How NT Wright Stole Christmas » Peter Leithart | A First Things Blog

Christmas is an interesting time of year with most people revelling in the sentimentality of the season. But Jesus himself was not sentimental at all. Peter Leithart makes the point that so much of what we see and hear about Jesus in popular culture, Christmas hymns, movies and even Christian ethos is not really that much like the real Jesus of the scriptures.

In particular he makes reference to the excellent NT theologian NT Wright and some of the deeply challenging things he has written that force us back to the gospels to find the Jesus we've often missed. Often Wright has 'spoiled' our commonly held ideas of Jesus - but he has replaced them with far deeper, more truthful and powerful themes from the scriptures.

Liethart makes the following observation:

Several years ago, when The Passion of the Christ was making headlines, I realized that N. T. Wright has spoiled every Jesus film. Once you’ve read Wright, you realize that none of the movies get Jesus right. Pharisees and scribes are reduced stock villains with caricatured Jewish features. Pilate has to make an appearance, and Herod, but we are given no sense that first-century Israel was the powder keg that it actually was.

No film ever gives us what Wright says we should be looking for: a “crucifiable” Jesus, a Jesus who does something so provocative to make the Jews murderously hostile. In the movies, Jesus is a hippy peace-child, a delicate flower of a man, a dew-eyed first-century Jewish Gandhi. Why would anyone want to hurt Him? Maybe because He’s so annoyingly precious; but that’s not the story of the gospels.

It's an interesting comment and in many ways true. So much of what we believe about Jesus is more flavoured by culture rather than scripture. May we keep turning back to the text of the gospels this season to allow our preconceived ideas of Jesus to be undone, that this Christmas we may again meet the saviour of the world and not simply an empty caricature.

Liethart's full article is here: How NT Wright Stole Christmas