An excellent video from NT Wright on the way in which a first century Jewish reader likely would have “heard” the Genesis 1-3 stories.
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An excellent video from NT Wright on the way in which a first century Jewish reader likely would have “heard” the Genesis 1-3 stories.
3 replies on “NT Wright on Genesis 1-3”
interesting video. Thanks for sharing this. I also posted it over on my blog (and gave you credit for the find).
I’m still not sure what Wright picks out the time just before Jesus as *the* time in which he wants to know how the readers would have understood Genesis. Is it so that we understand the New Testament better?
Great question Jordan. I think its probably because Wright’s overall hermeneutic would be Christocentric — that is, interpreting the whole Bible through the lens of God’s revelation of Himself in Christ. So I think for Wright the big question is, how should we as Christians understand this text today, knowing that one of its fundamental purposes in scripture is to point towards who God is as revealed in Christ.
But you make a good point, in that it’s hard to say who the “original audience” for a text like this would be, given that the text served a variety of purposes over hundreds or thousands of years, all the way back to its roots in oral tradition.