Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?

by Don Stewart

  A comment on the visit of Dr W Tom Wright to New Zealand

This was one of Dr W Tom Wright's subjects in a series of meetings and interviews in New Zealand in September this year [1996].  Dr Wright's curriculum vitae includes stints as Dean of Lichfield Cathedral (current) and Canon Theologian of Coventry Cathedral.  Recently, Dr Wright was included in Time Magazine's inquiry into "The Search for Jesus" (April 8, 1996).  In that discussion, referring to his new book Jesus and the Victory of God, Time Magazine said that his book "will state that Jesus' trial, the fact that he claimed to be the Messiah and his bodily Resurrection have sound historical basis." (sic)

Broadly speaking, that was the substance of Dr Wright's most important message to his audiences.  In respect to the bodily resurrection, Dr Wright brilliantly dispatched into oblivion one well-known explanation.  That is the idea that somehow Jesus' followers experienced a 'presence' of the Lord.  Wright says it is simply not valid from a Jewish perspective.  That experience, according to Dr Wright, was known to the Jews.  However, the language that would have been used to express that sort of experience, is more like that used in Acts 12:16.  Following Peter's release from prison, the gathering at Mary's house thought that he was as good as dead since James had just been killed by Herod.  They believed that it was "Peter's angel" which Rhoda heard knocking at the door.  The believers in the days and weeks following the Resurrection did not believe it was Jesus' angel to be the content of their 'experience'.

Dr Wright contrasted Jesus as Messiah with others who would have been Messiah.  There were many messianic claims before and after Jesus.  Simon Bar Kochba was declared Messiah when the Romans threw the Jews out of Israel in AD 132.  Frequently, a defeated would-be messiah was replaced by a brother or son.  One curious exception is James, the Brother of Jesus.  Wright says that one would have expected him to be declared messiah after Jesus death, but that never looked likely.  In fact James became the apostle of prayer.

On a radio interview (Radio New Zealand, 16 September), Dr Wright said he wanted to stand up and counter "writers like Jack Spong and Barbara Thiering who have been splashing around radically different ideas" about Jesus.  In Wright's view, "we can, as historians, know quite a lot about who Jesus was and let's get to the bottom of it".  In response to the interviewer's plea that "there are so many views", Dr Wright adopted a sound scientific approach.  He explained that "as with any historical subject, the more information you can get together, and the more seriously you can study it and relate it, then the better chance there is of actually homing in onto the subject."  More significantly, he pointed out that "in our generation there is a tremendous opportunity due to the wealth of new material from Jewish sources, not just from the Dead Sea scrolls but new editions, easily accessible, of texts that before, you had to grub around (for) in the dusty basements of libraries."

Unfortunately, this "explosion of studies" that put Jesus into his Jewish context, could still be a two-edged sword.  After attending two of his seminars; taping his Radio New Zealand interview; catching him briefly on Radio Rhema; and interviewing him on a couple of occasions; I am left with the feeling that Dr Wright's particular Hebrew perspective could become just that.

The difficulty is that he does not appear to be willing to go the whole journey.  He seems merely to be scratching the surface.  He is quite correct to say that putting Jesus into his Jewish context is where we "have to begin".  That in a nutshell, describes the problem of two thousand years.  Gentile Christians simply failed to do this, although there have been exceptions.  Jerome Friedman in The Most Ancient Testimony  points out that during the Reformation "scholars found Hebrew knowledge necessary if the Old Testament was to be properly translated and the New Testament understood in its conceptual, historical, and linguistic context."   Thus one Protestant tradition is to turn to Jewish teachers, grammarians and exegetes, especially where they are Christian believers (viz Edersheim).  Dr Wright follows some good company.

In a debate with Dr Jim Veitch at the Law Lecture Theatre in Government Buildings, Wellington, two acutely relevant problems were discussed.  One is that the scholar's desired outcome often colours his or her conclusion or the way the research is done.  Boundary markers are set by the Church.  That leads to the second problem: that it is therefore difficult for the Christian to step out of his faith to do the job properly.  That is of course the environment that people like Dr Wright risk involving themselves in.  From time to time they might say or write things that seem to take them over the wrong edge or cloud the issue further.

For example, at the seminar at St James Anglican, Lower Hutt (28 September), Dr Wright responded to a question about Jesus experience of God the Father from his pre-existence.  I was confused by the response, so I asked him privately if he accepted at face value the words of Jesus that "before Abraham was, I am."  Dr Wright does not seem to.  From a Jewish perspective, there cannot be any doubt that those people listening were incensed when Jesus said that.  They threw stones at him.  Just as the Jewish perspective demands that there must have been a bodily resurrection which Dr Wright correctly asserts, there can be no doubt that the early Jewish Church also understood Jesus knew of his experience before Abraham.

At the same venue (and at Government Buildings), Dr Wright doubted that the modern State of Israel had any relationship to the prophecies of Israel, viz the regathering from all the countries of the world (Lev 26:41, Is 11:11, Ezek 20:34) or that its present existence is as though Israel was "born once" (Is 66:8; KJV).  The content of our faith does not require us to believe these things about Israel, of course, rather Christians must believe in salvation by the blood of the one who is the true Israelite.  The statement by Jesus about Abraham, does of course bear more directly on the content of our faith because we have to believe that Jesus is God.  Jesus saw Satan fall.  Jesus wrote with his finger in the sand when the adulteress was brought before him.

Dr Arnold Fructenbaum is another scholar who has developed a Hebrew perspective.  He refers to a "full-blown Israelology".  In his Israelology - The Missing Link in Systematic Theology, Dr Fruchtenbaum quotes Lewis Sperry Chafer's definition of systematic theology as the "collecting, scientifically arranging, comparing, exhibiting, and defending of all facts from any and every source concerning God and his works."  Dr Wright appears to concentrate on documents from the period around Jesus own time.  However, that is not enough.  Fruchtenbaum points out that the Bible, especially the Old Testament, was rarely, if ever, interpreted within a framework where an "Israelology" had been sufficiently developed. In many respects, in comparison to Dr Fruchtenbaum, Dr Wright is like the timid canon Copernicus.  He is prepared to shift the hub of planetary orbits from the earth to a point on the centre of the earth's orbit; but that is not good enough.

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