Justified True Belief

(●) The historian who put Jesus back inside his own century, and argued that the resurrection is the best explanation of how the church began. + For most of the twentieth century, serious historical study of Jesus was something Christians read about nervously. It was done, for the most part, by people who expected to finish with less than the church had claimed, and they usually did. Tom Wright spent forty years arguing that this was a failure of history rather than a discovery of it, and that a Jesus put back into first-century Palestine, among people who were waiting for God to act and arguing about what that would look like, turns out to be more like the Jesus of the creeds and not less. His case runs in two directions at once, and that is the thing to notice about him. On one side there is a technical series planned in five volumes, four of them published so far, with footnotes in Greek, Hebrew and German and several thousand pages between them. On the other there is a shelf of short paperbacks that a person with no theological training can read on a train. He keeps the two apart by name: the scholarship goes out as N. T. Wright, and in Britain the books for everyone else go out as Tom Wright, which means a reader who owns both has two authors on the shelf who are the same man. He is also the rare New Testament scholar who spent seven years as a diocesan bishop, sat in the House of Lords, and went back to a university afterward because the books were not finished. Somewhere over seventy titles have his name on them, including a translation of the whole New Testament that he made himself.

(●) 1948 AD: Born in Northumberland into a churchgoing family, and expecting to be ordained before he was old enough to know that was unusual. + Nicholas Thomas Wright was born on 1 December 1948 in Morpeth, a market town on the river Wansbeck in Northumberland, about fifteen miles north of Newcastle. The household was Anglican in the ordinary, unremarkable way: he was baptized as a child among praying relatives, and he went to a school where prayers came round every day. Asked later how he came to faith in Christ, he did not name a date. The question usually expects one, and he had none to give. What he described instead was the home and the school, and then a series of jumps forward, each one making real for him something that had been there all along without meaning very much. The first jump he could remember came around the age of seven, when he began to realize he was called to ordained ministry. Children that age generally want to drive trains. Another of the things he did not know, he said afterwards, was that this was unusual. In his early teens he started going to boys’ camps run by Scripture Union, an evangelical organization that ran outdoor holidays with Bible teaching morning and evening, and he has said that the combination of a steady church background with exciting biblical study set him up for life. The other discovery of his teens was less comfortable. It dawned on him gradually that most adults in Britain did not believe in God in any serious way, and that the world he had grown up inside was not the world outside it. That is a discovery a believing teenager tends to make in pieces rather than all at once, and it does not go away again. Meanwhile the schooling went on. He was sent to Sedbergh School, in the Yorkshire Dales, where he specialized in Classics: Greek and Latin, ancient history, and the habit of reading a text closely enough to notice what a single word is doing.

(●) 1968 AD: He read classics at Oxford, and then stayed on to train for the priesthood. + He went up to Exeter College, Oxford, in 1968 to read literae humaniores, the Oxford course in Greek and Latin literature, ancient history and philosophy that everyone calls Greats. He took a first in 1971, a first being the top class of an English degree, the one awarded to a small fraction of a year group. Notice what the training was not. There was no theology in it at any point, and he has said since that this was the best preparation he could have had: three years of being made to ask what an ancient text meant to the people who first heard it, before anyone asked him what it meant for the church. From 1971 he trained for Anglican ministry at Wycliffe Hall, an evangelical theological college in Oxford, and married his wife Maggie during those years. They have four children. He was ordained deacon in 1975 and priest the following year. He had assumed all along that he was heading for a parish. What redirected him, on his own account, was a set of seminars he organized in his last undergraduate year for the Christian Union, which is what British universities call the evangelical student society. One of the speakers was the New Testament scholar John Wenham, who told the room that what was desperately needed was people who loved the Lord and loved Scripture and had the academic background to do the biblical research. Wright heard it as addressed to him. It was not a call away from ministry. It was a decision that the study was the ministry.

