How would Jesus’ original audience—first-century Galileans, Pharisees, and peasants—have received his words? That’s the question posed in two books by scholars Scot McKnight and Kenneth Bailey—and it’s one they answer in very different ways, according to reviewer Andrew Wilson. This week’s column also features Wilson highlighting Athanasius’ classic work of theology, On the Incarnation, which continues to resonate with believers after more than 1,700 years.
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On more than a dozen occasions in this provocative book, Scot McKnight claims the Gospels are exaggerating. Some of these exaggerations, of numbers and geographical reach, he regards as relatively minor and forgivable. Others he says are dangerous and must be resisted: those relating to the theological differences between Jesus and the Pharisees, for example, or regarding the individuals responsible for the execution of Jesus. (McKnight argues the latter exaggerations escalate chronologically, from Mark to Matthew to Luke and Acts and finally to John, with each blaming the Jews more than its predecessor did.) How readers respond to these claims will probably shape the way they respond to Jesus, People, Pharisees as a whole.
At times, some will wonder whether McKnight is the one exaggerating. Are all conflicts essentially reducible to power struggles? Are Protestants genuinely responsible for seeing the Pharisees as examples of self-righteousness? Can we exonerate the Pharisees of hypocrisy to the degree McKnight wants to, based on the sources we have? Are the Gospels really guilty of absolving Pilate of responsibility and blaming the Jews instead? How do we know the quarrel the evangelists had with the Pharisees is so different from that of Jesus himself, given that we know about the latter only via the former? (And while we’re at it, do we have to call John the Baptist “Yōannes the Dipper”?)
Others, however, will be intrigued, lean in, and in the process learn a lot about both the Pharisees and the crowds in the Gospels. McKnight, as you’d expect from a scholar of his standing, is well-versed in the primary and secondary sources on Pharisaism. He communicates with punch and clarity. His central thesis—that the Pharisees are agents in a wider power struggle between the temple authorities in Jerusalem and Jesus’ grassroots movement in Galilee, and that this underlies their disputes with him about how to apply the Torah—is compellingly argued, based on New Testament and other first century sources. His insights on crowds, Greco-Roman poverty in the first century, and the teaching of Jesus in relation to both (like “God blesses the beggars”) are indispensable.
Scot McKnight has written a bracing and challenging book about Jesus, and books like that are good for the church to wrestle with. But most evangelicals will also find plenty to disagree with here.
Bailey’s book is in some ways the mirror image of McKnight’s. It focuses on a single chapter—namely, Luke 15—rather than the Gospels entire. It has no hesitation in accepting the ways Luke (and Jesus) portrays and challenges the Pharisees. Its tone and style are pastoral and even devotional rather than scholarly and academic, although both McKnight and Bailey are scholars of note with extensive knowledge of rabbinic Judaism and a deep concern for the church. It even finishes with a one-act play.
Yet Bailey and McKnight are attempting to do something very similar: to set Jesus’ words about Pharisees and sinners in their first-century Galilean context rather than our 21st-century Western one, such that we can understand and feel the force of what he really meant.
Bailey does this by making a host of observations about the way Middle Eastern villages work—based in part on his own experience of living and teaching in them—and using them to illuminate these three magnificent stories. We learn about the significance of meals; the behavior of shepherds; the differences between men and women; the weight of a sheep over the shoulders; the scandal of demanding an early inheritance; the village dynamics when a son leaves home; why and how people facing extreme poverty “attach themselves” to wealthier citizens; the meaning of symbols like robes, rings, and shoes; and the honor-shame dynamics of the famous final scene.
The effect is powerful. We notice and feel things in the three parables that we might otherwise miss, even if we have read and heard them many times before. Most strikingly, we encounter the love and the joy of the shepherd, the woman, and the father as they search, wait, find, welcome, and celebrate—and we encounter the invitation to enjoy his grace rather than resent it.
There are two obvious problems with introducing Athanasius’ classic work in a couple of paragraphs. The first is that many of the people who read reviews like this will have already read it, and rightly so. The second is that unlike many of the great patristic writings, On the Incarnation already has a famous and compelling introduction by none other than C. S. Lewis, such that there is very little to add. The solution? Urge people to read the edition of Athanasius’ masterpiece that contains Lewis’s introduction, to get the best of both worlds.
Athanasius’ argument—that God took on flesh in Christ in order to restore God’s image in humanity, defeat death, and make it possible for people to be saved by participating in the divine life—is both theologically rich and, in the context of the Christological debates of the fourth century, historically momentous. His most arresting line, that “he, indeed, assumed humanity that we might become God,” is jarring enough (at least for Protestants) to invite serious reflection, and biblical enough to be true (2 Pet. 1:3–4). Lewis’s introduction, meanwhile, is one of his best essays and provides all the reasons we need to keep reading old books. Given that the introduction is now over 80 years old and the main text is 1,700, this edition is a great way of reading two old books in one.
Andrew Wilson is teaching pastor at King’s Church London and author of Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West. Follow him on X @AJWTheology.
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