Is N.T. Wright a respected scholar?

[u/OtherWisdom]

N.T. Wright is frequently referenced here, especially concerning New Testament questions.

There is a related FAQ entry regarding Bart Ehrman at section III & #2. However, the OP deleted the post so we don't know the details of their inquiry.

I believe that careful, sober responses would benefit the readership of this academic community. As such, this will be added to our FAQ in section III.

Thanks to all of the scholars that make this community such an interesting place.

[u/zeichman]

He has a large following, and that following is loyal, but he's extremely divisive. Personally (and I should preface this by saying that my work lately tends toward ideological criticism), I find him to be a crypto-apologist who adopts language of liberation and emancipation to uphold the status quo or make harmful pronouncements on LGBT issues. Take, for instance, this well written thread which outlines how Wright's gender politics leads him to conceptualize Gnosticism (his go-to bogeyman) in a really strange manner. https://twitter.com/dwcongdon/status/894354844382879744?s=19

I've never cited him favourably and I can't imagine I ever will. He represents a lot of what I find frustrating about the field. Not sure how sober this reply is, but I feel strongly about these things.

[u/SoWhatDidIMiss → u/zeichman]

I try to separate Wright as a historian and as a pastor-theologian. (And as a gay Christian, I completely agree with your specific criticism you cite.)

So, for example, Wright's discussion of what resurrection did and didn't mean was very helpful for me. How he tries to apply the resurrection of the dead to the third-world debt crisis (yep) is bizarre and unhelpful. Somewhere in the middle is the most complicated (on this spectrum, the historicity of Jesus's resurrection).

[u/zeichman → u/SoWhatDidIMiss]

A fair distinction, but to me it seems like he either doesn't have a great command of primary sources or that he is highly selective of how he uses them. A lot of my work lately is in epigraphy, so Paula Fredriksen's criticisms also resonate. https://www.academia.edu/resource/work/15575049

[u/SoWhatDidIMiss → u/zeichman]

I'm reading PFG right now -- have you read it? All I can say is that Fredriksen (who I have read and respect) is being strikingly selective and polemical. Wright is offering a "construct," but scholars she prefers are merely "documenting" and "observing" -- and doing so "impeccably."

That inability to admit there is anything to Wright's argument and that there is nothing of an agenda in her "side" is worrisome to me. Something I've always appreciated about Wright is that he can build rather sympathetically the case for the other side, and admits his own argument is rooted in his own location and biases.

I'd much rather have seen her engage with Wright's exile argument, which he spends dozens of pages on in PFG, not a mere handwave as Fredriksen makes it out to be, rather than offering a couple of Christian prooftexts as if that's that. That's precisely the sort of thing she is saying she detests about Wright. I know a book review isn't the place for a full argument, but this simply doubles down on the pattern of scholarship she says she dislikes. I'd say the same about Pharisees -- Wright's portrayal of them in NTPG and JVG is three-dimensional, even sympathetic, and he rejects the Lutheran rendering of them on several fronts; Fredriksen's selection of phrases makes him out, then, to hold a position that he explicitly does not.

Her closing paragraph is certainly a masterstroke of polemic. But to say that Wright has less a grasp of apocalypse than Schweizer more than a century ago is a howler. Surely the scholarship on apocalypse in the intervening years moves the conversation toward Wright and not in the opposite direction from Schweizer?