Figure · 1937

E.P. Sanders

E. P. Sanders (1937–2022), American New Testament scholar. His Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977) argued that ancient Judaism was a religion of grace and covenant, not of earning salvation, and laid the ground for the New Perspective on Paul.

History

Life

Ed Parish Sanders was born in Grand Prairie, Texas, in 1937. He studied at Texas Wesleyan College and at Perkins School of Theology (Southern Methodist University), then spent 1962–63 studying in Göttingen, Oxford and Jerusalem. His doctorate at Union Theological Seminary in New York (1966) was supervised by W. D. Davies, whose Paul and Rabbinic Judaism (1948) had already read Paul as a Jewish thinker. The thesis became The Tendencies of the Synoptic Tradition (1969, Archive.org).

He taught at McMaster University in Ontario (1966–1984), where he led a large research project on Jewish and Christian self-definition. He was Dean Ireland’s Professor of Exegesis at Oxford (1984–1990), then taught at Duke University until he retired in 2005. He died in 2022 (Wikipedia, secondary, for the career dates).

Causes

Sanders wrote against a picture of Judaism that ran through Protestant New Testament scholarship. In that picture, first-century Jews tried to earn God’s favour by piling up good works, and Paul’s gospel of grace was the answer to their anxious legalism. Ferdinand Weber had systematised it in the nineteenth century, the Strack–Billerbeck commentary supplied the rabbinic texts, and Rudolf Bultmann built it into his theology. George Foot Moore had attacked the picture in “Christian Writers on Judaism” (Harvard Theological Review, 1921), and Krister Stendahl had argued that Western readers projected Luther’s troubled conscience onto Paul (“The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” 1963, reprinted in Paul Among Jews and Gentiles, Archive.org). But neither had offered a full reading of the Jewish sources to put in its place.

Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977, Archive.org; Fortress 40th-anniversary edition) did that. Sanders worked through the Tannaitic rabbinic literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, and compared the “pattern of religion” in each with Paul’s.

Influence

The book changed the field within a decade. James Dunn named the movement it started in his 1982 Manson Memorial Lecture, “The New Perspective on Paul” (published 1983). N.T. Wright took Sanders’s account of Judaism as his starting point, though he rejected Sanders’s reading of Paul. Even scholars who defend the older Protestant reading now accept that they must answer Sanders on Judaism before they can make their case on Paul.

Sanders then turned to Jesus. Jesus and Judaism (1985, Archive.org; Fortress) won the Grawemeyer Award in Religion in 1990 and became a landmark of the so-called Third Quest for the historical Jesus. Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE–66 CE (1992, Archive.org) described the “common Judaism” shared by ordinary Jews whatever their party. The Historical Figure of Jesus (1993, Archive.org) brought his work to a general audience.

Key ideas and contributors

Covenantal nomism. Sanders’s name for the pattern he found across Palestinian Judaism. He defined it as “the view that one’s place in God’s plan is established on the basis of the covenant and that the covenant requires as the proper response of man his obedience to its commandments, while providing means of atonement for transgression” (Paul and Palestinian Judaism, p. 75). Put simply, Jews “got in” by God’s gracious election and “stayed in” by obedience, with repentance and sacrifice to repair failure. Obedience kept one’s place in the covenant; it did not earn it.

From solution to plight. Sanders argued that Paul did not begin with a sense of failure under the law and then find relief in Christ. He began with Christ. Having come to believe that God saves through Christ, he concluded that every other way, the law included, could not be the way. Paul’s own account of his past calls him “blameless” in law-righteousness (Philippians 3:4–9), which fits poorly with the anxious legalist of the older picture.

What Paul found wrong with Judaism. The book’s most quoted line follows from this: “this is what Paul finds wrong in Judaism: it is not Christianity” (p. 552). Paul’s objection was not that Jews were trying to earn salvation, but that they relied on a covenant God had now opened to Gentiles through Christ.

