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Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People
This book is devoted both to the problem of Paul's view of the law as a whole, and to his thought about and relation to his fellow Jews. Building upon his previous study, the critically acclaimed Paul and Palestinian Judaism , E.P. Sanders explores Paul's Jewishness by concentrating on his overall relationship to Jewish tradition and thought. Sanders addresses such topics as Paul's use of scripture, the degree to which he was a practicing Jew during his career as apostle to the Gentiles, and his thoughts about his "kin by race" who did not accept Jesus as the messiah. In short, Paul's thoughts about the law and his own people are re-examined with new awareness and great care. Sanders addresses an important chapter in the history of the emergence of Christianity. Paul's role in that development -- specially in light of Galatians and Romans -- is now re-evaluated in a major way. This book is in fact a significant contribution to the study of the emergent normative self-definition in Judaism and Christianity during the first centuries of the common era.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1959
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About the author
E.P. Sanders
22 books71 followersEd Parish Sanders is a New Testament scholar, and is one of the principal proponents of the New Perspective on Paul. He has been Arts and Sciences Professor of Religion at Duke University, North Carolina, since 1990. He retired in 2005
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February 15, 2014
I didn't find his project to be as radical as many of his critics and followers think it is. More often that not, Sanders hedges his bets and only gives "tentative" proposals. Many of his conclusions will be familiar to those who have wrestled with the NPP:
1) Judaism was not a religion of works-righteousness.
2) Paul was a coherent thinker, if not an organized and systematic one.
3) The tensions in Paul's theology arise from sets of convictions: He does not view Christianity as a different religion than Judaism, yet notes that it is quite different in focusing around Jesus of Nazareth and a loosening of Torah.
3a) Paul gives numerous treatments of the Law which are not easily systematized.
Analysis:
Per 1) I disagree with him, but any answer to this question is tricky. I certainly agree that the Law God gave to his people was not intended to be works-righteousness (otherwise God is a tricksy fellow). That is an entirely different claim than saying 1st century rabbis saw it as such. I think Sanders is guilty of conflating two issues into one. I can agree with him that the average Jew didn't go around in a crude medieval Catholic fashion worrying about how many Hail Marys he said that day. On the other hand, and even the NPP project hints toward this, many did associate at least one level of salvation with who they were as Jews. Contrary to both critics and advocates of NPP, it really isn't that wide a gap between salvation based on my good works and salvation based on my ethnic identity.
Per 2) This might be tough to say, but we all think it: in one sentence what did Paul really teach about the Law? You simply cannot answer it in one sentence. In some places he says its good; others its bad. Romans 2 almost reads it in soteriological terms, yet that is the exact opposite of Paul's larger theology. Surprisingly, Sanders doesn't opt for either easy route: he doesn't say "Paul's view is consistent" nor does he say "Paul is simply incoherent." Rather, he says that Paul is operating around certain parameters from which he does budge. When faced with different ethical situations, it seems like there are different conclusions.
Per 3) This conclusion would have been easier to say pre-70 AD. While the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch, its doubtful they gave themselves that name. They would have saw themselves as good Israelites reconstituted around Jesus of Nazareth, whom God raised from the dead. This creates a real tension that isn't easily solved until the Temple's (and hence, Judaism's identity) is destroyed.
i) It goes without saying that Jewish converts to "The Way" would not have to give up their identity (Paul certainly acts like a good Jew from time to time).
ii) Yet, Gentile converts would not have to embrace Jewish identity markers.
SO far both points are unremarkable. The real problem come with the next one:
iii) Jew and Gentile have to worship together as "one body."
Sanders doesn't really point to a conclusion so much as to highlight the problem.
1) Judaism was not a religion of works-righteousness.
2) Paul was a coherent thinker, if not an organized and systematic one.
3) The tensions in Paul's theology arise from sets of convictions: He does not view Christianity as a different religion than Judaism, yet notes that it is quite different in focusing around Jesus of Nazareth and a loosening of Torah.
