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But when I stick with what the Gospels actually report Jesus saying, I gain new insights that make the truisms of one's own tradition look cheap and shallow. When you come to the parable of the Prodigal Son, for example, we assume, "Of course, it's about God's gracious welcome for sinners." End of conversation. But when I discovered most first-century Jews believed they were still in exile, still suffering under the pagans because of their rebellion, I realized, Hey, this is a story of exile and restoration.

Scholars today emphasize the Jewishness of Jesus. Why is that so important?

We have to recognize Jesus' apocalyptic eschatology, the first-century Jewish sense that history was coming to its climax. Starting a Jewish movement in the first century was not simply saying, "Here is a better way of doing religion, sacrifice, and forgiveness." It was not a new philosophy or teaching. It was a movement saying, "The great moment of history is upon us. We've got to seize it or be seized by it!"

The Jesus who was shows us who the eternal Lord is because he is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Of course this clashes radically with, and offends, more recent Western assumptions that world history actually reached its climax in the European Enlightenment or in today's postmodern era.

One of the great struggles we have as Christians is to say Easter morning was the beginning of God's new age for the world. Christians often talk as if the Resurrection simply "meant" that individuals can know the living Jesus and discover forgiveness for themselves. That's true, of course, but the full meaning of Easter is the much bigger truth that we are already living in God's new age, under the hidden rule of Christ.

But to set Jesus thoroughly in his Jewish, apocalyptic, first-century world makes him seem irrelevant today.

Many people assume the only things that are "relevant" are great truths hanging in mid-air, applicable to everybody equally. But the entire biblical revelation, from Genesis to Revelation, insists that God reveals himself through the particularity of Israel's history, which reaches its climax in Jesus, the Jewish Messiah.

That is always scandalous intellectually and culturally. But it is only by holding on to Jesus as the Jewish prophet who finally fulfills his messianic vocation that we understand in biblical terms—not in our terms—the Lord of all space and time.

What are some of the misunderstandings we've developed?

Let me give but two examples. First, the word messiah is routinely taken as a description of divinity. When people read Peter's pronouncement, "You are the Messiah," many think Peter is saying Jesus is the Second Person of the Trinity. But in Jesus' day, messiah referred to the concept of king—not deity.

Second, many people believe that when Jesus spoke of giving his life as a "ransom for many," he was implicitly pointing to an atonement theology that Luther or Augustine developed. In fact, within first-century Judaism, some believed the suffering and death of God's righteous people could bring about Israel's liberation; that it could focus and thus conclude the time of wrath. I have argued that Jesus believed his death would bring salvation not through some abstract theological scheme but by his taking upon himself the fate of the nation, and thus of the world, so that God's new age would come at last.

I don't want to deny the importance of theologians trying to fill out for us the full meaning of atonement or Christ's divinity, but we must always begin with what the text said in its original setting.

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