Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

For Paul there was no question about the starting point. It was always Jesus: Jesus as the shocking fulfillment of Israel’s hopes; Jesus as the genuinely human being, the true “image”; Jesus the embodiment of Israel’s God—so that, without leaving Jewish monotheism, one would worship and invoke Jesus as Lord within, not alongside, the service of the “living and true God.” Jesus, the one for whose sake one would forsake all idols, all rival “lords.” Jesus, above all, who had come to his kingdom, the true lordship of the world, in the way that Paul’s friends who were starting to write the Jesus story at that time had emphasized: by dying under the weight of the world’s sin in order to break the power of the dark forces that had enslaved all humans, Israel included. Jesus, who had thereby fulfilled the ancient promise, being “handed over because of our trespasses and raised because of our justification.”1 Jesus, who had been bodily raised from the dead on the third day and thereby announced to the world as the true Messiah, the “son of God” in all its senses (Messiah, Israel’s representative, embodiment of Israel’s God). Jesus, therefore, as the one in whom “all God’s promises find their yes,” the “goal of the law,” the true seed of Abraham, the ultimate “root of Jesse.”2 Jesus, then, the Lord at whose name every knee would bow. Jesus, who would reappear in a great future event that would combine the sense of a true king coming to claim and establish his kingdom and the sense ...