Frankly, I think the interpreation modern thinkers might make of the itinerant prophet from Galilee are much more appealing and helpful o us than the interpretations of first century evangelists.
More than anything else in his long, thoughtful comment, this caught my eye because it lies at the heart of the whole issue of Christian faith, an is part of the reason Wright is pursuing the project he has embarked upon. We need to relearn how to read Scripture and the early tradition of the Church without certain prejudices that our modern and post-modern thinkers have insisted are non-negotiable: the superiority of contemporary ways of thinking over "primitive" (Bultmann) ones, and the opacity of texts to readers, leaving them barren mirrors reflecting neither what early modern sciprture scholars thought they saw (early church controversies placed in texts) or late modern scripture scholars thought they saw (metaphors wrapped in symbols surrounded by an ever-retreating enigma named Jesus of Nazareth, always out of reach in his unsullied purity), but our own concerns and prejudices, which usually include the above, but are void of any actual content of their own. Wright is waging a one-person war against the deconstruction of Bibilical texts with a simple dose of interpretive common sense. As such, while I far from agree with everything he says, I find his approach refreshing, and some at least of his conclusions to be a wonderful counter to the "sensible" approach of too many non-believers masking as scripture scholars.
One of the things DL wrote concerns the mission of Paul to the Gentiles. Indeed, Paul's mission work was to Gentiles, but as Craig Hall, a student of Wright's from Oxford who now teaches at my seminary alma mater, Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC, has pointed out, much of the so-called "Hellenists versus Hebrews" controversy is front-loaded with gross (in all senses of the word) anti-Semitism, and a complete miscontrual of the complexities of first-century Jewish life, not the least of them Jewish evangelism in the diaspora. Many of the "Gentiles" were, in all likelihood Jewish proselytes who had not yet completed the very rigorous conversion process. Paul was not out to invent a religion; there is nothing in his letters to even pretend such a reading is credible. Indeed, he protests constantly that his message is no different from the tradition that was passed to him (part of which he repeats verbatim from the Gospel accounts in his first letter to the Corinthians in re the institution of the eucharist). It is difficult to get around the simple truth that Paul no more invented the divinity of Jesus than did the writers of the Gospels make up stories of resurrection to say something else. I will grant that the God-man, as you call him, is nonsensical in a variety of ways. I will not grant, however, that it is a later gloss by those intent on distorting a message to serve ends other than those of Jesus.
This, in fact, is part of Wright's point. We completely misunderstand early Christianity if we think the divinity of Jesus was easier to understand for early Gentile Christians than for either their Jewish counterparts or contemporary thinkers. In fact, the idea was and is preposterous on its face. Part of the struggle the early church faced was that Jesus' teachings, not their teachings about him, were a complete re-writing of Jewish thought on messianism, not the least of which included the inevitability and necessity of his own death. I do not try to rescusitate substitutional atonement theory; it is a viable reading, although my reading of it is not traditional, nor is it Wright's. As to why God would require it, ask God. Part of the problem with a question like that implies that there exists some general idea of what God can and cannot do to which the Christian God must conform. I do not ask you to either believe in God or like what the Christian God does and does not do. I struggle with this issue no less than you do, but I cannot escape something that is both simple and, to me, profound - God isn't me, and God's ways aren't mine, or yours, or anyone else's. The situation is what it is, and there comes a time in any person's life when that person is forced to take it or leave it. If you leave it, it doesn't make it any less real or true. If you take it, though, it just might mean all the difference in the world.
We have to surrender our own prejudices and, perhaps, open ourselves to the possibility that those first century evangelists knew a thing or two we sophisticated moderns and oh-so-cynical and knowing post-moderns do not. We should take them at their word, although not in any literal way, and read them for what they say, not what we want them to say. In the same way, we should come to God not expecting God to conform to our thoughts and ideas about what God should be and do and say, but as God is. God did the same, and asks no less of us than God was willing to do.
