3/23/2008 10:54:54 AM

At this point, someone may say: surely, if the Gospels are inspired scripture … they should be accurate in all ways? In a sense, yes. But beware. That argument is regularly used by people as an excuse for not reading the gospels for all they’re worth, but simply for reading them in a flat and naïve way which fits with a modern Western worldview … rather than a truly Christian one. It is used, often, as an argument for treating the Gospels as a collection of proof-texts for a supposedly Christian worldview which in fact owes a great deal more to particular, and quite recent, traditions within the church, rather than to serious engagement with the God-breathed word itself. If we say that God inspired scripture, we are saying that God was involved in the rough-and-tumble, warts-and-all historical processes that led to us having these Gospels to read – not that they appeared from the sky one day, containing some sort of timeless truth divorced from history.

Tom Wright, The Original Jesus, p. 131