Paul and Palestinian Judaism: 40th Anniversary Edition

General

Foreword

Rarely in biblical scholarship has a book made such an immediate and lasting impact as did Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion. E. P. Sanders did what apparently no New Testament scholar had done before by combing through virtually all of the available Palestinian Jewish texts from 200 BCE to 200 CE—early materials in rabbinic literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls that had thus far been published, and the most pertinent apocryphal and pseudepigraphical books. His goal was to identify the shared presuppositions and pillars of Jewish theology, compare them with those of Paul, and advance new theses for understanding both. Noting the earlier insights of figures like Solomon Schechter, George Foot Moore, Albert Schweitzer, W. D. Davies, and Krister Stendahl, he crafted a proposal intended to move not only Pauline scholarship but also the entire field of New Testament studies beyond lingering debates about the nature of Judaism.

Sanders’s research led him to the conclusion that much of that field had long interpreted Judaism in general and the rabbis in particular in ways that were uninformed, unfair, and derogatory.[1] Many scholars had long argued that Jews believed in a dry, works-righteousness religion in which each individual has to earn his or her salvation by piling up good deeds (or works of the law), resulting in either smug self-righteousness or profound anxiety.[2] Critics of Judaism had alleged that it "necessarily tends towards petty legalism, self-serving and self-deceiving casuistry, and a mixture of arrogance and lack of confidence in God."[3] Noting the lasting influence of Martin Luther’s distinction between justification by works and justification by faith alone, Sanders traced the dissemination of these charges through a current of scholarship that included Ferdinand Weber, Wilhelm Bousset, Hermann Strack and Paul Billerbeck, and Rudolf Bultmann. His own poring over Jewish texts convinced him that such scholars had either failed to examine the sources themselves, drastically misinterpreted them, or woefully or even willfully misrepresented them. He boldly proclaimed in his preface that he intended to destroy this prejudicial view of Judaism and replace it with one that was more historically accurate.[4]

Sanders insisted that most Jewish sources assumed a strikingly different belief system, even in their diversity. To paraphrase his now famous summary: Jews believed that God had chosen and established a covenant with Jews and given them the Torah. Jews lived by the Torah as their covenant obligation and as a means of maintaining membership in the covenant people. God rewarded obedience and punished disobedience, but with divine mercy included provisions for repentance and atonement within the framework of the Torah. Salvation for the people of Israel came because of God’s forgiveness, grace, and covenant faithfulness, not because of perfect observance of the Torah or the works of individual Jews. Sanders dubbed this theology covenantal nomism.[5]

Paul’s conviction that God had acted decisively through Christ led him to an essentially different type of religiousness from any found in Palestinian Jewish literature.[6] His central conviction was that salvation lay in being in Christ, a notion Sanders calls participationist eschatology. Justification by faith in Christ and dying with Christ are transfer terminology that Paul uses to describe how Jews and Christians alike join the body of Christ.[7]

For Paul, the fact that Christ had died on the cross demonstrated that this new mechanism of being in Christ was necessary for humanity’s salvation. If such salvation had been available before, Christ’s death would have been in vain (Gal 2:21). Thus, Paul concluded, traditional Jewish theology, practices, and understandings of covenant and Torah must have been inadequate to produce justification or righteous standing before God. Paul’s thought had not developed from any long-held worry that Judaism was a broken system in need of a new solution. Instead, his new realization that God had provided a solution in Christ necessitated the diagnosis that the previous system was flawed. As Sanders put it, Paul’s thought process proceeded not from plight to solution but from solution to plight.

Far from having struggled with the difficulty of living by Torah, Paul had previously considered himself blameless under the law (Phil 3:6). But although Judaism might enable a form of justification, Paul instructed the Philippians, it was not the right form of justification, which was attainable only through Christ (Phil 3:4–11). This realization explained the ad hoc and inconsistent nature of Paul’s arguments about the law. He reacted furiously to other missionaries’ teachings that gentiles must adopt Torah observance for eschatological salvation, yet he himself freely drew from the Torah when the issue at hand was not salvation but ethics.

Sanders made clear that scholars who had taken their cues for understanding early Judaism primarily from Paul rather than from other Jewish sources had not recognized how fundamentally his views differed from those held by his Jewish contemporaries. Likewise, those who had uncritically repeated assertions in earlier biblical scholarship that Judaism was dry and obsessively legalistic stood guilty of maligning a religion and people both ancient and living. Readers of Sanders’s careful, historical work who were conscious of the looming shadow of Auschwitz immediately realized the book’s implications. A new period of trying to understand the relationship between early Judaism and early Christianity had begun. Forty years later (an appropriately biblical time frame), that period continues.

In retrospect, the extent to which scholars immediately recognized the paradigm-shifting significance of Paul and Palestinian Judaism is remarkable. To be sure, they differed in the degree to which they accepted Sanders’s individual arguments, but many regarded their cumulative impact as undeniable. The book was quickly hailed as a stunning masterpiece. Praising its vigorous, cogent, well-documented argument, Nils A. Dahl declared it a milestone in the history of Pauline scholarship that deserved a place alongside the classics of earlier generations.[8] Philip King launched his review by declaring, It will save time if I say at the outset that every student of the New Testament and anyone with an interest in Palestinian Judaism between the Hasmonaeans and the codification of the Mishnah should make the effort to master it.[9] G. B. Caird characterized it as a book of erudition, clarity, and considerable originality.[10]

Perhaps the highest praise came from Samuel Sandmel, a Jewish New Testament scholar: I had written elsewhere that it was my hope to be able to write about Christianity in the way in which I would want Christians to write about Judaism. I would cite Sanders as a Christian who has accomplished from that side what I hope I can accomplish from the Jewish side. Sandmel poignantly reflected, I admire the thoroughness of his scholarship, the clarity of his thought, and the sensitivity of his understanding. . . . I hold this book to be one of the very great works of New Testament scholarship of our time.[11]

Even great works of scholarship benefit from the expansion, revision, and reformulation of arguments that subsequent publications allow. Sanders published a follow-up volume in 1983, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People, that devoted more detail to some of the most-contested problems of Pauline exegesis. A few years later (1991), he produced Paul, a short volume accessible to general readers, in Oxford University Press’s Past Masters series. More recently (2015), he published a fuller and more detailed discussion of Paul for a popular audience, Paul: The Apostle’s Life, Letters, and Thought.[12]

It is in some ways ironic that Sanders’s scholarship has come to be so closely identified with a broad but diverse cluster of arguments often called the New Perspective on Paul. Sanders himself employed the term new perspective only once in Paul and Palestinian Judaism: Paul did not so much misunderstand the role of the law in Judaism as gain a new perspective which led him to declare the law abolished.[13] The new perspective to which Sanders refers is Paul’s new perspective on the Torah and Judaism.

James D. G. Dunn first suggested that Sanders’s work necessitated a new perspective on Paul.[14] In his 1982 Manson Memorial Lecture, published the following year, Dunn discussed his review of earlier books and articles while preparing his commentary on Romans.[15] Impressive as many of those works were, Dunn noted, In none of these cases . . . could I confidently say that I have been given (I speak personally) what amounts to a new perspective on Paul. In his opinion, none have succeeded in, to use a contemporary phrase, ‘breaking the mould’ of Pauline studies, the mould into which descriptions of Paul’s work and thought have regularly been poured for many decades now. Dunn continued, There is, in my judgement, only one work written during the past decade or two which deserves that accolade: Paul and Palestinian Judaism.[16]

Yet for Dunn, Sanders had not taken the opportunity his own mould-breaking work offered.[17] Dunn went on to offer his own reconstruction of Paul’s theology, arguing, I believe that the new perspective on Paul does make better sense of Paul than either Sanders or his critics have so far realized.[18] In Dunn’s own perspective, when Paul referred to works of law, he meant neither Torah observance broadly defined, as per Sanders, nor good works in general, as per Martin Luther and so much subsequent theology and biblical scholarship. Instead, when writing to the Galatians, Paul "intended his readers to think of particular observances of the law like circumcision and the food laws (italics original).[19] Circumcision, Sabbath, and dietary restrictions were identity markers [that] identified Jewishness because they were seen by the Jews themselves as fundamental observances of the covenant. They functioned as badges of covenant membership."[20]

Unlike the Paul of Sanders, the Paul of Dunn did indeed find tragic fault in Judaism: Jews held an idea of ethnic exclusivity that restricted covenant membership and national righteousness to those who observed the Jewish practices that especially defined Jewish identity. Dunn’s Paul rejected not the notion of a Jewish covenant itself but rather the ways in which Jews understood covenant and Torah to exclude non-Jews from God’s grace. Paul’s solution to this plight was justification by faith in Christ. Dunn later added to the list of Paul’s objections to Judaism the complaint of a zeal for the law which treated other [less zealous] Jews as sinners and apostates in effect, and, in extension of the same zeal, regarded Gentiles as ‘beyond the Pale.[21] He has continued to develop his interpretation of Paul in a lengthy series of publications.[22]

Yet even before Dunn, N. T. Wright had recognized the usefulness of the term new perspective for understanding critical developments in Pauline scholarship. In his 1978 Tyndale New Testament Lecture, Wright cited Sanders’s new book, along with earlier arguments by Moore, Stendahl, and others, to propose a new way of looking at Paul and a new perspective for approaching exegetical problems in his letters—though he did not apparently mean to describe the emergence of a new, unified school of thought in the way Dunn’s use of the phrase did.[23] Wright agreed with Sanders that scholars, theologians, and preachers had often assumed and repeated malformed understandings of Judaism and misreadings of Paul. Wright explains, My case here is simply stated: the tradition of Pauline interpretation has manufactured a false Paul by manufacturing a false Judaism for him to oppose. He continues, The result of the traditional, and false, picture of Judaism has been, then, the manufacture of an imaginary apostle, attenuated and demythologized to suit the limited needs and desires of certain [time] periods and interpretive communities.[24]

Wright agreed with Sanders that Judaism was not a works-righteousness religion and that the foundation of Paul’s theology was not the idea of righteousness or justification by faith. Yet unlike Sanders, Wright found in Paul’s arguments evidence of a more deeply rooted rejection of aspects of Judaism. Traditional Christian caricatures of Judaism were wrong, but nonetheless, in Wright’s eyes, Paul’s letters do mount "a detailed and sensitive critique of Judaism as its advocates present it (italics original). Wright contends, Paul has not a word to say against the law itself, but only against its abuse—and its abuse is not legalism but ‘national righteousness,’ the attempt to use the fact that God has entrusted the Jews with his oracles (compare [Rom] 3:2) as a foundation for permanent and automatic Jewish privilege. Wright reasoned that Paul was attacking Jewish trust in the law and circumcision as badges of national privilege."[25]

Wright’s evolving reconstruction of the theology of the historical Paul has always diverged sharply from that of Sanders in other respects as well. Wright’s Paul adhered to a covenantal theology grounded in the belief that the covenant God had initiated through Abraham now continued through the church. For him, God’s covenant with Israel had reached its climax with the revelation of Jesus as messiah and his triumph over death and sin at the cross.

In contrast, Sanders did not place covenantal theology at the heart of Paul’s theology. As Sanders saw it, Paul regarded the community of Jews and gentiles that were united in Christ as being largely discontinuous with his own kindred according to the flesh (Rom 9:3 NRSV). The apostle’s exegeses of the Abraham story excluded most of the people of Israel by linking the seed of Abraham directly to Christ and those who had faith in him (Gal 3:6–29; 4:21–31; Rom 4:1–25).[26]

Wright has argued that Paul considered the gospel of Christ to be a rejection and replacement of the Roman emperor’s claims to be ruler of the world. Sanders, while always keenly attuned to the fine points of Paul’s political and social context, did not emphasize anti-imperial implications of Paul’s gospel. In his eyes, resisting empire was not Paul’s concern.[27] The end of the age, after all, was imminent anyway.

