There are many scholars whom we call “influential” in the narrow sense that they influenced our own thinking as scholars. There are also some “influential scholars” whose impact ripples on the level of a field at large, remembered as a name forever linked to this-or-that distinctive hypothesis, this-or-that manuscript find, this-or-that argument about dating, or some other sort of discrete yet lasting contribution.
The most influential thinkers, however, arguably achieve something different. They reshape a field to such a degree that it becomes difficult to remember how we ever thought otherwise. They do not just make a new argument or add a new piece of knowledge. They reframe some of the terms with which we analyze and argue. They shift some of the ground from which we discuss and debate. They give us new questions and new analytical frames.
And a few do even more: they take on the difficult work of clearing out the accumulation of lingering past debris, making possible in practice what then might seem to us (in the ease of retrospect) as an inexorable move toward “progress” or an inevitable “paradigm shift” to what might seem (again: in retrospect) to be the self-evidently teleological direction of the development of a field. To be influential in this sense is to reassess and thus to reorient. It is to make visible what was once habitual so that habits can be changed. It is to make new knowledge but also to reconfigure knowledge-making.
I do not think that it is hyperbole to suggest that E. P. Sanders should be counted in that category—perhaps even in more than one of the overlapping subfields in which he worked, but certainly for Second Temple Judaism.
I did not have the opportunity to study with Prof. Sanders. Nor did my own time teaching at McMaster University intersect with his. I do, however, work in his wake within a subfield whose structuring logics spin differently due to his interventions. I have benefited from all the efforts that he put in—over the course of decades!—to clear the way for what the study of Second Temple Judaism is now becoming: a subfield in which the Second Temple period is no less Jewish history than Christian prehistory; a subfield in which scholars trained in Jewish Studies are commonly read alongside scholars trained in the New Testament; a subfield in which we ask questions, not just about sects and beliefs, but also about people and practices; a subfield in which “Pharisee” is not a slur; a subfield in which we take the Temple as seriously as our ancient sources do; a subfield in which we take no less seriously that Paul was a Jew. And to the shifts that Sanders helped to make possible, we might add his modeling of how best to do so: he embodied the courage needed to resist the twin comforts of consensus and criticism, taking on the constructive work of synthesis.
Precisely because of how much Sander shaped what is increasingly taken for granted in the study of Second Temple Judaism, it strikes me as especially pressing to take a moment to make sure that we remember his impact on this subfield. When I heard the sad news of his passing, I found myself fretting about the possibility of forgetting. I thus found myself turning to re-read much of his oeuvre—and especially his monumental tome on Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE-66 CE (1992).[1]
The book is massive. And so too its impact, as one sees already in the first flurry of reviews. Judaism was the culmination of a series of books by Sanders, beginning nearly two decades earlier with his Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977).[2] These books are all data-driven, analytically sharp, and richly informed by specialist findings, while also engaging to read and written in an accessible manner. All of them say a lot about ancient Judaism. The rest, however, remained framed in terms most familiar from Christianity. Indeed, Jesus and Paul feature in most of their titles, even if sometimes the reader who opens up their pages might find themselves surprised to read so many pages discussing other ancient Jews instead. What’s remarkable about his 1992 Judaism, by contrast, is that it embodies what Sanders had been arguing in these other books too: even if one wishes to learn about Judaism foremost to understand Jesus or Paul, one cannot do so unless one understands ancient Jews on their own terms, not just through questions about Jesus, Paul, the New Testament, Christian Origins, or Christianity today.
Some of the early reviews seemed to bristle against this contention. Martin Hengel and Roland Deines, for instance, penned a 70-page review essay in which the focus falls almost wholly on Jesus![3] The review essay was largely positive but perhaps misses its point. That this point came through to other readers, however, is clear from the surprising number of reviews by scholars trained primarily in Jewish Studies—from Louis Feldman to Stanley Isser to Martin Goodman.[4]
Goodman, for instance, observed that “It is an extraordinary fact that nothing like thus has previously been written.”[5] And in an especially prescient insight, he stressed that Sanders’ Judaism “should be treated as the start, rather than the end, of a new era of research.”[6] By the second statement, he meant that the book served in part to help close the door on an era in which students and scholars of the New Testament, in particular, leaned heavily on Emil Schürer’s History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ and the approach it represented.[7] Today, it might strike us as strange that scholars in the 1970s thought it sufficed to revise a work that didn’t just bear this title but was first published in German in 1874.[8] And it might strike us as even stranger that scholars well into the 1990s did not question that a hundred years of new research could be fit into the same basic structure, simply revised with updates. After all, the century that separates the 1870s from the 1970s saw the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and countless archaeological finds but also major institutional shifts in the study of Second Temple Judaism, including with the entry of Jewish scholars as faculty in European universities, the founding of the State of Israel, and the establishment of Jewish Studies programs and departments across North America as well.
