Insights from N.T. Wright's Inaugural Lecture: Imagining the Kingdom of God

Last night I had the opportunity to listen to Professor Tom Wright (a.k.a. N.T. Wright) give his Inaugural Lecture as Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity here at the University of St Andrews. Professor Wright has actually been at the university a year now and has previously given major public addresses here, but I guess this one is more official.

I share here my notes from the lecture. Please be aware that the following is based on rather skimpy hand-written notes, and so does not do justice to Wright’s elegant and precise handling of the English language, but I hope I have preserved the thrust of his arguments.  The speech was entitled:  ”Imagining the Kingdom: Mission and Theology in early Christianity.”

Wright begins by outlining how the four Gospels are remarkable documents that are still largely unknown to us. We are failing to understand the thrust of the Gospels. We need to apply our imagination and look beyond the boundaries of the various philosophies that guide our views.

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(Wright will present a fresh thesis about the Gospels)

The Gospels all tell the story of Jesus as “how God became King.” They are talking about the setting up of a theocracy over the world. Westerners react strongly to the idea of a theocracy, but this is what is meant by the talk of the “Kingdom of God” in the Gospels. The idea was that the kings of the worldly nations would be replaced with God as king. The notion of the Kingdom of God does not relate to a heavenly kingdom alone, as some have thought — we remember Jesus’ desire for things to be “on Earth as it is in Heaven.”

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Wright suggested that we should understand that the Gospels are biographies and that they do describe life in the early Church, despite the continued claims of some to the contrary. The story of Jesus doesn’t come out of thin air, but is the continuation and climax of the story of Israel. There is narrative continuity here — history may be cyclical, but it is also moving progressively toward an end — the Messianic age. Many Second Temple documents reflect this idea, including Ezra and Daniel. In Daniel, we have the expectation of the coming of the Messiah after 490 years. Different groups had different ways of calculating this. The Essenes expected it to coincide with the time of King Herod’s death. The Rabbis had a different, later calculation.

Heavenly Ascents News

Just wanted to give you a brief update of some things I’ve been doing lately.

I posted (a couple of weeks back now) some material over at The Millennial Star about the reforms of King Josiah and the Deuteronomists and how these reforms may have affected the theological themes found in the Old Testament we read today.  This post is based on material I posted here on Heavenly Ascents a couple of years ago, but I think it’s still worth sharing. You can see it here: http://www.millennialstar.org/the-deuteronomists-and-the-suppression-of-ancient-truths/

I was recently invited to be a contributor at Reviews of Biblical and Early Christian Studies (rbecs.wordpress.com). This website is run by Dan Batovici, PhD student here at the University of St Andrews, and a few other postgrad students at Cambridge and Durham universities. The main purpose of the site is to provide reviews of the latest publications in the fields of Biblical Studies and Early Christian Studies and also to give reports on important seminar presentations given at the respective universities.  I am honored to be able to contribute to this very helpful site.  You can see my first post here. I give a report of Dr Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer’s seminar paper on “The Geographical and Theological Location of Isaiah 40-55”.

Dan and I, along with Beth Tracy and other colleagues here at the University of St Andrews, are organizing a graduate conference that will be taking place in June, entitled “The 1st St Andrews Graduate Conference for Biblical and Early Christian Studies: Authoritative Texts and Reception History.” I will be presenting a paper on the early Christian interpretation of older Melchizedek traditions. You can read more about the conference here.

Why We Need Akkadian (and the Humanities)

The following is from my PhD supervisor Jim Davila’s blog, PaleoJudaica.blogspot.com.  I hope he doesn’t mind me reproducing the entire post, but I feel that it is an important topic and he makes a good argument.

WHY WE NEED AKKADIAN is explained in a book review in The Forward:

Why We Need Akkadian
How One Semitic Language Sheds Light on Another

By Jerome A. Chanes
Published August 11, 2010, issue of August 20, 2010.

An Akkadian Lexical Companion for Biblical Hebrew: Etymological- Semantic and Idiomatic Equivalents With Supplements on Biblical Aramaic
By Hayim ben Yosef Tawil
KTAV Publishing House, 456 pages, $125

Reading the Tanach, the Hebrew Bible, is tough. For one thing, it’s very, very old, and not refracting the text through our 21st-century prism is difficult. For another, it’s written in two odd languages, Hebrew and Aramaic, in such a way that even those familiar — even fluent — in these tongues find that the simplest passages beg analysis.

“What’s the p’shat?” — the basic meaning of the text — is the toughest question of all.

Where does Akkadian fit into this question? What indeed is Akkadian? The word itself comes from the place name “Akkad,” which is found in the Bible and is a reference to an ancient city of Mesopotamia and also to a third-millennium BCE Mesopotamian dynasty. Akkadian, written in cuneiform — Mesopotamian wedge writing — left to right, on clay tablets, is actually a generic term for the languages spoken by the Babylonians and the Assyrians. These two peoples dominated the Tigris-Euphrates region of Mesopotamia, and far beyond, for centuries, and developed a vast literature. The narrative portions of the Tanach contain many references to Assyrians and Babylonians, mostly as enemies, and almost always in terms of wars, conquests and exiles.

From Abraham (an erstwhile resident of Ur in Mesopotamia) onward, Ashur and Bavel are a constant trope in the Hebrew Scriptures, and Akkadian, as a Semitic contemporary of biblical Hebrew and Aramaic, is a truly invaluable — and underused — resource in the understanding of biblical words, expressions, usages and concepts. Now Hayim ben Yosef Tawil’s “Akkadian Lexical Companion,” directly compares the Akkadian and biblical Hebrew in an effort to explicate difficult words, idioms, phrases and whole verses in the Bible. And the book succeeds. The paradoxical fact is that Akkadian lexicography is further advanced than that of biblical Hebrew, and Tawil exploits this discrepancy for our benefit.

[…]

Wordle of HeavenlyAscents.com

This is a wordle I did at http://www.wordle.com. It displays some of the main words used in recent posts here at Heavenly Ascents. I got this idea from Dr. James Davila’s great blog on ancient Judaism and related topics: www.PaleoJudaica.blogspot.com. Interesting enough, it looks like he heard about it from BYU Librarian Ryan L. Combs. James Davila is a professor and head of the School of Divinity at St. Andrews University in Scotland. 

You can see my wordle here: http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/522023/Heavenly_Ascents_1

You can make your own wordle of any text or webpage/blog at http://www.wordle.com