It has become traditional in scholarship to group Sanders, Dunn, and Wright together as the founders of the New Perspective on Paul. Yet while their arguments occasionally touch and overlap, at the end of the day each scholar’s understanding of both Paul and Judaism remains quite different. For Dunn, Paul’s repudiation of works of the law reflected his opposition to Jews who saw circumcision, distinctive dietary customs, and Sabbath observance as distinctive markers for Jewish identity, to those who judged other Jews for being less stringent in those practices than they, and to those who would exclude Gentiles from God’s grace apart from such practices. For Wright, Paul’s problem with Judaism was its assumption of permanent Jewish privilege and distorted perception of the law. Concerns about Jewish exclusivism and identity markers unite the two Pauls of Dunn and Wright.

Sanders will have none of that. He maintains that Paul’s criticism of his own culture and people appeared only in the wake of his mystical encounter with the risen Christ. Paul had not believed Judaism to be flawed before this revelation and its accompanying call to be an apostle of the gospel. All of his denunciations of the law flowed from his new soteriology. His abandonment of his former life in Judaism (Gal 1:13–14) followed from his new conviction that salvation came only from being in Christ. In Sanders’s words, "this is what Paul finds wrong in Judaism: it is not Christianity."[28] To put it another way, Paul’s only fundamental objection to his native religion was that it did not include faith in Christ.[29] Sanders’s perspective on Paul is thus quite different from those of Wright and Dunn, who in his view find in Judaism faults that are at least as bad as legalism.[30]

Given the significant distinctions between their positions, it is surprising that these three scholars have been so often lumped together as the architects of the New Perspective on Paul. Dunn’s 1983 article first deployed the term to demonstrate his appreciation for Sanders’s comprehensive analysis of Jewish sources. For Dunn, the New Perspective meant selected aspects of Sanders’s arguments plus Dunn’s own distinctive reading. Dunn popularized the phrase further in his 1988 commentary on Romans and later publications.[31] Other scholars began utilizing the phrase similarly to Dunn. In the same year that Dunn’s commentary appeared, Stephen Westerholm critiqued the New Perspective as a combination of the views of Sanders, Dunn, and Heikki Räisänen, whose Paul and the Law had also just been published.[32] By the mid-1990s, the term sometimes included Wright and sometimes not.[33] Yet as Wright developed his own line of thinking throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, his points of agreement with Dunn made their grouping together perhaps inevitable.

That is how the idea that Sanders, Dunn, and Wright had together ushered forth a New Perspective on Paul became such an oft-repeated claim in the new century. Yet Wright has at times expressed ambivalence about the idea. Applying the term primarily to Sanders and Dunn in 2002, he noted that they had made two or three important, accurate and theologically fruitful points but also got quite a lot of things wrong. He described himself as a critical insider to the New Perspective, supporting some of its main thrusts but remaining deeply critical at certain other points.[34] Sanders, whose Paul and Palestinian Judaism had caused the earthquake in Pauline studies in the first place, never embraced the term at all. In light of the differences between his positions and those of Wright and Dunn, this is no surprise.

As is well known, application of the term New Perspective on Paul expanded beyond those three scholars to include numerous others who found aspects of their different theses compelling and buttressed or built upon them. The result is a rich chorus of voices that perpetually remind the larger guild of biblical studies that the days of unchallenged negative generalizations about Judaism are over. Yet this chorus has grown so sizable and diverse that it is difficult to argue its members fit under one rubric. They may agree that Judaism was not a legalistic, works-righteousness religion, but they often disagree on what it actually was, especially in terms of its internal diversity. When it comes to reading Paul, they hardly share a single perspective.[35] As Wright observes, there are probably almost as many ‘New Perspective’ positions as there are writers espousing it.[36]

The moniker New Perspective on Paul has come to mean so many different things to different people that its referent is no longer clear, if it ever was. The label is best reserved for those whose conclusions line up closely with Dunn. As a reference to a broader movement, however, it has outlived whatever usefulness it once had.[37] If we are to differentiate the periods before and after when New Testament scholars began making critical use of primary Jewish sources for interpreting Paul, let us refer to the pre-Sanders and post-Sanders eras. If we are to categorize scholars who hold common exegetical conclusions or methodological assumptions about Paul, let us utilize terminology that more precisely identifies their shared characteristics.[38]

Indeed, even after the shifts Paul and Palestinian Judaism inaugurated, Pauline studies as a whole remains ever full of robustly different competing views.[39] Given the obliqueness of Paul’s own arguments, the distance between his cultural context and those of modern interpreters—and, at least for some readers, the theological stakes—such a state of affairs is not surprising. Some scholars agree with the displacement of justification by faith as the starting point for Paul’s theology while others champion more traditional Lutheran and Reformed perspectives. The controversy over whether to translate pistis Christou as faith in Christ, faithfulness of Christ, or some other way continues. Strong and eloquent voices advocate for placing relatively greater weight on concepts such as apocalypticism, messianic expectations, or Jesus’s lordship vis-à-vis Caesar’s. Some posit that Paul believed in one means of salvation for both Jews and gentiles, while others discern in his writings a two-track or two-covenant system.

Questions abound. To what extent did Paul himself intend to break or remain in continuity with the Judaism and Jews of his day?[40] Did he envision himself as heralding the birth of a new people who were neither Jews nor gentiles? Given the blurriness and fluidity of identity categories and boundaries, at what point in history can we even begin to speak of Christianity as distinct from Judaism? Such debates vividly attest to the ongoing influence of Paul and Palestinian Judaism and the avenues of inquiry it opened up.[41]

Most scholars recognize that the simplistic charges of Jewish legalism that once filled the pages of New Testament scholarship were based on ill-founded and often unidentified assumptions. Some advance more nuanced arguments contra Sanders that at least some streams of early Judaism were legalistic; at least those scholars typically ground their argument in more sensitive terminology and deeper engagement with Jewish texts than in the pre-Sanders era.[42] Nonetheless, the guild should not assume that the specter of anti-Jewish stereotypes (whether intended as such or not) has fully disappeared or ever will.[43] For New Testament scholars seeking a reliable guide to Jewish sources, Sanders remains indispensable.

