Paul and Palestinian Judaism

One of the many books I’m using as a source for my revised version of The Untold Story of the New Testament Church, due to release in the future, is E.P. Sanders new book Paul: The Apostle’s Life, Letters, and Thought.

Like most the work of most scholars of Sanders’ stature, the book can stop a freight train. Dense, but readable. Mammoth in its treatment.

For many years, Sanders has written extensively on Judaism (Second Temple Judaism in the first century) and has contributed to New Testament studies, even redefining the field.

His groundbreaking book, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, shifted New Testament studies, initiating the New Perspective.

Sanders’ new book, Paul: The Apostle’s Life, Letters, and Thought, is published by Fortress Press. This book comes in at 862 pages. It contains Sanders’ brilliant historical analysis and his attempt to exegete Paul’s letters with clarity against the backdrop of first-century Judaism and Greek culture.

Sanders places Paul in his historical context. He writes, “Paul would be one of the most interesting people in the ancient world to study even if he occupied a smaller place in history. But of course, he is one of the most influential figures in the history of the Near East and the West. Paul was trying to convert Gentiles (non Jews) to worship the God of Israel and to accept Jesus as Son of God and Savior of the world.” 

Sanders argues (rightly I might add) that Paul of Tarsus was starting communities of Jesus all throughout the Roman Empire. Sanders points out that Paul was a man of his day. As such, Paul didn’t think like 21st-century people. He was a first-century Jew who was familiar with Greek culture. Paul wasn’t a systematic theologian, but rather, a prophet, teacher, evangelist, and ancient letter writer.

There are many wonderful insights in this book. At the same time, there are areas in which I disagree with Sanders’ analysis.

For example, I believe that Paul’s testimony and the book of Acts agree and complement each other. I also disagree with Sanders that only seven of the New Testament letters were written by Paul (Romans, 1-2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon). I believe Paul wrote Ephesians, Colossians, and the Pastorals, for instance.

In addition, I am unconvinced by the “New Perspective” view that alleges that “the works of the Law” in Galatians and Romans refers only to circumcision, the dietary laws, and the Sabbath. I believe Paul had in mind the entire Law by that phrase, and the human effort to perform in obeying all of it. He says so much in Galatians.

Yet despite my disagreements, the book is worthwhile for the seasoned scholar and the serious student of Paul.

Here’s a description of the book from the publisher.

Decades after setting the study of Paul on a profoundly new footing with Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Fortress Press, 1977), E. P. Sanders now offers an expansive introduction to the apostle, navigating some of the thorniest issues in scholarship in language accessible to the novice and seasoned scholar alike. Always careful to distinguish what we can know historically from what we may only conjecture, and these from dogmatically driven misrepresentations, Sanders sketches a fresh picture of the apostle as an ardent defender of his own convictions, ever ready to craft the sorts of arguments that now fill his letters but—as Sanders carefully argues—were not the basis for his own beliefs and attitudes.

He also gives sustained attention to a historical sketch of Paul’s context, particularly Second Temple Judaism, in order to set comparisons of Paul and that context on solid ground. Here are familiar themes from Sanders’s earlier work—the importance of works in Paul’s thought, the relationship of “plight” and “solution”—in a presentation that reveals a career’s reflection, along with new thinking regarding development in Paul’s thought. All of the letters are carefully introduced in a text that will prove a worthy guide to the student and interested reader.

Here are some comments by Sanders on various topics related to his field of study.

I think context is the crucial issue. In light of what are we reading this? I’m a person of very limited brain, and I’m going to read Paul in light of what I have studied and what I know—i.e., Palestine in the first century and especially first century Judaism. You could ask, “Can he be lifted out of that context?” and I would start stumbling. I do not want to say that what I do is the end all and be all and that everyone who wants to read Paul must do it the way I do it. On the other hand, when I see a sentence that had a perfectly clear meaning in its original context taken out of that context and used some other way in a later context, then I kind of shudder.

With the modern appropriation of Paul, I feel like I’m stuck. Readers have been appropriating him into their own contexts since at least the Epistle of James (which misunderstood him!). The epistle says [in argument with Paul], “Faith without works is dead.” But Paul was entirely in favor of good works. The works he had in mind, against which he was polemicizing in Galatians and Romans, were those works that make you Jewish and distinguished you from Gentiles.

I think Paul basically felt what most of us think: that the whole world ought to be like we are. Then everything would be fine. He thought the whole world should be like he was. He recommends himself as the model to his churches in letter after letter. If you go through his letters looking for the first-person (“I do it this way”), you always find the implied imperative (“this is the way you ought to do it”). So, his universalism is patterned on his own conversion experience: “Of course you’re suffering. Suffering is good, Christians suffer. Christ suffered. Prophets suffer. Look at me, I suffer. So, you should suffer. What’s your problem?” His view of what people should be is highly autobiographical. I don’t know how that actually plays—this autobiographical side of Paul, this “Do things the way I do!”—in a multicultural situation.

The Greco-Roman world was highly universalized, and it had a kind of universalist vision. But you don’t actually detect this precisely articulated, as far as I know, by Gentile thinkers as early as Paul. I think you first begin to see a notion within Rome that Romans have a universal mandate (“everyone should be like us”) with the emperor Hadrian. He wanted the Jews to stop being circumcised. He wanted everyone to have temples of the sort he liked. He toured the empire and tried to stitch it together into a kind of unity, and he wanted to build a fence around it and keep other people out. So, this sort of unified empire wouldn’t actually take on the entire world. He built a wall across the narrow part of England to keep the barbarians to the north out of his civilized world.

