A new kind of humanity

   

  In an age in which many people are hovering between their religious and their spiritual identity amidst a widespread decline in church attendance, it’s good to have someone like N. T. Wright to shed light on the issue—and especially on the role the Bible plays in it.

      Tom Wright is the chairman of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland; former Bishop of Durham in the Church of England; and, though he tends to downplay it, a highly successful author.

      Since its publication in 2011, his contemporary Bible translation The Kingdom New Testament (HarperOne) has been a favorite of mine. He writes in clear, brisk English, avoiding, as he puts it, “long, fuzzy words where short sharp ones would do instead.”

      I've also become absorbed in his most recent offering Paul: A Biography (HarperOne, 2018) in which he explains how the events that unfolded two thousand years ago in south-eastern Europe and western Asia are still as startling in retrospect as they were at the time.

      Wright points out that Paul’s letters, in a standard modern translation, occupy fewer than eighty pages. Even taken as a whole, they are shorter than almost any single one of Plato’s diaries or Aristotle’s treatises.

      It’s a safe bet, says Wright, that these letters, page for page, have generated more comment, more sermons and seminars, more monographs and dissertations than any other writings from the modern world.

      So, what was Paul doing, and why? These are among the questions Wright sets out to answer in his scholarly, but always conversational, 464-page attempt to get inside the mind, the understanding, and the ambition of Paul the Apostle, known earlier as Saul of Tarsus—to grasp what motivated Paul in his heart of hearts.

      Wright divides his exploration into three main parts across fifteen chapters, along with a chronological table, scriptural and subject indexes, and sixteen maps—all sweeping us toward the reality that ultimately burst upon Paul on the road to Damascus.

      There, says Wright, Paul’s vision of the One God reshaped around Jesus would provide a robust, necessary framework for Paul’s new thinking.  

      This is what made Paul who he was, adds Wright—the ultimate explanation for why his work, so contested, so agonizing, so demanding, so inevitably open to misunderstanding, would not go to waste.

      It would grow, Wright continues, to produce not just “a religion,’’ but a new kind of humanity—new people, a new community, a new world, a new kind of love that would do things Paul could hardly have dared to imagine.

      Wright describes the Apostle Paul as one of a handful of people from the ancient world whose words still have the capacity to leap off the page and confront us.

      And that’s precisely what Wright’s biography does for me. He lifts Paul’s words right off the page and makes it vibrantly clear what we must do to keep Paul’s legacy alive.

      I can’t wait to make my contribution!