Borg sees the gospels as a developing tradition, a mixture of history remembered and history metaphorized.  He believes that the name 'Jesus' refers to both the human Jesus, or Jesus of history, and the 'Christ of Faith.'  He calls these the pre-Easter Jesus and post-Easter Jesus.  He sees the pre-Easter Jesus as a Galilean Jewish peasant of the first century, dead and gone.  The post-Easter Jesus is the Jesus of both Christian tradition and experience.  He believes that if we don't distinguish between the two, we risk losing both.  He looks at Christ through four 'lenses':  the modern study of Jesus, the study of ancient Judaism, the interdisciplinary study of Jesus and Christian origins, and the cross-cultural study of religion.

Wright doesn't split his idea of Jesus, but talks about two ways of knowing Jesus:  by history and by faith.  History challenges the Jesus we know by 'faith'; faith prevents history from turning Jesus into a historical artifact.  We know Christ by history through evidence, and by faith through our experience of the living Christ.  History cannot veto 'faith', only put hard questions to it.  By sitting with contradictions, we allow faith and history to work together to create new insights.  Wright believes we need to understand the personal 'lenses' that distort our understanding of Christ.  His method for knowing Christ is to start with what we know of Christ, and then 'step-by-step draw in new evidence within a growing hypothesis about Jesus and Christian origins.'

Borg does not believe that Jesus had any idea of himself as 'Messiah', which Borg equates with 'Son of God', and other 'exalted metaphors'.  He believes that these claims were made in the early Christian movement but not by Christ himself.   He looks at Christ first as a Jewish mystic, meaning that for Jesus, God was an experiential reality, both immanent (indwelling) and transcendent (beyond).  Jesus was a deeply Jewish figure with an experience of injustice.  Having established this idea of Jesus, Borg turns to 'what he was up to'.  He believes Christ had a 'sense of mission', and that healing and a shared meal were two central features of Jesus' public activity.  Jesus offers alternative wisdom (as opposed to conventional wisdom, which acts to enculturate).  Jesus offers a new way of seeing, a new way of centering (from a life centered in convention to a life centered in the sacred), and a new way of living - according to an ethic of compassion which sees all people as beloved of God.  Jesus was a social prophet, opposing a domination system which was characterized by politics of oppression, economics of exploitation, and a religion of legitimation.  In addition, Jesus was a movement initiator.  Finally, he was a prophet of the kingdom of God (which Borg sees referring primarily to an experience of the power of God, the presence of God among us, life under the lordship of God, and a social vision of a world based on social justice).

Part II:  What Did Jesus Do And Teach?

In this chapter Wright builds his understanding of who Jesus is.  His 'final' conception is that Christ is "A first-century Jewish prophet announcing and inaugurating the kingdom of God, summoning others to join him, warning of the consequences if they did not, doing all this in symbolic actions, and indicating in symbolic actions, and in cryptic and coded sayings, that he believed he was Israel's messiah, the one through whom the true God would accomplish his decisive purpose."  Wright believes that Christ's conception of the 'kingdom of God' was one where compassion and forgiveness would 'rule'; it was in opposition to the then current view that created fear and hatred of outsiders, and oppression of insiders.  Instead of creating a 'restored community' by keeping the impure out, Jesus created his by healing and thus bringing them in.  He believed that 'the kingdom was breaking in to Israel's history in and through his own presence and work.'  Christ was replacing the temple as the means of salvation, thereby fulfilling Israel's destiny as the 'light of the world; the salt of the earth.'  Christ did not see himself as divine, but was 'powerfully aware of the deeply personal presence and purpose, strength and guidance' of God.  Wright believes that Christ understood himself in messianic terms, in that he believed himself to be the one through whom Israel's God would bring about Israel's longed-for redemption.

Borg believes that Jesus' belief in the necessity of his own death for our salvation, as a fulfillment of Jewish (OT) scripture is a product of the early Christian community, and not something Jesus himself believed.  Borg isn't saying Jesus didn't see his own death coming, just that he doesn't think Jesus saw his death as central to his purpose.

In Jesus' final week, he was portrayed by Mark not as a healer, but was, above all, in conflict with the temple.  Borg sees him then, as a teacher and social prophet embroiled in controversy, protesting the temple's role in the domination system, doing that in Jerusalem, the center of that domination system.

Borg argues that the passion stories developed and grew in the decades between Jesus' death and their composition, and that although they contain some history remembered, they are largely prophecy historicized, imaginative elaboration, and purposive interpretation.  He argues that much of the quoting of Hebrew scripture by Christ was added to narratives because they seemed to fit the situation, not because Jesus actually uttered them.

Borg questions how exactly Judas betrayed Jesus, how details of the  'unwitnessed' trial could be known.  He believes that blame for Jesus' death was shifted from the Romans to 'the Jews' as the story was told through time, and that the reason Jesus was executed was because he challenged the domination system in the name of God.

