The Challenges of Jesus

不断受良好教育的熏陶是当今人们的一种思想，对于人类挑战特定的项目或探索值得探索的东西，目前这已经形成了一个趋势。当更多的作者和读者参与讨论更有争议的话题时，这种现象尤为明显。本文的有争议的话题是耶稣和其挑战者赖特，他的一本书《耶稣的挑战:发现耶稣到底是谁》讲述了他的想法。

Increasingly cultured and well educated are today’s human beings and more and more varied are people’s view toward a certain subject, currently it has formed a tendency for human beings to challenge a specific subject that interests them a lot or deserves to be explored. Such phenomenon is more obvious when it is for a more controversial subject with more authors and readers involved in. The specific controversial subject that will be challenged in this paper is Jesus and the challenger is N. T. Wright who delivers his own opinions in his book The Challenges of Jesus: Discovering Who Jesus Was and Is, as will be elaborately discussed in the below.

In the masterpiece of N. T. Wright, Jesus is described as a vivid, proactive and historically credible portrait due to his own commitment to both historical scholarship and Christian ministry, from which we can see that Jesus is a highly historical one and the author has tried his best to view Jesus with the lens of a controlling theology being deprived of. Though the author is challenging Jesus through the eyes of Second Temple Period Jewish Politics as will be quite different from the Jesus that has been described before, he still reshapes Jesus without setting aside personal commitment to and belief in the essential truth and genuine historicity. In a word, the specific Jesus in the author’s mind is a political one as he can exert influences on the church in this postmodern world.

According to N. T. Wright, the first feature of Jesus is that he is not a sage and he is not included in the type of people that are deeply wise, gentle moral philosopher preaching timeless aphorisms. The reason why this author will hold in this way is that he personally is not in support of Deism so that he tends to give a waffling answer without support as for whether Jesus is god or not. To put it more specifically, Jesus is not one that is completely holy and always preach for all the human beings without taking personal profits into consideration. Such kind of opinion can be seen from the author’s argument that “Jesus remained utterly anchored in first-century Judaism” and that everything he said and did was a “unique challenge to his contemporaries” and was “related uniquely and specifically to that situation”.

Furthermore, the author as well argues what he holds a creeping Docetism into our modern understanding of who Jesus was, and of how he understood his vocation together with what he thought himself to be. From this we can say that the author does not regard Jesus as a Christian but as a true Israel, a true Jew as well as a true human. The fact that the author’s having such point of view has to a certain degree made defenders of the Faith hold that his book is quite threatening and hard to be accepted. In this book, he has stated that “The key I propose for translating Jesus’ unique message to the Israel of his day into our message to our contemporaries is to grasp the parallel, which is woven deeply into both Testaments, between the human call to bear God’s image and Israel’s call to be the light of the world…Jesus came as the true Israel, the true Jew, the true human. ” Therefore we can naturally draw a conclusion that this author tends to be against Christianity so that he does not want to see Jesus as a Christian.

The third feature of Jesus from the author’s perspective is that he is actually a breathing, sleeping, walking man who will also suffer and die just like all the ordinary people. Detailed speaking, Jesus is not one that has supernatural ability that is exclusive to him and human beings can not make it even if they want to fight for it with might and main. In the world of N. T. Wright, Jesus’ ghostly and supernatural presence has completely been removed and he will feel the pain and suffering as will be brought by the unsmooth things that will turn up in the daily life. He can not make his suffering disappointment immediately at will as he is only an ordinary man so that he has to endure it silently and wait for the pain to pass in the due time. The difference between Jesus and other ordinary people is that Jesus can help give publicity to postmodern philosophy so that he can make contributions to the human society in a certain sense. The author’s holding that Jesus will experience all the life periods just like all the human beings, such as disasters, death and other life periods like that, which can be justified for the final death of Jesus before the crucifix. The author as well urges Christians to “forget the ‘titles’ of Jesus, at least for a moment, forget the attempts of some well-meaning Christians to make Jesus of Nazareth conscious of being the second person of the Trinity ”.

What has to be mentioned is that the aforementioned three core traits are just the most important three ones of Jesus and there are many others as have not been mentioned due to the text limit. Though Jesus in the author’s point of view is different from others, it can not be evaluated that whether this author’s opinion is right and that of the other is wrong and vice versa. What matters here is that as long as all the authors can support their own opinion with appropriate evidence provided, then all the opinions that have been raised are all suitable ones and can make sense in a way or another. Therefore in the daily life, we should try to challenge subjects as much as possible if there is a chance in that it can help cultivate our creativity so that we can always put forward our own point of view all the time. Imagining that if we always follow others when it is time for us to make decision, then we will gradually lose the ability to think and put forward insightful opinions.