Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

Great, Accessible Summation of Jesus' Life and Ministry!

If you've never read N. T. Wright, you're missing out on the greatest pastor and theologian alive right now. No other pastor is so respected in the academic world, and no other academic can write and speak so accessibly to those who don't have the formal training of a seminary or graduate program. So when he published a book called Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did and Why He Matters, I was excited. In Simply Jesus, Wright has somehow distilled his academic study and pastoral experience of Jesus of Nazareth into a profound, challenging meditation. Using the analogy of the Perfect Storm, Wright identifies three disparate storms that converge to make any discussion of Jesus precarious: Rationalistic Skepticism, the Conservative/Fundamentalist Christian reaction, and the actual, factual complexity of the "historical Jesus" questions themselves. If anyone is equipped to captain us through this storm, it's Wright, with his sharp academic mind and large pastoral heart. From the midst of this Perfect Storm, Wright asserts that There emerges a sense, which is central to the New Testament itself, that Jesus's way of running the world here and now is, however surprisingly, through his followers. Wright rightly begins with how poorly we all understand Jesus today. He observes that asking what Jesus was really about "...Isn't about "religion" in the sense the Western world has imagined for over two hundred years. This is about everything: life, art, the universe, justice, death, money. It's about politics, philosophy, culture, and being human." He takes us back into the first century and introduces us to the world of Jesus: under the heel of the Roman Empire, but totally saturated in the Hebrew Scriptures. Wright teases out a picture of the Hebrew Salvation story, grounded in the Exodus, centered on the Temple and having survived the Exile. Wright introduces us to various religious and political leaders who lived both before and after Jesus, showed how th...