NT Wright shreds his credibility singing about evolution in Genesis to the tune of Yesterday with the already incredible former NIH Director Francis Collins

 Here.

Probably the most cringe-worthy thing you'll see today in a world absolutely teeming with cringe-worthy.

New Testament scholar NT Wrong laughably believes in the unfolding Kingdom of God through the church, so it is entirely consistent for him to believe humans evolved from the cosmic kiss of heaven and earth 14 billion years ago. 

Genesis means DNA, double helix in the Milky Way, dontchaknow.

Francis Collins, with Anthony Fauci, suppressed from the very beginning of the pandemic the belief by some of their own trusted scientists that COVID-19 escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, a charge doggedly demonstrated with evidence over the years by none other than Richard H. Ebright, Professor of Chemistry at Rutgers.

 

 

N.T. Wright's problem is that he can't imagine that Jesus' Judaism wasn't normative and had long since been "paganized"

For example, by the ideas of the Two Ways, resurrection from the dead, and an elaborate angelology adapted from Greek mythology and other beliefs over long centuries after the dispersion and Babylonian Captivity, to name but three. 

Here:

We would have to suppose that, within the first fifty years of Christianity, a double move took place: from an early, very Jewish, high Christology, to a sudden paganization, and back to a very Jewish storytelling again. The evangelists would then have thoroughly deconstructed their own deep intentions, suggesting that the climax of YHWH's purpose for Israel took place through a pagan-style miraculous birth.

The simplest explanation for the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke sees them as defenses of Jesus' divinity against the charge that he was a bastard. Wright does not consider that it was the Pharisees who were obsessed with the sexual, while Jesus wasn't.

N. T. Wright tells an existential whopper about Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem

 

 

 Here's N. T. Wrong telling us Jesus was weeping as he entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, for all manner of reasons except for what the text says:

The crowd went wild as they got nearer. This was the moment they had been waiting for. All the old songs came flooding back, and they were singing, chanting, cheering and laughing. At last, their dreams were going to come true. But in the middle of it all, their leader wasn't singing. He was in tears. Yes, their dreams were indeed coming true. But not in the way they had imagined. He was not the king they expected. Not like the monarchs of old, who sat on their jewelled and ivory thrones, dispensing their justice and wisdom. Nor was he the great warrior-king some had wanted. He didn't raise an army and ride to battle at its head. He was riding on a donkey. And he was weeping - weeping for the dream that had to die, weeping for the sword that would pierce his supporters to the soul. Weeping for the kingdom that wasn't coming as well as the kingdom that was. What was it all about? What did Jesus think he was doing?

What a gooey mess this is, which is fitting I suppose for a part of the tradition which is itself utterly confused and self-contradictory.

The weeping is only Luke's. Matthew, Mark and John do not know it in the triumphal entry.

Luke for his part nevertheless explains quite clearly that Jesus wept for a good and sober reason, namely the coming judgment of Jerusalem, which he believed was the consequence of the imminent coming of the kingdom:

And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it, Saying, If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes. For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, And shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation.

-- Luke 19:41ff.

This is no dream dying. This is a nightmare being expressed, the bad news part of the good news. It's Luke's Jesus at his eschatological best.

This is what Jesus expected, that many would be called, but only few chosen. Not even his father's house would survive in its current form.

And he went through the cities and villages, teaching, and journeying toward Jerusalem. Then said one unto him, Lord, are there few that be saved? And he said unto them, Strive to enter in at the strait gate: for many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in, and shall not be able. When once the master of the house is risen up, and hath shut to the door, and ye begin to stand without, and to knock at the door, saying, Lord, Lord, open unto us; and he shall answer and say unto you, I know you not whence ye are: Then shall ye begin to say, We have eaten and drunk in thy presence, and thou hast taught in our streets. But he shall say, I tell you, I know you not whence ye are; depart from me, all ye workers of iniquity. There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when ye shall see Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets, in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrust out.

-- Luke 13:22ff.

Luke says Jesus believed this bad dream to the bitter end, even while being led to crucifixion:

And there followed him a great company of people, and of women, which also bewailed and lamented him. But Jesus turning unto them said, Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children.

-- Luke 23:27f.