But to your average thoughtful Gentile, the people who appeared to be opposed to universalism were (a) the Jews and (b) the Christians, because they would not fit in. The Jews retained their autonomy and their national characteristics; they wouldn’t just surrender them to Greco-Roman sameness. Josephus, the great Jewish historian, points this out. He wrote, “No people hold on to their customs the way we do. Even the Spartans gave them up! They did not cling to their constitution the way that the Jews cling to their constitution.”

It was the Jews who held out against the merger of Greco-Roman identities, and the Christians followed them. Christians wouldn’t merge either, and so they got persecuted for a while—until they took over the empire. Then they started persecuting everybody else. They were not at all concerned with getting along with everyone or having something into which everyone fits. Christians started persecuting people who were not Christians, and then they started persecuting one another for being the wrong kind of Christian. So, I would say there’s a kind of anti-universalism in the Biblical tradition. It accepts universalism, but only if everyone would be like the dominant group.

It’s quite clear that he is constructing new social circumstances, that his church members did not go to synagogues on the Sabbath, and that they also did not go to pagan temples. They’re definitely a third creation—neither Jew nor pagan—and he thought everyone should join it. That was his form of universalism, his social form of universalism.

I either am, or wish very badly to be, a historian. In my own case I always start “back there” and focus on what case Paul was arguing in what context. Who were his opponents? What other issues were at stake in the debates? Because Paul’s letters are partially debates, and we can reconstruct another side, or two or three other sides, behind the letters.

For instance, there are actually five main actors—either individuals or groups of people—in Galatians, and all we know about them is what Paul wrote in Galatians. But it does appear that there were these five bunches of people. There were people who were persecuting Paul, and those who were persecuting because they feared being persecuted by someone else, and the persecutors of the persecutors, etc.

So, there are lots of groups, and we can reconstruct this situation. Then we’ve at least understood why he said what he said when he said it, and after that you might try to think how you could make use of this. I think that my view is that the use of the Bible is long, slow, and tedious, and it would never work if you had to give a sermon every Sunday. You can’t analyze a biblical passage from the ground up every week.

The proper business of the clergyman is to make sense of what this could mean for us today. That’s his job, and as I said, he doesn’t have time to work the issue out from the ground up, to go back to its origin and march forward. So, we all end up lifting bits from the Bible or other ancient sources and using them as it seems best to us, and I don’t think that this is evil. I think it sometimes has unfortunate results, but I don’t think Luther was evil to read Paul and be inspired by it, although his Paul is not quite the Paul of the first century.

I don’t think Calvin was evil to read the Bible and derive from it the majesty of God, which led him from point to point so that he built up this enormous and wonderful structure (with somewhat biblical roots). But this sometimes ends up departing quite widely from what’s in the Bible. I think it’s a question of the quality of the person who does this. Luther and Calvin were great men, something I can’t say about the fundamentalist system-builders.

I think historians and exegetes all toil at their task thinking, “Someone’s going to be able to use this.” It isn’t just of antiquarian interest. The truth is that for pros who spend their lives doing this, they have a lot of antiquarian interest. They want to know the nitty-gritty of what things really were back then, and that becomes a goal in and of itself. But I think in the back of most people’s minds who write a commentary on Galatians, a commentary on Romans, a commentary on Genesis, or a book about one of these subjects, is the idea that someone will be able to use their historical work for some good end. I wouldn’t know how to apply this, but I think that’s the hope of historians. Whether or not it’s ever the outcome, I don’t know.

I don’t know what information was available to Kierkegaard, for instance, when he wrote Fear and Trembling, but I have the impression he could have written it without any information at all about the historical origin of the Abraham story. But again, it’s the question of the quality of the individual who’s employing it. I don’t have a principle that says what Luther did with Paul is good and what someone else did is bad, or what Kierkegaard did was good and what someone else did was bad. This is entirely a humanistic assessment. What are the consequences? How profoundly was it done? What are the points that are made? And so on.

One of the things I wish I could live long enough to write a book on (but I won’t) could be called the “humanistic evaluation of religion.” It has a history: it comes out of Greece and follows the theory of a guy named Euhemerus, who thought that the Greek gods were all humans who had simply become glamorized and glorified with the passing of years. Therefore [according to Euhemerism], the study of Greek religion is something that should be entirely humanistic, because the gods were anthropomorphically conceived. So, you would be evaluating what the benefits are to humans.

Then there’s Philo of Alexandria, who asks why Judaism is better than paganism. And of course in part it’s because it’s revealed by the only true God. He’s got a theological view, but his most telling arguments are humanistic. Judaism produces better human beings. “We are sincere,” he argues; “in our purification rituals we are really purifying ourselves, whereas in pagan purification rituals they’re not really purifying themselves.” It’s entirely based around things like sincerity, avoiding hypocrisy, the love of humanity instead of the hatred of humanity, etc. The entire evaluative process is humanistic; it is the notion that human values are those that really count. Philo used that to evaluate his own religion, and found it to be excellent!

I think that is very interesting, and I like it. I believe in it. So, I will now confess to you what I think, which is that some people use the Bible out of context and the results are wonderful, and some people use it out of context and the results are awful. My criterion is humanism; the question is whether or not interpretations benefit people.

There was the anti-humane move toward dogma, which got Christianity into all sorts of difficulties, I think. You stop worrying about the welfare of humans, because all you’re worried about is their souls. So, if they suffer in this life, that’s fine. And if they have the wrong idea, and you have to torture or kill them, that’s fine because their souls will then be saved—or there’s a chance, if they would only confess! Dogma turned out to justify extremely anti-humane treatment of people. I think that’s a very bad point in Christianity. I much prefer the ancient (and modern) humane evaluation of religion.