Pauline Studies 2: Paul and Judaism

The second chapter of Gupta, Heim, and McKnight's The State of Pauline Studies is "Paul and Judaism," by Kent Yinger. Yinger wrote a nice little book on the new perspective on Paul a few years back. Then a couple years ago, he and Craig Evans teamed up to write a nice historical overview of the Pharisees.

I might add that in 2019, I had a book published with Lexington Books that examined Hebrews through the lens of these sorts of developments in recent decades (A New Perspective on Hebrews). It's a bit pricy but I was very proud of the first chapter because it set the groundwork for the book by synthesizing the kinds of discussions in Yinger's chapter. In particular, I tried to systematize previous discussions on the new perspective, the third quest, and the parting of the ways discussions of these last decades. I've uploaded that first chapter of that book to Academia.edu.

1. So the material in Yinger's chapter is very familiar. He begins by giving the older view that is now generally displaced -- the idea that Paul fully departed from Judaism. As Yinger says, "The momentum in Pauline scholarship is undoubtedly toward a Paul who is more comfortable in his Jewish skin than the older consensus allowed" (25). I wonder how much preaching is still in the mid-1900s on this score.

It's fair to say that the majority of scholars today do not think that Paul's mission saw itself as breaking from Israelite faith, although we can debate what the word Ioudaismos ("Judaism" or "Judeanness") might have meant. The gradations of perspectives among scholars is maddening, which is why I was so proud of the synthesis in my book that I mention above. 

To sum up, Paul did not see himself as founding a new religion. He saw his mission as nothing other than the true form of Israelite faith and in full continuity with the Scriptures of the first covenant.

On the other end of the spectrum are those who argue for Paul within Judaism. I find some of these views extreme -- for example, those who would say that Paul had two different systems of salvation, one for Jews and one for Gentile converts. In general, I think that Paul's language is in tension with itself across his writings, which is why there are so many different scholarly perspectives. 

The middle ground is Paul alongside a "reconfigured" Jewish identity. I think it is inevitable that this is what Paul's mission ended up doing whether he entirely saw the extent to which he was doing this. See the material on specific verses below.

2. The middle part of this chapter very briefly mentions some of the key debates. What does "Judaism" mean, for example? Its connection to Judean may indeed come into play in passages like 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16. At times Ioudaismos does seem to refer to a pattern of zeal for the Law that Paul rejects.

To what extent is the word conversion appropriate for Paul? I go with appropriate in the sense of shifting between Jewish sects. It really seems more a debate over an English word and thus a bit extraneous to Paul himself. 

How welcome were Gentiles into Jewish synagogues? I would say it varied but probably it was a common phenomenon in the Diaspora. 

How much did Christians remain in the synagogue? I would say it varied again. I think Acts' sense that Paul always started in synagogues very plausible, with him then only separating when the situation was too hostile. I side with the minority on Romans being addressed primarily to Gentile believers since I side with the older view that Romans 16 was originally for Ephesus.

What did Paul find wrong with Ioudaismos? I lean toward Sanders' sense that the starting point is Christ. Because most Jews rejected Jesus, Paul saw their version of Israelite faith problematic. But for Paul, grace through Christ was an alternative righteousing system to grace through Torah. Justification through Christ made it possible for Gentiles to be grafted into the Israelite tree without them keeping the Law. Judaism's problem was that it rejected this whole Christ-system.

3. Yinger helpfully ends the chapter with a quick pass through several key passages.

• Acts 21 -- Paul seems very Law-observant here, even offering sacrifices. I've argued with regard to Hebrews that most Christian Jews did continue to offer sacrifices and that it wasn't until the destruction of Jerusalem that Christians largely began to see the scope of Christ's death as extending beyond the sins of Israel and Gentile converts to all time. At the same time, one can easily see a lot of what Paul does in this passage as tactical -- "To the Jews I became a Jew."
• Romans 9-11 -- This is a passage that leans more on the continuity side of the Judaism debate. It sees Gentiles being grafted into the Jewish tree and sees a wholesale conversion of Israel to Jesus at the point of his return (I think). But this is Paul in one rhetorical mode.
• Romans 14-15 -- I think Paul's references to conservative Christian Jews is a little rhetorical here. He's trying to get his "Gentile Israelites" to behave a certain way and so the language is a little extreme -- he is siding more with the strong in his rhetoric than he really feels. When he says in effect "some don't observe the Sabbath and some do," this would largely fall along ethnic lines, although not entirely.
• 1 Corinthians 9 -- My own position on Paul is that he was largely Law-observant except when it came into conflict with mission. Like Jesus, I don't think he was scrupulously Law-observant when it came to the traditions of the elders. Paul extends this non-scrupulousness to purity laws that came into conflict with Gentile Christian interaction.
• Philippians 3 -- Here I side with Stendahl and others that Paul is not speaking of the utter worthlessness of his Jewish past but of the relative worthlessness of it in comparison to Christ.

Kudos to Yinger for giving such a good taste of the maddening debates of these last decades. It's not hard to see why there are so many books on Paul and Judaism/the Law. The gradations of perspectives can drive one to the cliffs of insanity, and they are driven by the fact that Paul's language is generally unsystematized and often has a rhetorical dimension. I suspect he would have to reflect to answer some of these questions for us.

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.

England - Paul and the Law 6

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52. The highlight of my first year in England was surely the Durham-Tübingen Symposium on Paul and the Mosaic Law in the spring of 1994. The papers from the conference were later published. Jimmy was the convener of the meeting and scholars on Paul came from all over.

Looking through the Table of Contents of this book you can see that we graduate students were privileged to sit on the sidelines of the greatest world experts on Paul at that time--and we literally did sit in chairs at the edge of the room. Frankly, I do not think that the current lay of the land has yet added anyone comparable. Now that Dunn is retired, I'll give John Barclay the nod, who, interestingly enough, currently sits on Dunn's chair in Durham (or shall I say Lightfoot's). And he was present at the conference.

Dunn was obviously there, whom I consider the greatest scholar of Paul in that generation. Tom Wright and Richard Hays were there. I got to show Wright to the train station as he left the conference a little early. I believe he was at Oxford at the time. It's hard to believe that the later Bishop of Durham would need to be shown how to get to the train station, but I think we were meeting in St. Johns, with which he might not have been as familiar. Perhaps I am mis-remembering.

From Germany had come Martin Hengel, whom I had met in Kentucky. At one of the meals he came over to the long table where I was sitting and spoke to Richard Hays, I think it was. I think Stephen Barton was also at the table. He was not a man of small talk, as I experienced him.

He launched in, "Luke could not have used Matthew as his source instead of Q. Can you think of it, taking a hammer to the Sermon on the Mount and scattering it around the Gospel of Luke." I don't know what got him on the topic but he was addressing the Farrer/Goulder/Goodacre hypothesis that Q did not exist and that Luke used Matthew and Mark. It seemed like an out of the blue comment at the time.

Frankly I find this argument persuasive. I can see Matthew collecting and molding Q sayings around a sermon core in Q, but I find it hard to believe that Luke would break the majestic Sermon on the Mount into pieces. Similarly, it seems to me that Luke's scattered Q sayings are sometimes less edited than Matthew's versions (e.g., "poor in spirit" in Matthew versus just the "poor" in Luke).

53. Hermann Lichtenberger was the leader on the Tübingen side. He would be my host when I spent a couple months there in the spring of 1995. He was a Methodist and a man of faith. Also from Tübingen was Otfried Hofius, who wrote a couple books on Hebrews: Katapausis ("rest") and Der Vorhang vom dem Thron Gottes ("The Veil before the Throne of God").

I believe it was Hans-Joachim Eckstein that I spoke with over a meal about Hofius' work. Eckstein was working on his Habilitationschrift that year. Germans not only have to write a dissertation but, in order to become a professor, they must write the equivalent of a second dissertation. To be frank, the rigor of the German system made me feel minuscule.

I remember saying something to Eckstein about how I had not really dug into Hofius' work because I considered the Gnostic reading of Hebrews to be anachronistic. Patiently, he explained to me that Hofius' work actually had argued against the Gnostic reading of Käsemann. Man, did I feel stupid! It would not be the last time. I plowed through most of Hofius' Vorhang eventually.

Others at the conference included from Germany, Karl Kertelge and Hans Hübner. Hübner was the strongest representative of the "old perspective" on Paul. It was interesting to see Hübner function as a man out of time, a man who had lived beyond the moment of his paradigm. In a similar vein, I believe Charles Cranfield came to one of the sessions. In retrospect I would put Stephen Westerholm from Canada as someone who was a little bit of a fish out of water.

Representing French-speaking scholarship were Peter Tomson and Jan Lambrecht. During the conference, each speaker was welcome to speak in their most comfortable language, but it was pretty much German and English. The French speakers spoke English. The other English speakers included John Barclay, Graham Stanton, Stephen Barton, and Bruce Longenecker. Sandy Wedderburn was German but spoke English. Heikki Räisänen was the sole Scandinavian representative. [1]

54. A notable absence from the conference was Ed Sanders. I heard a rumor that he was not invited out of respect for the name of Joachim Jeremias. Jeremias was a mid-twentieth century German scholar who is much respected as a person in both Germany and English speaking countries. Many would know his book, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus. I believe that he was a good man and a good scholar.

His work, however, was a child of its age. It was skewed by the centuries-long inability of so many scholars to see ancient Judaism accurately rather than through the lens of the Protestant Reformation. I want to be clear. I am not saying that Jeremias was anti-Semitic, not at all. I am saying that the old perspective on Paul took some time to shake its stereotypical view of what Judaism was and what the nature of early Christianity was in relation to it.

It is often said that Luther was anti-Semitic, with quotes that seem to demonstrate it. We cannot pretend that centuries-long stereotypes of both Jews and Christianity in relation to them did not play a role in German attitudes in the lead up to the second world war, culminating in the Holocaust. Frankly views toward Jews often were not terribly different in England and the United States prior to the war. In the Protestant Reformation, Luther imposed his conflict with the Roman Catholic Church onto Paul's conflict with Judaizers. The Jews became the Catholics, and Paul was Luther.

Sanders more than anyone broke the dam on this misreading of Paul and Judaism in his 1977 book, Paul and Palestinian Judaism. A Methodist by background, Sanders was able to see that the Jewish writings did not reflect the kind of "works-righteousness" that Luther and high Protestant scholarship ever since had read into it. In fact, as he went through the intertestamental literature book by book, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, it was clear that the grace of God permeated these texts.

The problem was a blistering chapter in a Festscrift Sanders wrote in 1987. In it he accused Jeremias either of being an incompetent scholar of rabbinic literature or, as Sanders seemed actually to think, of Jeremias intentionally misrepresenting Judaism. You can read the aftermath in two articles, one by Ben Meyer and the other by Sanders in a 1991 issue of the Journal of Biblical Literature.

It's my impression that Sanders was somewhat isolated in the Pauline scholarly world for some time after that. Only recently has he published Paul: The Apostle's Life, Letters, and Thought.

55. There were responses to Sanders, not least the two-volume collection of Don Carson and Peter O'Brien, Justification and Variegated Nomism. I did not personally think that these volumes undermined the basic thrust of the new perspective on Paul. If anything, I thought they embodied to some extent its influence.

Calvinists and Lutherans stood to lose the most to this new reading of a Judaism that believed in the grace of God and a Paul who expected works as part of the life of a believer. Wright has done the best job of synthesizing Calvinism with the new perspective, in my opinion. For him works are part of final justification, but if you are truly justified initially, you will have those works finally.

As someone from the Wesleyan tradition I have found the new perspective refreshing. Wesleyans have long been accused of works-righteousness, like the Jews of high Protestantism. A sense that Paul saw one's actions as potentially undermining final justification fits hand in glove with Wesleyan theology. You can see where there would be a natural resistance in other theological quarters.

56. Thinking back to Jeremias, rabbinic literature in itself is problematic when it comes to the study of the New Testament. I would agree with Wright that the destruction of the temple in AD70 fundamentally shaped the nature of subsequent Judaism. For example, there were militant Pharisees prior to that time. It is thus unclear the extent to which the practices and thought of rabbinic Judaism go back to the time of Christ. When I encounter Christians who do Seders, I always have the lingering question in the back of my mind--was it really done this way at the time of Christ?

It is quite common in the church to be enamored with those who might bring rabbinic insights to the New Testament. However, the Talmud and Mishnah largely do not provide background to the New Testament. They are much more the after-life of the Judaism of Jesus and Paul's day.

I was once privileged to tour Israel with a dear friend. However, I was also conscious on that trip that my friend was not really an expert on first century Judaism. It is not clear in my mind, for example, that the synagogues of Capernaum and Nazareth actually met in buildings at the time of Christ. A synagogue was a gathering, like an early church house "assembly." At the time of Christ there seems to have been a transition underway toward meeting in buildings. So maybe. Maybe not.

Disciplined history can really ruin the sentimentality of a biblical tour. [2]

If you want to know about the Judaism at the time of Christ, read the intertestamental literature. Read the Apocrypha. Read the Pseudepigrapha. When I taught the course, I used James VanderKam's An Introduction to Early Judaism, along with Vermes' Dead Sea Scrolls and a copy of the Apocrypha. This is the background to Judaism at the time of Christ, not so much rabbinic literature.

57. Dunn was a little disappointed that no greater consensus was reached by the end of the conference. I think this reflects his "T" personality. He is a modernist through and through, expecting that a group of scholars could reach common conclusions if they were objective enough. He hoped that the most likely reading of the facts would win out. This was far too optimistic.

I heard that he presented lectures at the Pontifical Institute in Rome on Hebrews, not long after I finished at Durham. Quite bold! He argued that the book of Hebrews indicated that there was no need for any human intercessor or priest between humanity and God because Christ was the sole intermediary. Of course he is right but what a cheeky thing to teach in Rome!

Chris Bounds would later describe me as a "chastened modernist." I am still generally a modernist. I aim for objectivity even though I know it is unattainable. But I have taken my lumps from postmodernism.

58. If you were to ask me what I have taken from these scholars in relation to the new perspective, it might go something like this:

• From Sanders I took that the sense that keeping the Law was more a matter of "staying in" the people of God than "getting in." 
• From Sanders I took the sense that some of Paul's argument is a movement back to the problem from the solution. Paul knew Jesus was the answer, therefore the problem could not be inadequate keeping of the Law because he did fine at that (cf. Stendahl). His little book on Paul was much more helpful to me than his more scholarly version.
• From Dunn I took the insight that the "works of Law" on which Paul was focused in his arguments were primarily the works that excluded Gentiles, matters like circumcision and purity rules. His seminal essays are now collected in one place.
• From Wright I took the sense that Romans 2 is about Gentiles who keep the Law even though they do not have the Law by nature. From him I took support for a final justification by works in 2 Corinthians 5.
• From Hays, although not really a new perspective name, I would eventually take a sense that Romans 3:22 and Galatians 2:16 are initially about the faith of Jesus Christ. But I agree with Dunn that Paul moves on in those arguments to talk about human justification.

It is still hard for many scholars to kick against the pricks. So much of scholarship today, it seems to me, has become sentimental. Has postmodernism empowered sloppy exegesis in the guild?

[1] I used to joke about Räisänen, for whom Paul's theology was completely incoherent. He has been my footnote for that position ever since. Although extreme, I have come to appreciate him for his attention to detail and as a representative of a certain detailed savant who can only see detail and difference rather than similarity and connection.

[2] Gordon's tomb is a perfect example of this. Some nineteenth century soldier sees an outcropping of rock that looks to him like a scull. There's a garden there--1800 years later. A tomb there fits the picture book in his head, unlike the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which is far too catholic in feel. All of it is rubbish. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is the most likely location for the crucifixion and burial of Jesus.

Hebrews and New Perspectives

Forty years ago now, New Testament studies reached a certain tipping point on the question of how the books of the New Testament might have related to the Judaism from which they emerged. Prior to this moment, numerous unexamined assumptions had prevailed about the earliest church in relation to Judaism. Suddenly, a paradigm shift took place. To those participating in this shift, this "new perspective on Paul" seemed obvious. Predictably, those invested in the traditional paradigm strongly resisted.

However, the blind spots of the traditional paradigm seemed obvious to many. The earliest Christians did not think they were part of a new religion. They saw their faith in Jesus as Messiah as nothing but the truest faith of Israel. They saw themselves participating in the fulfillment of Israel's story, not in the beginning of a new story or a new religion. The spread of the Jesus-movement to Gentiles was surely unanticipated by many of the earliest believers. The Christian story was a Jewish story in its very essence.

The bias against Judaism by many Christians was also laid bare. Judaism affirmed the grace of God. Jews by and large did not believe that they could merit God's favor apart from God's grace, of which the sacrificial system was a part. Protestants in particular were wont to read into the theology of the New Testament the theology of the Reformation, another anachronism exposed by the new perspective. The New Testament itself had far more room for works than would make Martin Luther comfortable.

The first chapter discusses these developments in greater detail. A significant amount of literature arose in the 1980s and 90s re-examining Paul's letters and Judaism from this new perspective, which claimed to be the original perspective itself, not truly a new perspective at all. Then it is no surprise that this re-examination of the relationship between Paul and Judaism soon led to another look at Jesus in relationship to Judaism, a movement sometimes called the "third quest for the historical Jesus."

Finally, again predictably, the question shifted to exactly when Christianity and Judaism actually parted ways. For years many had simply read back the situation today into the early church. Christianity and Judaism are different religions today. It was perhaps natural to assume that they had always been different religions. Now the question needed to be asked, "When did they actually become distinct religions?" When did they truly part ways? The question has proved far more complex and variegated than we might have imagined forty years ago.

Although the study of books like Hebrews has continued to swim in the altered waters of these debates, no one to date has actually done a holistic re-examination of Hebrews in the light of these revised perspectives. The interpretation of a verse might change here and there. Perhaps a scholar might soften his or her sense of the tone with which Hebrews viewed the Levitical system as no longer needed. However, it is my contention that the unexamined assumptions go much deeper.

Why is it that so much study of Hebrews thinks it obvious that the audience must have been Jewish? Could it be a serious underestimation of the degree to which Gentile converts saw themselves joining a Jewish movement and embracing the story, symbols, and institutions of Israel? Why does it seem obvious that an audience invested in the temple would have to be a Jewish group tempted to return to mainstream Judaism? Could it be still more unexamined assumptions? We know that the temple was destroyed and never returned. Today it is obvious to Christians that Christ made the temple obsolete. Why is this obvious to Christians today? It is obvious because of the book of Hebrews itself! Prior to the book of Hebrews, it is not at all clear that Christ's supercession of the temple would have been obvious to Jesus followers.

It seems far more likely that it took some time for the earliest Christians to reach this conclusion. I would argue that it did not likely become a prevailing understanding among Jesus-followers until after the temple was destroyed. The earliest Christians were not likely at all to conclude instantly that Christ's offering had replaced the temple. Over time it is likely that a spectrum of positions developed on this question within the movement, just as took place earlier on the question of the Jewish Law. Accordingly, the earliest Gentile converts to the Jesus movement would have owned the Jerusalem temple as part of their new faith just like other Christian Jews likely did.

Forty years after the tipping point, scholarship on the book of Hebrews is still largely operating within a pre-new perspective paradigm. The intuitions of American scholars in particular still find it difficult to move beyond the glasses of the Protestant Reformation and Nicaea to hear this sermon in its original Jewish and Gentile Christian context. We do not need to abandon our personal faith to read Hebrews in context. A mature hermeneutic will recognize the difference between fuller theological readings and appropriations of scriptural texts and historical-cultural interpretations which attempt to examine moments on the way to the later formulations. We can distinguish historical tasks from confessional ones without sacrificing either.

The pages that follow are one attempt to look at Hebrews in this light. As with any scholarly construct, it is a probing of the possibilities. It is an attempt to play out one possible scenario in the light of the evidence we have and the conversation of interpreters as it stands. Time will tell whether it manages to convince others or if it stands alone as just one possibility to check off the list. I offer it to the great, never-ending conversation that is biblical scholarship.

Hebrews and Works

1.For several years, I've been puttering around on a book trying to think through how "new perspectives" might impact the study of Hebrews. The last chapter is titled, "Hebrews and God's Covenant with Israel." It seems to me that one thing this chapter should address is Hebrews' sense that there are limits to how much sin the sacrifice of Christ will cover. There is a point where there "remains no more sacrifice for sins" (10:26) or where covering one's sins in effect would crucify Christ again (6:6).

Hebrews of course was not one of Luther's favorites (although it fared better than James), and we can see why. It seems to require works if one expects to reach final salvation. Since I am from the Methodist tradition, I'm hardly bothered. Much of the opposition to the "new perspective" came from Lutheran and Reformed scholars for whom it was a thorn in their theological side. Hebrews is also troubling to those who believe in eternal security.

(The D. A. Carson, Peter O'Brien, and Mark Siefrid led project, Justification and Variegated Nomism (JVN), in part tried to distance Jewish thinking from the New Testament by portraying Jewish thinking in a way that is not entirely dissimilar to Methodist theology and then trying to maintain that the New Testament doesn't teach that theology.)

2. These are points of continuity with Judaism. E. P. Sanders famously suggested that while Jews did not believe that keeping the Law was about "getting in," they believed it was essential for "staying in." Hebrews seems to have this same position somewhat straightforwardly. Faithfulness, obedience, and active faith are essential in order to enter into God's rest, understood primarily as making it to final salvation. So this chapter should address the "rest of God" in Hebrews 4.

Again, JVN tried to distance the NT from Judaism by pointing out that Jewish literature expected works as an essential response to God's covenant. But Hebrews (and the NT) are in continuity on this point, unlike this project's authors. Hebrews starkly indicates that faithfulness is essential for final salvation and holds out the stark possibility of future destruction even after tasting of the Holy Spirit.

3. There are a few verses that the new perspective immediately held the mirror up to.

• The most obvious is 9:14 - "cleanse your conscience from dead works." In the light of the Reformation, we might think that this verse was about some anachronistic faith versus works. The NIV2011 helps us not think that--"from acts that lead to death."
• Similarly 6:1 - "repentance from dead works" is best understood as, "acts that lead to death." I believe it was this verse that even William Lane mistook to be about some Lutheran faith versus works.
• More difficult for me is 4:9 - "anyone who enters his rest has ceased from his own works just as God rested from his." Given the later references to works, I first thought today that this also referred to works that lead to death--sins against the living God, in other words. Michael Teller in class pointed out the comparison to God resting. Since God didn't rest from "acts that lead to death" I'm back to the eschaton interpretation. Matthew Morley pointed out the continued striving in 4:10, which points to a time beyond the present (i.e., the eschaton).

That's it for today on this Ash Wednesday.

Faith versus works in Paul

Continuing some of my writing from Sunday...
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... If Dunn is correct that Paul primarily has works of the Jewish Law in view, particularly those actions that distinguished Jew from Gentile, then the issue is alleviated somewhat. Then Paul was never thinking about works of love or a life free of murder or sexual immorality when he declared that Jews and Gentiles are not justified by works of Law. Rather, he was primarily thinking about works like circumcision, food laws, Sabbath observance, and so forth. [1] This ambiguity in Paul’s language of Law goes a long way toward explaining what might otherwise seem like inconsistencies. How could a Gentile possibly demonstrate the Law written on their hearts (Rom. 2:15) unless some of Paul's uses of the word law referred to a core of the Jewish Law that did not include those boundary markers than distinguished Jew from Gentile? Other instances then had these boundary markers as their primary referent.

A second ameliorating factor in explaining Paul's rhetoric of faith versus works against a revised sense of his Jewish background is the strong possibility that at least some of his references to the "faith of Jesus Christ" refer not to human faith directed toward Christ but to the faithfulness of Jesus Christ himself. The name of Richard Hays is not usually invoked when presenting the new perspective on Paul. He is rather associated most strongly with the resurgence of a particular interpretation of the phrase, pistis Iēsou Christou, in passages like Romans 3:22 and Galatians 2:16. [2] Reviving and re-presenting an older suggestion, Hays argued that this phrase should be understood as a reference to the "faith of Jesus Christ," his faithfulness to the point of death, rather than to faith in Jesus Christ, as the phrase had traditionally been understood. It is a question of whether Jesus in this phrase is an objective genitive—trust of Christ—or a subjective genitive—faith of Christ, understood as Christ's faith. Hays' revival of this interpretation was not a direct result of Sanders’ work on Judaism nor of Dunn and Wright’s versions, so it is understandable that it is often not included in discussions of the new perspective.

Another reason why the pistis Christou debate is often not connected to the new perspective is the fact that James Dunn, one of the key players in the new perspective, is Hays' most notorious sparring partner on the issue. Neither Sanders nor Dunn agree with Hays' reading of the key passages. On the one hand, Hays does not deny that faith in Jesus was part of Paul's theology. Indeed, part of his argument in relation to the interpretation of Galatians 2:16 is that Dunn’s interpretation implies an extensive redundancy in this verse. Paul's statement amounts to three consecutive mentions of faith in Christ: "knowing… through faith in Jesus Christ, even we have put faith in Christ Jesus in order to be justified through faith in Christ." By contrast, in Hays’ interpretation, only the second instance, the expression εἰς Χριστὸν Ἰησοῦν ἐπιστεύσαμεν (“on Christ Jesus we have believed”), refers to faith directed toward Christ Jesus.

If Hays' interpretation is at least in part correct, our picture of earliest Christianity does seem even more integrated with its Jewish precedents than even in Dunn's reconstruction. Paul’s theology, for example, turns out to be theocentric more than Christocentric. God rather than Christ becomes the primary object of faith (cf. 1 Thess. 1:8). I have argued elsewhere that Paul may, in effect, argue "from Hays to Dunn." In this reconstruction, the initial sense of διὰ πίστεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ in both Romans 3:22 and Galatians 2:16 would be "the faithfulness of Jesus Christ," perhaps a shorthand for a common Christian belief that the faithful death of Jesus was an atonement for the sins of Israel. Paul may then have used the ambiguity of the genitive phrase in order to suggest that the fundamental principle of justification was faith, now contrasted with works of Law in a more ethnocentric sense. [3] This reading combines the strengths of both Hays and Dunn's arguments.

In this revised perspective on Paul, Paul conflicts with other Jews primarily on the significance of what we might call the ethnic particulars of the Jewish Law, those boundary aspects of the Law that most differentiated Jew from Gentile. This is an argument generated from practice, namely, whether Gentiles must be circumcised and whether Jewish believers can have table fellowship with Gentile believers. These arguments are simply ideological proxies for real people that Paul believed must be fully included within the people of God.

Paul argues that faith is the more basic principle than these boundary practices. He uses the example of Abraham, who was justified before he engaged in the Jewish boundary marker of circumcision (e.g., Rom. 4:9-10). While Paul's Jerusalem brothers and sisters agree that the faithful death of Christ as essential to justification, in Paul's view they overrate the significance of Jewish particulars in the Law in the equation of righteousness. Paul radicalizes the principle--even Jews are not established as right before God by their keeping of boundary markers. The essence of rightness before God is faith, and there is a core to the Law that even Gentiles can keep, a circumcision of the heart...

[1] As Dunn and Wright have both demonstrated, 4QMMT among the Dead Sea Scrolls suggests that the phrase "works of Law" especially referred to inter-Jewish debates over how to keep the Jewish Law. See Dunn, "4QMMT and Galatians" in New Perspective, 339-345 and Wright, "4QMMT and Paul: Justification, 'Works' and Eschatology," in Pauline Perspectives, 332-355.

[2] πίστις Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ. His primary work in this regard is, The Faith of Jesus Christ: The Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1-4:11, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002).

[3] "2 Corinthians 4:13 and the πίστις Χριστοῦ Debate," CBQ (2008): 524-37.

Hebrews and New Perspectives...

... As we look at the dialog these past decades since Sanders, some features of the discussion seem more directly relevant to the interpretation of Hebrews than others. In the next chapter, for example, we will look especially at Hebrews 6:1-2. There we will argue that the way in which Hebrews treats beliefs like repentance and resurrection--namely, as entry level beliefs--suggests that the bulk of the audience is not Jewish at all, but Gentile. [1] Before the new perspective, when it was easy to think of joining the Jesus movement as conversion to a new religion, it was easy to miss the fact that Jews would have already believed or practiced most if not all of the elementary principles mentioned in these verses.

While the extent to which Hebrews reflects a parting or partitioning of the ways from Judaism is a major feature of this book's inquiry, the new perspective puts the burden of proof on the one who argues for parting, rather than on continuity. That is to say, we should presume that the author of Hebrews located his sermon within the limits of Judaism unless the evidence clearly shows us otherwise. A Jew had faith in God and believed in repenting from "dead works." Jews practiced various forms of baptism and laid hands on people. Jews believed in resurrection and judgment. [2]

The expression, "dead works," is perhaps the most obvious place in Hebrews where the new perspective on Paul immediately called prior interpretations into question. Prior to Sanders, most commentaries on Hebrews assumed that the dead works here were something along the lines of works of Law in Romans and Galatians. So a person repented of trying to earn one's salvation. After the new perspective, however, it is obvious that one does not repent of works of Law. Indeed, Stendahl  pointed out that Paul rejected boasting about his works of the Jewish Law--he does not consider them to be sinful or to his discredit. The vast majority of commentaries now rightly suggest that Paul is talking about sins, here, acts that lead to death.

In the next chapter, we will also explore the phrase, "seed of Abraham." At first glance, we might easily miss the potential significance of this expression. The tendency of Christians to understand the church as the new Israel has made it easy to miss how striking it is that Hebrews never refers to the Gentiles. Are we to understand the phrase, "seed of Abraham" in the way that is Paul's default and certainly the default of the earliest believers: as a reference to ethnic Israel? Paul may raise the possibility that Gentiles can become the seed of Abraham (e.g., Rom. 2), but Hebrews seems to assume it. Hebrews gives no argument or explanation for the phrase but matter-of-factly can combine Jew and Gentile into this phrase, a fact that may suggest a time beyond that of Paul himself.

Nor is Hebrews in discontinuity with Judaism when it assumes that it is only by God's grace that believers can receive the forgiveness of sins. This was always the presumption of the Jewish sacrificial system as well. Further, it has proved just as problematic to Christian interpreters of a certain theological stripe to find that Hebrews does not treat God's grace as inexhaustible without an appropriate response. The new prospective renders that entire issue moot. Both the early Jesus movement and the Judaism from which it sprang both held that God's favor was a matter of grace and that it demanded a faithful response in order to be maintained.

Clearly discussions concerning the early partitionings between Judaism and incipient Christianity bear more directly on the interpretation of Hebrews than the new perspective on Paul or the third quest for the historical Jesus. Was the earliest Christology of Christian Judaism such a significant mutation that it almost immediately placed it outside the normal boundaries of Jewish monotheism? ...

[1] cf. DeSilva.

[2] Not all Jews believed all these things, of course, and not all Jews believed them in the same ways. We will return to this diversity in the chapter that follows.

Best New Perspective Insights

Here is my attempt to capture the best insights of the last sixty years or so since the first rumblings of a revised perspective of Paul in relation to Judaism:

• Paul did not see himself as a miserable failure at keeping the Law before he believed on Christ. If anything, his attitude was more like the Pharisee in the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector in Luke 18. As far as the righteousness in the Law, he was blameless (Phil. 3:6). Stendahl
• Paul's "conversion" certainly was not a change of religions but a partial modification of his beliefs within Judaism, most significantly the fact that he came to believe that Jesus was the Messiah. (Stendahl would say a call, but that is probably too weak.) Paul is not his Christian name (Acts continues to call him Saul for over a decade after he believes Jesus is the Messiah) but relates to his Roman name. It would be easy to argue that Paul had long suppressed his Diaspora identity--a more generative psychological explanation for his conversion than introspective guilt in the modern sense.
• Paul's turning point centered on a religious experience he had of the risen Christ. (Segal)
• The earliest Christians were thus a messianic sect. They in no way saw themselves as departing from Judaism but saw themselves representing what all of Israel should believe and do, true Israel, as it were.
• Those elements of Paul's theology that the "new perspective" has most impacted largely grew out of the Gentile mission. In these areas, Paul's theology largely developed "from solution to plight." (Sanders) Paul knew that the Gentiles were in through Christ (solution); therefore, he presented arguments for why keeping "works of Law" was not effective for "justification" before God (problem).
• "Works of Law" for Paul referred especially to those aspects of the Jewish Law that were "boundary markers" that separated Jew from Gentile. (Dunn) These stood at the heart of the earliest Christian debate over the inclusion of the Gentiles into the community of faith. Judaizers argued that Gentiles had to be circumcised to be included, and James/Peter argued that they had to observe certain purity rules to have table fellowship. Paul's teaching on justification by faith (solution) grew out of these problems.
• Later interpreters of Paul have understandably misread Judaism in the light of Paul's arguments. For example, Jews did not see themselves as keeping the Law to get right with God. Keeping the Law was not about "getting in" but about "staying in" (Sanders). Indeed, it wasn't even as much about staying in as about responding appropriately to God's covenant expectations (covenantal nomism--Sanders).
• Judaism thus thoroughly presupposed that God was a God of grace, meaning that his favor was not earned by Israel's faithfulness. (Sanders) Once we understand grace against the backdrop of patron-client relationships, we see that there were informal expectations that came with grace, even if grace could not be earned. (Malina)
• It is thus incorrect to accuse either Judaism or interpretations of Paul as "justification by works" if we conclude that there were definite ethical expectations of both Jews and believers. Paul teaches that our deeds are an element of our final justification before God. (Wright) This neither contradicts a proper understanding of grace nor Paul's arguments that keeping the ethnic particulars of the Jewish Law cannot demonstrate one's right standing before God.
• Justification language did not stand at the heart of Paul's theology but was rather a set of lenses Paul used in response to opposition to the Gentile mission from conservative elements within the earliest church. (Sanders, Dunn)
• Paul's arguments about "faith in Christ" begin with statements about how he and the Jerusalem church agree on the necessity of the "faithfulness of Jesus" for a right standing before God. (Schenck, synthesizing both Hays and Dunn)
• Paul's arguments with his opponents are thus arguments over a story (Hays), namely, the story of Christ's death and resurrection. Paul shares with earliest Christianity the belief that the resurrection has enthroned Jesus as Messiah. He shares with earliest Christianity the belief that the cross has functioned as a sacrifice of atonement, that the "faithfulness of Jesus" has made justification possible before God. He agrees that baptism in the name of Jesus is a mystical participation in the death of Jesus (Sanders, Schweitzer). He disagrees on the implications of these affirmations.
• Wright is probably correct on a background narrative at least in this respect. The cross was seen by the earliest Christians as the solution to the problem of Israel's "captivity." Israel should not be under the power of the Romans. God would send a Messiah to deliver it. Jesus' death was likely initially seen as a Maccabean type sacrifice to atone for the sins of Israel.

What was the "new perspective" all about?

The late 20th century saw the rise in biblical scholarship of what was called the "new perspective" on Paul, the third quest for the historical Jesus, and re-investigations of the "parting of the ways" between Christianity and Judaism. What was that all about? Basically, it was the fact that it took until the late 1970s for Christian scholars to recognize the Lutheran glasses that they had been wearing to interpret the New Testament and Judaism for centuries.

The new perspective was not just a new perspective on Judaism. It also involved some modification to the understanding of early Christianity. There has been much debate over the new perspective, especially in Reformed and Lutheran circles. And while there was much push-back and "new perspective" remains a dirty phrase in some circles, I don't know that you will find any scholars anywhere who haven't made some adjustments to their understandings after the debates of the last 40 years.

On the side of Judaism, new perspective was being honest about the fact that there was far more grace in the Jewish literature of Paul's day than the paper cut-out that had been in use in the 1800s and early 1900s, especially in German scholarship. Joachim Jeremias is so off on some things that E. P. Sanders was tempted to think he was intentionally skewing his account of Judaism at some points.

The stereotype of legalism, as if all Jews were like the Pharisees of Matthew 23, just doesn't fit what the Jewish writings of the time say (such as the hymns of the Teacher of Righteousness in the Dead Sea Scrolls). Reformed folk like D. A. Carson launched a push-back project called, Justification and Variegated Nomism to try to undermine the new perspective's understanding of Jewish literature. But the entire project more less confirms that Judaism wasn't this "works-righteousness" type hypocrisy that was par for the course before 1977. Even those pushing back have already modified their understanding of Judaism.

On Paul's side, those of us in the Wesleyan tradition can be happy to find that the new perspective actually says what we have said all along. The Reformed tradition has always accused us of works-righteousness in our interpretation of Paul. So it's no surprise that they would reject the new perspective when it more or less said what we have said all along--Paul expected a Christian to demonstrate fruit of righteousness in Christian living, and those who do not are in danger of not making it into the kingdom.

So the new perspective suggested that Paul and the rest of the New Testament believed that righteousness was a central part of Christian living. Similarly, it suggested that grace was an essential feature of Second Temple Judaism. It took the Lutheran and Augustinian glasses off of our reading of Judaism and Paul, which prompted a wholesale re-evaluation. That eval spread to Jesus (thus the "third" quest) and eventually to a re-examination of when Christianity really became a distinct religion from Judaism.

The result has been a much fairer perspective on both, more or less calling into question any resource on Paul or Judaism before about 1980.

Tom Wright and the New Perspective

Filling in gaps in my Hebrews book...
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... N. T. Wright substantially agrees with Dunn on the question of works of Law. Even before Dunn began to popularize the phrase, "new perspective," Wright had written that Israel's problem, according to Paul, was not legalism or an attempt to become righteous by doing good works. Rather, Paul saw Israel as guilty of "national righteousness," "the belief that fleshly Jewish descent guarantees membership of God's true covenant people." [1] Dunn agreed. [2]

We see this sentiment play out especially in Paul's letter to the Romans. Dunn writes, "The 'boasting' of the 'Jew' in Rom. 2:17-23 is certainly to be understood as a boasting in covenant privilege over against the less-favored, or rather passed-over Gentiles" [3] Dunn assents to what Brendon Byrne has written similarly of Romans 10:3. In this verse, Israel is said to have attempted to establish its own righteousness. Byrne writes, "'their own righteousness' ... can only mean the righteousness of Israel as holy people separate from the sinful rest of humankind." [4]

Wright and Dunn thus shift the sense of boasting in Romans from a sense of boasting in individual righteousness, because of an individual's good works, to a boasting in one's race, one's Jewishness, over and against non-Jews. Similarly, the works in question are not just any good works but especially those works of the Jewish Law that most differentiated Jew from Gentile in matters like circumcision, food laws, and Sabbath observance. The so called "new perspective" thus pulled the trajectory of Pauline scholarship out of the clouds of a generalized and universizalized Paul, the Paul of Augustine and the Reformation, and back down to the concrete earth that was the real world that Paul was navigating as he conducted the Gentile mission...

[1] "The Paul of History and the Apostle of Faith," (1978), in Pauline Perspectives, 6.

[2] E.g., "The New Perspective on Paul," (1983), in The New Perspective on Paul, 114-15.

[3] New Perspective, 9.

[4] "The Problem of Nomos and the Relationship with Judaism in Romans," CBQ 62 (2000): 294-309, esp. 302, quoted in Dunn, New Perspective, 11 n.40.

D. A. Carson and "Variegated Nomism"

Working on a book I'm writing for Fortress called, A New Perspective on Hebrews.  This morning I wrote the following in relation to D. A. Carson's two volume project, Justification and Variegated Nomism:
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No doubt there is some validity to this element of Carson’s critique. We cannot assume that the attitude of each Jewish individual and group toward the Law was uniform or consistent.  Indeed, we cannot assume that Paul’s own rhetoric toward the Jewish Law can be easily systematized into a neat theology. [1] At the same time, Carson and those like him clearly have their own theological axes to grind. His base camp is set in a particular Christian theology whose evaluative lens may or may not be appropriate for Paul, let alone for Jewish literature. For example, his understanding of what constitutes “merit theology” is arguably more a matter of the Protestant Reformer John Calvin than Paul himself. [2]

[1] The plethora of books and positions on Paul and the Law argues quite strongly to the contrary. For one failed attempt of a diverse group of scholars to come to such a consensus, see Paul and the Mosaic Law.

[2] In particular, Carson’s theology leads him to consider anything but “monergism” as a theology of “works righteousness” and “merit theology.” Monergism is the idea that human will plays no part in an individual’s righteousness before God. What if, however, Paul’s own theology proves to be “synergistic” in Carson's terms, involving a necessity of works to be finally justified (e.g., 2 Cor. 5:10) and a cooperation of human will with divine will? In that case, not only Second Temple Jewish literature proves to espouse a merit theology, but the New Testament itself. In that case, Carson’s bold project not only proves to have a lackluster result—the essays constitute only minor rather than major critiques of Sanders’ work. In that case, the project itself proves to be fundamentally unsuccessful.

