Scot McKnight on NT Wright's "Simply Jesus"

Scot McKnight's 4-part post:

Simply Jesus 1:
Tom Wright belongs in a line of only a few noble UK scholars who have the capacity to write about complexities with clarity and simplicity, without turning the whole thing into some kind of limp populism. That line of UK scholars includes William Barclay and C.H. Dodd. I’d like to include C.F.D. Moule but I don’t know that he ever quite turned his pen toward the ordinary person. Still, Tom is the current version of the prose of Barclay and Dodd. Yet different, as they too were different.
Tom Wright is proposing that next to our New Testament we should open Virgil’s The Aeneid and Josephus. Josephus is boilerplate for those who want to comprehend the Jewish context of earliest Christianity, but why Virgil? Simply put: Virgil provides the historical grounding myth of the Roman empire. He tells a story that comes to completion in none other than Julius Caesar, Octavian and Tiberius — in effect, the sons of god of Rome.
Here’s one way to put the claim of Tom Wright: to claim that Christianity, or whatever you want to call it, non-political is the worst sort of...continued here 

             

 Simply Jesus 2:Deep in the heart of Judaism in the centuries leading up to Jesus was a dual conviction: that God had elected Israel as creation-restoring agents and, right next to this, the manifold brokenness of creation and Israel and the Land and the priests and the Temple. What sustained their hope? One Story: the Exodus. They told its story, sang its songs and continued to celebrate God’s victory. Why? Someday that same God would do it all over again. So argues Tom Wright in his new book, Simply Jesus.The Exodus Hope included seven...continued here


Simply Jesus 3:
It is Tom Wright’s contention, in his new book Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters, that Jewish kingdom movements had two integral features: a battle and the temple. Tom examines those two themes in the  continued here








Simply Jesus 4:
The major themes of the Exodus are at the heart of Tom Wright’s new book Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters. But there’s more to say than that: Exodus is at the heart of the entire mission of.....continued here

      
Jesus Creed - Simply Jesus 5
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Jesus Creed - Simply Jesus 7