And of course, Challenge ends with two chapters addressing the question, If all this is true, so what for us today in our postmodern world? At that level, it sticks its neck out way beyond the academic study of Jesus, into the area which I have written about in my more "popular" books, most recently The Millennium Myth (Westminster John Knox, 1999).
IVP: I think many of us who have read Jesus and the Victory of God would say that whatever our disagreements, our understanding of Jesus has been greatly enriched. For myself, it changed the way I understand Jesus. Can you point to any particular defining moments in your own study of Jesus that triggered a paradigm shift or set your agenda?
Wright: The defining moments for me in my study of Jesus came first when teaching a New Testament intro course at McGill University in 1987, when I found that by following through with the Jewish history I had been reconstructing with the class, Jesus simply emerged in a quite new and three-dimensional way. A particular breakthrough was reading George Caird's little booklet Jesus and the Jewish Nation. A second defining moment came when pulling the material together for a summer course at Regent College, Vancouver, in 1988 and integrating in particular the theme of the temple with Jesus' self-understanding. That has been formative for me ever since.
IVP: Who are your most significant conversation partners--whether contemporary or past--in the study of Jesus?
Wright: My most significant conversation partners are, to one angle, Albert Schweitzer; to another, Ben Meyer, Ed Sanders and, to a lesser extent, Paula Fredriksen. And at a very different angle, Dom Crossan and Marcus Borg.
IVP: So apart from a Greek New Testament and a synopsis, what three or four books on Jesus would you want in your desert-island library?
Wright: Schweitzer's The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Meyer's The Aims of Jesus (more learning and wisdom there than in some whole shelves of lesser work), Sanders's Jesus and Judaism. I'm not sure I'd want Crossan's The Historical Jesus on a desert island with me--it might make me too cross. But it's a great book in its own way.
IVP: What do you find to be the most common roadblocks for orthodox Christians in warming to the task of seeing Jesus in truly historical terms--placing him at ground zero of the social, religious and political realities of first-century Galilee and Jerusalem?
Wright: The docetic assumption that because we know Jesus was divine we know that he knew everything, was just giving abstract "teaching" about the way things were, knew the full Pauline atonement-theology, etc. And also the common, equally docetic assumption that because the Bible is inspired we know the Gospels are true, so we don't need to think about what they're saying--i.e., we can assume that what we mean by these words and phrases is what they meant and mean--kingdom of heaven, Son of Man, etc. Thus there is an innate laziness which affects us all: the sense of "d'you mean I've got to learn all that stuff about first-century Judaism just to get the simple gospel message?" Answer: Yes. If God chose to become a first-century Jew you might have thought finding out about first-century Jews would be something a believer in God would want to do!
IVP: You do place a great deal of emphasis on the timing of Jesus' ministry in terms of the historical situation of Israel--"the fullness of time," to use a Pauline phrase.
Wright: Yes, lots of Jews believed that the time was ripe for the Kingdom, and Jesus shared that belief, as did John the Baptist.
IVP: But from a canonical perspective does the church need to rely on historical data "behind" the text of the Gospels to understand this historical moment? Or does that data simply affirm what is already plain and evident within the Gospels if we only have the eyes to see it?
Wright: This relates to the "roadblocks" we were just talking about: All translators (Luther, Tyndale, etc.) have had to rely on, for instance, Greek lexicography to understand what the New Testament means. That already is appealing to historical data behind the text of the New Testament. Without doing so we just won't understand the words themselves. All history does this. Actually lots of conservative Christians are, without realizing it, dependent on older works in this vein; for example, Edersheim's splendid though dated work The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, and similar things, filtered through a tradition of preaching and teaching. Sermons on the Pharisees have given little potted versions of Edersheim's more careful studies of Pharisaic practice and so forth. What I am challenging people to do is to go beyond Edersheim, and hence beyond--and in some cases contradicting--those traditions which though themselves appealing tacitly to non-biblical material, are now so much taken for granted that people think they're just "reading the text straight." Then, yes, the historical data is not in opposition to the text of the New Testament but will regularly challenge what we have "always thought" these texts to mean.
IVP: In his response essay in Jesus & the Restoration of Israel Marcus Borg suggests that you need "the common scholarly understanding of synoptic relationships to be wrong," that your "reconstruction depends on seeing most (all?) of the material in the Synoptic Gospels as equally early, indeed as going back to Jesus, and only modestly shaped by the early Christian movement after Easter." How would you reply? Could your general profile of Jesus be established even on "the common scholarly understanding of synoptic relationships"?
Wright: I haven't seen or read Marcus's essay yet. If he says what you say he says, then he's wrong! I am quite clear that the Christian community shaped the traditions about Jesus. I have written about that (a reconstructed form-criticism) in New Testament and the People of God chapter fourteen. I am equally clear that any case that the early church invented material about Jesus has to be made by showing that Jesus couldn't have said it, etc. In other words, hypotheses about what the church invented are logically dependent on hypotheses about what is thinkable in relation to Jesus. The hypotheses about Jesus are logically prior, in fact, to hypotheses about Gospel origins, despite the rhetoric of the Jesus Seminar. I am agnostic about Q and about the precise way in which the Synoptic Gospels used each other for the very good reason that I think all theories are significantly underdetermined. In other words, more than one theory of those on offer will explain the data. But even if Q did exist, which I am prepared to grant for the moment, and even if Matthew and Luke used Mark in the way one mainstream scholarly tradition (not the only one) has said, then it still doesn't follow that, for example, everything not in Mark and Q is made up by Matthew and Luke.
What Marcus and his colleagues on that side of the Quest never allow for is what we most surely know was characteristic of pre- or semiliterate peasant cultures: a vibrant and essentially conservative oral tradition. My reconstruction therefore doesn't depend on the view that the material goes back to Jesus; my view that most of the material goes back to Jesus depends, in terms of the argument of my scholarly work, on my reconstruction of Jesus. My reconstruction doesn't depend on the view that the most common scholarly understanding is wrong. It could be substantially correct (Mark and Q the two main sources) and
still the portrait of Jesus I draw is dead on target. If by "the common scholarly understanding of synoptic relationships" means "the view that the Evangelists and their sources invented material to suit the needs of the church," I reply that that's a straightforward begging of the question. And incidentally, there are dozens of scholars of major international reputation in Synoptic studies who disagree with the paradigm that is so popular in the rather constricted circles that the Jesus Seminar will give credence to.
IVP: Finally, you are both a New Testament scholar and an Anglican priest, one who is very much involved in the life of the church. I have heard you comment on the rewards of your joining the daily celebration of the Eucharist with your scholarship. How has that been formative in your thinking about following Jesus today, the subject of the final two chapters of this book?
Wright: That's like asking how breathing, eating and drinking have been important for my life as a human being! Where do I start? A theory of oxygen, nutrition, hydration?
IVP: Sorry. It's the Eucharist, so let's start with nutrition and hydration.
Wright: I think what I have learned as a scholar and what I have learned as a Christian and an Anglican priest is that the story and the symbol and the praxis are all equally bottom-line and that the worldview I grew up with, in which ideas were the only real bottom line, just won't do. Of course ideas matter, true belief matters, doctrine matters, and don't let anyone tell you I don't think so. But precisely because the central true beliefs include the incarnation, the life of story, symbol and praxis now as well as then matter equally. And the central symbolic praxis, at which the story is told and the belief reaffirmed both intellectually and emotionally and simply humanly, is the Eucharist.