New Quests

1977 was a particularly important year in the history of biblical studies.  It was the year in which E. P. Sanders published Paul and Palestinian Judaism, one of the landmark books of the century in the study of the New Testament. [1] It was not the first book nor was Sanders the first scholar to argue that the predominant "Lutheran" paradigm for understanding Paul was anachronistic. Nor has Sanders' work gone without critique.  What the book did was change the tide toward reading Paul against his Jewish context.

Sanders' book reflects one of the most significant turning points in biblical studies because, after it, the interpretation of the New Testament could no longer simply read Paul or Jesus against the backdrop of the Christian history of interpretation. [2]  Sanders forced interpreters to read Jesus and Paul against their Jewish context--and an authentically understood Jewish context rather than the "straw man" Christian tradition had developed and so long utilized.

Perhaps the central claim that Sanders' book disputed was the idea that Judaism was a religion of "works righteousness." Judaism, so the dominant interpretation went, was a religion in which you tried to earn your salvation by doing good works.  Paul then counters this form of religion with a religion of grace, whereby an individual is saved by grace alone (sola gratia) and by faith alone (sola fide). The impact of the Protestant Reformation on this interpretation of Paul and Judaism is obvious.  Martin Luther saw in Paul's conflict with his opponents the ideological conflicts he himself was having with the Roman Catholic Church.

What Sanders did was to free us from these interpretive lenses by methodically working through the texts of Second Temple Jewish literature themselves, showing that this portrayal of Judaism as a "graceless" religion simply could not stand up against what the texts themselves said. What he found instead is that the grace of God is almost without exception the presupposition of any expectation that a person's actions might play a role in a right standing before God.  Jews did not keep the Jewish law in order to "get in."  They kept the law to "stay in." [3]

Sanders' famous phrase is "covenantal nomism."  Jews kept the law as a response to God's grace, not to earn it.  A Jew was, of course, born into the people of God.  Such a person did nothing themselves to get in.  Rather, keeping the law was simply God's expectation to stay in the people of God. To be sure, Sanders was criticized by some Jewish scholars for worrying about some distinctions that really were not of concern to Jews themselves. Jacob Neusner, for example...

[for more along these lines, see my overview of Romans: Paul: Soldier of Peace]

[1] E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1977).

[2] The theological interpretation of the early twenty-first century, while representing a shift back in confessional circles toward reading the New Testament against its later Christian context, does so not on historical-critical grounds but on hermeneutical grounds. The earlier Christian interpretations of Jesus and Paul were done unreflectively and uncritically--such scholars thought they were reading Jesus and Paul in their historical context.  By contrast, theological interpretation at its best is done more on the basis of textual polyvalence and a postmodern hermeneutic that is more self-reflective.

[3] E.g., Paul, 420.

New perspectives on Judaism

I thought I would take down some notes on the change that took place in the late twentieth century on our understanding of Judaism at the time of Christ in relation to early Christianity. These changes brought on three movements in New Testament studies: 1) the new perspective on Paul, 2) the third quest for the historical Jesus, and 3) the partings of the ways discussion.

More than any other figure, E. P. Sanders catalyzed these movements with his 1977 Paul and Palestinian Judaism. In Jesus studies, his Jesus and Judaism was less momentous, but still significant. Prior to him, we might point to rumblings like W. D. Davies' Paul and Rabbinic Judaism. But Krister Stendahl's "Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West" ranks up there for me as the real tour de force, my starting point.

Again, following my stream of consciousness to get these notes out, some basic shifts are:

New Perspective on Judaism
1. Judaism in general believed that acceptance before God was a matter of God's grace. No one could earn favor with God. All have sinned.

2. Jews kept the Law in response to God's grace, not to earn it. Keeping the Law was about "staying in" not "getting in."

New Perspective on Paul
1. Paul did not see himself as changing religions when he believed on Christ. Paul is not his Christian name but a name he probably had his entire life.

2. Paul did not consider himself a miserable failure at keeping the Law before he believed on Christ.

3. Even after believing, works remained a major part of Paul's equation, so much so that works might nullify one's salvation.

Third Quest for the Historical Jesus
1. Emphasis on the fact that Jesus was a Jew. Jesus' message likely fit within the spectrum of options current within Palestinian Judaism at the time. Jesus' message fits well within apocalyptic Judaism, as does John the Baptist's.

2. Jesus is not likely to have sparred much with Pharisees in Galilee, since they were overwhelmingly located in Jerusalem (Sanders).

3. The picture of Pharisees in Matthew in itself is not the entire picture. The portrait in the other gospels is more positive, especially in Luke-Acts. Pharisees were not all legalists, and Matthew's portrayal may have as much to do with conflicts at the time of his writing (ca. AD75-80) as with conflicts at the time of Jesus himself.

Partings of the Ways
1. Christianity was a form of Judaism in the first century, not a distinct religion. Gentile converts would have seen themselves converting to a form of Judaism. There was no official Roman policy relating to Christians in the first century. The question of whether Christianity was a "religio licita," a legal religion, was not a major factor in the first century.

2. The one of the Eighteenth Benedictions relating to heretics was not in play in the first century. There was no Jewish policy on expelling Christians from synagogues.

3. The early Christians did not see their worship of Jesus as a violation of monotheism, although different scholars explain this phenomenon in different ways.

4. The contribution I hope to make to this discussion is the claim that most Christians also stood within the main options for attitudes toward the temple while it stood.

What have I missed? I may edit this list as things occur to me...

The New Perspective and the Wesleyan Tradition

If I were to write a chapter or essay on the question, "The New Perspective and the Wesleyan Tradition," it became clear to me this weekend how I think I would structure it. Here is the outline:

1. What is the "new" perspective?

• First, at this point of the game, calling the trends of this essay "the new perspective" is probably unhelpful. All that is meant by the term is 1) the re-appraisal of the nature of Judaism that took place in the late twentieth century in the light of new discoveries and, especially, some harsh political mirrors held up to the West, and 2) the re-appraisal of exactly what Paul was saying in this light.
• Hardly anyone--not even those high level scholars who resist these trends--has been unaffected. Even those who are more "old perspective" have changed. The only ones who have not changed are those who do not really read Paul with a view to what he original meant at all, but almost entirely read him through traditional glasses (e.g., John Piper, who for this reason does not completely count as a scholar of the original meaning).

2. Krister Stendahl, Paul, and Introspective Consciences

• Stendahl's (a Lutheran) main contribution was to show the falseness of the Lutheran model of Paul as so vexed with his guilty conscience that he finally turned to justification by faith alone, understood as having nothing to do with action at all. Rather, Paul had a "robust conscience" both before and after he believed on Christ. His turning to Christ was more of a call to the Gentiles than a conversion and in any case was not in his mind a conversion from one religion to another.
• Romans 7 thus was not Paul's current struggle with sin, an acknowledgement made now even by the most prominent original meaning scholars in the Calvinist tradition (e.g., Moo).
• The end result is that Paul had a much greater emphasis on a blameless life than the primary representatives of Protestantism had allowed.

3. E. P. Sanders, Judaism, and Staying In

• If Stendahl and others opened the door, Sanders gave critical mass to the recognition that Judaism almost always had acknowledged the primacy of God's grace over Jews being able to earn God's favor. The Jews did not understand keeping the Law to get them in but to be the appropriate response to God's grace and essential for staying in the covenant.
• This schema fits well with both Calvinist and Arminian understandings of post-justification righteousness. The Spirit empowers us to keep the righteous requirements of the Law after we have been justified by faith. However, it is the Arminian tradition that correctly understands the importance of blamelessness for staying in after justification by faith.

