The New Perspective on Paul (6)

I've been posting reflections on the work of Jimmy Dunn, that great giant of biblical studies, my Doctorvater, who passed away this last Friday. Thus far we've looked at

1. The Evidence for Jesus (1985)
2. Baptism in the Holy Spirit (1970)
3. Unity and Diversity in the New Testament (1977)
4. Christology in the Making (1980)
5. "Once more, ΠΙΣΤΙΣ ΧΡΙΣΤΟΥ" (1991)

Yes, I have also cheated a little. We have also briefly mentioned Jesus and the Spirit (1975), Romans 1 and 2 (1988), and Jesus, Paul, and the Law (1990).

1. I want to go a little out of order now. Although Jimmy is known for many things, probably the biggest thing he is known for is the "new perspective on Paul," a phrase that he popularized. [1] This was again part of his genius, his ability to sense the Zeitgeist, name it, channel it, and amplify it.

Yesterday, I mentioned this contribution in his book, Jesus, Paul, and the Law, which was a 1990 collection of presentations and articles. Because the new perspective on Paul was a key focus of his writing in the 80s and 90s, I want to jump now to a fuller compilation of articles and presentations from 2005 which included some of the same pieces. This volume is the full, mature collection of his writings on the new perspective and Paul and so is the best place to approach his contributions on this subject:

The New Perspective on Paul

2. In 1946, the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. In a story that is interesting in its own right, they didn't fully get published until 1991. However, the main texts did get published fairly quickly and they prompted a re-examination of previous assumptions about Judaism among Christian scholars. The Holocaust also prompted self-examination among Christian scholars--to what extent had a pretty cardboard, straw man view of Judaism played a role in anti-Semitism?

In 1977, Ed Sanders published Paul and Palestinian Judaism. Sanders went through pretty much all of second Temple Jewish literature and showed that Judaism was not this sinister "works-righteousness" religion from which that "pure," grace-oriented Christianity broke away. The Jews did not have to do works to "get in." They were born in. Keeping the Law was more about "staying in" the covenant. (I always wondered if Sanders had this breakthrough in part because he grew up Methodist. :-)

Sanders coined the phrase "covenantal nomism" to express the idea that Jews kept the Law (nomism) because they were part of a covenant. Further, he argued that the logic behind Paul's soteriology (his sense of salvation) was not "I couldn't keep the Law so Christ did it for me." Paul's train of thought was rather "Christ is the solution so Law-keeping must not have been." Christ represents a change in the "system of righteousness."

2. In 1982, Dunn presented a seminal lecture titled, "The New Perspective on Paul" in which he began to think through the possible implications of a "new perspective" where Jews kept the Law because they were "in" the people of God rather than to get in. He did not find Sanders' account above entirely satisfying.

First, he suggests that language of justification in Paul was not about an initiatory experience but a confirmatory one. "God's justification is rather God's acknowledgement that someone is in the covenant" (107). Second, "Paul is fully at one with his fellow Jews in asserting that justification is by faith" (108). Therefore, "justification by faith is not a distinctly Christian teaching."

I'll confess that the first point has never fully gelled with me because Galatians is, after all, about the inclusion of the Gentiles. That is to say, the Gentiles were not already in before justification. Similarly, since I have taken the "faithfulness of Jesus Christ" interpretation for the first pistis Iesou Christou expression in Galatians 2:16, I would agree that Paul's Christian opponents agreed with Paul here. However, it sure seems like Paul's claim of justification by faith is at least perceived as a different position than his opponents in Romans 4.

I have thus found a couple of Dunn's comments here suggestive, although not exactly in the way he took them. For example, I agree that in the expression, "through faith of Jesus Christ," "Paul appeals to what was obviously the common foundation belief of the new movement" (112). I just take that foundation to be "the faithfulness of Jesus Christ" to death, common ground between Paul and Peter.

