So Radically Jewish that He’s an Evangelical Christian: N.T. Wright’s Judeophobic and Privileged Paul

Where are the Criticisms of N.T. Wright?

A common phenomenon recently surfaced again in biblical studies Twitter. A mainline minister asked for help finding criticisms of N.T. Wright’s work on Paul. As usual, what followed was a series of Tweets linking to take-downs of Wright by conservative evangelical, often Reformed, readers of the Bible, plus links to the few well-known negative reviews of his books by critical scholars in academic journals inaccessible to most ministers. ¹ This phenomenon on social media mirrors the wider worlds of biblical studies and theological publishing. Most of the books about Paul that engage with Wright from publishing houses like Fortress, Eerdmans, Westminster John Knox, Baker Academic, and Baylor are either conservative evangelical critiques of Wright that relate to the anti “New Perspective on Paul” tidal wave from the early 2000s, or books by moderate evangelical and conservative-mainline scholars who largely resonate with and develop Wright’s approach. The voices of critical biblical scholars who do not inhabit these particular spaces are scarce.

This article seeks to help ministers and others invested in the use of the Bible think critically about Wright’s work on Paul, in particular his well-known two volumes, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Fortress, 2013). I examine how Wright discusses Paul and Greco-Roman philosophy, ancient Judaism, and the question of whether Paul was counter-cultural. Though I disagree with most positions that Wright takes in these volumes, which, of course, is possible in the critical give and take of scholarship, my primary concern goes further. The nature of the writing, arguments, and engagements with evidence and others’ research make it difficult to conceive of Paul and the Faithfulness of God as an academic contribution in the first place. This situation sets Wright’s recent volumes apart from his earlier work on Paul in the late 1970s through the 1990s, when he became one of the foremost conservative Protestant New Testament scholars who was a recognized participant in mainstream biblical studies.

I make no pretense of detached objectivity. As feminist scholars like Sara Parks and womanist scholars like Angela Parker have shown, such a posture reaffirms privileged—often masculine and White—versions of the exploitative status quo. ² In fact, a crucial point to make about Wright’s work is not just that readers come away from it with inaccurate historical understandings of ancient Judaism, Paul, the landscape of scholarship about them, and the range of questions we could be asking. More than that, Wright’s Paul reproduces a comfortable status quo among his readers. Paul becomes a ventriloquist for the very narratives, fixations, and voices that erase people who do not benefit from the Christianity of Wright’s Paul.

An “Irreducibly Jewish” Paul, Safe from Philosophical Contamination?

Few areas within Pauline studies have seen as much development after the period when Wright formulated his characteristic ideas than the study of Paul’s letters in relation to Greek and Roman philosophy. He devotes almost sixty pages of the first volume of Paul and the Faithfulness of God to Greek philosophy. ³ But these pages offer an introductory, undergraduate-level discussion of matters: basic rundowns of ancient philosophical schools’ positions plus biographies of key figures. The reader is left wondering what concrete relevance much of the discussion will have for Wright’s own arguments about Paul beyond the laying of verbose contextual groundwork that was already available in numerous other publications.

Most strikingly, at least to the eyes of scholars who research how early writers about Jesus reflected or contested philosophical ideas, Wright devotes no space to one of the most important philosophical matrices around the time of Paul: so-called Middle Platonism. Neither is there much discussion of a signature topic within late-Hellenistic and Roman period philosophy: the nature of the soul and “moral-psychology” (the discussion of ethics from something like a “what is human nature like?” standpoint). It is a topic that also structured the concerns of many writers—including Jewish and Christian writers—who were not philosophers but deployed philosophical ideas. This omission is curious given that scholars who have been working on Paul and Greco-Roman philosophy often focus on these particular areas.

