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From RNS-
New Testament scholar N.T. Wright has spent most of his life teaching people how to study the New Testament.
And the most important thing, he says, is getting the context right.
Without that context, it’s “fatally easy for people to distort bits of Christianity,’” Wright said.
“If we ignore the context, we can make the New Testament stand on its
hind legs and dance around the room and play to our tunes — and that
that has always been the case, no doubt,” he told Religion News Service
in a recent interview. “But the correction is always to go back to,
‘What was the context?’”Wright, a retired Anglican bishop and now chair
of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of St. Andrews
in Scotland, is author more than 80 popular and academic books about
Christianity and the Bible. The latest — co-authored with fellow scholar
Michael F. Bird — is “The New Testament in Its World: An Introduction to the History, Literature, and Theology of the First Christians.”
More here-
https://pres-outlook.org/2019/11/n-t-wright-explains-the-world-of-the-new-testament-in-new-book/
From Christian Century-
When I took my first New Testament course at Fuller Theological Seminary, the professor, Robert Guelich, opened the first class by asking who, after Jesus and Paul, was most responsible for the spread of Christianity. Eager students raised their hands and offered various answers: Peter, Mary, Augustine.
“No,” Professor Guelich countered, “It was Alexander the Great.” He went on to explain how the young conqueror, dead for three centuries by the time Jesus was born, had laid the roads upon which the Roman Empire was built, and over which the gospel was subsequently spread. “Without Alexander the Great,” he told us, “no missionary journeys for Paul, and no Christianity.”
If Alexandrian roads provide a geographical map for the promulgation of Christianity, Philip Jenkins has provided us with a political-spiritual-textual map in his outstanding new book. Jenkins, a trusted historian and observer of the ebbs and flows of Christendom, has set his sights on a little-known period, which he dubs the “Crucible Era,” 250–50 BCE. It was in these two centuries, he argues, that the table was set for the emergence of Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism. (He says it paved the way for Islam, too, but here I think he’s stretching his thesis a bit.)
More here-
https://www.christiancentury.org/review/books/whats-behind-new-testament
From RNS-
