Kategorie: The forgotten story of the Gospels

By Christian / N. T. Wright

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The eleventh chapter of N.T. Wright’s book How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels concludes by addressing how the creeds should be read and understood in light of the Gospels.

The whole and the parts

As ordinary Christians, we have the New Testament before us and rejoice in this wonderful text. But we are also aware that there are some things we do not understand, the meaning in the context and in the language of the 1st century is foreign to us and we do not even suspect some connections. But that’s not a problem, because biblical scholars have been analyzing these texts for over two millennia, taking them apart, repairing and polishing them, and then presenting us with these wonderful parts and explaining them in detail.

In the process, scholars and denominations have each interpreted different texts differently, emphasizing different parts of the New Testament. And while we appreciate the efforts of scholars, we may sometimes wonder if they are all really talking about the same text of the New Testament.

What we need, however, is not the excellently presented individual parts, but the whole reassembled: “The text was ultimately written to be part of the lifeblood of a community.” Later creeds, such as the Nicene Creed, were historical milestones for the Christian community, based on and together with the Gospels. They are not meant to be a substitute for them.

Let us take a look, for example, at the so-called Apostolic Creed or Apostolicum (in Latin Symbolum Apostolorum or Symbolum Apostolicum), at how it could be read and how it might be better read.

One way of reading the Creed

In the following, I will use the English version that N.T. Wright uses in the book.

I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.

Apostles’ Creed

We should not immediately slide into a creation-versus-evolution discussion here. But perhaps we are quick to move on here without realizing the significance of this statement: the world is not a dark place made by a lower deity, as taught, for example, by Marcion and others. Many will quickly move on to the next part…

And in Jesus Christ his only son, our Lord…

Apostles’ Creed

Many Christians do this and thus cultivate their quiet and unrecognized Marcionism: that the Old Testament is only a kind of interruption in history between creation and Jesus. N.T. Wright formulates the thoughts of many like this: „Yes, God made the world, but we are sinners, and so God sent Jesus to save us from our sins.“

But the word Christ in ‚Jesus Christ‘ is not a second first name but the title: “Jesus, the Jewish Messiah”. And ‚our Lord‘ is not vaguely meant as ‚whom we worship and call upon‘. Lord here has the meaning of a true ruler.

The next part of the creed is the one we mentioned at the beginning of the series, which ignores most of the gospels:

Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried.

Apostles’ Creed

And why? Interestingly, many people will think of something here that, surprisingly, is not included in these early creeds: “The Apostles‘ Creed does not mention the purpose of the death, as does the Nicene Creed — „who for us men, and for our salvation“ –but most modern creedal Christians will think of it at this point, and be rightly grateful.“ And, like N.T. Wright, you have to ask yourself these questions: “But will they understand the incarnation as Godbecoming human in order to become king? Will they understand the cross as the means by which God completed his incarnate kingdom work? Pretty certainly not.”

In fact, I can well understand N. T. Wright here: “Indeed, I sometimes fear that people have been all the more eager to affirm the official doctrines in this truncated sense as a way of carefully avoiding the implications of God’s actually being king on earth as in heaven. Far safer to have a superman Jesus who zooms down into the world to snatch us away from it.”

The next part of the creed will also be understood by very few and quickly passed on:

He descended into hell. [Latin descendit ad inferos],

Apostles’ Creed

Why should Jesus descend to hell? Or to the realm of the dead? ‚Descend‘ is an active action that only the living can perform, but it is said that he had died. It is a good thing that a familiar and beautiful thought comes right after that:

The third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty.

Apostles’ Creed

Are we aware of the symbolic significance of this description? Or do we just get the impression that Jesus is far away? But then comes what many Christians have been waiting for:

From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

Apostles’ Creed

„Fine, think creedal Christians. Final judgment may be a fearful prospect, but we know that we, having been justified by faith, need fear “no condemnation,” as Paul says (Rom. 8:1)“ And doesn’t that mean we’ll go to heaven? Not according to this, though.

The Apostolic Creed could have ended there, but it doesn’t:

I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.

Apostles’ Creed

Now, on the one hand, it should be noted that the Latin “sanctam Ecclesiam catholicam” does not refer to the Catholic Church of today. Rather, catholicam is meant in a general sense. So it is a completely different statement. And what is the “communion of saints”? And at the latest with the “resurrection of the dead and eternal life”, many will think that this refers to eternal life in heaven. But that is not what the early Christians believed, and it is not what is stated in the Gospels or the Apostolic Creed.

We see that a creed may be helpful to keep in mind some essential core elements of faith. But without the foundation of the Gospels, one does not really know what is meant by this.

A different way of reading the Creed

So let’s go over the Apostolic Creed again:

I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.

Apostles’ Creed

„Here the wise worshipper will celebrate the God ofAbraham, Isaac, and Jacob, knowing that this confession of him as „father“ resonates back to the Jewish scriptures and that the delight in him as maker of all, heaven and earth, puts us on a level not only with the author of Genesis 1, but also with such majestic writings as Psalm 19 („The heavens are telling the glory of God,“ v. 1) and Isaiah 40 („Lift up your eyes on high and see: Who created these?“ v. 26). This is, in particular, the Israelite and Jewish confession of faith, which carried with it an implicit social, cultural, and political edge: the gods of the nations are mere idols, but our God made the heavens (Ps. 96:5; Ps. 96 is one of the great psalms of creation and its renewal).“

Maybe you are thinking: ‚But God is not referred to as a father in the Old Testament!‘ He isn’t? Take, for example, Exodus 4:22-23: “Then you shall say to Pharaoh, ‚Thus says the Lord: ‘Israel is My firstborn son. And I say to you, let My son go, that he may serve Me …’ ” (NEÜ) Here he speaks of the close relationship between father and son, and this is how the Israelites felt about it in the Shema Israel according to Deuteronomy 6:4-9.

And so the whole creation – heaven and earth – will become a temple for God, as Paul wrote: “He wants to carry out his plan when the right time comes and bring everything under the head of Christ, everything that exists in heaven and on earth.” (Ephesians 1:10, NEÜ) Which brings us to the next point in the creed.

And in Jesus Christ his only son, our Lord.

Apostles’ Creed

As already stated, the word Christ in ‚Jesus Christ‘ is not a middle name but the title: “Jesus, the Jewish Messiah” And by ‚our Lord‘ is not vaguely meant ‚whom we worship and call upon‘. Lord here has the meaning of a true ruler. Which should remind us of Psalm 2. “And to call him ‘Lord’ was never a mere honorific in the canon. It was one of the regular imperial titles.”

Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate,was crucified, dead and buried.

Apostles’ Creed

The birth of Jesus was a highly political moment, as Matthew and Luke also depict it. He is the one who will establish the kingdom of the one true God.

The Nicene Creed adds here: “For us humans, and our salvation”. But that puts the emphasis on something quite different from what was said before about the Kingdom of God. N.T. Wright writes: “Yes, indeed, but that „salvation“ is not a rescue from the earth, from God’s creation, but in and for the earth, and for us as creatures of earth.”

He descended into hell. [Latin descendit ad inferos]

Apostles’ Creed

Where does this idea come from that Jesus descended into the “realm of death” or “hell”, as it is often translated, after his execution and before his resurrection? There is only one Bible verse about this: “He went and made proclamation to the spirits in prison, saying…” (1 Peter 3:19 Züricher) Why is it so important that it is in the Creed? Perhaps N.T. Wright’s explanation will help us here as well: “It is principally a statement of Jesus announcing to the „spirits in prison“ that through his death God has won the ultimate victory..”

The third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty.

Apostles’ Creed

N.T. Wright summarizes the full significance of this passage as follows:

„If Jesus is the one who is carrying the destiny of Israel, and if Israel is the people who are carrying the ultimate purposes of God to bring his justice and new creation to birth, then the resurrection of Jesus is the launching of the new world in which that justice and new creation have arrived at last, on earth as in heaven. „Some people standing here,“ said Jesus, „won’t experience death before they see God’s kingdom come in power.“ Yes, and now they have. And the ascension is then, as Luke certainly intends and John and Matthew hint, not Jesus „going away“ in the sense of being out of sight and out of mind. Heaven, in biblical thought, is after all the „control room“ for earth. For Jesus to be now „at God’s right hand“ is for him to be given full authority over heaven and earth, as Matthew’s Jesus says explicitly. Every line of this section of the creed thus speaks powerfully about the kingdom of God.“

N.T. Wright, chapter 11

From thence he shall come to judge the quickand the dead.

Apostles’ Creed

The Nicene Creed adds here: “His kingdom will never end.” “The kingdom (which Jesus introduced in his public career and established through his death and resurrection) will never end.”

II believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.

Apostles’ Creed

With the thoughts of the Kingdom of God in mind, one better recognizes why the Holy Spirit was given: There is clearly a missionary mandate that is made possible by the Holy Spirit. (John 20:19-24) It is not primarily about God’s redeemed people feeling comfortable through their presence and love, but what we make of it. The “holy catholic church” is not the institution in which we can settle down and feel safe. It is the worldwide community that exists out of its mission. It is about us forming a community with these ‚kingdom people‘ of all times and feeling solidarity with them.

And finally, the creed ends with a truly moving statement.

And so, finally, we come to the „resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.“ Here we must „festoon“ around the well-known words the great New Testament hope: „the life of the age to come,“ the „coming age“ in which the whole creation will be transformed to share the liberty of the glory of the children of God. And, within that new creation, the coming together of heaven and earth of which Paul spoke (Eph. 1:10), God’s people are promised new bodies. I have written about this elsewhere, but it is perhaps worth reiterating it. If you belong to Jesus the Messiah, if his Spirit dwells in you, if you are a worshipper of the one true God, maker of heaven and earth – then however you may feel at the moment, whether you are sick or healthy, handsome or jaded, you are simply a shadow of your future self. God intends to transform the „you“ you are at the moment into a being – a full, glorious, physical being – who will be much more truly „you“ than you’ve ever been before.

N.T. Wright, chapter 11

Summary

At this point, I would like to let N.T. Wright himself summarize his thoughts:

I understand the frustration of those who are now saying we should, as it were, start with the creeds, so that we shall at least read the Bible in a „believing“way. But if we start with the creeds, granted the way our Western Christianity is now more or less bound to read them, we will never understand the gospels, and hence the whole canon itself. If, however, we start with the gospels, which form the heart and balance point of the whole Christian canon, and if we understand them to be telling the story of how God, the creator God, Israel’s God, became in and through Jesus the king of all the world, then we can return to the creeds and say them in a very different spirit. Put tradition first, and scripture will be muzzled and faded. Put scripture first, and tradition will come to new life. Better still, as Jesus himself said, put God’s kingdom first – put first the revelation that, as the gospels have been eager to tell us, this is the story of how God became king! – and all these things will be added to you..

N.T. Wright, chapter 11

This whole book has been about new reality, the new reality of Jesus and his launching of God’s kingdom. The new reality of a story so explosive (unlike the muddled, murky, „self-help“ world of the noncanonical gospels!) that the church in many generations has found it too much to take and so has watered it down, cut it up into little pieces, turned it into small-scale lessons rather than allowing its full impact to be felt. Part of the tragedy of the modern church, I have been arguing, is that the „orthodox“ have preferred creed to kingdom, and the „unorthodox“ have tried to get a kingdom without a creed. It’s time to put back together what should never have been separated. In Jesus, the living God has become king of the whole world. These books not only tell the story of how that happened. They are the central means by which those who read and pray them can help to make that kingdom a reality in tomorrow’s world. We have misunderstood the gospels for too long. It’s time, in the power and joy of the Spirit, to get back on track.

N.T. Wright, chapter 11

By Christian / N. T. Wright

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In the tenth chapter of N.T. Wright’s book How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels, he explains why the kingdom and the cross are not as unrelated topics as we might think. I would like to quote his introduction to the chapter directly:

We noted In part I of this book the way in which we have been conditioned to read the gospels as though the themes of the kingdom and the cross could be held at arm’s length from one another. As we have seen, one very popular understanding of the story the gospels tell is that Jesus’s public career began with a time of happy, early fulfillment, when every-thing seemed to be going well, but that it then turned a dark corner and ran into opposition, unpopularity, and finally arrest, trial, torture, and death. As I have tried to explain, this splitting apart of the story in the four gospels has come about because the story the writers actually tell simply didn’t fit the categories that centuries of readers, including some very devout ones, were bringing with them. But we should be in no doubt that, for the gospel writers themselves, there was never a kingdom message without a cross, and Jesus’s crucifixion never carried a meaning divorced from the launching of God’s kingdom. Our task now, having worked our way back into the gospels by means of adjusting the volume on the four crucial speakers, is to offer a positive statement of what happens when we treat kingdom and cross not as two themes, but essentially as one. We begin with two scenes that more or less bookend the whole presentation in each of the gospels: Jesus’s baptism and the „title“ on the cross. In each — and each is decisive as a marker for the writers’ meaning – we see exactly the combination of kingdom and cross that has proved so elusive in the history of interpretation.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 10

The tenth chapter is quite long – about 15% of the book! Therefore, I will only quote some of the main points and the argumentation leading to these statements will not be mentioned or only very briefly. Since the book is also available in German translation, I would like to refer to this.

Baptism and Kingdom.

The description of the baptism of Jesus in John 1 links these two themes:

Jesus has not come simply as a „superman“ figure, a „divine hero“ parachuted into the world to sort out the mess. He has come – and the gospel story only makes sense if we take this very seriously – as the one who will embody Israel’s ultimate vocation in himself.

The title „son of God“ expresses both halves of this complex and delicately balanced picture.

The heavenly announcement that Jesus is „my son, my beloved one,“ the one with whom God is delighted ,indicates for those with biblically attuned ears that Jesus is marked out as the king of Psalm 2 and the servant of Isaiah 42:

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 10

This reference to Psalm 2 and Isaiah 42 does not allow us to ignore the kingdom theme, since it features so prominently in it.

All the signs are, rather, that the aim of incarnation and cross is precisely to establish God’s kingdom; that, after all, is what Jesus begins to say when, not long after his baptism, he begins his public career (Matt. 4:17, and parallels).

In other words, with the echo of the opening words of the first „servant“ poem, the synoptic writers are not inviting their readers merely to contemplate Jesus as the one who dies so that sinners may be forgiven. They are invoking one of the primary scriptural passages in which Israel’s God, YHWH, establishes his sovereignty over the whole world, doing so indeed despite the failure of his own people to believe in him. He will rescue them through the servant’s work, but merely to do that is „too light a thing.“ He will provide, through the servant, „a light to the nations, that [his] salvation may reach to the end of the earth“ (49:6). At the heart of all this is the ultimate good news: „Your God reigns,“ malak elohayik (52:7). He is king, and has demonstrated this by overthrowing the pagan kingdoms and their idols, unveiling his worldwide justice, and inviting all and sundry to turn to him and enjoy the benefits of his renewed covenant and renewed creation (Isa. 54-55).

The baptism narrative, therefore, in all the gospels, is not simply about Jesus’s „divine identity,“ on the one hand, or a particular program of „atonement,“ in the sense of a rescue from the world of creation, on the other. Yes, the gospels affirm Jesus’s divine identity. Yes, they affirm his death on the cross as the climax of God’s age-old plan of salvation. But the purpose of God coming incognito in and as Jesus and the purpose of this Jesus dying on the cross was – so the gospels are telling us – in order to establish God’s kingdom, his justice, on earth as in heaven. As in Psalm 2, the point is that in this way the nations are to be called to account. This is how the creator is bringing his creation back into proper shape.

I think of the Emmaus road story, where the risen Jesus declares that the divine plan always involved the Messiah suffering and then „coming into his glory“ (Luke 24:26). We note that „coming into his glory“ does not mean simply „going to heaven“ in the normal sense; „glory“ is a way of saying „sovereign majesty,“ so that the saying exactly combines the two themes we are looking at. The crucifixion was the appropriate and long-prophesied way by which the Messiah would come to be king of all the world, and Luke’s second volume, the Acts of the Apostles, describes how that works out.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 10

The “title” on the cross

The Latin word titulus was used to describe the public announcement of the offense for which the executed person had been held responsible. And Pilate had this proclaimed: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.”

In John’s gospel, it is repeatedly made clear that Jesus is the “Messiah”. This title is therefore the opposite pole to the realization of Jesus‘ first disciples in chapter 1 of John’s gospel. Of course, this title is also extremely ironic. Pilate knows that Jesus does not conform to any of the meanings of “king” that Pilate knows. He has redefined the meaning of “being king”. John is dealing with a theology of the kingdom here. As Paul writes, the rulers of the world had no idea what they were doing in the crucifixion. (1 Corinthians 2:8)

The point for our present purpose is that, in all four gospels, readers are strongly urged to see Jesus’s death as explicitly „royal,“ explicitly „messianic“ — in other words, explicitly to do with the coming of the „kingdom.“

Jesus, John is saying, is the true king whose kingdom comes in a totally unexpected fashion, folly to the Roman governor and a scandal to the Jewish leaders.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 10

“You are the Messiah”

A key passage here is Mark 8:27-30, where Peter says these words: “You are the Messiah.”.

This functions as the midpoint in Mark, looking back to the voice at the baptism and forward to the paradoxical question of Caiaphas at the trial („Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?“ 14:61, which is a statement in Greek; it gets turned into a question by the punctuation and presumably the tone of voice) and then the centurion’s statement at the foot of the cross („This fellow really was God’s son,“ 15:39).

The Messiah is to come into his kingdom through a horrible death; and those who not only follow him, but are called to implement his work must expect that their royal task – for such it is– will be accomplished in the same way, by the same means. There is every sign that the earliest church understood this very well indeed, just as there is every sign (alas) that today’s church does not — except, of course, in those parts of the world, like China and the Sudan, where there has been no choice.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 10

Peter’s words, “You are the Messiah,” therefore mean, “You are Israel’s Messiah,” as Paul confirms in Romans 8:3-4 and Galatians 4:4-7.

What the four gospels are eager to tell us, then, is that the messianic kingdom that Jesus is bringing will come through his suffering and indeed through the suffering of his followers. But it is Jesus’s own suffering in particular, gradually revealed as unique and uniquely effective, that is highlighted as the gospel narratives proceed. The key text of Mark 9:1 and parallels, so often read as an unfulfilled prediction of an imminent „second coming“ or even of the „end of the world,“ was never intended that way by the evangelists or, I believe, their sources or earlier traditions. Coming at the conclusion of Jesus’s prediction of suffering for himself and his followers, this is what the text says:

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 10

„I’m telling you the truth,“ Jesus said; „some people standing here won’t experience death before they see God’s kingdom come in power.“

Mark 9:1

But doesn’t the parallel text in Matthew 16:28 seem to say something different?

„Some of those standing here will not taste death until they see ‚the son of man coming in his kingdom.’“

Matthew 16:28

But this understanding is itself based on an assumption that, however commonplace, is deeply misguided, namely, that „the coming of the son of man“ in the New Testament refers to the „coming“ to earth of one presently in heaven.

In Daniel, „one like a son of man,“ in other words, „a human figure,“ „comes“ from earth to heaven to be presented before the „Ancient of Days.“ It is a move from suffering and humiliation to enthronement and sovereignty.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 10

Matthew does not think that the words of Matthew 16:28 refer to a time far in the future, but to Jesus‘ death and resurrection, which Jesus referred to only a few verses before. Mark adds “in power” in 9:1 and Luke speaks of “God’s Kingdom” in 9:27.

These parallel verses, in the intention of all three evangelists, are best read as indicating a kingdom fulfillment that they, the authors of the gospels in question, believe had already come to pass in the death and resurrection of Jesus.

They believed this, of course, because of Jesus’s resurrection – just as it was disbelief in the bodily resurrection that made scholars from Reimarus to Bultmann and beyond assume that there must still be some great coming event to which the evangelists were referring. Such scholars have normally supposed this great coming event to be the Parousia. The word parousia is a Greek term meaning „royal presence“ or „divine appearing,“ or perhaps both. It has become the regular technical term used by New Testament scholars to refer to Jesus’s „second coming“ and its supposed attendant phenomena, which, they maintain, the early church believed to be „imminent.“ Early Christians thought, say these scholars, that the Parousia would be the final kingdom-bringing moment. That scholarly mistake has fused with the dispensationalism of popular (mostly American) subculture and speculation to give the present state of confusion about the „end-times“ that is so prominent a feature of today’s American church life.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 10

Narrating the cross

It has often been assumed that the four evangelists, in recounting the events that led to Jesus’s crucifixion, are doing so with minimal intention to offer theological interpretation of those events. To take a step back once more, when people write about „atonement theology,“ the tendency has been to go to Paul and Hebrews and to come to the gospels only for those detached phrases that will support (or so it seems) the kind of „theological“ construct that has already been culled from Paul. The actual narratives of Jesus’s arrest, trial, and crucifixion have, to be sure, been combed for hints of „meaning,“ and this has been found not least in the use of the Old Testament, of passages like Psalm 22:1.

The trials, in other words, address the theological and soteriological „why“ of the cross, not only the „how.“

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 10

The great scene in John with Jesus and Pilate gives us the reasons for the cross, and these are kingdom reasons. However, N.T. Wright also points out a common misunderstanding here:

Jesus once again takes the initiative in the conversation, introducing the discussion of different types of „kingdoms.“ „My kingdom isn’t the sort that grows in this world,“ he says (18:36). (We note here that the regular translation, „My kingdom is not of this world,“ has contributed to, and in its turn also generated, multiple misreadings of all four gospels, appearing to suggest that Jesus’s „kingdom“ is straightforwardly „otherworldly.“ The Greek for „of this world“ is ek tou kosmou toutou; the ek, meaning „out of“ or „from,“ is the crucial word.) There is no question but that Jesus is speaking of a „kingdom“ in and for this world.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 10

And so Jesus emphasizes that this is exactly what must happen when God’s kingdom successfully paves its way – not with violence but nonviolently. “And in the broader Johannine perspective, we discover that the only word that does justice to this combination of kingdom and cross is agape, ‘love’.”

I will omit the analysis of John 19 for once and just give his summary:

Gradually, inch by inch, in a narrative heavy with ironic kingdom theology, we discover the theological „why“ of the cross within the historical „how.“ As we should have realized all along, the „lifting up“ of Jesus on the cross is his exaltation as the kingdom-bringing „king of the Jews,“ because the kingdom that ist hus put into effect is the victory of God’s love. Kingdom and cross fully joined.

The famous tetelestai in 19:30 („It’s all done!“) matches the synetelesen in Genesis 2:2 („God finished the work that he had done“)

The cross serves the goal of the kingdom, just as the kingdom is accomplished by Jesus’s victory on the cross.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 10

Temple, Kingdom and Cross

It is difficult for us to grasp the central importance of a temple and especially of the temple in Jerusalem for devout Jews. If we think of it like a modern religious building – for example, a cathedral or a mosque – then we are quite off base. It is now widely recognized that in ancient times there was no separation of ‚religion‘ and other things such as ‚politics‘, ‚culture‘ or ‚economics‘.

It would have made no sense in Judaism in particular. Not only was the Temple the center of the whole national life. It was, Jews believed (as many ancient peoples believed about their temples) the place where heaven and earth themselves interconnected and overlapped.

„Heaven,“ after all, was seen as the throne room, the place from which „earth“ would be ruled. But if „heaven“ came to be linked with a particular point on“earth,“ then that point was where power was concentrated. Divine power. Theocracy. The kingdom of God.

And the gospels tell the story of Jesus as the story of a one-man walking temple. Early on in the story we find the hints. „Who then is this?“ people ask as Jesus does remarkable things, speaks and acts with authority, behaving as if he is the one who’s now in charge. Jesus is portrayed by the gospels as a one-man apocalypse, the place where heaven and earth meet, the place where and the means by which people come and find themselves renewed and restored as the people of the one God, the place where power is redefined, turned upside down or perhaps the right way up.

The evangelists are in no doubt: Jesus is the reality, the place where Israel’s God now dwells, the human being in and through whom the one who called Abraham and uttered his voice from Sinai had now returned to judge and to save. Jesus is the reality, and the present Temple and its official spokesmen must give way before him. It is no accident, from the evangelists‘ point of view, that when Jesus finally breathes his last, the veil of the Temple is torn in two from top to bottom (Mark 15:38).

For a genuinely Jewish vision of theocracy, you need God in the midst of it. But what the gospels offer us — especially John, but actually all of them — is a God who is in the midst in and as Jesus the Messiah, and a God who is then committed to remaining in the midst, through Jesus, in the person of the Spirit. Jesus himself is the new Temple at the heart of the new creation, against that day when the whole earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.

It is much, much more. It is the moment when the story of Israel reaches its climax; the moment when, at last, the watchmen on Jerusalem’s walls see their God coming in his kingdom; the moment when the people of God are renewed so as to be, at last, the royal priesthood who will take over the world not with the love of power but with the power of love; the moment when the kingdom of God overcomes the kingdoms of the world. It is the moment when a great old door, locked and barred since our first disobedience, swings open suddenly to reveal not just the garden, opened once more to our delight, but the coming city, the garden city that God had always planned and is now inviting us to go through the door and build with him. The dark power that stood in the way of this kingdom vision has been defeated, overthrown, rendered null and void. Its legions will still make a lot of noise and cause a lot of grief, but the ultimate victory is now assured. This is the vision the evangelists offer us as they bring together the kingdom and the cross.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 10

Kingdom and cross in mutual interpretation

Once you realize that the kingdom and the cross are linked in the Gospels, it is possible to look at one from the perspective of the other. N.T. Wright offers three reflections on this. First, the kingdom from the perspective of the cross:

First, the evangelists insist that the kingdom truly was inaugurated by Jesus in his active public career, during the time between his baptism and the cross. That entire narrative is the story of „how God became king in and through Jesus.“

Second, this kingdom is radically defined in relation to Jesus’s entire agenda of suffering, leading to the cross.

Third, the kingdom that Jesus inaugurated, that is implemented through his cross, is emphatically for this world.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 10

“What, in other words, do we learn about the cross when we discover that the gospels present it as the means by which God (in Jesus) becomes king of the world?”

First, the way we have normally listed options in atonement theology simply won’t do. Our questions have been wrongly put, because they haven’t been about the kingdom. They haven’t been about God’s sovereign, saving rule coming on earth as in heaven. Instead, our questions have been about a „salvation“ that rescues people from the world, instead of for the world. „Going to heaven“ has been the object (ever since the Middle Ages at least, in the Western church); „sin“ is what stops us from getting there; so the cross must deal with sin, so that we can leave this world and go to the much better one in the sky, or in „eternity,“ or wherever. But this is simply untrue to the story the gospels are telling – which, again, explains why we’ve all misread these wonderful texts. … But the idea of messianic victory as a fresh interpretation of an ancient Jewish theme is precisely what the four gospels have in mind.

Second, however, when we see the cross in the light of the kingdom, we discover a fresh and helpful framework for understanding the vexed questions that surround substitutionary atonement. … As for the gospels themselves, there should be no doubt that they follow this line. Jesus, for them, is dying apenal death in place of the guilty, of guilty Israel, of guilty humankind. Through his death, the evangelists are telling their readers there will come the jubilee event, the great redemption, freedom from debts of every kind, which he had earlier announced and which is the central characteristic of the kingdom.

Third, if the cross is to be interpreted as the coming of the kingdom on earth as in heaven, centering on some kind of messianic victory, with some kind of substitution at its heart, making sense through some kind of representation, then the four gospels leave us with the primary application of the cross not in abstract preaching about „how to have your sins forgiven“ or „how to go to heaven,“ but in an agenda in which the forgiven people are put to work, addressing the evils of the world in the light of the victory of Calvary.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 10

Kingdom, Cross, Resurrection and Ascension

In addition to the kingdom and the cross, we also find the resurrection and the ascension in the gospels. Regarding the resurrection, N.T. Wright has written in more detail about this in his book Suprised by Hope, and I had published a series on it. In this context, the resurrection is important, of course, because without it the evangelists would not have had a story to tell. After all, thousands of other young Jews were crucified at the same time. The evangelists highlight several different aspects:

The resurrection is, from Mark’s point of view, the moment when God’s kingdom „comes in power.“ From John’s point of view, it is the launching of the new creation, the new Genesis. From Matthew’s point of view, it brings Jesus into the position for which he was always destined, that of the world’s rightful Lord, sending out his followers (as a new Roman emperor might send out his emissaries, but with methods that match the message) to call the world to follow him and learn his way of being human. From Luke’s point of view, the resurrection is the moment when Israel’s Messiah „comes into his glory,“ so that „repentance for the forgiveness of sins“ can now be announced to all the world as the way of life, indeed, as they say in Acts, as The Way.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 10

In fact, the resurrection has further consequences.

Heaven and earth are now joined in the person — in the risen body! – of Jesus himself

He therefore sends out his followers, equipped by his own Spirit (if the ascension locates a part of „earth“ in „heaven,“ Pentecost sends the breath of heaven to earth), to celebrate his sovereignty over the world and make it a reality through the founding of communities rescued by his love, renewed by his power, and loyal to his name.

When, therefore, at the start of Acts, the disciples ask Jesus whether this is the time for him to „restore the kingdom to Israel“ (1:6), his answer is not (as people often suppose) a „no.“ It is a „yes.“ As so often, however, it is a „yes but“:

And that „witness,“ as Luke has made abundantly clear, is not a matter of „telling people about your new religious experience“ or of informing them that there is now a new prospect of a much better other-worldly destiny than anything the bleak pagan world had to offer. The „witness“ of Jesus’s followers is the message that there is now „another king, Jesus“ (Acts17:7). It is the witness according to which the temples that presently exist, whether in Jerusalem, Athens, Ephesus, or anywhere else, are now to be seen as at best redundant (Acts 7) and at worst a blasphemous category mistake (Acts 17; 19). Jesus is the true Temple, now ruling the world as the one who was crucified; 

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 10

And with that, we have arrived at the end of chapter 10. There were probably some new, unfamiliar thoughts. I have largely omitted the explanations using the text of the New Testament so that this text does not become too long. And it is probably also better to read these in his book and to understand them at your leisure. The main aim here is to convey these new – or actually very old and only new to us – thoughts. A renewed view of the Gospels that can be seen when the traditional explanations, classifications and interpretations are left out and the text of the Gospels is dealt with directly. In the next part, we will see that even the old creeds can be read and understood again in accordance with and on the basis of the Gospels.

By Christian / N. T. Wright

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In the ninth chapter of N.T. Wright’s book How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels, we now come to the central message of his book:

All four gospels are telling the story of how God became king in and through this story of Jesus of Nazareth.

The story Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John tell is the story of how God became king—in and through Jesus both in his public career and in his death.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 9

Since this is already episode 9 of this series, but only about half of the 300 pages have been covered, I will now be more brief. The English book is also available in German translation as a paperback.

Kingdom, Cross and Israel

earlier, offering the story of Jesus as the completion of the story of Israel, in what sense is it now complete? How has it been fulfilled? The answer seems to lie, for the gospel writers themselves, in the dark strand that emerges at various stages of the tradition of ancient Israel. As the psalms and prophets sharpen up their vision of how God’s kingdom is to come to the world, there emerges a strange and initially perplexing theme: Israel itself will have to enter that darkness.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 9

As evidence for this, N.T. Wright cites Psalm 22. And that both Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34 quote the opening words of Psalm 22 as Jesus‘ words on the cross. This suffering is also found in Isaiah 52 and 53, which is followed by true triumph in 54 and 55.

When we see the story of Jesus as the climax of the story of Israel, we should not be surprised to discover that the suffering of Israel and of Israel’s supreme representative is to be understood as part of the longer and larger purposes of Israel’s God, in other words, the establishment of his world-wide healing sovereignty. Conversely, we should not be surprised to discover that when this God finally claims the nations as his own possession, rescuing them from their evil ways, the means by which he does it is through the suffering of his people – or, as in the story the gospels themselves are telling, the suffering of his people’s official, divinely appointed representative.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 9

Kingdom, Cross and God

N.T. Wright proves that God is the savior of his people with Isaiah 63 and Ezekiel 34. The reference is found especially in John 10 (but also Luke 15:3-7 for example). The way the story of Jesus is developed, it exactly reflects the return of the God of Israel. How is that to be understood?

To be sure, neither John nor any of the others makes the mistake one often encounters in popular parlance, of saying „Jesus is God“ without remainder. Jesus constantly refers to „the father“ both as distinct from himself and as bound with him in a tight bond of love and obedience. And the point to be made here for our present purposes is that in this central „incarnational“ passage we find the themes of cross and kingdom once more tightly interwoven. This reinforces the warning we gave earlier, that it is possible to state the doctrine of Jesus’s „divinity“ in such a way as to let it float loose from both kingdom and cross, but this is what the New Testament never does. The „God“ who has become human in Jesus is the God who, as he had always promised, was returning to claim his sovereignty over the whole world (note the „other sheep“ in John 10:16) and would do so by himself sharing the pain and suffering of his people, „laying down his life for the sheep.“

How can we even begin to understand this? Perhaps we should say that, with the hindsight the evangelists offer us, God called Israel to be the means of rescuing the world, so that he might himself alone rescue the world by becoming Israel in the person of its representative Messiah.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 9

For further explanations and supporting documents, I would like to refer you to the book by N.T. Wright (there are quite a few pages, in fact…).

Kingdom, Cross and Church

The activity of Jesus is presented in the Gospels as it was by the earlier prophets: Israel must turn back and live according to its true calling. His followers were convinced that this renewal had indeed begun. “Israel had not been rejected. It has not been ‘replaced’. It has been transformed.” His first disciples did not understand this:

Part of the meaning of the kingdom, in the four Gospels, is precisely the fact that it bursts upon Jesus’s first followers as something so shocking as to be incomprehensible.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 9

It took his death, resurrection, ascension and the dramatic events of Pentecost. “The story of the gospel of Jesus, seen as the beginning of the renewed people of God, includes as a central element the lack of understanding, the failure and the rebellion of this people, until it is transformed by the resurrection into a new faith and inspired by the Spirit to new obedience.” It was not about abstract theology, but a pattern for their lives. And they were well aware that this pattern would also include suffering as a central and meaningful element: lack of understanding, their own suffering and perhaps even death.

