Some things are simply common sense, and should be obvious to anyone with
the wit God gave a goose. One plus one, for example, equals two. We
often use this as the canonical case of a statement that simply must be
true. One plus one equals two: it’s just common sense.

If you’re a pure mathematician, though, that simple statement hides a
world of peril and uncertainty. Vast are the swamps the student of math
must cross, stepping from axiom to axiom, proof to proof, theorem to
theorem, before he can demonstrate unequivocally that indeed, one plus
one really does equal two. And the mass of his acquaintance greet his
joyful shouts with, “Of course one plus one equals two. What else could
it equal? So what?” The student of math is unbowed. Now he not only
knows the basic fact; now he also knows why one plus one equals
two.

That’s kind of how I feel about this book. The first volume in a series
entitled Christian Origins and the Question of God, it strikes me
as nothing so much as a detailed defense of common sense in the field of
New Testament studies–a field in which, to judge from the author’s
sources, common sense has often been distinctly lacking.

The book lays the foundation for the other volumes in the series;
consequently it begins with a lengthy survey of the epistemologies used in
New Testament studies over the last century or so, combined with a
criticism of most of them. This is followed by Wright’s own epistemology,
which he terms “critical realism”; in his view, the New Testament cannot
be approached as simply historical, or simply theological, or simply
literary, but requires the union of all three. He then goes on to examine
the world view of the Jewish community in which Christianity arose, and
then uses this world view in a preliminary look at the gospels and the
earliest Christians.

And all the way along, he’s disposing of popular but absurd readings of
the New Testament. I do not have the time or the learning (this is an
exceedingly scholarly book, albeit a lucid one) to go into all of them,
but here’s an example. It has become popular in certain circles to claim
(largely on the basis of an early date for the apocryphal Gospel of
Thomas) that the earliest Christianity was a Hellenistic
movement–that Jesus, in fact, was a Cynic. Later on, goes the claim, a
Jewish veneer was added; it is this we see in the canonical gospels.
Wright examines the world view displayed in the gospels, and in particular
in the smaller stories told and retold within them; he also examines the
praxis of the earliest Christians so far as it is known. And he
concludes, persuasively, that the Cynic theory is all wet–it is much
more likely that Christianity should begin as a Jewish sect and retain
aspects of its origin at a later time than that it should have begun as a
Greek philosophical movement and unaccountably have Jewish language and
symbols grafted onto it.

Reading this book has been a long, involved journey; and though I end up
with familiar conclusions I feel rather like the student of math I
describe above: I can now feel comfortable that common sense really does
make sense.