I also agree that in Galatians 2:16 we are getting the distinction between James and Peter's understanding and that of Paul. They see faith and works as supplementary in justification--a person is not justified by works of Law except through the faith of Jesus Christ, the "most obvious grammatical sense" of ei me in Greek. Paul's insight is that these are "now posed as straight alternatives" (113). The alternatives for me, however, are Sanders' two "righteousing" systems.

3. Where I believe Dunn's real contribution in this discussion lies is his realization that the expression, "works of Law," is not primarily focused on "works" in the abstract. In Galatians especially, this expression refers to those marks of Jewish identity like circumcision, food laws, Sabbath observance. As N. T. Wright put it in his Oxford dissertation, these became emblems of "national righteousness" (114). [2]

Although Dunn received a lot of push-back on this position, it seems clear to me that circumcision is clearly the "work" that is under principal discussion in Galatians, and festival observance is also mentioned. Romans is slightly more abstract in its discussion of works, but even there Paul is dealing with the inclusion of the Gentiles. Accordingly, the works that primarily distinguished justification by works and by faith would still be these Jewish identity markers. [3]

In a 1984 presentation, Dunn expanded more on his position: "Works of the Law and the Curse of the Law (Gal. 3:10-14)." Dunn of course received a lot of push-back from Reformed and Lutheran circles. Several chapters in New Perspective are reiterations of Dunn's defense of this position: "Yet Once More--the Works of the Law" (1992), "Whatever Happened to 'Works of the Law'" (1998), and "Noch einmal 'Works of the Law': The Dialog Continues" (2002). In the new, quite long prefatory chapter in New Perspective, Dunn was still defending his interpretation of the phrase, although arguably softening his approach a little.

4. I was privileged in the spring of 1994 to be present for a "Paul and the Mosaic Law" conference in Durham, done jointly with the New Testament faculty from Tübingen. It was quite an event, with virtually all the key players there except Ed Sanders. Sanders had seriously offended the German scholars by assassinating the character of Joachim Jeremias in a scathing piece in JBL, I believe.

The Table of Contents says it all: Martin Hengel, N. T. Wright, Richard Hays, John Barclay, Hans Hübner, Otfried Hofius, Heikki Räisänen, Hermann Lichtenberger, Bruce Longenecker, Stephen Westerholm, Steven Barton.

Dunn was too optimistic about the possibility of consensus. Who is to say that any of these scholars really changed their perspective much because of the interaction. But the conference volume is the best snapshot of the state of the question in the mid-nineties, with the exception of Sanders.

5. There is one more article in New Perspective that I think should be mentioned. "4QMMT and Galatians" (1997). 4QMMT was a smaller document among the Dead Sea Scrolls that, unfortunately, was not officially published until 1994. The title of this document, "Some of the Works of the Law," was surely too close to Paul's phraseology to be coincidental. Surely when Paul uses the phrase, "works of Law," he was referring to a known quantity.

Dunn concludes that the expression, "works of the Law," was "a summary reference to a series of legal/halakhic rulings/practices." In MMT, Dunn finds that "righteousness is reckoned to those who are faithful in observing the ruings and following the practices (works) outlined" (344). If the contextual arguments from Galatians were not enough, here we have historical evidence that "works of Law" was a phrase with a background in Jewish disputes over how to keep the particulars of the Jewish Law faithfully.

6. I will not be featuring Dunn's Galatians commentary as one of my twelve books, but let me end this post by noting that the interpretations that Dunn worked out in more detail in these articles found their way into his 1993 commentary on Galatians. I personally think the articles are more helpful. He also wrote, The Theology of Paul's Letter to the Galatians in the New Testament Theology series.

[1] The phrase was actually first used by Tom Wright in a 1978 lecture, but Dunn's megaphone made it a thing.

[2] The word "national" probably doesn't work as well right now, given that one might think of nationalism. Nationalism would be an anachronistic framework and thus is potentially confusing language.

[3] Even Ephesians, where this discussion is the most abstracted of all into faith and works in general (Ephesians does not use the central Pauline expression, "works of Law"), the boundary wall between Jew and Gentile is in view.