3a) Paul gives numerous treatments of the Law which are not easily systematized.
Analysis:
Per 1) I disagree with him, but any answer to this question is tricky. I certainly agree that the Law God gave to his people was not intended to be works-righteousness (otherwise God is a tricksy fellow). That is an entirely different claim than saying 1st century rabbis saw it as such. I think Sanders is guilty of conflating two issues into one. I can agree with him that the average Jew didn't go around in a crude medieval Catholic fashion worrying about how many Hail Marys he said that day. On the other hand, and even the NPP project hints toward this, many did associate at least one level of salvation with who they were as Jews. Contrary to both critics and advocates of NPP, it really isn't that wide a gap between salvation based on my good works and salvation based on my ethnic identity.
Per 2) This might be tough to say, but we all think it: in one sentence what did Paul really teach about the Law? You simply cannot answer it in one sentence. In some places he says its good; others its bad. Romans 2 almost reads it in soteriological terms, yet that is the exact opposite of Paul's larger theology. Surprisingly, Sanders doesn't opt for either easy route: he doesn't say "Paul's view is consistent" nor does he say "Paul is simply incoherent." Rather, he says that Paul is operating around certain parameters from which he does budge. When faced with different ethical situations, it seems like there are different conclusions.
Per 3) This conclusion would have been easier to say pre-70 AD. While the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch, its doubtful they gave themselves that name. They would have saw themselves as good Israelites reconstituted around Jesus of Nazareth, whom God raised from the dead. This creates a real tension that isn't easily solved until the Temple's (and hence, Judaism's identity) is destroyed.
i) It goes without saying that Jewish converts to "The Way" would not have to give up their identity (Paul certainly acts like a good Jew from time to time).
ii) Yet, Gentile converts would not have to embrace Jewish identity markers.
SO far both points are unremarkable. The real problem come with the next one:
iii) Jew and Gentile have to worship together as "one body."
Sanders doesn't really point to a conclusion so much as to highlight the problem.
June 1, 2025
SANDERS GOES BEYOND HIS BOOK ‘PAUL AND PALESTINIAN JUDAISM’
Ed Parish Sanders (1937-2022) was a New Testament scholar, and (prior to his 2005 retirement) was Professor of Religion at Duke University.
He wrote in the Preface to this 1983 book, “[I]n ‘Paul and Palestinian Judaism’ I did not intend to explore Paul’s Jewishness, his overall relationship to Jewish tradition and thought… the subject was limited to how ‘getting and staying in’ were understood by Paul and his near contemporaries in Judaism. The present work, however, does focus more closely on Paul’s general relationship to contemporary Judaism… More precisely, the work addressed an important chapter in the history of the emergence of the Christian movement as a separate religion.”
