Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

he had redefined what that loyalty would mean. It did not mean that, when eating with Gentile friends, he would avoid their type of food. It did not mean that he would keep the Sabbaths and the festivals the way he had kept them as a young man. When the reality has come, the signposts are no longer needed, not because they were misleading, but because they have done their work. One does not put up a sign saying, “This way to London” outside Buckingham Palace. Paul took the stance he now did neither because he was some kind of a “liberal”—whatever that might have meant in his day!—nor because he was making pragmatic compromises to try to lure Gentiles into his communities, nor, to say it again, because he secretly hated his own culture and identity. It was all because of the Messiah: “I have been crucified with the Messiah. I am, however, alive—but it isn’t me any longer; it’s the Messiah who lives in me.”11 If the Messiah has come, and if God has marked him out in his resurrection, then to be a loyal Jew is to be loyal to this Messiah and to the God who has acted in and through him. But if the Messiah had been crucified and raised, then the question of what being a loyal Jew actually meant had itself been radically redrawn. It now meant following this pattern of crucifixion and resurrection—reflecting, Paul would have insisted, the pattern of Israel’s scriptures themselves. It meant discovering the deep truth of baptism: that one was now “in the Messiah,” a member of his e...