Scot McKnight on Jesus and Paul

Over at CT, Scot McKnight has an article on Jesus and Paul which is well worth checking out!

I think Scot is hitting at what is quite possible the major issue in biblical theology for evangelicals. How do you read Jesus and Paul together? How does Jesus' kingdom message line up with Paul's theology of justification?

Scot's own solution is: "The gospel is first and foremost about Jesus. Or, to put it theologically, it's about Christology. Behind or underneath both kingdom and justification is the gospel, and the gospel is the saving story of Jesus that completes Israel's story. "To gospel" is to tell a story about Jesus as the Messiah, as the Lord, as the Son of God, as the Savior ... Excuse me for piling on here, but only when we grasp the gospel as the saving story about Jesus that completes Israel's story do we see the profound unity between Jesus and Paul. Both "gospeled" the same gospel because both told the story of Jesus."

Wellhausen on Jesus as a Jew

J. Wellhausen's dictum is well-known: ‘Jesus was not a Christian, but a Jew’. What is a little less known is that he also said a few paragraphs later: ‘one may be justified in maintaining that what is un-Jewish in him, what is human, is more characteristic than what is Jewish’.

J. Wellhausen, Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien (1911), pp. 102-3.

This calls to my mind something that Ernst Käsemann said in a radio broadcast where he said about human beings that "each man has become his own Jew". Yet ironically, being a Jew inwardly is regarded as being a good thing by Paul in Rom. 2.25-29.