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Interview: N. T. Wright
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Dr. Wright is Canon Theologian at Westminster Abbey. He spoke at the January Series on Jan. 23 on the topic, "St. Paul in the Big Picture: The Apostle and the Gospel in the 1st and 21st Century." Dr. Wright was interviewed on the day of his lecture by Chimes News Editor William Refvem. Second of two parts.
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One great controversy—I’m not sure it’s a controversy across the pond—is the role of the Scriptures. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “inerrancy of the Scriptures” or “infallibility of the Scriptures.”
Yes.
What is your position on that? To what extent is a doctrine that says something like infallibility or inerrancy necessary?
Right. I see words like that—inerrancy, infallibility—as attempts to put into a glass case, almost, something that Christians down the years have instinctively felt and known but not until recently have they actually formulated—a Scripture principle of some sort. You know that in the Middle Ages, in the early Church, it just came with the turf. If you were a Christian, the Bible was your book, and they didn’t develop great theories about what it was or how. They said odd things here and there, but it’s very recently that people have done that.
Particularly that a lot of that debate has happened within modernity, within post-Western-Enlightenment modernity, makes me worried because often, then, you get modernist categories about certainty and objectivity dumped on Scripture which really don’t do it justice and really don’t do what needs to be done. I was with a group of Anglican bishops last year, and one of them was asked the question about what he felt about Scripture, and his first answer was, “There isn’t any other book in the world I read every day of my life.” And in a sense that’s a very Anglican answer. It’s to say, “I’m not necessarily going to give a one-word theory, or even a five-word theory, but I am going to tell you that I am on my knees in front of this book day after day after day.”
In fact, I know the bishop in question, and I know there are some parts of Scripture that he would want to distance himself from. I wouldn’t take that view. I really think that if it’s in this book, I need to be doing serious business with it. If I say that I believe X but that the Bible says Y which is different, then chances are I’m making a mistake somewhere, but that doesn’t prejudge all issues of interpretation, you know. There are many, many issues where I say I am committed to believing this text whenever I figure out what on earth it’s supposed to mean, which at the moment I don’t think I know. So that, for me, is often an open question.
I know what the people who say inerrancy are trying to say, and broadly I want to affirm something like what they’re trying to affirm. I do have a sense that that word has got in the way. And as you say, in England this isn’t a big debate. We just don’t have the heat that it generates in the United States.
Well, since we seem to have come full circle—well, almost full circle—back around to Scripture. The gospels have always been an issue that looms large in my mind, because as you say, with modernist categories of objectivity and certainty, and things like that, it seems to me that if you apply those to the gospels specifically that the heat is especially felt there. I’d just like to hear your thoughts—what about the differences among the gospels? What about St. Paul’s influence on Luke, and so forth?
Paul’s influence on Luke would be a very interesting and difficult topic. Yes, of course there are differences among the gospels. My favorite one is that if you try to figure out how many times the cock (or the rooster, as you call it in America) crowed when Peter was busy betraying Jesus, it’s very, very difficult to do. The only way you can actually harmonize all the accounts is by having the rooster crow I think it’s nine times in order to fit in the different ways the gospels tell the story. And of course then you have said they’re all true by saying something which none of them say, and there are some evangelical apologists who have gone that route and have really tied themselves in knots, because you end up saying that they’re all wrong—in order to say they’re all right, you end up saying they’re all wrong, which is just ridiculous. But I really do think that Peter really did deny Jesus two or three times and that there was a cock crowing in the background while he was doing it. In fact, if you’ve ever stood in Jerusalem at four o’clock on a spring morning, there are dozens of roosters crowing all over the place—it’s actually very evocative.
The fact that the gospels tell it slightly differently doesn’t mean that nothing happened. The other important thing to say is that for almost all ancient history we are dependent on, or at most two, sources, plus the odd coin or inscription and that we are always in the business of doing reconstructions, and thinking probably it happened this way, and these sources can be fitted in and made to make sense. People often come to the gospels as though it was like doing 19th-century history, where you can go to the university library and look up all the pamphlets and newspaper and books and articles that were written and form an extremely detailed and accurate map of what precisely happened. In ancient history it is never like that.
The thing with the gospels is that it is more like that than anywhere else in ancient history because you’ve got these four accounts, themselves probably incorporating earlier sources, which converge so powerfully—and I’ve tried in my work about Jesus to show how they converge—but the reason many people say they don’t converge is that they come with skeptical, modernist spectacles on, where you discount all the miracles, where you say Jesus could never have said this because that would have meant he was mad, even though, of course, they said he was mad, and so on and so on.
And so the gospels all collapse into a heap of dust on the floor, and I have come to them and said, “No, I’m an ancient historian. I want to read these documents seriously as ancient history.” Of course they were written later by people within the movement. So? Tacitus and Suetonius were written after the life of Augustus and Tiberius, Claudius and so on, by people who had very definite axes to grind about how they saw the developing Roman Empire. Tacitus was an extremely cynical historian. That doesn’t mean we say his account is all projection, so we’ve got to do all the stuff that good historians do, and when we do the gospels show up remarkably well.
What do you think the writers of the gospels, and the people of the ancient world in general who thought about such things, would have thought about the nature of language, or the nature of narrative as a tool for portraying what actually happened? Would they have some of our modernist ideas about being able to nail it right on the head?
They knew the difference between saying, “Here’s a nice story, and of course it didn’t happen,” and saying, “Here’s a nice story, and actually it did happen.” There’s a lovely moment in Acts 12 when it says that Peter didn’t think what he was seeing was really happening, but that he thought he was seeing a vision. They knew the difference between things that really happened and visions, and from Herodotus on, they know the difference between saying, “Somebody told me this story, and actually I think it’s true,” and “Somebody told me this story, and actually I think it’s a bit odd.” And it’s interesting what they go for.
Herodotus said that “I met a traveler who said he traveled so far south that the sun was going round to the north. These sailors—they make up the most absurd things.” But we know, of course, that the guy was actually telling the truth, so sometimes the skepticism of the ancients was unwarranted. Sometimes, likewise, our modern skepticism of them is unwarranted.
There’s an awful lot of loosening of firm lines that needs to go on. But in particular, Jews of the first century—and the gospel writers were all either Jews or soaked in Judaism; Luke may have been a Gentile, but he knew his Jewish culture—lived within a narrative world where, because one of the principal actors in the narrative was the God who had made the world, as opposed to the pagan gods who hadn’t, it mattered that what they were talking about actually did happen in the real world. Their story was about things that happened in the real world. If that wasn’t true, then their stories were false.
In other words, though the gospels contain parable—stories which didn’t happen but which carry a meaning—the gospels themselves demonstrably cannot have been large-scale parables. The meaning they have is a meaning to do with the real world.
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