An understanding of the fully God, fully man, person of Jesus Christ was incomprehensible to both the Jew and the Greek, for reasons peculiar to them both. For this understanding of Jesus Christ to arise, it had to come from another source. Skarsaune finds this in the Old Testament understanding of wisdom of God. The usual Jewish portrayal of the Messiah did not automatically lead to an understanding of a personal, preexistent, incarnate Messiah. For that, we must go back to the Old Testament itself and its concept of the Wisdom of God.
Wisdom becomes the entity which holds creation and salvation history together .
Skarsaune points out that Christ understood Himself as incarnate Wisdom. It is this understanding of the radical reality of an incarnate Christ, who came as the Wisdom of God, that was a stumbling block to both the Jews and the Greeks. For Skarsaune the scandal of the cross is matched only by the scandal of the incarnation. Neither the Hebrew nor the Greek mind would have made this up. Skarsaune dedicates a large portion of his book to discussion of how this scandal worked itself out in the early Christological controversies and their culmination at Nicea and Chalcedon.