N. T. Wright's Simply Jesus

N.T. Wright, in his book Simply Jesus, splits his work into three sections: who Jesus was, what he did, and why he matters. All three of his points in the book are connected to help give the reader a better understanding of how complicated Jesus really was. If a single point was unknown to mankind, the other two points would become useless, without knowing who he was, we could not know what he did, or why it mattered, also not knowing what he did would make him insignificant to us, and lastly, not knowing why he matters would make any person think that he is just another revolutionary man. N.T. Wright wants the reader of the book to be able to put these three points together to make sense of the whole situation. The first thing the reader

Wright makes the argument that what God promised to do for the Jewish people in the Old Testament is what Jesus thought he was accomplishing through his ministry. According to Jewish belief, God was to be the one and only king, and Jesus was spreading the word of his coming kingdom through himself. Jesus’ ministry was actually aligned more with the Roman belief of a divine ruler than with the Jewish belief of a Messiah. However, Jesus was unlike anyone before him, he was able to put together the suffering servant with the old testaments claims of God’s coming kingdom. He made the kingdom centered on the type of values that were considered weak in the Ancient world. The kingdom of God was coming not through Glory, but from sickness, and death. All the miracles that Jesus performed, is what the true kingdom of God would look like. Jesus made claims about God’s dwelling, it was widely accepted that the place of merging for heaven and earth was the temple, however Jesus, in his preaching, made it seem like he was the only way to merge Heaven with earth. These claims were what really made the religious leaders fear Jesus. To understand what Jesus did and how he did it, one must first understand the meaning behind his