He explains in the Introduction, “I have previously argued… that much of what Paul says in the very divergent circumstances of his surviving letters is controlled by certain central and identifiable convictions: that God had sent Jesus Christ to provide for the salvation of all; that salvation is available for all, whether Jew or Greek, on the same basis…; that the Lord would return soon; that he, Paul, was called by God to be the apostle to the Gentiles; and that Christians should live in accordance with the will of God...” (Pg. 4-5)
He states, “The argument of Galatians 3 is against Christian missionaries, not against Judaism, and it is against the view that Gentiles must accept the law as a condition of or as a basic requirement for membership. Paul’s argument is not in favor of faith per se, nor is it against works per se. It is much more particular: it is against requiring the Gentiles to keep the law of Moses in order to be true ‘sons of Abraham.’” (Pg. 19)
He explains, “In the phrase ‘not by works of law’ the emphasis is not on WORKS abstractly conceived but on LAW, that is, the Mosaic law. The argument is that one need not be Jewish to be ‘righteous’ and is thus against the standard Jewish view that accepting and living by the law is a sign and condition of favored status. This is both the position which, independently of Paul, we can know to have characterized Judaism and the position which Paul attacks. In other terms, Paul’s ‘not by works of law’ shows that he had come to hold a different view of God’s plan of salvation from that of non-Christian Judaism. It was never, he argues, God’s intention that one should accept the law in order to become one of the elect. Though fully evident now that Christ has come, God’s intention to save on the basis of faith, not the law, was previously announced in Scripture. The case is made above all by Abraham, who was chosen without accepting the law. This is, in effect, an attack on the traditional understanding of the covenant and election, according to which accepting the law signified acceptance of the covenant.” (Pg. 46)
He states, “[Paul] was absolutely convinced that God sent Christ to save all humanity on the same basis, and therefore apart from law. He had already… argued extensively that righteousness does not come by keeping the law. Yet he thought that God gave the law. He attempted to hold these convictions together in different ways. Each attempt… [is] part of a coherent line of thought. But in and of themselves the attempts are not harmonious… the problem remained real for him, since he kept searching for a formulation which was satisfactory… we learn that he did not begin his thinking about sin and redemption by analyzing the human condition, nor by analyzing the effect of the law on those who sought to obey it. Had he done so we should doubtless find more consistency.” (Pg. 81)
He clarifies, “I do not wish to propose that Paul consciously deleted from the law which Christians are to keep the elements which were most offensive to pagan society on purely practical grounds, so that pagans would find it relatively easy to convert. We should recall, rather, two of his principal convictions: all are to be saved on the same basis; he was called to be the apostle to the Gentiles. Putting these convictions into practice understandably resulted in deleting circumcision, Sabbath, and food laws from ‘the whole law’ or ‘the commandments of God.’ Yet we must also bear in mind that Paul himself offered no theoretical basis for the de facto reduction of the law. We can say that he meant in fact a REDUCED law when he said that the law is fulfilled in the requirement to love the neighbor only because we can observe the ways in which he reduced it. He still calls it ‘the whole law.’ We cannot determine to what degree he was conscious of his own reduction of the law…. Yet he offered no rationale for his de facto limitations, but insisted that those in the Spirit keep what the law requires.” (Pg. 102-103)
He summarizes, “we see that [Paul] regarded as either wrong or optional three laws or groups of laws: the requirement of circumcision, special days, and special food. The most obvious common denominator to these laws is the fact that they distinguish Jews from Gentiles. The contents of what Paul required differ from the Mosaic law in a second way: many of the aspects of behavior which he regarded as obligatory are not specifically governed by Scripture.” (Pg. 113-114)
He argues, “Since Paul retained his native conviction that God gave the law, but had also come to the conviction that Christ saves and that therefore the law does not, he naturally had to give some account of God’s purpose in giving the law and of the law’s function in God’s overall plan. This problem plagued him and led to some of the most difficult and tortured passages in the surviving correspondence. He was still struggling with [it] in … Romans, and no single statement encompasses neatly all of his attempts to deal with it… When it came to concrete acts, Paul, as a good Jew, thought that his converts should act in accord with the will of God as revealed in Scripture, not in accord with the customs of the Greeks… Whether more cases would have produced more exceptions we cannot say, but it is clear that his ethical views were basically Jewish… when it came to evaluating the Mosaic dispensation vis-à-vis the dispensation in Christ, Paul found the former, glorious as it had been, to be worthless.”(Pg. 143-144)
He contends, “I would urge that Paul held a limited number of basic convictions which, when applied to different problems, led him to say different things about the law. Even at the point at which Paul may most obviously be charged with true incoherence, the statements in Romans 2 that the sole basis of salvation is the fulfillment of the law, we can see that he has been led to make use of material which is contrary to one of his central convictions (salvation by faith in Jesus Christ) by the desire to assert another one (the equality of Jew and Gentile). Nevertheless Romans 2 remains the instance in which Paul goes beyond inconsistency or variety of argument and explanation to true self-contradiction.” (Pg. 147)
He states, “Paul… we cannot doubt, thought of the church as the fulfillment of the promises to Abraham. In that sense it was not at all a new religion. Jews who entered the Christian movement did not have to convert in the way Gentiles did: they did not have to renounce their God, nor… observance of the law. Nevertheless in very important ways the church was… a third entity... It was not established by admitting Gentiles to Israel according to the flesh… but by admitting all, whether Jew or Greek into the body of Christ by faith in him. Admission was sealed by baptism, more emphatically not by circumcision and acceptance of the law…. Paul’s view of the church … was substantially that it was a third entity, not just because it was composed of both Jew and Greek, but also because it was in important ways neither Jewish nor Greek.” (Pg, 178-179)
This book will be of keen interest to those studying the ‘New Perspective’ on Paul, his view of Judaism, and similar topics.