Middle Platonism, debates between Platonists and Stoics, and the nature of the soul may sound like irrelevant or hopelessly abstract topics to many readers now. But to ancient writers, including Paul, the nature of the soul relates directly to practical questions about what a happy life is like, how you should treat others, what a good leader versus an exploitative one looks like, the nature of true friendship, and even how to please the gods and end up with a desirable afterlife. In contemporary church parlance, “It can preach!” So, let’s dive in to Middle Platonism, the soul, and Paul.

As most histories of Classical (sixth through fourth centuries BCE) and Hellenistic (late fourth through late second centuries BCE) period philosophy explain, while Plato is a dominant figure in Classical philosophy, his influence in the way that modern people think about Plato and Platonism waned after his death. ⁴ “The Academy” quickly became known more for being Skeptical, that is, having skeptical denial that one could know the truth about various topics. This is why, for example, Cicero’s Roman period discussions of Classical Greek philosophy may reflect Stoic or Epicurean positions in various spots, but also feature “Academic” voices that undermine certainty. Stoicism ascended to greater dominance than Platonism through much of the Hellenistic period. Then toward the end of the Hellenistic and beginning of the Roman Imperial period (i.e., the first centuries BCE and CE), it becomes more common to find intellectuals who promote key Platonist ideas, but often in specific combinations with Stoic ideas. They sometimes also array themselves against Stoics and Epicureans. Plutarch is an example of this phenomenon. Scholarship on this resurgence of Platonism, which is often termed Middle Platonism, remains complicated and contested. ⁵ Wright’s misleading rundown of philosophical schools leaves the reader ignorant of this history of philosophy’s politics, re-alignments, and relative promotion and demotion of key philosophical positions. ⁶

Many of Plato’s dialogues advance a “tri-partite” understanding of the soul in which it is hierarchically divided between three parts. The highest part, often termed the mind (nous), is associated with reason and even the gods. The middle and lower parts are associated with the appetites, passions, and desires. This approach to the soul syncs with a characteristic obsession in not just ancient philosophers, but most Greek and Roman intellectuals: what the ideal ruler or virtuous person is like and how to live virtuously. Most writers presumed that mastering one’s passions, instead of being mastered by them, was a picture of virtue. This is why sophrosyne (moderation, control) and enkrateia (self-mastery) were ethical and even political ideals. It is important to note that these ideas were hierarchical and gendered for ancient writers: virtue, piety, strength, reason, and so on were masculine and atop the hierarchy, whereas vice, weakness, impiety, irrationality, and passions were feminine and at the bottom. ⁷ An intellectual like Dio Chrysostom in his Orations on Kingship simply assumes that the ideal ruler and person is a man who exercises his masculine domination over others. As a man who can rule over himself, he is qualitied to rule over (effeminate) others who are not even capable of mastering their own passions and desires.

For Platonists and their understanding of the soul, a man achieves self-mastery when the highest part of his soul masters the appetites and passions of the lower parts. One cannot ever eliminate the passions since they are inherent to the soul, but they can be tamed. A vicious, irrational, and effeminate or slavish person is mastered by their passions and can even experience a death of the soul, or what some Platonists like Philo termed “the disease of effemination.” ⁸ This brings us to one of the signature fault lines within ancient philosophy that is also at the center of scholarship on Paul and Greco-Roman philosophy: whereas Platonists had a divided and inherently irrational soul, Stoics held to a unitary and inherently rational soul. Stoics likewise idealized mastery of the passions. For them, one could eliminate the passions entirely since they were not inherent to the soul but the result of wrong beliefs about what is good. Stoics were also materialists or physicalists who denied that there was a separate realm that could be apprehended only by the mind and not by the bodily senses. Stoics thus had no need for a part of the soul that alone could apprehend the “noetic” realm that was a favorite topic among Platonists (i.e., the realm of what Plato called the Forms). One of the key debates in Pauline studies is whether, as Troels Engberg-Pedersen argues, Paul had not only a Stoic understanding of physics (i.e., cosmology and what things like pneuma [i.e., “spirit”] are made up) but also a Stoic moral-psychology, or whether, as Emma Wasserman and Stanley Stowers argue, Paul had a Platonist moral-psychology in combination with some Stoic ideas about physics.

