N. T. Wright, Why and How Paul Invented "Christian Theology" at Duke

In my previous post, I linked to the Tom Wright's Panel Discussion with Douglas Campbell, Ross Wagner and Susan Eastman at Duke Divinity School.  This was the first of several events in the area featuring N. T. Wright.  Yesterday lunchtime, Professor Wright gave a lecture "Why and How Paul Invented 'Christian Theology'" and with thanks to Reed Criswell, it is now available on Youtube here:





Make sure that you stay all the way to the end.  There are some enjoyable Q&As at the end, including one from Joel Marcus.

Tom Wright Panel Discussion with Douglas Campbell, Ross Wagner and Susan Eastman at Duke Divinity School

We have enjoyed having N. T. Wright visiting Duke this week.  Two of the events at which he spoke are now available to view online, with many thanks to Reed Criswell for his fine work in recording and uploading them.  The first is this panel discussion on Pauline Theology which took place on Monday evening:





I was able to get to this panel discussion and I must admit that I found it really compelling stuff. The participants are my colleagues over in the Divinity School Douglas Campbell, Ross Wagner and Susan Eastman. Richard Hays was the moderator. The event was absolutely packed out. Watching Douglas and Tom spar with one another was a particular highlight. There are some great moments. The video is about 90 minutes long.

Tom Wright on the Apostles Junia and Mary Magdalene

I am teaching Paul this term at Duke and we have reached the part of the course where we look at issues connected with women and gender.  I was hoping to find some Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza on Youtube to show the class, but the only piece of her that I can find is her Burke Lecture from 2007 on another topic, and it is a video of her simply reading a script.  But while searching, I came across a short piece of a rather casual Tom Wright chatting about Junia and Mary Magdalene

 



It's an enjoyable piece, and it is good to see him so strongly behind the Junia reading given that he earlier assumed the Junias reading (Climax of the Covenant: 48, "these two men . . .").

Tom Wright reads Humpty Dumpty

With thanks to Jason Hood, on the SAET Blog:

Tom Wright Reads Humpty Dumpty

Tom Wright on Moving to St Andrews

BBC Wear had a nice little feature on the forthcoming retirement of of Tom Wright as the Bishop of Durham, and his move to St Andrews University, Scotland, to work on his Paul book. And it turns out that he is a keen amateur golfer too, and there is some footage of him playing. It's about three minutes long:

Bishop of Durham approaches retirement

Is it just me or is Bishop Tom now sounding a bit more like Archbishop Rowan in the bishopy way he enunciates? Perhaps after a few months at St Andrews, that will all change and he will begin talking like Jim Davila.

Wright on Resurrection in Today's Guardian

N. T. Wright has a short piece, a kind of numbered list, in today's Guardian, responding to Adam Rutherford who has been attending an Alpha Course* and who is writing up his experiences as he goes:

The resurrection was as shocking then as it is now
When Adam Rutherford talks about the resurrection, he misses the point. It isn't an extra thing, bolted on to our moral philosophy

Fans of Wright's work will find the piece a robust and engaging summary of familiar themes from his work on the resurrection, like the claim that the ancients found resurrection as perplexing an idea as we do ("we all know that dead people don't rise. Actually, the early Christians knew that too") but there was one element that appeared new to me, the idea that "The other "raisings" in the NT are of course what we would call 'near death experiences' – people who are clinically dead and then find themselves called back," but it is possible that I have missed that in Wright's writings.

A couple of other things occur to me. The first, underlined for me all the more after reading James McGrath's post today on Preach your doubts, is that I am quite taken aback by the degree of confidence that Wright has in his historical analysis. For those who do not share the same degree of confidence, the certainty expressed here, the repeated "of course" (x 6 in a short article), may perhaps be tough to handle. I wondered too whether this kind of vigorous response quite met the more impressionistic jottings-style commentary of Rutherford's original piece in his ongoing response to the Alpha course he is attending.

*The Alpha Course is a popular British evangelical week-by-week introduction to the Christian faith, usually consisting of a talk, a meal and some discussion.

Did Wright coin the term "the new perspective" on Paul?

