In the final chapter of his introductory section, Wright engages in a close reading of the parable of the prodigal son (which is also the parable of the “prodigal father” in Wright’s reading) and then utilizes the interpretation of that parable as the analogy for his own methodology of studying Jesus amidst the sea of other options which he has already submitted to critique. The result is the most concise statement of Wright’s own methodology and presuppositions in the book thus far.

First off, Wright explores parables, not as narrative vehicles for aphorisms or wise sayings, but rather as subversive narratives that, in effect create a new world into which the hearer is invited to live. The parable of the prodigal, he argues is a subversive way of reading Israel’s experience of exile. The prodigal son is Israel who spurns his father and ends up in a far country, in the service of Gentiles and is now returning home, and being welcomed back in the extravagant, indeed, “prodigal” love of the father, much to the anger of the other brother who stayed behind. In this subversive retelling, Israel is cast as being in exile, and in the ministry and action of Jesus himself, they are being invited home, into the love of the father. However, those that spurn this homecoming are cast as the older brother, the one who stayed behind – in effect Jesus is casting those who oppose his ministry as Samaritans. The main point of the parable in Wright’s reading is this: “history is turning its long-awaited corner; this is happening within the ministry of Jesus himself; and those who oppose it are the enemies of the true people of god.” (p. 127)

Wright’s point in all this is to show the way in which the parables of Jesus “act”. They offer a new version of Israel’s story which makes new claims about how God is going to address his people’s expectation of messianic salvation. This is how Wright begins to answer his five questions from the previous chapter. He locates Jesus, believably within the context of first century Jewish messianic expectation and hope and simultaneously shows how Jesus deeply subverted the conventional understandings of how that hope would be fulfilled by God. Jesus believed, according to Wright that in his own ministry, God was reconstituting Israel as his people, that he was brining the exile to an end, and that the promises of the kingdom of God were coming to pass in him. This, of course as Wright notes will certainly arouse hostility, and offers a plausible rationale for why Jesus was killed.

Wright concludes this chapter with some notes about how to engage the question of reconstructing the worldview of a particular time and culture. This is particularly relevant to the study of Jesus and Jewish messianic expectation, as he has already made clear. This section provides something of a re-hash of parts of Wright’s first volume and makes a case for the fact that we can in some realistic way explore the mindsets and worldviews of past cultures and communities.

In his third chapter, Wright edges closer to beginning his own constructive work on Jesus as he outlines in more detail the nature of his inquiry into the life of Jesus. Over-against the skeptical straitjacket which has been imposed on historical study by the Wredebahn scholars of the “New Quest” for the historical Jesus, Wright explores an emerging “Third Quest”, which seeks to more thoroughly place Jesus in his Jewish context and likewise understand more accurately the way in which the career of Jesus gives rise to the early church and its beliefs about Jesus. It is here that Wright locates himself.

In setting forth his constructive methodology in conversation with similarly-minded scholars, Wright unpacks five key questions that bear on how studying the historical Jesus ought to be done. He observes how the many scholars who come up with unsatisfactory portraits of Jesus often tend to be guilty of being unable to come up with well-integrated and plausible answers to these five key questions.

The first question, which for Wright is quite possibly the most important question of all, is the question of how Jesus fits into first century Judaism. The key problem that Wright identifies with all the various scholars of the “New Quest” lies in the ways in which they construe the identity of Jesus in relation to his Jewish context. Touted claims about Jesus as a cynic or Jesus the existential preacher of forgiveness have no grounding in anything that would have been intelligible to Jews of Jesus’ time. Wright insists, rightly that any portrait of Jesus must show how he is intelligible in his historical context.

Wright moves on to discuss the question of the aims of Jesus. He explores the legitimacy of seeking to discern the motives of historical figures and contends that his is central to the study of Jesus. He then moves to the other all-important question of why Jesus died. This question is an important corollary to the first question. While Jesus must be intelligible within his own context, he must not become indistinguishable from it. Something about what Jesus said and did made him stand out from his cultural location, so much so that he was executed. Any portrait of Jesus must reckon with how he subverted and deviated from the norms of his time. The fourth and fifth questions inquire as to the nature of the early church and the gospels, respectively. Wright insists that both of these sources of information about Jesus must be understood in relation to what Christ actually did in a historically plausible way. The standard “New Quest” way of seeing that relationship so arbitrarily separates Jesus’ historical career from the church and the gospels that it is clearly driven by ideology rather than history. Finally, Wright looks at how these five questions fit together and at a sixth question, namely the question of “So what?”. A proper integration of all five of the answers to these questions is necessary, Wright insists, for a proper portrait of the historical Jesus.

