Jesus’ message about fulfilment and judgment, and his redefinition of them through his own work, became especially dangerous when it was recognized as a ‘clash of symbols’. Wright looks first at recent scholarly controversy over the interpretation of Jesus’ disputes with Jewish officialdom for which his own summary is adequate:
(i) Traditional readings of the gospels have made Jesus the teacher of a religion of love and grace, of the inner observance of the heart rather than the outward observance of legal codes.
(ii) The same traditional readings have envisaged Jesus opposing the Pharisees, or they him, on the grounds that they supported a religion of outward observances and perceived him to be an antinomian threat.
(iii) This double reading has recently been opposed, particularly by E. P. Sanders, on the grounds of historical implausibility: Jesus did not ‘speak against the law’, and what he did say would not have been particularly irritating to the Pharisees.
(iv) I shall propose a quite different reading of the controversy-stories, which avoids the critique of the older, caricatured position, to which I do not for a moment subscribe. Jesus announced, in symbol as in word, the kingdom of Israel’s god; he attacked the symbols which spoke of an Israel resistant to his kingdom-vision…. As a result, some of his contemporaries believed that he was guilty of the offence spelled out in Deuteronomy 13, that is, of ‘leading Israel astray’.
(v) The controversy-stories are highly likely to be historical at the core; but their meaning is not the one traditionally assigned to them. They were about eschatology and politics, not religion or morality. Eschatology: Israel’s hope was being realized, but it was happening in Jesus’ way, and at his initiative. Politics: the kingdom Jesus was announcing was undermining, rather than underwriting, the revolutionary anti-pagan zeal that was the target of much of Jesus’ polemic, the cause (according to him) of Israel’s imminent ruin, and the focal point of much (Shammaite) Pharisaic teaching and aspiration. (371-372)
1. Symbols of Israel’s identity: sabbath, food, nation, land. In order to understand the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees two things need to be made clear: i) the zeal for YHWH expressed by the ‘hard-line Shammaite Pharisees’ was a matter of guarding Israel against paganization; ii) the purity codes were the means by which the separation of Jew and Gentile was maintained (384). In Jesus’ view this ‘zeal’ was leading Israel to ruin, which is the reason for his opposition to ‘those aspects of Torah which marked out Israel over against her pagan neighbours’. The kingdom that was coming would be ‘characterized not by defensiveness, but by Israel’s being the light of the world; not by angry zeal which would pay the Gentiles back in their own coin…, but by turning the other cheek and going the second mile’ (389).
I therefore propose that the clash between Jesus and his Jewish contemporaries, especially the Pharisees, must be seen in terms of alternative political agendas generated by alternative eschatological beliefs and expectations. Jesus was announcing the kingdom in a way which did not reinforce, but rather called into question, the agenda of revolutionary zeal which dominated the horizon of, especially, the dominant group within Pharisaism. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that he called into question the great emphases on those symbols which had become the focal points of that zeal: sabbath, food taboos, ethnic identity, ancestral land, and ultimately the Temple itself. The symbols had become enacted codes for the aspirations of his contemporaries. Jesus, in challenging them, was not ‘speaking against the Torah’ per se. He was certainly not ‘speaking against’ the idea of Israel as the chosen people of the one true god. Rather, he was offering an alternative construal of Israel’s destiny and god-given vocation, an alternative way of telling Israel’s true story, and an alternative to the piety which expressed itself in nationalistic symbols. He was affirming Israel’s election even as he redefined it, just as other Jewish groups and parties did. This was, of course, revolutionary; which was why, in all the stories up to the time of the Temple-incident itself, the message remained veiled and cryptic. (390)
Wright then examines the nature of the controversy in relation to the sabbath and food but suggests that in two other areas, nation/family and land/possessions, Jesus ‘challenged the symbols of Israel’s worldview’ (398) on the grounds that they sustained his ‘contemporaries in an idolatrous pursuit, in a quest they could not hope to win’ (405).
2. Symbols of Israel’s identity: the temple. The question of Jesus’ attitude towards the temple is central to the task of historical reconstruction. Here Wright asks: what did Jesus do, and why? By way of introduction he stresses three aspects of the temple’s significance: ‘the presence of YHWH, the sacrificial system, and the Temple’s political significance’ (406-407).
Scholarly views regarding the meaning of Jesus’ action in the temple run from reform of the temple cult to an ‘acted parable of destruction’. Wright summarizes the argument of the book so far with respect to Jesus’ role as a prophet of the kingdom of God and arrives at an ‘irresistible’ conclusion:
…when Jesus came to Jerusalem, he symbolically and prophetically enacted judgment upon it – a judgment which, both before and after, he announced verbally as well as in action. The Temple, as the central symbol of the whole national life, was under divine threat, and, unless Israel repented, it would fall to the pagans. Furthermore, Jesus, by making this claim in this way, perceived himself to be not merely a prophet like Jeremiah, announcing the Temple’s doom, but the true king, who had the authority which both the Hasmoneans and Herod had thought to claim. (417)
Taking his cue from Borg, Wright also suggests that the phrase ‘den of robbers’ (Mk.11:17 and pars.) points to the role of the temple as a focus for resistance to Rome (lestai interpreted as ‘bandits’ or ‘insurrectionists’).
3. Jesus’ symbols of the kingdom. Jesus’ intention was not to depart from the traditions of Israel but to call the people back to a true understanding of them. ‘Israel’s hope was conceived in relation to land, Torah and Temple; Jesus subverted the common interpretation of these, and offered his own fresh and positive alternatives’ (428).
In place of Israel’s inheritance in the land Jesus offered ‘human communities that were being renewed and restored through the coming of the kingdom’. He substituted for the existing ‘familial and national symbolism’ a ‘fictive kinship, a surrogate family, around himself’. At the heart of the ‘symbolic praxis which was to characterize his redefined Israel’ was neither Torah nor the temple but Jesus’ offer of forgiveness as a sign of eschatological blessing.
Healing, forgiveness, renewal, the twelve, the new family and its new defining characteristics, open commensality, the promise of blessing for the Gentiles, feasts replacing fasts, the destruction and rebuilding of the Temple: all declared, in the powerful language of symbol, that Israel’s exile was over, that Jesus was himself in some way responsible for this new state of affairs, and that all that the Temple had stood for was now available through Jesus and his movement. It is not surprising, therefore, that when Jesus came to Jerusalem the place was not, so to speak, big enough for both him and the Temple together. The claim which had been central to his work in Galilee was that Israel’s god was now active, through him, to confront evil and so to bring about the real return from exile, the restoration for which Israel had longed; and that Israel’s god himself was now returning to Zion in judgment and mercy. The house built on sand, however - the present Temple and all that went with it, and all the hopes of national security which clustered, as in Jeremiah’s day, around it – would fall with a great crash. If we understand Jesus’ action in the Temple in the way I have suggested, we achieve the very great historical benefit of coherence, at this point, between a good many words and deeds which were most characteristic of Jesus during his itinerant ministry, and the deeds and words which, in Jerusalem, brought that whole prophetic career to its climax. (436-437)
Wright concludes this chapter with some brief comments on the meal in the upper room (437-438) and an examination of the view that Jesus was regarded by his opponents as a ‘deceiver of the people’ (cf. Deut.13) and ‘false prophet’ (cf. Deut.18).
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