The Book Depository Jesus and the Victory of God by N.T. Wright
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Description: Jesus and the Victory of God : Paperback : Augsburg Fortress : 9780800626822 : 0800626826 : 07 Feb 1997 : In a responsibly provocative new portrayal of several old issues raised by the quest of the historical Jesus, the author of The Climax of the Covenant deals with such questions as: What was Jesus' message? How did Jesus see Hi mself in relation to other Jewish leaders and groups of his time? How does the work of Jesus relate to the rise of the church?. The Book Depository Jesus and the Victory of God by N.T. Wright - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk
Category: Books
Merchant: The Book Depository
Product ID: 9780800626822
MPN: 0800626826
GTIN: 9780800626822
Author: Dr. C. Jeynes
Rating: 5
Review: This wonderful book published in 1996 is from the (to my mind) foremost Biblical scholar today. It is over 600 pages long, with 32 pages of bibliography and another 35 pages of citations of ancient texts, most of which are Biblical but including 6 pages of Jewish sources (including Apocryphal, Pseudepigraphy, Philo, and rabbinical works), nearly 2 pages of Christian (and Gnostic) writings, and nearly a page of Roman and Greek writings. If you want an index on who has said what, and how, this book is a good place to start! Many scholars have written popular books on Jesus, largely, it seems, from a point of view seeking to discredit the "traditional" orthodox account. N.T.Wright (who is now Bishop of Durham) writes here from a purely historical standpoint, but he takes detailed issue with the revisionist scholars, and in particular those of the Jesus Seminar. Wright states that his aim is to take account of all the evidence (including Biblical, extra-canonical, Jewish and pagan sources), and reconstruct the events in a way that incorporates all of this evidence naturally. He takes the New Testament text effectively at face value, carefully explaining where doing this is contrary to "received wisdom" and why his reading is at least as plausible as those of the revisionists. It is a book of history, not theology. He does not get into Christology (hence "Jesus" in the title), but he is centrally interested in exploring the important historical question, why did Jesus die? The "Victory of God" in the title is referring to the various different ways in which the Jews then thought of the "Hope of Israel", and the way in which Jesus thought of it which was at once continuous with the Jewish traditions and radically different at some vitally important points. Looming over the whole discussion is the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 after the first disastrous Jewish War. Wright's thesis is that Jesus saw this coming, and interpreted it similarly to the way that Jeremiah interpreted the foreseen fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC. But Jesus is preaching the Kingdom of God realised in himself! "Something greater than the Temple is here!" he says (Matt.12:6). Whoever you are, if you want to understand our society with its Christian heritage (for better or worse!) you need to know who Jesus really was. And in this long and complicated book a historian of the very first rank leads us through a huge mass of primary and secondary sources, astonishing us at every turn. He makes perfect and disturbing sense of the Gospel accounts, which are today overlain with so much anachronistic and sentimental assumptions that it is often hard to see what was going on and what the Evangelists are getting at. This book, with the two others in the series (I have already reviewed the third, "The Resurrection of the Son of God"), is the most exciting thing I have read for many years. I can't recommend it enough.
Author: S. Meadows
Rating: 4
Review: In the introduction, Wright takes issue with those who propose that we can know very little about Jesus himself and who propose that there is a stark difference between the `Jesus of faith' and the `Jesus of history'. Instead of accepting this proposition at face value, Wright sets out to examine who the Jesus of history was and what his aims were. He proposes that many Christian theologians have, over the years, examined very closely the idea of why did Jesus die, but at the neglect of the question as to why he lived. This is a book for the patient reader, yet it is well worth it. The one drawback to the book, which is highlighted early on, is that, for the most part, the testimony of John's gospel is ignored. This may frustrate many readers as it seems as though Wright is dismissing one of the key witness statements. Part of the reason given for this was one of brevity, as the book is over 600 pages long (plus bibliography and index) on the basis of the 3 other gospel accounts. Wright's portrait of Jesus is that of a man who understood himself, and was understood by others, as being a prophet, using as his foundation passages such as Mark 8: 27-30 and its parallels. The key theme to the book is what Jesus meant by the "kingdom of god" - a topic that I've often found glossed over in many different churches, presumably on the assumption that everyone knew and agreed what the referent was, even if it somewhat hazy. After his "portrait of a prophet" Wright moves on to look at the aims and beliefs of Jesus. Much of this is tied in with what has gone before. It is here that Jesus moves onto the end of Jesus' life. In trying to understand Jesus in his historical context, Wright does seem to be missing a very big side of the story. He is keen to stress that in order to understand Christology you must first get "Jesusology" or else risk putting the cart before the horse. But I cannot feel that by focusing exclusively on Jesus' reformation of the Jewish worldview and ignoring the impact on Gentiles and at any time and place other than 1st century Israel/Palestine, that Wright is painting a portrait of the horse and cart, only without legs and wheels, so that Jesus is so firmly rooted in his setting that he is static and has nothing of relevance to say to 21st century westernised christians. Only at the very end of the book is this problem acknowledged. The proposed solution is that everything changes with the resurrection, so the reader is referred onto the next volume. In his discourse of Jesus in relation to "apocalyptic" Wright swims against the tide of 2,000 years of theology to deny that there will be a "second coming." Though hints are dropped throughout the book, the core argument is given in Wright's exegesis of Mark 13. Rather than consider this a new form of apocalyptic, Wright chooses to read this as a strictly Jewish apocalyptic in exactly the same vein as Daniel. I would wholeheartedly recommend this book to christians, jews, muslims and atheists. To understand christianity (and how it relates to Judaism) one has to study the figure of Jesus. And though this doesn't cover all aspects of Jesus' ministry and life, it certainly covers a lot and in a lot of depth. It is at once both enlightening and challenging, asking us to look at our worldview in a different light - just as Jesus did in his day.
