Jesus and the Victory of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, Volume 2) by N. T. Wright (PDF)

Description

In this highly anticipated volume, N. T. Wright focuses directly on the historical Jesus: Who was he? What did he say? And what did he mean by it?Wright begins by showing how the questions posed by Albert Schweitzer a century ago remain central today. Then he sketches a profile of Jesus in terms of his prophetic praxis, his subversive stories, the symbols by which he reordered his world, and the answers he gave to the key questions that any world view must address. The examination of Jesus’ aims and beliefs, argued on the basis of Jesus’ actions and their accompanying riddles, is sure to stimulate heated response. Wright offers a provocative portrait of Jesus as Israel’s Messiah who would share and bear the fate of the nation and would embody the long-promised return of Israel’s God to Zion.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: About the Author N. T. Wright is the former Bishop of Durham in the Church of England and one of the world’s leading Bible scholars. He has taught New Testament at Oxford, St. Andrews, McGill and Cambridge. His award-winning books include The Case for the Psalms, How God Became King, Simply Jesus, and Jesus and the Victory of God.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I am not a Christian, but I agree with Dostoevsky that Jesus is the most interesting character in all of literature.Mostly using the canonical gospels, N.T. Wright provides a unique perspective on this enigmatic personality. Jesus is well known as meek and humble, the suffering servant who offers his life on the cross. But rarely is he thought of as someone with a profound intellect.In the Victory of God, Wright argues that Jesus was immersed in the texts of the Hebrew Bible. He then offered a unique interpretation in which all the institutions of the Jewish people are seen to be fulfilled in him.This isn’t the trite quoting of a passage and then claiming that it is fulfilled. Instead, it is a understanding at the deepest level of the meaning of the Temple, the prophets, the giving of the law, etc. Jesus, Wright argues, used the three years of his mission to impart a exegesis that is by no means surpassed even by the rabbis of the Talmud.Whether one agrees that Jesus truly interpreted the Hebrew Scriptures with the profound understanding Wright imparts to him is up to the judgement of every reader. But it is a perspective that deserves a hearing. With Jesus remaining at the center of much of Western religious culture, it’s interesting to view him as a creative genius—albeit one whose mind was shaped by his particular place and time. Well worth reading by all who find the man from Nazareth a person of perennial interest.

⭐Volume 1 was a great book and should be read ahead of this one, but this one cannot be out done. It is difficult to speak of this work without sounding overly enthused about the importance of this book for the understanding of Jesus.The first 144 pages of this book are spent addressing the two main camps that have dominated the landscape of study for the last 100 years. The two camps are Wrede (who see Jesus as a teacher of timeless truth) and Sweitzer (who see Jesus as an eschatalogical prophet announcing the Kingdom). Wright lines up scholar after scholar and puts them in one camp or the other. Some of the scholars dealt with are Bultman, Crossan, and Borg and several others. Wright himself comes down on the side of the “Sweitzerbahn”, but with many disagreements. Sweitzer saw Jesus as anouncing the “second coming” within a generation. As a result the disciples were either disappointed or modified the tale. Wright maintains that Jesus was not predicting the “second coming” but the vindication of the Son of Man through resurrection and the predicted destruction of the Temple by the Romans.Wright then proceeds to talk about Jesus as a prophet who announced the coming destruction of the Temple by his actions and his words and the reconstitution of Israel in himself. In the process Jesus condemnns the Jewish establishments of his day who saw themselves as the people of God around Torah and Temple and instead redefines the people of God or Israel as those who trust him for his way of being Israel.This book addresses the why of the crucifixion from the standpoint of the opponents of Jesus. Wright’s conclusion was that Jesus was a threat to the Jewish establishment, especially the Temple, but also Torah itself and he was a threat to Rome because he was acting and speaking as Messiah.Wright, rightly I think, believes the central message of Jesus was the exile is coming to an end, Yahweh is returning to Israel, and Yahweh is becoming king.Wright works out the synoptic message and does not leave many if any stones unturned in the doing so. He has drawn a line in the sand and anyone who wishes to cross over into an honest assessment of the life and message of Jesus must deal with what Wright has to say in order to get there. I recommend this book for everyone, but especially serious Bible students and scholars.If I had to find a weakness it would be in Wright not giving John’s gospel equal say. It is not that he does not uses John at all, but John does seem to take a back seat to the synoptics.