N.T. Wright expands on this idea in the book with many more details..

Kingdom and Cross in Caesar’s World

From all that we examined in Chapter 7, it is clear that all four gospels regard the story of Jesus not only as the confrontation between God’s kingdom and Caesar’s kingdom, but as the victory of the former over the latter.

Jesus, after all, has come to Jerusalem and found the Temple no longer to be the place where heaven and earth do business, but the place where mammon and violence are reigning unchecked, colluding with Caesar’s rule. Jesus himself, the evangelists are saying, is now the place where heaven and earth come together, and the event in which this happens supremely is the crucifixion itself. The cross is to be the victory of the „son of man,“ the Messiah, over the monsters; the victory of God’s kingdom over the world’s kingdoms; the victory of God himself overall the powers, human and supra human, that have usurped God’s rule over the world. Theocracy, genuine Israel-style theocracy, will occur only when the other „lords“ have been overthrown.

Without the cross, the satanic rule remains in place. That is why the cross is, for all four gospels (and, as I have argued else where, for Jesus himself) the ultimate messianic task, the last battle. The evangelists do not suppose that the cross is a defeat, with the resurrection as the surprising overtime victory. The point of the resurrection is that it is the immediate result of the fact that the victory has already been won. Sin has been dealt with. The „accuser“ has nothing more to say. The creator can now launch his new creation.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 9

This, too, is explained in more detail, of course, so I would like to refer to the book itself.

By Christian / N. T. Wright

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In the eighth chapter of N.T. Wright’s book How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels, the point is to become aware of the multi-layered, complex and rich content of the Gospels. Because in the past, exactly the opposite has happened.

Making the gospels ordinary

N.T. Wright formulates the problem as follows:

Near the heart of my purpose in this book is to suggest that not only have we misread the gospels, but that we have made them ordinary, have cut them down to size, have allowed them only to speak about the few concerns that happened to occupy our minds already, rather than setting them free to generate an entire world of meaning in all directions, a new world in which we would discover not only new life, but new vocation.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 8

This happened, for example, because the topics “kingdom” and “cross” are considered separately, although the Gospels bring both together.

The separation of the kingdom and the cross

First of all, we need to recognize that the four gospels effortlessly bring together many things into a rich unity that later traditions separated from each other. For a long time, there have been the opposing positions of “Kingdom Christians” with their social gospel and “Cross Christians” with their “save your soul for heaven” agenda.

But first-century Greeks, Romans and Jews did not think in separate categories such as politics and religion.

Likewise, modern philosophers today separate the question of the “problem of evil” from what modern theologians call “atonement”. In the Gospels, the two topics are linked. N.T. Wright has written about this in his book Evil and the Justice of God, which I might do a series on at some point.

„But the problem we face lies deeper within the mind-set of the critical scholarship of the past two hundred years.“ If Jesus was talking about God’s kingdom, it was understood in terms of the usual armed revolution, and that couldn’t have happened yet. And if it was understood as a reference to the end of the world – well, that hadn’t happened yet either. Although the words in Mark 9:1 are quite clear: “Some people standing here, won’t experience death before they see God’s kingdom come in power.”

obscure, but because the philosophy of the European Enlightenment demanded that they close their eyes to it, was that Jesus announced and inaugurated a vision of God’s kingdom that he was constantly redefining, through actions and parables, and that would be inaugurated by his own vindication. The importance of Daniel 7, of the exaltation and vindication of the “one like a son of man,” cannot be over-stressed here—and of course it is at that very point that critical scholarship has again done its best to neutralize a central element of the evidence.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 8

The writers of the New Testament, on the other hand, did their best to make this point clear. Matthew thought that Jesus had already achieved this: it: “All authority,” declares Matthew’s Jesus, “in heaven and on earth has been given to me”. (Matthew 28:18) You cannot understand Paul’s letters like Romans, 1 Corinthians and Philippians without this understanding. And in the Revelation of John, the sovereignty of Jesus is celebrated from the first to the last page. But of course, not for a second did any of these authors think that utopia had already arrived.

The early Christian writers were, of course, setting forth an eschatology that had been inaugurated, but not fully consummated; they were celebrating (Paul is quite explicit on this point in 1 Cor. 15:20–28) something that has already happened, but at the same time something that still has to happen in the future. They believed themselves to be living between Jesus’s accomplishment of the reign of God and its full implementation.

New creation itself has begun, they are saying, and will be completed. Jesus is ruling over that new creation and making it happen through the witness of his church. “The ruler of this world” has been overthrown; the powers of the world have been led behind Jesus’s triumphal procession as a beaten, bedraggled rabble. And that is how God is becoming king on earth as in heaven. That is the truth the gospels are eager to tell us, the truth the past two hundred years of European and American culture has been desperately trying to stifle.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 8

For the disciples of Jesus in the first century, this was the turning point in human history. Christianity was supposed to be an eschatology: “This is how history should turn out, despite appearances!” But since the thinkers of the Enlightenment to this day believe that their time is the turning point in human history, after which everything will be better, Christianity was reduced to a religion: “Here is a way to be spiritual.”

How did Christians react to this?

Christian reactions

One reaction over the past two hundred years has been to say that it’s not really that important, because we’re going to heaven anyway. But that is not at all what the evangelists thought; rather, it is closer to Gnosticism. You can find more about this in the series on N.T. Wright’s book “Surprised by Hope”.

Another school of thought says that the church should simply keep its house in order and be a shining example for others. And otherwise, please do not get involved in the world. However, this does not fit with Jesus‘ claim in Matthew 28 and runs the risk of ignoring the part of Christian thinking in relation to creation.

A third and fourth reaction has simply sanctioned the right or left wing of the political spectrum (especially in the USA).

Behind these different reactions, however, one can also recognize one of the modern contexts with which the Gospels are then read. But if we want to let the Gospels speak for themselves, then we have to read them in their context.

Power and empire within first-century Judaism

In the period after the exile and up to the first century, the Jews had a fairly clear idea of the relationship between God and the kingdom: although many were waiting for the predicted complete rule of God, they also believed that He was somehow sovereign over the nations even now. Since God did not want the world to plunge into utter chaos, He allows kings to rule. Even if he does put them in their place, as in the case of Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar in the Book of Daniel.

The Jews assumed, on the basis of their strong creational theology, that the creator had made the world in such a way as to be properly ordered and run by human beings. The Jewish vision of theocracy, of God being in charge, was always one of a rule mediated through his image-bearers, that is, through human beings.

society. In a genuinely creational monotheism, the world works best when ruled by wise stewards, human beings who are humble before God and hence effective in bringing fruitful order to his world.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 8

The Jews also didn’t seem to be particularly interested in how a ruler came to power, but rather in what he did afterwards. And the Jews in the first century also knew all about bad rulers – Jewish or pagan. What many wanted was a theocracy. But this was neither a theocracy like the one Calvin enforced in Geneva, nor like the one that is enforced today by no less radical Muslims. In the Psalms, in Isaiah and in many other biblical and later texts, the Messiah, the anointed king, is the central figure. And in Psalm 2, 72 and similar passages, it becomes clear that the Messiah would become the anointed king not only for God’s Jewish people.

N.T. Wright summarizes it as follows:

So, to sum up this very long but necessary introduction. Judaism always assumed that the creator God wanted the world to be ordered and ruled by his image-bearing humans. The world, heaven and earth, was created as God’s temple, and his image-bearers were the key elements in that temple. But the world was out of joint through the failure of humans in general and Israel in particular, so God the creator would have to act in judgment and justice to hold them to account. And the sign of that coming judgment was that at the heart of the world God had placed his covenant people, gathered around the Temple, which was the microcosm of creation, to celebrate his true order and to pray for it to come on earth as in heaven.

The significance of the Temple as the fulcrum of ancient Jewish theocracy, actual and eschatological, cannot be overemphasized.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 8

That is the context of the people with whom Jesus spoke, and the context of Jesus‘ disciples and the evangelists.

As we turn now, none too soon, to consider the themes of kingdom and cross, we note that for all the evangelists, as for Paul, there is no sense of the kingdom not after all having appeared. Yes, it has been redefined. Yes, there is still more to do, as long as evil continues to stalk the earth. But the early Christians all believed that with Jesus’s death and resurrection the kingdom had indeed come in power, even if it didn’t look at all like they imagined it would. The hope had been realized, even though it had been quite drastically redefined in the process. A new theocracy had indeed been inaugurated, because the Temple where God lived among his people had been radically redefined. A new empire had been launched that would trump Caesar’s empire and all those like it, not by superior force but by a completely different sort of power altogether. And the place where this vision is set out is, to the great surprise of many who at one level know these documents well, the collection of the four gospels we find in the New Testament.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 8

Von Christian / N. T. Wright

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In the seventh chapter of N.T. Wright’s book How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels, Wright addresses a topic that is usually not discussed at all, even though the Gospels tell of it:

The fourth topic is the story of Jesus told as the story of the kingdom of God clashing with the kingdom of Caesar.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 7

God and Caesar

Before we can talk about this clash between the two kingdoms, it is important to understand that the Bible, the New Testament and even the Gospels themselves clearly state something that even many Christians today no longer believe:

Caesar. The gospels are very much aware of the dark forces that ultimately owe their origin and strength to the power sometimes called “the satan,” “the accuser.” The gospel writers have plenty to say about those dark forces, that dark power. They are quite clear where the ultimate enemy lies.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 7

We will discuss this in more detail later. For now, we would like to draw your attention to the temptations of Jesus. The devil could not offer Jesus less than all the kingdoms of this world, and Jesus did not dismiss this as a lie (Matthew 4:8-10).

In this respect, these words of Jesus may have a different meaning than we thought: “Do not be afraid of those who kill only the body but cannot harm the soul. But fear the one who can deliver soul and body to ruin in hell.” (Matthew 10:28; Luke 12:4-5) But soul, body and hell would take us too far away from the topic now.

When Jews of this period spoke about their history, they always did so with an eye to how their God would liberate them from the domination of the evil and powerful pagan empires – as in the Exodus from Egypt. And when the Old Testament speaks of the God of Israel fighting for his people against other powers, it always does so with an eye to their gods (see also Isaiah 40-55).

God and the Powers in Jewish Tradition

The Old Testament wastes no time. Right after the rebellion of the people, in the fourth chapter, it draws our attention to forces at work: Cain’s reaction to being convicted for the murder of his brother is to build a city (Genesis 4:17). This is followed by the description of the rebellion of the “sons of God” (Genesis 6:2) together with the humans, which God has to end with a flood. Then, in chapter 11, the third rebellion is described in Babel, which God fights by confusing the languages.

In chapter 12, we learn that God calls Abram to do in His grace what people with their arrogant power want to achieve themselves. Before the account of the Exodus, we find in Exodus 1:11 that the ruler of the mighty Egyptian empire forces the Israelites to build something: cities. If you take a closer look at the 10 plagues and the devastating defeat of the attacking Egyptian army at sea, you will see that each one was also a blow against one of the Egyptian gods. Including the god-like Pharaoh.

The rest of Israel’s history until David and Solomon is characterized by the fact that Israel repeatedly comes under the rule of other powers until Yahweh frees them. It is only during this time that there is a safe place for the Ark of the Covenant and the Tent of Meeting in the Temple in Jerusalem, so that God can dwell in the midst of His people.