Sanders did much to update the scholarly discourse to fit these shifts, recognizing that mere revision would not suffice. On the one hand, he criticized many of the common habits and assumptions in the practice of studying Judaism within the ostensibly academic but fundamentally Christian frame of New Testament Studies as embodied by Schürer. On the other hand, Sanders worked to construct an alternative, writing synthetically in a manner that was equally comprehensive but framed around a different set of questions.
In earlier research, for instance, much effort was put into categorizing every known text or figure as “Pharisee,” “Sadducee,” or “Essene.” These, of course, are the “sects” that Josephus lists in his description of first-century Judaea. Since at least the 19th century, this list fed the scholarly penchant for splitting into “parties” (as we see also from that same era in the study of the early church, so influentially with F. C. Baur). The analytical habit of presuming that to explain is to categorize also extended to the partitioning of pre-Christian Judaism into discrete “-isms.” Henrich Graetz, for instance, framed his history as about “the Jewish people,” but he nevertheless extended and reinscribed the habit of telling the story of ancient Jews as a tale about “Pharisaism,” “Essenism,” etc. Among scholars of the New Testament, the temptation remained even stronger, not least due to its power to partition off “Pharisaic legalism” from the Jewish background of Jesus and Christianity, which was sometimes (as for R. H. Charles) distinguished as “apocalyptic Judaism” instead. So too even among some later scholars of Judaism, like Jacob Neusner, who described inner-Jewish diversity by speaking instead of “Judaisms” and centered these differences in specific literary collections or corpora thus analyzed as if distinct.
This is what Sanders resisted in his famous call to focus on our historical and analytical efforts on reconstructing “Common Judaism”—meaning “common” in two senses. He reread our sources with an eye to unity in diversity. But he also reoriented our reading-practices, away from the assumption that every single source or person mentioned in a source necessarily saw themselves as “Pharisee,” “Sadducee,” or “Essene.” Sanders focus, instead, on what we might know of the ordinary Jew living in the long first century CE under Roman rule.
This reorientation dovetailed with his call to heed “divine law” in the sense of the religiosity of everyday lived practice. Long before Cynthia Baker’s Jew, Daniel Boyarin’s Judaism, or Leora Batnizky’s How Judaism Became a Religion, Sanders stressed how “being Jewish meant living in a certain way… more a way of life than a doctrinal system,” [9] and he cautioned that “our word ‘religion’ does not have a precise ancient counterpart” because “there was no simple distinction between ‘church’ and ‘state’ or ‘religion’ and ‘politics.’”[10] For ancient Jews, “God… cared about all aspects of life; no part of it was outside ‘religion.’”[11]
Sanders called his book Judaism. But it is mostly about ancient Jews and what they did—including their cycles of everyday life, their festal and liturgical year, and their family and life-cycle experiences, no less than their eating, piety, and pilgrimage.[12] He asked about textiles and beards and hair-styles. He wrote about women and not just men. He attended to the home as well as the Temple.
What was striking at the time, as Goodman noted, was not just “the attempt to give the reader a chance to understand how ordinary [first-century] Jews thought and felt about their religion.”[13] Sanders’ investigated this question with “real empathy for those who practice a religion”[14]—with all the capacity for contradiction that entails in lived practice and in striking contrast to the older habit of assuming halakhic observance could only be felt as a burden.
Here too, what might seem obvious now was far from obvious at the time. Among scholars of New Testament, in particular, it was common to mine ancient Jewish literature for doctrines that might either presage or contrast with formative or core Christian beliefs. And hence the importance of Sanders’ insistence on centering questions of practice and thus legal sources and traditions—an intervention that had the additional effect of helping to reverse the longstanding scholarly habit whereby Second Temple Judaism was partitioned off from the history of Jews and treated as the background to the drama of “Christian Origins.”
