Rating: 
Summary: Thought provoking and challenging
Review: An extremely insightful account of the historical origins of Jesus. Not a light read by any means, but certainly worth the effort. The arguments are presented with great clarity and extensive cross-referencing. It will definitely challenge all readers, believers and non-believers alike, to reinterpret their understanding of who Jesus was, and even to redefine their praxis based on this. For those who call themselves followers of Jesus - this is a book that cannot be ignored!
Rating:
Summary: JVG
Review: As mentioned in my review of NTPG, reading this book is like joining a train that has by now built up a considerable head of steam, and travelled some distance. Building on the work of NTPG Wright now turns his gaze to questions specifically about Jesus. And in doing so starts to paint a picture of who is was and what he was wanting to achieve.
Again for me this was another time of personal epiphany for me as I discovered for the first time a Jesus who seemed real and understandable. Meeting a desire that had stirred in me since more ephemeral encounters with God and, I presumed, Jesus had in church.
Rating:
Summary: Easy to read and very informative
Review: At the time of writing I am a Baptist pastor undertaking sabbatical studies on the background, culture and history of Jesus. This book has been invaluable. Wright gives you all the differing views on various topics and then a personal opinion. This means that you can find out what others have said (and follow this up if you want) as well as helping you to make up your own mind. Buy this book, your life will be better!
Rating: 
Summary: Insightful, thorough, and often brilliant scholarship
Review: I am refraining from a very lengthy treatment of the topics in Wright's book largely because other reviewers have treated them in such depth. Overall, Wright sets forth an extremely well supported argument, placing Jesus's work in a context of the Jewish prophetic tradition which is completely orthodox yet far from what most would consider "conventional" devotional approaches. He well refutes "Jesus Seminar" types, though his tendency to dismiss prestigious scholars in a few sentences does seem a bit smug at times.
My difficulty was in being left with some rather puzzling questions, which is why I withheld a "fifth star." Much of Wright's thesis is built on Jesus's message having been highly grounded in an apocalyptic tradition (which Wright explains clearly and in depth), and on its being quite revolutionary (in the sense of "going against the grain," not inciting to violence.) Wright develops two points in this category - first, that Jesus's message greatly used familiar images yet presented them in a fashion which was shocking because it "re-wrote" the underlying tales of exodus and vindication and applied them to Himself. Secondly, Wright sets forth that these messages had to be carefully cloaked or they would have incited the people to riot. He particularly uses the parables' messages to illustrate both themes. Unless the first-century hearers had read Tom Wright's work, there are several, glaring loose ends in this argument. However familiar images of exodus, exile, and restoration may have been, and however well embedded in the thought of scholars at Qumran, it does not seem credible that an audience of fishermen, carpenters, and tent-makers would have immediately connected the parable of the Prodigal Son with the images of Israel and Jesus as the deliverer King which Wright develops. Indeed, the Temple scholars may have seen the subtle message, but how would this cause a general riot, particularly if the message was deliberately obscure? Many sections of the book are true "eye openers," particularly those dealing with the prophetic and apocalyptic aspects of Jesus's ministry. It is generally a brilliant work, well-suited for personal reading but also for use as a university or adult education text.
Rating:
Summary: Insights into Jesus
Review: I shouldn't give a 10 for a book I haven't finished yet, but it probably deserves it. Thorough, clear, densely packed and above all insightful. I don't know whether I'll agree with all of Wright's conclusions yet, but his background material and understanding of the text are very illuminating. More reasoned than many who push their pet beliefs and theories without really justifying them
Rating:
Summary: Jesus and The Victory of N.T. Wright
Review: In this work N.T. Wright has successfully waged a minnie revolution in the search for the Historical Jesus. Reviewing extensively the history of this search, and decapitating modern liberal approaches to Jesus, Wright has reset the match. He clearly and lucidly sets out a new approach to the question of the historical Jesus, and the methodological presuppositions that determine the course of this study. Although taking the "Return from Exile theme" a bit far and despite some questions regarding his interpretation of Jesus' parables, Wright, gives, overall a strong picture of Jesus that is historically viable and responsible. This work is destined to hold a definitive place in this area of study and is a must read for the scholar and anyone interested in this topic.
Rating:
Summary: Good British Common Sense!!