In his second chapter, Write begins to lay the foundation of his argument through an exhaustive examination of the history of Jesus scholarship. At the outset he notes two very broad and basic threads in such scholarship. The first takes its impetus from William Wrede’s “thoroughgoing skepticism” which believes we can know very little about Jesus, or at least that the sources we have that purport to tell us about him are more or less pure fiction. The second thread derives from Schweitzer’s “thoroughgoing eschatology” which attempted to place Jesus in his first century setting (which for Schweitzer meant a very specific interpretation of “apocalyptic eschatology”). Thus, Wright sees two basic threads, one of them based in methodological skepticism and the other in a desire to locate Jesus within the context of Jewish apocalyptic eschatology which consequently places more value on the biblical records (p. 28-29).

Wright then proceeds to examine the major players whom he judges to fall within the train of Wrede’s skepticism (the “New Quest”). The first of these is the contemporary “Jesus Seminar”. Wright explores their agenda and methodology at length, and engages is an eviscerating critique of their methodology, particularly the way in which they engage in “voting” on the “authentic” statements of Jesus and the way in which such results are calculated (p. 33-35). He also explores the latent positivism that undergirds their quite confident account of “what Jesus really said”.

Wright then moves on to critique Burton Mack, and particularly his idiosyncratic dismissal of the gospel of Mark as a source of historical knowledge about Jesus (p. 41). In this context Wright also discusses the matter of “Q” and the ways in which statements about such a document, and the more strangely imagined “Q community” are thrown around by Jesus scholars that fall within the “Wredebahn“. Wright then moves into a lengthy and well-written critique of John Dominic Crossan who Wright sees (rightly in my judgment) as the most comprehensive and thoroughgoing contributor to Jesus studies in this school of thought. Wright proceeds to systematically examine and deconstruct Crossan’s presentation of Jesus and the epistemological and theological assumptions that sustain his wildly speculative account of Jesus and the early church (in fact it is Crossan’s reconstruction of the early church that is the most obscenely groundless of all – see p. 62-63). Wright concludes his critique of the Wredebahn scholars with an examination of the various people who posit Jesus as a cynic sage. Wright gives particular attention to Marcus Borg, who he regards as the most nuanced and variegated of all the members of this stream of Jesus studies. Wright concludes that all the members of the Wredebahn have ended up with a de-Judaized Jesus and an image of the early church that is historically incredible. He proposes that another mode of “questing” for the historical Jesus is necessary.

At the moment I am going through the second two volumes of N.T. Wright’s Christian Origins and the Question of God series.  Part of what I’m doing in reading the books is giving a review and summary of each chapter of both books.  I thought I might as well contribute them here, so occasionally over the next few months I’ll continue to post chapter-by-chapter sections reviewing Wright’s corpus.  Here is my overview of the first chapter.

Wright sets out, first of all to define the aim and methodology of his study of the historical person of Jesus. He notes at the outset (p. 4) that the very attempt to write an account of the person of Jesus has become a task which more and more theologians are hesitant to do, instead opting to discuss the shape of the early Christian community. Wright argues, however that a portrait of Jesus in his historical context is possible, and may very well be a point of reunion and convergence between critical historical study and theology. He notes that there are at least two “jigsaws” which need to be fitted together in putting forth such a historical study of Jesus.

The first jigsaw is a “historical one” (p. 5). Wright notes that what we have to say about Jesus from a historical point of view will be definitively shaped by what we have to say about “the first century as a whole” (p. 5). The relationship between pre-Christian Judaism, John the Baptist, Jesus, the earliest church, Paul, and the other New Testament writings are all part of the “jigsaw” which must be carefully fitted together in such a way as for us to have an accurate or at least plausible understanding of the historical person of Jesus.

In laying out this “jigsaw”, Wright explores and critiques Schweitzer and Bultmann for their particularly different ways of failing to properly place Jesus in his Jewish context. Bultmann ended up making Jesus into nothing more than a “preacher of existentialist decision” (p. 7), something that would have been utterly unintelligible in the first century. Schweitzer, likewise, though attempting to place Jesus in his historical context more thoroughly ends up saying virtually the same types of things about Jesus in terms of his relevance for today through a problematic understanding of “Jewish apocalyptic eschatology.”

This issue – that of the relevance of Jesus for today – is the “second jigsaw” which Wright is seeking to address in his work. Wright argues that “rigorous faith” and “rigorous history” belong together and can be a source of mutual enrichment, rather than mutual antagonism (p. 8). It is with that central presupposition in mind that Wright puts forth his analogy that guides the argument of the book, that of the parable of the prodigal son. The prodigal (critical historical study) demands his inheritance, scorning his father and goes into the far country in defiance while his older brother (orthodox belief) stays home, hurt and angry. However, Wright appeals to “the older brother” that, should the prodigal come home, he should be welcomed back rather than excoriated for his foolish and antagonistic youth. It is on this basis that Wright moves forward with his exploration of the previous two “quests” for the historical Jesus, and the ways in which they have been predatory on orthodox Christian faith, and seeks to move beyond them to a portrait of Jesus that is at once more historically situated in first century Judaism, and more theologically potent on the very basis of that historicity.