Category Archives: Wright, N.T.

Mt 28; Mk 16; Lk 24; Jn 20 – Do the resurrection accounts add up?

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[This is an update of a piece first posted in 2013]

The difficulties involved in reconciling the details of the resurrection narrative of the four Evangelists are well known.

Let us begin with the question of how many women went to the tomb.

Mt 28:1 Now after the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb.

Mk 16:1 When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought aromatic spices so that they might go and anoint him.…

The warnings of Jesus

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It is sometimes imagined that Jesus was nothing but sweetness and light.  But this is very wide of the mark.

As N.T. Wright (Jesus and the Victory of God, p183f) points out the Synoptic Gospels record a ‘pretty devastating catalogue of threats and warnings’.

That catalogue, as compiled by Wright, looks something like this:

Leave the dead to bury the dead (Mt. 8:22/Lk. 9:60);

Do not put the new wine into old wineskins (Mt.

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N.T. Wright on the Virgin Birth

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The New Testament accounts of the Virgin Birth (more properly, the virginal conception) of Christ make good historical sense, says N.T. Wright.  In an article entitled ‘God’s Way of Acting’ (The Christian Century, December 16th 1989) Wright sets out his argument.  What follows is a summary.

Of course, we make much of the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke, even though the New Testament itself places much more stress on events of Calvary, Easter and Pentecost.…

The Day the Revolution Began

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I’ve been going through Tom Wright’s important new book The Day the Revolution Began: Rethinking the Meaning of Jesus’ Crucifixion (SPCK, 2016) with a fine tooth-comb.  Here I offer a synopsis of what I think Wright is saying.

Part One: Introduction

1. A Vitally Important Scandal

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Lost boys

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Tom Wright, bless his heart, has a habit of turning things on their heads, so that we see them at a completely different angle.  Sometimes this is infuriating.  But at other times it is fascinating and enlightening.  So…

Much of the discussion about the Bible’s teaching on the relationships between men and women, between husbands and wives, has focused in recent years on the role and status of women.  But this can disguise the fact that in our own day it’s harder than ever to be a boy.  …

Miracle and metaphor

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Marcus J. Borg describes himself as  ‘moderate to liberal’ scholar.  In setting out his ‘appreciative disagreement’ with Tom Wright (in response to the latter’s Jesus and the Victory of God), Borg homes in on the question of miracle.  He sees the Gospels as a combination of ‘history remembered’ and ‘history metaphorized’.  The first of these terms refers to those events that are recorded in the Gospels simply because they actually happened.  The second term refers to other things that are related in the Gospels.  …

Why preachers cannot ignore the New Perspective on Paul

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To talk of a ‘New Perspective on Paul’ (NPP) is to imply that there is an ‘Old Perspective’ that has now come under scrutiny.

It might be tempting to respond by saying, “A curse on both your houses! I shall ignore them both and simply read and preach the text itself.”

An understandable aim, no doubt, but one that would be unwise to attempt, and impossible to achieve.

Unwise to attempt, because we would then be elevating what we think the Holy Spirit is telling us about what God’s word means, above what others, possibly more insightful than us, think he has told them.…

Idolatry today

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The word ‘idolatry’ has a remote, archaic, feel to it.  Ancient people, and primitive people, are idolatrous, aren’t they.  But us…?  The command ‘You shall have not other Gods before me’ (Exodus 20:3) seems to be quite irrelevant.

Tom Wright, in his recent book Surprised by Scripture, shows that idolatry is alive and well in our modern, supposedly secular, society.  The ancient gods are alive and kicking.

Today’s Western world hardly needs reminding about the place of Mammon, the worship of money, in our society.
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Was Paul a Catholic?

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It is interesting to note that the New Perspective on Paul has flourished in the wake of the Holocaust and the onset of the ecumenical movement, and the development of closer ties between Roman Catholics and Protestants.

The link here is that the ‘old’ (Protestant, and especially Lutheran) perspective on Paul taught that both Judaism and Roman Catholicism were (and are) beset by legalism, and that Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith alone was needed to counter-act this.…

Why did Jesus do nature miracles?

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N.T. Wright (Jesus and the Victory of God) points out that in addition to the healing miracles of Jesus, we find him exercising power over the natural order, as with the miraculous catch of fish, the stilling of storms, feeding of multitudes in the desert, and (negatively) the cursing of a fig tree.

In these actions, Jesus is demonstrating his power to bring the natural order into ‘a new harmony with itself’ in ways that had only occasionally been glimpsed previously, as with the crossing of the Red Sea.…