I’m pleased Paul has posted this comment, as I’ve felt for some time there has been very little critical discussion of N.T.Wright’s views - maybe because his output is so prodigious and formidable that few dare to lift a pen against it!

Having said that, I largely concur with Wright’s views - or at least his approach, which is to engage in biblical interpretation through a reconstructed worldview of Christians and Jews in New Testament times. Like Paul, I have also noticed that one of Wright’s first assumptions is that spanning the entire biblical writings is an interpretation of covenant - that God’s plan through all its covenantal stages had always been to reverse the damage done by the fall, and to fulfil his ambitions for creation. Since I find this very compatible to myself personally, I tend to accept it, but it is always open to question.

The view that ‘God’s righteousness’ means ‘His faithfulness to His covenant’, as so interpreted, provides a major key to unlocking Paul’s letter to the Romans, and to Paul’s thinking generally. It also provides a key to unlocking the gospels, as suggested in ‘Jesus and the Victory of God’. In a broad sense, Wright’s approach depends on an understanding that 1st century Jews were anticipating an imminent breakthrough of ‘the kingdom of God’ - a phrase which points back to the ‘glory days’ of the Davidic kingdom, and the promise to David that a future king would surpass this glory.

Wright’s interpretation is that while 1st century Jews tended to expect a triumph for Israel on the stage of national and international politics, Jesus brought a message of judgment on Israel, and the promise of salvation through a people of God reconstituted around himself. All that was needed for a Jew like Paul (not to be confused with paulhartigan elsewhere in this post referred to as ‘Paul’) was proof that Jesus had risen from the dead and that therefore his credentials as Messiah were intact. For Paul, and the early Christians, Jesus’s credentials of course went considerably further than this, as the significance of his redirected fulfilment of Israel’s destiny was pondered.

My point is that Wright is investigating the significance of Jesus’s life, teaching and claims within the reconstructed context of the various strands of 1st century Judaism - which should be the starting point for an understanding of his significance to us today. It is this perspective which provides an interpretation of the OT writings. Whether Wright, Paul, Jesus, 1st century Jews and Christians had all got it wrong is another matter. I don’t personally think so - and it is perfectly possibly even within Paul (hartigan’s) terms of reference that the OT presented an incremental understanding of God’s purposes, so that by the time of (second) Isaiah, Israel was beginning to see her role as of significance to the nations, in line with the development of God’s purposes for her.

I agree with Wright in the main - but I’d be interested in further critical discussion of his views.