Hi Guys,
Sorry I have missed out for a few weeks.
Dave, please excuse my ignorance, I am not sure what you mean by “archival material”.
“Gospel records” simply means what is recorded in the Gospels - like Jesus knowing that He was doing His Father’s business at an early age.
If I understand Wright correctly, in contrast to all other prophets, Jesus was not called to His prophetic role and told what to say, He just presumed to take it upon Himself to announce and pre-enact, like an OT prophet, God’s coming to the Temple that He, based on His human reasoning, deduced was probably going to happen some time soon.
According to Wright, Jesus was well aware that He was possibly making a terrible, lunatic mistake.
To Wright, that presumption is perfectly reasonable for a good, Torah-abiding man of the time.
However, Scripture says that “a prophet who presumes to speak in my name anything I have not commanded … is to be put to death.” (Deut 18:20).
I cant see from the Gospel records (and the OT) how one can argue that Jesus did know who He was and was simply acting on an impulse to help God out in some way.
However, I note that you (too) refer to Jesus simply as a man. “Knowing that He was God” is therefore totally irrelevant in that case. He was just a man who later mistakenly came to be worshipped as God by ignorant Christians. The Gospel records were later falsified to reflect such later beliefs. Wright’s job is to filter out all that Deity nonsense.
That is what, in my opinion, Wright believes. However he appears to want to have his cake and eat it. He wants to reject the Deity of the purely human Jesus, yet appear to his large evangelical following that he is still orthodox. I would respect him more if he stated his beliefs much more clearly. He IS an expert communicator. I therefore feel very strongly about his vagueness and ambiguity in these matters.
Throwing in words such as “incarnates” when he simply means “symbolises” is misleading, he knows better.