Gospel accounts: How, When, Why? (Original Jesus, Chapter 10)

John's Gospel is designed to bring you to your knees in wonder, love and praise. Luke's is meant to make you sit up and think hard about Jesus as Lord of the whole world. Matthew's is like a beautifully bound book which the Christian must study and ponder at leisure. Mark's is like a hastilly printed revolutionary tract, read by torchlight, and whispered to one's co-conspirators.
(Original Jesus, 144)

Remarkably we know frustratingly little about how or when the Gospels were written. Scholars have their theories, their ways of dating the Gospels, but none know for certain when the Gospels were actually authored. We also know very little about the evangelists themselves.

That's OK. The historical authenticity and accuracy of the Gospels have little to do with their dating or even their author; it depends on us constructing the juxtaposed puzzle of Christianity and Judaism with Jesus straddling both. The question isn't who wrote the accounts and when...but (based on what we know of this world) are the accounts historically plausible? And, more importantly, why exactly was each of them written?

Wright offers some helpful suggestions for our study of the Gospels. Read them cover to cover....

... struggling to make more and more sense of exactly who Jesus was.

... struggling with each book to what each evangelist is saying as a whole

... asking how people, today, can retell the story so that the world gets the message?

... putting yourself inside the story (in the crowd, among the disciples or Pharisees or lepars) and paying attention to what it does to you.

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?

God with a Human Face (Original Jesus, Chapter 7)

^{The closer we get to the original Jesus - to the storytelling Jesus, the healing Jesus, the welcoming Jesus, the Jesus who declared God’s judgment on those who rejected the way of peace and justice... the closer we are to recognizing the face of the living God.
(Original Jesus, 83)}

What do we mean when we say "Jesus is God"? Too often I fear this is a matter of detached theology, simply affirming that Jesus is the incarnation of the God of the universe. You know, "that's just what we Christians are supposed to believe. So drop it already."

But when it comes to God, are we all on the same page for the above statement to make sense? Do we really know enough about God to know what a personal visit from him might look like? In our culture today this is an important question. Do we really want to attach Jesus to most popular conceptions of God? Many in our world imagine a detached and distant creator -- up there somewhere. Do we imagine Jesus to be that god? (or do we prefer to pick the god of New Age or Americanism or something else?)

Our confusion on this point is precisely why we needed Jesus. Not just to set our ideas straight. But to introduce us to something of what God is like. As Wright put it, "We don't know, off the top of our heads, exactly who God is; but we can discover him by looking at Jesus." (p.79).

The God Jesus knew (as a first century Jew steeped in the Old Testament) is both the Almighty Creator and the Caring Father who hears and is willing to roll up his sleeves and sort out things himself; a God involved in the world and invested in turning things around.

Jews actually did have an idea of what it might look like for this God to visit, though Jesus wasn't quite what they had in mind. They had pictures like these: Lady Wisdom calling out in the streets (in Proverbs); the Law as the means through which God would personally gather and guide His people; and the Temple itself as the place where the presence of God dwelt.

Enter Jesus. He called out and taught as if he were that Wisdom. As if he were the Law and Lawgiver sent to gather and guide. As if he were Temple, housing the living presence of God himself.

And so in Jesus, we see what this God, the involved God of sovereign love, might look like if he were to become human. The closer we get to understanding the "original" Jesus (the real, in-your-face Kingdom-of-God Jesus), the closer we are to seeing the face of the Living God.

This Jesus cannot be contained. He can't be treated as a mere signpost to God, or a supporter of our agendas (however well-intentioned or religious or "Christian"). This Jesus upsets our ideas about God, our religion.

This Jesus lived among God’s people telling stories about the kingdom of God, healing the sick and confronting the powerful. He died under the weight of the world’s pain, and rose again having defeated death.

Fast forward to today: If the living God was uniquely and personally present in Jesus... so what? What does it mean for us?

Ultimately this question brings us to a journey. Not just a personal, more-or-less self-centered spiritual quest. As Paul reminds us: "God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ." (2 Corinthians 5:19 NIV) This journey begins by recognizing the love of God in the face of Jesus of Nazareth but continues as we join in God's work of healing the world.

Biblical Text: Philippians 2:1-11

Embedded Questions:

• Do we know enough about God to answer the question ‘Is Jesus God’?
• Can we fit Jesus into our God picture?
• Is it true that the living God was uniquely and personally present in Jesus?
• What might it look like today if people were captivated by the Spirit of this (the original) Jesus?

Resurrection (Original Jesus: Chapter 6)

When people died they stayed dead, in first-century Palestine just as much as in the technological twentieth century. Jesus' followers weren't expecting him to die in the first place; when he did, they certainly weren't expecting him to rise again. Yet they said, loud and clear, that that was what had happened.
Original Jesus, 72

Why did Christianity ever get going anyway? There were other Jewish would-be messiahs and revolutionaries within a hundred years of Jesus’ life (Judas the Galilean and Simeon ben-Kosiba, among others). A leader would gain a following, people would proclaim him to be Messiah, and then he would be hunted down and killed by the occupying forces. Every time, the movement would die with the leader.

