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Two vital ingredients go into the new perspective. The first is actually more a new perspective on Judaism than on Paul. It reacts against the traditional idea that Jews in Paul's day believed they could accumulate merit before God by their deeds. In place of seeing Paul's contemporaries as legalistic, the new perspective says the concern in early Judaism was to maintain the identity of the Jewish nation, especially through observing the Sabbath, circumcising their newborns, and eating kosher. These boundary markers or badges of identity for the Jewish nation distinguished them as belonging to God's covenant people.

Second, this understanding of first-century Judaism is then applied to Paul. According to the new perspective, Paul is only focusing on these aspects of Jewish life (Sabbath, circumcision, food laws) when he mentions "works of the law." His problem isn't legalistic self-righteousness in general. Rather, for Jews these works of the law highlighted God's election of the Jewish nation, excluding Gentiles. Called by God to reach the Gentiles, Paul recognizes that Jews wrongly restricted God's covenant to themselves.

Paul extends these insights to church relations. Just as Jews wrongly restricted God's covenant, so also Jewish Christians wrongly insisted that Gentile Christians needed to observe the law to be full-fledged disciples. This led to the challenge that Paul issued to Peter at Antioch (Gal. 2:11-14). How could Peter withdraw from table fellowship with the Gentiles there? Surely such an action was inconsistent with the truth of the gospel.

These two points are the product of a flurry of literature in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The new perspective on Judaism was argued for largely by E. P. Sanders in his Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977). Sanders was particularly concerned about anti-Jewish tendencies in the old perspective and its portrayal of Judaism as inferior to Christianity. Sanders's aim was to present a cleaned-up picture of early Judaism, untainted by Christian prejudice. He argued that both pre-Christian Judaism and its successor, rabbinic Judaism, had just as strong an emphasis on grace as Pauline Christianity did. Election was central to Judaism, as was God's redemption of his people from Egypt. Observing the law merely kept Jews in the covenant established by God.

Scholars received Sanders's work as a major contribution to Jewish studies. But it fell rather flat when applied to Pauline scholarship. So N. T. Wright and James D. G. Dunn, along with Sanders, attempted to integrate this new view of Judaism more successfully with a new view of Paul. They focused on "exclusivism," the sense of national righteousness maintained by practices such as Sabbath-observance, circumcision, and keeping kosher. Paul, the new perspective argued, dedicated himself to warning against exclusivist national righteousness. God was bringing people from all nations to believe in the Messiah.

Almost all scholars, new and old, agree that Paul answers the problem of "works of the law" with "faith." But if the new perspective has shifted how we understand works of the law, then the meaning of faith—or at least the emphasis of it—needs to shift as well. In the old perspective, faith means trust in God's mercy alone, not in human acts of righteousness. In the new perspective, faith is a badge, or identity marker, which can be shared by all, Jew and Gentile.

The new perspective does not necessarily deny the traditional meaning of faith, but rather finds its focus elsewhere. Faith remains central to Paul's doctrine of justification, because it means that Gentiles do not need to become Israelites when they become Christians. According to the new perspective, Paul accentuates this point in the early chapters of his letter to the Romans.

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August 2007, Vol. 51, No. 8