Paul and the law: E. E Sander's retrieval of Judaism

THE JEWS OF Jesus' time, the preacher intoned, were slavishly devoted to the practices of their ancestors. They studied scripture but did not apply it. Their temple was "rotten to the core." Ancient Judaism was a religion whose rituals were "impressive, inspiring and empty." It was a faith preoccupied with the superficial and lacking in substance. "As long as people talked about love," the speaker thundered, "they did not have to practice it."

I took notes on this particular preacher because his portrait of Judaism was so outrageously negative. But his version of Judaism is not that unusual in Christian history. Such caricatures of Judaism have abounded in Christian preaching.

A major reason that many Christians now know that these are caricatures is the work of E. E Sanders, a biblical scholar who retired last year from Duke University. The Judaism that emerges in his writing is a living, vibrant religion, not the Judaism of empty ritual and oppressive legalism found in many earlier studies. For those who want to understand early Judaism on its own terms but whose primary familiarity with it is through the New Testament, Sanders's writings are invaluable.

Sanders was brought up as a Methodist in the small town of Grand Prairie, Texas. After attending nearby Texas Wesleyan College, which nurtured his nascent interests in history and religion, Sanders went to Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. There he supported himself by doing church work and selling cookware while taking as many ancient-language courses as possible. He had never met a Jew before moving to Dallas.

Sanders credits a Perkins professor, William R. Farmer, with changing the direction of his life by urging him to study abroad. When Sanders's resources proved too modest for travel, Farmer and a local Methodist minister took it upon themselves to raise the money. A sizable donation came from an anonymous benefactor at Dallas's Reform synagogue, Temple Emanuel. "I especially vowed that the gift from Temple Emanuel would not be in vain," Sanders writes--a vow that he would more than fulfill.

After a year studying in Gottingen, Oxford and Jerusalem, Sanders landed at Union Theological Seminary, where he worked under W. D. Davies, who was well known for his 1948 book Paul and Rabbinic Judaism: Some Rabbinic Elements in Pauline Theology. Sanders was receptive to Davies's sympathetic approach to Jewish sources, and he made a point of taking classes at Jewish Theological Seminary. He completed the doctoral program in two years and nine months--as he often reminded his own graduate students ("Go thou and do likewise"). His subsequent career took him from McMaster University (19661984) to Oxford University (1984-1990) to Duke (1990-2005), where his mentor Davies had moved in 1966.

Sanders's first major book, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977), canvassed Palestinian Jewish literature from 200 BCE to 200 CE in order to compare those texts' theology with that of Paul. Sanders was not reticent about his chief motivation: to "destroy the view of rabbinic Judaism" as a legalistic religion in which one earned salvation by doing works.

The book opens with a devastating critique of 19th- and early 20th-century Protestant scholarship, with particular attention given to the influence of Ferdinand Weber, Wilhelm Bousset and Rudolf Bultmann. Relying on misleading summary treatments of Judaism, such scholars often had little firsthand familiarity with ancient Jewish sources, Sanders demonstrated. Because they wrongly believed that Judaism was a "works-righteousness" religion, they also wrongly believed that Jewish efforts to save themselves led inevitably to arrogance about their accomplishments or to insecurity about their inability to completely uphold the Torah. Sanders found little evidence for such a theology.

Sanders proposed that ancient Jewish texts reflected a "pattern of religion" he gave the shorthand title of "covenantal nomism" and defined this way:

   (1) God has chosen Israel and (2) given the law. The law
   implies both (3) God's promise to maintain the election
   and (4) the requirements to obey. (5) God rewards obedience
   and punishes transgression. (6) The law provides
   for means of atonement, and atonement results in
   (7) maintenance or re-establishment of the covenantal
   relationship. (8) All those who are maintained in the
   covenant by obedience, atonement and God's mercy
   belong to the group which will be saved.

Thus, while Jews did believe that their covenant obligation was to live by Torah (nomos in Greek), they did not believe that their efforts earned them salvation. Salvation came only through God's grace. On this essential point--one may not become righteous in God's eyes through works--Paul and his Jewish contemporaries agreed. Sanders regards later Christian misunderstanding of Judaism as a projection onto it of Luther's critiques of Roman Catholicism.