Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
Perspective

Perspective

Last updated on: December 6, 2022 at 3:49 pm by Fred Clark

Perspective 2022-12-06T15:49:21-05:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

E.P. Sanders died last month at the age of 85.

Sanders was a New Testament scholar and not, strictly speaking, a historian, but his life’s work took place at the intersection of those disciplines. I think that work is something historians really need to attend to and to appreciate. E.P. Sanders changed our understanding of the New Testament by changing our understanding of history. He helped to correct a massive mistake in our (for limited values of “our”) historical understanding.

Here’s Mark Chancey on Sanders, for RNS:

From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, Sanders turned out a series of massive tomes, including “Paul and Palestinian Judaism,” “Jesus and Judaism,” and “Judaism: Practice and Belief 63 BCE–66 A.D.,” exploring the relationship between early Judaism and early Christianity. In his work and personally he forcefully called on fellow scholars to reject caricatures of Judaism and to immerse themselves more deeply in ancient Jewish sources.

… Of his 10 books, “Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion,” which appeared in 1977, proved to be the most influential. Earlier New Testament scholars had argued that Jews believed that people earned their salvation by piling up good deeds or works of the Jewish law, resulting in what Sanders referred to as “smug self-righteousness” or profound anxiety about their status before God. Judaism, in their view, was a dour religion slavishly devoted to legal minutiae.

Sanders’ own poring over Jewish sources, especially rabbinic texts, convinced him that such scholars had failed to examine them firsthand, drastically misinterpreted them or else willfully misrepresented them. He argued instead that ancient Jews understood Torah observance to be part of the Jews’ covenant relationship with a loving, merciful God. He was impressed by the “humanity and tolerance” of the rabbis, along with their “academic love of precision,” he wrote.

Sanders determined to offer a more accurate and fair-minded portrayal of the religion and “to destroy the (negative) view of Rabbinic Judaism which is still prevalent in much, perhaps most, New Testament scholarship.” … Sanders was not the first New Testament scholar to expose distortions of Judaism, but the sheer force and exhaustiveness of his argument proved particularly effective in drawing attention to the problem.

Sanders’ work is the basis for what has come to be called the “New Perspective” on Paul and on the world of first-century Judaism that shapes the New Testament context. The implications of this New Perspective — as I’ve written here before — are tectonic. That’s because the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of first-century Judaism wasn’t only the basis for the contemporary scholarship of most of Sanders’ NT Studies colleagues, it was the basis for a great deal of the theology of the Reformation.

If E.P. Sanders was right, then Martin Luther was, well, wrong. And it sure seems like Sanders was right.

Luther was neither a New Testament scholar nor a historian. He was an Augustinian monk dealing with a European church that was calcified and, in many ways, corrupt. And thus Luther read Paul as though Paul were also an Augustinian monk struggling against corrupt medieval Catholic bishops. As I wrote earlier, Luther recast Paul as:

… Paul the Reformer who was converted from his former life as Saul the medieval Catholic bishop, and first-century Judaism was recast as the embodiment of late-medieval Catholicism. [He] imagined that first-century Judaism was all about works righteousness instead of salvation by grace and so Paul was read as someone writing about a theological clash that coincidentally mirrored [his] own.

The evidence in support of Sanders’ position is formidable. This is why I think it helps to regard him as a historian as much as a New Testament scholar. The latter term conjures up an image of some professor sitting in his study, reading and re-reading the 27 short books of the New Testament, and scrupulously conjugating ancient Greek verbs. But Sanders’ work was based on his study of primary sources — of everything he could find written by and for and about first-century Judaism itself. And his interpretation of those primary sources was bolstered by a rich wealth of information that had been shamefully untapped by much of previous New Testament scholarship, which is to say that he learned about Judaism by actually talking to and studying with actual Jews.

That’s something Martin Luther might have benefitted from but never did. Luther wrote a great deal about Jews, but never listened to them or sought to understand them, and so what he wrote was not just inaccurate, but downright awful.

