N.T. Wright, Again

I just finished the second volume of N.T. Wright's series Christian Origins and the Question of God, and Jesus and the Victory of God was just as great as the first volume. Wright engages and critiques many scholarly commonplaces and checks the excesses of post-deistic "orthodoxy" on his way to a picture of Jesus that at once takes into account all of the disparate parts of the synoptic gospels and yet, or perhaps as a consequence, leaves Jesus a truly compelling, mysterious, and human figure.

With regards to Jesus' vocation, Wright demonstrates that the role of an apocalyptic Jewish prophet is the starting point from which his teachings and symbolic actions make most sense. Proceeding from there, he shows quite nicely how the prophetic vocation expands in the person of Jesus until he becomes a symbolic embodiment of YHWH's purposes and even the embodiment of YHWH's own self on earth.

Wright argues that the transition between first-century, pre-Rabbinic Judaism and first-century, Jewish Christianity needs a middle term, and he spends the bulk of his six-hundred-sixty-two-page book demonstrating that Jesus, as known primarily through the synoptics, is that middle term. When he's done, it seems the only sensible thing to think.

I've got Wright's next book, The Resurrection of the Son of God, on order from amazon, so I'll be digging into it as the semester starts. I can hardly wait.