This contested interest in the mechanics of the soul dominated philosophical and philosophically adjacent writings around the time of Jesus and Paul. Paul and the Faithfulness of God, however, leaves the reader with little awareness of these emphases in ancient philosophy or inkling that much scholarship on Paul and philosophy explores how these discussions can help one understand his letters. When Wright turns to the question of Paul himself in relation to ancient philosophy in his second volume of Paul and the Faithfulness of God, there is sparse discussion of the details of Paul’s letters and Hellenistic philosophy. There is likewise little interaction with the avalanche of work on Paul and philosophy over the last thirty years, apart from a long section devoted to Troels Engberg-Pedersen (see below).

Wright instead opts for a generalizing approach: since Paul “remains a traditional Jew,” he would have “a specifically Jewish worldview” and think with a “robust version of the Jewish monotheistic doctrine of creation.” ⁹ He would have understood reality through his Jewish “sense of a narrative” of God’s rescuing of Israel. ¹⁰ Paul also thought his God’s climactic actions through Christ had “radically” transformed things such that “there is, then, an epistemological revolution at the heart of Paul’s worldview.” ¹¹ So, when it comes to any topic Wright regards as Jewish, Paul can interface with it in ways that follow Wright’s own ideas about ancient Judaism. But when it comes to Greco-Roman philosophy, Wright’s repetition of his own large-scale frameworks sets the expectation of “radical change,” “revolution,” “rethinking around Jesus himself,” and living “counter-culturally, being radically different from those around.” ¹²

Wright’s generalizing approach permits him to side-step detailed textual discussions about how Paul’s letters might presume, strategically deploy or contest, or innovate upon widely recognizable philosophical positions in Roman period literary cultures. Instead, Wright wields his approach to dismiss notable overlaps between Paul and philosophy by (a) discussing how Paul could “choose such a well-known word and give it significantly different meaning” ¹³ and (b) painting scholars who demur as retrograde simpletons who engage in the discredited phenomenon of “parallelomania.” ¹⁴ Wright acknowledges that Jewish writings may reflect “engagement … with many varieties of contemporary philosophy.” ¹⁵ But his model remains one of Judaism as an “essentially” separate entity such that Jewish writers would be “borrowing from Plato” rather than being participants in Mediterranean literary cultures wherein philosophical debates and ideas were part of the contested pool of shared discursive resources.

Wright is reproducing what researchers of ancient Judaism and Christianity term the Judaism-versus-Hellenism dichotomy and the associated paradigm of thinking in terms of “influences” and the “borrowing” of ideas. It is worth dwelling on this point since it also gets to the heart of how Wright approaches ancient Judaism, which he claims is central to his understanding of Paul. In Judaism-versus-Hellenism logic, the New Testament only derives substantive influence from Judaism and not wider Greek and Roman culture. Most scholars now reject this dichotomy. But its well-worn paths, plus the paradigms of influence and borrowing, continue to structure much of the background logic of biblical studies. ¹⁶ Wright briefly affirms the growing chorus of protests against Judaism versus Hellenism and even asserts himself as the protest’s true vanguard since others “have not, I think, seen all the ramifications of following through a genuinely historical investigation.” ¹⁷

