Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

But the point of Jesus’s rescuing death, which Jesus himself had seen as the new Passover, was that the powerful “gods” and “lords” to which humans had given away their own proper authority had been defeated. The resurrection proved it and had thereby launched a new world and a new people to reflect the true God into that new world. That is why Paul’s Gentile mission was not a different idea from the idea of “forgiveness of sins” or the “cleansing of the heart.” It was because the powerful gospel announced and effected those realities that the old barriers between Jew and Greek were abolished in the Messiah. It was because in the Messiah the promises of Psalm 2 had come true—that God would set his anointed king over the rulers of the nations, thus extending into every corner of the world the promises made to Abraham about his “inheritance”—that Paul could summon people of every kind of background to “believing obedience.”