Paul and His Recent Interpreters Quotes

“once again, just because I prefer Guinness to lemonade that doesn’t mean I am not particular about the temperature at which the Guinness is served; and I believe Paul would have told Calvin to take his dark Irish beer out of the fridge, to let it come up to room temperature and taste its full flavour.”
― N.T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters

“The new perspective on Paul – not that there is any single thing which can now be called by that name, despite the ambitious title of Jimmy Dunn’s collection of related articles 1 – has burst in, like the delightful Goldilocks, to disrupt the peaceful scene where the Three Reformation Bears were planning to have an undisturbed breakfast. She has sat on the chair of traditional justification-theology, and it now seems to be broken (though they have called in the carpenters from Louisville, Sydney and elsewhere to try to fix it).”
― N.T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters

“Only those who have tried to understand and expound the Bible, and especially Paul as a man of his own day, only those who have happily escaped the dangers which threaten us on these two sides (exposition and application), are entitled to cast the first stone.”
― N.T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters

“Rabbinic literature, though it includes plenty of material from before AD 135, tends to see everything in the light, not of a continuing story about God and Israel within the ongoing flow of world history, but of the much thinner, often dehistoricized world of Torah-piety.”
― N.T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters

“Anyone who supposes that, because a church has officially renounced some doctrine, nobody thereafter will hold to it, has little experience of real church life.”
― N.T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters

“I suspect, though, that part at least of the anti-Sanders backlash has come from those who are engaged, in their institutions, in the kind of ‘theology versus religious studies’ sniping which is part of the long-term fallout from the Enlightenment’s split worldview.”
― N.T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters

“What is needed is history, genuine history, multi-faceted history, ‘thick description’ history that takes seriously the full range of human life and culture.”
― N.T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters

“Agendas are what get people, even historians, out of bed in the mornings, though one might hope that, once at the desk, they allow the data to challenge the hypotheses they have dreamed up overnight.”
― N.T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters

“anyone trying to be a Pauline exegete while still in thrall to Luther should consider a career as a taxidermist. Heroes are to be engaged with, not stuffed and mounted and allowed to dominate the room.”
― N.T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters

“Paul’s strong, clear teaching at exactly this point both on the new status of the believer as having died and risen with Jesus Christ and on the new gift of God to the believer, the gift which Paul calls the holy spirit. It is astonishing to see how much of the debate has been conducted without the help of these two categories, as though the ‘doctrine of justification’ had to proceed with minimalist theological tools in order to be pure. You might as well try to play Wagner on a tin whistle.”
― N.T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters

“They are being offered a narrative, an historical story whose hope of ‘salvation’ lies not in a flight from history but in a great convulsive change within history, a transformation in which there will be continuity with the present as well as discontinuity.”
― N.T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters

“It is that they learn to think of themselves as characters in the story of God and his people, whose earlier chapters set out characteristic lessons to be mastered by those who find themselves in the later chapters. But the overall point is this: they are in the same story, not a different story which happens to be parallel to another earlier one.”
― N.T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters

“It is of course possible to produce apparent ‘parallels’ to almost anything. There is after all only a limited range of things that one can say in any ‘religion’, and some statements, taken cold and out of context, will look a bit like other statements whose own setting would actually indicate significant differences.”
― N.T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters

“Rereading some of these writers, one is tempted to say that if anyone needed help to struggle against some of the unfortunate things they committed to paper, it was not Paul, but some of his twentieth-century interpreters.”
― N.T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters

“But just because I would rather eat part of a dead cow than part of a dead rat, that doesn’t mean that I don’t care whether my steak is properly cooked;”
― N.T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters

“The ‘popular Paul’ has all too often been addressing sixteenth-century questions in a nineteenth-century tone of voice,”
― N.T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters