Jesus and the Jewish Nation

The Ethel M. Wood Lecture, delivered before the University of London on 9 March 1965 and published by the Athlone Press the same year as a pamphlet of 22 pages. Caird argues that the Christian faith, having appealed to history, is committed to the quest of the historical Jesus, and he declines the scepticism of the school of criticism that would credit nothing to Jesus unless it could not have come from the church, naming Bultmann among its representatives. Against it he reads Jesus as calling his own nation to a different way of being Israel: his teaching was a national way of life, not only private piety, and the nation's refusal of it would bring disastrous conflict with Rome. On this reading the gospel warnings of judgment, Mark 13 among them, concern a historical crisis, and Jesus goes to his death identified with the nation whose fate he foresaw. N. T. Wright later credited the lecture as a source of his own approach to Jesus.