Where do the Gospels fit in the big story? (Original Jesus, Chapter 9)

The Gospels should not be taken as free-standing compositions, to be read as though nothing else existed. They only make sense as the completion, the final chapter, of a great drama that had been running for two millennia.
(Original Jesus, 119)

As we explored in chapter 3, the Jewish world -- in which Jesus lived, the Gospels were written and out of which the church was born -- was a storytelling culture. Stories were not just creative ways of illustrating or explaining abstract truth. Stories meant business.

There were lots of little stories (from the Old Testament and other Jewish literature) that can be summed up into one basic story: "The pagan nations would trample upon Israel, enslaving and oppressing the people. Then Yahweh, her God, would remember the promises that he had made, and would act dramatically within history to rescue Israel, to set the people free, to show the world that he was the true God and they were his true people." (p. 111) The most famous of these stories was the Exodus. Then, there was also the story of Esther, and of Judas Maccabeus. They celebrated feasts every year (still observed by many devout Jews today) to help them remember these stories: Passover for the Exodus, Purim for Esther, Hanukkah for Maccabeus.

And they told the stories in such a way to remind themselves that God would again act in history. They saw themselves in the stories, and God coming again to rescue and liberate once more. Different groups put their own spin on the story. We know from the Dead Sea Scrolls writings that the Essenes retold this story of God and Israel so as to include themselves (and really, only themselves, not those "other" Jews) in it -- as the true Israel through which God would fulfill prophecy. Other groups had their own way of telling it.

The way that God would come and act would often be stated through powerful apocolyptic imagery (example: description of Ancient of Days in Daniel 7) -- a new world order was coming, in which God himself would come and sort things out.

Jesus (in his life, death, resurrection) was the fulfillment and climax of all those stories and prophecies. The Gospels, according to Wright, tell "how the scriptures were fulfilled, how the story reached its climax, how God's long and chequered relationship with Israel, and with the world, was finally sorted out." (p. 120). This is a big story. Jesus' telling of it made those around him uncomfortable. And if we let it, it will make us uncomfortable as well. We listen by engaging the Gospels, finding that our worldview may need some adjusting. We may even find that our "would-be Christian worldviews" need to once more be remade around him (see p. 124). Not around the Jesus of our imagination or whim -- but the Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The Jesus of history. Yes he is alive and present in our experience today. But our religious experience is rooted in what we know of him from the Gospels. This Jesus stands at the turning point of history beckoning us to follow him, to join him in bringing the story, the good news, to the present.

Embedded Questions:

• What do the Essenes have in common with early Christianity?
• Where do we fit within the "big story" of God at work, in the cosmos, in the world, in Israel, in Christ?
• In what ways is the Jesus we find in the Gospels different than the Jesus we hope to find in our culture? In our churches?
• What does it mean to "remake our worldviews around Jesus"?
  

Getting to Grips with the Gospels (Original Jesus, Chapter 8)

Many readers of the Gospels, particularly within devout Christian contexts, assume that they tell us the same as we would have got if someone had been following Jesus around with camcorder. You don’t have to read very far, though, before you discover that this can’t be so.
(Original Jesus, 92)

Following Jesus today means joining with others who are trying to follow him in getting a good understanding of what they believe and why. This means studying the earliest evidence about Jesus: the Gospels. There are two basic fundamental approaches to these writings today that, according to Wright, don't do justice to the intent of the Gospels: (1)It happened exactly like that (simplistic realism); or (2) nothing like that happened (simplistic cynicism).

Wright uses the story of Jesus' trial in the four Gospels as a telling case-study of why these approaches don't work. On the one hand, clearly something actually happened and these are not cleaned up attempts later written to bolster a vision of Jesus not rooted in history. On the other hand, we have a hard time mashing together the accounts we have in order to get a harmonised picture, perfect in every detail.

If we are to take Jesus seriously, we need to be careful to avoid simplistic approaches to the Gospels.

This means considering why they were written. Wright lists two reasons (p. 105-106):
(1) To tell the story of Jesus. This sounds obvious. But some people will actually try to tell us that the Gospels were not about an actual person but about the faith of the early Christians projected onto a more or less fictionalised version of Jesus. A close reading of the story doesn't allow for this. It is clear that the Gospels intend to tell a story that is real, to introduce the reader to a person who is real.
(2) To address the evangelists' contemporaries. All storytelling involves selection and interpretations. The Gospels were not written by a fly on the wall. Why did they arrange the story as they did? How does the original setting affect our understanding today?

It is important to understand the two worlds in which the Gospels were written in. On the one side, the Greek/Roman culture dominated Palestine with its combination of classical Greek culture and ruthless Roman government. On the other, the Jewish people lived with their strong sense of national and cultural identity as the people of God. These two peoples lived uneasily with one another, learning portions of each others’ cultures and languages and, at times, seeking to fight or dominate each other. To that world, Jesus came, and in it, Christianity was born. There the Gospels were written. There, the Gospels make sense.

Embedded Questions:

• What do you make of the Gospel accounts?
• What does it mean to take Jesus seriously today? (and what does that have to do with in depth study?)
  
• How does our understanding of the world in which the Gospels were written affect the way we read them?
  
• How can we steer clear of simplistic readings without getting bogged down in the details?
  
• What about other ‘gospels’ like Thomas, Peter?