that the Bible is its own best normative context. So, yes: context, context, context—including the canonical context. It is for this reason that Brevard Childs’s The Church’s Guide for Reading Paul: The Canonical Shaping of the Pauline Corpus, in particular the section on “the historical and canonical Paul,” is conspicuous by its absence from Wright’s own books on Paul. Childs there says: “The historical Paul of the first century has been transmitted by Christian tradents who have received and shaped
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