(●) 1975 AD: He began a doctorate on Romans, and the question it left him with took the next forty years to answer. + From 1975 he was a junior research fellow and junior chaplain at Merton College, Oxford, and from 1978 fellow, chaplain and lecturer at Downing College, Cambridge. Through both posts he was working on a doctoral thesis, finished in 1980 and awarded in 1981, with the title The Messiah and the People of God: A Study in Pauline Theology with Particular Reference to the Argument of the Epistle to the Romans. The title is a mouthful, but the question underneath it is simple enough to state at a kitchen table. Paul was a Jew who believed in one God and in the covenant that God had made with Israel. A covenant is a binding agreement with obligations on both sides, the sort of thing two parties swear to and cannot quietly walk away from, and the covenant in question ran from God’s promise to Abraham that his family would be a blessing to the whole world. Paul then spent his life telling non-Jews that they belonged to Abraham’s family without becoming Jews. How did he think that worked? Wright came out of the thesis convinced that the usual answers were answering a question Paul was not asking. Those answers mostly ask how an individual gets right with God, which is a real question and not Paul’s starting point. What holds the letters together, on Wright’s reading, is the older question of what God had promised Israel and whether he had kept his word. That conviction is the seed of everything. His first book had appeared before the doctorate was finished: Small Faith, Great God (1978), a short pastoral book arguing that what saves a person is not the size of their faith but the size of the God it is placed in.

(●) 1981 AD: He taught for five years in Montreal, came back to Oxford, and published the first volume of a series planned to run to five. + In 1981 he crossed the Atlantic to McGill University in Montreal as assistant professor of New Testament studies, and stayed until 1986. North America gave him something Oxford could not: a classroom of students who had no inherited Anglican assumptions to fall back on, and colleagues in a faculty where the historical questions were being fought over in public. He came back in 1986 to Worcester College, Oxford, as chaplain, fellow and tutor, and lectured in the university until 1993. Those seven years produced the technical work that made his name in the guild, which is what biblical scholars call their own profession: the people who read one another’s footnotes, review one another’s books, and decide between them what counts as a serious contribution. Two very different books came out of those years. The Climax of the Covenant (1991) is a set of hard exegetical studies on Christ and the Jewish law. Exegesis is the slow business of getting out of a text what is actually in it, clause by clause, in the language it was written in, and this is the sort of book that is read with a Greek New Testament open on the desk beside it. Who Was Jesus? (1992) is the opposite kind of book, a short reply to three popular authors who had told the British public that the real Jesus was nothing like the one in the Gospels. Then, in 1992, came The New Testament and the People of God, the first volume of a project he announced would be called Christian Origins and the Question of God. It contains almost nothing about Jesus. It is five hundred pages of groundwork: how history is done, how a first-century Jew saw the world, what the word "God" meant to people who said it in Aramaic and Greek in the Roman Empire. Readers who wanted the Jesus book had to wait four more years, and the delay was the point. He was refusing to describe a man without first describing the room he was standing in.

(●) 1994 AD: He left the university for a cathedral, and wrote his Jesus book in a deanery. + In 1994 he became Dean of Lichfield, the senior clergyman of a medieval cathedral in Staffordshire with three spires and a working choir. It is a full job, and none of it is reading: services, staff, the fabric of the building, money, and a diocese looking on, a diocese being the whole district of parishes a bishop is responsible for. He held it for five years, living in the deanery beside the cathedral, and wrote through all of them. Jesus and the Victory of God (1996) is the second volume of the big series and the book that made him famous outside the academy. What Saint Paul Really Said (1997) took the argument of his doctorate and put it into fewer than two hundred short pages, subtitled with a question the tabloids liked: was Paul of Tarsus the real founder of Christianity? Then, in 1999, came a book of a kind that hardly anybody manages. The Meaning of Jesus was written with Marcus Borg, a scholar of the Jesus Seminar, the group that had lately been voting with coloured beads on which sayings in the Gospels Jesus had really said and concluding that most of them were not his. Borg disagreed with Wright about almost everything that mattered. They wrote alternating chapters, disagreed in print, and remained close friends until Borg’s death in 2015. The book is still the cleanest example anywhere of two people arguing about Jesus without either of them pretending the other is stupid. In 2000 he moved to Westminster Abbey as Canon Theologian, a post on the Abbey staff whose work is the thinking and the preaching rather than the administration, and it was there, in a house beside the Abbey, that he finished the volume most people on an apologetics shelf come to him for.

