Von Christian / N. T. Wright
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
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