The New Perspective on Paul “Big 3″: E. P. Sanders [Crash Course 2]

Ed Parish (E. P.) Sanders, the author of Paul and Palestinian Judaism, is one of the “Big 3” proponents of NPP. His book was complete in 1975, but due to the controversial nature of the book, wasn’t published until 1977 [1].

Sanders’ book became the catalyst to the early developments of NPP because it drew the attention of many other scholars. In the book, he argues that the traditional Christian understanding of Paul’s argument against Rabbinic Judaism was wrong because they misunderstood not only Rabbinic Judaism, but Paul’s thought as well. Sanders’ book has the intention of “setting the record straight” so that Paul can be interpreted correctly. The book became foundational to NPP, and is still to this day on of the most influential works in the early developing stages of NPP.

What I would like to do here is take a look into the mind of E. P. Sanders and see if he is a neutral scholar and historian, examining the facts and drawing conclusions after the facts, or if he has an agenda that underlies all of his work, affecting his conclusions, giving cause to selective usage of the facts.

I would like to draw your attention to the Journal of Philosophy and Scripture Volume 2, Issue 2, Spring 2005. In this issue of the journal, Sanders is being interviewed. Interviews generally reveal a lot about the interviewee. So, let’s take a look at what we can learn about E. P. Sanders that may be able to shed some light on his presuppositions and motivation for his pioneering work in NPP.

“I’m a person of very limited brain, and I’m going to read Paul in light of what I have studied and what I know—i.e., Palestine in the first century and especially first century Judaism.” – E. P. Sanders

“The great thing about saying that you accept a figure or that you accept a text…is that you can choose which bits and pieces you will make use of and ignore the bits and pieces that you don’t want to make use of. So, that’s the way it is with appropriating Paul: I can say that I accept the entire Paul, while only taking bits of Paul.” – E. P. Sanders

“Readers have been appropriating him into their own contexts since at least the Epistle of James (which misunderstood him!). The epistle says [in argument with Paul], “Faith without works is dead.” But Paul was entirely in favor of good works. The works he had in mind, against which he was polemicizing in Galatians and Romans, were those works that make you Jewish and distinguished you from Gentiles. So, the author of James takes it that Paul is against works, i.e., good deeds. Paul loved good deeds! He recommends them to people all the time. But if you take his statement, “righteousness by faith, not by works,” out of its context—the question whether or not Gentile converts need to be circumcised—if you take it out of that context and put it in another context, I always kind of shudder at this. But it makes me go through life shuddering! I shudder when James does it, I shudder when Luther does it, I shudder when a more modern person than Luther does it. But I take these to be my own limits rather than the fault of everybody else.” – E. P. Sanders

“I think Paul basically felt what most of us think: that the whole world ought to be like we are. Then everything would be fine. He thought the whole world should be like he was. He recommends himself as the model to his churches in letter after letter. If you go through his letters looking for the first-person (“I do it this way”), you always find the implied imperative (“this is the way you ought to do it”). So, his universalism is patterned on his own conversion experience: “Of course you’re suffering. Suffering is good, Christians suffer. Christ suffered. Prophets suffer. Look at me, I suffer. So, you should suffer. What’s your problem?” His view of what people should be is highly autobiographical. I don’t know how that actually plays—this autobiographical side of Paul, this “Do things the way I do!”—in a multicultural situation.” – E. P. Sanders

“Christians started persecuting people who were not Christians, and then they started persecuting one another for being the wrong kind of Christian. So, I would say there’s a kind of anti-universalism in the Biblical tradition. It accepts universalism, but only if everyone would be like the dominant group.” – E. P. Sanders

- Did you catch all that? This guy is heralded as a leading NT scholar and he thinks that even James, or the author of James (denies James authorship), misunderstood Paul. Sanders is placing himself above the biblical authors by saying that James misunderstood Paul. Sanders also admits that he just takes bits and pieces of texts, using what fits his scheme and discarding what contradicts it. This doesn’t sound like sound scholarship to me, it has the stench of postmodern, liberal, humanistic, BAD scholarship. Is Sanders pursuing the truth, or is he just trying to become popular and sell books?

“It’s very hard for me to think that the human mind actually can comprehend absolute, ultimate truth that can somehow be true through all circumstances over thousands of years.” – E. P. Sanders

- E. P., Has the earth been round for thousands of years? Have human beings always had to eat to survive? Do human beings require the inhalation of oxygen? This is foolish talk, and it’s coming from one of the most prominent NT scholars of our day! What an idiot!