But Wright then immediately reasserts Judaism-versus-Hellenism (what he calls “the real antithesis”) to reject substantive intersections between Jewish writings and Greco-Roman philosophy: “Most Jews in the first century thought of themselves as significantly different from their non-Jewish neighbors … and many Jewish thinkers and writers of the time brought this to articulation … urging what they saw as a specifically Jewish worldview.” ¹⁸ His logic for this reassertion boils down to two problematic methodological claims. First, the assumption that a few writings by literate Jews represent what “most Jews” thought. Second, the assumption that since Jewish writers said they were different from Greeks, scholarship must accept this at face value. Wright leaves no space for thinking about how insider claims of distinction often have rhetorical, strategic, polemical, and political functions that mask more complicated social and textual realities. ¹⁹ Instead, for Wright, such insider claims of distinction mandate that scholars accept an “irreducible, and irreducibly Jewish, element of the picture” (i.e., Judaism-versus-Hellenism) if our sources manifest anything that, in his mind, is a key Jewish characteristic. ²⁰ Paul and the Faithfulness of God, accordingly, rejects the possibility of Stoic physics or ethics in Paul’s letters via classic Judaism-versus-Hellenism logic: “the main sources for what [Paul] says about the spirit are (a) the scriptures and (b) the actual experience of the first Christians” and “Jewish apocalyptic traditions and their reshaping around the Messiah,” the assumption being that such “sources” are inherently incompatible with Paul assuming some forms of Stoic physics and ethics as well. When Jewish sources do reflect Greek philosophy, this indicates for Wright different “worlds” bumping into each other. ²¹

Wright’s approach thus obscures exactly how Paul’s letters reflect Greco-Roman philosophy. The questions that shape fruitful thinking about the matter are not the extent to which Paul “appropriated” Hellenistic period philosophy. Neither do the useful questions focus on whether Paul was more Greek and less Jewish. It would have been news to ancient Jewish writers like Philo, Paul, Aristobulus, Artapanus, or the writers of Pseudo-Phocylides, 4 Maccabees, and the third Sibylline Oracle (to pick a few) that their Greco-Roman philosophical ideas and myths made them less Jewish. These Jewish writers were participants in Greco-Roman intellectual cultures where varying levels of facility in specialized philosophical knowledge were common. In other words, Paul’s Jewishness did not make him an essential outsider who had to “borrow,” “appropriate,” or be “influenced by” Greco-Roman philosophy.

So, it is not surprising that when Paul wants to explain the relevance of his version of Jesus to gentiles in Rome, he commences with a myth of gentile degeneration into corruption in mind, morality, and religion. Gentiles are dominated by their passions and exhibit all manner of transgressions of the usual hierarchical gendered order in Greco-Roman literature (Rom 1:18–2:16). Paul then continues by offering these gentiles access to the God of Israel’s Christos, whose actions deal with God’s wrath against them while also making them descendants of Abraham (Romans 3–4) and thus beneficiaries of divine pneuma (“spirit”), which empowers the highest part of their souls to master and even put to death the passions of the lower parts of their souls and their flesh (Romans 6–8). As Paul likewise clarifies throughout Galatians, the Corinthian letters, and 1 Thessalonians, one signature benefit gentiles derive from God’s Christos (i.e., Jesus) is a re-attainment of self-mastery (note the culminating fruit of the spirit in Galatians 5). Paul’s letters reflect this Platonist moral-psychology and a Stoic physics of a material pneuma that concretely joins gentiles to the risen Christos. This material spirit explains how they not only have access to God’s renewing power, but also can be transformed to have a pneumatic body (1 Cor 15:35–51; Phil 3:20–21) like God’s Christos, fit for participation in God’s eschatological kingdom. This is a classic example of a Middle-Platonism. And like Philo, Paul need not see any disjunction between these philosophical assumptions and his Jewish eschatological schemes that frame them. ²²

Wright, for the most part, does not engage with the specifics of Paul’s letters and Hellenistic philosophy. He instead repetitively asserts his version of a Judaism-versus-Hellenism rubric. ²³ Wright’s readers will thus likely not appreciate that scholars who promote the philosophical contours of Paul’s letters do so in order to offer more compelling readings of Paul, not to wage a war against his Jewishness.

