Dr Paul Allen

The public ministry of Jesus didn't create demonic activity, but it did expose it, theologian and New Testament scholar N.T. Wright said during a recent episode of "Ask Me Anything," cautioning Christians against both the denial of spiritual evil and the unhealthy fixation on it. Responding to a question  about whether Jesus’ arrival triggered an apparent surge of demonic activity in the New Testament, the 77-year-old British author said the Gospels portray Jesus’ proclamation of God’s Kingdom as a moment when hidden spiritual forces were suddenly confronted. “When Jesus comes into Galilee and starts saying, ‘The Kingdom of God is at hand,’ it’s as though suddenly all the furniture starts flying around the room,” Wright said, pointing to Gospel accounts of public confrontations and exorcisms. “The dark powers realise, if He does everything that He looks as if He’s going to do, then we’re in deep trouble.” Wright, one of the world’s leading biblical scholars and a former A...

A while back on Church Leaders, N.T. Wright was interviewed on what he thinks about women preachers. Here’s what he said: “The usual idea that women were kept down in the ancient world and it’s only recently that feminism has brought them back up is quite wrong,” Wright argues.  The theologian, who recently published a book called The New Testament in Its World, said women who had some authority in the church and society were not anathema in the ancient world.  “There were many independent women in Paul’s world, and that was something Paul worked with.” In John 20, when Jesus is raised from the dead, the first person he meets is Mary Magdalene. “He does not say, Mary, I’ve got some essential news–I want you to go get Peter because I need to tell him so that he can then go and tell everybody else,” Wright explains.  Instead, “he says, ‘Mary, go and tell my brothers–those men who are hiding at home because they’re scared–go and tell them I am ascending to my father and your...