“I think if there is an absolute Truth, an absolute Good, or an absolute Beauty out there somewhere, we would never know it.” – E. P. Sanders

- That sure sounds like an absolute truth to me. How do you know that? This pessimistic epistemological nightmare is suicide to intelligent thought. The incoherence of such statements as these are just thrown around in our day, and people admire it! They sit back and listen to the deceptive talk and respond by saying: ooh, how intellectual he is.

“The devil is in the details; the devil is in the application of ideas. And I don’t think anything helps us with it. I don’t think there’s some sort of truth that helps us with these things, that helps us know how to apply things.” – E. P. Sanders

- Ding! Ding! Ding! Natural Theology alert! Sanders humanism is beginning to flow. Out of curiosity though, how did he learn of the devil? If the devil is introduced in Scripture, but no sort of truth is needed to help us know how to apply things, I wonder how he came up with that absolute statement he just made.

“It’s a dogma—that all the parts of the Bible agree with each other—that simply kills study. The mind studies by comparison and contrast, and if you eliminate contrast from its tools, you’re sunk.” E. P. Sanders

- In the name of study he dismisses dogma. How dogmatic of him!

“People, as far as I know, who believe in transcendence—true transcendence—believe in revelation. And that somehow the revelation that gets into the human mind is not corrupted by it, that it stays over and above. But I think that’s impossible. I think that whatever one makes of revelation, it’s still apprehended by people, and people all have their limitations.” – E. P. Sanders

- Just ignore everything sanders ever says about the New Testament, because according to him, it’s all corrupted by his mind anyway. But why does he say all this? From the following quotes, it becomes clear that Sanders intentions are to elevate himself to a position of authority in order to govern what is taught in the church. Sound ridiculous? Let’s see.

“I think that my view is that the use of the Bible is long, slow, and tedious, and it would never work if you had to give a sermon every Sunday. You can’t analyze a biblical passage from the ground up every week.” – E. P. Sanders

- So, in other words: buy my books pastors and teachers, I’ll provide you with solid objective neutral scholarship that will tell you what to preach. You don’t have the time to research these things yourself. I do. I’m a scholar. I taught at Duke. I’m a fellow of the British Academy! I have a D.Litt from Oxford! That’s higher than a PhD! That degree is only issued on the basis of a long record of research and publication! My research shows conspicuous ability and originality and constitutes a distinguished and sustained achievement! You on the other hand, have to preach every Sunday. Your education is limited; inferior to mine. Notice how I abbreviate my first and middle name!

“I think all users of the Bible or any other ancient text do basically the same thing, except historians who try not to (but who doubtless nevertheless sometimes do it too)—viz., read a text as what it seems to them to mean rather than what it would have seemed to someone at the time to mean.” – E. P. Sanders

- I’m a distinguished historian! I spent months in Israel studying the rabbinic literature. You don’t know how to read the text. I’ll read it for you, filter it through postmodern liberalism, add a twist of humanism for flavor, you know, to kill the theological aftertaste, and before you can say “Paul and Palestinian Judaism” 6 times fast, I’ll have your religion so far off track from it’s beginning that it’ll be a religion all to it’s own. We can call it the emerging church!

“The question I always have is whether or not I think anyone except a historian should deal with an ancient text.” – E. P. Sanders

- At least you know I’m not knocking down a straw man!

“So I think the difference is between, on the one hand, an individual reading that asks, “What does this say to me?”—which seems to me perfectly natural and wholesome—and, on the other hand, using bits from the Bible deliberately to build a system that is basically contrary to some of the principles of the Bible.

… I’m going through life with this gap very strongly in my mind, it becomes difficult for me to listen to sermons because I keep thinking of what this meant at its time. And the proper business of the clergyman is to make sense of what this could mean for us today. That’s his job, and as I said, he doesn’t have time to work the issue out from the ground up, to go back to its origin and march forward. So, we all end up lifting bits from the Bible or other ancient sources and using them as it seems best to us, and I don’t think that this is evil.” E. P. Sanders

- Again, let me do it for you. You don’t have the time. Unsaved heathen heretic historians will find it difficult to sit through sermons if you don’t buy my book and repeat my forked-tongue interpretations. I think I’m allergic to logic. What is evil?

