The Misunderstood Apostle

A revolution in New Testament studies has challenged traditional understandings of Paul’s critique of Judaism.

Today if a seminary graduate of the late 1970s were to take a refresher course in Pauline theology, he or she would find new questions being posed—and some unexpected solutions being offered.

The most significant area of reinterpretation has been of Paul’s theology of the law and the Jewish people. A decade ago an evangelical scholar could describe the Jewish background for Paul’s statements about the law with the words: “For the Jews the law was the pre-eminent means of salvation.” Nearly everyone would have agreed. Today many would call that statement a gross caricature of Paul’s Jewish background and a misleading assumption for understanding Paul.

What has happened in the meantime? The story begins with the 1977 publication of E. P. Sanders’s detailed study, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Fortress). Sanders, who formerly taught at Oxford but will begin teaching at Duke this fall, presented formidable evidence from rabbinic and other Jewish literature that first-century Judaism was a “covenantal nomism” in which salvation was understood to be granted by grace, not according to a righteousness based on merit-earning works.

Law keeping was understood by Jews to be the proper response to God’s initiating grace. It was necessary for staying within the bounds of the covenant. But keeping the law was not the covenant entrance requirement or a means of salvation. For this the Jews relied on God’s electing grace by which he had made Israel his covenant people.

While Sanders was not the first to set out this perspective on first-century Judaism (G. F. Moore and Jewish scholars had done so before him.), he presented it with new and compelling force. His extensive arguments and documentation, his frontal attack on a long-standing scholarly assumption, and his proposal for understanding Paul against this background caught the attention of the scholarly world. By the early 1980s Sanders’s work was generally becoming recognized as a landmark in Pauline studies. In 1983 Sanders published a follow-up work, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (Fortress), further clarifying his understanding of Paul.

Reassessing Paul

In the past, conservative scholars read Paul to be saying that Judaism, having misunderstood the gracious nature of God’s covenant with Moses, perverted it into a system of attaining righteousness by works. Paul exposes the Jewish dilemma as either succeeding in keeping the law—and falling prey to the sin of boasting—or failing to keep the law and being condemned for the transgressions. Paul’s negative statements regarding the law, therefore, do not refer to the law as a revelation of God’s will, but to Jewish misunderstanding and misuse of the law.

The new perspective claims that we have misunderstood Judaism and consequently distorted Paul’s criticism of the Jewish religion. It also tries to show how Paul arrived at his conclusions.

A major premise behind these claims is that Paul did not arrive at faith in Christ through being dissatisfied with the law or frustrated by an inability to keep it. He was not hounded by the demands of the law, burdened by a sense of guilt and so psychologically primed for conversion. He was a man of robust conscience and confident of his standing before God. Most scholars today recognize that the key to Paul’s theological perspective lies in his Damascus Road encounter with Christ.

According to Sanders, Paul’s Damascus Road experience entailed a giant leap that left his theology in disarray. Against the backdrop of Jewish covenantal nomism, Paul, the converted rabbi, wrestled with a dilemma posed by two central convictions: God gave the law and it is good, but Jews and Gentiles are saved only by faith in Christ.

Paul’s statements regarding the law, Sanders argues, were derived not from analyzing the human dilemma and then concluding that Christ is the solution, but the other way around. In his theologizing, Paul starts with the solution (Christ) and then proposes the problem. The result is a series of statements about the law that, taken as a whole, are unsystematic and at times inconsistent. Sanders explains that Paul, in the course of his ministry, produced an assortment of arguments to support his views and meet the needs of the hour. But these arguments were not the true reasons for his own commitment to Christ and his Christian understanding of the law.

Sanders criticizes Luther and his successors who have interpreted the Judaism of Paul’s day as if it were a first-century Semitic form of medieval Catholicism. He finds no instance of Paul objecting to Judaism on the grounds that it encourages men and women to earn merit before God. Paul does not reject the law because keeping it leads to boasting or because its requirements are unattainable. After all, Paul states that as a Jew he had no trouble keeping the law (Phil. 3:6; Gal. 1:14). He reckons the righteousness of the law worthless because he has found something far superior—Christ (2 Cor. 3:4, 18; Phil. 3:3–11). Paul’s chief objection to Judaism is that it rejects Christ.