Sanders once identified what he considered the most important lesson of his career: You really know what you learn for yourself by studying original sources.[44] He was referring, of course, to the careful analysis of ancient texts. But his point holds true for classic works of scholarship as well. Numerous books and articles summarize Sanders’s contributions, modify and further develop his line of reasoning, spar with his exegetical moves, and advocate different construals of both Paul and Judaism. But when it comes to truly understanding what made Paul and Palestinian Judaism a work of enduring significance and ongoing relevance, nothing compares to reading the original. This fortieth anniversary edition offers a timely occasion to do just that.

Mark A. Chancey

E. P. Sanders, Comparing Judaism and Christianity: An Academic Autobiography, in Redefining First-Century Jewish and Christian Identities: Essays in Honor of Ed Parish Sanders, ed. Fabian Udoh, Susannah Heschel, Mark Chancey, and Gregory Tatum (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 11–41. ↵

Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism:A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), 45, referring in this case specifically to Rudolf Bultmann; hereafter abbreviated as PPJ in the notes. ↵

Sanders, PPJ, 427. ↵

Sanders, PPJ, xii. ↵

Sanders, PPJ, 422. ↵

Sanders, PPJ, 543. ↵

Sanders, PPJ, 463–72. ↵

Nils A. Dahl, review of PPJ, Religious Studies Review 4:3 (1978): 153–58, quotes from 155 and 154. ↵

Nicholas King, review of PPJ, Biblica 61:1 (1980): 141–44, quote from 141. ↵

G. B. Caird, review of PPJ, Journal of Theological Studies 29:2 (1978): 538–43, quote from 538. ↵

Samuel Sandmel, review of PPJ, Religious Studies Review 4:3 (1978): 158–60, quotes from 159 and 160. ↵

E. P. Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1983); Sanders, Paul (Past Masters) (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Sanders, Paul: The Apostle's Life, Letters, and Thought (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015). For Sanders’s response to scholarly discussions of his reconstruction of Judaism, see Covenantal Nomism Revisited, Jewish Studies Quarterly 16:1 (2009): 23–55, reprinted in Sanders, Comparing Judaism and Christianity: Common Judaism, Paul, and the Inner and the Outer in Ancient Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016), 51–83. ↵

Sanders, PPJ, 496. ↵

James D. G. Dunn, The New Perspective on Paul, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 65 (1983): 95–122, reprinted in multiple places. Terence L. Donaldson tracks the early usage of the term new perspective in Pauline studies in Paul within Judaism: A Critical Evaluation from a ‘New Perspective’ Perspective, in Paul within Judaism: Restoring the First-Century Context to the Apostle, ed. Mark A. Nanos and Magnus Zetterholm (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 277–301; see especially 278n2. ↵

Dunn, New Perspective on Paul; see also James D. G. Dunn, Romans 1–8 and Romans 9–16 (Waco, TX: Word, 1988). ↵

Dunn, New Perspective, 97. ↵

Ibid., 100. ↵

Ibid., 103. ↵

Ibid., 107. ↵

Ibid., 108. ↵

James D. G. Dunn, Noch Einmal ‘Works of the Law’: The Dialogue Continues, in Fair Play: Diversity and Conflicts in Early Christianity: Essays in Honour of Heikki Räisänen, ed. Ismo Dunderberg, Christopher Tuckett, and Kari Syreeni (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 273–90, quote from 278. In my opinion, it is deeply unfortunate that Dunn, a distinguished scholar from whose works I have learned so much, saw fit to equate Jewish zealousness for the law and the seriousness of the [Jewish] exclusivistic attitude that Paul purportedly combated, on the one hand, with the horrors of the Holocaust and the horrific savagery of the intra-ethnic and inter-ethnic conflicts of former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, on the other (Noch Einmal, 278). ↵

Representative examples of James D. G. Dunn include Beginning from Jerusalem, vol. 2 of Christianity in the Making (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009); The New Perspective on Paul: Collected Essays (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005); and The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). ↵

N. T. Wright, The Paul of History and the Apostle of Faith, Tyndale Bulletin 29 (1978): 61–88. ↵

Wright, Paul of History, 78, 80. Other representative works by Wright include The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (London: T&T Clark, 1991; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992); Paul in Fresh Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005); New Perspectives on Paul, in Wright, Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul, 1978–2013 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 273–91; and Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 2 vols. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013). ↵

Wright, Paul of History, 82. ↵

Sanders, PPJ, 457, 483–84, 488–93, 551. ↵

Indeed, in Sanders’s estimation, Paul’s exhortation to respect civil authorities in Rom 13:1–7 was clear enough, even if the passage raises some questions (which Sanders has addressed more recently in Paul: The Apostle’s Life, Letters, and Thought, 692–95). At any rate, in Sanders’s view, a resistance movement does not appear anywhere in Paul’s letters (personal communication). ↵

Sanders, PPJ, 552. ↵

Sanders, Comparing Judaism and Christianity, 30. ↵

For similar criticisms see Thomas Deidun, James Dunn and John Ziesler on Romans in New Perspective, Heythrop Journal 33 (1992) 79–84; Mark D. Nanos, The Mystery of Romans: The Jewish Context of Paul’s Letter (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), 88–95; and Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 209–24. ↵

Dunn, Romans 1–8. ↵

Stephen Westerholm, Israel’s Law and the Church’s Faith: Paul and His Recent Interpreters (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), 141–43. The words new perspective appear on page one of Heikki Räisänen, Paul and the Law (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1987), but in a quotation from another scholar’s work and not in a technical sense to refer to a particular school of thought. Räisänen is aware of Dunn’s New Perspective article (xxix) but does not appropriate or refer to the phrase as a label. ↵

For example, John A. Ziesler’s discussion of it begins with Stendahl, emphasizes Sanders, and takes the term itself from Dunn; see Justification by Faith: In the Light of the ‘New Perspective’ on Paul, Theology 94 (1991): 188–94. Stanley E. Porter uses it primarily for Sanders and Dunn in Understanding Pauline Studies: An Assessment of Recent Research: Part One, Themelios 22:1 (1996): 14–25. An early example of the term’s inclusion of Wright is Mark D. Thompson, Personal Assurance and the New Perspective on Paul, Reformed Theological Review 53:2 (1994): 73–86. ↵

N. T. Wright, "Communion and Koinonia: Pauline Reflections on Tolerance and Boundaries," in Wright, Pauline Perspectives, 255–69, quote from 257. ↵

