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 In The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, Marcus Borg and Tom Wright present dramatically divergent perspectives on the nature of the Christian messiah. Borg is a member of the Jesus Seminar and a leading proponent of progressive Christianity at the popular level. Wright is among the most formidable defenders of orthodox Christian faith, though he is not a strict traditionalist.
Borg's approach to the gospels is to see what our age has to say about them and their authors, so that modern people can decide for themselves what to think about Jesus and his story. He sees the gospels as "a developing tradition…a mixture of history remembered and history metaphorized" (p4), and wants to continue to develop the Christian proclamation for our own time. If theology doesn't have a credible expression in experience, it easily seems bankrupt.
Wright is concerned more with understanding the worldview of the New Testament authors in order to see what they have to say to us. He takes into account that every historian and student has a perspective which is impossible to eliminate but possible to compensate for (p17). Part of his own perspective is a "no-holds-barred Christian faith" (p24), and Borg criticizes him for including it in his historical investigation (p234), but Wright's description of his faith is poetic and attractive.
In Chapter 3, Wright explains Jesus' activity as an announcement of the kingdom of God, not only as a promise for the future but as something that had begun in and through his work, although there was more yet to do. Jesus often confounded but also fulfilled contemporary Jewish messianic expectation in unexpected ways. As such, the story "possesses the double similarity and double dissimilarity…which is a major hallmark of historical plausibility" (p99) and a key feature of Wright's argument.
Borg is perhaps too quick to dismiss the "argument from inference" - that Jesus' actions and teaching imply that he somehow knew he was God, since he claimed to do what only the Lord could do (p57). He sees Jesus as a teacher of unconventional wisdom, the prophet of a new social order and the initiator of a movement to bring it about, but not as God incarnate.
Beginning in Chapter 8, Wright makes a compelling case that Jesus knew his vocation to suffer, die, and rise again, and that those events did in fact come to pass. For Wright, nothing else seems to account as well for the vitality and messianic proclamation of the early church. Messiahs who died were not seen as messiahs for long after (p102). The line of thought continues through the next chapter, where Wright argues that the resurrection of Jesus involved a physical body. The resurrection, he says, made it clear to the disciples that Jesus is the messiah, the means by which God's people are rescued from exile, which God alone could accomplish, which is why they spoke of Jesus in terms reserved for the Lord (p163).
Borg argues that Easter is true and has significance independently of a bodily resurrection. He thinks the resurrection accounts are likely to refer to something more mystical and subjective, but no less real, than bodily resurrection (p132). His metaphorical interpretation of the accounts allows him to say that the first Christians' experiences of Jesus' resurrection are the same sort of experience that Christians may have of Jesus' presence today (p135). "The truth of Easter," he says, "is grounded in these experiences, not in what happened (or didn't happen) on a particular Sunday almost two thousand years ago" (p135). His view of the atonement is therefore also related only metaphorically to Jesus' passion (p140).
What Borg takes to be the central meanings of the gospel are, in Wright's metaphor, ripples on a pond, and God's activity is the stone that caused them (p217). Despite the differences in their understandings of the historical ground of contemporary Christianity, there are very significant overlaps in their views on the nature of the Christian life now. Borg sees it "as a relationship to God, mediated by Scripture and tradition, and transforming our sense of ourselves and our relationship to the world" (p229), and Wright describes it in the context of worship and mission.
The mutual respect and friendship of the authors is clear throughout the book and represents a plausible way forward in a time when many Christian denominations are struggling with deep internal divisions. In reading it, I found my own understanding of Jesus challenged and reinforced, compelled, troubled, and educated.
Will Burrows
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