As we approach Lent, Rt Rev Prof NT Wright shares his thoughts on how Lent emerged, why it’s significant and what it means for us today

The early Christians were different. Different from the Greeks and Romans, the Egyptians and Syrians in whose world they lived, their next-door neighbours and, often enough, their extended families. Different, too, though in a different way, from the Jewish families and communities to whom, again, many Jesus-followers would be related.  

The early Christians were marked out in many ways, but one of the most distinctive was something they did every year. The first solid evidence for this comes from about 300 years after the time of Jesus, but this clearly reflects an already established… (Register to read the rest of the article)