From an older (excellent) article on justification:

It is false to say that I suggest that Paul would have seen the hopes of Israel in 'political' terms; in our world, that word carries the overtones of 'and therefore not religious'; whereas my point is that, as is easily provable from almost any second-Temple Jewish writing, the 'religious', the 'political', and for that matter the 'personal' and the 'communal', are cheerfully mixed up together in ways that baffle post-enlightenment readers (and so much evangelicalism is, alas, still in complete thrall to the enlightenment), but were obvious to people in that day. When it comes to the word dikaiosune and its cognates, it isn't a matter of 'what Wright thinks the word would have meant then', but what serious historical lexicography tells us....

Let me risk labouring this point by adding the following. What I am doing, often enough, is exactly parallel, in terms of method, to what Martin Luther did when he took the gospel word metanoeite and insisted that it didn't mean 'do penance', as the Vulgate indicated, but 'repent' in a much more personal and heartfelt way. The only way to make that sort of point is to show that that's what the word would have meant at the time. That's the kind of serious biblical scholarship the Protestant Reformation was built on, and I for one am proud to carry on that tradition -- if need be, against those who have turned the Reformation itself into a tradition to be set up over scripture itself.