To be sure, Sanders did not deny that there were Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes. What he doubted was that this distinction captures the entirety of “ancient Judaism”—in the sense of the ways of life, inclusive of devotion, practiced by ancient Jews. So too with apocalyptic ideas, which he resisted partitioning off from other expressions of Judaism. Some Jews cared about some issues more and less than other Jews. Some issues were more and less important to other Jews. Or, in other words: ancient Jews acted like we know that people act, including in the capacity to have a communal identity that encompasses difference and contains contradictions without shattering. Likewise, a certain Jewish text might focus on this or that topic, but Sanders reminded us that one text rarely exhausts even the interests of its particular author. Or, as he deftly explained: “I think that the description of first-century Judaism according to categories of surviving literature (apocalyptic, rabbinic, philosophical, mystical, or the like) is an error… we should not suppose that each collection corresponds to an isolated group of people who had no other ideas and who would have denounced other literary collections as belonging to a different ‘Judaism’… This is no less true of ancient people (for example, Paul and the author of Jubilees) than of modern (such as Isaac Newton…).”[15]
This statement is exemplary of the empathy Sanders consistently extended to first-century Jews in a field in which it was once common to treat Jews (both past and present) in dismissive if not abject terms. Sanders clearly liked “ordinary Jews”—and he said so! In his Epilogue, Sanders even proclaimed, “I rather like the Pharisees.” Even more surprisingly, especially for his time, he liked Sadducees too. “Modern scholars,” he noted, “both Jews and Christians, are inclined to see the temple system as corrupt, or detrimental to the people’s welfare, I think, because both represent movements that replaced it. We all like moral reform, and it is nice to see our spiritual ancestors as moral reformers.”[16] What he sought to recover, by contrast, is how the sources (taken on their own terms) suggest otherwise: “the populace was quick to protest any form of profanation of the Temple.”[17] From Aristeas to Philo to the Essenes, it seems that most Jews were “pro-Temple,” even if that commitment naturally came with critiques of its workings in practice.[18] What he noted—which further work has since confirmed, especially from the Dead Sea Scrolls—was the centrality of sacrifice, the Temple, and thus the priests as well. And why should we be surprised? In the ancient world, and not just among Jews, “religion was sacrifice”—as Sanders reminded us as well.
Of course, the success of any synthesis also comes with dangers. Another thing I noticed re-reading Sanders’ books is the degree to which his image of “Common Judaism” was later taken by some scholars of the New Testament as an end rather than a beginning, as a description rather than an invitation. But an invitation it still is. To honor Sanders, and remember his impact, is to be invited to resist the lazy comfort of repeating received narratives, rising from the indolent lean upon familiar points of consensus, testing what “is known” against the data of our primary sources and what we can know from them, to critique but also to construct.
[1] E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE-66 CE (London: SCM Press, 1992); page numbers are here cited from the 2016 Fortress reprint.
[2] E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977).
[3] Martin Hengel and Roland Deines, “E. P. Sander’s Common Judaism, Jesus, and the Pharisees,” Journal of Theological Studies 46 (1995) 1-70.
[4] E.g., Louis Feldman in Catholic Biblical Quarterly 55 (1993) 393; Stanley Isser in AJS Review 19 (1994) 252-54; Martin Goodman in Scottish Journal of Theology 47 (1994) 89-95.
[5] Goodman, review, 89.
[6] Goodman, review, 95.
[7] First published in German as Emil Schürer, Lehrbuch der neutestamentlichen Zeitgeschichte (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1874), and later expanded and published under the title Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi (two volumes; Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1886-1890), from which was translated the English (trans. J. Macpherson; New York: Scribner, 1890).
[8] I.e., the revision overseen by Geza Vermes and Fergus Millar (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1973-1987).
[9] Sanders, Judaism, 3.
[10] Sanders, Judaism, 74.
[11] Sanders, Judaism, 5.
[12] I.e., “Judaism” for Sanders might be best described as an attempt to bring “more-or-less everything” about human life into devotion in the sense of that which fits “under the heading ‘Divine Law’” (Judaism, 74).
[13] Goodman, review, 89.
[14] Goodman, review, 90.
[15] Sanders, Judaism, 13.
[16] Sanders, Judaism, 151.
[17] Sanders, Judaism, 152.
[18] Sanders, Judaism, 79.