This led me to Denny Burk’s review of Wright’s latest on Paul. Even though I agree that there is not much of substance new, I’m still glad I received my own copy. First of all, even if you’ve heard it or read it before, it is still helpful to possess it and have it at one’s disposal.

Also, one still runs into gems. This, for instance: “there are such things as texts; however much we deconstruct them, they bounce back with renewed challenge,and Paul’s texts have a particularly stron track record in this respect.” Or this,

I do believe in the mysterious, unpredictable and usually hidden work of the Holy Spirit. It would be odd to omit this from a discussion of Paul of all people; rather as though one were to discuss Beethoven’s sonatas while dismissing fromone’s mind the possibility there there might actually be such a thing as a piano.

And again:

But if our own positions are thus to be relativized, it may be high time to enquire about some of the supposed “fixed points” of scholarship which, growing as they did out of a very different era to our own, may perhaps have been allowed to remain more by fashion (and the fear of being though unscholarly if one challenges such fashion) than by solid argument. Take, for example, the widespread assumption still common in many quarters that not only Ephesians but also Colossians are not written by Paul himself, even if they may contain some material that goes back to him. There are, of course, many interesting points to be made on this subject. But our suspicions ought to be aroused by the fact that such consensus as there has ever been on the subject came from the time when the all-predominant power in New Testament scholarship lay with a particular ckind of German existentialist Lutheranism for whom any ecclesiology other than a purely functional one, any view of Judaism other than a purely negative one, any view of Jesus Christ other than a fairly low Christology, any veiw of creation other than a Barthian “Nein,” was deeply suspect. The false either/or, as I would see it, of justification or the church, of salvation or creation, hovered as a brooding presence over the smaller arguments (which are in any case always unconvincing, given the very small textual base) from style. The extremely marked stylistic difference between 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians is far greater than that between, say, Romans and Epheisans, but nobody supposes for that reason that one of them is not by Paul…. Much of the “new perspective” writing on Paul has simply assumed and carried on the critical decisions reached by the old perspective, without noticing that the new perspective itself calls several of them into question. In an image suggested by Rober morgan thirty years ago, there comes a time when the chess pieces have to be put back on the board so that the game may restart. I suggest that when it comes to the extent of the Pauline corpus we may have reached that time. The same goes, I suggest, for the question of the Pauline material in Acts.

(This last is rather bittersweet, aside from being delightful. I heard a conference speaker speak of the WrightSaid list as if it represented some sort of threat to PCA orthodoxy–one preposterous claim in what seemed an infinite series. As much as mission creep has occured in that list, I originally started it because an RUF minister assured me as absolute truth that Wright denied the Pauline authorship to Ephesians and Colossians. Where he picked up this certitiude is a depressing story.)

As wonderful as these sorts of statements are, there would be many more wonders if the long-awaited “big book on Paul” would eventually come out. In another direction, Wright’s schedule and the hysteria surrounding him have kept me more or less constantly thinking about Paul and perhaps the Gospels. How stultifying! That’s not even a third of the Bible. I need to spend some more quality time in the Old Testament.