Given Wright’s approach, it is not surprising that he sometimes bases his treatment of Paul and philosophy on wildly inaccurate claims. For example, he states that a radical difference between Paul and Greco-Roman philosophers was Paul’s embrace of suffering and the idea that progress in virtue or holiness happens through suffering. Conversely, Greco-Roman philosophers apparently wanted no such part of suffering. ²⁴ This is false. Contemporary philosophers wrote extensively about virtue through suffering and the ideal sage as someone who suffers. Well known scholars have even argued that Paul’s rhetoric about holiness through suffering participates in philosophical ideas about the sage and suffering. ²⁵

Wright focuses primarily on Troels Engberg-Pedersen when discussing Paul and philosophy. ²⁶ Wright, however, gives a deceptive rundown of Engberg-Pedersen’s work. In particular, he zooms in on the part of Engberg-Pedersen’s Cosmology and the Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit in which he addresses whether some of Paul’s categories are live options for people today (i.e., Paul has ideas about biology and physics that we now know are wrong). Wright then presents the situation as though Engberg-Pedersen’s entire historical analysis is oriented around this concern. He accordingly portrays Engberg-Pedersen’s historical description of Paul as essentially a “demythologizing” project that ignores the cardinal rules of doing history since it contemporizes an ancient person. ²⁷ This is a misleading and marginalizing depiction of Engberg-Pedersen’s work that likely results in conservative Christian readers dismissing it. Engberg-Pedersen, in fact, keeps the concern in question separate from his historical description, and includes it so that his books can also be useful reflections on the relevance of Paul for theologically invested readers now.

Judeophobic Stereotypes and Wright’s “Essentially Jewish” Paul, Who is Not that Jewish

Early in my graduate student days, Wright’s work was deeply compelling to me. His reading of Paul legitimated a greater theological inclusivity than I had encountered before. For Wright and many New Perspective readers, Paul’s gospel is not simply a vision of individual sinners receiving the imputed righteousness of Christ (i.e., the classic Protestant doctrine of justification), but a corporate action by God to reconcile different peoples, thus also individual people, to God and to each other. Conservative evangelical critics often caricature Wright on these matters as articulating just a “sociological” gospel. It is more accurate to say that in New Perspective readings, questions about the inclusion of gentiles and how to identify God’s people are inherently “salvation” and not “merely sociological” issues. Accordingly, Wright’s Paul was establishing “multiethnic communities” of Jews and gentiles. ²⁸

Inclusivity and the dismantling of racist structures should be urgent priorities among all humans! Readings of Paul that facilitate such action are thus understandably important in church settings. This is doubtless why Wright’s Paul who brings Jews and gentiles together in Christ is compelling to many Christian leaders, students, and theologically interested churchgoers.

But Wright’s multiethnic Paul unfortunately results in a de-ethnicized Paul that trades in historically inaccurate and Judeophobic stereotypes. There is union between Jew and gentile because, for New Perspective readers like Wright, ethnic distinctions are transcended, “radically transformed,” or in other ways erased when it comes to “in-Christ” Christian realities. It’s not that the Jewish deity, ancestral customs, land, and history are irrelevant to Wright’s reading. Far from it. He is known for insisting that a master “story of Israel” that climaxes in Christ animates Paul’s thought. But the gospel of Wright’s Paul is a de-ethnicized reality: in-Christ, Paul and his followers have moved beyond Jewish or gentile notability. This theme stretches back in Wright’s work to 1991 when he wrote about “the family of Abraham defined by grace not race,” to his Paul and the Faithfulness of God where “God’s Israel” of Gal 6:16 consists of Jews and gentiles who believe in Jesus–-in other words, Christians who are a “third race” or “new thing.” ²⁹

Every concrete aspect of Paul’s Jewishness (at least as Wright understands it) vanishes as it is “radically revised … in the light of Jesus and the spirit” ³⁰ into his Christianity in which ethnic distinctions cease to have relevance. Paul ceased being “a hard-line right-wing Pharisee” obsessed with “absolute purity” and Jewish “nationalist” or ethnic “boundarymarkers” ³¹ and went through a “radical mutation of Jewish theology.” ³² He commenced founding churches of Jews and gentiles that he came to think were the true “climax” of God’s purposes for Israel and “the story of Abraham” in the first place. Or, as Wright writes in his biography of Paul, “People must have wondered who he was … and what sense it made for a hard-line nationalist Jew to become the founder of multiethnic communities.” ³³ He recognizes the supersessionism of this position in Paul and the Faithfulness of God, but deals with it in a way that effectively lowers the bar for what counts as Judeophobic by contrasting (good) “Jewish supersessionism,” which he attributes to Paul and (without qualification) “Qumran,” with (bad) “sweeping supersessionism” and “hard supersessionism,” which he attributes to New Testament scholars’ readings of Paul with which he disagrees. ³⁴

While Wright criticizes the Protestant contrast between Jewish works-righteousness and Christian grace, his Paul reinscribes the historically inaccurate and Judeophobic stereotype of Jewish exclusiveness or particularity in contrast to Christian universalism. ³⁵ As James Crossley has argued, Wright’s “essentially Jewish” Paul thus turns out to be “Jewish but not that Jewish.” ³⁶ Any Jewishness that fails to legitimate Wright’s Christianity has been banished from Paul’s letters. Wright can then leverage his version of a Jewish Paul to legitimate his conservative Protestant project as historical. The effect is to authorize his interpretations since they all turn out to be some version the beliefs, worldviews, and stories of ancient Jews (as Wright constructs them) that have been “radically revised” and “rethought, reimagined and reworked around Jesus himself.” ³⁷

Many non-evangelical and non-New Perspective scholars such as Caroline Johnson Hodge, Brian Rainey, and Paula Fredriksen have done detailed work to re-ethnicize Paul. Paul’s writing about topics usually considered to be beyond ethnicity—God, God’s promises, what Christ accomplishes, how initiates participate in Christ, faith, conversion, sin, and even the “spirit”—are animated by ancient logics about kinship, patrilineal descent, and ethnic groups. ³⁸ The so-called “Paul within Judaism” movement in scholarship furthermore explains that Paul was not a Christian, a category he does not use. He presented himself instead as a Jewish teacher of gentiles, not to establish mixed Jew and gentile communities, but to offer gentiles access to the power and benefits of Israel’s God, all as part of that deity’s eschatological plan to gather the nations. ³⁹ Paul’s supposed “universalism” turns out to presume and even re-intensify the ethnic distinctions of Jew versus gentile. As Romans 3–8 and 9–11 plus Galatians 3–4 clarify, gentiles inherit the blessings of God’s ethnically-specific promises to Israel only as they, through Christ, are adopted as (not replace!) Abraham’s descendants. ⁴⁰ The “universalism” of Paul’s letters is very much an exclusive ethnic “particularism.”

What I would like to highlight from the preceding discussion is not only that Wright’s Paul is a de-ethnicized historical distortion, but also that Wright’s approach also amplifies supersessionist readings and Judeophobic stereotypes. For example, “Pharisees” stand-in for negative associations like hardline right-wing or nationalist concerns in contrast to multiethnic inclusion. Wright even deploys Matt 23:5’s imagery about hypocritical, arrogant, and self-serving scribes and Pharisees to dismiss opposing scholars accordingly, “who wear their fringes long and their phylacteries broad.” ⁴¹ As biblical scholars like Amy-Jill Levine, Meredith Warren, Sarah Rollens, and Eric Vanden Eykel have explained, the normalizing of these distorting stereotypes erases the harm they have caused to Jews. ⁴² This is not simply a matter of post-Holocaust political correctness, as Wright frequently avers. ⁴³ Wright’s volumes rehabilitate Judeophobic narratives that are so well established that they have become largely invisible to his conservative (often White) Christian audiences. Would it not be better if biblical scholarship disrupted such inaccurate and harmful tropes instead of weaponizing them to shield itself from criticism? A good place to start would be to cease treating Paul’s Jewishness as something problematic or incomplete that must radically mutate into Wright’s Christianity.

A Counter-Cultural Paul who Normalizes an Exploitative Status Quo?

In relatively privileged, and especially in White European and American settings, there is often a moral capital to claiming alignment with the marginalized and against the status quo. Many readers in privileged Christian settings thus find Wright’s Paul who “significantly modifies the expectations of his day” and challenges “followers of Jesus to live counter-culturally” compelling. ⁴⁴ Another way to put this is that Wright, like many other theological readers, adds another attractive register of meaning in Paul when he writes things like, “When Paul said that Jesus was now in charge, he meant something much more dangerous and subversive. He meant, in some sense or other, that Caesar was not the world’s ultimate ruler.” ⁴⁵

Material subversion of exploitative racial, gender, sexual-norm, and economic structures is, at least in my estimation, a paramount goal. But a double-edged historical question remains. Is this sketch of Paul accurate, and does that sketch accomplish the marketed disruptive goals for Wright and among his readers now? Lest one think this an unduly skeptical question, critical scholars, especially non-White voices, have long identified a pervasive phenomenon of relevance. For example, Olúfẹ´mi Táíwò has written brilliantly about ideological versions of “elite capture,” wherein the language, vocabularies, and ideals for promoting the marginalized are deployed in ways counter to their actual interests and in favor of the interests of the elite or status quo who benefit from their exploitation. ⁴⁶ Táíwò’s point is not that such capture of values is always about cynical appropriation, conscious intentions, or conspiracies. Elite capture is nurtured by structures and social systems that militate against substantive changes in material conditions. ⁴⁷ If we take seriously that the foreseeable negative consequences of our actions matter, then it is incumbent upon us biblical scholars who talk about subversion to interrogate whether our claims about ancient sources are accurate or whether they reproduce a problematic biblical or Christian exceptionalism that erases its exploitative realities.

It is notable that while Wright often uses the language of counter-cultural, radical, and subversive to brand his Paul, ⁴⁸ he is vague about what precisely it means. He sets up generalizing foils: “the deaf ears of some critics who have assumed that when I say Paul had a counter-imperial gospel I mean that he was a modern Marxist or anarchist born out of due time” ⁴⁹ or not “a ‘Constantinian’ compromise and an ‘Anabaptist’ detachment.” ⁵⁰ In this way, Wright positions himself as a nuanced middle or third way. But what is that way? I will engage one example to illustrate some key points. ⁵¹

Wright twice addresses the household codes of Eph 5:21–6:9 and Col 3:18–4:1. ⁵² Since he has established an expectation that Paul is counter-cultural and subversive, Wright’s discussion focuses on why these passages command wives to submit to their husbands and fail to reject slavery. He writes, “Paul treads a fine line … between challenging followers of Jesus to live counter-culturally, being radically different from those around, and merely accommodating to the prevailing cultural mores.” ⁵³ Wright deals with how the passages naturalize misogyny and enslaving in two related ways. First, he (approvingly) claims that Paul’s concern was that “the only things people will find to say against [his followers] will be to do with their basic allegiance to Jesus.” ⁵⁴ Second, Wright dismisses readers who are frustrated with Paul’s non-rejection of slavery by saying, “Many writers today seem to expect that all morality will be reduced to the liberal ideals of western society in the second half the twentieth century, and then to complain that the early Christians ought to have said this more clearly than they seem to have done.” ⁵⁵

Wright’s approach does indeed have a long Euro-American Christian theological history. Pro-slavery and Jim Crow Christian apologists in the American South, for example, deployed similar arguments to ridicule abolitionists and civil rights advocates while promoting their own commitment above-all to Jesus and not newfangled political fads. But to dig more into Wright’s rhetoric, it implies that rejection of misogyny and enslaving are simply “the liberal ideals of western society in the second half of the twentieth century.” Put simply, Wright’s discussion erases the voices and actions of women and slaves from history while enshrining the dominant ideologies represented in our textual remains as, in effect, “the values.” As critical historians of abolition like Manisha Sinha, Gerald Horne, and Kellie Carter Jackson emphasize, we know, for example, that slaves rebelled in antiquity (e.g., Helots, the Spartacus slave rebellion) through colonial America and up through the American Civil War. They were the original abolitionists! ⁵⁶

