Von Christian / N. T. Wright
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
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