Participation in Christ. Sanders held that the centre of Paul’s thought was not justification by faith but “participationist eschatology”: believers share in Christ’s death and resurrection and belong to him now. Justification language (Galatians 2:16) served mainly to explain why Gentiles could enter without the law. He developed the argument in Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (1983, Archive.org), where he also argued that Paul’s statements about the law are not fully consistent.

Jesus as prophet of restoration. In Jesus and Judaism Sanders started from facts he judged secure rather than from the sayings. The key one was Jesus’ action in the Temple, which he read as a symbolic prophecy of its destruction and replacement in God’s coming kingdom (Mark 11:15–17). Jesus was a Jewish eschatological prophet expecting the restoration of Israel, not a critic of the law or of Judaism.

Others built on these ideas in different directions. Dunn argued that “works of the law” meant the boundary markers of Jewish identity, such as circumcision, food laws and the Sabbath. Wright folded covenantal nomism into a larger story of Israel’s exile and restoration, and set out his differences with Sanders in “New Perspectives on Paul” (Edinburgh Dogmatics Conference, 2003), where he praises the account of Judaism but calls Sanders’s Paul “muddled and imprecise.”

Key controversies

Was Judaism really so uniform? The strongest reply came from Justification and Variegated Nomism (2 vols., 2001–2004), edited by D. A. Carson, Peter O’Brien and Mark Seifrid. Its contributors went back through the sources Sanders used and argued that the pattern varied. Some texts fit covenantal nomism; others placed real weight on merit and final judgment by works. Carson’s conclusion was that “covenantal nomism” is too broad a category to settle how any given text thought about salvation.

Grace and works at the final judgment. Simon Gathercole’s Where Is Boasting? (2002) argued that Second Temple Jews did expect final vindication on the basis of obedience, and that this is what Paul targets in Romans 1–5 (Romans 3:27–28). On this reading Sanders was right that Judaism began with grace but wrong to treat obedience as only about staying in.

Did Sanders misread the Reformers? Stephen Westerholm’s Perspectives Old and New on Paul (2004) defended the “Lutheran” Paul. He argued that the Reformers’ point was never that Judaism lacked grace, but that all people, Jew and Gentile, fall short and need God’s righteousness as a gift. That claim, Westerholm said, stands even if Sanders is right about Judaism. The dispute matters for Lutheran Justification and for the debates that followed the Joint Declaration on Justification.

What kind of grace? John Barclay’s Paul and the Gift (2015) accepted that grace is everywhere in Second Temple Judaism, but argued that Sanders treated it as one thing. Barclay distinguished several ways a gift can be “perfected.” Sanders had stressed priority, God acting first. What sets Paul apart is incongruity: grace given without regard to the worth of the person receiving it (Douglas Moo’s review in Themelios, secondary). As Moo sums it up, “Sanders is right that grace is everywhere; but this does not mean that grace is everywhere the same.”

Paul’s coherence and Jesus’ message. Many readers, sympathetic or not, found Sanders’s claim that Paul’s view of the law is inconsistent too quick. Others questioned his reading of Jesus’ welcome of “sinners,” which he took to mean the openly wicked, offered a place in the kingdom without first making restitution through the normal means. Bruce Chilton, for one, argued that the texts do not support that reading: Sanders’s thesis “simply discounts too much material which refers to repentance explicitly, and clashes too much with material which implies the necessity of repentance, to be convincing” (“Jesus and the Repentance of E. P. Sanders,” Tyndale Bulletin 39, 1988).

What remains unresolved

Almost no one now defends the old picture of Judaism as anxious legalism, and that change is Sanders’s lasting achievement. What remains open is how much follows from it for Paul. Readers who start from Sanders find Paul arguing about who belongs to God’s people. Readers in the tradition of Martin Luther find Paul arguing about how a sinner stands before God. The best recent work, like Barclay’s, tries to hold both.