Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

Worshipping Jesus would no longer be invested with the echoes of the Psalms and prophets, according to whom Israel’s Messiah would be the Lord of the whole world. The Jesus movement would turn itself into a kind of private spirituality, less concerned with the kingdom of God on earth as in heaven and more concerned with cultivating one’s own spiritual interiority. It would no longer be a movement based on messianic eschatology. It would become a “religion” that saw itself as different from “the Jewish religion,” a private religion that would no longer pose much of a threat to the principalities and powers, the rulers and authorities. This is exactly what happened in the second half of the second century with the rise of so-called Gnosticism, a religion of inner self-discovery rather than of rescue, of private devotion rather than public witness. Though Marcion regarded Paul as a hero (because he misunderstood him to be saying that God had finished with the Jews and their law), Paul himself, and especially Romans, stands firmly in the way of his entire scheme.