Abstract
Among New Testament scholars, Tom Wright is undoubtedly the best known in the UK and also among the few whose name is familiar worldwide in the pews. Perhaps this is hardly surprising given his clear and lively style, as well as the fact that he has written almost a hundred books, some popular, others lengthy academic tomes. Those who have been daunted by the length of some of the latter might well find the work under review the ideal introduction. Originally Gifford Lectures, as such they present his views not just on the New Testament but also in relation to philosophy and culture more generally, and the book comes with endorsements from 11 internationally known scholars. Always lucid and engaging, readers will have no difficulty in sustaining the course to the book’s end, and they will be rewarded by many insights along the way. For me, the most impressive was his subtle chapter on what is involved in the writing of history. In essence, the argument of the work as a whole is that, in contrast to modern secular society, which has placed a huge gulf between God’s world and ours, Jesus sought to unite heaven and earth in his person, seeing himself as the replacement for the Temple, which had been the model for a similar single reality in the Hebrew Scriptures.
How many readers will be persuaded by what is certainly an attractive thesis? To my mind, the problem is not that there are no elements of truth in his presentation but rather that nothing seems to be allowed to count against it. Take first his view of the modern world outside scripture. In his opening chapter he talks of Joseph Butler (d. 1752) as representing ‘an old order which was about to disappear’ (p. 3) to be replaced by ‘Epicureanism’, which has become ‘the mainstream … up to the present day’ (p. 8), in which the divine has been placed at an enormous distance from our world. Yet not only did Butler remain a set text at Oxford and Cambridge until the late nineteenth century, no less a figure than Gladstone became his principal editor, while what succeeded the arguments of Butler against a non-interventionist God at the end of the eighteenth century was in fact not Epicureanism but Romanticism, with God coming closer, not more distant.
Then, if we turn to the Scriptures, it does certainly look as though someone such as John thought of Jesus as a replacement for the Temple (e.g. 2.21), but the Synoptics never make the direct equation, instead assigning the identification to his accusers (e.g. Mark 14.57–58). Indeed, taking the Bible as a whole, do we not find a great range of attitudes towards the Temple, some certainly very enthusiastic, but others more suspicious or even indifferent? Wright is quick to accuse those with whom he disagrees, such as Schweitzer or Bultmann, as creatures of their time, shaped by wider currents of thought beyond the biblical text itself. But in his desire to make the text speak with a single voice, has not Wright done something similar, inasmuch as ordinary readers are not allowed to take the text at face value but now must constantly hear meanings modified as words are carefully nuanced in this new proposed larger vision?
For an alternative view, readers might like to consider whether it is not the very plurality of voices in Scripture that helps give it its continuing relevance. In a similar way, why think of the world outside those Scriptures as a barren desert rather than yet another locus for divine activity where the divine address is to be found in numerous forms, sometimes challenging, sometimes comforting and sometimes even with questions that could transform our understanding of Scripture itself?