N. T. Wright, Bishop, Ph.D.

Wright is Bishop of Durham for the Church of England (northeast England, which includes 290 parishes). He is one of today’s leading theologians and author of Jesus and the Victory of God, which is widely regarded as one of the most significant studies in the contemporary “Third Quest” of the historical Jesus. He has been featured on ABC News,Dateline, and Fresh Air. He taught New Testament studies for twenty years at Cambridge, McGill, and Oxford universities. Among his many published works are The Challenge of Jesus,The Meaning of Jesus (coauthored with Marcus Borg), and What Saint Paul Really Said.

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The Kingdom New Testament

A Contemporary Translation

Talking Points

N.T. WRIGHT is the former Bishop of Durham in the Church of England and one of the world’s leading Bible scholars. He is now serving as the Chair of New Testament and Early Christianity at the School of Divinity at the University of St. Andrews. For twenty years he taught New Testament studies at Cambridge, McGill and Oxford Universities, and he has been featured on ABC News, Dateline, The Colbert Report, and Fresh Air. Wright is the award-winning author of After You Believe, Surprised by Hope, Simply Christian, The Challenge of Jesus, The Meaning of Jesus (co-authored with Marcus Borg), as well as the much heralded series Christian Origins and the Question of God.

Description

From the man Newsweek called “the world’s leading New Testament Scholar” comes a fresh translation of the New Testament.

Most readers of the New Testament have grown overly familiar with the biblical text, losing sight of the wonder and breadth of its innovative ideas and world-changing teachings about the life and role of Jesus of Nazareth. Wright now offers an all-new English translation that allows us to encounter afresh these historic works. The original Greek text is vibrant, alive, and active, and Wright’s translation, The Kingdom New Testament, retains that spirit by providing a new English text for the twenty-first-century reader. At the same time, based on his work as a pioneering interpreter of the Bible, Wright also corrects other translations so as to provide more accurate representations of the original writers’ intent.

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Simply Jesus

A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

Talking Points

N.T. WRIGHT is the former Bishop of Durham in the Church of England and one of the world’s leading Bible scholars. He is now serving as the Chair of New Testament and Early Christianity at the School of Divinity at the University of St. Andrews. For twenty years he taught New Testament studies at Cambridge, McGill and Oxford Universities, and he has been featured on ABC News, Dateline, The Colbert Report, and Fresh Air. Wright is the award-winning author of After You Believe, Surprised by Hope, Simply Christian, The Challenge of Jesus, The Meaning of Jesus (co-authored with Marcus Borg), as well as the much heralded series Christian Origins and the Question of God. Newsweek calls Wright “the world’s leading New Testament scholar.”

Description

Bible scholar, Anglican bishop, and bestselling author N.T. Wright summarizes a lifetime of study of Jesus and the New Testament in order to present for a general audience who Jesus was and is. In SIMPLY JESUS, we are invited to hear one of our leading scholars introduce the story of carpenter’s son from Nazareth as if we were hearing it for the first time. “Jesus-the Jesus we might discover if we really looked,” explains Wright, “is larger, more disturbing, more urgent than we had ever imagined. We have successfully managed to hide behind other questions and to avoid the huge, world-shaking challenge of Jesus’ central claim and achievement. It is we, the churches, who have been the real reductionists. We have reduced the kingdom of God to private piety; the victory of the cross to comfort for the conscience; Easter itself to a happy, escapist ending after a sad, dark tale. Piety, conscience and ultimate happiness are important, but not nearly as important as Jesus himself.” As the church faces the many challenges of the twenty-first century, Wright has presented a vision of Jesus that more than meets them.

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Bible/Jesus Experts

Simply Christian

Why Christianity Makes Sense

Talking Points

Pastors and laypeople alike have come to look to N.T. Wright for thoughtful, accessible scholarship on the Bible and Jesus.

For over fifty years, Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis has been the go-to guide for Christians and non-Christians alike looking for a clear statement of Christian faith and practice. Wright is poised to deliver such a book for a new generation, using a similar style as Lewis’s classic, but taking into account the past fifty years of tradition, research, and history.

Description

Why is justice fair? Why are so many people pursuing spirituality? Why do we crave relationship? And why is beauty so beautiful? N. T. Wright argues that each of these questions takes us into the mystery of who God is and what he wants from us. For two thousand years Christianity has claimed to answer these mysteries, and this renowned biblical scholar and Anglican bishop shows that it still does today. Like C. S. Lewis did in his classic Mere Christianity, Wright makes the case for Christian faith from the ground up, assuming that the reader is starting from ground zero with no predisposition to and perhaps even some negativity toward religion in general and Christianity in particular. His goal is to describe Christianity in as simple and accessible, yet hopefully attractive and exciting, a way as possible, both to say to outsides “You might want to look at this further,” and to say to insiders “You may not have quite understood this bit clearly yet.”

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Bible/Jesus Experts

How God Became King

The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

Talking Points

New Testament scholar N.T. Wright shows us how we have been misreading the Gospels for centuries and restores its lost central story: the coronation of God through Jesus as the climax of history.

Description

Since ancient times, the church has sought to distance itself from its Jewish roots and has developed teachings on the Bible and about Jesus that actually serve as a barrier for reading the New Testament for what it is: the story of the coronation of God through Jesus at the fulfillment of Jewish history and as the climax of all human history. Award-winning New Testament scholar and Anglican bishop, N.T. Wright peels back the barriers to reveal the lost story they tell. He begins by asking why each gospel starts by connecting back to the Old Testament in a dramatic way, repeatedly making the point that Jesus was the Messiah, God’s chosen one, who is continuing a story that began in Eden.

Not only does Wright reveal a new way of looking at what the writers of the New Testament were attempting to reveal, he also lays the groundwork for how this new perspective can transform how we see our role and duties in the world today. Whereas the old framework caused the church to be preoccupied with our future fate (i.e., who’s going to be in heaven and who will be left out), this new paradigm sees our current life as under the reign of an active and caring God who wants his kingdom made incarnate in this world by the church. The forgotten story shows us that we should read our charge as: “Are you cooperating with God’s kingdom here and now?” This book will revolutionize how we read the Gospels and how the church understands its role in the world.

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Bible/Jesus Experts

Spirituality

After You Believe

Why Christian Character Matters

Talking Points

Newsweek has dubbed Wright “the world’s leading New Testament scholar.” As a trusted authority, pastors and laypeople alike have come to look to this author for thoughtful, accessible scholarship on the Bible and Jesus. He has been featured on ABC News, Dateline, Fresh Air, and can speak with authority on the surprisingly neglected question of how Christians ought to live in the here and now.

Description

In the tradition of his award-winning Surprised by Hope, Bishop N.T. Wright once again topples the accepted wisdom about what we think the Bible teaches. Wright argues that people are so preoccupied about who gets into heaven that they forget not only that much of the New Testament is about the here and now, but also that even the passages about heaven are there to help us know how we act “here and now.”

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