4. James D. G. Dunn, Paul, and Works of Law

• Dunn correctly has recognized that "works of Law" in Paul are not best understood as bald "works" in general. Most of the time, the phrase "works of Law" has overtones of the Jewish particulars of the Law rather than law-keeping in some general sense. This recognition significantly diminishes the Protestant polarization of faith and works.
• Dunn also has shown the lack of focus in readings of Paul that focus on some supposed absolute moral perfection being God's expectation. This is a reading of a verses like Galatians 3:10 or 5:3 that puts an artificial emphasis on "all" or "whole," as if Paul is painting a picture of God's character in which he must have justice for every last drop of sin. But God's justice is not the centerpiece or fountain of Paul's theology, or of the theology of any part of the New Testament. God's righteousness has more to do in Paul with God's proactive character in saving His people and the world, which fits very well with Wesleyan theology.

5. N. T. Wright and (Final) Justification

• Wright's primarily contribution, in terms of Wesleyan-Arminian theology, is his recognition of the importance of works in final justification, chiefly in passages like Romans 2:5-10; 14:10-12; and 2 Corinthians 5:10. Wright also correctly sees the Spirit as establishing in reality what God does on the basis of faith when one first believes on Christ. The missing piece for Wright is the importance of blamelessness for "staying in."
• Wright follows in the train of the majority who now see Romans 1:16 as a reference to God's righteousness rather than some righteousness from God, which again fits with a greater emphasis on love as the driving characteristic of God in salvation, not a drive to work around His justice.

6. Conclusion

• These developments thus support love (righteousness) as the central character of God in relation to salvation, not God's justice.
• They point out the importance of literal righteousness as a product of the Spirit, essential for final justification, that faith and works are not contradictory.
• They recognize that Romans 7 is in fact exactly the opposite of the situation of the believer. It is exactly the problem that the Spirit solves for the believer.

Sin, the New Perspective, the Pope, and Peter Enns

No, the post doesn't try to connect all these. These are just some topics that have wandered through my head today as I sit at home with my sick son Tom until my wife returns to relieve me for Latin at 1:15.

First, sin. We translated Galatians 2:15 today in my Greek Galatians class this morning. I argued to them that to put "sinners" in quotes ("we who are Jews by nature and not sinners from the Gentiles") reflects a misunderstanding of the context (sic to the NIV). Of course Paul literally meant that Gentiles were sinners. Indeed, the point he is building to in 2:17 is that Christian Jews are sinners too.

Where the new perspective on Paul comes in is this. First, calling it the new perspective turns out to be a little like thinking of modern translations as more recent texts than the "old" King James. The text is not newer, it's older. The KJV text is based on manuscripts over 700 years "newer" than those on which modern translations are based.

Exactly! The new perspective on Paul is nothing other than the attempt to take Paul's Jewish context seriously, just as the "third quest" is nothing other than the attempt to take Jesus' Jewish context seriously. The reason some groups have fought tooth and nail against the new perspective is not because their perspective is "older" but because some of their traditions are being questioned by the recent trend of reading Paul in his Jewish context.

So on the matter of Paul's understanding of sin--and I don't know anyone who has addressed this from this "new, original Jewish, perspective"--it is the same error of tradition to define sin as anything short of absolute perfection. Just as when Paul says "all have sinned" he is thinking concretely of Jews and Gentiles, both have sinned, what standard would a Jew take as the point of departure for what a sin is? Obviously, the concrete Jewish Law.

A sinner is thus someone who violates the Jewish Law, not someone who falls short or "misses the mark" of absolute moral perfection. And the primary sense of such sin is intentional, not unintentional. I can hardly find any room in Paul's thought for unintentional sin in the context of known rights and wrongs.

Then the Pope. He reinstated an excommunicated priest who had denied the Holocaust. Now he is demanding the priest recant such positions. For all my sense of the importance of the church catholic, it is unfortunate that so much authority came to be placed into a single individual and a single institution that only with great difficulty can reverse its course on an issue.

Finally, I've asked Peter Enns and he's agreed to do a Q & A in the near future here on some topics of interest. Personally, I'm very intrigued that he has been attending a Nazarene Church for about 7 years, although I believe he remains a member of the Presbyterian Church of America and theologically Calvinist. We'll forgive him for that :-)

Nevertheless, I'll be interested to know what differences in flavor he has picked up on. We'll also ask him what he's been up to recently and let him respond to our recent reviews of his book, Inspiration and Incarnation.

Pagan Christianity review 2 tomorrow, Lord willing...

Friday Post #2: Garlington's Review of Piper

I'm sorry, but you're likely to get three posts today (in other words, I'm going Jim West on you today :-).

... but I wanted to point out Don Garlington's review of John Piper's The Future of Justification that came out today in the Review of Biblical Literature. Some of you will know that I extensively reviewed this book in the Fall as well. The entire review is now archived at my kenschenck.com site.

Don (a fellow Dunnite) agrees with Piper on a few things, disagrees with him on others. To me his most memorable critiques have to do with Piper's fearmongering over how dangerous Wright's thinking is and his rejection of trying to read Paul's writings in context in deference to reading Paul the way Augustine and Calvin do. In a memorable line, Don writes, "Once a Copernican revolution has occurred, it will not do to retreat into a pre-Copernican universe."

Friday Review: Dunn's 1991 Article, "The Justice of God"

I thought I would skip a few articles in James D. G. Dunn's collection and move on to the next "hot one." Surely his 1991 JTS article, "The Justice of God: A Renewed Perspective on Justification by Faith" constitutes such an article. The backlash on both Dunn and N. T. Wright for their views on justification has taken both of them by surprise. If you want to see some of their puzzlement and reaction, check out The Paul Page, particularly this piece by Dunn and this piece by Wright.

I personally struggle to find much of anything objectionable in this article. Indeed, in many respects it is simply Dunn's version of Krister Stendahl's "Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West." As someone from the Methodist tradition--and a revivalist version of that as well--I need not worry (like Peter Enns of Westminster Theological Seminary) whether or not I am properly living out the Calvinist Westminster Confession of 1647. And the Methodist tradition stands on an opposite side of the spectrum from the Lutheran, which takes a particularly hard hit from recent developments in Pauline studies.

Frankly, developments in Pauline studies have made this a great time for Wesleyan theology. The runt of the litter proves to be the most biblically sound of the lot. Of course Dunn himself is a Scottish Presbyterian, as his stubborn interpretation of Romans 7 reflects. Seemingly out of keeping with his other perspectives, he has become a minority in continuing to see this chapter as an expression of Paul's ongoing struggle with sin even as a person with the Spirit. Wright is an Anglican bishop, and I wonder at times whether the Westminster Confession colors some of his thought as well.

But to the article.

1. A richer understanding of biblical justification
Dunn begins with the famous quote from Luther in which Luther expresses his shift in understanding of what "the righteousness of God" is in Romans 1:17. Luther moves from the Latin sense of the justice of God, which was fearful to Luther, to a righteousness from God. This righteousness from God is our righteousness by faith or, as we English speakers say, "justification by faith."

In his contemporary response to his detractors, Dunn points out several lines from the article they seem to have willfully overlooked, like this one: "I should perhaps emphasize that what I say is not and should not be conceived as an attack on the Protestant doctrine of justification" (194). Oops. Dunn is not denying the doctrine of justification by faith. He is rather "drawing attention to aspects of a larger, still richer doctrine" that have been lost in the train of Luther's rediscovery.

I'm sure it's irritating when you find out that, after your tradition has trashed the church in deference for "Scripture alone," it turns out that your tradition too is a Christian tradition that has modified biblical teaching itself. There is development of doctrine after the New Testament in the church in every Christian tradition. It's about time we all came to grips with it and clarified appropriate and inappropriate means for evaluating it.

2. Negative fallout from Luther's doctrine
Dunn mentions four areas in which the impact of Luther's version of justification by faith has been untrue to Paul himself.

First, it has led interpreters to see Paul's "conversion" as the climax to a long, inward, spiritual struggle (195). The problem is that Paul gives no hint of such agony in any of the passages where he explicitly recalls his pre-conversion days (e.g., Gal. 1:13-14). Dunn recognizes that Romans 7 is not giving pre-Christian autobiography (as Kümmel pointed out way back in 1929).

Secondly, Augustine and Luther led to an understanding of justification by faith in distinctly individualistic terms. But as Stendahl and before him William Wrede and Albert Schweitzer have protested, Paul is focused on identity in relation to groups (which more recent sociological NT studies like those of Bruce Malina have vindicated). Paul only writes indirectly about individual justification before God. It is an implication of his writing but not the main thrust, which is about how the Gentiles can be included within the people of God and God still be true to his covenant with Israel. I frankly don't see how this point is even debatable.

