[The New Testament] is a Jewish book, telling Jewish-style stories, yet telling them for the world. It is a book of the world, retelling the story of the world as the story of Israel, and the story of Israel as the story of Jesus, in order to subvert the world's stories, and to lay before the world the claim of Jesus to be its sovereign. It is a Christian book, pouring new wine into the old bottles of Judaism, and new Jewish wine into the old bottles of the world, intending that this double exercise should have its inevitable and explosive double effect.

bishop n.t. wright, the new testament and the people of God, p.469

But why did Jews persecute Christians? Were they not both in the same boat -- branded as atheists, regarded as the scum of the earth, scorned when doing badly and resented when doing well? The answer here clearly lies in the ferocity of polemic between different pressure-groups, parties and/or sects within the same parent body. Sibling rivalry is fiercest when the siblings have an inheritance to share, or when one feels that another is ruining the chances of any of them inheriting it at all.

bishop n.t. wright, new testament and the people of God, p.450

interesting. also why i think it likely that islam arose out of arian/jacobite heresy and is not simply a different religion than Christianity.

In particular, it is vital to the whole thrust of John's theology that the logos becomes a human being. Sirach, somewhat loftily, could not envisage a human being ever fully fathoming Wisdom. John sees this Wisdom becoming, fully, a human being. In doing so he is still conscious of writing a new version of Genesis. The climax of the fist chapter of Genesis is the creation of the human being in the image of the creator. The climax of John's prologue is the coming to full humanness of the logos, who, in taking on so many of the characteristics of Wisdom, may be assumed also to be the divine image-bearer. When Pilate declares to the crowds, 'Here is the man,' John intends his readers to hear echoes that have been present since the very beginning. Jesus, as the logos having become flesh, is the truly human being.

bishop n.t. wright, new testament and the people of God, p.416

Mark's whole telling of the story of Jesus is designed to function as an apocalypse. The reader is constantly invited by the gospel as a whole to do what the disciples are invited to do in the parable-chapter, that is, to come closer and discover the inner secret behind the strange outer story.

bishop n.t. wright, the new testament and the people of God, p.395

this is going to be very influential in my upcoming hermeneutic project on Mark for leithart.

"If in one sense the camera never lies, we can see that in another sense it never does anything else. It excludes far more than it includes."

bishop n.t. wright, new testament and the people of God, p. 83

this is, i think, both the power and the peril of film. it's perilous because, as wright says, film is a lie in a very important sense, an intentional blinding to the rest world in order to create a story. it truly is a moving picture -- a capsule of life no bigger or more encompassing than a normal picture frame can be, yet it allows us to tell a story. and this is the power, because in that snapshot, in the distillation and intentional limiting of our vision, we can inspect much more closely character, plot, motif, theme, metaphor, in short, we can more fully realize who we are in our own grand story by comparing that story to the director's limited one.