Donaldson, Paul within Judaism, 277–78. ↵

Wright, New Perspectives on Paul, 276. ↵

On this point, see Donaldson, who points out that the term [i.e., the New Perspective] is used more broadly and less precisely with reference to scholars who have not so much a shared position as a shared interest in a set of related questions stimulated by Sanders’s trailblazing work (Paul within Judaism, 278). ↵

An example of my own vague usage of the term is Mark A. Chancey, Paul and the Law: E. P. Sanders’s Retrieval of Judaism, Christian Century, June 3, 2006, 20–23. ↵

Sanders, Covenantal Nomism Revisited; Nanos and Zetterholm, eds., Paul within Judaism; Magnus Zetterholm, Approaches to Paul: A Student’s Guide to Recent Scholarship (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009); Stephen Westerholm, Perspectives Old and New on Paul: The Lutheran Paul and His Critics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003). ↵

On this point, see Sanders, Did Paul Break with Judaism? (1996) and Paul’s Jewishness (2008), both published in Comparing Judaism and Christianity (231–40 and 267–86, respectively). ↵

To my mind, much of the most provocative investigation of Paul’s self-perception of his relation to his fellow Jews is found in the Paul within Judaism circles. See Nanos and Zetterholm, Paul within Judaism; Pamela Eisenbaum, Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle (New York: HarperOne, 2010). ↵

Sanders further developed the idea that covenantal nomism characterized early Judaism in Judaism: Practice and Belief 63 BCE–66 CE (London: SCM and Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016). For his rejoinder to scholars who question how widely Jews shared this theological framework, see Covenantal Nomism Revisited. ↵

Consider the forthcoming appearance of the first English translation of Hermann L. Strack and Paul Billerbeck, Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch, 5 vols. (Münich: C. H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Oskar Beck, 1922) as Commentary on the New Testament from the Talmud and Midrash, 3 vols. (Bellingham: Lexham, 2013); despite the copyright date, the work is not yet available. Strack-Billerbeck, as the German original was once commonly called, purports to illuminate New Testament passages with supposedly pertinent rabbinic quotations. Sanders devoted special scrutiny to its essential deficiencies and once-pervasive influence. The fact that many New Testament scholars, when writing about Rabbinic literature, can refer only to Billerbeck indicates that they do not perceive a theory operating in the selection of passages which may itself be suspect. His devastating analysis highlighted specific examples where "Billerbeck . . . distorted the clear meaning of a text or

. . . prejudiced

a question by his selections" (PPJ, 42; see Billerbeck, P. in the index). Because Logos Bible Software is enthusiastically promoting an electronic version of the new translation, this dated, deeply flawed, and demonstrably unreliable resource may impact wider circles in the English-speaking world than ever before. A blurb on the Logos Bible Software website celebrates Strack-Billerbeck’s collection of all the relevant quotations from this vast and diverse rabbinic literature . . . here in one place. It urges every pastor, every New Testament scholar, everyone interested in first century history, and every library to get this work. The company falls into the very trap of which Sanders warned forty years ago (https://www.logos.com/product/30801/commentary-on-the-new-testament-from-the-talmud-and-midrash, accessed April 2, 2017); see Cliff Kvidahl, Strack and Billerbeck’s Works in English, April 11, 2013 (https://blog.logos.com/2013/04/strack-and-billerbecks-works-in-english/, accessed April 2, 2017). ↵

Sanders, Comparing Judaism and Christianity, 22. ↵

Preface to the 40th

Anniversary Edition

I was very pleasantly surprised when I learned that there would be a new edition to mark the fortieth anniversary of Paul and Palestinian Judaism, which was originally published in 1977. This is not a revised edition; the text is the same as it was forty years ago. Even though I have learned a few things that I did not know in 1977 and my view of the topics and issues has in some cases evolved or shifted or developed, I have not revised this edition. The reason is that I have continued to publish on the same two subjects—Paul and Judaism. Thus changes, modifications, retractions, and so on can be found in these successive efforts.[1] I have always tried to provide full subject indexes, and it should be possible for anyone who wants to find inconsistencies or trace the development (or lack thereof) of my understanding of these two topics to do so without an inordinate amount of work.

The highlight of this edition is the penetrating and clarifying foreword by Mark Chancey. Besides providing the context of my work and some of its reception history, Professor Chancey disentangles it from the confusing conglomeration of views called the new perspective on Paul. His foreword is a substantial academic achievement that will prove to be very helpful as Pauline research continues.

I consider the foreword to be in part a gift to me, since Chancey did something that I would have liked to do but was not able to accomplish. Moreover, he finished writing it on my eightieth birthday—the day on which I am typing this preface. I thank him with all my heart. But even if the foreword is in part a gift to me, it is even more a boon to the noble guild of Pauline scholars.

I am grateful to Fortress Press and its staff for once again supporting the publication, and especially to Neil Elliott, who, as usual, saw to it that complexities were resolved and problems went away.

A special word of thanks goes to Hosung Maeng, my Korean agent, who started the process that, after several twists and turns, eventually led to this publication.

E. P. Sanders

Some further specification and refinement of my views was already made available in Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983). I set out my understanding of ancient Judaism, often in contrast to certain trends in current scholarship, in Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah: Five Studies (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992) and Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE‒66 CE (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992), both published in a new typeset format by Fortress Press in 2016. Shorter studies published in the years since are now available in Comparing Judaism and Christianity: Common Judaism, Paul, and the Inner and the Outer in Ancient Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016). A fuller bibliography of my works through 2008 is available in Redefining First-Century Jewish and Christian Identities: Essays in Honor of Ed Parish Sanders, ed. Fabian E. Udoh and Susannah Heschel (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 391–96. Finally, I have summed up my views after a career as an interpreter of the apostle in Paul: The Apostle's Life, Letters, and Thought (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015). ↵

Preface to the 1977 Edition

The present work is the result of rather a long period of research and thought, during which there was at least one major change in the precise focus of the research. I first started trying to work seriously on what I then thought of as the Jewish ‘background’ of the New Testament in 1962-63, when I studied Rabbinic and modern Hebrew in Oxford and Jerusalem. Since I thought that comparative studies should not be undertaken too early, nor under the time pressure of a doctoral program, my thesis was not a comparative study, although I did continue course work on aspects of Judaism. In 1966 I set myself to consider Goodenough’s theory of Judaism—a small island of Rabbinic Judaism set in a vast sea of mystical, strongly Hellenized Judaism. I worked on Goodenough’s materials for two years and then, during a year’s leave, returned to the Hebrew language sources. During this period I not only came to the obvious conclusion that Judaism must be studied in its own right, but, as I became increasingly immersed in the study of Rabbinic religion, I also began to focus on a somewhat different project from the one first outlined: a comparative study limited to Palestinian Judaism and the most obvious New Testament writer, Paul. The present work is the result of that study.

