← Ask NT Wright Anything
Ask NT Wright Anything
Gender Hierarchy, Habakuk 2:4, What bits of the Bible did Paul write? Did Paul write the Pastoral Epistles?
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- [00:01]
Podcast Host (Premier Insight)
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- [00:47]
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- [01:47]
Mike Bird
Hello and welcome to another episode of Ask NT Write Anything, the show where we try to answer your questions on Jesus, the Bible, and the life of faith. I'm Mike Bird from Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia, and I'm joined by Tom Wright from Scotland. And Tom, we are doing well, Tom, do you know how many listeners we've had in this last, what, 10 months?
- [02:14]
Tom Wright
I haven't been able to keep up with the statistics. So you tell me.
- [02:18]
Mike Bird
Well, we have had over a million downloads. Over a million. Now, I don't impress my children very often with anything, let alone my jokes, my cooking, my sporting achievements from my youth. But when I told them we've had over a million downloads on this podcast, they actually started to treat me with a bit of respect. And it was about time.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
Good.
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Tom Wright
Absolutely.
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Mike Bird
Yesterday was Father's Day in Australia. It was Father's Day in Australia. So I did get some respect and a bit of love. Some of it was cajoled and coerced. Some of it had to pay for myself with the presents I was given, but it doesn't really matter. But it's good. The show is going well. And I think we have a good thing going here, Tom, where we're getting some really good questions in, some real heartfelt questions, things that are puzzling and perplexing people and they're sending it in. So if that is you, if you have a question, if you'd like to hear Tom answer it, please do send it into the show. Go to ntright.com sorry askntright.com and send us your question. But let's get into this week's questions, Tom, questions on gender, Habakkuk 2, 4 and Paul's authorship of the pastoral letters. So first up, we have a question from Joanna Vass from Athens, Georgia. Again, someone from Georgia. God bless the great state of Georgia, I tell you, Tom, the home of Coca Cola and cnn. Joanna asked this while I don't believe God intends for men and women to be arranged hierarchically, I am challenged by the passages used to promote gender hierarchy. Here's my two part question about the Greek word or words for submit. First, when we see submit in English, has it been translated from from the same Greek word every time? Second, is the Greek strictly conveying something about yielding to authority or is there a broader understanding we might have about submission? So, Tom, that's a little bit of a lexical question there about Greek words and the like, but also one about the meaning of authority in the Bible, particularly in male female relationships. Now, Tom, I can see your mind buzzing with thoughts, deeply immersed in Greek. So we need to, if we can get those Greek thoughts into English thoughts, what would you say to our good friend Joanna?
- [04:50]
Tom Wright
Yes, I would say first, I have said more in the forthcoming book the Vision of Ephesians. When I'm discussing Ephesians 5:21 and following, I've said more in that book than I can possibly say now in answer to a question on a podcast. But just to be brief, that the word hupotassin or hupotasso, I submit, is the one that comes regularly here. We have it particularly at the beginning of the section Ephesians 5:21. But interestingly.
- [05:25]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
That is a participle in.
- [05:29]
Tom Wright
The Greek which is dependent on a main verb, which we find back in verse 18 don't get drunk with wine because there's an excess there, but be filled with the spirit speaking to one another. And then Paul has a string of participles speaking to one another, giving thanks, always submitting to one another, et cetera. So everything that he says is under.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
The rubric of what comes before in.
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Tom Wright
Chapter five really, verses three, 15, 16, 17 and 18.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
And we have to see that not so that the submit question isn't a detached thing.
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Tom Wright
Here's a list of instructions and now.
- [06:10]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
Here'S the submit bit. And it's very interesting that when Paul.
- [06:15]
Tom Wright
Having begun by talking about wives being subject to their own husbands or submitting, when he then talks to the husbands, it's husbands, love your wives as the Messiah loved the church and gave himself for them.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
And the kind of love which he's.
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Tom Wright
Talking about here, clearly because he spells.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
It out, is the utter self giving.
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Tom Wright
Love of Jesus going to the cross.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
And that sets such a high bar.
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Tom Wright
For those of us who are husbands, fathers and grandfathers, et cetera, but husbands.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
Specifically, that it's really hard to think.
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Tom Wright
Of anything, any greater commandment than to give that self giving love to one's spouse.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
And so the whole thing is within the larger context of mutual submission in.
