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We are, of course, far removed from the world of the first century, and so it is natural for us, when we encounter these words and others like them in the New Testament, to see them as having only very vague imports, apposite to mistily ill-defined concepts or spectrally impalpable objects. Nowhere is this more strikingly the case-and nowhere does Wright’s work in particular present a more troubling specimen of pious exegetical violence to scripture-than in regard to the New Testament’s use of the words πνεῦμα (spirit), ψυχή (soul), and σάρξ (flesh), as well as to the theologies of resurrection that attach to them. Unfortunately, they are at other times positively disastrous. And, as I say, the results are sometimes comic. (And, really, how often does Paul not employ allegory in reading scripture?) But Wright’s anxiety is quite in keeping with a certain traditional Protestant picture of the pagan and Jewish worlds of late antiquity, one that involves an impermeable cultural partition between them-between, that is, the “philosophy” of the Greeks and the “pure” covenantal piety of the Jews. Now, needless to say, nothing of the sort follows logically from my observation more to the point, my footnote did nothing more than call attention to Paul’s own words. For Wright, this was tantamount to a suggestion that Paul did not believe in the reality of God’s covenants with Israel. In that note, I mentioned more or less in passing that Paul seems to have thought that some of the narratives of the Jewish Bible not only were apt for allegorical readings, but might also have originally been written as allegories.
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And I was recently reminded of this by Wright himself, when he publicly objected to a footnote in my own recent translation of the New Testament. No such Judaism ever existed, either in the days of Christ and the apostles or in any other period but it has enjoyed a long and vigorous life in Protestant dogmatics and biblical criticism.
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Naturally, this also entails the simultaneous creation of an equally fictional late antique Judaism, of the sort that once dominated Protestant biblical scholarship: a fantastic “pure” Judaism situated outside cultural history, purged of every Hellenistic and Persian “alloy,” stripped of those shining hierarchies of spirits and powers and morally ambiguous angels and demi-angelic nefilim that had been incubated in the intertestamental literature, largely ignorant even of those Septuagintal books that were omitted from the Masoretic text of the Jewish bible, and precociously conformed to later rabbinic orthodoxy-and, even then, this last turns out to be a fantasy rabbinic orthodoxy, one robbed of its native genius and variety, and imperiously reduced to a kind of Protestantism without Jesus. I can think of no other popular writer on the early church these days whose picture of Judaism in the Roman Hellenistic world seems better to exemplify what I regard as a dangerous triumph of theological predispositions over historical fact in biblical studies-one that occasionally so distorts the picture of the intellectual and spiritual environment of the apostolic church as effectively to create an entirely fictional early Christianity. Wright as an antagonist in what follows, he functions here only as emblematic of a larger historical tendency in New Testament scholarship.