|
Thus, as we will see in Part IV, when the early church told stories about Jesus these stories were not, as might be imagined, mere random selections of anecdotes. They were not without a sense of an overall story into which they might fit, or of a narrative shape to which such smaller stories would conform….As has been recently shown in relation to some key areas of Paul’s writing, the apostle’s most emphatically ‘theological’ statements and arguments are in fact expressions of the essentially Jewish story now redrawn around them…So, too, his repeated use of the Old Testament is designed not as mere proof-texts, but, in part at least, to suggest new ways of reading well-known stories, and to suggest that they find a more natural climax in the Jesus-story than elsewhere…In fact, he (Paul) is an excellent example of it. (N.T. Wright. The New Testament and the People of God 78-79) |
|
