Schlagwort: Christians

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