Jesus: Who, What, and Why?

Who was Jesus, what did he do that was so important, and why does he matter? These are three important and often unaddressed questions that N.T. Wright attempts to conceptualize in his book Simply Jesus. In Simply Jesus, Wright attempts to answer these questions by first analyzing both first century and contemporary claims about Jesus. Then, Wright provides historical background for these statements, and through the use of textual evidence, Wright creates claims of his own that either augment or debunk the analyzed assertions. Finally, Wright wraps everything up by circling back and effectively answering the three original questions with his evidence-based claims, effectively identifying Jesus for who he was, what he did, and why he matters.

First off, Wright attempts to explain who Jesus actually was, stating that many Christians aren’t completely grasping his true identity. Wright uses his “perfect storm” analogy to explain the reasons people don’t fully understand Jesus. Skepticism of Christianity, extreme Christian conservatism, and the complexity of Jesus’s history create the ultimate combination that entrenches the difficulty of understanding Jesus as a person. In order to know who Jesus was, we must focus on understanding how people in his day knew him, the events that were taking place at the time, and how Jesus’s idea of God was different than the people’s.

In addition to this storm of clashing ideologies and historical complexity, there was another storm brewing around Jesus, and in order to comprehend Jesus, one must know the forces affecting the world around him. The first of the three forces was Rome and its empire. Rome was very important in Jesus’s time, possessing a large amount of resources, as well as political...

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...ences in beliefs clash with the uncertainty about Jesus. In addition, Wright provides logical answers to skeptic’s questions about Jesus’s divine abilities.

Another reason Wright’s explanations about Jesus were successful was because he wasn’t drastic in his writing. Much of his book is simply analyses of previous writings about Jesus, like the gospels, or other parts of the New Testament. This makes Wright seem more credible; he isn’t simply making up claims left and right. Instead, Wright takes as much historical evidence and prophetical writings of Jesus as he can, and then he blends it all together, making old claims fit with new evidence, and vice versa. Wright is simply putting the pieces to a 2000 year old and highly debated puzzle back together, forming a single image depicting Jesus of Nazareth for who he was, what he accomplished, and what he means to us.