It may be the case that critiques of enslaving were rare among ancient Mediterranean writers, ⁵⁷ but this did not make enslaving “the” values “of the day.” There were millions of slaves who had very different “values.” The scarcity of literary critiques means that enslaving was a naturalized value within literary networks, and that Pauline writings aligned with them and not with the interests and bodies of the enslaved. Angela Parker makes this point forcefully when she examines Paul’s self-authorizing “privileged identification with other bodies” and “conceit in self-identifying as a birthing mother” and female slave in Galatians 4. ⁵⁸ Paul, instead, occupied a privileged free-male position, and his writing naturalizes patriarchal-enslaving ideologies. Parker criticizes not only Paul’s unethical and self-authorizing “use [of] the identities of enslaved people to argue for his identification as a slave for Jesus,” but also the tendency of White New Testament scholarship to reproduce rather than interrogate Paul’s rhetoric and the ideological work it accomplishes. ⁵⁹ Laura Nasrallah likewise argues that “Paul’s ambiguous statements about slavery also normalized slavery,” especially since he “used slavery as a way to think through philosophical and theological problems” in ways that divinely naturalized such violently exploitative relations. ⁶⁰

Similar points obtain for Paul and gender. Yes, Paul’s letters indicate he approved of certain women in positions of authority among Christ followers (e.g., 1 Cor 11:5; Rom 16:1–7). But as discussed above, his writings also fundamentally participate in patriarchal systems for thinking about moral improvement, assimilation to God, and what Christ accomplishes for gentiles: they were effeminate and lost masculine self-mastery (e.g., 1 Cor 6:9–11; Rom 1:18–2:16) but are masculinized in Christ. This is a reaffirmation of misogynist hierarchies of value, not a counter-cultural subversion. ⁶¹ Shelly Matthews makes similar points in her critique of how interpreters largely identify with Paul and thus overlook the alignment of his subordinationist rhetoric of 1 Cor 11:2–16 with gendered violence. ⁶²

When addressing misogyny and enslaving, Wright misleadingly says that Paul “significantly modifies the expectations of his day” and challenges “followers of Jesus to live counter-culturally.” ⁶³ This starts to look more like elite capture than useful historical description. He allows a Paul who is symbolically (if you will) subversive and counter-cultural, but when it comes to social, material, and economic realities, Wright’s Paul explicitly normalizes these realities.

Conclusion

Paul and the Faithfulness of God delivers an attractive Paul to its Christian readers. They experience Wright’s irreducibly Jewish, countercultural, and subversive Paul as a Paul who has been authorized by historical scholarship that has shown all competing Pauls to be captives to political correctness and retrograde ways of thinking about ancient Judaism. A key part of this Paul’s attractiveness is that he ventriloquizes the narratives, theologies, and culturally prestigious values of Wright’s readership. Wright’s Paul feels like home to them.

To be clear, some versions of the values of Wright’s Paul— like inclusion and subversion of a problematic status quo—are understandably compelling. But just as Wright’s recent book on how Christians should respond to the COVID-19 pandemic normalizes individual actions (like prayer and grieving) while maligning larger-scale state imperatives for economic-societal changes that can disrupt the pandemic and the racialized inequality of its harms, so too does his subversive Paul stop short of not only historical accuracy, but any actual subversion. ⁶⁴ Wright’s Paul instead embodies the Judaism versus Hellenism divide, comes from basic methodological mistakes for thinking about texts and history, and reflects inaccurate and Judeophobic stereotypes. This is a Paul who has the privilege of erasing his relatively elite, literate, free-male privilege, while he naturalizes enslaving, misogyny, and his own authority. Wright’s volumes perpetuate the erasure. Biblical scholarship can do otherwise.