What Saint Paul Really Said Quotes

“Saul of Tarsus, in other words, had found a new vocation. It would demand all the energy, all the zeal, that he had devoted to his former way of life. He was now to be a herald of the king.”
― N.T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity?

“Justification is not how someone becomes a Christian. It is the declaration that they have become a Christian. And the total context of this doctrine, here in Philippians 3, is that of the expectation - not of a final salvation in which the individual is abstracted from the present world, but of the final new heavens and new earth, as the Lord comes from the heavenly realm to transform the earthly”
― N.T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity?

“He is saying, as he says extensively in Romans 8, that the whole creation is longing for its exodus, and that when God is all in all even the division between heaven and earth, God's space and human space, will be done away with (as we see also in Revelation 21). Paul's message to the pagan world is the fulfilled-Israel message: the one creator God is, through the fulfilment of his covenant with Israel, reconciling the world to himself.”
― N.T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity?

“There are five language-sets in particular which they employed for this purpose. Briefly, they are as follows: Wisdom, Torah, Spirit, Word and Shekinah”
― N.T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity?

“Paul believed, in fact, that Jesus had gone through death and out the other side. Jesus had gone into a new mode of physicality, for which there was no precedent and of which there was, as yet, no other example.”
― N.T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity?

“The ‘God’ that the great majority believe in is, pretty certainly, the Deist god, which corresponds in Paul’s world to the Epicurean god or gods. These beings were distant, remote, and uncaring. They enjoyed a state of perfect bliss, no doubt; but they never got their hands dirty by caring for, or being active within, the world in which we humans live. It’s not surprising that people who believe in the existence of that sort of god don’t go to church except now and then.”
― N.T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity?

“This does not, therefore, mean `the gospel reveals justification by faith as the true scheme of salvation, as opposed to Jewish self-help moralism'. When we unpack it fully, in the light of subsequent passages in the letter, it means:
The gospel - the announcement of the lordship of Jesus the Messiah - reveals God's righteousness, his covenant faithfulness, his dealing with the sin of the world through the fulfilment of his covenant in this Lord Jesus Christ. He has done all this righteously, that is, impartially. He has dealt with sin, and rescued the helpless. He has thereby fulfilled his promises.”
― N.T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity?

“problematic within post-Reformation dogmatics. Is faith something I `do' to earn God's favour, and, if not, what role does it play? Once we release Paul's justification-language from the burden of having to describe `how someone becomes a Christian', however, this is simply no longer a problem. There is no danger of imagining that Christian faith is after all a surrogate `work', let alone a substitute form of moral righteousness. Faith is the badge of covenant membership, not something someone `performs' as a kind of initiation test.”
― N.T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity?

“Once you understand how first-century Jewish covenant theology actually works, you will see that law-court language, `participation' language, and a great deal else besides, settle down and make their home with each other, dovetailed without confusion and distinguished without dislocation. But to take this further we must turn, at last, to Paul. What, precisely, does Paul mean by `justification', and how does it relate to what he meant by `the gospel'?”
― N.T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity?

“Sanders argued, basically, that the normal Christian, and especially Protestant, readings of Paul were seriously flawed, because they attributed to first-century Judaism theological views which belonged rather to medieval Catholicism. Once we described Judaism accurately, Sanders argued, we were forced to rethink Paul's critique of it, and his whole positive theology in its turn.”
― N.T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity?