The Biblical and theological understandings of Jesus (Essay Sample)

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The Biblical and theological understandings of Jesus
according to Marcus Borg (Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time)
and N.T Wright (The Challenges of Jesus)
Introduction
There are several books by different authors which showcase different ideology about the life of Jesus Christ which highlights the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and more importantly the meaning of the life of Jesus according to Christianity in the current world.
1 Jesus’ identity
Marcus Borg in his book "Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time" refers that the image of Jesus represents a strong connection with the Christian life. Marcus Borg has a Lutheran background with a family that included several ministers, so, he has been taught to accept the most popular image of Jesus, the one in which he is regarded as the divine savior. This vision is only part of the identity of Jesus, but Borg has managed to make a distinction between Jesus and the "Christ of faith”.
The identity of Jesus, in the vision of Borg, must be more than just the popular belief. This vision would be inadequate since in His identity there are traits often forgotten, such as the fact that he was a teacher, a good man that had Life in high regards, not only has a man that came to the world only to die for our sins. Reducing the image of Jesus indeed presents some problems in this era of information, also prone to misinformation; Borg states that "every month or two some publisher comes up with a blockbuster saying that Jesus was a New Age guru, an Egyptian freemason or a hippie revolutionary. Every year or two some scholar or group of scholars comes up with a new book full of imposing footnotes to tell us that Jesus was a peasant Cynic, a wandering wordsmith or the preacher of liberal values born out of due time.”
There’s more to understand about Jesus, and that should be made considering both visions, the traditionalist one, where he’s considered as the Savior, but also Jesus as a man of this world, with traits that should be praised.
N.T. Wright in his book "The Challenge of Jesus" shows a more skeptic view; indeed he refers the need to keep Jesus as an important part of the Christian discipleship, but he refers that it might be impossible to ever understand who was Jesus, what Jesus said, what he did and what that meant.
This skeptic point of view places Jesus in the world of the unknown, completely opposed to what Borg said. While Borg indicates that there are two views regarding Jesus, a more traditionalist one and the more modern one, N.T. Wright claims that it is impossible to have a view at all, since we lack information on Jesus to make these claims. Borg gives two identities to Jesus while N.T Wright states that the identity of Jesus is still unknown and it becomes a matter of "belief”.
2 Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection
In this point Marcus Borg has a clear vision, he claims that there’s a Pre-Easter Jesus and a Post-Easter Jesus. The Pre-Easter Jesus consisted in an intelligent man, a teacher, with a great wisdom with several forms of speech, such as parables, aphorisms. He was a social prophet that criticized the elites and was often in conflict with authorities and the founder of a movement that shattered the social standards. The Post Easter Jesus gives him a new dimension, more than just a man that caused a revolution in his era, he became a martyr, and it is in this point that the message starts to dilute, was his death due to His own beliefs or did he die for our own sins? Or even both. His resurrection, in addition to meaning a sign of hope, also means the risk of forgetting his qualities as a man of this world with significant contributions to World History.
According to N.T. Wright, many Jesus scholars have reconstructed the image of Jesus to a different one found in the New Testament. He criticizes that blind belief in the Bible without assessing other sources of information when the best knowledge is available. The Bible is dynamic, and what we know about Jesus should not be extrapolated to have different meanings. Believing in the Bible means that everything what concerns the traditions should be discovered, including "protestant" or "evangelic" traditions. In this points, Marcus Borg and N.T Wright somehow agree since they believe that the death of Jesus brought the metaphorical into the life of Jesus as a man, while one as to understand that the religion itself began as Jesus as a man, His death, a tragic event should not be the source for metaphorical magnification of the tradition, nor...