Review: Is it coincidence that it falls to a British scholar, Tom Wright, to be, arguably, the major stumbling block in the way of an ever-active Jesus Seminar with its witty, aphorism-producing Jesus? British scholarship has always been more conservative than that produced in the States and this is shown here in Wright's argument for a Jesus who sees himself as a representative both of God and of Israel, one who is seen as releasing Israel from exile and the power of her enemies (spiritual and temporal) and "reconstructing Israel around himself". Wright's thesis, for all his conservatism, is both bold and distinctive. He holds to an "eschatological" Jesus, one who has a future aspect to his theology and also one who, in Crossan-like ways, has compassion for the poor and the outcast of Palestinian society in his acts of healing and eating. Wright though, in distinction from Crossan and the Jesus Seminar, is, it seems, looking to give an historical account of the historical Jesus which can dovetail nicely with a more traditional reading of the Synoptic Gospels and the New Testament more generally. In this book you will not find a plethora of references to either the Gospel of Thomas or to the Q Gospel. Instead, you will find historical argument, replete with numerous biblical and extra-biblical Jewish quotations and texts, which aims to build up a picture of a Jewish prophet and more than a prophet. This does not, in my opinion, spill over into worship or sycophancy but the argument is carefully pitched so as not to upturn too many applecarts. One might almost call it "historical evangelism" but I hope that by using that term readers wil not think that this book is either crassly evangelistic or proselytizing; it is neither. But Jesus is clearly here a hero of sorts and someone who, for the writer, answers questions of deep and meaningful significance which can only be understood by present readers within the matrix of Christianity (though Wright goes out of his way to show Jesus off as a Jew in every sense of the word). I really liked this book and valued its argument. I think Wright procedes along the correct line of interpretation to view Jesus as eschatological(in a future sense, though not simplistically so) and I think he argues correctly for a Jesus who saw himself connected both to the Jewish God and to Israel. I also think that Jesus fits into the paradigm of "leadership prophet" and I think that he had a distintive "prophetic consciousness". So I think that on a number of things Wright is right. But the reason I would recommend this book is because it offers a coherent and cogent opposition to a nascent belief in the Jesus of the Jesus Seminar. That Jesus has many aspects which I would disagree with, and disagree with on historical grounds. This book critiques and causes damage to the arguments of the Jesus Seminar ON HISTORICAL GROUNDS and if that is where the battle takes place then Wright's book should be welcomed and read by all who have an interest.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting and useful but not entirely self-consistent
Review: Let me state first that in my opinion N.T. Wright's book, _Jesus and the Victory of God_ (JVG)--along with its predecessor _New Testament and the People of God_ (NTPG)--are worth getting, and I found them very useful. They're useful enough, and well-written enough, that I wish certain methodological problems did not exist in them. It is because I _do_ want to recommend them that I want to counterbalance my recommendation by alerting potential readers beforehand to be on the watch for certain problems I detected (primarily in JVG, which my caveat will focus on). This paragraph from Mr. Wright's next-to-last chapter (pp 652-653) sums up what I consider to be several of his persistent mistakes, in one fell swoop: "Speaking of Jesus' 'vocation' brings us to quite a different place from some traditional statements of gospel christology. 'Awareness of vocation' is by no means the same thing as Jesus having the sort of 'supernatural' awareness of himself, of Israel's god, and of the relation between the two of them, such as is often envisaged by those who, concerned to maintain a 'high' christology, place it within an eighteenth-century context of implicit Deism where one can maintain Jesus' 'divinity' only by holding some form of doceticism. Jesus did not, in other words, 'know that he was God' in the same way that one knows one is male or female, hungry or thirsty, or that one ate an orange an hour ago. His 'knowledge' was of a more risky, but perhaps more significant sort: like knowing one is loved. One cannot 'prove' it except by living it. Jesus' prophetic vocation thus included within it the vocation to enact, symbolically, the return of YHWH to Zion. His messianic vocation included within it the vocation to attempt certain tasks which, according to scripture, YHWH had reserved for himself. He would take upon himself the role of messianic shepherd, knowing that YHWH had claimed this role as his own. He would perform the saving task which YHWH had said he alone could achieve. He would do what no messenger, no angel, but only the 'arm of YHWH', the presence of Israel's god, could accomplish. As part of his human vocation, grasped in faith, sustained in prayer, tested in confrontation, agonized over in further prayer and doubt, and implemented in action, he believed he had to do and be, for Israel and the world, that which according to scripture only YHWH himself could do and be. He was Israel's Messiah; but there would, in the end, be 'no king but God'." (Note: in the immediately following paragraph, Mr. Wright suggests that we "forget the pseudo-orthodox attempts to make Jesus of Nazareth conscious of being the second person of the Trinity; forget the arid reductionism that is the mirror-image of that unthinking would-be orthodoxy.") Let me hit each point here in turn: a.) I most strongly disagree that any attempt to posit Jesus as conscious of being the second person of