(●) 2003 AD: He was made Bishop of Durham in the same year his book on the resurrection appeared. + He was consecrated at York Minster on 3 July 2003 and went north to Durham, one of the oldest and most senior sees in England. A see is a bishop’s office together with the territory that goes with it, and this one carried a seat in the House of Lords. Bishops of Durham live at Auckland Castle and are expected to be public figures. He was one, and not always comfortably: he wrote and spoke on the Iraq war, on debt relief, on the treatment of asylum seekers, and on the divisions then pulling the Anglican Communion apart. The same year, The Resurrection of the Son of God was published: more than eight hundred pages on what "resurrection" meant to pagans, to Jews, and then to the first Christians, and on what could have caused the change. It is the third volume of the series and the one that other historians have had to answer. The rest of the decade was argument in public. In 2005 he sat down for two days at a forum in New Orleans and debated the resurrection with John Dominic Crossan, among the best known sceptical scholars of the period, and the exchange was published as a book. Two years later the criticism arrived from the other flank: the American pastor John Piper published The Future of Justification, a book-length criticism of Wright’s account of Paul, having first sent him the manuscript and taken his comments on it, which is a courtesy the genre does not require. That same year Surprised by Hope argued that most Christians have been taught to hope for the wrong thing, and it sold in numbers academic publishers never see. Underneath all of it he kept writing the short commentaries, one New Testament book at a time.

(●) 2010 AD: He gave up the bishopric to finish the books, and has not stopped since. + In April 2010 he announced that he would leave the see of Durham at the end of August. His reason was not a quarrel and not ill health. His "continuing vocation to be a writer, teacher and broadcaster, for the benefit (I hope) of the wider world and church," he said, "has been increasingly difficult to combine with the complex demands and duties of a diocesan bishop." Bishops do not usually resign in order to write. He did. He went to the University of St Andrews in Scotland as Research Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity, and three years later the thing he had left the diocese for arrived. Paul and the Faithfulness of God (2013) is the fourth volume of the series, in two books running to about seventeen hundred pages, which is longer than most Victorian novels and considerably harder going. The recognition followed. The British Academy gave him its Burkitt Medal for biblical studies in 2014, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh elected him a fellow in 2015. Then, in February and March of 2018, he gave the Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen under the title Discerning the Dawn: History, Eschatology and New Creation. The Giffords are the most prestigious lecture series in natural theology, which means reasoning toward God from the world as anybody can look at it, without starting from Scripture or the church as an authority. A New Testament historian is not the usual choice for that platform, which turned out to be the point of choosing one. He moved back to Oxford in 2019 as Senior Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall, the college where he had trained nearly half a century earlier, and is Research Professor Emeritus at St Andrews. The books have gone on coming into his late seventies, at a rate that would be respectable from someone half his age: Broken Signposts and God and the Pandemic in 2020, Into the Heart of Romans in 2023, Jesus and the Powers with Michael Bird in 2024, The Vision of Ephesians in 2025, and God’s Homecoming in February 2026.

What He Taught

(T1) Jesus was a first-century Jew, and his words have to be heard the way his hearers heard them. + Imagine a historian in the year 2500 who finds a letter from 1941 saying that a man "did his bit at Dunkirk." She knows what a beach is and what a bit is, and she is nowhere near the meaning. To get there she needs a war, an evacuation, a nation’s memory of small boats. The words are ordinary. The world behind them is not. Wright’s complaint about a great deal of Jesus scholarship is that it skipped the world. When Jesus said "the kingdom of God is at hand" (Mark 1:15), the phrase was not a general remark about spirituality and not an offer of life after death. It belonged to a people living under Roman occupation who told themselves a particular story: God had made promises to Israel, the exile had gone on in one form or another for centuries, and one day God would come back, deal with the pagan empire, and reign. Second Temple Judaism is the historians’ name for that period, the six hundred years or so from the rebuilding of the temple after the Babylonian exile to its destruction by the Romans in AD 70. "Kingdom of God" in that setting meant God taking charge, here, on the ground. "Son of man" was not a modest way of saying "human being" but a phrase out of Daniel 7:13-14, where a human figure comes on the clouds and is given a kingdom. Two habits of reading follow. The first is that a saying of Jesus is not a timeless maxim floating free of its century; it is a move in a live argument with real opponents about what God was doing. The second is a warning to Christians, and Wright presses it hard: a Jesus who agrees with everything the reader already believed is a Jesus who has been assembled rather than found. The discipline of history is what stops that from happening, which is why he insists that history is a friend of faith rather than a threat to it.

(Q) "We need to know what ‘kingdom of God’ meant in the first century. We need to know what ‘son of man’ meant. If we do not, we might as well substitute the word ‘enlightenment’ for the first and the word ‘superman’ for the second." + Source: N. T. Wright, "Jesus and the Identity of God," Ex Auditu 14 (1998), pages 42 to 56. The point of the joke is that both substitutions have actually been made. Nineteenth-century liberal theology heard "kingdom of God" and thought of moral progress; popular piety hears "son of man" and thinks of a superhero in a cloak. Neither is what a Galilean crowd heard (T1).

(T2) Jesus believed he was doing in person what Israel’s Scriptures said God himself would come and do. + Here is the hardest question in the field, and Wright does not dodge it: what did Jesus think he was doing? Historians are usually shy about a dead man’s inner life, and rightly. But a vocation, meaning a sense of being called to a particular task, is not a private mood. It shows up in what a person does, and Jesus did some very odd things. He forgave sins on his own authority, in a crowded house up in Galilee, some eighty miles from the temple where forgiveness was transacted. That is roughly like a man on a street corner handing out pardons that only a court can issue, and the objection recorded in Mark is exactly the one you would expect: "Who can forgive sins but God alone?" (Mark 2:7). Then there is what he did in his last week, which takes a piece of Israel’s story to make sense of. The prophet Ezekiel, writing while Jerusalem was falling to the Babylonians, watched in a vision as the glory of God rose up out of the temple and left the city (Ezekiel 10 and 11). That is the darkest moment in the prophets: not that the building came down, but that God had walked out of it before it did. The prophets who followed promised that one day he would come back. Isaiah pictured watchmen on the walls who would see the return of the LORD to Zion (Isaiah 52:8), Zion being the temple hill and, by extension, Jerusalem itself. Then the exiles came home, and the temple was rebuilt, and Herod later enlarged it into one of the wonders of the ancient world, and on Wright’s reading nothing in the Jewish writing of the period claims that the glory had ever returned to it. The promise was still outstanding. Wright reads the last week of Jesus’ life, the ride into the city and the action in the temple courts, as the deliberate enactment of that homecoming, with Jesus taking the part of the God who was coming back. The claim is narrower than it sounds, and also stronger. Wright is not saying that Jesus walked around Galilee thinking in the vocabulary of the fourth century, reciting to himself that he was the second person of the Trinity. He is saying something a historian can actually get at: that Jesus took on himself a job description which, in his own Scriptures, belonged to God and to nobody else. And he holds that this is not less than the creeds confess but the ground floor underneath them. Critics have answered that a vocation is thinner than an identity, and that the church confesses more about Jesus than he is here shown to have believed about himself. The dispute is a real one, and it is about method as much as about doctrine.

(Q) "Jesus believed he would win the messianic victory over the real enemy and would build the true messianic temple through taking Israel’s fate upon himself and going to the cross. Jesus believed that in doing so he was not just pointing to or talking about, but was actually embodying, the return of YHWH to Zion." + Source: N. T. Wright, "Jesus and the Identity of God," Ex Auditu 14 (1998), pages 42 to 56. YHWH is the personal name of God in the Hebrew Scriptures, the four letters behind the English "the LORD" in capitals, which pious Jews did not say aloud. Wright uses it rather than "God" because the claim is specific: not that Jesus thought of himself as divine in some general sense, but that he took the last week of his life to be the homecoming Israel’s own texts had promised to the God of Israel by name (T2).

(T3) The best historical explanation for the church’s existence is that Jesus was raised bodily from the dead. + Wright’s resurrection argument does not begin with the empty tomb. It begins with a piece of intellectual history that anyone can check, and it is the reason hundreds of pages go by before the book reaches the Easter stories in the Gospels at all. Ancient people held a range of views about death. Greeks and Romans overwhelmingly held that bodies do not come back, and their poets said so cheerfully; Homer’s underworld has no exit. Most Jews of the first century, unlike their pagan neighbours, did expect a resurrection, but expected exactly one, at the end of history, involving everybody, as part of God’s putting the world right. Nobody expected one man to be raised ahead of schedule, on his own, in the middle of ordinary time, leaving the world otherwise unchanged. That is the puzzle. Within about twenty years, a group of Jews were saying precisely that, and had rearranged their entire hope around it. They also did something odder still. Israel had known plenty of would-be messiahs. Messiah means the anointed one, the king from David’s line whom God had promised to send to rescue his people and set the world right, and in the century either side of Jesus a number of men were followed as though they were him. The pattern after a Roman execution was reliable: the movement collapsed, or it went home, or it found a new leader, often the dead man’s brother. Luke has Gamaliel run through two such cases in front of the council in Jerusalem, and the shape is the same both times, the leader killed and the followers scattered and the whole thing come to nothing (Acts 5:36-37). No group in the ancient world responded to the death of its leader by announcing that he was the Messiah after all. Something changed these people, and Wright’s case is that two things account for it and nothing else does: a tomb that was found empty, and encounters that the disciples took to be with a Jesus who was solidly, physically alive. Either one alone will not do the work. An empty tomb on its own suggests a theft; visions on their own were, in that world, exactly what people expected of a dead man’s ghost, and would have proved he was dead rather than alive. He is careful about what this delivers. Historical argument gives probability, not proof, and the last step from "something happened" to "God raised him" is not one the historian’s tools can take alone. Not everyone in the field has followed him: Dale Allison, who takes the appearances very seriously, is far less confident that the empty tomb can be established, and other historians have argued that the tomb story is a later development. Wright has answered them in print, and the argument continues.