Ed Parish Sanders (1937-2022) was a New Testament scholar, and (prior to his 2005 retirement) was Professor of Religion at Duke University.
He wrote in the Preface to this 1983 book, “[I]n ‘Paul and Palestinian Judaism’ I did not intend to explore Paul’s Jewishness, his overall relationship to Jewish tradition and thought… the subject was limited to how ‘getting and staying in’ were understood by Paul and his near contemporaries in Judaism. The present work, however, does focus more closely on Paul’s general relationship to contemporary Judaism… More precisely, the work addressed an important chapter in the history of the emergence of the Christian movement as a separate religion.”
He explains in the Introduction, “I have previously argued… that much of what Paul says in the very divergent circumstances of his surviving letters is controlled by certain central and identifiable convictions: that God had sent Jesus Christ to provide for the salvation of all; that salvation is available for all, whether Jew or Greek, on the same basis…; that the Lord would return soon; that he, Paul, was called by God to be the apostle to the Gentiles; and that Christians should live in accordance with the will of God...” (Pg. 4-5)
He states, “The argument of Galatians 3 is against Christian missionaries, not against Judaism, and it is against the view that Gentiles must accept the law as a condition of or as a basic requirement for membership. Paul’s argument is not in favor of faith per se, nor is it against works per se. It is much more particular: it is against requiring the Gentiles to keep the law of Moses in order to be true ‘sons of Abraham.’” (Pg. 19)
He explains, “In the phrase ‘not by works of law’ the emphasis is not on WORKS abstractly conceived but on LAW, that is, the Mosaic law. The argument is that one need not be Jewish to be ‘righteous’ and is thus against the standard Jewish view that accepting and living by the law is a sign and condition of favored status. This is both the position which, independently of Paul, we can know to have characterized Judaism and the position which Paul attacks. In other terms, Paul’s ‘not by works of law’ shows that he had come to hold a different view of God’s plan of salvation from that of non-Christian Judaism. It was never, he argues, God’s intention that one should accept the law in order to become one of the elect. Though fully evident now that Christ has come, God’s intention to save on the basis of faith, not the law, was previously announced in Scripture. The case is made above all by Abraham, who was chosen without accepting the law. This is, in effect, an attack on the traditional understanding of the covenant and election, according to which accepting the law signified acceptance of the covenant.” (Pg. 46)
He states, “[Paul] was absolutely convinced that God sent Christ to save all humanity on the same basis, and therefore apart from law. He had already… argued extensively that righteousness does not come by keeping the law. Yet he thought that God gave the law. He attempted to hold these convictions together in different ways. Each attempt… [is] part of a coherent line of thought. But in and of themselves the attempts are not harmonious… the problem remained real for him, since he kept searching for a formulation which was satisfactory… we learn that he did not begin his thinking about sin and redemption by analyzing the human condition, nor by analyzing the effect of the law on those who sought to obey it. Had he done so we should doubtless find more consistency.” (Pg. 81)
He clarifies, “I do not wish to propose that Paul consciously deleted from the law which Christians are to keep the elements which were most offensive to pagan society on purely practical grounds, so that pagans would find it relatively easy to convert. We should recall, rather, two of his principal convictions: all are to be saved on the same basis; he was called to be the apostle to the Gentiles. Putting these convictions into practice understandably resulted in deleting circumcision, Sabbath, and food laws from ‘the whole law’ or ‘the commandments of God.’ Yet we must also bear in mind that Paul himself offered no theoretical basis for the de facto reduction of the law. We can say that he meant in fact a REDUCED law when he said that the law is fulfilled in the requirement to love the neighbor only because we can observe the ways in which he reduced it. He still calls it ‘the whole law.’ We cannot determine to what degree he was conscious of his own reduction of the law…. Yet he offered no rationale for his de facto limitations, but insisted that those in the Spirit keep what the law requires.” (Pg. 102-103)
He summarizes, “we see that [Paul] regarded as either wrong or optional three laws or groups of laws: the requirement of circumcision, special days, and special food. The most obvious common denominator to these laws is the fact that they distinguish Jews from Gentiles. The contents of what Paul required differ from the Mosaic law in a second way: many of the aspects of behavior which he regarded as obligatory are not specifically governed by Scripture.” (Pg. 113-114)
He argues, “Since Paul retained his native conviction that God gave the law, but had also come to the conviction that Christ saves and that therefore the law does not, he naturally had to give some account of God’s purpose in giving the law and of the law’s function in God’s overall plan. This problem plagued him and led to some of the most difficult and tortured passages in the surviving correspondence. He was still struggling with [it] in … Romans, and no single statement encompasses neatly all of his attempts to deal with it… When it came to concrete acts, Paul, as a good Jew, thought that his converts should act in accord with the will of God as revealed in Scripture, not in accord with the customs of the Greeks… Whether more cases would have produced more exceptions we cannot say, but it is clear that his ethical views were basically Jewish… when it came to evaluating the Mosaic dispensation vis-à-vis the dispensation in Christ, Paul found the former, glorious as it had been, to be worthless.”(Pg. 143-144)
He contends, “I would urge that Paul held a limited number of basic convictions which, when applied to different problems, led him to say different things about the law. Even at the point at which Paul may most obviously be charged with true incoherence, the statements in Romans 2 that the sole basis of salvation is the fulfillment of the law, we can see that he has been led to make use of material which is contrary to one of his central convictions (salvation by faith in Jesus Christ) by the desire to assert another one (the equality of Jew and Gentile). Nevertheless Romans 2 remains the instance in which Paul goes beyond inconsistency or variety of argument and explanation to true self-contradiction.” (Pg. 147)
He states, “Paul… we cannot doubt, thought of the church as the fulfillment of the promises to Abraham. In that sense it was not at all a new religion. Jews who entered the Christian movement did not have to convert in the way Gentiles did: they did not have to renounce their God, nor… observance of the law. Nevertheless in very important ways the church was… a third entity... It was not established by admitting Gentiles to Israel according to the flesh… but by admitting all, whether Jew or Greek into the body of Christ by faith in him. Admission was sealed by baptism, more emphatically not by circumcision and acceptance of the law…. Paul’s view of the church … was substantially that it was a third entity, not just because it was composed of both Jew and Greek, but also because it was in important ways neither Jewish nor Greek.” (Pg, 178-179)
This book will be of keen interest to those studying the ‘New Perspective’ on Paul, his view of Judaism, and similar topics.
May 11, 2017
Very laborious read but seminal work on the New Perspective on Paul. Almost wish I had skipped the textual discussions and just read the conclusions. Almost.
March 19, 2009
Wow. My friend and I made study guide questions to go with this book if anyone wants! It was hard, and good. Makes you re-think. Read this and listen to Dwight Pryor's series on Paul, The Law, and The Church and you'll be on your way.
July 11, 2014
A thought-provoking read about the Apostle Paul and his writings.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews