This proposal cuts most deeply against the Lutheran readings of Paul which have been common coin in New Testament scholarship for a long time, and also in many non-Lutheran parts of the church which have assumed that its account of Judaism (enshrined in such monumental works as Strack-Billerbeck and the Kittel Wörterbuch) was historically accurate.

Keeping the law within the ‘staying in’ mode is what he calls ‘covenantal nomism’, another thematic technical term. Law-keeping was not part of ‘getting in’ but of ‘staying in’-two categories which become thematic for Sanders. Judaism was not, basically, a religion of self-help moralism, a kind of early Semitic Pelagianism, but was a religion in which the keeping of the law mattered not because people were trying to earn their member-ship in God’s people but because they were eager to demonstrate it. Sanders’s proposed reading of Paul had at its heart a massively argued proposal about first-century Judaism, in which Sanders substantially followed the protest of H.-J. But I am inclined to believe that the rumours of my theological demise have been exaggerated, and that the modified and developed version of the ‘new perspective’ (hereafter NP) which I adopt possesses not only life but considerable explanatory and exegetical power.Ī few brief introductory notes on the various topics thus introduced.

I am conscious that the current wave of gravediggers are making room for more than one coffin, and that some of them at least want to bury N. I come neither to bury Sanders nor to praise him, but to do two things simultaneously: to look at Paul’s doctrine of ‘redemption’ from (one version of) the perspective Sanders proposed, and in so doing to see what if anything can be redeemed from his proposal. Others have written its history some are now trying to write its epitaph. Original pagination is retained in bold italicized numbers.Ĭalling something ‘new’ is always risky, and the ‘new perspective’ on Paul, now a quarter of a century old since it was introduced by Ed Sanders in 1977, is starting to look rather frayed around the edges. Towards a Multi-Layered Pauline Theology of the Cross

Mass effect redemption summary