However, as we can read in Isaiah 40-55 and Daniel – both books from which the early Christians drew a lot – the ‚climax‘ of this clash between the kingdom of God and the powers that be is that God’s people go into exile. And even when Israel returns from exile, they are still under the rule of the other powers. So that couldn’t be the end of the story:

He will vindicate his people, rescuing them from their exile (Isa. 52; Dan. 9), exalting them to his right hand (Dan. 7), setting up a kingdom that cannot be shaken (Dan. 2), the true Davidic kingdom, which, built on the renewal of the covenant, will be nothing less than new creation (Isa. 54–55). In Isaiah this will be accomplished through the work of the “servant of the LORD”; in Daniel it will be accomplished through the suffering and faithfulness of God’s people. It’s the same story all the way through. And there is no doubt that this is the story the gospel writers intend, in their different ways, to retell in the basic story of Jesus himself.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 7

Other texts such as Psalm 2 and Psalm 89 also reinforced the Jews in the knowledge that they had not yet reached the end of their story. This is the context in which the Gospels occurred and were written.

God and Caesar in the Gospels

“But the gospels do contain a peaceful message, don’t they?” you might think. ‘And didn’t Jesus himself say, ’Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God‘?” (Matthew 22:21 NEÜ). However, the issue here is not the behavior of each individual, but the relationship between God and the powers. Perhaps our view is based on a few verses, while other parts of the Gospels receive little attention?

In fact, the Gospel of Luke begins by mentioning the emperor:

Now in those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus, that a census be taken of all the inhabited earth. This was the first census taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria.

Luke 2:1,2 NASB

Is Luke just mentioning this to record the historical moment? Or to explain why Joseph and Mary are in Bethlehem? Aren’t we overlooking something? “Tax rolls” – everyone knew what that meant. For us, paying taxes is so routine that we hardly think about it. For any Jewish person hearing this, it meant registration as subjects in a kingdom ruled by a foreign power. Far-fetched? Josephus reports on several uprisings due to such registrations. And at the end of Luke, we find this indictment:

The whole crowd of them got up and took Jesus to Pilate. They began to accuse him. “We found this fellow,” they said, “deceiving our nation! He was forbidding people to give tribute to Caesar, and saying that he is the Messiah—a king!”

Luke 23:2 N.T. Wright

So it is also about the question of who is the rightful king of Israel. And it is therefore not surprising that Luke has his second volume – the Acts of the Apostles – end with: “[Paul] proclaimed the kingdom of God and taught about Jesus Christ, the Lord, openly and without hindrance.” (Acts 28:31).

Matthew contains similar references, only his focus in the second chapter is on “King Herod”, Herod the Great, and his dynasty. Herod Antipas appears repeatedly during Jesus‘ public ministry and even kills his cousin John. And so at the end of Luke, we find that Herod Antipas and Pontius Pilate, as representatives of the powers of this world, even become friends through their dealings with Jesus: “Now Pilate and Herod Antipas, who had been at enmity until then, became friends that day.” (Luke 23:12)

In Mark 10:35-45 we also find a concise passage on this topic:

“You know how it is in the pagan nations,” he said. “Think how their so-called rulers act. They lord it over their subjects. The high and mighty ones boss the rest around. But that’s not how it’s going to be with you. Anyone who wants to be great among you must become your servant. Anyone who wants to be first must be everyone’s slave. Don’t you see? The son of man didn’t come to be waited on. He came to be the servant, to give his life ‘as a ransom for many.’”

Mark 10:42-45 N. T. Writght

In Mark’s account, we are reminded of the “deacon of Yahweh” from Isaiah 40-55 and we have the “son of man” from Daniel. And thus the listeners are reminded that the God of Israel will return and claim sovereignty over his people and even all nations.

There is, in other words, a clear line all the way from Genesis 11, via Isaiah 40–55 and Daniel 7, to Mark 10, and thereby in turn to Mark 14–15, where Jesus meets his captors, his judges, and his death. He not only theorizes about the difference between pagan power and the kind of power he is claiming; he enacts it. The passage just quoted is not a “political” statement (about different types of power) followed by an “atonement” statement (about how sins would be forgiven), as though the two were entirely separate things. As we shall see in the next part of the book, when we put together “kingdom” and “cross” in a way few readers of the gospels have even tried to do, Jesus establishes the new kind of power—God’s kingdom as opposed to Caesar’s, on earth as in heaven—precisely through his (scripturally interpreted) death. And, to put it the other way around, God rescues his people from their sins, through the work of the Isaianic “servant,” precisely in order to establish his rule, his own very different kind of power, in all the world.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 7

A similar train of thought can be found in the Gospel of John:

“That voice came for your sake, not mine,” replied Jesus. “Now comes the judgment of this world! Now this world’s ruler is going to be thrown out! And when I’ve been lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.” He said this in order to point to the kind of death he was going to die.

John 12:30-33 N.T. Wright

Later, he emphasizes again that the victory of the kingdom of God will be achieved, surprisingly, not by war but by his death:

And now I have told you before it happens, so that when it happens, you may believe. I will not speak much more with you, for the ruler of the world is coming, and he has nothing in regard to Me, but so that the world may know that I love the Father, I do exactly as the Father commanded Me. Get up, let’s gofrom here.

John 14:29-31 NASB

N.T. Wright is fully aware that for many, this connection is outside their usual environment:

This, no doubt, will already take many modern Western Christians way outside their normal backyard. But there is more. In chapter 16, Jesus declares that when the “helper” comes, the “spirit of truth” of whom he has been speaking, this Spirit will have an extraordinary, complex, and dangerous-sounding task to perform. The Spirit, says Jesus, “will prove the world to be in the wrong on three counts: sin, justice, and judgment” (16:8).

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 7

And this is what Jesus says according to the Gospel of John:

“In relation to sin—because they don’t believe in me. In relation to justice—because I’m going to the father, and you won’t see me anymore. In relation to judgment—because the ruler of this world is judged.”

John 16:9-11 N.T. Wright

What does that mean?

We can perhaps add our own brief further explanations. First, the world (which includes, tragically, most of Jesus’s fellow Jews at the time) doesn’t believe in Jesus. It is therefore heading off on the wrong track, missing the mark. The technical term for that is “sin.” Second, Jesus is going to be vindicated, dramatically proven to be in the right. This will be God’s great act of “justice,” putting everything right and so showing up the injustice, the not putting right or the active putting wrong, of the rest of the world. The world, in other words, is deeply and radically out of joint, with all sorts of things going wrong; God will put it all right. Third, God will pass a sentence of condemnation on the “ruler of this world” (“judgment”).

How will all this happen? Through the work of the Spirit, whom Jesus is promising to send to his disciples. In other words, it will happen through the Spirit-led work of Jesus’s followers.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 7

N.T. Wright expands on this in the book, but a book is needed for such a large amount of material.

Finally, Jesus explains that his kingdom, though for this world, is not of this world (18:36). It comes from heaven, from God. John also draws our attention to God and Caesar:

The Jews answered him, “We have a law, and by that law He ought to die, because He made Himself out to be the Son of God!“ Therefore when Pilate heard this statement, he was even more afraid;

John 19:7,8a NASB

Was Pilate even more frightened because the Mosaic Law was at stake? Hardly, because in his world, “Son of God” means nothing less than Caesar! So it is about power, in Greek exousia, which also carries the meaning of authority and authorization. Jesus‘ answer is enlightening:

So Pilate said to Him, “Are you not speaking to me? Do You not know that I have authority to release You, and I have authority to crucify You?” Jesus answered him, “You would have no authority over Me at all, if it had not been given to you from above; for this reason the one who handed Me over to you has the greater sin.” 

John 19:10,11 NASB

Pilate’s power, the rulers of the world, do they have their power and authority from God? In the Jewish context of the time, this follows from the idea that God, as creator, intended for humans to take care of the world, even if the humans called to do so prove to be selfish brutes. God does not just let things happen, but will hold everyone accountable for how they live out this calling. And this is shown in the rest of the gospel.

In a striking parallel to 1 Samuel 8:4, 20, the religious leaders want to be “like the nations.” They are tired of waiting for the “Son of Man”: “We have no king but Caesar.” (John 19:15) That Pilate had Jesus killed with a sign saying “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews” was both a slap in the face of the Pharisees and a mockery of Jesus. But, as with Caiaphas, it was also much more true than they realized. Jesus is not only King of the Jews, but at his death and resurrection he becomes King of the whole world, through an act of love (13:1).

Render unto Caesar?

And how should we act now? Perhaps we should still think of this incident with the coin (Mark 12:13-17, Luke 20:20-36; Matthew 22:15-22). The idea that Jesus is speaking here of a separation of church and state is one that did not arise until the end of the 18th century.

First of all, we have to realize that this was an extremely dangerous question in the time of Jesus. Everyone knew that people had been crucified for inciting rebellion against these taxes. In view of this, and in the face of a hostile mob, we should hardly expect a long, detailed explanation from Jesus. Nevertheless, there are some interesting details:

When I translated the New Testament, I didn’t quite have the courage to let this verse say what I suspect it says: “So, you’d better pay Caesar back in his own coin—and pay God back in his own coin!” This saying would then echo a saying that had already become famous in Jewish circles following the Maccabean revolt two centuries earlier. “Pay back the Gentiles in full,” said old Mattathias to Judas Maccabeus and his brothers, “and obey the commands of the law” (1 Macc. 2:68). And he wasn’t telling them to pay the Gentile taxes. The Greek in question uses the same root word for “pay back,” antapodote, cognate with the apodote we find in all three synoptic gospels at this point. I suspect that Mattathias’s double command may already have been proverbial. Jesus may well have been deliberately echoing it.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 7

It is also not the case that Jesus cleverly avoided the problem by saying that he was either for the rebellion or for Rome. His answer is more aimed at showing them that the answer is quite different:

human being and whose “inscription” is written across the pages of creation and the story of Israel—to receive his due. This is the message of God’s kingdom, all right, but it doesn’t play out in either of the obvious, simplistic ways, either as an “otherworldly” kingdom completely separate from that of Caesar or as a straightforward, old-fashioned violent revolution. For Matthew, Mark, and Luke the story is one of the key pointers, following Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem and prior to his arrest and death, to what is “going on” throughout: this is the story of how God truly became king, as Jesus offered back to God what was his own, in his obedient suffering and death. And within the new world that was thereby created, the question of Caesar, his power, and his coins looks completely different. There may be a time for confrontation; there may be a time for appropriate collaboration.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 7

All four aspects of the gospels together

At this point, we should briefly summarize the four aspects of the gospels that we discussed in parts 4 to 7:

• The long story of Israel, with the Exodus in terms of salvation and the journey. This long story, the evangelists say, has come to its end, has reached its goal.
• The Exodus is also the story of the God of Israel, Yahweh, the living God, who shows his people his identity in a new way and dwells with them. First in the tent of meeting or tabernacle, then in the temple. In the person of Jesus, the living God has come into their midst again as the fulfillment of the prophecies of Isaiah and Ezekiel.
• The Gospels also tell the story of the renewed people of God, which reminds us of two elements of the Exodus story: Israel’s calling as a royal priesthood and the gift of the Torah, through which the calling could become reality.
• And like the Exodus, it is about the powers of this world and God’s kingdom. The story of the Exodus is the story of “how God became king,” as Moses and the Israelites sang (Exodus 15:1-3,18). The story of Jesus is the new and ultimate Exodus.