- [07:06]
Tom Wright
The body of Christ.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
And that is such a Pauline emphasis which we have largely lost. People have thought of Pauline ethics in.
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Tom Wright
Terms of what does he say about sex or money or personality cults or.
- [07:19]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
Whatever it may be. But again and again Paul talks about being kind to one another, forgiving one another, reconciling with one another. And he says this again and again. These are the keynotes of his ethics. Kindness and mutual submission. And forgiveness is right in there of recognizing that this other person may have something going for them. We may not agree with everything they're.
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Tom Wright
Saying, we may feel boxed in or constrained.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
But submission and then particularly the self.
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Tom Wright
Giving love, that's the thing that matters. So.
- [07:56]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
Yes, the word submit probably is.
- [07:58]
Tom Wright
Translating hypotasin each time. But the broader understanding that is going.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
On is one of the complete redefinition of authority around the cross of Jesus.
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Tom Wright
This goes all the way back to.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
Mark, chapter 10, when James and John.
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Tom Wright
Say they want to sit at Jesus.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
Right and his left. They want to be in the positions of power.
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Tom Wright
We're going to be the right hand man, the left hand man. We're going to do stuff on his behalf. So watch out, we're coming through.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
And Jesus says, you got it all. That's how the rulers of this age organize the world. They boss people around, they bully people and make them force them to do what they want. So we're not gonna do it that way, we're gonna do it the other way. The one who would be great among you must be your servant. The one who wants to be first must be slave of all, because the Son of man didn't come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. And that is the absolute center of it all. That's a way of saying that Jesus death on the cross defines what authority is like, right? The way through society, whether it's rulers.
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Tom Wright
And authorities, whether it's husbands, wives, children, whatever.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
And so again and again, we shouldn't be narrowed down and boxed in to, oh, this word means precisely this.
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Tom Wright
That's important, but it's not the whole thing.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
We should look at it in terms.
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Tom Wright
Of the larger overall New Testament perspective.
- [09:23]
Mike Bird
Yeah, I think that's right, Tom. When you come to questions about the meaning of biblical words, it's not just like looking at a dictionary definition. You have to look how a word is used in an entire book, across an entire corpus, in an entire testament, and give the sense of it. And certainly the way it's used in Ephesians 5, it's not used in a somewhat cruel and authoritative way. It's about submitting to one another. I do have one bit of advice for our good friend Joanna here, and that is to say, if you have Logos Bible software, you know, the sponsor of the show, you go into Logos, you can find either a Greek New Testament or like an interlinear, where you've got the English and Greek words parallel. You literally put your cursor on the word and then right click. And it then gives you all the dictionary definitions of the Greek words and it helps you track them down in other passages. So that can be a great thing. You might want to consider using Logos Bible Software, particularly if you go to logos.com NT but thank you for your question, Joanna. We've got a second question, Tom. This one is from Andrew Long in Bristol. And this is another question where. I know I'm pushing this a lot, but this would be a good question where, if you've got Logos Bible Software open, it really does help. This is Andrew from Bristol, asked this in Habakkuk 2. 4. It says, the righteous shall live by his faith, which is quoted in Hebrews and Romans. Does this faith refer to the faith of the believer or the faithfulness of God? So you've got the quote there, the just will live by faith. But then if I remember correctly, it goes on to say that everything is revealed from faith to faith. So it's quite an awkward little Greek phrase there because Paul says in it, the Gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed through. In your translation, Tom, through faith. For faith as it is written with Habakkuk 2.
- [11:35]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
4.
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Mike Bird
The one who is righteous will live by faith. So you've got like multiple uses of the word faith here. But the question everyone has is whose faith is being spoken of? And there are so many options. People say, is it from God's faithfulness to our faithfulness? Is it from the faithfulness of Jesus? Is it the faithfulness of Jews to the faithfulness of Greeks? Or is Paul just saying it's all from faith from first to last?
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Tom Wright
Yeah. Yeah. This is, as you and I well know, an old conundrum. Everyone who's written a commentary on Romans or anyone who's tried to write about justification and faith is bound to come upon this again and again. And yes, it is the more complicated, because in the Hebrew original of Habakkuk, insofar as we've got it, in the Hebrew Masoretic text, it's his faith, Emunatho, if I remember rightly. And then in the Septuagint, it's the other way around. Let me just get this straight here. Yeah, the tzadik, the righteous will have life through his faith or faithfulness. That's another thing, of course, that emunah in Hebrew and pistis in Greek aren't just meaning faith. In most of the modern Western Christian senses, they can mean faithfulness, reliability, trustworthiness. It's a much bigger range of words and ideas than the English word faith will give you. And then in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, insofar again, as we know, we can't be absolutely sure that Paul had the same exact Septuagint that we do. But it says.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
The righteous shall live.
