N.T. Wright and the Quote of the Week

The Meaning of Jesus, p.18:

"The guild of New Testament studies has become so used to operating with a hermeneutic of suspicion that we find ourselves trapped in our own subtleties [later Wright jokingly calls it a "hermeneutic of paranoia."]. If two ancient authors agree about something, that proves one got it from the other. If they seem to disagree, that proves one or both are wrong. If they say an event fulfilled biblical prophecy, they made it up to look like that. If an event or saying fits a writer's theological scheme, the writer invented it. .... Anything to show how clever we are, how subtle, to have smoked out the reality behind the text. But, as any author who has watched her or his books being reviewed will know, such reconstructions again and again miss the point, often wildly. If we cannot get it right [as with book reviews] when we share a culture, a period, and a language, it is highly likely that many of our subtle reconstructions of ancient texts and histories are our own unhistorical fantasies, unrecognized only because the writers are long since dead, and cannot answer back."