⭐N.T. “Tom” Wright is the most prolific and influential New Testament scholar of our day. I’m convinced that his solid and extensive exegetical work – which yields rich theological fruit – will continue to influence Christian leaders of my generation for decades to come.Jesus and the Victory of God (JVG) is volume 2 in Wright’s multi-volume project entitled “Christian origins and the question of God.” It’s unclear how many volumes his research will yield. His first volume, The New Testament and the People of God, explained Wright’s method of research in painstaking detail. But it’s well worth it! It lays the groundwork for overturning one of the most abused and dubious doctrines of modern biblical studies: the criterion of dissimilarity, sometimes called the criterion of embarrassment. Simply put, this criterion says that anything embarrassing to the early church in the gospels must be true because you don’t make up embarrassing things about yourself or your founder. Likewise, if something in the gospels is dissimilar from early church teaching, it’s likely true. There are many problems with the criteria used by modern (mostly secular) biblical studies in studying the historical Jesus, too many in fact to cover here.Wright argues, however, that Christians should not shrink before the historical task. He then defends a criteria of double SIMILARITY and double DISSIMILARITY. Jesus, he argues, should be both appropriately similar to the Judaism of his day and to the early church, and appropriately dissimilar from the two, respectively. Example: Judaism had a variegated expectations of a Messiah. Though there was no one definitive expectation, it was largely assumed that the Messiah would violently overthrow Israel’s enemies (re: pagans like Rome) through military means. In this regard, Jesus was similar to his Jewish context. However, though Jesus explicitly acted in certain ways characteristic of the Messiah, he also did so in ways to subvert the very militarism that he saw as counter to Israel’s God-given mission to be the source of God’s blessing to all nations. Other examples of this kind abound in JVG.Wright behaves a bit like the Jesus he describes. Wright comfortably fits both his academic context and church context (he is a bishop, after all) in many ways. However, he also subverts traditional expectations in each. Wright refuses some assumptions of modern biblical scholars, such as ruling out of hand that any sort of “god” can exist and act in human history. On the other hand, though Wright affirms the core of Christian theological orthodoxy, he also denies particular readings of the Bible long held by many evangelicals and Protestants in general. For example, Wright does not believe that Jesus ever predicted what we call “the second coming.” The texts most often pointed to (Matthew 24, Mark 13, etc) refer to the destruction of Jerusalem and Jesus’ vindication by God, not to his floating back to us on a cloud. But Wright’s goal is never to overturn treasured interpretations for the sake of change. His goal is always to discover how we moved from Second Temple Judaism (i.e. 1st AD) to the early church.At the end of the day, Wright discovers a Jesus that bridges that divide. It may surprise some but Wright’s portrait of Jesus manages to include what we actually find presented in the gospels. He doesn’t blacken out bits of the story that disagree with his own assumptions. In fact, Wright has publicly said again and again that the Jesus he finds in the gospels constantly challenges his own creaturely comforts.I find Wright’s description of Jesus compelling and intellectually coherent. I was first introduced to Wright’s work in college when I read The Challenge of Jesus. Challenge distills JVG into a more accessible popular format. I then read “The New Testament and the People of God.” Volume 3, The Resurrection of the Son of God is on my soon-to-read list. It’s unclear how many volumes Wright will complete. He plans at least one more to address Paul.I’m not sure how he finds time to complete these tomes of biblical exegesis, given his other writing projects of distilling his exegesis into accessible theology (cf. Simply Christian, Surprised by Hope) and his translation-commentaries of the entire New Testament (his “For Everybone” series).One thing is sure. If Wright doesn’t complete this series, generations of Christians will be the lesser for it.

⭐One of the best books I have read on Jesus. Tom Wright firmly shows Jesus as a 1st century Jewish prophet. He argues well and you get a real feel for what Jesus as a real human would have been like, how he thought and how he was received by his contemporaries. So often I find that Christians are not really clear about both the humanity and the deity of Christ and they end up with a muddled superhuman person. Tom Wright doesn’t make that mistake and you come face to face with a real, historical and remarkable human person (the deity of Jesus is there too but that is not the focus of this book).It was refreshing to read and to be able to see Jesus for who he was. There are some real nuggets in this book. So why then not give it 5 stars? There were times when the discussion felt long-winded, especially when it came to discussing the views of other scholars and it took a bit of ploughing through. I was more interested in what he had to say rather than when he agreed or disagreed with other scholars.I have read the previous book which was helpful when reading this book but not essential. (The previous book sets out some of the approaches to discussing the subject.) This book was definitely better than the previous one, and I’m looking forward to reading the next two books.

⭐In the introduction, Wright takes issue with those who propose that we can know very little about Jesus himself and who propose that there is a stark difference between the `Jesus of faith’ and the `Jesus of history’. Instead of accepting this proposition at face value, Wright sets out to examine who the Jesus of history was and what his aims were. He proposes that many Christian theologians have, over the years, examined very closely the idea of why did Jesus die, but at the neglect of the question as to why he lived.This is a book for the patient reader, yet it is well worth it. The one drawback to the book, which is highlighted early on, is that, for the most part, the testimony of John’s gospel is ignored. This may frustrate many readers as it seems as though Wright is dismissing one of the key witness statements. Part of the reason given for this was one of brevity, as the book is over 600 pages long (plus bibliography and index) on the basis of the 3 other gospel accounts.Wright’s portrait of Jesus is that of a man who understood himself, and was understood by others, as being a prophet, using as his foundation passages such as Mark 8: 27-30 and its parallels. The key theme to the book is what Jesus meant by the “kingdom of god” – a topic that I’ve often found glossed over in many different churches, presumably on the assumption that everyone knew and agreed what the referent was, even if it somewhat hazy.After his “portrait of a prophet” Wright moves on to look at the aims and beliefs of Jesus. Much of this is tied in with what has gone before. It is here that Jesus moves onto the end of Jesus’ life.In trying to understand Jesus in his historical context, Wright does seem to be missing a very big side of the story. He is keen to stress that in order to understand Christology you must first get “Jesusology” or else risk putting the cart before the horse. But I cannot feel that by focusing exclusively on Jesus’ reformation of the Jewish worldview and ignoring the impact on Gentiles and at any time and place other than 1st century Israel/Palestine, that Wright is painting a portrait of the horse and cart, only without legs and wheels, so that Jesus is so firmly rooted in his setting that he is static and has nothing of relevance to say to 21st century westernised christians. Only at the very end of the book is this problem acknowledged. The proposed solution is that everything changes with the resurrection, so the reader is referred onto the next volume.In his discourse of Jesus in relation to “apocalyptic” Wright swims against the tide of 2,000 years of theology to deny that there will be a “second coming.” Though hints are dropped throughout the book, the core argument is given in Wright’s exegesis of Mark 13. Rather than consider this a new form of apocalyptic, Wright chooses to read this as a strictly Jewish apocalyptic in exactly the same vein as Daniel.I would wholeheartedly recommend this book to christians, jews, muslims and atheists. To understand christianity (and how it relates to Judaism) one has to study the figure of Jesus. And though this doesn’t cover all aspects of Jesus’ ministry and life, it certainly covers a lot and in a lot of depth. It is at once both enlightening and challenging, asking us to look at our worldview in a different light – just as Jesus did in his day.