Thirdly, it has led interpreters to see Paul's "conversion" as a conversion from Judaism and the idea that Judaism is opposite Christianity. How many pulpits still speak of "Paul" as Paul's Christian name and "Saul" as his Jewish name, as if Paul's identity changed fundamentally with regard to his ethnicity at his "conversion." Oops. Acts continues to call him Saul for over 10 years after his "conversion."

Stendahl has of course pushed the question of whether Paul's coming to Christ should be called a conversion or rather, a call from God to go to the Gentiles. In his Theology of Paul the Apostle, Dunn rightly notes that it depends (as Joel Green has pointed out previously in blog comments here also). It is appropriate to call Paul's coming to Christ a conversion if you are speaking of a change from one Jewish group to another (such as from Pharisee to Essene or from Pharisee to Christian). However, given the way the term conversion is usually used, it is more often inappropriate. Paul did not see himself changing religions when he believed on Christ.

Lastly, Luther's views fostered a virulently negative view toward Judaism as a degenerate religion, with the Pharisees the worst of all. No doubt Matthew has helped perpetuate this view of the Pharisees. It is important to remember that Matthew's portrayal of them is only one of those in the gospels, and by far the most negative of all. If we only use Matthew to arrive at our understanding of the Pharisees, our view will be very one-sided, which is what happens when you form your understanding of a person or group solely through the eyes of their enemies.

No one would deny that Luther's views toward the Jews were detestable and certainly did nothing to prevent the Holocaust. It is far more likely that, in fact, they helped enable it.

While E. P. Sanders may himself have overstated his case, he has surely shown more correct than not that "Judaism is first and foremost a religion of grace, with human obedience always understood as a response to that grace" (199). To be sure, this theology may at times have been obscured by an over-focus on righteous acts. But I suspect it would have been very hard to find an ancient Jewish thinker who would not have put true to this question on a quiz.

3. Overlooked Pauline Clues
Now Dunn mentions three overlooked Pauline clues that might have kept us from such Lutheran fallout.

First, we should have known from the background of the word zeal. All the examples of zeal in the Jewish background literature are about fighting to defend the exclusiveness of Israel, "by maintaining Israel's distinctiveness as God's own people over against the other nations" (201). It is very easy to see that these sorts of individuals from Jewish tradition--Phinehas, Judas Maccabeus--might very well have served as Paul's "pre-Christian" role models. These are individuals who were zealous for those aspects of Jewish identity that distinguished Jew from Gentile, not zealous to be a person with more good works than anyone else.

Again, I fail to see how this perspective is even debatable.

Second, the boasting Paul has in mind is patently not Rudolph Bultmann's "sinful self-reliance" or Käsemann's boasting in one's own achievements--when these are understood apart from Jewish identity. The confidence of Romans 2 is primarily a confidence in one's status as a Jew. This is not to say that there is not an implication for individual boasting in self-righteousness. It is simply to say that to put this notion first is to skew the context of Paul's comments.

While I am still mulling over Dunn's understanding of "my own righteousness" in Philippians 3:9, I think Dunn must be more correct than incorrect to see the reference to "their own righteousness" in Romans 10:3 as a sense of Israel's righteousness in the light of its performance of the law, understood to refer primarily to distinctives like circumcision and purity laws.

Thirdly, Dunn mentions "works of law" as primarily, although not exclusively, a reference to acts that distinguished Jew from Gentile and, indeed, that distinguished Jew from Jew. As far as I can tell, Dunn here mentions for the first time 4QMMT, which at that time was still unpublished. Dunn concludes, "... 'deeds or works of the law' was a way of characterizing the same intense concern shared by so many Jews of the period to maintain the distinctiveness of their relationship with God as over against the Gentiles" (204).

Dunn draws a conclusion at then end of this section, one that is part of what he means by a "richer" doctrine of justification by faith: "Justification by faith is a banner raised by Paul against any and all such presumption of privileged status before God by virtue of race, culture or nationality, against any and all attempts to preserve such spurious distinctions by practices that exclude and divide" (205).

4. The Righteousness of God in the Old Testament
I never got back to a comment under an earlier post about the idea that Paul understands the righteousness of God as a reference to God's righteousness in His saving relationship with Israel and the world. The comment asked why look to the Psalms and Isaiah for the background of this phrase. The answer is that Paul's writings are replete with echoes of middle Isaiah and, indeed, Richard Hays spends a good deal of his Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul unfolding them.

So in this final section of the article, Dunn's makes some claims about the concept of the "righteousness of God" or, as the title of the article puts it, "the justice of God," understood more in its Old Testament sense.

First, Dunn follows Cremer (1900) in seeing righteousness as a "relational concept" (206). It's background is not the Greco-Roman legal sense of absolute ethical norms. "God is righteous not because he satisfies some ideal of justice external to himself. Rather, God is righteous when he fulfils the obligations he took upon himself to be Israel's God" (207).

So in Romans 1:16-17, the righteousness of God is "God's saving power to faith." The issue between Paul and his Jewish brothers is thus "not because of any dispute over the fundamental principles of grace and faith and human obedience" (208). It is rather "dispute about the particulars and outworkings of these principles." By implication, "to characterize Judaism per se as a religion of self-achievement is not only scurrilous, it is simply bad exegesis."

Dunn's second and final point is that God's saving righteousness brought with it expectations both in an appropriate response to God in obedience and in "being righteous toward one's neighbour" (208-9). Dunn cites Ezekiel 18:5-9 to show what Ezekiel understood a righteous person to be. The one who rejects this aspect of righteousness thus rejects not Judaism but the Old Testament.

Part of the justice of God thus entailed care for the poor, the fatherless, the widow as one's brothers and sisters (citing Deuteronomy 24:10-22 at some length). Again, this dimension of righteousness is no doubt part of what Dunn means by a "richer" understanding of the "justice of God."

There are no doubt minor points at which one might take issue with one or another aspect of this understanding of Paul. But its general accuracy over and against the earlier prevailing "Lutheran" reading seems beyond serious dispute. That of course has not stopped attempts by those who have suddenly found themselves kicking against the pricks. Why I heard that D. A. Carson did some kicking and screaming in a class just a couple weeks ago at Trinity against Dunn et al.

Ah, what a great time to be Wesleyan :-)

A Tribute to Krister Stendahl (1921-2008)

Krister Stendahl, former professor at Harvard and bishop of Stockholm, died yesterday. I consider his brief article, "Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West," the single most important piece of scholarship on Paul since the Reformation. If you think you understand Paul and haven't read this article, go no further until you have read it.

Chiefly, Stendahl argued back in 1963 that the common reading of Paul was anachronistic in the extreme.

1. Paul did not struggle with a sense of moral failure either as a Christian or before he believed in Christ (still a common misreading of Romans 7). Paul had a "robust conscience" that considered himself blameless as a Pharisee (Phil. 3:6), rarely used words like repentance and forgiveness, and regularly admonished his churches to follow the example of his life.

2. Romans is not an abstract theological discussion of how individuals have sinned and need to be saved but about how Gentiles can become part of the people of God. In Romans 3:23 Paul was not thinking "all individuals have sinned" but that "all--both Gentile and Jew--have sinned." Romans 9-11 is not an appendix to the first 8 chapters but in some sense the climax of what he has been discussing all along.

3. Luther read Paul in the light of his own personality struggles and conflict with the Roman Catholic Church. But Paul was a Jew, not a Catholic, and his issues with the Roman Catholic Church were not the same as those Paul had with his fellow Jews.

4. Paul does not have the Augustinian sense that "I" am thoroughly corrupted and thus that sin flows from my sin nature. Rather, the "I" of Romans 7 wants to do the good but is unable to because of the power of sin over me. Paul absolves his "I" of blame for sin--"It is not I that does it but sin that dwells in me."

5. The Law is not a schoolmaster to beat me over the knuckles as a failure but a guardian, a custodian to take me to school and help me learn.

There were some extremes to Stendahl's thought, especially as time went by, but I wholeheartedly agree with all these points from his key article. When I first read them, they seemed so obvious, like a breath of fresh air. My own anachronistic assumptions suddenly seemed so clear.

If you want to understand Paul, read nothing else until you have read this.