As everyone knows, the term "the new perspective on Paul" was coined by Jimmy Dunn in 1982, on 4 November, at his Manson Memorial Lecture at the University of Manchester, subsequently published in 1983 in the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 65 (1983), 95-122, and reprinted in several places, most recently online at the Paul Page. And yet four years earlier, N. T. Wright had already used the term,

N. T. Wright, "The Paul of History and the Apostle of Faith": The Tyndale New Testament Lecture, 1978, Tyndale Bulletin 29 (1978), 61–88, reproduced at the N. T. Wright page

The debate between Stendahl and Käsemann concerns the relation, in Paul’s thought, between justification and salvation-history — between the Apostle who preached the Lutheran Gospel of justification by faith and the Paul who was called, in God’s historical purposes, to be the Apostle to the Gentiles. It would not be an overstatement to say that all the major issues in Pauline interpretation are contained (at least by implication) in this debate, and in one lecture there are therefore bound to be oversimplifications and downright lacunae. I want to try nevertheless to present what I take to be a new view of Paul. . . .

. . . . This debate has all the makings of a classic, with the agenda including wide-ranging issues in Pauline theology detailed exegesis of several passages, and challenges to traditional dogmatic frameworks, all with inescapable twentieth-century overtones. I want now to contribute to it by offering a new way of looking at Paul which provides, I believe, not only an advance in the debate between Stendahl and Käsemann but also a new perspective on other related Pauline problems. I shall first sketch out this new view and argue briefly for its central thrust, and then show how it offers new light on the debate.

Who'd have thought that Wright gave us not only "the third quest" but also "the new perspective"? He has a lot to answer for!

Ehrman vs. Wright Smackdown

If you haven't already seen it, there is an interesting exchange between Bart Ehrman and N. T. Wright over on Beliefnet. It's the kind of thing they used to call a "smackdown" but they have replaced that term with the more gentlemanly "Blogalogue - Debates with Spirit":

Is Our Pain God's Problem?

You have to read them from the bottom up if you navigate from that page, or you can begin with Ehrman's first and proceed through each contribution (three each) by clicking through at the top of each page. The debate is interesting but ultimately frustrating. As is also characteristic of the old "smackdowns" on Beliefnet, the scholars who are debating with one another are celebrity scholars and their tendency is to use the opportunity to expound their own views afresh, often using the other's views only as prompts. In other words, one never gets the feeling of rigorous intellectual exchange of the kind where the scholars are thinking fresh thoughts. At the end of Ehrman's last post, for example, he asks Wright if he agrees on any one of four of the leading claims in his new book. Wright does not answer the question directly, but implies that it is the wrong question. To be fair to both, I do feel that each one is trying to listen to the other, but perhaps what we need on these occasions is a live debate with a chairperson who can hold each one to account, and direct each one to speak in bite-sized chunks rather than mini-essays.

Fish, Ehrman, Flew, Oppenheimer and Wright

There is an interesting piece in The New York Times in which Stanley Fish reviews new books by Antony Flew and Bart Ehrman:

Suffering, Evil and the Existence of God

Bart D. Ehrman is a professor of religious studies and his book is titled “God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer.” A graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, Ehrman trained to be a scholar of New Testament Studies and a minister. Born-again as a teenager, devoted to the scriptures (he memorized entire books of the New Testament), strenuously devout, he nevertheless lost his faith because, he reports, “I could no longer reconcile the claims of faith with the fact of life . . . I came to the point where I simply could not believe that there is a good and kindly disposed Ruler who is in charge.” “The problem of suffering,” he recalls, “became for me the problem of faith.”

Much of the book is taken up with Ehrman’s examination of biblical passages that once gave him solace, but that now deliver only unanswerable questions: “Given [the] theology of selection – that God had chosen the people of Israel to be in a special relationship with him – what were Ancient Israelite thinkers to suppose when things did not go as planned or expected? . . . . How were they to explain the fact that the people of God suffered from famine, drought, and pestilence?” . . . .

The article goes on to look at Antony Flew's new book, There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, but what really caught my attention was the appended reference to an article also appearing over the weekend in the New York Times:

The Turning of an Atheist
Mark Oppenheimer

The article is a fascinating and ultimately quite depressing account of the genesis of a book that, according to Oppenheimer, has more to do with a certain Roy Varghese and Flew's failing memory than it does to Flew's own rigorous academic research. The key passage is here,

“This is really Roy’s doing,” he said, before I had even figured out a polite way to ask. “He showed it to me, and I said O.K. I’m too old for this kind of work!”

