N. T. Wright

Background

Nicholas Thomas Wright (b. 1948) is an English New Testament scholar and Anglican churchman: former Bishop of Durham, subsequently research professor at St Andrews and Oxford. His multi-volume Christian Origins and the Question of God is the most ambitious contemporary historical case for orthodox Christian origins, and its third volume, The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003), is the canonical statement of historical maximalism about the resurrection. Wright accepts the Jewish-eschatological frame Albert Schweitzer established, but argues the quest can and does yield a positive historical verdict.

Corpus status: Wright's primary works are in copyright and not in corpus. This profile reflects how the wiki's debate articles use him — his arguments are presented in outline there, flagged as summary, and readers are directed to the works themselves.

Positions held in this wiki

• The Resurrection of Jesus — Historicity — the maximalist case in outline: Second-Temple Judaism expected an end-time resurrection of all the righteous, not a mid-history resurrection of one; the early Christian claim that Jesus was raised as "firstfruits" (1 Cor 15:20 (bib)) is an unprecedented mutation of that expectation, best explained by the disciples actually encountering Jesus alive.
• The Empty Tomb: Arguments and Critiques — empty tomb plus appearances as jointly necessary and jointly sufficient to generate early resurrection belief; presented in outline only, with the lexical argument (in Second-Temple usage "resurrection" meant something that leaves graves empty) flagged {{UNSOURCED}} pending acquisition.
• Listed in The Pre-Pauline Creed in 1 Cor 15:3-8 as holding the early-Jerusalem-tradition reading within a maximalist frame.

Key works in our corpus

Corpus gap: none of Wright's primary works are ingested (in-copyright). The wiki's outline presentations rest on the scriptural data cited directly (1 Cor 15; the Gospel narratives) rather than on quotation from Wright. See meta/ingestion-queue.md for the standing acquisition note in the debate articles. - The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003) — the definitive statement; not in corpus. - Jesus and the Victory of God (1996) — the historical-Jesus volume; not in corpus.

Principal critics

• David Friedrich Strauss — the ancestor of the standing objection that visionary experience plus scriptural reflection suffices; Strauss's machinery is in corpus (Strauss §140).
• Adolf von Harnack — the moderate position Wright's lexical argument targets: Easter faith without a settled Easter message (Harnack 1900, p.160-162).
• Bart D. Ehrman — contemporary agnostic critic of maximalist conclusions (not in corpus); also cited in the articles' counter-sections: the objection that Second-Temple resurrection expectation was more diverse than Wright allows.

See also

• Gary Habermas — the minimal-facts strategy, deliberately narrower than Wright's maximalism.
• J. Gresham Machen — the in-corpus twentieth-century antecedent of the maximalist case.
• Richard Bauckham — Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2006), allied eyewitness-tradition argument; not in corpus.