Wright makes the points that news of the details of even 'secret' meetings travels fast in a largely oral culture, and that he believes the original stories of Jesus death were told repeatedly with little alteration.

Wright argues that scripture and tradition shaped Jesus' understanding of himself as "the one through whom Israel's God would at last deal with its exile and sin and bring about its longed-for redemption ... through his own suffering and death."    He says that the understanding that God would use suffering and death to bring about the redemption of his people was accepted in Jesus' time. Jesus believed his death would serve both actually and symbolically to inaugurate both a new way of thinking about Israel's redemption and the redemption itself. 

Wright argues that the priests wanted Jesus out of the way because of his challenge to the temple, and that to accomplish this, Pilate could be told that Jesus was a rebel king, and the crowds could be told that Jesus was a 'blasphemer'.

Wright believes that in the Christian community, Jesus' death was not originally seen as individuals' sin having been atoned for, but rather pointed to where Israel and the world now were 'within God's eschatological timetable.'  Christian atonement theology evolved out of this belief, though it went beyond what Jesus had said, and developed through the extension of Israel's 'return from exile' to the gentiles.

Borg believes that Jesus being raised from the dead is the foundational affirmation of the New Testament, and that there are two central meanings to Easter:  Jesus lives (and continues to be experienced), and Jesus is Lord (Jesus is God).

 However, Borg believes the question of whether or not there was an empty tomb to be irrelevant.  He believes this for three reasons:  First, Jesus was not resuscitated, but resurrected, which implies a new kind of existence that is not dependent on transformation of a corpse.

Secondly, in Paul's earliest discussion of the resurrection, he does not mention the tomb, speaks of appearances of Jesus in a way that could be interpreted as visions or apparitions which are nevertheless true, and connects the 'body animated by soul' (earthly) to the 'body animated by spirit' (spiritual) as a seed is connected to the plant.  Borg claims that it is unclear that a physical body is present after the resurrection.  He claims that the resurrection story is a "metaphorical narrative with rich resonances of meaning."

His third reason is the nature of resurrection stories in the Bible, and he gives examples where of inconsistencies that make it unreasonable to assume that the story was meant literally. The historical importance of the resurrection, to Borg,  is that Jesus' followers continued to experience his presence after his death. 

Borg goes on to describe five meanings of the completed pattern of death and resurrection:  rejection/vindication (rejection of the domination system, vindication of Jesus), defeat of the powers (spiritual powers that hold us in bondage, and are embodied in earthly institutions, including political powers), revelation of the way ("a metaphor for the internal spiritual process that lies at the heart of the Christian path"), a revelation of the love of God (because of the sacrifice), and a sacrifice for sin (by negating the temple's claim to have an institutional monopoly on forgiveness and access to God.)

He emphasizes that Christ is the end of the system of requirements and failing to measure up.  He says that if we accept that we are made right with God by believing that Jesus is the sacrifice, we have only substituted one set of requirements for another, and that instead Jesus has done the work of salvation for us; resurrection is a metaphorical proclamation of the radical grace of God and nothing more is required of us.

Wright believes that an historical resurrection is necessary for the power of Easter to exist, and that it involves the transformation of the existing body into a new mode of physicality.  Discrepencies in the story don't undermine it, but point to the reality that the witnesses were not in collusion.  He believes that the metaphorical dimensions of the stories work precisely because the events actually occurred.

Wright begins with a review of resurrection in first-century Judaism, about which there was a spectrum of beliefs.  In early Judaism, it's meaning was often largely metaphorical, but gradually became literal.  In Jesus' day, the resurrection was to be the raising to life of the righteous dead (and perhaps the unrighteous dead).  In the meantime they were spirits, souls, or angels.

He then claims that when speaking of Jesus, resurrection implies coming back to bodily life, rather than continuing on in a spiritual form.  This was in strong contrast to other 'messiahs', whose movements usually dissipated after the leader's death, or who were followed by a 'new' messiah.  Declaring that one's messiah had been raised from the dead was not an option.  So early Christians not only claimed that the great hope of Israel had happened, but in a way that was totally unexpected.

Wright claims that most early Christians believed that Jesus had actually been raised from the dead, and that though the present age continued, the 'new age' had also come into existence.  He rests much of his belief in the physical resurrection on Paul's words and beliefs about Jesus' resurrection:  the significance of the resurrection was in the fact that it had happened, Paul's own 'seeing' of Jesus was of a different sort than the disciples, Jesus resurrection was the beginning of the final 'end' which would include the resurrection of all believers, the resurrected body and existing body are both continuous and discontinuous, and the resurrection not only gives hope for the future, but a sense of meaning and purpose to the present.

For Wright, the meanings of Easter are that the story of God, Israel and the world had entered a new phase, that Jesus had been validated as messiah, and that God's new world had been brought to birth, a world in which we are called "to holiness: to the fully human life, reflecting the image of God, that is made possible by Jesus' victory on the cross and that is energized by the Spirit of the risen Jesus present within communities and persons."