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Bishop N.T. Wright is one of the most prolific Christian writers of our day. As a New Testament scholar and former Canon Theologian of Westminster Abbey, Wright’s work has received a wide reading from a variety of Christians: mainline to fundamentalist, emergent to high-church Anglicans. Yet as wide as his readership is, even the quickest readers cannot seem to keep up with his pace of writing and publishing. As one pastor put it, “N.T. Wright writes faster than I can read!”

Nevertheless, Wright serves as one of the foremost defenders of orthodox Christianity today. We carry several of Wright’s most recent and most respected titles. Simply Christian has merited reviews from many prominent periodicals, and has been lauded as this generation’s Mere Christianity (the classic work by C.S. Lewis), serving to simply, yet faithfully present an introduction to the historic message of Christianity.

One of Wright’s newest books discusses the recently discovered Gospel of Judas. Hailed by critics as a major challenge to historical Christianity, many Christians have felt threatened by the document’s alternative accounts of some the most important moments in Jesus’ life. In his brilliantly concise book, Judas and the Gospel of Jesus, Wright seeks not so much to exegete and refute the “gospel” of Judas point by point, but to praise its discovery as providing a unique insight into second-century Gnosticism. This otherwise obscure second-century religious tradition has historically had very few primary sources to document its teachings, so rather than undermine the entire Christian tradition, the discovery of a document like The Gospel of Judas, Wright argues, provides a glimpse into the literary corpus of the heretical tradition that was combated by early Christian apologists. So in essence, a discovery like the Gospel of Judas will in the end shed more light on the context for early Christian writings, such as Iraeneus’ Against Heresies, which sought to distinguish orthodox Christian teachings from the heretical Gnostic teachings.

For anyone looking for a quick, yet insightful look at the Gospel of Judas by one of today’s foremost New Testament scholars, check this book out today.