[laughs]

Uh, so I, I, I think I quickly lived that one down, certainly with the next book, The Resurrection of the Son of God.

But, um, the, the, the question that I was faced with Which I've been faced with actually most of my life, was how the whole biblical story works as a complete story.

For years, I had been quite seriously puzzled on and off about holding up a Bible and seeing that two-thirds of it, the Old Testament, or even three-quarters of it, depending on the printing, um, was about something other than what I'd been taught the Christian Gospel was all about.

So that the Old Testament seemed to be about land and family and law and all that stuff, and then along comes Jesus and the apostles and says, "Forget all that stuff.

We're going to heaven instead." At least that was a, a short summary of how I was perceiving the Gospel as a young man and actually as a not so young man.

And the assumption then was that the Old Testament and the Jewish world of Jesus' day were over to one side, and then there was a huge gear change after which Jesus and the apostles came along and said something completely different.

So I guess my question is, to be true to these, to these conceptions, don't we have to really give them weight and, and give, um, a- and say that, that there is something there that it has in common with Platonism, but it's, it's prior to Platon- to, to being influenced by Platonism, and it's actually something disjunctive that Jesus has introduced into the Jewish tradition?

So what was Jesus doing? Talk about the new creation.

Okay, Jesus characteristically talks about the kingdom of God.

And I've often said, what does the kingdom of God mean? Now, when I was a kid growing up, I assumed the kingdom of God meant going to heaven.

Because Matthew has kingdom of heaven, so we assume, because that's the narrative we've got in our heads, we read that and we assume that's what he's talking about.

And then half the parables just don't make sense.

Some of the great parables, the seed growing secretive, How has that got to do with our souls getting to heaven? The answer is nothing whatever.

What is it about? It's about somebody going around sowing seed in order that there will be a great harvest to God's glory.

So talk about, if it's not about getting to heaven though but still being a part of the new creation what does that look like in a personal salvation yeah

Sure.

Um, and this is God's plan to flood the whole of creation with his own glorious personal presence.

And the language there is like the language of, um, when the glory of the Lord fills the tabernacle in Exodus 40 or Solomon's temple in I Kings 8.

God wants to do to the whole creation what he did proleptically, as it were, in the tabernacle or the temple.

So that's w- one day, that is the ultimate homecoming of God.

Now, park that and we'll come back to it, because the other one, which is a theme that I've worked on now for 30 years and more, is that when the Babylonians invaded, um, the Holy Land and destroyed the temple, then, uh, the prophet Ezekiel particularly talks about God abandoning the temple, and sort of goes off somewhere we know not where.

The later rabbis wondered if he went with the exiles to Babylon, et cetera, et cetera, but he wasn't around.

Mm-hmm.

Over the last 250 years, it's been common coin in Western culture that, oh, you can't believe what's said in the Gospels.

You know, it's even made into musicals.

The things that you're liable to read in the Bible, they ain't necessarily so.

And, and that sort of, that skepticism has wormed its way into much modern culture, and indeed into many Christian circles, many church circles, where they'll say, "Well, Matthew probably made this bit up," or, "Luke just added this bit on the end of the parable," or whatever it is.

I and others have spent some of the best years of our lives researching what was actually going on in Palestine in the first third of the first century AD, and trying to get inside the minds of first century Jews, first century Romans, different Jewish parties and movements, et cetera, et cetera.

And the more that I have tried to do that, the more I've found that what you find in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John comes up in three dimensions and says, my goodness, this actually belongs.

And according to their own words, it was that they saw Jesus risen from the dead for themselves.

People have often said, and I think it's a perfectly fair position, that, okay, there aren't actually any good alternative hypotheses for how you explain the rise of early Christianity.

Yeah.

"This is not the way it should be.

Do something." And so Psalm 44, Psalm 88, et cetera, these, these are hugely important, and I noticed that Paul-Is referring to Psalm 44, one of the classic laments in Romans 8 when he talks about the groaning of all creation and us groaning and the spirit groaning within us and God knowing, et cetera.

He's got Psalm 44 in mind throughout the whole thing.

And, and I, I got all sorts of, you know, hate, not exactly hate mail, but "Doesn't N.T. Wright read his Bible anymore?" uh, kind of mail, because people were saying, "Read the prophet Amos.

If evil happens to a country, it's because they have done this and this and this.

And so isn't it obvious that the pandemic has happened because..." And then you kind of rattle off a list of the things that you were probably preaching against anyway.

And then life.

Yeah

... justification work in those different contexts? And then in the middle of all of that, um, along came Ed Sanders and other people, and it was exactly where I was getting to, which was how come every time Paul talks about justification, he's also talking about the inclusion of Gentiles within the church? And some people have resisted that enormously.

Um, I suspect because-Some people have used justification by faith to prop up some kind of ethnocentric Christian nationalism or whatever.

So the idea that Paul was interested in having people of all sorts come into the church, and that this was not incidental, this was actually central- Mm ... um, that's been scary for some people, and you will understand what I'm talking about there.

