put off by the sneer

"We now have crowning irony after a long tradition in which orthodox theology has been “playing away from home” expressing Christian truth in non-biblical patristic and subsequent formulations, we are now told that if we wish to go back and discover what the [New Testament] meant within its own universe of discourse—in other words, the world of Second Temple Judaism—it is we who are playing away from home.  And let us not be put off by the sneer that if these meanings were what God had intended us to have they would not have been forgotten for two thousand years.  Those who stand in the Reformation tradition should remember what Luther said when people tried to pull that trick on him."  [emphasis mine]
    - N.Thomas Wright, "Jesus and the Identity of God"