When I asked Varghese, he freely admitted that the book was his idea and that he had done all the original writing for it. But he made the book sound like more of a joint effort — slightly more, anyway. “There was stuff he had written before, and some of that was adapted to this,” Varghese said. “There is stuff he’d written to me in correspondence, and I organized a lot of it. And I had interviews with him. So those three elements went into it. Oh, and I exposed him to certain authors and got his views on them. We pulled it together. And then to make it more reader-friendly, HarperCollins had a more popular author go through it.”

So even the ghostwriter had a ghostwriter: Bob Hostetler, an evangelical pastor and author from Ohio, rewrote many passages, especially in the section that narrates Flew’s childhood. With three authors, how much Flew was left in the book? “He went through everything, was happy with everything,” Varghese said.

The article is a must-read, an impressive piece of investigative journalism. But there is another angle that will be of interest to New Testament geeks, something not mentioned in Oppenheimer's piece.

The Atlantic.com yesterday published a comment from Ross Douthat on Oppenheimer's piece, and it notes that Tom Wright provides an appendix for the book in which he "responds to questions from ('from'?) Flew along the lines of 'what evidence is there for the existence of God?'". Douthat's concluding comments express some concern:

On the basis of his [Oppenheimer's] reporting, There Is A God is a disgrace, the publisher ought to be ashamed of itself (ha!), and N.T. Wright, whose reputation is deservedly sterling, ought to disassociate himself from the project. Anthony Flew’s turn to deism seems genuine, but he’s in no position to have his name and reputation associated with a book about so important a topic, and the people responsible for taking advantage of his friendship have brought only scandal to the name of the beliefs they hold so dear.

On Faith latest: Wright and Crossan

Tom Wright and John Dominic Crossan weigh in again in the latest of the On Faith column from The Washington Post and Newsweek, both on the Pope, Wright's headed A Caste System for Chrisitans and Crossan's Primacy and Insecurity. Of relevance to the NT too is Randall Balmer, Peter, a rock he was not.

Tom Wright on the Resurrection: Online Video

The N. T. Wright page notes a new online lecture from N. T. Wright, available to download as an MP3, or to watch as a .mov file:

Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection (MP3)
Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection (Streaming Video)
Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection (Video Download)

The location is the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at St Edmunds College, Cambridge (and that link will take you to several other lectures on the topic "Science and the Bible"), and the date is 15 May 2007.

Faith and Works with Crossan, Wright and Others

I have recently been following with interest the new column in the Washington Post / Newsweek headed On Faith, which asks a controversial question and gets an array of contrasting expert views. This week's question is What's more important from a faith perspective? Being saved, or doing good works?. Three NT scholars on the panel have responses:

N. T. Wright: Start by Understanding Salvation
John Dominic Crossan: Both/And not Either/Or
Paula Fredriksen: Now or Later?

Fredriksen's is rather terse, just two or three sentences. All are quite interesting, though none will hold any surprises to those familiar with their work. The column is set up like a blog, so you can add your own comments into the debate.

Tom Wright "Wrightsaid" answers

On the N. T. Wright page, there is the latest in the series of "Wrightsaid" posts where Tom Wright answers questions put to him by anonymous punters. This is one of the odder instalments, with most of the questions asking about how Wright conceives of Jesus' knowledge of his divinity in relation to the creeds, the kinds of question that make me go "Huh?!":

Wrightsaid Q & A for June 2007

Using Judas to Push an Agenda

Tomorrow's Church Times (it's still Thursday in America as I write, watching the British election coverage, where it is the middle of the night) features a review by Robin Griffith-Jones on two recent books about the Gospel of Judas:

Using Judas to Push an Agenda
by Robin Griffith-Jones

The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A new look at betrayer and betrayed
Bart D. Ehrman
Oxford University Press £12.99

Judas and the Gospel of Jesus
Tom Wright

. . . .Ehrman has in mind, I think, readers who have been prompted by the Gospel of Judas to investigate the canonical stories about Jesus which they have not encountered for ages, if ever. Such readers will find Ehrman’s book well judged and informative; but perhaps fewer would bother with it if the publishers had put on the cover the one sentence (tucked away on page 145) that addresses the only question on such readers’ minds. “This Gospel appears to be using Judas to advance an agenda, and is probably not reliable as a historical source, however interesting it is for under-standing how later Christians portrayed Judas.” To make that a sensible summary, just remove one word: “probably”.

