And the Crossan book BTW, actully doesn’t go as far as the work Michael has reviewed seems to. He has a typically sceptical view of much of Paul, but he does a good job in laying out the archaeological evidence for the religous and political context of the times. Even though I didn’t agree with some of what Crossan had to say, I learned from the book.

The device of reading PAul as against the power claims of the Roman empire is also useful in other parts of the Bible. Historians have never, for example, been able to determine that there was an empire wide census as stated in Luke. Of course, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t one. Thinking along the lines Wright suggests, might it be that the reader of Luke wouldn’t have known for sure either? But Theophilus would have known what q census back then meant– not jsut a counting of people, but an assertion by Caesar that he had power over all his subjects throughout the then civilized world. But without saying so in so many words, Luke tells us the real power of the world was born in Bethlehem.

Submerging that point in any prticular political agenda is, frankly, shameful.

The book is so anti-America that its sounds like the night table reading for Saddam Hussein. No hint of any actual evil in the world other than America and its corporations.

The solutions are uniformly Marxist, U.N. mandated and sponsored socialist, statist power grabs.

The authors, who I assume are up to their ears in the technical west in order to teach in Universities and write books about postmodern geeks and nerds, are about as Luddite as you can be.

The inclusion of an f-word boasting poem that is glibly announced as something Paul would approve of sounds like the freshmen poli sci clubs newsletter.

All the solutions that would come to mind are NOT U.N. statist, Marxist, leftist, anti-American solutions. The authors need to check THEIR persups at the door.

But I can also see why politics do get brought in. Before Christ came and showed us otherwise politics and religion were often inextricable. It took Jesus saying “my kingdom is not of this world” for there to be an eventual apolitical option.

I agree that Wright’s variation seems more palatable because he doesn’t move from exegesis quite as quickly as, say, Crossan might, from a text to what liberal agenda you have to embrace to even be a real follower of Jesus.

If one wants to read Paul politically, the same arguments Wright makes for reading Paul as an advocate of, say reducing thrid world debt, can just as easily be used to advocate substituting charity through the Churches for welfare. I’m conservative, but I’ve never read Paul that way. Wright’s earlier works, while not without problems, were very provocative becuase they seemed to bring Paul up to the level of an advocate for a transcendant, non-legalist Gopsel, away from the proof texting I had so often heard. If the work you have reviewed has the drift you seem to be saying it does, it is a step backwards. Paul’s radical worldview (”Make every thought captive to Christ”) is only trivialized by efforts to make him subject to a political agenda, liberal or conservative.

Even though there may be some great stuff coming from these circles on Paul a lot of it may get dismissed because peopel don’t like their politics. I know people at my church who dismiss Wright for his political views and think he’s a mushy liberal while in the UK people in the Guardian dismiss him as some old conservative. A conservative from the UK or Europe isn’t going to look lik a conservative from the Bible belt, or even a conservative from the Northwestern United States.