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Tom Wright
By my faith or faithfulness. So already in the Tradition, we seem to have a disparity between the Hebrew and the Greek. And since Paul doesn't have in his quotation of it In Romans chapter 1, verse 17, we can't be sure which way he'd have gone.
- [13:47]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
However. However, I think Paul is here quite explicitly setting up a brief statement of something he's then going to spell out more. He does this again and again, says something cryptically and briefly, and then it serves as a heading over a much.
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Tom Wright
Larger argument in which he gradually unfolds what he means.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
And I think we can see exactly what he means here, because when it all comes down to it, it in Romans chapter three, he spells out much.
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Tom Wright
More fully the relationship between dikaiosune righteousness.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
God's righteousness, and our righteousness and faith.
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Tom Wright
And it goes like this.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
God's righteousness is his faithfulness.
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Tom Wright
To the covenant.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
The covenant was with Israel, but through Israel, for the world. Because God promised Abraham that in his.
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Tom Wright
Seed all the families of the earth would be blessed.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
So if God is to be faithful to the covenant, that means that somehow God must complete and deliver on his.
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Tom Wright
Promises to Abraham, but that this must.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
Stretch out towards the rest of the world. But there's a problem about that, and Paul addresses this in Romans 2:17 29.
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Tom Wright
And then Romans 3:1 10, that Israel.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
The people who were entrusted, and he.
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Tom Wright
Uses that word with God's covenant promises.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
God's oracles for the world, Israel itself failed to deliver on those purposes. And on that vocation, what is God then going to do? Is God gonna say, okay, well, let's abandon that? That, tragically, is what many Christians have said. Oh, God had a first shot at.
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Tom Wright
Saving the world by calling his people Israel. Didn't work. So he scrapped that and sent Jesus instead.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
That's exactly wrong. The point is that God is not phased. When ethnic Israel fails to deliver on the Abrahamic promises, what is then required is a faithful Israelite. Which is precisely what, According to Romans.
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Tom Wright
3:21, following God has provided in Jesus the Messiah.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
The Messiah is the one who is faithful to the purposes of God.
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Tom Wright
This is like what Paul says in Philippians chapter two, that he is obedient.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
Unto death, even the death of the cross, and that his faithful obedience.
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Tom Wright
And those two words are very closely to one another.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
For Paul, they constitute God's act of covenant faithfulness, God's dikaiosune. But who will benefit from those? Well, those who share this faithfulness, Those who, through the Gospel, by the Spirit, respond in faith to that message which is coming through to them, that in Jesus, the Messiah of Israel, the Creator God has done what he promised Abraham he would do.
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Tom Wright
That's Romans 3:21 to 4:21. That's how it works.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
So that then when we read back.
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Tom Wright
And we say that's probably what Paul.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
Meant when he quoted habakkuk in chapter 1, verse 17, that Habakkuk, after all, is written to a situation where the.
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Tom Wright
Whole world seems to be going crazy and falling apart, and there are wars and rumors of wars and so on.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
How are you going to hang on and cling on to faith in the middle of that? And the answer is trust in God's faithfulness. But your trust becomes your faithfulness, which somehow is anchored in and into God's faithfulness. Paul seems to be saying exactly the same thing. The world has gone through this great convulsion, the death and resurrection of Israel's Messiah. And in the middle of that, cling onto the fact that God is faithful.
- [17:31]
Tom Wright
To his promises, that Jesus is the faithful one through whom God has done what he promised, and that you're clinging.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
On, you're believing that you're receiving this gift in faith is the sign that.
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Tom Wright
You are part of that covenant, that your sins are forgiven, that you are a child of Abraham.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
So I think that's what Paul is.
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Tom Wright
Getting at when he quotes from Habakkuk2 here, though there is much, much more to be said, Mike, as you and I know only too well.
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Mike Bird
Yeah, well, I just love the way that in Romans that becomes a template for the whole book. So Romans 1:17 with the quote of Hapakuk 2:4 that's kind of expanded in Romans 3:21 to 26. Then it comes again in Romans 5:1, then Romans 8:1. So this theme of, you know, of God's faithfulness, the righteousness of God that acquits us all, that keeps getting recapitulated across the letter such. It's such a key theme. So yeah, I think Andrew there has picked up on a great verse to look at as to its meaning and how it applies and in all of the letter to the Romans. Yeah, well, we're going to take a break there and when we get back, we're going to look at the question of did Paul really write the pastoral epistles? So don't go away. We'll have that question coming at you very soon.
- [18:56]
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- [20:33]
Mike Bird
Welcome back. We have a question from Kerry Bryant in Chattanooga, Tennessee about whether Paul really wrote the Pastoral Epistles. And Kerry says this it seems to be the case that the majority of New Testament scholars think that Paul did not write all the letters attributed to him in the New Testament, especially 1 Timothy. What is your view on who wrote 1 Timothy and when? And if Paul didn't write one or more of the letters that are attributed to him in the New Testament, how should this affect our theology of Scripture? Now, Tom, this is a very big question about pseudepigraphy. Is it false writing? Is it forgery? Bart Ehrman has done a number of books arguing that a lot of the New Testament is forgery. This has been a question that's been around for a long time in scholarship. We tackle it a bit in our book, the New Testament in its world. What are your thoughts on Paul and the Pastoral Epistles?
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
Yeah, yeah. My first thought is that for many.
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Tom Wright
Years now I have read through the Pauline letters on a day by day basis. Part of my morning discipline is to read a chapter or half a chapter from the Gospels and a chapter or half a chapter from the Epistles and Revelation. So I'm working through the whole time. And so I'm used to going through from Romans right through to the Thessalonian letters. And then you suddenly hit one Timothy.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
And again and again.
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Tom Wright
As I've been doing that over many years, I am struck by the fact that one Timothy just feels different. And that's a very subjective reaction. But I am perfectly happy to say, though not everyone has been, that second Thessalonians is just as much by Paul as 1 Thessalonians was.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
But when we get to 1 Timothy, it just feels different.
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Tom Wright
He uses phrases differently and so on. And then two Timothy is much more like the Paul that I recognize from the regular letters.
- [22:35]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
And then Titus is in the middle somewhere.
- [22:38]
Tom Wright
And then we get to Philemon, which feels like the Paul we know from Colossians and so on.
- [22:45]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
So that's my instant reaction, simply as a regular reader of the Greek of Paul's letters. However.
- [22:52]
Tom Wright
However, I should say that as I.
- [22:55]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
Read through then, the biggest stylistic difference.
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Tom Wright
In all of the Pauline letters is that between 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians.
- [23:03]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
Because in 1 Corinthians, Paul is cheerful.
- [23:06]
Tom Wright
And happy and we're dealing with this issue and that issue and the other issue, and he lines things up and he argues it out and he teases them a bit, he reaches conclusions, he moves on to the next topic, Second.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
Corinthians, feels as though, and he does.
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Tom Wright
Actually say this, that he's just had.
- [23:22]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
Something like a nervous breakdown. He has despaired of life itself, and his style reflects that. It comes out all gritty and jerky and awkward and repetitive and uses similar rather complex phrases again and again, as though he's desperate to get this message out. But it's really, really difficult.
- [23:44]
Tom Wright
And it sounds like somebody who has just had something like a nervous breakdown.
- [23:50]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
Struggling to get it back together again.
- [23:52]
Tom Wright
And psychological explanation may not be the whole of the story.
- [23:57]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
But I want to say the difference.
- [24:01]
Tom Wright
In style between the different Pauline letters.
- [24:03]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
Are not that great.
- [24:05]
Tom Wright
That would make us say, ah, they must be written by somebody else. In fact, the guy who did several years ago the stylometric analysis, the computerized analysis of the letters, Antony Kenny, the great Oxford philosopher, he came back with saying, actually the computer says that there's too few of these letters to have a genuine comparison. There's nothing like, say, Plato's Dialogues or whatever, much more expansive. And that insofar as we can tell, then they are perfectly compatible with being written by the same person.
- [24:41]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
So I have then been worried that some of the people who want to.
- [24:45]
Tom Wright
Say that one Timothy is either a forgery or pseudepigraphical or whatever.
- [24:51]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
Part of the problem is they don't.
- [24:53]
Tom Wright
Like what's in first Timothy, particularly the stuff about women in Chapter two and so on.
- [24:59]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
And so I remember somebody saying to me all that stuff where Paul is fussing about widows, and I realized later on, yeah, if you want Paul to be talking about justification and Christology and the law, then to have something telling you about how to look after widows in the church may seem a bit of a comedown, but actually, Paul's real concern was for actual communities that are trying to live out this extraordinary experiment of living as family across ethnic and cultural boundaries. If you're going to do that, you're going to have to get into admin.
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Tom Wright
You're going to have to figure out.
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Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
Who qualifies for the free food distribution. And this is practical advice which reflects a deep underlying ecclesiology which is there.
- [25:48]
Tom Wright
Which is what we find in Acts, of course, and so on.
- [25:50]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
And so I'm suspicious of some of.
- [25:53]
Tom Wright
The thematic arguments that have been used.
- [25:56]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
I'm suspicious of some of the stylistic.
- [25:58]
Tom Wright
Arguments that have been used.
- [25:59]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
But that doesn't mean that I'm just.
- [26:01]
Tom Wright
Happy to say, okay, Paul wrote it, so what?
- [26:04]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
And I do think it's perfectly possible that Paul's writings were edited in some ways. And you see underneath this, there's a.
- [26:11]
Tom Wright
Problem about the view of inspiration of.
- [26:14]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
Scripture, that some people, particularly in the.
- [26:16]
Tom Wright
18Th and 19th century, through rationalist movements.
- [26:20]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
And so on, had this view of inspiration of Scripture, that the authors of Scripture kind of went into a trance.
- [26:26]
Tom Wright
And God just gave them the words and they wrote them down, and that was what it was.
- [26:31]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
And I just don't see that in the Bible. And indeed, when I look at the Old Testament, I see books that I think very clearly have been edited and pulled together, et cetera, et cetera, in different ways by maybe generations of people working on a text, adding extra oracles, et cetera. And I don't want to say that.
- [26:51]
Tom Wright
Only the very first person in that chain was inspired and everyone else was a wicked person who shouldn't have done it.
- [26:59]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
I think God inspired Scripture in all.
- [27:02]
Tom Wright
Sorts of ways, and if that means including editors and arrangers, so be it. Editing and arranging is a perfectly fine thing to do. And it seems to me that there's.
- [27:14]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
At least a possibility that some bits.
- [27:17]
Tom Wright
Of Paul's letters, like certainly some bits in the Gospel tradition and some bits in many parts of the Old Testament.
- [27:25]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
Have been pulled together wisely and devoutly by teachers faced with different fragments of.
- [27:32]
Tom Wright
Things, wanting to make them into something coherent.
- [27:35]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
So I don't think we'll ever know.
- [27:37]
Tom Wright
That about one Timothy or indeed the other Pastorals.
- [27:41]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
But I want to say something like.
- [27:43]
Tom Wright
That is at least an open possibility.
- [27:45]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
So rather than saying, oh, it's a.
- [27:47]
Tom Wright
Forgery, you can't believe a word it says, no, in the mercy of God.
- [27:51]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
We have these texts.
- [27:53]
Tom Wright
The church has lived with them over all this time, and they do fit broadly with the picture of Paul that we've got from the other letters and Acts. Now that's the position that I've come to after a lifetime of reading these texts. Others will differ, but that's where we are.
- [28:10]
Mike Bird
Yeah, I'm similar. Tomorrow, I think you gotta remember about the variation within a single author. The Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet also wrote the slightly more forgettable Titus Andronicus. So he clearly had a bit of a repertoire. He had good days and bad days. I think you've also got to remember a lot of Paul's letters aren't just by Paul. A lot of them are written with collaborators. We know Romans was dictated to a chap called Tertius, who was probably having a very difficult time keeping up with. With Paul's argument. So, you know, did. Did Tertius ever skip a word or kind of paraphrase something or summarize something that Paul said? You know, we don't know. And with the Pastoral epistles. Yeah, look, there are parts of the Pastoral epistles that do sound like they're from a later era, like someone's eulogizing Paul as the great hero in the faith. But then there's parts that really do just sound like ordinary Paul. And like you said, I think one theory that does explain that is the idea that some fragments, maybe some bits of Paul's letters that have been torn or kind of damaged at some point have been compiled and filled out by an editor like Luke or someone in a second, third generation of Paul's legacy. I think that's all possible. That's all possible.
- [29:30]
Tom Wright
And I would give, as an analogy for that, the opening verse of Mark's Gospel, which says the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, which looks very much like a grand heading.
- [29:40]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
And then we get, as it is.
- [29:43]
Tom Wright
Written in Isaiah, the prophet. And then we get a quote from Malachi.
- [29:46]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
And that's very awkward. And I have believed for many years.
- [29:50]
Tom Wright
That the beginning of Mark's Gospel, like the end of Mark's Gospel, was lost. If you go to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and look at the Dead Sea Scrolls, you'll see that most of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the beginning and ending is lost because they were attached to a wooden rod for scrolling up. The wooden rod rotted and took the beginning and ending with it or with those rods, and we're left with a text which is truncated at both ends. Now, the ending of Mark is very.
- [30:20]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
Odd, as we know.
- [30:22]
Tom Wright
And people have seen that it's odd and tried to produce different endings. But the beginning, I think, was odd as well, because we have a quote from Malachi and then a quote from Isaiah, and somebody said it's Isaiah, and somebody else has put that more formal opening because it would be very odd to have a book just beginning as it is written in Isaiah with a quote from Malachi. So somebody has put the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
- [30:49]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
Now, I don't think that means that's inauthentic.
- [30:52]
Tom Wright
Mark 1:1 is somehow not inspired. I just think this is the reality of the books that we've got. I've said many times to people, I.
- [31:03]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
Think we have the book that God.
- [31:05]
Tom Wright
Intended us to have. This thing we call the Bible and.
- [31:08]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
The means by which we have it.
- [31:10]
Tom Wright
Is not a function of a particular typewriter theory of inspiration, as though God is using humans as his typewriter. It's much more complicated and interesting actually than that and human than that. And that's part of my reaction against the sort of docetic views of some Christians who think that unless it was all just sort of sent down from heaven with no human participation, then, then it's not really worth anything. And that is to make a fundamentally Christological mistake as well as a human mistake.
- [31:42]
Mike Bird
Yeah, indeed. Indeed. Well, care if you want to read more, you can check out the relevant chapters of the New Testament in its world where we do discuss these topics, particularly the Pastoral epistles. Also a book that just came out. I just got this in the mail yesterday. It's called Does It Matter who Wrote the Bible? Edited by my good friend David Capes. Tom, you'd know David from your time at Houston and hanging out around there with. With various friends. Alas, though, that is all we have time for today. But in our next episode, it's going to be a good one. The next one coming is great. It's about we have questions about do we do works greater than Jesus? You know, also a question about the Filoque clause in the Nicene Creed. If you don't know the filio co, I urge you to Google it. And would God ever really call us to abandon parents? That's what we're going to be looking at at a future episode, so make sure you tune into them when they come out.
- [32:42]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
Yeah, and Mike, I hope our listeners.
- [32:44]
Tom Wright
Do know about the bonus episodes which are there for our subscribers.
- [32:49]
Mike Bird
Well, I hope they do too so they can listen in as you and I go deeper into pressing topics. I mean, we often do a survey of the Bible, like, you know, parts of act, but every now and again we'll do some contemporary topics like Christian nationalism or even blasphemy laws in the United Kingdom.
- [33:08]
Tom Wright (continued, possibly co-host or guest)
Yeah, but is there a way for.
- [33:09]
Tom Wright
Our many listeners to get hold of these bonus episodes?
- [33:13]
Mike Bird
Well, indeed there is, Tom. They just have to go to askantyright.com and click on bonus content. And for the price of a single coffee a month. They can get an extra premium episode every week and they can listen to those deep down dives we do into various hot topics of the day.
- [33:36]
Tom Wright
Great. And all that for the price of a coffee. I'm about to go off and grab some fish and chips, so I will think of that. The fish and chips is going to cost me at least three or four times what the episodes would be, so there it is. Go for it.
- [33:50]
Mike Bird
Well, I bet it's probably these are. Probably these episodes are more nourishing than what some fish and chips is anyway. But if you don't want to miss out on that, join the hundreds of people who are subscribing to our premium episodes. Otherwise, that's everything from us for this week. I'm Mike Bird.
- [34:07]
Tom Wright
And I'm Tom Wright.
- [34:09]
Mike Bird
Thank you for joining us on the Ask NT Wright Anything podcast. We'll see you next time around. Until then, God bless you and take care.
- [34:25]
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- [34:48]
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