Theopedia

E. P. Sanders

Overview

Ed Parish Sanders (1937-2022) was an American New Testament scholar who taught at McMaster University, the University of Oxford, and Duke University.1 He is best known for Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977), whose thesis about the nature of Second Temple Judaism became the historical foundation for what later scholars named the New Perspective on Paul.2 Reformed evangelical scholarship has responded to his work at length, arguing that his account of first-century Judaism, even if granted, does not require the revision of the Reformation doctrine of justification.3

Life and Ministry

Sanders was born in Grand Prairie, Texas, on April 18, 1937. He studied at Texas Wesleyan College (1955-1959) and at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University (1959-1962), before a year of further study at Göttingen, the University of Oxford, and in Jerusalem. He earned his doctorate at Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1966 with a thesis on the tendencies of the Synoptic Gospel tradition. He taught at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, from 1966 to 1984, then became Dean Ireland’s Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture and a Fellow of Queen’s College at the University of Oxford. He moved to Duke University in 1990, where he was Arts and Sciences Professor of Religion until his retirement in 2005. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy and received the 1990 Grawemeyer Award in Religion for his later book Jesus and Judaism (1985). He died on November 21, 2022.1

Theological Contribution

Paul and Palestinian Judaism

Sanders stated two purposes for Paul and Palestinian Judaism: “to destroy the view of Rabbinic Judaism which [was at the time] still prevalent in much, perhaps most, New Testament scholarship” and then “to establish a different view of Rabbinic Judaism.”4 He traced the prevailing legalistic view of Judaism through Ferdinand Weber, Wilhelm Bousset, Paul Billerbeck, and Rudolf Bultmann, arguing that it functioned as a foil that let New Testament scholars “write theology as if it were history,” projecting the Protestant critique of Roman Catholic merit theology back onto ancient Judaism.5

His method was to survey the Tannaitic literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha for a common “pattern of religion,” which he defined as how a religion “is understood to admit and retain members,” not what an adherent does day to day but “how getting in and staying in are understood.”6 From this survey he concluded that Second Temple Judaism followed a pattern he called “covenantal nomism,” stated as eight propositions:

(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 requirement 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.7

On this reading, obedience to the law does not earn entry into the covenant, which rests entirely on God’s electing grace; obedience is instead the means by which a Jew already in the covenant by grace stays in it, with the law’s own provisions for atonement covering failures short of apostasy.8

Paul’s polemic as christological, not anthropological

Sanders argued that Paul’s opposition to the law did not arise from a conviction that fallen humanity could not keep it, or that even trying to keep it was itself sinful. Instead Paul reasoned from solution to plight: having concluded that Christ was savior of all, Paul then concluded that all needed saving, and so the law could not have been able to save.9 Sanders held that “righteousness by faith alone” was consequently not the center of Paul’s own thought; missing that point, he wrote, one misses “the significance of the realism with which Paul thought of incorporation in the body of Christ, and consequently the heart of his theology.”10 Two other convictions governed Paul’s theology instead: “the fact that Jesus Christ is Lord” and his “calling as apostle to the Gentiles.”11 On this account, Paul’s argument in Galatians has little to do with “whether or not humans, abstractly conceived, can by good deeds earn enough merit to be declared righteous at the judgment,” and everything to do with “the condition on which Gentiles enter the people of God.”12 Sanders held that Paul’s polemic targeted the requirement that Gentiles keep the Mosaic law to become “true ‘sons of Abraham,’” not any Jewish legalism, so the question at stake was who may enter the people of God, not how an individual sinner is declared righteous.13

Sanders extended this account of Paul in Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (1983).14

Historical Significance

Hassler describes Paul and Palestinian Judaism as “widely considered the watershed moment that led to the formation of the New Perspective on Paul, creating a paradigm shift in Pauline studies.”15 N. T. Wright and James D. G. Dunn, its two most prominent developers, both credited Sanders directly. Wright wrote that “since the publication in 1977 of Ed Sanders’ Paul and Palestinian Judaism, the fat has been in the fire,” because “Sanders argued, basically, that the normal Christian, and especially Protestant, readings of Paul were seriously flawed because they attributed to first-century Judaism theological views which belonged rather to medieval Catholicism.”16 Dunn likewise credited Sanders with breaking the older mold of Pauline scholarship “altogether by showing how different these reconstructions are from what we know of first-century Judaism from other sources.”17

Even scholars broadly sympathetic to the shift Sanders set in motion judged his own account of Paul weaker than his account of Judaism. G. B. Caird’s 1978 review called the book’s second half a disappointment: “The chief disappointment of this fascinating book is that the expectations raised by the first part are not fulfilled by the second.”18 Wright himself judged Sanders’s treatment of Paul “in some ways curiously unsystematic and incomplete,” adding that “one of the ironies in Sanders’s position is that he has never really carried through his reform into a thorough rethinking of Paul’s own thought.”19 Dunn wrote that Sanders had “failed to take the opportunity his own mould-breaking work offered,” so that his “presentation of Paul is only a little better than the one rejected.”20

Reformed evangelical scholarship has responded to Sanders’s thesis on two fronts. O’Kelley’s dissertation argues that even granting Sanders’s portrait of Second Temple Judaism as grace-based, it has no bearing on the categories that actually defined justification during the Reformation, since sola fide was never distinguished from Rome by a simple grace-versus-works antithesis but by the doctrine of an alien righteousness answering a divine demand for perfect obedience.3 Other scholarship has questioned whether covenantal nomism accurately describes all of the Second Temple sources it claims to synthesize. Timmer’s study of the Qumran Community Rule (1QS) argues that Sanders’s “getting in” and “staying in” categories have “the same undesirable effect on 1QS that Procrustes’ bed had on its oversized occupants,” since the document ties obedience to reward in a way that requires a “merit” aspect Sanders’s model does not allow for.21

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Wikipedia, s.v. “E. P. Sanders,” accessed 2026-09-03, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._P._Sanders. No library-held source treats Sanders’s own biography as its subject; this article’s theological content is sourced independently of Wikipedia throughout. ↩ ↩2

  2. Aaron Thomas O’Kelley, “Introduction,” in “A Historical-Theological Critique of the New Perspective on Paul” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 1. ↩

  3. O’Kelley, “Introduction,” 23. ↩ ↩2

  4. E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), xii, quoted in O’Kelley, “Introduction,” 10. ↩

  5. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 57, quoted in O’Kelley, “Introduction,” 11. ↩

  6. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 17, quoted in O’Kelley, “Introduction,” 11-12. ↩

  7. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 422, quoted in O’Kelley, “Introduction,” 12. ↩

  8. O’Kelley, “Introduction,” 12. ↩

  9. O’Kelley, “Introduction,” 12-13. ↩

  10. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 434, quoted in Andrew Michael Hassler, “Introduction,” in “Justification and the Individual in the Wake of the New Perspective on Paul” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 11. ↩

  11. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 442, quoted in Hassler, “Introduction,” 11. ↩

  12. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 497, quoted in Hassler, “Introduction,” 11. ↩

  13. E. P. Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), 18-19, quoted in Hassler, “Introduction,” 11. ↩

  14. O’Kelley, “Introduction,” 14 n.36. ↩

  15. Hassler, “Introduction,” 10. ↩

  16. N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 114, quoted in O’Kelley, “Introduction,” 16. ↩

  17. James D. G. Dunn, “The New Perspective on Paul,” in The New Perspective on Paul, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 103, quoted in Hassler, “Introduction,” 10 n.36. ↩

  18. G. B. Caird, review of Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion, by E. P. Sanders, Journal of Theological Studies 29 (1978): 542, quoted in Hassler, “Introduction,” 11 n.39. ↩

  19. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said, 189, quoted in Hassler, “Introduction,” 11 n.39. ↩

  20. Dunn, “The New Perspective on Paul,” 103, quoted in Hassler, “Introduction,” 11 n.39. ↩

  21. Daniel C. Timmer, “Variegated Nomism Indeed: Multiphase Eschatology and Soteriology in the Qumranite Community Rule (1QS) and the New Perspective on Paul,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 52, no. 2 (June 2009): 353. ↩