The more I studied Jewish sources, the more it became apparent that it would be wrong and futile to try to write as if I were not primarily a student of the New Testament. New Testament scholars who have written on Juda­ism have sometimes pretended to an indifferent ‘history of religions’ viewpoint and educational background which they have not had, and I have tried not to make that mistake. On the other hand, I have tried to avoid the opposite pitfall of limiting the description of Judaism to individual motifs which are directly parallel to a motif in Paul or which are seen as directly relevant to his ‘background’. I have attempted to compare Judaism, understood on its own terms, with Paul, understood on his own terms. I hope that this effort will prove to make a contribution not only to the understanding of Paul and his relationship to Judaism, but to the study of Judaism itself. If I cannot teach a Talmudist anything about Rabbinic religion, I hope at least that the argument about the structure and function­ing of that religion and the way in which it is compared to other forms of Judaism will prove useful.

The present study may present the reader with the problem of the forest and the trees, and a word about that problem should be said in advance. The ‘forest’ in this case is really two forests, each one of which is, dropping the metaphor, a comparison. In the first part of the book there is a comparison of the various forms of Judaism, and a hypothesis as to the nature of Palestinian Judaism is argued. In the second there is a comparison between Paul and Palestinian Judaism, and a further hypothesis is presented. Along the way there are quite sizeable accounts of religion as reflected in the differ­ent bodies of literature considered. In each chapter I end up arguing for a certain view: religion as reflected in each of the bodies of literature dealt with—early Rabbinic literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, several of the apocryphal and pseudepigraphical works, Paul’s letters—should, it is argued, in each case be understood in one way rather than another. All of these arguments are important for the larger theses, and I have tried to make each chapter and section worthy of careful consideration as a discrete account of the material under discussion. On the other hand, the overall aim of the work is to carry out the two comparisons named. Thus I need to be right about both the trees and the forests. The reader who is interested primarily in the comparisons will need to bear in mind that we need well­-described entities to compare, and be patient while reading through a few hundred pages of descriptions of those entities before I undertake to compare them. The reader who is primarily interested in my account of religion as it appears in the body of literature which most interests him or her will need to bear in mind the limitations imposed by the comparative aim of the book as a whole. I do not intend by these remarks to avoid criticism from either side, but only to inform the reader about the relationship of the parts and the whole.

Another way of stating the matter is to explain that I am trying to accom­plish at least six things. The chief aims are these:

to consider methodologically how to compare two (or more) related but different religions;

to destroy the view of Rabbinic Judaism which is still prevalent in much, perhaps most, New Testament scholarship;

to establish a different view of Rabbinic Judaism;

to argue a case concerning Palestinian Judaism (that is, Judaism as reflected in material of Palestinian provenance) as a whole;

to argue for a certain understanding of Paul;

to carry out a comparison of Paul and Palestinian Judaism.

These various aims are not contradictory but complementary, and I think that it is reasonable to try to achieve them all in one book. It should be noted that the fourth and sixth constitute the general aim of the book, while I hope to accomplish the others along the way.

In arguing against some positions and for others a certain amount of scholarly polemic is naturally involved, and the reader will find this in the normal proportions in the Introduction and in chapters II, III and V. Chapter I, which deals with Rabbinic religion, deserves special mention, for there the criticism of the positions of other New Testament scholars over several generations becomes pronounced. The chapter was originally written in an almost entirely positive way, and it was only in the third or fourth revision that the argument against a certain understanding of Rabbinic religion was introduced. I hope that a careful reading of section 1 of chapter I will indicate why I judged it necessary to introduce a tone of sharp rebuttal: milder statements have fallen on deaf ears and are now cited as if they supported views which in fact they opposed. As I read book after book in which the same texts were repeatedly misconstrued, it seemed increasingly necessary to go into the misconstruction at some length, and this involves not only criticism of misunderstandings, but also the full quotation of numerous passages which have often appeared only as refer­ences in footnotes. Thus the first chapter turns out to be not only polemical, but also long. Achieving a correct understanding of Rabbinic Judaism, a religion which has been so often misunderstood, is sufficiently important to justify both explicit and detailed criticism and lengthy citation. I intend by all the negative criticism to accomplish a positive goal, the implantation of a better understanding of Rabbinism in New Testament scholarship.

Once the question of polemics in connection with Rabbinic Judaism is raised, the reader may wonder whether or not the topic is anti-Semitism. It is not. A Jewish scholar of my acquaintance offered to tell me which of the older generation of scholars whose views I criticize were in fact anti­- Semites, but I declined to find out. As I see it, the view which is here under attack is held because it is thought to correspond to the evidence, and I attack it because I think it does not. The history of the relationship between scholarly representations of Judaism and anti-Semitism is quite complex, but the present work is not a contribution to unravelling it. The charges of misunderstanding should be read as simply that and no more.

Each of the sections of the work has presented its own difficulty, but per­haps only one difficulty involved in writing about Paul needs to be mentioned here. The secondary literature on Paul is vast, and it proved not to be feasible to summarize and discuss all the positions on each point. There are some questions of perennial interest in Pauline studies which are not even mentioned: the question of the identity of Paul’s opponents, for example, has been excluded from the discussion, and with the exclusion has gone the omission of references to a large body of secondary literature. The section on Paul is written primarily vis à vis three positions: Bultmann and the Bult­mann school, Schweitzer, and Davies. The first two were chosen because they are two major ways of understanding Paul which are more or less polar opposites and the third because of the obvious significance of Davies’s position for the question of Paul and Judaism. Other scholarly views and contributions are discussed on individual points, but I have systematically tried to set my view of Paul over against (and sometimes in agreement with) the three positions mentioned.

