A Need to “Reinterpret” Paul?

by Allen Dvorak
via Biblical Insights, Vol. 14 No. 8, August 2014

In Matthew 5:41, Jesus said, “And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.” His statement makes sense to the Bible student who understands that, under Roman law, a Roman soldier could compel any Jew, as a subject in the empire, to carry his pack for a mile without compensation. Jesus’ teaching must be understood in light of its historical context.

That’s an important principle of Bible study. Although the Scriptures have application for modern man, they were written in a different chronological, geographical, and cultural context. Understanding the themes and specific argumentation of the biblical books is sometimes aided by an understanding of the historical context surrounding their authorship. An appeal to this hermeneutical principle has led some modern scholars to shift their interpretation of Paul’s epistles.

I believe that the theme of Paul’s epistle to the Romans is justification by faith. The apostle began his argument in the book by pointing out the failure of both Gentiles and Jews to be justified by their own efforts. Having shown that both Jew and Gentile were “under sin,” he concluded that no one would be justified in God’s sight by the deeds of law; law provides the knowledge of sin (Romans 3:20). It is at this point in his argumentation, having closed the door of “righteousness by the perfect keeping of law” to both Jew and Gentile, that Paul introduced the plan of God to justify all men by His grace (Romans 3:21-26).

I would also affirm that Paul wrote his epistle to the Galatians to confront Jewish Christians who were teaching that it was necessary to keep the Law
of Moses in addition to obedience to the gospel. The apostle affirmed that “a person is not justified by works of the law” (Galatians 2:16) and “it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law” (Galatians 3:11). As with Romans, the thought is that Paul was confronting Jewish legalism, i.e., that righteousness could be achieved through the perfect keeping of the law.

This view of Paul’s argument in these epistles began to be questioned after WWII, perhaps partially as a response to the prevalence of anti-Semitism expressed not only in the holocaust, but among denominational churches as well. In the early 1960s, Krister Stendahl was one of the earliest scholars to suggest that Paul was not dealing in his writings with Jewish legalism or even the “guilt-ridden conscience” of the individual. According to Stendahl, Paul’s primary objective was to address the relationship between Jew and Gentile with respect to salvation.

The individual who really laid the foundation for this “new perspective on Paul” (known as NPP) was E. P. Sanders. In 1977, he published Paul and Palestinian Judaism, in which he proposed a new view of Second Temple Judaism, the Judaism practiced by those Jews who lived from approximately 200 B.C. to A.D. 200. In his book, Sanders claimed that his research in Tannaitic literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, apocrypha and pseudepigrapha indicated that Second Temple Judaism was not a legalistic, works-righteousness religion.

Sanders was looking for the “pattern of religion” (how one “gets in” and “stays in” a religion) in the literature of Second Temple Judaism with the intent of comparing that pattern to the writings of Paul. He concluded, principally from rabbinic literature, that the Jews of Jesus’ day and Paul’s day understood their relationship with God to be the result of divine grace. Sanders coined the expression “covenantal nomism” to describe his view of the character of rabbinic Judaism.

Mark Mattison offers this description of “covenantal nomism”:

"The meaning of 'covenantal nomism' is that human obedience is not construed as the means of entering into God’s covenant. That cannot be earned; inclusion within the covenant body is by the grace of God. Rather, obedience is the means of maintaining one’s status within the covenant. And with its emphasis on divine grace and forgiveness, Judaism was never a religion of legalism"(1) (emphasis mine - asd).

Proponents of the NPP charged that Protestant scholars for the last 150+ years were mistaken about the point of Paul’s writings, that they had been viewing Paul’s argument in Romans and Galatians through the lenses of 16th century Reformation issues (e.g., works-based salvation versus salvation by faith only). Sanders’ work in researching Second Temple Judaism was seen as an adequate foundation for the movement away from this “mistaken view” of Paul.

Are we also subject to the accusations of NPP proponents? Have we indeed “imprinted” Reformation issues on the writings of Paul? Am I incorrectly seeing in Paul’s writings a response to those who would find their confidence in law, rather than grace?

My answer to each of these questions is a resolute “no!” I believe that it is quite possible for an individual to pick up a New Testament, read the epistles of Paul, and understand his argumentation without the benefit of an extensive knowledge of rabbinic literature from the period of Second Temple Judaism.

Jesus told parables in which He characterized the Pharisees as those who “trusted in themselves that they were righteous” (the words of Luke, but clearly an accurate description of the intended depiction of the Pharisee by Jesus; Luke 18:9). Why would Jesus “paint” the Pharisees by means of these parables in a way that was entirely inaccurate, according to proponents of NPP?

As might be expected, not everyone has accepted Sanders’ conclusions about Second Temple Judaism. In 2001, a group of scholars published Justification and Variegated Nomism, a work that affirmed that first-century Judaism was not the “uniform” religion Sanders portrayed but rather embraced a spectrum of beliefs, including covenantal nomism and legalism. D. A. Carson, one of the editors of the aforementioned volume, commented: “One conclusion to be drawn, then, is not that Sanders is wrong everywhere, but he is wrong when he tries to establish that his category is right everywhere.”(2)

Sanders’ research methodology is critically flawed. For instance, he essentially ignored the Old Testament books, the gospels, and some of Paul’s epistles in determining the nature of Second Temple Judaism. If one believes these documents are inspired by God, what better sources could there be? The following comment by Sanders, however, is illustrative of his (lack of) respect for Scripture:

“The possibility cannot be completely excluded that there were Jews accurately hit by the polemic of Matthew 23, who attended only to trivia and neglected the weightier matters. Human nature being what it is, one supposes that there were some such. One must say, however, that the surviving Jewish literature does not reveal them.”(3)

“One supposes that there were some such?” Can we trust Scripture? Can we trust Matthew when he records that Jesus described the Pharisees as “attending to trivia”? Or do we need to depend on our understanding of human nature to accept the inspired record? Shall we take a jaundiced look at rabbinic literature and then decide whether Scripture has actually conveyed the truth of the matter, based on its agreement with the writings of rabbis?

Besides excluding some key sources of information, Sanders apparently minimized any differences in his research that didn’t align with his “pattern of religion” template. William Barrick comments:

"One of the world’s leading Jewish experts on Judaism, Jacob Neusner, describes Sanders as a writer with a “rich capacity to make up distinctions and definitions as he goes along, then to impose these distinctions and definitions upon sources that, on the face of it, scarcely sustain them.”(4)

N.T. Wright, a vocal proponent of NPP, has summarized the importance of Sanders’ work:

"He nevertheless dominates the landscape, and, until a major refutation of his central thesis is produced, honesty compels one to do business with him. I do not myself believe such a refutation can or will be offered; serious modifications are required, but I regard his basic point as established."(5)

Although Wright erroneously accepts Sanders’ basic premise, he is correct to say that Sanders’ work is the foundation of the NPP, a foundation this article has suggested is cracked. It is never wise to build a house on a cracked foundation.

For more comprehensive analyses by brethren of E.P. Sanders’ work, see “The New Perspective on Paul: A Historical, Critical, Appraisal of a New Approach to Judaism and Paul” by Chris Reeves and “Jewish Legalism” by Marc Gibson; both available at http://alpharetta-bible-study.com/index.php/en/2013/the-speakers-their-lectures.

I would be among the first to say that, if we have misunderstood any section of Scripture or scriptural theme, we should change our view rather than zealously cling to error just because it is what has “traditionally” been taught or what we have “always believed.” On the other hand, we also cannot bow at the altar of modern “scholarship,” even if some verbose authors with educational credentials have a “new idea.”

Footnotes:

1. Mattison, Mark M. “A Summary of the New Perspective on Paul.” October 16, 2009.(http://www.thepaulpage.com/a-summary-of-the-new-perspective-on-paul/)
2. Carson, D.A., Peter T. O’Brien, and Mark A. Seifrid. Justification and Variegated Nomism. Volume I: The Complexities of Second Temple Judaism, p. 543.
3. Sanders, E. P. Paul and Palestinian Judaism. p. 426.
4. Barrick, William. “The New Perspective and ‘Works of the Law’ (Gal. 2:16 and Rom 3:20).” The Master’s Seminary Journal 16/2 (Fall 2005), 277-292 (http://www.tms.edu/tmsj/tmsj16j.pdf)
5. Wright, N.T. What Saint Paul Really Said, p. 20.