the Trinity must be an "unthinking" anything. It may instead be a result of having sifted philosophical impossibilities, possibilities and certainties before going to the texts; but that's what we're all going to do anyway, Mr. Wright included. b.) I deny that a conscious understanding of deity on Jesus' part requires a nineteenth (or even second)-century conception of docetic Deism--as I think several of the second-century church fathers would agree (their 'traditional' creeds having been instituted partly to fight that)! Mr. Wright rightly rejects the metaphysical mistakes of the Enlightenment revisionist scholars; yet he seems to conclude quite strangely that their mistakes reflected the 'traditional' Christian position! Far from it. It would be like rejecting Manichaeism as metaphysically mistaken, and then misidentifying it as traditional Christian doctrine, to be also rejected. c.) Jesus, we are told by Mr. Wright, "did not, in other words, 'know that he was God' in the same way that one knows one is male or female, hungry or thirsty, or that one ate an orange an hour ago. His 'knowledge' was of a more risky, but perhaps more significant sort: like knowing one is loved." Jesus' knowledge of what? That he was God? Mr. Wright never quite comes out with that, and I suspect this is because it inevitably leads to the question: If Jesus _was_ God, then why for love of Himself would He persistantly hide that knowledge from Himself? I do not see any advantage at all to God the Father obscuring _always_ from the Incarnate Son the inherent self-knowledge of His state. d.) Mr. Wright insists that Jesus was a good, first-century Palestinian Jew, deeply monotheistic, with only one relatively minor difference bridging (with proper double similarity/dissimilarity) mainstream Judaism and early Christianity: namely that Jesus believed that he himself would be the means by which God would bring about the new covenant, redeem and free His people, etc. What, _according to Mr. Wright himself_, does this entail? Some rather startling claims: "...the vocation to attempt certain tasks which, **according to scripture, YHWH had reserved for himself.** He would take upon himself the role of messianic shepherd, **knowing that YHWH had claimed this role as his own.** He would perform the saving task **which YHWH had said he alone could achieve.** He would do what **no messenger, no angel, but only the 'arm of YHWH', the presence of Israel's god, could accomplish.** [...] [H]e believed he had to do and be, for Israel and the world, that **which according to scripture only YHWH himself could do and be.**" [asterisks mine] Notice the places I've emphasized; and let me state that these positions from Mr. Wright are not unique to this paragraph or that chapter, but slowly increase throughout JVG, particularly in its last quarter. Now, Mr. Wright in this very same paragraph (much more the rest of the book and its predecessor) wants us, as his readers, to accept that the person who seriously thought this, could think these things _WHILE BEING A LOYALLY MONOTHEISTIC JEW_ and yet not _really_ consider himself to be God!--not the way he would consider himself to be male, or hungry, or having eaten an orange an hour ago. To me, this is a massive disparity. I do not perceive that _I_ am God Incarnate. If I were nevertheless to arrogate to myself those responsibilities and authorities, would I be _at the same time_ a loyal monotheistic servant of God, of the sort found in 1st Century Palestine? Although I've found Mr. Wright's books to be very helpful, I think his somewhat non-traditional conclusions rest on shaky grounds: they require starting with the historical questions first and building the theology afterwards, despite the fact that (as I think Mr. Wright himself pointed out) the interpretation of purported history depends on what we accept philosophically _first_. They require the suppression of John's Gospel (at the very least), for no immediately valid reason except the one Mr. Wright hints at near the beginning of JVG (i.e., considering it along with the synoptics would blow his thesis). They also require that we remember that God and Jesus both are represented as setting up multiple levels of meaning with the same proclamations, and then that we conveniently forget this when it comes time to figure out what certain texts 'mean' and what they don't.
Rating: 
Summary: Let's Get Something Straight
Review: N. T. Wright may be a brilliant NT scholar, he may even be a devout Christian, but he definitely is NOT an ORTHODOX PROTESTANT scholar. Wright's view of soteriology is skewed and does not conform to the historic Protestant understanding of justification. Wright and those who follow his views may protest otherwise but the truth is that Wright's soteriology is wrong and him trying to use Protestant labels is misleading (he believes that justification is like having some covenant member badge; while the Reformers believed that justification is a forensic declaration of God of the believer). Wright's view of Law and Gospel is swallowed up by the New Perspective started by higher-critics, modernists, and liberals like E. P. Sanders, Heikki Raisanen, and James D. G. Dunn. It is sad that someone who can contribute so much to Christianity has to use misleading labels and think contrary to the great men of the Reformation like Martin Luther and John Calvin. Before one starts to say how great Wright's works are one should get straight where he lies on the theological spectrum.
Rating:
Summary: This is the 21st century gospel
Review: N.T. wright answers the questions posed by not only the Jesus seminar, but by many Christians as well. While 20 centuries of aristotlian linear thought has ate away at the core of christianity, N.T. Wright has brought back the narrative approach which places Jesus firmly in the first century, takes the words of the Gospels from the early church and places back on His lips, and has given the church the full embodiement of Jesus the Christ.
|
