Taken from "The Challenge of Jesus" (1999) by N.T. Wright. InterVarsity Press.
If Christianity is not rooted in things that actully happened in first-century Palestine, we might as well be Buddhist, Marxists or almost anything else. And if Jesus never existed, or if he was quite different from what the Gospels and the church's worship affirms him to have been, then we are indeed living in cloud-cuckoo-land. (p. 18)
The Jews of Jesus' day, as is well known, were living under foreign rule and had been for several centuries. The worst thing about that was not the high taxation, the alien laws, the brutality of oppressision and so on, awful though that often was. The worst thing was that the foreigners were pagans. If Israel was truly God's people, why were the pagans ruling over her? If Israel was called to be God's true humanity, surely these foreign nations were like the animals over which Adam and Eve were to rule.(p. 36)
With a certain oversimplification we can trace easily enough the three options open to Jews in Jesus' day. If you go down the Jordan valley from Jericho to Masada, you can see evidence of all of them. First, the quietist and ultimately dualist option, taken by the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran: separate yourself from the wicked world and wait for God to do whatever God is going to do. Second, the compromise option taken by Herod: build yourself fortresses and palaces, get along with your political bosses as well as you can, do as well out of it as you can and hope that God will validate it somehow. Third, the zealot option, that of the Sicarii who took over Herod's old palace/fortress of Masada during the Roman-Jewish war: say your prayers, sharpen your swords, make yoursevleves holy to fight a holy war, and God will give you a military victory that will also be the theological victory of good over evil, of God over the hordes of darkness, of the Son of Man over the monsters. (p 37)
Jesus' opening challenge as reported in the Gospels was that people should "repent and believe." This is a classic example, which I mentioned in the previous chapter, of a phrase whose meaning has changed over the years. If I were to go out on the street in my local town and proclaim that people should "repent and believe," what they would hear would be a summon to give up their private sins (one suspects that in our culture sexual misbehavior and alcohol or drug abuse would come quickly to mind) and to "get religion" in some shape or form - either experiencing a new inner sense of God's presencce, or believing a new body of dogma, or joining the church or some sub-branch of it. But that is by no means exactly what the phrase "repent and believe" meant in first-century Galilee.
How are we to unlearn our meanings for such a phrase and to hear it through first-century ears? It helps if we can find another author using it at around the same place and time as Jesus. Consider, for example, the Jewish aristocrat and historian Josephus, who was born a few years after Jesus' crucifixion and who was sent in A.D. 66 as a young army commander to sort out some rebel movements in Galilee. His task, as he describes it in his autobiography, was to persuade the hot-headed Galileans to stop their mad rush into revolt against Rome and to trust him and the other Jerusalem aristocrats to work out a better modus vivendi. So when he confronted the rebel learder, he says that he told him to give up his own agenda and to trust him, Josephus, instead. And the word he uses are remarkably familiar to reader of the Gospels: he told the brigand leader to "repent and believe in me," metanoesein kai pistos emoi genesesthai.
This does not, of course, mean that Josephus was challenging the brigand leader (who confusingly, was called "Jesus") to give up sinning and have a religious conversion experience. It has a far more specific and indeed political meaning. I suggest that when we examine Jesus of Nazareth forty years earlier going around Galilee telling people to repent and believe in him or in the gospel, we dare not screen out these meaings. Even if we end up suggesting that Jesus meant more than Josephus did - that there were indeed religious and theological dimensions to his invitation - we cannot suppose that he meant less. He was telling his hearers to give up their agendas and to trust him for his way of being Israel, his way of bringing the kingdom, his kingdom agenda. In particular, he was urging them, as Jospehus had, to abandon their crazy dreams of nationalist revoltuion. But whereas Josephus was opposed to armed revolution because he was an aristocrat with a nest to feather, Jesus was opposed to it because he saw it as, paradoxically, a way of being deeply disloyal to Israel's God and to his purpose for Isreal to be the light of the world. And whereas seen as compromise, a shaky political solution cobbled together with stiky tape, Jesus was offering as a counter-agenda an utterly risky way of being Israel, the way of turning the other cheek and going the second mile, the way of losing your life to gain it. This was the kingdom-invitation he was issuing.This was the play for which he was holding auditions. (p 43-44)
