Wright on Symbols--in particular, the Pharisees's righteousness

ok, i'm getting a little bored here, I feel like I get the point already.

(This, by the way, is a nice articulation of the point:

...Jesus is to be located within the Judaism of his day in terms of his activity as a prophet announcing the kingdom of God... He understood by this the real return from exile, which was taking place in and through his revolutionary work, and that he saw this in turn in a doubly revolutionary sense, setting himself not only against Rome, and by implication against the Temple regime, but also against the normal revolutionaries. (54)

So, Jesus was like a pro-life feminist or something. Got it?

Anyway, next we learn that scholars such as one E.P. Sanders like to argue that the gospels were written by the early church and reflect their controversies. This is completely wrong, Wright tells us, for numerous reasons which you can read for yourselves if you care.

And then we learn that the Pharisees were so keen on the law, on preserving righteousness etc. because it was their way of maintaining their identity as a Jewish people (thereby perpetuating the possibility of a Jewish Kingdom in the future). Interesting, right? I think Wright is saying the law was more about identity than about salvation, and the real divide wasn't--as all good Christians have been taught to believe--the dichotomy between faith and works, between religion and true belief. Instead, Wright argues that the focus on "works" was part of a system of symbols of Jewish identity. In Wright's terms, "...the clash between the Jesus and his Jewish contemporaries... must be seen in terms of alternative political agendas generated by alternative eschatological beliefs and expectations" (58). Jesus was preaching that the Kingdom would not depend on maintaining the Jewish people but on becoming the light of the world.

...and that takes us back to where we started! only in slightly different terms. And with some new ideas about the pharisees, who might be slightly more sympathetic in this light than they were in 5th grade Sunday school.

There is still much more to learn about symbols--we have  "Jesus and the Symbols of Judaism" and "Jesus's symbols of the Kingdom" ahead of us, but those will have to wait for another day.