(Q) "As far as I am concerned, the historian may and must say that all other explanations for why Christianity arose, and why it took the shape it did, are far less convincing as historical explanations than the one the early Christians themselves offer: that Jesus really did rise from the dead on Easter morning, leaving an empty tomb behind him." + Source: N. T. Wright, "Jesus’ Resurrection and Christian Origins," Gregorianum 83/4 (2002), pages 615 to 635. The same conclusion closes The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003). Note the careful shape of the claim. He is not saying the resurrection can be proved. He is saying it is the best available explanation of a set of facts that need explaining, and that the rival explanations do worse at the job historians are actually doing (T3). A few sentences earlier he puts the test the other way round: if some other account explained the rise of Christianity as naturally and completely as this one does, while leaving ordinary assumptions about the world intact, it would be accepted without argument.

(T4) Justification is God’s verdict that a person belongs to his family, not the process of getting into it. + Picture the moment in a courtroom when the verdict is read out. Nothing about the man in the dock changes in that instant. He is the same person he was a second earlier. What changes is his standing: the court has now said where he stands, and everybody in the room knows it. Justification is a courtroom word, and of everything Wright has written, his account of this one has cost him the most friends. To justify someone, in the language Paul inherited, is not to make them good; it is for a judge to declare that this person is in the right. Wright’s claim is about which trial Paul has in mind. The standard Protestant reading, running from Luther through the Reformed confessions, hears Paul asking how a guilty sinner can stand before a holy God, and answering: not by anything he does, but by trusting Christ, whose righteousness is credited to him. Wright thinks that answer is true and that Paul teaches it, and also that it is not what the word "justification" is doing in Paul’s sentences. What Paul is arguing about, on this reading, is a first-century crisis in the churches: are these uncircumcised Gentiles really members of Abraham’s family, and may Jewish believers eat with them? "Works of the law," in that fight, are not good deeds offered as payment; they are the boundary markers, circumcision and food laws and sabbath, that told you who was inside. Justification is God’s announcement, in the present, of the verdict he will give at the last day: this person is in the right, forgiven, and a member of the one family promised to Abraham. And "the righteousness of God" is not a substance handed across the courtroom but God’s own covenant faithfulness, his keeping of the promise he made. The objections came quickly and they are serious. If justification is the announcement that you are in rather than the means of getting in, what has happened to the great Reformation comfort that Christ’s righteousness is reckoned as mine? Does Romans 4:5, where God "justifies the ungodly," fit a verdict about family membership? Wright’s reply is that he has not moved the ground of salvation an inch, that it is still sheer grace received by faith on the basis of the cross, and that Paul says all of this in other words, in the language of dying and rising with the Messiah. His critics reply that a doctrine which has to be said in other words has been weakened. That exchange has now run for twenty years.

(Q) "‘Justification’ in the first century was not about how someone might establish a relationship with God. It was about God’s eschatological definition, both future and present, of who was, in fact, a member of his people." + Source: N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said (Eerdmans, 1997), page 119. "Eschatological" means having to do with the last day, the end of the story, when God finally sets everything right. Wright’s "both future and present" is the load-bearing phrase: the verdict belongs to the last day, and God announces it now, in advance, over anyone who believes (T4). Twelve years later he set out the same case at book length, and answered his critics by name, in Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision (2009).

(T5) The Christian hope is a raised body in a renewed world, and the work done now lasts into it. + Go to almost any funeral and you will hear that the person who died has gone to a better place, and that the body in the coffin is a shell they have left behind. Wright’s argument, made at length in Surprised by Hope, is that this is a kindly thought, that it is roughly what Plato taught, and that it is not what the New Testament promises. What the New Testament promises is two stages, and he coined a deliberately awkward phrase for it: life after life after death. There is a rest with Christ for those who have died, real and conscious and good. But that is the waiting room and not the destination. The destination is resurrection: new bodies, in a new heavens and new earth, when God finishes what he started. Heaven, in this reading, is not where a Christian goes forever; heaven is where God’s future is stored up until it arrives, and the direction of travel at the end of the Bible is downward, God coming here, making all things new (Revelation 21:5), the creation itself set free from its bondage to corruption (Romans 8:21). The practical consequence is what made the book sell. If the world is going to be scrapped, then everything except saving souls is arranging deck chairs. If the world is going to be healed and raised, then the things people do in it are not wasted. Wright takes his warrant from the end of Paul’s long chapter on resurrection: after fifty-seven verses about raised bodies, Paul’s conclusion is not "so hold on until the end" but "your labor is not in vain" (1 Corinthians 15:58). Building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy: on this reading none of it is a distraction from the gospel, because none of it is going to be thrown away.

(Q) "What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it." + Source: Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (SPCK, 2007; HarperOne, 2008). He is commenting on the last verse of 1 Corinthians 15, and the sentence just before it is the hinge of the whole book: the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die (T5).

(Q) "Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance. Made for relationship, we insist on our own way. Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment." + Source: N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense (HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), closing chapter. Simply Christian was his attempt to do for a new century what C. S. Lewis had done in Mere Christianity, and it starts where Lewis started, with the things people cannot stop wanting. Wright calls them echoes of a voice: the ache for justice in a world full of injustice, the hunger for relationship in a world where everyone dies, the pull of beauty, the itch for something beyond the material. None of them proves anything on its own. All of them, he suggests, sound like a voice heard through a wall.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) He wrote the same case twice, once for the specialists and once for the person on the train. + Scholars who write for the public usually do it by thinning the scholarship. Wright did something less common: he wrote the technical version and the popular version of the same argument, side by side, for thirty years, and let readers choose their depth. The technical version is Christian Origins and the Question of God, four volumes so far with a fifth on the Gospels intended, plus a companion survey of other Pauline scholars. The popular version is the for Everyone series, short commentaries on every book of the New Testament, each chapter opening with a story from ordinary life before a word of Greek appears. He finished the series in 2011 and, having translated every passage himself as he went, published the whole New Testament in his own translation the same year. Neither half was written down to. The guild took him seriously enough to argue with him at length, which is the compliment that matters in a university. In 1999 InterVarsity Press published Jesus and the Restoration of Israel, a whole volume of critical assessment of Jesus and the Victory of God by scholars including Craig Blomberg, Klyne Snodgrass, Craig Evans, Darrell Bock, Richard Hays and Dale Allison, with Marcus Borg adding an appreciative disagreement and Wright answering all of them at the end. Very few living New Testament scholars have had a book like that written about them. The honours followed: the British Academy’s Burkitt Medal for biblical studies in 2014, election to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2015, and the Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen in 2018, where he argued that the study of Jesus in history is itself a kind of natural theology, and that the signposts in human life which point beyond themselves are all, in this world, broken ones.

(†) His resurrection book made the empty tomb a question working historians have to answer. + Before The Resurrection of the Son of God, a historian could set Easter aside as a matter of faith and get on with the sources. After it, that became harder to do quietly, because Wright had turned the question into one about evidence: not "can miracles happen," but "what best explains the mutation in Jewish resurrection belief that shows up in our earliest Christian texts." Mutation is his word for a belief that stays recognisably itself and yet changes shape, the way a family face turns up in a cousin with one feature altered, and the change he is pointing at happened inside a single generation. Christian philosophers and apologists took it up at once. Gary Habermas and Michael Licona built their own historical cases for the resurrection alongside his, and Licona’s The Resurrection of Jesus (2010) engages Wright’s method at length while disagreeing with parts of it. Twenty years on, his case turns up wherever Christians argue the empty tomb in public. The disagreements are as instructive as the agreements, and Wright has taken them in public rather than in footnotes. He spent two days at the Greer-Heard Forum in New Orleans in 2005 debating John Dominic Crossan, who holds that resurrection language is about the world being put right rather than about a body leaving a tomb, and the transcript was published with responses from other scholars. James Crossley answered him in the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, arguing that the empty tomb story is less historically secure than Wright allows. Dale Allison, who is if anything more struck than Wright by the appearances, remains unconvinced that the tomb can be established with the confidence Wright gives it. None of this is settled, and Wright has never claimed it was; what changed is that the argument is now conducted on historical ground, which is where he wanted it.

(†) Reformed readers heard his account of justification as a threat to the gospel, and the argument has run for twenty years. + Nothing else he wrote produced heat like this, and neither side of the quarrel is a foolish one. The critics’ case, put most carefully by John Piper in The Future of Justification (2007), is that Wright has taken the doctrine that carried the Reformation and reduced it to a statement about ecclesiology, about who belongs to the church. If "the righteousness of God" is only God’s covenant faithfulness, then the righteousness reckoned to the believer has gone missing, and the sinner is left without the one thing he most needs to hear: that Christ’s obedience counts as his. Piper wrote the book without malice and with unusual courtesy, sending Wright the manuscript in advance and revising it in the light of his reply. Wright answered in Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision (2009). He insists he has denied nothing that matters: salvation is by grace alone through faith alone on the basis of the cross alone, and he holds that Paul says what the Reformers wanted said, in the language of union with the Messiah rather than in the language of a transferred bookkeeping entry. His complaint is that a good doctrine has been read into the wrong sentences, and that Paul’s actual argument, about one family for Jew and Gentile alike, is lost when it is not. The reception has not been simple. Wright is usually filed with the "new perspective on Paul," which began when E. P. Sanders argued in the 1970s, working from the Jewish sources themselves rather than from what Christian scholarship had assumed about them, that first-century Judaism was not a religion of earning God’s favour by good behaviour. If that is right, then whatever Paul was attacking in his opponents, it was not that. Wright accepts the correction and then differs sharply from Sanders and from James Dunn, the other two founders of the movement, on how much of the traditional doctrine survives it. Some Reformed writers judged the whole programme a danger to the churches. Others, Michael Bird among them, worked out a mediating reading and then co-wrote a New Testament textbook with him. Two things are worth holding onto: this is a family argument between Christians who agree that a sinner is saved by grace, and both parties have conducted it by exegesis, which is how such arguments are supposed to be conducted.

(†) He leans hard on a framework the sources do not clearly carry, and too readily tells the church it has lost the plot. + Two criticisms attach to his own books rather than to anything later readers did with them, and both are part of his record. - The continuing exile. Almost everything in Wright’s reconstruction rests on the claim that first-century Jews believed themselves still in exile: the Babylonians had gone, the people were back in the land, but the promises had not landed and the story was unfinished. It is a fruitful idea, and there are texts that support it. The prayer of confession in Nehemiah, prayed aloud in the rebuilt city, says of a people living in their own country that they are slaves in it still (Nehemiah 9:36). The trouble is the weight the idea carries. Wright tends to present it as the assumed background rather than as a contested thesis, and scholars working the same sources have pushed back hard. The New Testament historian Maurice Casey pointed at the plain facts on the ground: a functioning temple, a sacrificial system, pilgrim festivals, Jews living in the land God gave them. People in that situation do not obviously describe themselves as exiles, and the argument that they secretly did needs to be very strong indeed. A whole volume, Exile: A Conversation with N. T. Wright (2017), was given to the question, with Wright answering; it is not resolved. When a single framework is doing this much work, a reader is entitled to ask how much of the reconstruction survives if the framework is wrong. - The forgotten story. In How God Became King (2012) he argues that the creeds jump from the manger to the cross and leave out everything Jesus did in between, and that the church has consequently forgotten the middle of its own Gospels. The observation about the creeds is correct as far as it goes. The inference is where reviewers dug in: the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds were written to settle who Jesus is, in the middle of fights about exactly that, and they were meant to be said alongside the Gospels rather than instead of them. A summary is not a rival. Wright says clearly that he affirms the creeds and that his complaint is about how they have been used, which is fair enough; the habit that draws the criticism is broader, a recurring frame in which the tradition has lost the plot and the reader is about to be handed it back. Neither point touches his character, and neither is a reason to put the books down. He has answered his critics in print every time, at length, under his own name, which is more than most. But confidence is part of a scholar’s record, and a reader is better served knowing which of his conclusions the field has largely accepted, such as the mutation in resurrection belief, and which remain his own contested proposals.