The Wright Book

Well, let's get going on looking at some recent reads. First up is N.T. Wright's newest book - a short one called Judas and the Gospel of Jesus: Have We Missed the Truth about Christianity?

Interesting title since the occasion for the book is the Gospel of Judas, but Wright's little book is really, as the title indicates, about pointing the reader to the real Gospel of Jesus.

It's typical Wright (Anglican bishop of Durham) , and perhaps a good intro to the man's work for those who don't have the time or inclination to tackle his, er, longer books. When I say "typical Wright," this is what I mean: he has a process - a most interesting and almost addicting process - for dissecting these problems.  Not unique, of course, perhaps simply Thomistic in a sense, but he wields it all with great effect.

What he does is this:

1) Looks at the question at hand

2) Touches on several answers to that question, most notably the skeptical answers

3) Returns to the original question and spends a great deal of time taking it apart, analyzing and especially placing the question in its historical context.

4) He then returns to (2) and tries to put the pieces of (3) together according to what (2) declares must be true.

5) The pieces don't fit, usually, (2) is brushed off the table, and another answer is sought, and at this point, Wright usually whips out Occam's razor to great effect, and we're all left thumping our heads saying, "But of course. Why'd everyone have to make this so complicated?"

There are subsets of the process, including taking (2) to its logical conclusion, which is usually absurd, as well as finding other rather large questions that (2) can't answer at all. A very, very simple example is this: Wright regularly takes on the school of Gospel scholarship that declares the Gospels tell us more about the early Church than they do about Jesus, and that's essentially what the early Church did: compose and shape the Gospels in order to answer the issues most pressing to them.

Well, says Wright, what was the single most pressing controversy in the early Church?

That's right - circumcision and attendant issues.

"...we know that it was one of the fiercest and most difficult controversies in the early church, but nobody ever thought to invent a 'saying of Jesus' which addressed it." (73)

Just one example, as I said, used as Wright powerfully builds his case.

Back to this book specifically - it's really about more than the Gospel of Judas. Wright gives an account of the finding and presentation of the document, explains clearly why gnostic writings are not valuable for telling us anything about events of the first century, and then turns his attention to the promoters, not only of this document, but more generally, of what he calls the "New Myth" of Christian origins.

Long-time readers will be familiar with this, but Wright's book offers a particularly succinct and powerful analysis. He does a marvelous job comparing and contrasting early Christians and gnostics in context, asking the important questions - between these two, who exactly sold out to the broader culture? Who exactly were martyred and who were not? He is particularly harsh on those who play the Mean Irenaus card, claiming that the Bishop of Lyons was all about the politics. Yes, says Wright. That is why Irenaus accepted the see of Lyons directly after the great persecution there and started writing his work against heresies. Because, contemplating the burning embers and the blood-stained sands, he was all about the power, all about the comfort. And the gnostics were not.

One can't help jumping to the present, of course, and thinking, not so much about the current-day gnostics and pseudo-gnostics (although they do come to mind) but also about our Christian faith itself. Where do we stand, really?

Here is the irony: that the gnostic gospesl are today being trumpeted as the radical alternatives to the oppressive and conservative canonical gospels, but the historical reality was just the opposite. The Gnostics were quite content to capitulate to their surrounding culture, in which mystery-religions, self-discovery, Platonic spirituality of various sorts, and coded revelations of hidden truths were the stock in trade. In other words, the Gnostics were the cultural conservatives, sticking with the kind of religion that everyone already knew. As such, when we read their writings without the rose-tinted spectacles of Meyer, Ehrman, and others, they are bound to strike us (to use our modern, anachronistic language) as fairly thoroughly sexist, anti-Semitic, and lacking the courage to stand out against the ideologies and authorities of their day. It was the orthodox Christians who were breaking new ground, and risking their necks as they did so. (101)

Wright's quite direct in his critique of Bart Ehrman, Elaine Pagels, and other proponents of the Many Christianities theories, essentially accusing them of dishonesty in dealing with these documents, twisting them to make them say things they know very well they don't.

Where the book takes an even more interesting twist - and it wil be interesting to see the reviews in Protestant circles, some of whom are already not to keen on Wright because of that whole New Perspectives on Paul business - is at the end, when he settles on a paradigm to blame for all of this: Western (particularly North American) Protestant Neo-Gnosticism.

You'll really have to read it to get what he's saying completely, but it comes down to this: his opinion that Protestantism has a gnostic core, having been founded on the conviction that the Catholic Church was "hiding" the truth about Christianity, and that it was up to them to reveal the real Jesus. Further, there's the primacy of experience and feeling:

The New Myth regularly charges orthodox Christianity with having negotiated a compromise with its surrounding culture, with having developed a theology that legimates oppression, that won't offend people, that is really a power play in disguise. But this begins to look suspiciously like a case of what the psychoanalysts call "projection." If anyone has negotiated a cheerful compromise with the political status quo of the last two hundred years, it is precisely post-Enlightenment Western Protestantism, not least by agreeing that religion should be deemed a matter of private interest only, leaving the rest of life -- the public square with all that it involves - to its own devices.

There's much more. At its core is Wright's constant call, woven through all of his books, for us to recall and retrieve the cosmic dimension of Christ, to look at the whole story of Israel, Jesus and the Church as the story of the world and one in which we, graciously, via baptism, are deeply involved. What a paltry thing is this Gospel of Judas in comparison.

And, as to be expected with Wright, there are humorous moments, as when he says that surely the scholars involved in the New Myth project are more than Dan Browns with PhDs. Surely. Or when he compares the more, er, discursive parts of the Gospel of Judas to the closely-written, single-spaced crank letters he regularly receives as a bishop. Or when he runs through the usual course of events for these AmazingrevelationsthatwillrockChristianity...ending with the static state of confusion in the general public: 'But haven't the Red Sea Scrolls disproved it all?'

I'd suggest this book (it will be published next week) as an adult ed resource. It's short, it's timely and will spark peoples' interest, but Wright grapples with so much more - it would be a really interesting way to guide your adult ed group through the questions of the historicity of the Scriptures and the clear differences between the Gospel of Jesus and everything else. As Wright concludes:

This is the real gospel. It has to do with the real Jesus, the real world, and above all the real God. As the advertisements say, accept no substitutes.