Um, so for me, the new perspective on Paul so-called didn't in any way undermine all the things I basically believed.

It fleshed them out- Yeah ... and it made exegesis all the more exciting, because I could see how this was playing out in ways that hadn't been explored.

And so for me, a lifetime of Pauline scholarship had opened up, um, and that, that has been enormously enriching in all sorts of ways.

Hmm.

... not some kind of, like, party pooper explanation.

Well, all sort, all sorts of things, all sorts of reasons.

But, um, I mean, one of the subthemes of this whole book is the, um, apparent clash between scripture as a whole, Old and New Testaments, and much church tradition.

Now, saying that sounds like a very typical Reformation-ish thing to say, scripture versus tradition.

But part of my problem is that the reformers themselves were deeply meshed into the medieval tradition and were, were adjusting nuts and bolts within it.

And what I've tried to do is to show how a whole Bible reading, the way in which the Old Testament comes forward into the new and is reaffirmed and not left behind, that that really changes everything.

So the notion then of, of heaven and home and so on, of course, Paul says in Philippians 2, "My desire is..." It's Paul in prison, where possibly facing a death sentence.

[chuckles]

[laughs]

There are, there are lots of, there are lots of great books out there, um, and you don't have to agree with everything that they say, but, um, uh, which is, goes for my books as well, of course.

But, um, y-y-y-you know, I'm sure you've got the, the, the wherewithal to go exploring in terms of, you know, take some Old Testament theologians.

Take my friend Richard Middleton and his, his works on, on the Old Testament.

Brilliant stuff.

And Walter Brueggemann, I, who's now no longer with us.

Uh, I disagreed with Walter profoundly about some things, but so many of his insights were remarkable.

What about something for us mere mortals? Um, [laughs] and so, you know-

... vision of grace is the opposite of doing stuff in the world?

Of doing stuff, yes.

Well, of course, one of the moves to make is that when you have the Pauline antithesis of grace, grace and, and, and faith or, or, or faith and works, um, uh, faith and grace over here, works over there, um, then the main thing Paul is talking about in Romans three or Galatians three or whatever, is the works which mark, which are works of the law, which mark out the Judean people over against their Gentile neighbors.

And because Paul believes that the wicked idolatrous Gentiles, if they come to faith in Jesus and get baptized and believe, they are not outsiders anymore.

And justification by faith means the inclusion of Gentiles because the cross means forgiveness, means the abandonment of idolatry, et cetera.

Once we realize that, then, um, uh, uh, suddenly the whole question of works looks very different from what it seemed to be in the medieval period, in the Reformation period, and in post-Reformation theology, which is where you and I and so many people, uh, learned our stuff.

That, well, good old Martin Luther, John Calvin, and people, it's, it's, it's faith not works, so don't think you can do anything which will impress God.

Yeah

But would you mind giving us some historical context and even an overview of this letter? Sure.

Well, yeah, indeed.

The scholars who've written about Ephesians are not agreed as to where it was written from, but I have argued, along with others, this is not unique to me, that actually Ephesians is a circular written while Paul was in prison in Ephesus to the many churches in the area.

And there's some good evidence for this because...

At the beginning of the letter where in some translations it says the saints in Ephesus, the earliest Greek manuscripts don't have the word in Ephesus because it looks as though Paul himself was in Ephesus and was sending this letter around and that it was probably later when a copy was found in Ephesus that somebody added those words in.

That's a technical detail, but it's part of the overall argument.

And also in Colossians, which seems to be very close to Ephesians in a number of ways.

To me, that's a massively huge statement, and it's one we should understand.

But would you mind giving us some historical context and even an overview of this letter? Sure.

Well, yeah, indeed.

The scholars who've written about Ephesians are not agreed as to where it was written from, but I have argued, along with others, this is not unique to me, that actually Ephesians is a circular written while Paul was in prison in Ephesus to the many churches in the area.

And there's some good evidence for this because...

At the beginning of the letter where in some translations it says the saints in Ephesus, the earliest Greek manuscripts don't have the word in Ephesus because it looks as though Paul himself was in Ephesus and was sending this letter around and that it was probably later when a copy was found in Ephesus that somebody added those words in.

That's a technical detail, but it's part of the overall argument.

And also in Colossians, which seems to be very close to Ephesians in a number of ways.

To me, that's a massively huge statement, and it's one we should understand.

What's activating in their minds about what he's doing there at the Jordan River?

Okay.

Wow.

Wow, wow.

M- my mind first goes to Deuteronomy chapter 30.

The last great chapters of Deuteronomy from the late 20s into the early 30s are a kind of a telling of the story of Israel, uh, seen from the point of view of the people who are waiting by the Jordan to go across and into the Promised Land.

Mm.

Now is the time of victory, and as a result of which, th- people in the whole world will be free, and all they have to do is recognize that and, and live under the, the new rule of God.