Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

For Paul and Barnabas, what mattered was that Israel’s God, the creator of the world, had done in Jesus the thing he had always promised, fulfilling the ancient narrative that went back to Abraham and David and breaking through “the Moses barrier,” the long Jewish sense that Moses himself had warned of covenant failure and its consequences. And if that had now happened, if the Messiah’s death had dealt with the “powers” that had held Jew and Gentile alike captive and his resurrection had launched a new world order “on earth as in heaven,” then the non-Jewish nations were not only free to turn from their now powerless idols to serve the living and true God, but their “uncleanness”—the idolatry and immorality that were always cited as the reason Jews should not fraternize with them—had itself been dealt with. The radical meaning of the Messiah’s cross was the reason, on both counts, that there now had to be a single family consisting of all the Messiah’s people.