⭐This wonderful book published in 1996 is from the (to my mind) foremost Biblical scholar today. It is over 600 pages long, with 32 pages of bibliography and another 35 pages of citations of ancient texts, most of which are Biblical but including 6 pages of Jewish sources (including Apocryphal, Pseudepigraphy, Philo, and rabbinical works), nearly 2 pages of Christian (and Gnostic) writings, and nearly a page of Roman and Greek writings. If you want an index on who has said what, and how, this book is a good place to start!Many scholars have written popular books on Jesus, largely, it seems, from a point of view seeking to discredit the “traditional” orthodox account. N.T.Wright (who is now Bishop of Durham) writes here from a purely historical standpoint, but he takes detailed issue with the revisionist scholars, and in particular those of the Jesus Seminar.Wright states that his aim is to take account of all the evidence (including Biblical, extra-canonical, Jewish and pagan sources), and reconstruct the events in a way that incorporates all of this evidence naturally. He takes the New Testament text effectively at face value, carefully explaining where doing this is contrary to “received wisdom” and why his reading is at least as plausible as those of the revisionists.It is a book of history, not theology. He does not get into Christology (hence “Jesus” in the title), but he is centrally interested in exploring the important historical question, why did Jesus die? The “Victory of God” in the title is referring to the various different ways in which the Jews then thought of the “Hope of Israel”, and the way in which Jesus thought of it which was at once continuous with the Jewish traditions and radically different at some vitally important points.Looming over the whole discussion is the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 after the first disastrous Jewish War. Wright’s thesis is that Jesus saw this coming, and interpreted it similarly to the way that Jeremiah interpreted the foreseen fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC. But Jesus is preaching the Kingdom of God realised in himself! “Something greater than the Temple is here!” he says (Matt.12:6).Whoever you are, if you want to understand our society with its Christian heritage (for better or worse!) you need to know who Jesus really was. And in this long and complicated book a historian of the very first rank leads us through a huge mass of primary and secondary sources, astonishing us at every turn. He makes perfect and disturbing sense of the Gospel accounts, which are today overlain with so much anachronistic and sentimental assumptions that it is often hard to see what was going on and what the Evangelists are getting at.This book, with the two others in the series (I have already reviewed the third, “The Resurrection of the Son of God”), is the most exciting thing I have read for many years. I can’t recommend it enough.

⭐Like the other books in this series, this book combines an astonishing amount of scholarly research and reflection with a style that’s not only readable but – dare one say it? – at times, wickedly impish. Casual asides, sometimes buried in the footnotes, point out some of the illogical conclusions or lazy thinking of other scholars, and do so in a wry style that’s apt to make you laugh out loud. Not the norm, when reading a theological book!But more seriously, there’s real depth here. Wright paints a picture of Jesus which is solidly rooted in history, and after reading this book, a lot of the odd little stories and sayings in the gospels suddenly make sense. I’m talking about those difficult to understand bits, which generations of preachers and lecturers have ‘explained’, but whose explanations have left us feeling dissatisfied and unconvinced.By placing Jesus solidly in his political/religious setting, and by seeing him as being in line with the Old Testament prophets, suddenly a lot of things begin to make sense.In some sections, the book *is* hard going, because Wright is such a careful and meticulous scholar. But there are real nuggets of knowledge to be mined here.An enlightening and important book. Highly recommended.

⭐When Tom Wright authors a book under the name “N T Wright” you know it is going to be scholarly and will demand careful reading and close attention; so it is with “Jesus and the Victory of God”. It is a thorough and highbrow critique of many scholarly publications and the broad range of evidence about Jesus, the early church and the New Testament. But it is a critique by a man who is sincerely and genuinely committed to God, whilst being honest about his source documents. Jesus can be accepted in simple faith, but people with enquiring minds and a capacity for long words may wish to delve into the evidence of history, rather than throw their brains away. For such people, this is a thoroughly worthwhile book to read – and to read again.However, this is not a book for people who seek an easy read.

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