There is an interesting series on Larry Hurtado's blog here http://larryhurtado.wordpress.com about Wright's latest quick read (1700 pages) in his Christian Origins and the Question of God series, titled "Paul and the Faithfulness of God."
1) I have made the obvious point several times that N.T. Wright has made many important contributions to Christian thought during his career.
2) I have also made the point that, despite his substantial credentials, and my substantial lack of credentials, I cannot reconcile some of his Pauline viewpoints.
3) Luckily, others with credentials cannot either.
Hurtado here http://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2014/03/18/paul-and-the-faithfulness-of-god-2nd-posting/ has something quite significant to say underlying a fundamental difference in Wright's understanding and his (mine). Wright contends that it was the Jewish expectation at the time that YHWH would appear in person, forming the lens that Jews at the time would identify Jesus. Contrast with Hurtado, who maintains with other scholars that Jesus was placed by 1st century Jews within the "divine identity".
Clearly, during this time, there was a very hard turn from classic understanding of God to one that began to include Jesus in it's composition. How this, as Hurtado puts it, "mutation" in Jewish monotheism occurred is an interesting question. Surely part of the problem is the tension even within single authors, such as Paul, as to what exactly Jesus' place in the Jewish tradition was, and where that place intersected with gentiles. One thing is for certain, if Paul got it wrong, then we were set very early on a strange and muddled trajectory, one that was crystallized in the idea of the Trinity. It seems to me, that, Wright continues to put a lot of confidence in Paul and his theology, as if he was acting in isolation, able to take early Jewish/disciple understanding of whom Jesus was, and in some ways, reshape that to the "triadic shape" that has become the idea of the Trinity.
I'm not sure if that makes a lot of sense. Taking his letters in whole, it seems to paint the picture of a very bright Pharisee whom was reliable on early disciple instructions on what exactly was going on with the Jesus he met on the road to Damascus, and not one that was in position to re-interpret early Jewish consensus on what exactly the person of Jesus meant to traditional Jewish monotheism. Through his re-interpreations of Paul, it also seems to be that Wright is forever giving Paul too much credit in forming early Christian thought, and not enough credit to Peter and those that spent several years with Jesus during his ministry. Morover, to use an analogy, he is setting Paul up as a mutagen, and not the natural development of religion in Mesopotamia. It again seems to me that this is the much more well-traveled road with God, a God that is, at least on some levels, okay with allowing nature to run its course through evolution to bring us to a point of emerging awareness of His Creation and Presence. As humans fail over and over, nature priming the brain and conscience is always the better route to bring God into our field of vision, in this case aided by Jesus' words, stories and actions. Why God needed Paul at all is not so abundantly clear to me and will remain a mystery. Why N.T. Wright insists Paul restructured the way Jews thought about Jesus, remains just as much a mystery.
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