The New Testament in Its World: An Introduction to the History, Literature, and Theology of the First Christians by N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird (review)

This introduction covers a lot of ground. It is, after all, close to one thousand pages! It shows the necessity of studying the NT in its historical, theological, and literary contexts. If one has read some of Wright’s prior writings, it will not be difficult to see how he weaves some of his previous analyses into this book. It is hard not to be very impressed by the seemingly encyclopedic knowledge displayed throughout the volume.

The book is written from a largely conservative Christian perspective, although there are a few attempts to situate it in a more political-and social-centric perspective. There are nods here and there to issues of social justice and to the necessity of the church to speak critically and prophetically to empires, whether ancient or modern.

One enjoyable feature of this introduction is the “Emails from the edge” when an imaginary student sends short, challenging, and quirky e-mails to a theology professor about issues encountered in the course of studying some of the materials. These imaginary interactions are usually well presented, and they may well hold a certain appeal for students in a seminary context.

I find, however, many problems with the text with regard to the authors’ lack of critical approach, and my critique will highlight some examples. Each chapter has a “Chapter at a Glance” and a theological summary at the end. A list of “Further Reading” also concludes each chapter. However helpful, these lists consistently exclude important and critical voices on the issues covered in the chapter. As a whole, the volume seriously lacks the scholarly distance necessary in the study of such a corpus.

There is clearly a lack of serious understanding of modern literary theories. The few times the authors go to that field, the results are disappointing. For example, consider this gratuitous caricature: “For postmodernists, there is no naked history to be found, only a plethora of historical interpretations to be laid out and compared, with subtextual power-games in the sources waiting to be unmasked, and—in some cases—with drunken celebrations of diversity and différence to be held along the French Riviera” (p. 54).

It seems that the authors’ focus on unifying beliefs and essentialized and unified entities has pushed them to obscure extremely complex areas of analysis. It is not historically accurate to state, “But Christianity has always said, with John 1.18, that nobody has ever seen God, but that Jesus has revealed him” (p. 174). Another example of lack of critical nuance is the following sentence: “In the early history of the church, it was the intellectual effort to answer strange deviant teachings that produced some of the great theological works” (p. 176).

The authors simply ignore some of the concerns raised by other scholars in using the term “church” for the gathering of early Christ-groups (see J. Eyl, “Semantic Voids, New Testament Translation, and Anachronism: The Case of Paul’s Use of Ekklēsia,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 26 [2014] 315–39), or “conversion” to refer to Paul’s calling (see, e.g., pp. 337, 341, 344), although the language of “conversion” used prior to this is clarified later on (p. 346): “Paul did not ‘convert’ in the sense of abandoning something called ‘Judaism’ for something called ‘Christianity.’” The major work on the issue, Alan F. Segal, Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Paul the Pharisee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), is not even cited or mentioned. Referring later to the Pastoral Epistles, the authors state, rather shockingly in my opinion, “A majority of scholars has decided that Paul did not write them” (p. 362). There is more to the issue than that most scholars have simply “decided that Paul did not write them.” The reader/student...