Next, we will tie together the threads of our argument as we address the central challenge that the gospel presents, the dramatic and explosive combination of the kingdom and the cross.

Von Christian / N. T. Wright

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In the sixth chapter of N.T. Wright’s book How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels, Wright presents an explanation of the content of the Gospels that has often obscured all other views in modern biblical scholarship: the Gospels are said to be only reflections of the life of the early church, put into the mouth of a fictitious Jesus.

N.T. Wright discusses this point of view in his book, but I would like to concentrate on the Gospels here.

The gospel writers were not, then, simply telling the story of Jesus in some “neutral,” “objective,” fly-on-the-wall kind of reportage. Actually, as I and others have often pointed out, there is no such thing as “neutral” reportage. All stories are told from a point of view; without that, you have no principle of selection and are left with an unsorted ragbag of information. No, the gospel writers were telling the story of Jesus, quite deliberately, in such a way as to put down markers for the life and witness of their own communities. The thing to bear in mind, though, …, is this: just because the gospel writers were consciously telling the story of Jesus as the foundation story of the church, that doesn’t mean they weren’t telling the story of Jesus himself. Just because the sports reporter is a thoroughly biased supporter of one team rather than the other, that doesn’t mean he is allowed to get the score wrong.

So, whether at a scholarly or a popular level, the gospels have been perceived and read as the story of Jesus launching the Christian movement, teaching the early Christians (and by implication their successors), and then dying and rising to save them.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 6

Foundational documents

The four gospels were deliberately written as foundational documents for the new movement:

When they told the stories in the gospels, they told them not simply as a way of reminding one another of things that had happened, however interesting. They were reminding one another of things that had happened through which the new movement of which they were a part had come into being and through which it had gained its sense of direction. Their whole raison d’être depended on these stories.

The early Christians believed that Jesus was Israel’s Messiah, not, as some Jewish apologists today have absurdly said, “the Christian Messiah.” There was, and is, no such independent thing. The fulfillment of Israel’s story in the story of the Messiah is the foundational charter of the church.

That is why I speak of the gospels as telling the story of the launching of God’s renewed people. It is wrong to imagine that the gospels (or Jesus, for that matter) were concerned with “founding the church,” which is the way some people have said it. There already was a “people of God.”

Rather, the gospels are consciously telling the story of how God’s one-time action in Jesus the Messiah ushered in a new world order within which a new way of life was not only possible, but mandatory for Jesus’s followers.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 6

The end is the beginning

The Gospels don’t end the way many stories do. Mark rushes to the end with his “immediately” – a conclusion that unfortunately has been lost. Matthew ends by sending his disciples on their mission in the certainty that he has already been enthroned as the rightful Lord. And John ends with the invitation to follow him and the feeling of reading it all over again… this time with the thought that this is how it all began.

When we ponder this, and the many other moments in all four gospels that have the same kind of effect, we realize that the scholars’ instincts were in this way right on target: the four gospels were never meant as “historical reminiscence” for its own sake. Just because we are (in my view) right to insist that, in supporting and sustaining the life of the early church, the gospels are precisely telling the story of Jesus, we are not for that reason to swing the other way and imagine that their writers are not aware, constantly, of their task of writing foundational documents for God’s renewed people. The gospels are, and were written to be, fresh tellings of the story of Jesus designed to be the charter of the community of Jesus’s first followers and those who, through their witness, then and subsequently, have joined in and have learned to hear, see, and know Jesus in word and sacrament.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 6

Von Christian / N. T. Wright

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In the fifth chapter of N.T. Wright’s book How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels, the point is that the story of Jesus is the story of the God of Israel, who returns to his people as he has always promised.

The problem is that one particular aspect of it has been so overemphasized in the Western church in the past few centuries that we no longer hear the quieter tones of the evangelists.

We have been so concerned to let the gospels tell us that the story of Jesus is the story of God incarnate that we have been unable to listen more carefully to the evangelists telling us which God they are talking about and what exactly it is that this God is now doing.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 5

For far too long, Christians have told the story of Jesus as if it were directly linked to the story of human sin in Genesis 3, skipping over the story of Israel. As if this part was a failed attempt by God and with Jesus, Plan B began, so to speak. But that is not what the Bible says.

The Biblical Story of God

God’s covenant with Abraham and the promise to bless all families of the earth through him is a direct response to the wickedness of mankind described in Genesis 3 to 11, which culminates in the dispersion of the people of Babel.

If we consider the worldview of early antiquity, then in Genesis creation is described as if it were a kind of temple in which God lives among humans. (See the series “Being God’s image”). While there was an image of the god or goddess in the ancient temples for this purpose, this was not the case in Eden and in the temple in Jerusalem: humans were to fulfill this task as the image of God. This is the core of the story, but it is ruined by the rebellion of the creatures bearing the image of God.

This thought seems to disappear, only to resurface all the more clearly:

But the astonishing thing about the book of Exodus, doubly astonishing as it turns out, is that God himself accompanies the people on their journey and then gives instructions for the “tabernacle,” the holy tent or “tent of meeting,” where he will be present in their midst and where he will meet, more particularly, with Moses himself.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 5

But very soon the Israelites also rebel. This does not thwart God’s purpose, but a pattern becomes apparent:

This pattern—God intending to live among his people, being unable to because of their rebellion, but coming back in grace to do so at last—is, in a measure, the story of the whole Old Testament.

Magnify that exodus story, project it onto the screen of hundreds of years of history, and you have the larger story. Solomon builds the Temple, succeeding generations either corrupt it or try to reform it, but eventually, faced with overwhelming rebellion and idolatry, God abandons the Temple at last, leaving it to its fate when the Babylonians close in. (Note the irony: Babylon, “Babel,” is the place of human pride and idolatry in contrast to which God called Abraham in the first place.) The whole of what we call the Second Temple period, roughly 538 BC onward, is characterized by this sense of divine absence; God is gone, and he hasn’t come back.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 5

ABut it will not remain so, as the prophet Malachi says, for example:

“Behold, I am sending My messenger, and he will clear a way before Me. And the Lord, whom you are seeking, will suddenly come to His temple; and the messenger of the covenant, in whom you delight, behold, He is coming,” says the LORD of armies.

Malachi 3:1 NASB

And that is the story the Gospels want to tell us: how Yahweh finally came back to his people.

Looking for the right thing

And that can be found in all the gospels if you are looking for it. If, for example, you assume on the basis of tradition that you will find a high Christology in John and only a low one in the synoptic gospels, then it will be difficult to recognize.

In Mark, however, Malachi 3:1 is quoted exactly and linked with Isaiah 40:3-11. On closer inspection, we therefore find a Christology in Mark’s first pages, albeit a Jewish Christology.

Mark’s Jesus goes about doing and saying things that declare that Israel’s God is now becoming king—Israel’s dream come true. But Jesus is talking about God becoming king in order to explain the things he himself is doing. He isn’t pointing away from himself to God. He is pointing to God in order to explain his own actions.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 5

Take, for example, how Jesus acts in Mark 4:35-41 and compare it with statements from the Old Testament:

And He got up and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Hush, be still.” And the wind dieddown and it became perfectly calm.

Who stills the roaring of the seas, The roaring of their waves,

LORD God of armies, who is like You, mighty LORD? Your faithfulness also surrounds You. You rule the surging of the sea; When its waves rise, You calm them.

Then they cried out to the LORD in their trouble, And He brought them out of their distresses. He caused the storm to be still,  So that the waves [s]of the sea were hushed. Then they were glad because they were quiet,  So He guided them to their desired harbor.

Mark 4:39 NASB; Psalm 65:7;89:8,9;107:28-30 NASB

Attentive readers of Mark may well wonder at such passages: Is it possible that God will return in this way?

Finally, we find another interesting clue at the end:

At the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “ELOI, ELOI, LEMA SABAKTANEI?” which is translated, “MY GOD, MY GOD, WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?” …

And when the centurion, who was standing right in front of Him, saw that He died in this way, he said, “Truly this man was the Son of God!”

Mark 15:34, 39 NASB

The term “Son of God” naturally reminds us of God’s voice at Jesus‘ baptism in Mark 1:11. But should a Roman centurion have referred to it? Wouldn’t he rather think of Tiberius Caesar, the son of the ‚divine‘ Augustus, as the Son of God? After all, this was even written on the coins – like the ones they had shown Jesus a few days earlier (12:15-17).

For Mark and other Christians, ‚Son of God‘ could have four meanings:

1. First, in the Old Testament Israel itself is “God’s son” (Exod. 4:22; Jer. 31:9).
2. Second — and this seems to be a primary meaning in the baptism story — it is the messiah, Israel’s anointed king, who is “God’s son” (2 Sam. 7:12–14; Pss. 2:7; 89:26–27).
3. Third, as we just noted, “son of God” was a regular and primary title taken by the Roman emperors from Augustus on.
4. But fourth, looming up behind and beyond all of these was the sense we find in the very earliest Christian documents that all of these pointed to a strange new reality: that, in Jesus, Israel’s God had become present, had become human, had come to live in the midst of his people, to set up his kingdom, to take upon himself the full horror of their plight, and to bring about his long-awaited new world. The phrase “son of God” was ready at hand to express that huge, evocative, frightening possibility, without leaving behind any of its other resonances. We can see this already going on in the writings of Paul. It is highly likely that Mark expected his first readers to have the same combination of themes in mind.

As a secondary thought, I would like to mention something that N.T. Wright does not address in his book. There are all sorts of explanations as to why Jesus says in Mark 15:34, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Various scholars have rightly pointed out that Jesus here seems to be quoting Psalm 22, which begins exactly like this. What did Jesus or Mark want his readers to remember? Those who knew Psalm 22 well? Let’s look at the end:

My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?
…
For the kingdom is the LORD’S. And He rules over the nations. All the prosperous of the earth will eat and worship,  All those who go down to the dust will kneel before Him, Even he who [w]cannot keep his soul alive. A posterity will serve Him; It will be told of the Lord to the coming generation. They will come and will declare His righteousness To a people who will be born, that He has performed it.

Psalm 22:1;29-32 NASB

Well, if that doesn’t fit our topic…

Matthew and Luke: Seeing Jesus, Thinking God

After seeing how Mark approaches the subject, it is easier to discover the same thing in Matthew and Luke. After the genealogy, Matthew starts with this topic right away:

The angel tells Joseph that Mary’s child is to be called “Jesus,” because “he is the one who will save his people from their sins”; the name “Jesus” is here being interpreted as meaning “YHWH saves.” Matthew’s comment fills this in from another angle: All this happened so that what the Lord said through the prophet might be fulfilled: “Look: the virgin is pregnant, and will have a son, and they shall give him the name Emmanuel”—which means, in translation, “God with us.” (Matthew 1:22–23)

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 5

The name of Jesus is interpreted here as “Yahweh saves” in accordance with the Hebrew or Aramaic name. And Matthew links this to the idea – however strange it may seem – that the God of Israel is personally present among his people in order to save them.

This is also reflected at the end of the Gospel of Matthew:

Jesus came toward them and addressed them. “All authority in heaven and on earth,” he said, “has been given to me! So you must go and make all the nations into disciples. Baptize them in the name of the father, and of the son, and of the holy spirit. Teach them to observe everything I have commanded you. And look: I am with you, every single day, to the very end of the age.” (28:18–20)

Matthew 28:18-20 N.T. Wright

“God is with us” has become ‘Jesus is with us.’ If we think of the first disciples of Jesus, who were all devout Jews, waiting for their God to be among them again, then some events take on a different perspective. Like the one where Peter almost perished: ‘They got into the boat, and the wind died down. The people in the boat worshipped him. “You really are God’s son!” they said.” (Matthew 14:32-33 N.T. Wright)

And so many of Jesus‘ parables make much more sense when he speaks of a noble man in Luke 19:11-27 who went away to attain kingship. In Luke 19:44, Jesus speaks of “you didn’t know the moment when God was visiting you.”. That sounds rather strange. The God of Israel Yahweh “visited” his people by being there. Is this a tendentious translation?

Actually, the Greek simply says ton kairon tes episkopes sou, “the day of your visitation.” But the word “visitation” here has only one possible meaning. This is the time when God was coming back, coming back at last to see how his people had been doing with their centuries-old commission. This, for Luke, is the meaning of the parable. Jesus is telling a story about Israel’s God coming back to his people to explain what was going on when he himself was arriving in Jerusalem.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 5

And so, according to Luke, Jesus kept drawing attention to this point:

“Go back to your home,” said Jesus, “and tell them what God has done for you.” And he went off around every town, declaring what Jesus had done for him.

Lukas 8:39 NEÜ

Glory Unveiled: John’s temple Christology

In Eden, the tent of meeting or tabernacle and the Jerusalem Temple were always about a place through which God dwells with people. Therefore, the destruction of the Temple in 587 BC was the greatest disaster for his people. And Yahweh had not yet returned despite the rebuilding of the second Temple.

And John, more clearly than the others, insists from the start that this promise has been made good in Jesus. The Word became flesh and kai eskenosen en hemin, “set up among us his skene,” his “tent” (it’s the word from which we get “scene”; a theatrical backdrop is a kind of “tent” in which the action takes place). In case there was any doubt, the Greek word skene is (coincidentally?) a close echo of the Hebrew shakan, which means “dwell” or “abide”; when we read of people “abiding” with Jesus or his “abiding” with them later in John, we should almost certainly catch this echo. In particular, in postbiblical Jewish writing the idea of the presence of God in the Temple was given the name Shekinah, the “tabernacling, abiding divine presence,” the personal presence of the glory of God. So, when John continues by saying, “We gazed upon his glory, glory like that of the father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (1:14), we should get the point loud and clear.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 5

As for the relationship between Jesus and Yahweh, we should not jump to any hasty conclusions, however:

All this means that we should be able to read John with more sensitivity to the nature of his “high Christology.” Obviously he thinks Jesus was and is fully divine (as well as fully human, but he doesn’t need to make that point in the same way). But this doesn’t mean he is simply saying “Jesus is God” in the way of some rationalist apologists. John’s “high Christology” remains very, very Jewish, very much rooted in Israel’s scriptures. His chosen vehicle for his matchless opening statement, the logos, draws not so much on Platonic or Stoic ideas as on the living Word of the Old Testament, as, for instance, in Isaiah 55, where the word goes out like rain or snow and accomplishes God’s work (55:10–11). This work, God’s great act of rescue, rooted in the accomplishment of the “servant of the LORD” in chapter 53 and the renewal of the covenant in 54, brings about the new creation in 55, with the thorns and thistles of Genesis 3 and Isaiah 5 replaced by wonderful trees and shrubs (55:12–13). It is (in other words) the creator God, and it is Israel’s God, who has become human in and as Jesus of Nazareth.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 5

In summary, N.T. Wright describes his proposal as follows:

The gospels offer us not so much a different kind of human, but a different kind of God: a God who, having made humans in his own image, will most naturally express himself in and as that image-bearing creature; a God who, having made Israel to share and bear the pain and horror of the world, will most naturally express himself in and as that pain-bearing, horror-facing creature. This is perhaps the most difficult thing for us to keep in mind, though the gospels are inviting us to do so on every page.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 5

Von Christian / N. T. Wright

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To hear the gospel of the gospels, the actual story of the gospels, we need to talk about four strands or levels of the gospels, which have either been pushed into the foreground or almost invisibly into the background. Because of this distortion, we find it difficult to recognize the story itself.

In the fourth chapter of N.T. Wright’s book How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels, the story of Israel is the focus. So it is not a historical outline of events, but the story, the deeper content that is to be communicated to us.

The Gospels as biographies

The times when scholars could proclaim that the gospels are not biographies of Jesus are long gone. They are not biographies like those written today, but resemble ancient Greek or Roman biographies. And the four gospels are different because they are not just biographies of the person of Jesus, but want to convey a much larger story. And they do that from different angles and with different focal points.

The four gospels present themselves as the climax of the story of Israel. All four evangelists, I suggest, deliberately frame their material in such a way as to make this clear.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, Chapter 4

Unfortunately, generations of Christian readers have virtually ignored this context and connection. We too will only be able to understand this point if we explicitly realize how the story of Israel was told at the time.

The strange story of Israel

N.T. Wright summarizes it as follows:

The story of Israel too is a subject for an entire book. But we can sum it up like this. Israel’s ancient scriptures are framed with a narrative, an unfinished narrative of a certain shape and type. Whether you read the Old Testament as set out in most English Bibles from Genesis to Malachi or whether you read it in the Hebrew canon from Genesis to Chronicles with the prophets in the middle, you are still left with a sense that this story is supposed to be going somewhere, but that it hasn’t gotten there yet. It is an unfinished narrative, an unfinished agenda. Things are supposed to happen that haven’t happened yet.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, Chapter 4

Just as Genesis 1-3 tells the story of human plight using the pattern of glorious beginnings, rich callings and then terrible failure and exile, so between Genesis 12 and Chronicles or Malachi we find the same story in relation to Israel. But it is precisely this story of Israel that is ignored by most modern readers of the Bible today.

And the creeds have a significant part in this, because they do not mention Israel at all. On the contrary, they give the impression that a new beginning was made with Jesus.

But the evangelists saw it quite differently.

Matthew: The story reaches its goal

The Gospel of Matthew, which has always been at the beginning of the canon, begins with what? The family tree of Jesus from Abraham. It thus covers the period from before Israel, from its patriarch Abraham, to after the exile in the time of Jesus. Now it is important to know that in Jesus‘ day, most Jews, even half a millennium after the return from the Babylonian exile, were of the opinion that the exile had not yet really ended (see Nehemiah 9:36). The great prophecies of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel had yet to be fulfilled.

In Daniel 9, the prophet asks how much longer it will take before Jeremiah’s prophecy of 70 years will be fulfilled. And the answer is: not 70 years, but 70 weeks of seven years each. But this formulation also reminded of the sabbath and jubilee years, the release of all slaves and the restitution of inherited property. 70 times 7 is indeed a long time, but it indicates a great liberation.

And Matthew makes it clear beyond cavil, to anyone thinking Jewishly in that period, that the moment had come with Jesus. Instead of years, he does it with generations, the generations of Israel’s entire history from Abraham to the present. All the generations to that point were fourteen times three, that is, six sevens—with Jesus we get the seventh seven. He is the jubilee in person. He is the one who will rescue Israel from its long-continued nightmare. “He,” says the angel to Joseph, “is the one who will save his people from their sins” (1:21). That, to any first-century Jew, didn’t just mean that individuals could turn to him and find personal forgiveness, though that would obviously be true as well. Read Isaiah 40 and Lamentations 4 again and see.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, Chapter 4

In this way, we have recognized an idea that Matthew also highlights: the life of Jesus recapitulates key events in the history of Israel! Jesus preaches on a mountain and, at that moment, he is Moses. When he answers his critics about the Sabbath, he is David. He chooses 12 as his apostles, which is reminiscent of Jacob and the 12 patriarchs. He heals the sick and raises the dead like Elijah and Elisha. In the transformation, he even meets Elijah and Moses.

But far more important than flashbacks, than the picking up of detached themes and hints from long ago, is the towering sense of a single story now at last reaching its conclusion.

The gospel writers saw the events concerning Jesus, particularly his kingdom-inaugurating life, death, and resurrection, not just as isolated events to which remote prophets might have distantly pointed. They saw those events as bringing the long story of Israel to its proper goal, even though that long story had apparently become lost, stuck, and all but forgotten.

In Israel’s scriptures, the reason Israel’s story matters is that the creator of the world has chosen and called Israel to be the people through whom he will redeem the world.

What God does for Israel is what God is doing in relation to the whole world. That is what it meant to be Israel, to be the people who, for better and worse, carried the destiny of the world on their shoulders. Grasp that, and you have a pathway into the heart of the New Testament.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, Chapter 4

Mark: Jesus and the breaking in of God’s new world

In the Gospel of Mark, this is made clear right from the first verses:

Isaiah the prophet put it like this (“Look! I am sending my messenger ahead of me; he will clear the way for you!”): “A shout goes up in the desert: Make way for the Lord! Clear a straight path for him!” (1:2–3)

This is how it happened. Around that time, Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee, and was baptized by John in the river Jordan. That very moment, as he was getting out of the water, he saw the heavens open, and the spirit coming down like a dove onto him. Then there came a voice, out of the heavens: “You are my son! You are the one I love! You make me very glad.” (1:9–11)

Mark 1:1-3;9-11

So it starts right away with a reference to an old prophecy of Isaiah. Do we have to look only in the Old Testament to find the story of Jesus?

Here, to be sure, is a paradox we meet throughout the New Testament: God acts completely unexpectedly—as he always said he would. Just because the new events are able to be seen as the fulfillment of ancient prophecy (and Mark, like the other evangelists, is clear that this is the only right way to see them), that doesn’t mean that one can see a smooth, easy line from the ancient texts to the modern fulfillment. On the contrary, what is being fulfilled is precisely the promise of drastic, unexpected, and perhaps even unwelcome judgment and mercy.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, Chapter 4

But now in the gospel of Mark, not just a few fulfillments are constructed. Already in verse 15 of the first chapter, Jesus himself is quoted: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand.” (Mark 1:15 Zurich). Mark builds the dramatic events up to 8:29, when Peter states that Jesus is the Messiah. And the transfiguration of Jesus follows in the very next chapter. Jesus talks about his death in 10:45 (alluding to Daniel 7 and Isaiah 53). “Jesus is fulfilling the story of Israel, even though this requires readers to understand Israel’s story in a new way.”

Luke: The scriptures must be fulfilled

That the scriptures must be fulfilled in this way is also exactly the point that Luke makes in key passages. This begins in the first chapter with the words of Mary (1:46-55) and Zechariah (1:68-79). And it continues until it is emphasized by Jesus himself in 22:37, for example: “For I tell you, this scripture must still be fulfilled in me: ‘He was numbered with the transgressors.’ And that is now being fulfilled.” (NEÜ). But even Jesus‘ disciples could not initially see the fulfillment of Israel’s story in Jesus‘ death: “We had hoped that he would be the one to redeem Israel.” (24:21) say the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. In this regard, Luke leaves no doubt as to the idea he wants to convey:

And then He said to them, “You foolish men and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and to come into His glory?” Then beginning with Moses and with all the Prophets, He explained to them the things written about Himself in all the Scriptures.

Luke 24:25-27 NASB

So it was not a matter of course for them to understand this surprising fulfillment of the scriptures. Jesus had to “explain the scriptures” to them (24:27) and “then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures” (24:45).

across—that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is in fact the climax of the story of Israel, even though nobody was expecting such a thing and many didn’t like the look of it when it was presented to them—is something that, like the risen Jesus himself, is visible to the eye of faith. The story makes sense as a whole or not at all.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, Chapter 4

John: Creation and New Creation

The gospel of John is no exception: the events related to Jesus are the fulfillment of the story of Israel – even if the latter neither expected nor desired such a ‚fulfillment‘. The gospel begins with references to Genesis. “In the beginning was…” (1:1) is an echo of the story of creation. In verse 14, we may not immediately notice something in German: “And the word, the Logos, became flesh and dwelt among us, …”. The word for “dwelt” actually means: He pitched his tent, his tabernacle or tabernacle. And with that, he refers to the presence of God among the Israelites from Exodus.

And even in the Gospel of John, the first chapter does not end without the emphatic indication of what it is about:

“We’ve found him!” said Philip. “The one Moses wrote about in the law! And the prophets, too! We’ve found him! It’s Jesus, Joseph’s son, from Nazareth!” “Really?” replied Nathanael. “Are you telling me that something good can come out of Nazareth?”

John 1:45,46

And so this theme keeps coming up (5:39-40; 7:31-52; 10:22-30; 5:46; 8:30-59). Caiaphas wants to save the nation of Israel and the Temple by having Jesus killed. But John gives this a different meaning, the fulfillment of the story of Israel:

Now he did not say this on his own, but as he was high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation; and not for the nation only, but in order that He might also gather together into one the children of God who are scattered abroad.

John 11:51,52 NASB

The paradox of the two stories remains all the way through, and John claims that Jesus was in line with the ancient prophecies, which always included prophecies about Israel’s failure to see, hear, and understand (12:37-41).

The result — the climax of the gospel, and for John the climax of Israel’s entire story — is the paradoxical “enthronement” of Jesus on the cross, the final moment of the fulfillment of the great scriptural story (19:19, 24, 28). Jesus’s final word, tetelestai, “It’s all done!” says it clearly. The story has been completed—the story of creation, the story of God’s covenant with Israel. Now new creation can begin, as it does immediately afterwards with Jesus’s resurrection. Now the new covenant can be launched, as the disciples are sent out into the world equipped with Jesus’s own Spirit (20:19–23). This is how Israel’s story has reached its goal and can now bear fruit in all the world.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, Chapter 4

Von Christian / N. T. Wright

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In this part, we will look at answers to the question of why the ‚middle part‘ of the Gospels exists at all. By taking a closer look at them, we will see why they are not completely wrong, but still inadequate. After we have recognized various ideas that may unconsciously block our view, we will then be able to hear the gospels with the ears of the first-century disciples. I am using the book by N.T. Wright: How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels (Deutsche Übersetzung: Reich Gottes, Kreuz, Kirche. Die vergessene Story der Evangelien)

N.T. Wright has repeatedly asked this question, what the ‚middle part‘ of the Gospels is good for, to scholars, pastors and lay people on various occasions. The answers were revealing and can be roughly grouped as follows.

Going to heaven

The first answer is often: Jesus came to explain to people how to get to heaven.

There is no doubt that the New Testament assumes that God has prepared a wonderful future for us after physical death. But ultimately, it is about the resurrection of a new world. I have discussed this at length in another series “Surprised by Hope”, which is about book the by N.T. Wright with the same title „Surprised by Hope“.

But that is demonstrably not what the four Gospels are about.

How did it come about that this notion became so widespread in the Western Church? How did translations of the Gospels contribute to this?

Since the canon of the New Testament was established, the Gospel of Matthew has been placed at the beginning. And the expression “Kingdom of Heaven” is frequently used there, whereas the other Gospels speak of “God’s Kingdom”. Some German translations reinforce this even further by translating it something like this:

Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the heavenly kingdom, but the one who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter.

Matthew 7:21 NASB

In German, the problem is even greater than in English due to the use of the term “Himmelreich” (heavenly kingdom), where “kingdom of heaven” has been used for centuries in the King James Version. Anyone who reads that one goes to the “Himmelreich” (heavenly kingdom) and immediately afterwards reads about the “Father in heaven” will think that he or she will also go to heaven.

But that was not what Matthew and Jesus meant. In the center of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7, Jesus speaks in the so-called ‚Lord’s Prayer‘ that “Your kingdom come. Your will be done, On earth as it is in heaven,” (Matthew 6:10 NASB).

The “kingdom of heaven” is not about people going to heaven. It is about the rule of heaven coming to earth.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, Chapter 3

It is the “kingdom of heaven” because its authority comes from God in heaven.

Even though this conception of the kingdom had spread early in the history of the church – see, for example, the Te Deum Laudamus from the fourth century – it was still completely different from the first-century understanding.

A second formulation that is usually misunderstood is that of “eternal life”. Those who read about “eternal life” and “eternity” usually think of a life of the soul in heaven. But that is Plato and not the Gospels of the first century! So we read:

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life.

John 3:16 NASB

In Greek, the words here are αἰώνιον ζωὴν aiōnion zōēn. But what did the term zoe aionios mean to both the writers, Matthew and Paul, and their first-century audiences? The use of aion referred to the Jewish concept of an age: ha-olam hazeh, the present age, and ha-olam ha-ba, the coming age. In this coming age, God would bring justice and peace and heal the world. Paul uses the same word in Galatians 1:4, but the translations like the King James Version often obscure this:

Who gave himself for our sins, that he might deliver us from this present evil world, according to the will of God and our Father:

Galatians 1:4 KJV

Other translations renders this better, for example the New King James Version:

who gave Himself for our sins, that He might deliver us from this present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father,

Galatians 1:4 NKJV

In other words, Jesus has inaugurated, ushered in, the “age to come.” But there is no sense that this “age to come” is “eternal” in the sense of being outside space, time, and matter. Far from it. The ancient Jews were creational monotheists. For them, God’s great future purpose was not to rescue people out of the world, but to rescue the world itself, people included, from its present state of corruption and decay.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, Chapter 3

In fact, this understanding of aion is confirmed by many scholars. For those who would like to know more about this, I gladly refer you to Jascha Schmitz’s video series “Eternity in the Bible. What is meant?” (In German)

Jesus’s ethical teachings

A second popular approach to the material in the middle of the gospels is to point out Jesus‘ teachings, especially what we call ethics. And to some extent that is true.

„Jesus’s summons to Israel to be Israel indeed, now that he was there, turns directly into a challenge and invitation to a whole new way of being human. This way is characterized especially by forgiveness, God’s forgiveness of people and our forgiveness of one another. All of that formed a quite new agenda for most of Jesus’s hearers. It had to be laid out, explained, repeated, illustrated, and generally taught. So, yes, Jesus was undoubtedly a “teacher.” Indeed, people sometimes addressed him as such, and Jesus never told them they were wrong to do so.“

But to speak of Jesus only as a “teacher” falls far short of what he did. By ‚teacher‘ we usually mean someone who imparts existing knowledge to others, like a piano teacher or school teacher. But Jesus did much more:

Jesus was announcing that a whole new world was being born and he was “teaching” people how to live within that whole new world. To that extent, we should both embrace the idea of him as a “teacher” and radically qualify or modify it. In fact, the modification should take place before the embrace. You only understand the point of the “teaching” when you understand the larger picture of what Jesus was doing.

Without that larger picture, the word “teacher” or “teaching” can result in a severely diminished sense of what the gospels are trying to say about Jesus. The notion of “teaching” can easily collapse into the standard popular picture of Jesus as one of the world’s great “religious teachers” alongside Buddha, Muhammad, and so on. In other words, there are some things called “religious truths,” which some great souls have discovered and taught, and Jesus was simply one of those great souls, one of those great teachers.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, Chapter 3

Jesus, the moral exemplar

A third popular model for explaining why the Gospels write so much about Jesus‘ public career is that they want to give us an example of how to live.

But is it really particularly encouraging to take Jesus, who is portrayed as perfect, as a role model? Isn’t it rather frustrating because we can never achieve that? “Have you ever tried to copy Jesus, not just in his amazing generosity and kindness, but in his sharp, brightly colored little stories? Very few people throughout history have been able to tell short stories like that, so brief yet so complete. … Again and again in the gospels we find that Jesus is not, in fact, holding himself up as an example to follow or copy. … His task is unique.”

So that is not a satisfactory approach for explaining the structure of the Gospels either.

Jesus the perfect sacrifice 

„A fourth inadequate answer has tried to tie the first and the third together. The aim is still to get us to heaven, but Jesus is not just the moral exemplar—his perfect life means that he can be the perfect sacrifice.“

„So, yes, Jesus’s own moral perfection does play a role in relation to his death. But, beyond these passages, the gospels show no interest whatever in making the link that much traditional teaching has employed. If that was what they were trying to say, you’d think they would have made it a bit clearer.“

Stories we can identify with

N.T. Wright weist noch auf einen fünften Punkt hin: „“The gospels are written,” people have said to me, “so we can identify with the characters in the story and find our own way by seeing what happened to them.” Well, there is once again quite a lot in that. Getting inside the stories in the gospels is indeed an excellent way of coming to understand Jesus better and allowing the power of his life to transform our own..“

Stories like these are a part of the Gospels and valuable, but is that the whole reason why the Gospels were written? And what about the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus? Why then the interweaving with the Old Testament?

Proving Jesus’s divinity

„The sixth standard line has been to say that the gospels were written to demonstrate the divinity of Jesus. This, I suspect, is what many Christians regard as the gospels’ principal purpose. Some would add too the equal purpose of demonstrating his humanity.“

But was that the question that was important for the disciples in the first century?

When did people start to talk about Jesus’s “humanity” and “divinity” in this way? Not, I think, in the first century. Don’t misunderstand me. As we shall see, if the question were raised, the New Testament writers would be quite clear that Jesus was indeed fully human and—somehow, strangely, but definitely—truly divine. But that does not seem to be their main point. Even John, who brings his stage-setting prologue to its climax by speaking of the Word becoming flesh, does not make this the main strand in the story he is telling. It is only later, when the church moves out into the wider world of Greek philosophy, that the question gets raised like that, in the abstract. In the middle of the fifth century Chalcedonian Christology declared, in ringing, round, and frankly very paradoxical tones, that Jesus was indeed fully divine and fully human. These abstract categories were in the center of the discussion then, and no mistake. But if you compare Chalcedon with the four gospels, you’ll find that they are very different sorts of documents and that the gospels, though they do indeed have Jesus doing remarkable things, on the one hand, and behaving like an ordinary human being, on the other, do not appear to be written in order to prove that point.

The point, to repeat, is not whether Jesus is God, but what God is doing in and through Jesus. What is this embodied God up to?

N.T. Wright How God Became King, Chapter 3

N.T. Wright then goes into some of the texts in more detail, but this would take us too far afield here. We will come back to this when we combine the various explanations into a surprising overall picture.

Displacement activities

The material of the gospels is so extensive that one can deal with each of these topics intensively. But in doing so, the view of the underlying central theme seems to have been lost.

The result has been a series of displacement activities. The church has said, in effect: (a) we know the gospels are important, because they are the inspired apostolic witness to Jesus; and (b) we know what is important in Christian theology, namely, the divinity of Jesus and his saving death or, as it may be, his moral teaching and example; so (c) we assume that that is the primary message of the gospels.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, Chapter 3

And what is the central message of the Gospels? This is what we will discuss in the next episodes:

In fact, to sum up the proposal toward which I have been working, the four gospels are trying to say that this is how God became king.

N.T. Wright How God Became King, Chapter 3