1) It’s not a major premise, more of an aside. However, the shape of James is overall more semitic in character than Paul’s letters and seems to hearken to the period before Gentiles began to outnumber Jews in the Church. Placing James in the pre-Pauline period I think gives it a much more vital link with Matthew and lets you understand it as a development and application of christology for the entire Church in Hebraic terms. Also, you get Paul being influenced by James for free. Otherwise, you get kind of a bizarre tension between the two and the explicitly Semitic character of James’ epistle becomes somewhat unexplainable.

2) What I mean is that Wright is operating in a scholarship context that would make most intelligent non-liberals pretty uncomfortable if they understood some of its implications. A major example would be the new development of a fundamental article of the faith after the Ascension. I suppose it also depends on how Christocentric one sees revelation. Is the Church simply charged with preserving and explaining what Christ taught, or is it given permission to add new dogmas on top of that? I’ve heard the argument about the Trinity; I believe that at Nicea, the Church re-affirmed what Christ taught about God in technical language rather than developing an entire “new” doctrine. The Church was condemning trinitarian heresies long before Nicea. Futher, there’s nothing wrong with “historical methods” per se. There is a world of difference between the historico-grammatical method and the historical-critical method, however. Frankly, I can’t tell if Wright is using the former or the latter, but he does seem to make his case entirely to appeal to the latter. I’m afraid I don’t have a terribly eloquent reason other that his Jesus doesn’t seem divine enough, and his Scriptures don’t seem inspired enough. He seems to read Paul like I would read Luther or Chemnitz, not how I would read someone I believed to be inerrantly and verbally inspired by the Holy Spirit. Maybe I’m wrong on how I read the Bible and should just treat its authors like ordinary men who just happened to be right all the time.

3) Since you’re Reformed, it’s fine, since the heart of your theology is the sovereignty of God, and Wright leaves that untouched. However, I’m a Lutheran, and I believe that justification by grace through faith is the heart of Christian doctrine. Hence Wright stabs at everything the Incarnation means to me. My point was that he dismisses all the exegesis and work coming from the Reformation with a wave of his hand and assumes he has nothing to learn from them, when the fact is he really doesn’t understand what the Reformation was about. When Mike Horton points out that Wright’s definition of “justification” is unsupportable by any Greek Lexicon or the last century of Greek scholarship, Wright devotees accuse Horton of ignoring historical context and true scholarship and blah blah blah.

The entire point is that there is a mountain of evidence that the Reformation was basically correct, and the fact that it remains to be seriously engaged by Wright instead of being misrepresented and abused should alert the reader to exercise some caution when reading him.