But, Sanders argues, a secondary line of thinking also guides Paul’s critique of the law within Judaism. Christ—the universal Lord—has commissioned Paul as apostle to the Gentiles, and Paul has come to understand that law keeping stands as an obstacle to the salvation of the Gentiles. The law, a peculiarly Jewish institution that relies on Israel’s privileged election, has been done away in Christ. Now Paul preaches salvation to Jews and Gentiles on equal terms—faith in Christ.

Evangelical interpreters of Paul as well as others who hold the mind of the apostle in high regard have been unwilling to accept this or any other proposal that reduces Paul’s theology of the law to a collection of ad hoc statements without logical consistency. Isn’t it possible that while Paul’s arguments may not reflect his original reasons for arriving at his conclusions, they may nevertheless be logical and coherent?

Some have pointed out that one of the most puzzling aspects of Sanders’s Paul is that he ends up disavowing a pattern of religion (“covenantal nomism”) that is remarkably similar to what many have understood to be Paul’s Christian understanding of grace and good works (salvation by grace with works as the evidence of that grace). Was Paul’s rejection of Judaism arbitrary, or did he have a fundamental and consistently reasoned objection to Judaism other than simply its rejection of Christ?

Works Of The Law

A more recent proposal for understanding Paul and the law has come from James Dunn, professor of divinity at the University of Durham. In his two-volume commentary on Romans (Word), Dunn has fine tuned Sanders’s basic insights and pursued a solution that promises to expose the cutting edge of Paul’s critique of Judaism. At the same time he reveals a logic that integrates Paul’s positive and negative statements about the law.

Dunn claims to have discovered something that Sanders, and other interpreters through the centuries, have missed: The Pauline phrase “works of the law” does not refer to Jewish striving after works righteousness. Instead, they are works performed in the service of the law by which members of the covenant people identify themselves as Jews and maintain their status within the covenant. Specifically, the “works of the law” are represented in circumcision, food laws, and Sabbath keeping—familiar Jewish practices in the ancient world that were widely recognized as marking off Jews from other people.

These boundary-defining features distinguished Israel in the flesh (Rom. 2:28) and encouraged Jews to boast in their national identity (Gal. 6:13). They were an obstacle to the extension of God’s grace to the nations through Christ. So when Paul says of the Jews that “they sought to establish their own righteousness” (Rom. 10:3), he is not speaking of a righteousness they have earned on their own but of a righteousness belonging to Jews in particular—to the exclusion of the Gentiles.

Dunn sees Paul’s criticism of Jewish religion as having a new edge. The issue at stake, particularly in Galatians, is not something generally true of religious men and women—a basic inability to fulfill all that the law requires and so achieve righteousness before God. The issue is that Jews define the people of God as those who keep the works of the law; their confidence is that by doing the works of the law they do all that the law requires. This is a specifically Jewish shortcoming that identifies God’s people by outward, physical, and nationalistic factors. In this they neglect all that the law requires (Gal. 3:10). That is, they neglect to live by the Spirit in faith and love. Because of this they fall under the curse of the law—a curse directed against those who exclude Gentiles from the blessings of the covenant by insisting on nationalistic boundary markers.

This line of argument leads Dunn to a surprising but perhaps inevitable conclusion. When Paul writes, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us” (Gal. 3:13), he is saying that Christ redeemed Jews from the curse that had befallen them for their narrow and wrong understanding of the law. Christ’s death has opened the blessings of the covenant to both Jews and Gentiles in the sense that Jews have been redeemed from the curse and Gentiles from the alienating effects of that curse. The blessings of Abraham are now opened to all in Christ.

Dunn finds this same critique of Jewish law keeping at work in Romans. In Romans 2, Paul gradually narrows the focus of his diatribe against Jewish presumption, climaxing his argument with the issue of circumcision. In 2:28–29, Paul indicts Jewish religion for its superficial understanding of the law, evident in its stress on the outward, physical, and visible aspects of the law, particularly circumcision. A true Jew is not identified by physical, visible, and ritual measures, but by the hidden working of the Spirit in the heart—a work that disregards fleshly boundaries between Jews and Gentiles.