“I don’t think Calvin was evil to read the Bible and derive from it the majesty of God, which led him from point to point so that he built up this enormous and wonderful structure (with somewhat biblical roots). But this sometimes ends up departing quite widely from what’s in the Bible. I think it’s a question of the quality of the person who does this.” – E. P. Sanders

- As a Calvinist, I’m offended! Just kidding, I’m not, offended, that is. I think Sanders made a very good observation though. Read the last line in the previous quote: I think it’s a question of the quality of the person who does this.

- This last section provides the question that the interviewer asked. Try and determine if E. P. Sanders is just doing scholarly research like he says, or if he’s attempting to Pope-ify himself and sell you his books. Warning: if you experience serious side effects from humanism, you may want to scroll down and skip this section, because the following humanistic vomit is about to spew.

JPS: Could one say that to the degree to which someone who does devote the time and energy to looking at the sources and going back to the historical circumstances in order to fully explicate what was going on at that time that produced these texts, the degree to which she is able to separate herself from a certain philosophy or theology or any imposed interpretation, the degree to which all that is successful—to that degree will more or better possibilities be opened up for philosophical and theological interpretations that are applicable today? In other words, if the preacher who doesn’t have the time to do the historical work can read someone who has had the time…

EPS: Yes, that’s the way it ought to work.

This is entirely a humanistic assessment. What are the consequences? How profoundly was it done? What are the points that are made? And so on. One of the things I wish I could live long enough to write a book on (but I won’t) could be called the “humanistic evaluation of religion.” It has a history: it comes out of Greece and follows the theory of a guy named Euhemerus, who thought that the Greek gods were all humans who had simply become glamorized and glorified with the passing of years. Therefore [according to Euhemerism], the study of Greek religion is something that should be entirely humanistic, because the gods were anthropomorphically conceived. So, you would be evaluating what the benefits are to humans.Then there’s Philo of Alexandria, who asks why Judaism is better than paganism. And of course in part it’s because it’s revealed by the only true God. He’s got a theological view, but his most telling arguments are humanistic. Judaism produces better human beings. “We are sincere,” he argues; “in our purification rituals we are really purifying ourselves, whereas in pagan purification rituals they’re not really purifying themselves.” It’s entirely based around things like sincerity, avoiding hypocrisy, the love of humanity instead of the hatred of humanity, etc. The entire evaluative process is humanistic; it is the notion that human values are those that really count. Philo used that to evaluate his own religion, and found it to be excellent! I think that is very interesting, and I like it. I believe in it. So, I will now confess to you what I think, which is that some people use the Bible out of context and the results are wonderful, and some people use it out of context and the results are awful. My criterion is humanism; the question is whether or not interpretations benefit people.There was the anti-humane move toward dogma, which got Christianity into all sorts of difficulties, I think. You stop worrying about the welfare of humans, because all you’re worried about is their souls. So, if they suffer in this life, that’s fine. And if they have the wrong idea, and you have to torture or kill them, that’s fine because their souls will then be saved—or there’s a chance, if they would only confess! Dogma turned out to justify extremely anti-humane treatment of people. I think that’s a very bad point in Christianity. I much prefer the ancient (and modern) humane evaluation of religion. – E. P. Sanders

- Conclusion: E. P. Sanders is like the guy in front of a supermarket soliciting some irrelevant petition to promote some liberal cause. He’s perched in front of the automatic doors, knowing that you have to pass to enter, and that’s where he gives you his quick pitch. Sometimes, if it sounds interesting, or you’re trying to be polite, you may actually stop to listen. I have. But the more you listen to what he’s saying, the less interest you seem to have. It’s different than the Salvation Army nun, ringing a bell with a bucket. You just drop a quarter in and go about your business. Sanders, on the other hand, requires much more than a measly quarter. He demands your eternal soul. The consequences of following his lead are profound. You see, all these shenanigans fuel his addiction to the excitement of reconstructing Paul. The excitement leads to surprise in his discoveries. But the ultimate surprise will be the realization of eternal separation from God, which will come to all those outside of Christ. This unbiased, objective blog-ography of E. P. Sanders presents a look into one of the “Big 3” of NPP. If you feel that this blog-ography is biased and subjective, then that’s OK. You just need to pick the parts you like and discard what contradicts. It doesn’t mean anything anyway. It’s just your perspective, which is wrong because it misunderstands 21^st century Reformed Christianity in Anaheim. I’ll write a book for you to buy that documents the Disneyland characters influence on Anaheim culture. Buy it for $27.99 and get a free banner for your blog. OK, I’m having too much fun with this. See you next time when we take a peek into the mystery and influence of “Big 3” #2: James (D. G.) “Jimmy” Dunn.