The transliteration of Hebrew is based on the simplified system of the Jewish Encyclopedia, with only one or two minor alterations (e.g. q instead of ḳ for ק). The vowels in particular are not scientifically transliterated (thus e represents seghol, tserẹ and vocal sheva). In transliterating I have had in mind producing terms which can be conveniently read by the reader who may not know Hebrew, or who may know it only slightly. I do not think that any of the transliterations will mislead those who do know Hebrew, any more than Schechter’s transliteration of וּת‎זְכ as Zachuth has prevented people from knowing what he was writing about. Worse, from the point of view of some, than the use of a simplified transliteration system will be the appear­ance of more than one system. When quoting others, I have naturally kept their transliterations. For Rabbinic names and for the titles of the Mishnaic and Talmudic tractates I have used Danby’s transliterations as being most familiar to English readers, and for the Mekilta tractates I have followed Lauterbach.

The research for and writing of this book have been supported by generous grants, and I am glad to be able to acknowledge my indebtedness and grati­tude to the granting institutions and agencies: to McMaster University for a series of summer grants which supported the research during its early stages; to the Canada Council for a Post-Doctoral Fellowship which provided a year’s study in Jerusalem; to the American Council of Learned Societies for a Leave Fellowship; and to the Killam Program of the Canada Council for a Senior Research Scholarship which not only provided the time to complete the study but also provided funds for secretarial help and research assistance, travel to discuss drafts of the various sections with other scholars, visits to other libraries, and all the miscellaneous expenses which are incurred in the production of a manuscript. Without this support the manuscript would still be a bundle of notes and drafts.

As grateful as I am for financial support, I am even more grateful to the scholars who have read and discussed the manuscript with me. I have for years been cornering everyone I could to discuss Paul and Judaism, and this must serve as a general word of thanks to numerous scholars who have answered my questions and discussed my theories. I should single out for special mention my two colleagues, Dr. Ben Meyer and Dr. Al Baumgarten, and also Professor C. F. D. Moule, Professor John Knox, and Dr. J. A. Ziesler, with all of whom I had especially rewarding and detailed conversations. Five scholars read extensive parts of the manuscript in an earlier draft, and I was able to discuss it with four of them. Professors Samuel Sandmel and Wayne Meeks both read chapter I and chapter V and discussed the two chapters with me at some length. Professor W. D. Davies read the Introduc­tion, part of chapter I and all of chapter V. I am grateful both for his strong and unflagging encouragement and for his critique on several points. Professor B. Z. Wacholder read chapter I, and his notes on it saved me from several mistakes. Dr. Gerd Lüdemann read the penultimate draft of the entire manuscript. His notes allowed me to correct several errors, and he also made helpful comments with regard to the contents. I am deeply indebted to these scholars, all of whom gave generously of their time. Their notes and suggestions have measurably improved the manuscript, and I am glad to record here my appreciation and thanks to them. In addition to the usual (and perfectly correct) statement that those who have so kindly helped me are not responsible for mistakes that remain, I should say that I have sometimes had to remain in disagreement with some of those who read the manuscript. The disagreements often provided the most fruitful topics in discussion, and I hope that in their written form they will be of interest to a wider audience.

I owe a debt of gratitude of a different kind to the late Dr. Mordechai Kamrat. Dr. Kamrat, who is best known as the ‘father’ of the Ulpan system in Israel, was a peerless teacher of Hebrew. Although his academic field was not Talmudics, he had an encyclopedic knowledge of Rabbinic literature (as well as of much else). Although burdened with numerous responsibilities, he undertook my private tutelage in modern and Rabbinic Hebrew both in 1963 and in 1968-69. It will give an idea both of the time he devoted to my education and of the incalculable debt which I owe him when I say that together we read through most of three of the four principal Tannaitic midrashim, several Mishnah and Tosefta tractates, and portions of the minor Tannaitic midrashim. The reading was necessarily rapid, but it gave me the opportunity of coming to grips with Tannaitic literature in a way which would otherwise have been impossible. Dr. Kamrat’s untimely death in 1970 deprived the world of a man of great learning and prodigious ability, but of even greater heart and spirit.

My research assistants at McMaster University have made material contributions to the work. Dr. Manfred Brauch prepared a survey of research on the phrase dikaiosynē theou which has led to an appendix to chapter V. Dr. Phil Shuler checked the references to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Dr. Benno Przybylski checked the references to Rabbinic literature and also gave me notes on the chapter which clarified some points. He has also spent dozens of laborious hours in proof-reading. Phyllis Koetting made last-minute corrections in the typescript, typed several revised pages, prepared the bibliography, helped prepare the indices, and assisted in proofreading. I am grateful to them all for their careful work.

The principal burden of preparing the manuscript for the press was carried by Susan Phillips. Between 1969 and late 1975 she helped organize and carry out my administrative duties so that I would have time for research and writing, typed almost countless drafts of various parts of the manuscript, conformed the footnote and manuscript style to the require­ments of the press, checked the English language quotations in chapter I and chapter III, and finally prepared, in the first twenty days of September 1975, an almost flawless typescript of some 1100 pages. For these things alone I would have recorded my warmest admiration, respect and gratitude. But, when she died, we had been looking forward to a long and happy life together; this book is offered as a memorial to her and that hope.

***

This second impression has given me the opportunity to correct typographi­cal and other minor errors, but the text is otherwise unaltered. Dr. Robert Huebsch called my attention to several errors, and Mr. G. W. Hilborn proof­read the entirety with extraordinary care and patience. I am grateful to them both.

The book has on the whole been treated generously by reviewers and others who have dealt with it in their own publications. Many scholars, too numerous to name here, have paid the author the greatest compliment which a scholar can expect, that of discussing his work seriously and searchingly. I have appreciated the praise and, I hope, learned from the criticisms.

