I’ve recently returned to John Barclay’s book on Paul, which is largely a response to this earlier book by Ed Sanders. The following might not be of interest to many people, but just in case someone wants a quick summary of a significant book from 1977, here’s something a wrote a few years ago. I should confess that I haven’t read the whole book!
N. T. Wright, in his 2015 book, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, says the following:
If Karl Barth’s Römerbrief [1919] fell like a bomb on the playground of the theologians, Ed Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism [1977] exploded like a volcano over the fields where the exegetes had been busy at their usual sports.1
What, then, are the main theses of this epoch-changing book?
Before we look inside the book itself,2 here is Wright again:
His major point, to which all else is subservient, can be quite simply stated. Judaism in Paul’s day was not, as has regularly been supposed, a religion of legalistic works-righteousness. If we imagine that it was, and that Paul was attacking it as if it was, we will do great violence to it and to him.3
Opening the book, then – but only just – it is clear from the table of contents that this is primarily a book about Palestinian Judaism, and only secondarily about Paul. After the Introduction, Part One, ‘Palestinian Judaism’, covers around 400 pages, leaving little more than 100 pages for Part Two, ‘Paul’. (‘Palestinian Judaism’, it should be noted, refers to the Judaism ‘revealed in Palestinian Jewish literature from around 200 b.c.e. to around 200 c.e.’ [xi].) The book is ‘a comparative study limited to Palestinian Judaism and the most obvious New Testament writer, Paul’ (xi).
The first of the two main theses, therefore, concerns ‘Palestinian Judaism … as a whole’ (xii). At the end of Part One, Sanders concludes that ‘the general type of religion prevalent in Palestine before the destruction of the Temple’ was what he describes as covenantal nomism (428). Contrary to ‘much, perhaps most, New Testament scholarship’ (xii), this is most emphatically not a matter of ‘legalistic works-righteousness’ (33–59). In contrast, ‘Briefly put, covenantal nomism is the view that one’s place in God’s plan is established on the basis of the covenant and that the covenant requires as the proper response of man his obedience to its commandments [hence, ‘nomism’, from nomos, ‘law’], while providing means of atonement for transgression’ (75).
The second main thesis involves ‘a comparison of Paul and Palestinian Judaism’ (xii). Sanders describes as ‘one of the major conclusions of the study’ the following: ‘Paul’s ‘pattern of religion” cannot be described as ‘covenantal nomism”, and therefore Paul presents an essentially different type of religiousness from any found in Palestinian Jewish literature’ (543, emphasis original). But different in what respect?
The difference is not about grace and works, about which ‘Paul is in agreement with Palestinian Judaism’; for both, ‘salvation is by grace’, and ‘works are the condition of remaining ‘in”, but they do not earn salvation’ (543).
Nor is the difference in terms of Paul’s apocalyptic tendencies. In fact, ‘the expectation of the parousia counts as a general similarity between Paul and Palestinian Judaism’ (543).
The difference between Paul and Palestinian Judaism, for Sanders, lies in Paul’s ‘participationist eschatology’ (549, 552), centred on ‘union with Christ’ (514):
The heart of Paul’s thought is not that one ratifies and agrees to a covenant offered by God, becoming a member of a group with a covenantal relation with God and remaining in it on the condition of proper behaviour [as under ‘covenantal nomism’]; but that one dies with Christ, obtaining new life and the initial transformation which leads to the resurrection and ultimate transformation, that one is a member of the body of Christ and one Spirit with him, and that one remains so unless one breaks the participatory union by forming another (514).
‘In short, this is what Paul finds wrong in Judaism: it is not Christianity’ (552, emphasis original): ‘to be righteous in Jewish literature means to obey the Torah and to repent of transgressions, but in Paul it means to be saved by Christ’ (544).
(John Barclay’s response to Sanders is that ‘Grace is everywhere in Second Temple Judaism but not everywhere the same.’)