Worst than that. However bad you’re thinking it was, Luther’s writing on “the Jews” was worse than you’re imagining even if you’re already trying to account for the fact that it’s probably worse than you’re imagining. Martin Luther was a raging antisemite. His 1543 tract Von den Jüden und iren Lügen called for ethnic cleansing, conscription into forced labor, deportation, lethal violence, and the burning of synagogues. It’s toxic, venomous, evil stuff.

Luther’s naked, indefensible, disgraceful antisemitism is something we Protestant Christians have to contend with. We are Luther’s heirs, inheriting both the good and the (very, very, very) bad of his legacy. And so, over the ensuing centuries, we have tried to sort out the good from the bad, keeping the former while discarding the latter. We’ll treasure the 95 Theses and the commentaries, but reject Von den Jüden, excising it as an isolated and isolatable malignancy that can be neatly removed like some cancer the doctors caught in time.

Alas, it turns out it’s not so easy to compartmentalize the antisemitism of a man who did not himself compartmentalize it. Sanders’ work shows us, among other things, that Luther’s misrepresentation of den Jüden also pervades his commentaries on Romans and Galatians — pervades the whole of his theology. Unweaving those threads is — and will be — a lot harder than we’ve previously acknowledged.

This shouldn’t be surprising. This is, after all, is something else we inherited from the great theologians of the Protestant Reformation — an appreciation for the pervasive and comprehensive corruption of sin. The idea that the obviously untainted good bits of Luther’s theology might be easily set apart from the obviously tainted, bad bits is, itself, not easy to reconcile with the strongest insights of Luther’s theology (or of Calvin’s, or Augustine’s, or Paul’s).

This is grim and more than a bit daunting. And it’s not at all limited to our consideration (and necessary reconsideration) of the inheritance we receive from Martin Luther.

It would be nicer and easier, for example, if we Americans had a Declaration of Independence or a Constitution that hadn’t been bequeathed to us by slave-owners, or if the taint of that atrocity were somehow easily and simply excisable from those great legacies. But, alas, few things turn out to be so very nice and easy. (Glances over at the bookshelf containing a once-unreservedly revered copy of The Politics of Jesus and sighs heavily.)

As the heirs of Luther and Jefferson, etc., we have our work set out for us. As the Reformers taught us, that work will require and rely on grace, but that grace will not — despite what we pretend they’ve taught us — exempt us from the necessity of that work.

– – – – – – – – – – – – –

P.S.: You may note that I haven’t said anything at all here about statues. I’m mourning the passing of E.P. Sanders and celebrating the revelatory insights of his work (and of his approach to that work), but I haven’t been demanding that we erect statues in his honor. Nor have I been demanding that we tear down statues of Martin Luther.

It ain’t about statues. Or about names on buildings or plaques, placards, posters, or T-shirts. Those aren’t wholly irrelevant, but they’re a tertiary concern, at best — a distraction for procrastinators daunted by the difficult prospect of the work we have to do as the heirs of legacies pervasively tainted by evils we can scarcely bear to look at directly.

Nor is it about reputation — theirs or ours. And, let’s be candid, whenever we attempt to defend their reputation, what we’re really doing is defending our own. And — let’s be even more candid — when we focus on attacking their reputation, what we’re usually doing is also defending our own. Reputation isn’t a helpful category. It inevitably sends us off to ask and to answer the wrong questions.

“Opinion” isn’t a helpful framework to consider here either. I’m not trying to diminish your opinion of Martin Luther here any more than I’m trying to express my own. Luther composed and signed his name to Von den Jüden und iren Lügen and neither my opinion nor yours matters a whit compared to that. We can go ahead and try to place our thumbs on either side of the scales of history there and it won’t matter. Our thumbs aren’t that heavy and, in any case, this isn’t about our thumbs or where we choose to stick them.

Uncategorized

Previous Post

December 6, 2022

Postcards from the class & culture wars (12.6.22)

Next Post

December 7, 2022 12/7 Flashback: The base

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category class warfare evangelicals Iraq Left Behind Mammon music Uncategorized

Select a Month November 2026 October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Which prophet challenged the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Elisha Jonah Isaiah Elijah