But the Jesus movement didn’t die with the crucifixion of Jesus. His followers kept following him. They didn’t even visit his grave to pray and grieve (with the exception of that first Sunday), as would be custom in Jewish culture.

Rather than going back to their old lives or looking for a new Messiah (perhaps in Jesus’ brother James?), Jesus’ followers were emphatic that Jesus was the Messiah. Three days after his execution and burial, they said, Jesus was raised to bodily life again, leaving an empty tomb behind him. The current Jewish understanding of a final resurrection at the end of the age left little room for a single person coming back to life in the middle of history. The last thing they would have expected was for Jesus to be resurrected.

The accounts we have are "mostly quite breathless and artless" (p. 72), more like eye witness sketches than carefully planned stories. They knew that it had happened, and that it would change everything. The resurrection meant that the kingdom of God had come to birth, that the real return from exile had happened, and that evil had been defeated. They, and others, had to go on taking Jesus seriously. The victory that Jesus had won over evil and death (which is the good news, the gospel) must be taken to the ends of the earth.

Biblical Text: Luke 23:33-38, 44-56; 24:1-12

Embedded Questions:

• After Jesus’ execution, why didn’t Jesus’ followers give up or find a new messiah?
• Why did they think he was the Messiah after all?
• Why didn’t the story end when Jesus was crucified?

Jesus vs. Temple (The Original Jesus: Chapter 5)

What was Jesus’ revolution all about? At its heart, he was remaking the people of God around himself, and telling everybody that they were freely welcome in it.
(Original Jesus, 60)

First century Jerusalem was, more or less, a city built around a temple. This structure was of special significance to the Jewish people– it was the place where God chose to meet with his people. It was considered to be the center of the city, the center of worship, even the center of the cosmos.

Temple was also at the center of Jewish expectancy when it came to the coming King of the line of David -- the Messiah, the anointed one. This king (it was believed) would have to go to Jerusalem to be crowned and to cleanse the Temple.

The turning point for Jesus' ministry came at Caesarea Philippi (some one hundred miles north of the Temple), where Simon Peter proclaimed: "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." (Matthew 16:16 ESV) Jesus is Messiah, the King they were waiting for. But what would this mean for his followers?

From that point on, what had been a Galilean movement shifted its focus to Jerusalem. And increasingly Jesus found himself at odds with the Temple itself. In offering the forgiveness of sins right on the spot, Jesus was claiming to do and be exactly what the temple was and did. Then, in an acted parable symbolizing judgment, Jesus actually cleansed the temple (see Mark 11:15-18). He overturned moneychanger’s tables and drove away people selling sacrificial animals, essentially preventing Temple from functioning.

Just a few days later, Jesus and his disciples celebrated the Passover– a meal to remember how God liberated the Jews from Egypt. Jesus brought to this meal new direction and significance: Real liberation was about to happen. All that the temple stood for would be summed up in Jesus’ death on the cross, through which evil would be exhausted and "the shameless, reckless love of God would come running down the road to embrace the whole world."(p. 65)

Biblical Text: Mark 11:15-18; Isaiah 53:3-9

Embedded Questions:

• Why was the Temple considered to be the center of the cosmos?
• In what ways was Jesus at odds with the Temple?
• What does Wright mean by "acted parable"? What was Jesus really up to when he cleansed the Temple?
• What does all this have to do with us today?
  

Revolutionary Rally (The Original Jesus: Chapter 4)

Jesus was calling and challenging his contemporaries to be the people of God in a radically new way. He solemnly announced God's blessings -- but he blessed all the wrong people.
(Original Jesus, 51)

The popular picture of the Sermon on the Mount today is of rolling hills and peaceful countryside. A calm Jesus delivers a flowery speech about being nice to each other, offering a quietly romantic view of religious life. But in the first century it looked more like a young leader rallying support for a new revolutionary movement.

At the time of Jesus, the hills above the sea of Galilee were a popular hangout for holy revolutionaries, who sought to gain a following. Similarly, Jesus went to the hills to commission his disciples (Mark 3:13-19) and deliver the sermon on the mount (Matthew 5-7). But his was a revolution unlike all the rest. It was a revolution of heart, calling for a radically different approach to life. Jesus tapped into Israel’s call to be the people through whom God would put the world right, calling all who would listen to follow him and embrace God’s agenda for them to be Israel. He was calling his original hearers, as he is calling us today, to believe that God is God, and let that turn their (and our) priorities upside down.

Jesus called them to follow him and his teachings, which is the only way to build your “house on the rock.” Jesus was declaring himself to be the real thing to which the temple had been pointing all along. Here we are called to take a hard, fresh look at God’s call to serve him in the world.

Biblical Text: Matthew 4:23, 25; 5:1-16, 38-45

Embedded Questions:

• Why did Jesus go up there (the mountains/where revolutionaries went to start rebellions) to instruct his followers?
• Why was there a “chosen people” (Israel)?
• What is the big deal about Israel in God’s plan?