Tom Wright is impatient with the whole Gnostic industry. He reckons some people are out to make a great deal of money, and far more are deluded by America’s left-wing selective neo-Gnosticism. Of Dr Wright’s many readers, those who dislike and distrust the noisy propagation of that creed will find themselves vindicated by his short and trenchant book. I wonder, however, whether others will feel handbagged by his rhetoric . . .

I must admit that I hadn't realized that Tom Wright had written a book about Judas. Someone once told me that his scholarly books are by "N. T. Wright" and his popular, devotional ones are by "Tom Wright", and this one is therefore one of the latter kind.

Wright's Blair Decade

The Daily Telegraph runs a feature today called My Blair Decade. As you'd expect from the Telegraph, it's all pretty negative, with the exception of a teacher in Nottingham who thinks, rightly in my view, that the Education System is now in better shape, but my reason for mentioning the article here is that it has a contribution from the Bishop of Durham, N. T. Wright, who is well known to all New Testament students these days. Increasingly of late, Wright has been willing to talk about politics, and here he talks only about politics, not a mention of Jesus, the kingdom of God, return from exile, Israel's God, the Scriptures or narrative. Perhaps the Telegraph took those bits out.

High hopes that died in the disaster of Iraq
Jonathan Petre

. . . With the disastrous escapade in Iraq, there was a sense of horror that the two world leaders who were most overtly Christian - Bush and Blair - should be lured into such a disastrous parody or caricature of the Christian imperialist, going around the world beating up Johnny foreigner and the infidel.

That's been a huge tragedy. There was a sense of something good and possible in Blair and his government which has been led to spend billions of pounds and hundreds of British lives on a fool's errand.

In the world of employment, we have seen the pulling apart of the high-earning professional fields, where there are massive rewards for young people in financially related fields, or the law. But not if you choose to do what our oldest son has done, which is follow me into the academic world. I was a theology don and he is a history lecturer at Durham University and he is paid not much more than a vicar . . .

On the last point, which I am better qualified to speak on than some of the others, and which has some relevance to this blog's topic, there is some truth, but things have got better for academics under Labour than they were a decade ago. My starting salary as a Lecturer in Birmingham in 1995 was something like £6,000 less than the starting salary for a lecturer now of the same age and qualifications, and the salary scale for academics overall has become much more competitive in the last decade, so that now many British academics are earning more than their American counterparts of similar age and experience. There is still some way to go, but I think that's one of the areas where progress has been made.

Tom Wright on Easter

Here's one I missed over Easter, but it's linked on the N. T. Wright Page, from The Guardian's weekly Face to Faith column:

Face to faith
In these troubled times, Easter's message of resurrection is a powerful one, says Tom Wright

A couple of features of interest for academic NT geeks:

We reflect on, and mourn, the ruin of the world and the folly of humankind. We look in the mirror and see our own shame and sin. And then we contemplate Jesus's suffering and death at the heart of the whole thing: the place where the arrogance of empire, the frenzy of religion and the betrayal of friends all rush together and do their worst.

Notice how central the motif of empire is becoming in Wright's thinking, and not just in discussion of Paul (cf. the fresh perspective on Paul and Empire). Also notice:

That's why the Easter stories tumble out in bits and pieces, with breathless chasings to and fro and garbled reports - and then, stories like nothing else before or since. As the great New Testament scholar EP Sanders put it, the writers were trying to describe an experience that does not fit a known category. They knew all about ghosts and visions, and they knew it wasn't anything like that.

I like the characterization of Sanders, whom I once described in print as "the greatest living New Testament scholar", though I don't think he would be so keen on the sentence that follows here, about ghosts and visions, which is pure Wright.

N. T. Wright Page latest

New on the N. T. Wright page:

Resurrecting Old Arguments: Responding to Four Essays
Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 3.2 (2005): 187–209

The essay is a response to four critiques of his mammoth tome, The Resurrection of the Son of God, by David Bryan, James Crossley, Michael Goulder and Larry Hurtado. It arose out of a couple of sessions at the Historical Jesus Seminar at the British New Testament Conference. I suppose my only regret about the availability of this essay free to all is that it is only one part of a five-part dialogue, and I can imagine that many will read this piece without reading and evaluating all contributors to the debate.

Tom Wright or Toby Ziegler?

Viewers of The West Wing may have noticed the resemblance between Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff) and the Bishop of Durham, N. T. Wright: