commentary on the New Testament),8 but it was Sanders’s forceful polemic that shook the old paradigm. He argued that nearly all of ancient Judaism affirmed that Israelites as a whole were graciously chosen as part of the covenant, and remained members of the covenant unless cutting themselves off through apostasy. Judaism was thus a religion of grace, and works confirmed rather than earned a place in the covenant.
One complication of revisiting ancient Judaism’s approach to works and grace is that one must then revisit Paul’s approach to the views of his contemporaries on these matters. Paul does in fact sound like he regards his contemporaries’ approach as based on human effort rather than grace, so New Testament scholars set out to reinterpret Paul based on this new interpretation of ancient Judaism. Many found Sanders’s reconstruction of ancient Judaism more plausible than his interpretation of Paul, but James D. G. Dunn, Hans Hübner, Heikki Räisänen, Francis Watson, N. T. Wright, and others also offered new readings of Paul in his Jewish setting.9 Some of these new interpretations became known as the “New Perspective,” but the new perspectives are in fact so diverse on various points of detail that the main characteristic of their newness is that they reject the older caricature of Judaism.
While Sanders’s challenge to caricatures of Judaism proved to be an important watershed, many of the details of his approach have come under increasing challenge. Sanders’s primary thesis, the prevalence of grace in Judaism (and perhaps especially rabbinic Judaism, where it was often least appreciated), won the day, and there is little likelihood, barring a nuclear holocaust or other cataclysmic event that wipes out the current generation of scholars and our work, that the bulk of nt scholarship will backtrack on that point. Yet scholars have increasingly noticed that another side of the picture, “works righteousness,” remains in the Jewish sources. A number of scholars argue that Sanders’s way of framing the questions (in response to more traditional ways of framing them) and arranging the data downplayed the sources’ emphasis on earning merit or even eschatological salvation.10
Synthesizing Various Factors
Part of the debate depends on the meaning of “legalism” and “works righteousness.” Thus, Sanders would point out that the nt sources themselves often speak of reward and even eternal salvation on the basis of works, yet in the larger context of God’s covenant grace. With some critics, one helpful approach to the varied evidence of Jewish sources is to recognize that diverse approaches existed, a variety that many teachers never sought to harmonize and Judaism as a whole certainly could not harmonize. It is indeed hard to imagine otherwise. For example, despite the heavy teaching on grace in the New Testament, many Christians today are what other Christians would consider “legalistic.”11 Ancient Judaism surely included its share of this sort of “legalism,” too, whatever the approach of those who most emphasized grace. (We did, after all, open this section by affirming the diversity of ancient Judaism in many other respects.)
Aside from this question, we should also allow for some other factors when hearing Paul. First, Paul is ready to use reductio ad absurdum where necessary (cf. e.g., Rom 2:17–24); ancient polemic could focus on a weakness in an opposing position that its supporters might not regard as fundamental to or characteristic of the position. Moreover, the center of Paul’s argument is not simply any gracious act, but God’s grace specifically in Christ, which was for Paul (and for other Christians) the climax of salvific history. This specific understanding of grace informs the distinction of his position from that of contemporaries who rejected his understanding of Christ. Finally, Paul is often addressing not Judaism as a whole, but (especially in Galatians) the demands of some fellow Jewish Christians who sought to accommodate the strictest Jewish expectations for full converts to Judaism. It was the status of Gentile converts that generated the conflict most starkly (hence the increased prominence of righteousness by faith in letters addressing Gentile believers’ relation to Judaism).12
Thus, most Jews welcomed Gentile interest in Judaism and even affirmed the future “salvation” of monotheistic, sexually pure Gentiles, yet believed that sharing in Israel’s covenant required circumcision and acceptance of the law, including those parts specific to Israel. Jews could keep the law as a natural part of their culture regardless of the question of salvation. By contrast, for Gentiles to keep it as a condition for belonging to the covenant, and still more (on some particularly strict views) for salvation,13 was to demand new “works” as a condition for inclusion rather than simply a sign of inner transformation. (One might compare Western missionaries one or two centuries ago obligating new believers in some parts of the world to adopt Western names and dress to confirm their conversion to Christianity.) Although ethnically distinctive markers in the law are not the only ones Paul addresses (his language is too broad for that), these are the features that provoked the most complaint in Rome and that seem a central problem in the practical relation of Roman believers addressed in Romans 14.
For Paul, to insist on maintaining literally all the distinctives mandated specifically for ancient Israel was to ignore the climax of salvation history, what God had accomplished in Christ. He treated outward circumcision as secondary to the spiritual covenant commitment it signified, and insisted that the new covenant in the heart obviated the details of the earlier covenant that merely prepared the way for it. From Paul’s perspective, this was simply following his own biblical Jewish faith to its logical conclusion, in light of the coming of Christ and the Spirit. Many of his contemporaries understandably disagreed, and their debates (albeit usually from the Pauline side) surface repeatedly in the nt texts.
Paul, Judaism, and Rhetoric
Our problems reconciling what we know of ancient Judaism with Paul’s arguments stem not only from the diversity of ancient Judaism but from our unfamiliarity with ancient rhetoric. Polemic regularly caricatured opponents, sometimes using hyperbole to reduce their position to the absurd (see e.g., Matt 23:24). An ancient audience could recognize and appreciate such strategies (except when recycling the language polemically themselves).
Most scholars today recognize that Paul sometimes employs ad hoc arguments (e.g., in 1 Cor 11:3–16).14 Some such arguments appear in Romans, where, for example, his caricature of a distinctly unreliable Jewish teacher (2:17–24) and his recycling of several more general texts to regard all Jews as sinful (the Psalm texts in 3:10–20) would not actually condemn every individual Jewish person. To notice this apparent anomaly is not to suggest that Paul would have relinquished his view that all people were sinners (a view that most Jews shared anyway), but to suggest that if had he written for a modern audience he sometimes would have used a different style of argumentation. His rhetoric, no less than his use of Greek language, is constructed to appeal specifically within a particular cultural setting. Such polemical rhetoric was expected and necessary for successful debate in Paul’s day. Indeed, Paul fashions his polemic in such a way that even his detractors would have been forced to condemn the figure he caricatures. Today we can learn from Paul’s message while aesthetically appreciating his plethora of figures of speech and rhetorical devices that displayed his brilliance while holding his original audience’s attention.
Some of Paul’s arguments reflect earlier Christian tradition, and some may have generated such tradition. For example, the polemic regarding true children of Abraham (4:11–17; cf. 9:6–13) reflects a debate already found in the early Palestinian gospel tradition (Matt 3:9/Luke 3:8; cf. John 8:39–41). Likewise, Paul’s treatment of faith and works (here or more generally) seems to have been caricatured (either to exploit it or to denigrate it; cf. 3:8), inviting a rejoinder to that caricature in Jas 2:18–24.15
The
