Marcus Borg and Tom Wright are good friends and enjoy discussing these issues. Between their two perspectives, Wright sees Jesus’ life in terms of a 1st century Palestinian Jewish prophet, announcing God’s kingdom, believing that the kingdom was
breaking in to Israel’s history in and through his own presence and work, and summoning other Jews to abandon alternative kingdom visions and join him in his kingdom movement, and warning of dire consequences for the nation, for Jerusalem and for the temple, if his summons was ignored. His agendas led him into a symbolic clash with those who embraced other ones, and this, together with the positive symbols of his own kingdom agenda, point to the way in which he saw his inaugurated kingdom moving toward accomplishment. All these actions make him a thoroughly credible first century Jew. Wright believes Jesus was aware of his mission as messiah and its likely outcome.

Borg sees the pre-Easter Jesus as a Jewish mystic: Jesus as Spirit person, healer, wisdom teacher, social prophet and movement initiator. He sees the post-Easter Jesus as Christian messiah: exalted titles like Son of God, Word of God, Wisdom/Sophia of God, Lamb of God, Light of the World, Bread of Life, Alpha and Omega, firstborn of all creation, etc. which are really exalted metaphors.
Borg distinguishes between “history remembered” and “history metaphorized.” Whether Jesus thought of himself in those exalted
metaphors, they are the Christian community’s testimony to what Jesus had become in their life together.

Jesus Death
Wright: Its relevance is traditionally in terms of sin and guilt, whereby the individual sinner finds peace for a troubled conscience, in the present, and the assurance of ultimate forgiveness from God, in life after death. The larger story of victory over evil as a whole is largely ignored given the apparent continuing state of the world.

Resurrection
Interesting contrast between resuscitation and resurrection with the former requiring the enlivening of a particular set of atoms and the latter the creation of something altogether new. Since we can’t even account for “our” atoms from hour to hour as we share them with everyone on the planet every two weeks, even God would run out of atoms trying to reconstruct an actual ‘me’ that has materially changed each day of my entire life.
Per Borg: A vision of the Christian life that takes Jesus seriously would not be very much concerned with the afterlife. Jesus’s message was not about how to get to heaven. This Impression is due to two misunderstood phrases in the gospels: Matthew’s frequent use of “kingdom of heaven” because he did not want to use the word God. John’s Jesus speaks of “eternal life” which translates “life of the age to come” — which is a present reality – not “life in heaven.”

Borg: The Bible is like a lens through which we see God. Fundamentalists say it’s important to believe in the lens. This lens is a means by which we see, not the object of belief. Borg does not think being a Christian is primarily about believing. It is not about believing in the lens, but about entering a deepening relationship to that which we see through the lens. It is not about believing in the Bible or the gospels or Christian teachings about Jesus, but about a relationship to the One whom we see through the lens of Christian tradition as a whole. It is widely held that “believing” is the central dynamic of the Christian life.
Borg: Jesus is, for us as Christians, the decisive revelation of what God is like and of what a life full of God is like. As both “true God” and “true human,” Jesus is a lens through which we see God and what a life full of God is like. Through this lens, God is: near, at hand, and can be experienced: immediately accessible, apart from convention, tradition, and institution — not requiring any other mediation. Ironically. fundamentalists have positioned Jesus as the “only way to God”; compassionate; and passionate about justice.
Borg has a cool way of describing how he “reads” scripture which happens to match the way I have often used. He calls it post-critical naivete. As kids we read the stories with pre-critical naivete. As we go through adolescence we learn critical thinking. Beyond that, and many people remain stuck in critical thinking, is post-critical naivete, the ability to hear the central stories of the Christian tradition once again as true stories. One knows that their truth does not depend upon their historical factuality.

This is similar to the Native American storyteller’s, “I don’t know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.”. T. S. Elliot wrote: “And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”