In the closing chapter of JESUS AND THE VICTORY OF GOD, N.T. Wright acknowledges that locating Jesus within his second-temple Jewish world includes the risk of making him irrelevant.
My question for all interested is this. Since Jesus mission was the ushering in of the reign of God, and since for the last 2000 years it is apparent that the lion is not laying down with the lamb, that plowshares are beaten into swords, the nations are not streaming to the mountain of the Lord, and no little child is leading them, doesn’t it make more sense to conclude that the reign of Israel’s God has not begun, and that Jesus in consequence must be regarded as a failure at best, or a false messiah and false prophet at worst? Stuart