Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

This time he tells more explicitly the story of the human race from Adam to the Messiah and on to the final promise of renewed creation. These chapters offer an astonishingly rich and multilayered account of the new Exodus, which was such a strong theme in early Christianity. The whole section is carefully structured in paragraphs almost all of which lead back to Jesus the Messiah. After the basic statement of “from Adam to the Messiah” in 5:12–21, Paul retells the Exodus narrative. Coming through the waters of baptism (chapter 6) is like going through the Red Sea, leaving behind slavery and discovering freedom. But then Israel arrives at Mt. Sinai and is given the Torah—which promptly declares that Israel has already transgressed. Indeed, as Deuteronomy made clear, the Torah simply brought Israel to the place of exile, of a new kind of slavery. The lament at the close of chapter 7 is the lament, seen with gospel hindsight, of “the Jew” who rightly celebrates the Torah and longs to be loyal to it, but finds that loyalty thwarted by the dark Adamic strain that runs through all humans, Jews included. This is the complex problem—Adam’s problem, if you like, magnified enormously in the rebellion of God’s own people—to which Romans 8 is the matchless answer. The death of the Messiah and the gift of the spirit together do “what the law was incapable of doing,”30 that is, giving the life the law promised but could not bring about because of human (and Israelite) sin. Throughout c...