Is NT Wright the Grinch?

I don’t often read Credenda Agenda, but I was amused to come across a recent article entitled How NT Wright Stole Christmas.

“Several years ago, when The Passion of the Christ was making headlines, I realized that N. T. Wright has spoiled every Jesus film.  Once you’ve read Wright, you realize that none of the movies get Jesus right.  Pharisees and scribes are reduced stock villains with caricatured Jewish features.  Pilate has to make an appearance, and Herod, but we are given no sense that first-century Israel was the powder keg that it actually was.

No film ever gives us what Wright says we should be looking for: a “crucifiable” Jesus, a Jesus who does something so provocative to make the Jews murderously hostile.  In the movies, Jesus is a hippy peace-child, a delicate flower of a man, a dew-eyed first-century Jewish Gandhi.  Why would anyone want to hurt Him?  Maybe because He’s so annoyingly precious; but that’s not the story of the gospels.

Just this year, I had another realization.  N. T. Wright has spoiled Christmas too…

…As it turns out, Wright is no Grinch.  He didn’t steal Christmas.  What he stole was a false Christmas, a de-contextualized and apolitical Christmas.  But we shouldn’t have bought that Christmas in the first place, and should have been embarrassed to display it so proudly on the mantle.  Good riddance, and Bah humbug.”

It’s am amusing article, but I think it is fair to say that NT Wright is not the first person to have picked up on the over-sentimentality and de-constextualisation of much of our view of the Christmas story. That being said, his series on Christian Origins is well worth reading. I hope to finish volume three this week.

• The New Testament and the People of God: Christian Origins and the Question of God v. 1 (Christian Origins & Ques God
• Jesus and the Victory of God: Christian Origins and the Question of God: v. 2 (Christian Origins & the Question of God)
• The Resurrection of the Son of God (Christian Origins & the Question of God)