How do we read Paul? Is he writing to Jews who tried to earn their way into the covenant by keeping the law? Or did the Jewish thinking of his day believe that the mercy and grace of God gave them entrance? If the latter, the role of the law, then, was to give evidence of their life within the covenant, not to earn the right to enter it.

The prevailing approach, at least for most Protestant scholarship since the Reformation, has been to read Paul as addressing Jews who wanted to earn their way in through the law. This assumption has been challenged in recent years, principally through the writings of Prof. James D. G. Dunn. This came out in his two-volume commentary on Romans, in several essays as well as his other books. In one of his essays he - inadvertently - coined the phrase for this approach as the "new perspective on Paul". He also observed that this is really not new nor is it a radical departure from the Reformation view.

Much of the new perspective rests upon the research and writing of Prof. E. P. Sanders. In his work from 1977, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, Sanders argues from his research for Jewish acceptance of grace. The law was not to get them in but to show evidence of being in. This does turn things around!

Sanders makes no claim for discovering this or for turning up new thought. He quotes a significant work done in 1920 by George Foote Moore who reached the same conclusion from a similar examination of the Jewish literature. Foote, in turn, shows how most Protestant scholarship of the 18th century acknowledged this. In fact both Moore and Sanders cite several rabbis who express dismay at the prevailing Protestant insistence of a legalist Jewish approach to God's righteousness. One Jewish scholar, R. Marcus, refers to the "wearying struggle" of trying to get Protestant scholars to acknowledge an unbiased view of Judaism.

Sanders examined all the significant Jewish literature of the time of Jesus - the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Tannaitic writings, and the apocrypha and pseudipigrapha. He sees a single conclusion they reach. What he writes about I Enoch, one of the more notable sources of rabbinic teaching expresses the thought. Sanders writes, "We find here that salvation depends on election [grace] and that what is necessary to maintain the elect state - to be righteous - is to maintain loyalty and obedience to God and his covenant [law]." (p. 362)

Sanders refers to another significant essay, this one by F. Weber in 1880, who accepted the more usual view on Judaism of Paul's day, that of legalism. Although Weber's scholarship is not as thorough as Sanders' or Moore's, his views continue to hold the thinking of most Pauline scholars today.

What is at stake in this new perspective? Let me mention two issues - one that is thought to be there but isn't, and one that is inherent but usually overlooked.

The first, that is thought to be there but isn't, is the thought that the new perspective brings with it a weakened view of the atonement. Some have concluded that a view of salvation which includes keeping the law goes part and parcel with the new perspective. This would be what is known as a semi-Pelagian view. But it is not there. The supposed connection comes from the Jews keeping the law as sign of being in the covenant. But it doesn't follow that the scholars believe that for us today. Dunn, for example, is crystal clear on justification by faith, just as Luther taught it. He just doesn't concur with Luther on Jewish assumptions of Paul's day.

The second implication, the one that has my rapt attention and the one that gets overlooked, is the removal of any reason not to include Gentiles. Turing that sentence to a positive statement makes the compelling mission clear: Since there is no requirement for Jew or anyone else entering the Kingdom, since God justifies the ungodly, since 1.5 billion ungodly people live beyond the hearing of the Gospel, they ought to have the same opportunity that we have had. All the ungodly of the world ought to be invited to enter God's Kingdom through the cross, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And the church should go as witnesses to the ends of the earth.

Rev. Tad de Bordenave
Founding Director, Anglican Frontier Missions