E. P. Sanders

E. P. Sanders (1937–2022)

Ed Parish Sanders was born on April 18, 1937, in Grand Prairie, Texas, and raised in Texas and Louisiana, the son of a Methodist family. He took his first degree at Texas Wesleyan College and went on to study at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University, where he was formed in the liberal Protestant tradition he would spend his career quietly unsettling. He was ordained a Methodist minister, a vocation that never became the center of his working life, though the questions it raised never left him. His doctoral work took him to Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he earned his Th.D. in 1966 under the supervision of the Pauline scholar W. D. Davies, whose own work on Paul and rabbinic Judaism set the problem Sanders would later transform. A year of study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1963–64 gave him something the Protestant seminaries of his youth had largely withheld: direct, sustained encounter with Jewish texts and the Jewish world in which Jesus and Paul had lived.

His first academic post was at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, where he taught from 1966 to 1984 and where the work that made his name took shape. In 1984 he moved to Oxford as Dean Ireland's Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture and a fellow of Queen's College, a chair once held by some of the most distinguished names in English biblical scholarship. He remained at Oxford until 1990, then became Arts and Sciences Professor of Religion at Duke University, where he taught until his retirement in 2005. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy and received the Grawemeyer Award in Religion in 1990. Ontario, Oxford, and North Carolina: the pattern is that of a scholar who belonged less to any single church than to the guild of historians reading ancient texts on their own terms.

That posture was the point. Sanders regarded himself as a historian and not a theologian, and he said so repeatedly. He was impatient with scholarship that used the first century as a screen on which to project later Christian anxieties, and especially with the long habit of defining early Christianity by contrast with a caricatured Judaism, a religion supposedly of anxious works-righteousness from which Paul or Jesus delivered humanity. He had inherited that picture from his own seminary education and from a century of respected Protestant and German scholarship, and he came to believe it was simply wrong as history. It was an uncomfortable conclusion for a man trained within the very tradition that had produced the caricature, and it carried real professional cost. His arguments were met in some quarters with open hostility, and he was accused of undermining the Reformation reading of Paul, an accusation he did not accept but could not entirely dissolve.

He wrote prolifically but lived without drama. Those who knew him describe a plain-spoken Texan, given to dry humor, wary of pomp, and more interested in the evidence than in the argument it might win him. He was reluctant to speak of his own faith. He once remarked that he was not a believer in any simple sense, yet he never wrote with contempt for those who were, and his scholarly care for Judaism and for early Christianity alike was marked by a quality of respect that critics on both sides sometimes found frustrating. He did not seek disciples and distrusted the movement that grew up around his name.

Sanders died on November 21, 2022, in the United States, after a career in which a single argument, patiently documented, altered the terms of a field.

His Writing and Its Influence

Sanders began publishing in the late 1960s, and the books that followed arrived in a sequence that now reads as a single sustained argument. His first major work, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977), was a comparative study of religious patterns, and its method was as important as its conclusion. Sanders asked what Judaism in the centuries around Jesus actually taught about how a person enters and remains in relationship with God, and he answered from the sources themselves: the rabbinic literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the apocryphal and pseudepigraphal writings. What he found was not a religion of earning salvation by accumulated merit. He found a religion built on God's election and covenant, in which obedience was the proper response of those already within the covenant and not the price of admission. He gave this pattern a name, covenantal nomism, and the phrase entered the vocabulary of every serious student of the New Testament.

The consequences for the reading of Paul were considerable. If first-century Judaism was not legalistic in the way Protestant interpreters had long assumed, then Paul could not have been objecting to it for that reason, and the whole architecture of the Lutheran reading of Romans and Galatians needed rethinking. Sanders's own proposal, developed in that book and in Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (1983), was that Paul reasoned backward from the conviction that Christ was the savior of all, concluding that the law could not be the means of salvation because salvation came through Christ alone. Many scholars found this account of Paul's logic unsatisfying, and Sanders was candid that Paul remained, in places, difficult and not wholly consistent. The criticism was serious and continues; his reconstruction of Paul has been revised extensively. His correction of the picture of Judaism has largely stood.

He turned in 1985 to Jesus and Judaism, which placed Jesus firmly within the restoration hopes of Jewish eschatology and argued that the action in the Temple was the key to understanding his death. The Historical Figure of Jesus (1993) carried the same method to a general readership, with a restraint about what can and cannot be known that made it a model of its kind. His later Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE–66 CE (1992) described the religion of ordinary Jews in the Second Temple period through its sacrifices, festivals and purity customs, and not through its theology, and it remains a standard reference.

The influence on later scholarship was immediate and lasting. Sanders set the agenda for what came to be called the New Perspective on Paul, developed in different and sometimes divergent directions by James Dunn and N. T. Wright, and he provoked in turn a vigorous Reformed and Lutheran resistance that insists the older reading was not so easily dismissed. He also reshaped the relation of Christian scholarship to Judaism, making it harder to sustain a contrast in which Judaism served only as a foil. The reception has never been settled, and Sanders himself was never wholly at ease with the schools that formed around his work.

Who should read Sanders: Readers who want to understand the first century on its own terms, and who are prepared to have inherited assumptions about Judaism, Paul and the nature of grace examined rather than defended. He is especially valuable for pastors and students formed in traditions that treat the Reformation reading of Paul as self-evident. He is not a devotional writer and offers no spiritual guidance, and readers seeking confessional reassurance, or an account of Jesus that settles questions of faith, will not find it here.