Wright suggests that the best initial model for understanding Jesus’ praxis is that of a prophet: ‘more specifically, that of a prophet bearing an urgent eschatological, and indeed apocalyptic, message for Israel’ (150). This, he believes, makes best sense in relation to Judaism generally, popular movements within Judaism, and the activity of John the Baptist. Both John the Baptist and Jesus fit the type of the ‘leadership popular prophet’ (drawing on Webb’s classification, 153) who not only announces a message from Israel’s god but also enacted through dramatic symbolic actions elements of an eschatological narrative – ‘a story in which Israel’s long night of suffering and misery would soon be over, and the new day would dawn in which Israel’s god would act, at last, as king of all the world’ (155).
In the first place, Jesus regarded himself, and was seen by others, not as the prophet (eg. the prophet spoken of in Deut.18:15) but as a prophet: ‘a prophet like the prophets of old, coming to Israel with a word from her covenant god’ (163). Wright suggests that “he was announcing a prophetic message after the manner of ‘oracular’ prophets, and that he was inaugurating a renewal movement after the manner of ‘leadership’ prophets. He was, in fact, to this extent very like John the Baptist, only more so” (163). There are, moreover, strong indications throughout the gospels that Jesus modelled his ministry on a range of Old Testament prophets, with Elijah being the most important. Wright concludes: ‘it should be clear that Jesus regarded his ministry as in continuity with, and bring to a climax, he work of the great prophets of the Old Testament, culminating in John the Baptist, whose initiative he had used as his launching-pad’ (167).
Jesus, like John, combined the roles of ‘oracular’ prophet and ‘leadership’ prophet but extended the model in three ways: i) he was itinerant, which incidentally has important implications for the development of the synoptic traditions; ii) he gave extensive teaching; and iii) he ‘engaged in a regular programme of healing’. These last two points are explored in some detail.
Jesus’ teaching
1. The authority of Jesus’ teaching lay in the content of his proclamation – an exceptional and provocative message from Israel’s covenant god:
For this reason (among others), the old picture of Jesus as the teacher of timeless truths, or even the announcer of the essentially timeless call for decision, will simply have to go. His announcement of the kingdom was a warning of imminent catastrophe, a summons to an immediate change of heart and direction of life, an invitation to a new way of being Israel. Jesus announced that the reign of Israel’s god, so long awaited, was now beginning; but, in the announcement and inauguration itself, he drastically but consistently redefined the concept of the reign of god itself. In the light of the Jewish background sketched in NTPG Part III, this cannot but have been heard as the announcement that the exile was at last drawing to a close, that Israel was about to be vindicated against her enemies, that her god was returning at last to deal with evil, to right wrongs, to bring justice to those who were thirsting for it like dying people in a desert. We are bound to say, I think, that Jesus could not have used the phrase ‘the reign of god’ if he were not in some sense or other claiming to fulfil, or at least to announce the fulfilment of, those deeply rooted Jewish aspirations. The phrase was not a novum, an invention of his own. It spoke of covenant renewed, of creation restored, of Israel liberated, of YHWH returning. It can be reduced neither to a general existential state of affairs, unrelated to Israel’s national hope, nor to a hypothetical ‘parousia’ hope (which the early church first invented, then cherished, then projected back on to Jesus, and then finally abandoned), nor to the offer of a new type of private spirituality. (172)
Jesus’ ‘moral teaching’ must be understood in relation to the proclamation about the kingdom of God, not as a universal ethic or instruction for the life of ‘the church’:
If we take seriously the public persona of Jesus as a prophet, the material we think of as ‘moral teaching’, which has been categorized as such by a church that has made Jesus into the teacher of timeless dogma and ethics, must instead be thought of as his agenda for Israel. This is what the covenant people ought to look like at this momentous point in their long story. (174)
2. The underlying mode of Jesus’ teaching was the retelling of the story of Israel. In particular he used parables to draw his hearers into ‘a new way of understanding the fulfilment of Israel’s hope’: ‘The struggle to understand a parable is the struggle for a new world to be born’; indeed ‘Jesus’ telling of these stories is one of the key ways in which the kingdom breaks in upon Israel, redefining itself as it does so’ (176).
Wright suggests that the closest parallel to the parables is ‘the world of Jewish apocalyptic and subversive literature’. Like the visions of apocalyptic writings the parables “encourage those who ‘have ears to hear’ to believe that they really are the true Israel of the covenant god, and they that will soon be vindicated as such – while the rest of the world, including particularly the now apostate or impenitent Israel, is judged” (178).
3. Oracles of judgment form another major component of Jesus’ teaching:
In the sad, noble, and utterly Jewish tradition of Elijah, Jeremiah and John the Baptist, Jesus announced the coming judgment of Israel’s covenant god on his people, a judgment consisting of a great national, social and cultural disaster, ultimately comprehensible only in theological terms. At the heart of the disaster would be the ruin of the Temple. (185)
Jesus’ miracles
Wright is careful to distance himself both from the older liberal repudiation of the miraculous and from the pre-critical appeal to the miracles as evidence for Jesus’ divinity or the truth of the Bible. In place of the rationalist and apologetic interests of the enlightenment period he posits a ‘sharper-edged question, historically’: “should we then think of the deeds of Jesus as in some sense ‘magic’?” (189) He picks up on Crossan’s argument that Jesus should be regarded as a ‘magician’ insofar as magic is ‘subversive, unofficial, unapproved, and often lower-class religion’, and accepts that the miracles possess ‘exactly the same kind of troubling ambiguity that characterized Jesus’ whole career’. But he argues that Jesus’ followers would have interpreted these works within the context of the overall proclamation about the kingdom of God.
The ‘mighty works’ are to be understood as signs of covenant renewal. The healings should be seen as ‘bestowing the gift of shalom, wholeness, to those who lacked it, bringing not only physical health but renewed membership in the people of YHWH’ (192). The multiplication of the bread in the wilderness and the stilling of the storms, which echo themes from the exodus, are also fundamentally signs of covenant renewal. There is also a cosmic dimension: Jesus’ power over the natural order is a sign that not only Israel but also the whole creation will be restored.
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