Since the book first appeared there have been a few substantial exchanges with other scholars, both on Rabbinics and on Paul, and it may be helpful to refer to them here. There is an exchange between Jacob Neusner and me on the methodology of using Rabbinic material in Approaches to Ancient Judaism II, ed. W. S. Green, Scholars Press for Brown Judaic Studies 1980, pp. 43-80. H. Hübner has devoted an article (‘Pauli Theologiae Proprium’ NTS 26, 1980, pp. 445-73) to a defence of ‘justification by faith’ as the centre of Paul’s theology; and W. D. Davies has responded to my work, particularly as it relates to his own understanding of the relationship between Paul and Judaism, in the new edition of Paul and Rabbinic Judaism (Fortress Press, 1980). I have replied to the most important points in ‘Paul and the Law: Different Questions, Different Answers’, which was presented at the annual meeting of Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas in 1980. The article is scheduled to appear within the coming year, together with another, in Paul, the Law and the Jewish People.

Abbreviations

References to texts will generally be familiar and self-explanatory. Details are given in the bibliography.

I

Introduction

1. Paul and Judaism in New Testament scholarship

The phrase ‘Paul and Judaism’ starts more questions than can be dealt with in one book, and perhaps more than we can conveniently list here. Even the phrase itself introduces a problem: should one not say, ‘Paul and the rest of Judaism’, since Paul himself was surely Jewish? He explicitly contrasts himself and Peter with the Gentile sinners (Gal. 2.15). Whatever his perception of his own identity, however, the traditional terminology would seem to be justified by his being engaged in a mission which went beyond the bounds of Judaism. He must himself discuss the fact that the Jews have not accepted his gospel, and he has to redefine ‘Israel’ so that not all who are descended from Israel belong (Rom. 9.6-8). In any case, the question of Paul’s self-identity is not the question before us, and we shall retain the convenient phrase ‘Paul and Judaism’.

Far hotter issues are raised by the phrase than whether or not Paul should be called Jew or Christian. There are, to begin with, the polemics of Paul’s letters against Jews and Judaizers (‘Look out for the dogs … , look out for those who mutilate the flesh’, Phil. 3.2). Almost as vitriolic have been the scholarly debates of the last several decades on how Paul does or does not relate to Judaism. Is he to be primarily understood as a Jewish apocalypticist, a Hellenistic mystic, a Rabbi who accepted Jesus as the Messiah, a Hellenistic Jew? Or as none of these or as some combination of them? Paul’s relationship with the contemporary world has been and remains one of the three or four main preoccupations of New Testament scholarship.

In order to give some immediate focus to the present work, but without yet defining the precise question which is to be raised, it should be said that we shall be dealing with the basic relationship between Paul’s religion and the various forms of Palestinian Judaism as revealed in Palestinian Jewish literature from around 200 b.c.e. to around 200 c.e. This restriction does not presuppose that Palestinian Judaism and Hellenistic Judaism have nothing in common, nor does it prejudge the question of whether Paul is closer to Palestinian Judaism, or some form of it, than to Hellenistic Judaism or to Hellenism proper. We do not intend to sort out and weigh ‘parallels’ and ‘influences’ in order to determine what part of the ancient world most influenced Paul and in what respects.[1] The limitation to Palestinian Jewish literature as providing a point of comparison is basically practical. One cannot discuss everything at once. We shall, however, in the conclusion raise briefly the question of Paul’s relationship to Hellenistic Judaism as known in Philo. In any case, it is not the intention of the present study to find sources and influences, although they will be sometimes discussed along the way, but to compare Paul’s religion and his view of religion to those which are seen in Palestinian Jewish literature.

It does not seem necessary to attempt a full review of scholarly stances on the question of how Paul and Palestinian Judaism are related. On the other hand, there has been serious disagreement among scholars on the question of the relationship. Without entering into a detailed history, it is possible to discern a few main tendencies. A view which has been very prevalent – it may deserve the adjective ‘dominant’, at least for certain periods and schools of New Testament research – is seen in H. St John Thackeray’s The Relation of St Paul to Contemporary Jewish Thought, published in 1900. The view is quickly summarized: Paul’s theology was basically antithetical to Judaism, but many particulars of his thought were rooted in Judaism.

Thackeray argued, for example, in discussing ‘justification by faith or works’, that the topic reveals ‘the Apostle’s independence of thought and his complete break from Judaism’ (p. 80). Thackeray briefly described ‘the Jewish idea of righteousness and the means of attaining to it in the time of St Paul’, basing his discussion on Weber’s systematic theology of Rabbinic Judaism. The latter will occupy us in the next chapter. It suffices here to say that the Jewish view, according to Weber, was that righteousness is earned by works, while Paul’s was that righteousness is the gift of God received by faith (pp. 80-7). Nevertheless, despite the antithesis, the various elements that make up Paul’s view have their ‘roots in the older ideas of Judaism’ (p. 87).

It is not our intention to use an old book which (unlike Thackeray’s work on the Septuagint and Josephus) has not had much influence on subsequent writers as a foil for the present study. There are, however, two points about Thackeray’s book which are interesting and instructive. In the first place, he himself stated that his knowledge of Rabbinic literature was completely derivative (p. 25). He cited several authors, but he made most use of Weber. Secondly, he did not consider the contrast which he sketched between Paul and Judaism to be the creative part of his work. He pointed out the antithesis partly in order to protect himself from being charged with having eliminated Paul’s originality and with having made him too Jewish (cf. pp. 4-6, 80, 97). What he considered original was the attempt to find Jewish sources for elements in Paul’s thought in a ‘connected work dealing with the whole subject’ (p. 6). What is instructive about these two points taken together is this: Thackeray’s depiction of Judaism – especially Rabbinic Judaism, although the distinction is not sharply drawn – and his consideration of Paul’s thought as the antithesis of Judaism were widely held opinions in his day. On neither point does Thackeray consider himself original, but he simply repeats what he regards either as being the scholarly consensus or as being obvious.

The two elements which constitute Thackeray’s view – on the whole Paul represents the antithesis of Judaism, while being dependent on it with regard to individual motifs – also constitute the view of many other scholars. In the next chapter we shall show how Weber’s view of (Rabbinic) Judaism has lived on in New Testament criticism. Wherever it appears, the antithesis between it and Paul is either explicit or implicit. Once Judaism is described