N. T. Wright

Nicholas Thomas Wright (born 1 December 1948), known as N. T. Wright or Tom Wright, is an English New Testament scholar, Pauline theologian and Anglican bishop.

He was educated at Sedbergh School in the Yorkshire Dales, and in the late 1960s Wright sang and played guitar in a folk club on the west side of Vancouver.

In 1971, Wright received his BA in literae humaniores, with first class honours, from Exeter College, Oxford.

During that time he was president of the undergraduate Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union.

From 1971 to 1975, he studied for the Anglican ministry at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, receiving his (Oxford) MA at the end of this period.

He was later awarded a Doctor of Divinity (DD) degree by the University of Oxford.

In 1975 he became a junior research fellow at Merton College, Oxford, and later also junior chaplain.

In this 1977 work, Sanders argued that the prevailing view of first-century Judaism in the New Testament was inaccurate.

He described it instead as "covenantal nomism", which emphasised God's election of a people and adherence to the Torah as a way of "staying in" the religion (rather than a way of "getting in").

Wright found that Sanders supported the picture he himself had been forming, but nevertheless for the next decade much of what Wright wrote was in disagreement with Sanders on various points.

Wright agrees with other "new perspective" scholars that the assumption that the Jews were guilty of a kind of "works-righteousness" is untrue, and that the story of God and the covenant people Israel comes to a climax with Jesus.

From 1978 to 1981 he was a fellow and chaplain at Downing College, Cambridge.

In 1981 he received his DPhil from Merton College, his thesis topic being "The Messiah and the People of God: A Study in Pauline Theology with Particular Reference to the Argument of the Epistle to the Romans".

After this, he served as assistant professor of New Testament studies at McGill University, Montreal (1981 to 1986), then as chaplain, fellow and tutor at Worcester College and lecturer in New Testament in the University of Oxford (1986 to 1993).

He moved from Oxford to become dean of Lichfield Cathedral (1994 to 1999) and then returned briefly to Oxford as a visiting fellow at Merton College, before taking up his appointment as canon theologian at Westminster Abbey in 2000.

From 1995 to 2000, Wright wrote the weekly Sunday's "Readings" column for the Church Times.

He has said that writing the column gave him the "courage" to embark upon his popular ... for Everyone (SPCK) series of commentaries on New Testament books.

He was the bishop of Durham from 2003 to 2010.

In a 2003 interview, he said that he could never remember a time when he was not aware of the presence and love of God and recalled an occasion when he was four or five when "sitting by myself at Morpeth and being completely overcome, coming to tears, by the fact that God loved me so much he died for me. Everything that has happened to me since has produced wave upon wave of the same."

In 2003, Wright became the Bishop of Durham; he was consecrated a bishop on 3 July 2003 at York Minster by David Hope, Archbishop of York.

On 4 August 2006 he was appointed to the Court of Ecclesiastical Causes Reserved for a period of five years.

He resigned from the see of Durham on 31 August 2010 and took appointment as research professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at St Mary's College, St Andrews, in Scotland, which enabled him to concentrate on his academic and broadcasting work.

He then became research professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at St Mary's College in the University of St Andrews in Scotland until 2019, when he became a senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall at the University of Oxford.

Wright writes about theology and Christian life and the relationship between them.

He advocates a biblical re-evaluation of theological matters such as justification, women's ordination, and popular Christian views about life after death.

He has also criticised the idea of a literal Rapture.

The author of over seventy books, Wright is highly regarded in academic and theological circles for his "Christian Origins and the Question of God" series.

The third volume, The Resurrection of the Son of God, is considered by many clergy and theologians to be a seminal Christian work on the resurrection of Jesus.

Wright was born in Morpeth, Northumberland.

As of 1 October 2019, Wright was appointed a senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, where he had originally studied for the Anglican ministry in 1971 through 1973.

In his popular book Surprised by Hope, Wright outlines the scriptural emphasis on resurrection as the proper hope of all Christians.

Wright is critical of the North American church's overemphasis on "going to heaven when you die" and the underemphasis on the resurrection from the dead, though he does not deny the teaching that a person's soul lives on after death.

He advocates a reunion of soteriology and ecclesiology, commenting that such a connection is often neglected in Protestantism.

In addition, he is critical of various popular theological ideas, such as the dispensationalist doctrine of the rapture.

Wright is one of the leading figures in the New Perspective on Paul interpretation, or rather group of interpretations, of the Pauline letters.

Wright contends that Paul cannot be ignored by any serious Christian and that, through his central place within the New Testament canon, Paul has come to be abused, misunderstood, imposed upon, and approached with incorrect or inappropriate questions about the Christian faith.

According to Wright, "Paul in the twentieth century, then, has been used and abused much as in the first. Can we, as the century draws towards its close, listen a bit more closely to him? Can we somehow repent of the ways we have mishandled him and respect his own way of doing things a bit more?"

This question reflects the key consideration for the New Perspective on Paul and a fundamental aim of Wright's scholarship: to allow the apostle Paul to speak for himself without imposing modern considerations and questions upon him and in so doing, seeking to ascertain what St. Paul was really trying to say to the people he was writing to.

From this, Wright contends that by examining the Pauline corpus through this unique perspective, difficult passages within the text become illuminated in new ways, his letters gain coherence both in their particularities as well as with one another, and it provides an overall picture of what Paul was about, without doing violence to the little details within the letters.

The beginning of the "new perspective" is the work of E. P. Sanders and his book Paul and Palestinian Judaism.