Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

The temptation would then be for such a new generation to look at the powerful synagogue communities in Rome, up and running again after five years in abeyance, and to assume that the God of Jesus had finished with the Jews once and for all. The proud and vital word “Messiah” would just become a proper name. 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.