The New Testament in Its World Quotes

“Jesus never wrote anything, so far as we know. But what he did and said, and particularly his claim to be launching God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven, and his vocation to die a horrible death to defeat the powers of darkness and bring God’s new creation into being with his resurrection—all this meant what it meant within its original setting. And that setting was the ancient story of Israel, and the ongoing hopes and longings of the Jews of Jesus’ day for God’s coming kingdom that would bring that ancient story to its long-awaited conclusion. But, from quite early in the movement, most of Jesus’ followers were not from that Jewish world. They needed to be told not only that ‘Jesus died for your sins’, but also that Jesus was Israel’s Messiah and that the meaning of his death was the messianic meaning, to be found in the long story of Israel’s scriptures: in other words, as Paul puts it, summarizing the very early ‘gospel’, that the Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.2 And to explain what that meant, and how it worked out in practice, four people took it prayerfully upon themselves to tell the story of Jesus in such a way as to bring out its different aspects. Several others, and one person in particular, namely Paul, wrote letters to churches which discussed particular issues but which did so by focusing that same larger story onto whatever needed to be addressed. And one man, out of persecution and prayer and a mind and heart soaked with the scriptures, was granted a breathtaking vision of heaven and earth coming together and Jesus at the middle of it all. Welcome to the New Testament.”
― N.T. Wright, The New Testament in Its World: An Introduction to the History, Literature, and Theology of the First Christians