N. T. Wrong strikes again, denies the Synoptic Jesus who teaches a revolution in the creation, not a reaffirmation of it

It makes you wonder if N. T. Wright, here, would consign the whole triple tradition to "incipient gnosticism", which would be quite the leap:

Second, John's prologue by its structure reaffirms the order of Creation at the point where it is being challenged today. John consciously echoes the first chapter of Genesis: "In the beginning God made heaven and earth; in the beginning was the Word" (John 1:1). When the Word becomes flesh, heaven and earth are joined together at last, as God always intended.

But the Creation story, which begins with the duality of heaven and earth, reaches its climax in the duality of male and female. When heaven and earth are joined together in Jesus Christ, the glorious intention for the whole of Creation is unveiled, reaffirming the creation of male and female in God's image. There is something about the enfleshment of the Word in John 1 that stands parallel to Genesis 1 and speaks of Creation fulfilled. We see what's going on: Jesus Christ has come as the Bridegroom, the one for whom the Bride has been waiting.

Not for nothing is Jesus's first sign to transform a wedding from disaster to triumph. Not for nothing do we find a man and a woman at the foot of the Cross. The same incipient gnosticism which says that true religion is about "discovering who we really are" is all too ready to say that who we really are may have nothing to do with being physically created as male or female. But the Christmas message is about the redemption of God's good world, his wonderful Creation, so that it can be the glorious thing it was made to be. This word is strange, even incomprehensible, in today's culture. But if you have ears to hear, then hear it.

Au contraire:

For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.

-- Matthew 22:30

For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven.

-- Mark 12:25

And Jesus answering said unto them, The children of this world marry, and are given in marriage: But they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage: Neither can they die any more: for they are equal unto the angels; and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection.

-- Luke 20:34ff.

However consequential Jesus has been for human history, zeal for Muhammad's message and its success have been at least comparable

From a follower of NT Wright, here:

"The real Jesus must have been . . . consequential. Jesus left such an impact on the early Christians that they were willing to suffer and die for their testimony that he’d risen from the dead. A failed prophet or revolutionary might have attracted lasting admiration at best, but what could’ve happened to make devout monotheistic Jews worship this man after his death?"

For a false prophet in the opinion of Christians, Muhammad's message has built quite a following in the world despite being a younger religion in the history of humankind. It's laughable not to notice how successfully Islam has revolutionized vast swaths of the globe despite having no divine man who rose from the dead to worship, and how many have died in the cause of pressing its case on an unbelieving world in the past and in our own time, through war and through martyrdom. 

Worldwide the 1.6 billion adherents of Islam face Mecca five times a day in something more than "lasting admiration", and now equal more than 70% of the global Christian population, while Hinduism's practitioners equal another 50%. Together the Muslims and Hindus outnumber the followers of Christ by over 20%.

Consider how many Muslims have martyred themselves in suicide bombings just in the period since 1982, as tracked by the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, here. There are in excess of 4,600 cases. Compare that with the number of Christians martyred until the time of Constantine, which my late teacher Robert M. Grant in a seminar on the apologists back in the day once put at no more than 5,000.  

Jesus was no more comprehensible in his time than Noah was in his

From a disciple of NT Wright, here:

  The real Jesus must have been ... comprehensible. Jesus was a first-century Jew from Galilee, and so we should expect his words and deeds to fit within this historical and geographical context. His message must have been understandable and on some level plausible to first-century Jews in order to have gained a hearing among them. This is why it’s so hard to see Jesus as a pagan myth or a Cynic philosopher; these portraits simply don’t make sense in Jesus’s Jewish context.

On the contrary, Jesus' frame of reference came entirely from the last episode of worldwide judgment in Jewish mythology.

 

Did Noah's warning of impending doom "make sense in Noah's 'Jewish' context"? No. Did he "gain a hearing among" his peers? No, they all perished. And with what social convention did Noah comply in building and entering the ark? None. He was by all accounts crazy.

As it was in the days of Noah . . ..

-- Luke 17:26

They don't call him NT Wrong for nothing.

N. T. Wright misses that Paul took recourse to conceptions of a heavenly dwelling in order to advance beyond the older failed apocalyptic

Here is N. T. Wright, wrong again, fittingly in Slate:

Jesus, Paul, and all other first-century Christians known to us embraced the older Israelite view, in which the created physical order was of primary importance. God’s promises concerned the present world, seen as the combination of “heaven” and “earth.” The Jerusalem temple symbolized the coming together of those two spheres, pointing ahead to a time when the divine glory would fill the whole creation. Israel’s scriptures offered only cryptic hints about resurrection and the divine purpose extending beyond the grave. But this belief came to the fore, not least through times of persecution, in the last centuries before Jesus. God would, at the last, raise from the dead all his faithful people to share in his new creation. This belief remained at the heart of early Christian hope. ...

They still believed in an interim between death and resurrection, though they did not speak of this in terms of immortality, a word they applied rather to the new resurrection body itself. When Paul speaks of the “interim,” he talks about “departing and being with the Messiah, which is much better.” Perhaps that is the best way of putting it: Jesus, the prototype of new creation, will look after those who belong to him until the moment of new creation. The Book of Revelation speaks of “souls under the altar;” the martyrs pray for God’s ultimate justice to triumph. Like all our speech about life beyond death, this is picture language. The first Christians were not hugely concerned with the immediate post-mortem future, but rather with the ultimate resurrection and new creation, the bodily immortality launched with Jesus’ own resurrection.

----------------------------------------------------------------

The narrative of 2 Corinthians 5 argues that Paul had moved forward in his thinking to reconcile the failure of the predicted kingdom to appear by recasting the old ideas in terms of heavenly, eternal, non-corporeal living realities with which we are clothed quite apart from the resurrection:

For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. Here indeed we groan, and long to put on our heavenly dwelling, so that by putting it on we may not be found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we sigh with anxiety; not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee. So we are always of good courage; we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight. We are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive good or evil, according to what he has done in the body.

Similarly Romans 14:

None of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living.

And 1 Thessalonians 5:

For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we wake or sleep we might live with him.

And Philippians 1:

For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. If it is to be life in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account.

Jesus predicted an imminently coming kingdom which brings catastrophic death, not N. T. Wright's Christendom

gathering tares to be burned

N. T. Wright, here:

Here is the central element: the point about God’s authority is that the whole Bible is about God establishing his kingdom on earth as in heaven, completing (in other words) the project begun but aborted in Genesis 1–3. This is the big story that we must learn how to tell. It isn’t just about how to get saved, with some cosmology bolted onto the side. This is an organic story about God and the world.  God’s authority is exercised not to give his people lots of true information, not even true information about how they get saved (though that comes en route). God’s authority, vested in Jesus the Messiah, is about God reclaiming his proper lordship over all creation. And the way God planned to rule over his creation from the start was through obedient humanity. The Bible’s witness to Jesus declares that he, the obedient Man, has done this. But the Bible is then the God-given equipment through which the followers of Jesus are themselves equipped to be obedient stewards, the royal priesthood, bringing that saving rule of God in Christ to the world.

Jesus in Luke 13.1ff.:

There were some present at that very time who told him of the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And he answered them, "Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered thus? I tell you, No; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen upon whom the tower in Silo'am fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, No; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish."

The hyperbolists, of course, must insist that "perish" means something more and something less than "die violent death", and that "you" must refer to more than those then "present", and that "likewise" doesn't really mean "in the same way", and that "repent" doesn't really mean "turn your back on your former life". Jesus couldn't have possibly meant what he said literally, because then he would have been mistaken, and a mistaken Jesus is unthinkable because then he is unworshipable.

And that would be crazy!

NT Wright's Kingdom of God is still basically a kingdom designed for and of this world, and that's the problem with it

It is not the apocalyptic kingdom of the gospel documents which he otherwise claims to be rescuing.

Here:

[A]t a particular time God called a particular pair for a particular task: to look after his creation and make it flourish in a whole new way. ...

The point is that if you start, not with Adam and a “moral test,” but with Adam and Eve and a vocation (see Psalm 8), then a lot of things in Paul look significantly different. There is more to Paul—and to Genesis—than you might have thought. It all works, it’s all good, it’s all about God’s grace—and it’s about a justification through which humans are “put right” in order to get the original project back on track, so that we might be “putting-right” people for the world.

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"For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven."

-- Matthew 22:30

"[T]he harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels."

-- Matthew 13:39

NT Wright settles for remnant theology to resolve the conflict between kingdom and cross

Here, imagining that God's kingdom is really present in a new form because of the cross even though the concept of final judgment and a transformed world, so prominent in the mouth of the Jesus of the Gospels whom he seeks to recover, rescue and defend, makes narry an appearance. You will find neither the term "judgment" nor the concept once in the essay.

"Kingdom and cross are woven tightly together in some of the very texts which the gospel writers themselves highlight in their interpretation of the story of Jesus. There are of course many, many more, all of which point to the following conclusion. When we see the story of Jesus as the climax of the story of Israel, we should not be surprised to discover that the suffering of Israel, and of Israel's supreme representative, is to be understood in terms of the longer and larger purposes of Israel's God - in other words, the establishment of his worldwide healing sovereignty. Conversely, we should not be surprised to discover that when this God finally claims the nations as his own possession, rescuing them from their evil ways, the means by which he does it is through the suffering of his people - or, as in the story the gospels themselves are telling, the suffering of his people's official, divinely appointed representative."

If that's the best he's got, the greatest living New Testament scholar is nothing but a tired trimmer for whom passages such as "many are called but few are chosen" must be roughly resolved into the single personality of the Messiah who suffers the judgment in the stead of everyone else, an allegorical interpretation designed to escape the difficulty of the plain meaning of the many warning sayings and calls to repentance of the Gospels, not a serious attempt at interpretation. I heard it in preparation for Lutheran seminary already in the early 1970s. 

NT Wright remains NT Wrong, a creature of orthodoxy first and foremost.

Even N.T. Wright Has Occasionally Come Close To Saying Jesus Was Nuts

My case has been, and remains, that Jesus believed himself called to do and be things which, in the traditions to which he fell heir, only Israel’s God, YHWH, was to do and be. I think he held this belief both with passionate and firm conviction and with the knowledge that he could be making a terrible, lunatic mistake. I do not think this in any way downplays the signals of transcendence within the Gospel narratives. It is, I believe, consonant both with a full and high Christology and with the recognition that Jesus was a human figure who can be studied historically in the same way that any other human figure can be. Indeed, I have come to regard such historical study not just as a possibly helpful source for theology but a vital and non-negotiable resource: not just part of the possible bene esse, but of the esse itself. Partial proof of this drastic proposal lies in observing what happens if we ignore the history: we condemn ourselves to talking about abstractions, even perhaps to making Jesus himself an abstraction. Fuller proof could only come if and when systematicians are prepared to work with the first-century Jewish categories which are there in the historical accounts of Jesus and which shaped and formed his own mindset.

-- Jesus' Self-Understanding, N.T. Wright (2002)

Western orthodoxy has for too long had an overly lofty, detached, high-and-dry, uncaring, uninvolved, and (as the feminist would say) kyriarchical view of god.  It has always tended to approach the christological question by assuming this view of god and then fitting Jesus into it.  Hardly surprising, the result was a docetic Jesus, which in turn generated the protest of the eighteenth century and historical scholarship since then, not least because of the social and cultural arrangements which the combination of semi-Deism and docetism generated and sustained.  That combination remains powerful, not least in parts of my own communion, and it still needs a powerful challenge.  My proposal is not that we understand what the word “god” means and manage somehow to fit Jesus into that.  Instead, I suggest that we think historically about a young Jew, possessed of a desperately risky, indeed apparently crazy, vocation, riding into Jerusalem in tears, denouncing the Temple, and dying on a Roman cross—and that we somehow allow our meaning for the word “god” to be recentered around that point.

-- Jesus and the Identity of God, N.T. Wright (1998)

When his family heard what was happening, they tried to take him away. "He's out of his mind," they said.

-- Mark 3:21

Jesus, Greek Speaker

From Tom Wright in The Times Literary Supplement, here:

Greek was as ubiquitous in Jesus’s world as English is in much of the world today, and there is every reason to suppose that Jesus was more or less fluent in it (thus able, for instance, to argue with Pontius Pilate).

Pace the partisans of Aramaic and Latin.