Albert gave me some books by New Testament scholar N.T. Wright. He is an Anglican bishop, but if the books are any indication, he might come to full communion with the Church before too long. The point of the books is to attempt to provide insight into the historical and cultural context of the Gospels. If you know me, you know I sit really loose to modern historical-critical type scripture scholars no matter where you come from. If you're like me, you wonder what these people think they're doing. To the ordinary (even really pretty well-read) layman-in-the-pew, these people sound crazy and of little or no help at all to the Christian life. To read many of them, it's like they think that in order to be properly historical and scholarly they have to start out from the assumption that Jesus wasn't God and come up with explanations that demonstrate this.
So I have come to become very cautious if not cynical about them. But I have enjoyed reading Wright's books so far. It felt odd at first that he takes so seriously the Scripture scholars I complained about in the beginning, which for me could have been dismissed with the observation that their conclusions are false (defective or flat-out false Christological doctrine), therefore either their premises or reasoning is faulty, but I'm glad I didn't just skip over those parts because he takes them seriously in order to critique and refute them - like the Catholic Church he is confident that real and accurate history will vindicate the traditional Christian beliefs about Jesus. One reason why this is valuable to me is that he is giving an explanation that even a Protestant or other non-Catholic can understand for why the Enlightenment era and 19th- and 20th-century liberal Protestant notions of Jesus' life and mission (notions which have had no small influence on our culture) are incorrect.
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