Book Review: Simply Jesus
by Steve Durham
“Jesus studies” are as common as bugs these days, and it seems each one claims some liberating insight or other that completely rewrites Christian tradition and sets us all free.
Simply Jesus—one of the most recent of numerous titles by New Testament scholar and Bishop in the Church of England N.T. (“Tom”) Wright—makes similar claims.
But this time it’s worth serious reading, study, and consideration.
In fact, it’s the best book on the topic I have ever read, period.
The biblical argument Wright makes, while brilliant in my opinion, is too complex to go into in this limited space. So I’ll simply talk about the Jesus I met in the pages of his book.
After all, that’s why I read it: to learn all I could about Jesus. The most important thing I learned was that Jesus chose to die. Maybe that’s old news to you, but to me it was new and downright exciting. Most importantly it means the “Father” did not send Jesus to be brutalized by the Romans, nor to be crucified. God is not a child abuser. God is not an ogre. This was entirely Jesus’ doing. Mel Gibson, eat your heart out. Jesus reached this conclusion, Wright maintains, by some serious prayer, meditation, and Bible study during the “missing years” of his life. Those are the years between age 12, when he stayed behind his parents in the Temple and gave them a scare, and age 30 when he began his public ministry. Wright says Jesus intuited God’s claim on his life. There were no visions or voices from heaven. (When God spoke from heaven and said “You are my son, whom I love; with you I am well-pleased,” this was at Jesus’ baptism as an adult. See Mark 1:9ff and parallel passages in Matthew and Luke.) 5 Most likely some specific Scriptures reflected his growing suspicions about his life, perhaps especially Daniel 7 and Isaiah 53. Based on such readings, he intuited what he was supposed to do. And what he was supposed to do involved confronting corrupt Jewish and Roman leadership. He began his ministry by announcing “The kingdom of God has come near” (Mark 1:15 et par). That was sure to stir up the Jewish leadership for a lot of reasons (that gets into the complicated Bible study I mentioned earlier) and really upset the Romans, who would tolerate no rivals. Jesus had enough street smarts, to say the least, to know the Jewish leaders were out to kill him. And he certainly knew that sedition against Rome, by claiming kingship, was a capital crime. He chose not to run away, even though right up until his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane he had ample opportunity to skip town. He would see it through to the death. There was only one way to take on a massively powerful oppressor like Rome, and that was to invite their overwhelming power, gambling that he would be raised from the dead. (See Mark 8:31f et par.) He didn’t know for sure God would do this! He could only hope. There was a second reason Jesus chose to die. In dying and then being raised, he outwitted the Accuser (hasatan in Hebrew; Satan in English) whose sole trump card was death. As the Eastern Orthodox chant every Easter, by death he conquered death. Wright has a fascinating excursus on what the New Testament calls “the principalities and powers,” i.e. the demons in the employ of hasatan. He suggests we read People of the Lie by psychotherapist M. Scott Peck, who tells the story of clients whose problems and behavior do not fit any psychiatric label. That led him back to the Bible and kindred literature, as well as sympathetic clergy and colleagues, for categories that would illuminate and help explain what he was running into. I’ll have to deal with this some other time. As I said before, the biblical studies lying within and behind this book are too complex to fit in this small space. They are not too complex to follow! But hopefully these admittedly superficial outlines of a portion of the book help convey the flavor of the text. Simply Jesus—a Jesus I did not expect, and frankly the one I now admire and revere vastly more than even I did before—is an excellent read!