N. T. Wright

What I have always appreciated about Wright is how he has worked very diligently to demonstrate how one can still hold on to canonical Christian beliefs and understand them in historically intelligible ways.

Such is on display in Paul: A Biography (link in picture). Wright attempts to reconstruct the life of Paul based on Paul’s letters and Luke’s account in Acts of the Apostles, contextualizing his development, the experiences he endures, and the letters he wrote situated in their appropriate chronological order and contexts. In short, Paul: A Biography is a diachronic and more popularly directed condensation of Paul and the Faithfulness of God.

By virtue of necessity such an exposition will be speculative in many respects, although the speculation is historically informed by what is known about the Eastern Mediterranean world of the first century. I still remain unconvinced by his early Galatians hypothesis (I understand it as written around the same time as 2 Corinthians), but walked away with a far greater willingness to countenance an Ephesian imprisonment in which Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon were written.

I would thus highly recommend Paul: A Biography just like I tend to recommend a lot of Wright’s popular level writing: it is great for an audience which is not well versed, and not much interested, in the “inside baseball” of the world of scholarship on Paul, as long as one recognizes there is a lot of analysis going on which may not be explicitly manifest in this work but can be found in Paul and the Faithfulness of God, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, etc. Likewise, it is good to remember he is crafting a story for coherence and there are a lot of questions behind the scenes which cannot be fully resolved. But he provides a well-reasoned portrait which can help believers better understand Paul in his context.… (more)