Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

But one could hardly imagine that the God whose scriptures warned constantly against covenant disloyalty would suddenly declare the Torah itself redundant. But that is

If Paul was really saying that God had made a way through the problems that Moses had left behind him—that now they could be “justified” from all the things that were still a problem under Moses3—then this was basically saying that the Torah itself could be set aside.

But out there in the Diaspora this new movement was, it seemed, treating pagans as equal partners.

Perhaps, indeed, that is what “holy scripture” really is—not a calm, serene list of truths to be learned or commands to be obeyed, but a jagged book that forces you to grow up in your thinking as you grapple with

“What God made clean,” he had been told, “you must not regard as common.”

The shocking and unexpected events of the Messiah’s death and resurrection, coupled with the dramatic sense of personal renewal for which the only explanation was the outpoured divine spirit, meant that everything had changed.

“righteous,” like the Greek and Hebrew words that term often translates, refers here to someone “being in a right relationship” with the One God, and the “relationship” in question is the covenant that God made with Abraham.

being part of the covenant family, and the covenant family is not defined by Jewish law, but “through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah.”

if this Jesus-shaped loyalty was the vital thing, then nothing that the law could say was to come between one Jesus-follower and another.

There is only one way forward, and that is to go where the Messiah has led, through death to new life. This journey is the same for all the Messiah’s people, Jew and Gentile alike.

Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. That is one of the most extraordinary statements ever written by a Jew of the first or perhaps any century.

baptism is all about (as in Romans 6), which is leaving the old life behind and coming through “death” into a new life entirely.