The key phrase for understanding Paul’s critique of Judaism—“works of the law”—crops up in the third chapter of Romans (vv. 20, 28, and in the shorthand “works” in 3:27; 4:2, 6; 9:12, 32; 11:6). As in Galatians, it is a polemical term, honed to combat the presumption of devout Jews—the presumption that their covenant standing would preserve them on the day of judgment.

Dunn would undoubtedly maintain that the New International Version generalizes Paul’s meaning and misses the point by translating Romans 3:20: “Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law.” Rather, he translates it as, “For by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified before him.” Paul does not have in mind religious people in general who think that acts of piety and good works can earn merit before God. That, after all, was not the understanding of Jews, who relied on God’s grace, acknowledged the need for repentance, and depended on the means of atonement provided by the law.

But on a general front, would Paul have opposed works righteousness? Dunn would probably answer yes. Although Paul would define this grace in terms of Christ, his emphasis on salvation by grace rather than works would not fundamentally distinguish him from Jewish theologians. Paul, according to Dunn, maintained a continuity between the old and new covenants. His criticism of Judaism was focused on its exclusive understanding of election and the covenant.

Inasmuch as technical commentaries can be exciting reading, Dunn’s certainly is. The freshness of his proposal and his unflagging pursuit of the new perspective on Paul instills a sense of adventure and rediscovery of Paul’s mind and ministry. For this experience alone, serious readers will become convinced that this is not just one more commentary on Romans—it is a tour de force. But is it a correct rendering of Paul? Has a more traditional rendering of Paul been needlessly sacrificed at the altar of the new perspective? Is it possible that Judaism was not guilty of legalism in any sense of the word?

The Doing Of The Law

A dissonant voice in the debate is that of Stephen Westerholm of McMaster University in Ontario, whose Israel’s Law and the Church’s Faith (Eerdmans) offers a helpful overview and penetrating assessment of the new perspective, and a new solution to the problem of Paul and the law.

Westerholm agrees with the new-perspective insight that Judaism did not conceive of salvation as being earned by human achievement. But he qualifies this by adding that Judaism on the whole had a more optimistic view of the value of works and human initiative than did the converted Paul. Contrary to the new perspective, Westerholm maintains that grace and works did not play an identical role in both Judaism and Paul. Paul’s radical reassessment of the nature, function, and power of the law called for exclusive reliance on God’s grace and arose out of his encounter with the risen Christ. It was this exclusive reliance on grace that was foreign to Judaism.

Westerholm argues that in Paul’s usage, ‘Taw” (nomos) most frequently refers to the specific commandments given on Mount Sinai, not to an alleged Jewish perversion of the law. Paul finds in the Sinaitic legislation divine requirements that demand “doing,” but he concludes that life through the law has proven an unobtainable goal. Thus Paul’s critique of law keeping includes what Westerholm calls the “soft legalists” of Judaism, who believed God required them to obey the law out of covenantal love.

The principal sin of Jews was not self-righteousness—though this, too, is excluded by faith in Christ. Paul’s point was that human works of any kind cannot justify an individual before God. Since Christ has superseded the law, Paul has been forced to conclude that though the law promised life, it could not deliver it. But God’s Word does not fail; he must have planned this from the beginning. Hence Paul goes to some length in explaining the role of the law in God’s plan of redemption.

In the end, Westerholm argues, Paul proclaims a law-free gospel. Though Paul’s ethic may overlap with the law at significant points, it does not depend on the law for its prescriptions. Christian fulfillment of the law is like that of a master musician, who fulfills the intention of the rules imposed on novice musicians without always observing them. The decisive difference for Christians is the indwelling Spirit who serves as their moral guide and enabler.

Westerholm’s thesis is provocative and well argued, teasing out the broader theological perspective lying behind Paul’s response to the issues of the moment. He raises serious questions both for proponents of the new perspective and for those who hold more traditional views of Paul and the law. Time—and debate—will tell whether his attempt to reset the focus on legalism will hold.

Like the optical illusion that appears at one moment to be the outline of a rabbit and the next as a bird, the new perspective yields alternative configurations of Paul’s theology from the same data. Those who take Pauline studies seriously cannot avoid interacting with the new perspective, and responsible communicators of the Pauline gospel will certainly want to refine their understanding of the Jewish context of Paul’s mission. No matter what the conclusion, it will lead to a fresh understanding of Paul.

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