Category Archives: Wright, N.T.

The Myth of Christian Origins

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Dan Brown’s The Dan Vinci Code is well past its sell-by date now.  But it has given wings to a fanciful myth about Christian origins which had being crawling around in the academic world in the US and elsewhere but has now, thanks to Brown’s book, nested in the public consciousness.

What is this myth?  The redoubtable New Testament scholar N.T. Wright, in the course of a lecture given in 2005 which exposes the sillinesses of the above-mentioned book, outlines the five elements of the Myth of Christian Origins:-

1.  …

Wright on the resurrection

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I’ve been listening to N.T. Wright’s lecture, given at the The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, in May 2007, entitled, “Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?”

It is most lucid exposition, demonstrating that only an empty tomb and a transformed body do justice to the historical evidence.

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Misreading Scripture

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N.T. Wright, in his recent book Scripture and the Authority of God, suggests some of the ways in which the ‘Right’ and the ‘Left’ have misread Scripture.  Here are some of the items in Wright’s list:-

Misreadings of the ‘Right’

  • the openly dualistic ‘rapture’ reading of 1 Thessalonians 4
  • the explicitly materialist ‘prosperity gospel’ understanding of biblical promises
  • the support of slavery
  • the endemic racialism of much Western culture
  • undifferentiated reading of Old and New Testaments
  • unacknowledged and arbitrary pick-and-mix selection of an implicit canon-within-a-canon
  • support for the death penalty
  • discovery of ‘religious’ meanings and exclusion of ‘political’ ones, thus often tacitly supporting the social status quo
  • attempted ‘biblical’ support for the modern state of Israel as the fulfilment of scriptural prophecy
  • an overall failure to pay attention to context and hermeneutics

Misreadings of the ‘Left’

  • the claim to ‘objectivity’ or to a ‘neutral’ reading of the text
  • the claim that modern history or science has either ‘disproved the Bible’ or made some of its central claims redundant, undesirable, or unbelievable
  • the attempt to relativise biblical teaching by appealing to Enlightenment-generated ‘principles’ (e.g.
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