For the full forum, see E.P. Sanders In Memoriam.
I’m hugely honoured to be part of this panel devoted to the work of Professor Sanders, and very grateful to have had the opportunity to revisit his immense contribution to scholarship on the historical Jesus. As someone who has dabbled in this area over the past couple of decades, I can’t imagine any book, or course, or even conversation about Jesus that doesn’t start – and often end - with the work of E. P. Sanders.
Sanders’ contribution comes largely from two books: Jesus and Judaism[1] and The Historical Figure of Jesus[2] (a revised version of the earlier work designed for a more general audience). In what follows, I’ll confine my comments to the first of these books, Jesus and Judaism. Without doubt, this was a ground-breaking scholarly analysis of both Jesus’ aims and his relationship with his Jewish contemporaries – areas of investigation which naturally led on to explorations of the reasons for Jesus’ death, and the motivating force behind the rise of Christianity. Even on its publication, the work was hailed as “one of the most important books about Jesus to appear in recent years,”[3] with the expectation that it would be “at the center of debate for a long time to come”[4]; and it was the first recipient of the Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion (1990).
There is a great deal in this book that we could profitably linger on and discuss, but I want to highlight just three of its many contributions.
First is the clarity and persuasiveness of its method. Prior to Sanders - and in the manner associated with the “New Quest” - scholars tended to start with Jesus’ message, looking for authentic sayings within the tradition. Sanders wittily imagines exegetes “hammering away at a saying in the hope that it will tell us more about Jesus than can reasonably be expected from a small piece of evidence.”[5] He was particularly sceptical of the form critical criteria of authenticity, especially double dissimilarity which emphasised only what was unique about Jesus and ruled out most of what he had in common with both his Jewish contemporaries and the later church. Not only did this focus on sayings material fail to produce secure results, but it had the unforeseen effect of assuming that Jesus was primarily a teacher (without ever interrogating that assumption) and leaving both Jesus’ death and its wider consequences unexplained.
In contrast, Sanders shifted the focus from what Jesus said to what he did. He started with a list of eight “almost indisputable facts” about Jesus, and then - with impeccable and unrelenting logic – worked outwards from what was most secure in the tradition to what was more debateable. Sanders realised that where the investigation starts has a profound effect on where it ends up, and he chose to begin his analysis with one of the most secure of his “almost indisputable” facts, the Temple controversy. From here, he worked outwards from that central (and to some extent controlling) event to other aspects of Jesus’ career, including his teaching. Sayings material was still important in this approach (and Sanders’ doctoral work had been a painstaking and thorough analysis of Synoptic material, including the sayings[6]), but it had now been consigned to a secondary role, largely to fill out the framework established by secure events.
I should note that Sanders was not the first to move from a preoccupation with sayings to events or a broad-picture approach (Geza Vermes, Morton Smith, Anthony Harvey and others had all moved in that direction[7]), but it was the systematic way that Sanders went about his work that made it distinctive, along with his rock-solid starting point with the incident in the Temple.
Second, as we would expect from someone with such wide and deep knowledge of early Judaism, Sanders produced a Jesus entirely grounded in the first century Jewish world of Galilee and Judaea. In a refreshing break from many earlier studies, Sanders was able to evaluate competing readings not simply according to their own internal logic, or their fidelity to the Gospels or even the later church, but according to their plausibility within first century Judaea. What would have made sense in this environment? And what would contemporaries have made of Jesus? Starting with the Temple incident, Sanders argued that it wasn’t a cleansing of traders, or an attack on the externals of religion, still less a disdain for sacrifice and ritual itself – all prevalent views in the 1980s, which seemed curiously unaware of the fact that the Temple cult was both required and commanded by the God of Israel. Instead, Sanders saw that Jesus’ actions in the Temple pointed to its destruction.[8] This led him to argue that the principal framework for understanding Jesus’ career was Jewish restoration eschatology: like others before and after him, Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet, preaching the imminent end-time, God’s destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, and the restoration of Israel. This in turn explained a number of other elements in the tradition: Jesus’ choice of twelve disciples (a symbolic number evoking the restoration of the twelve tribes), the promise that they would act as judges on twelve thrones[9], sayings to do with the reign of God in an imminent and otherworldly Kingdom, and those to do with table fellowship and the themes of future judgement and punishment.[10] Jesus’ healings and exorcisms didn’t so much offer a foretaste of the Kingdom as provide authentication of his mission, and proof that he acted as God’s messenger.[11]
A huge advantage of Sanders’ reconstruction is that it allows him to sketch a direct line from John the Baptist’s apocalyptic message, through Jesus, and on to Paul and other early missionaries. Thus a clear thread connects Jesus both to John’s earlier mission and to the movement which followed him.
And third, Sanders puts the reasons for Jesus’ death at the very heart of his analysis. One of our secure facts, of course, is that Jesus was executed, but scholars prior to Sanders had often failed to provide plausible reasons for his death. Too often they had resorted to perceived theological differences between Christianity and Judaism rather than anything that rang true to a first century context. With an almost breath-taking clarity of argument, Sanders cut through the often fuzzy thinking of his predecessors, demolishing one argument after another. Jesus, he shows, was not put to death because of his concern with the meek and downtrodden, or because he led a military campaign, or for blasphemously taking on himself the prerogatives of God, or because he promoted grace, love and forgiveness in the face of Jewish concern for merit and legalism. Nor was he executed for breaking the Jewish Law: he may have imagined that the Mosaic dispensation wasn’t final, but there is no evidence that Jesus rejected the Law in its entirety or even in part. Significantly, Sanders challenged the idea that the Pharisees governed first century Judaea and imposed their ideas on others; the real leaders, he maintained, and those with access to Pilate, were the aristocratic priests.[12] They, along with many other pious people, may have been irritated by Jesus’ offer of a place in the Kingdom to the wicked without repentance, and still more by the suggestion that the wicked would get into the Kingdom before the righteous. But the major reason for Jesus’ death, Sanders suggests, was his attack on the Temple with its implication that he knew God’s next act in history and could speak on God’s behalf. When combined with Jesus’ following, and the fact that at least some were hailing him as a Messiah or King, the reasons why both the Jerusalem priesthood and the Roman prefect would want Jesus eliminated become clear.[13]
The modern tendency to carve up scholarly analysis of the historical Jesus into three discreet “quests” has rightly been criticised in recent years. One of the interesting things I found about rereading Jesus and Judaism in preparation for this panel was Sanders’ strong sense not that he was writing in a vacuum (the gap left when the New Quest had run out of steam) but that he was contributing to an already lively debate. He writes about the vitality and impressiveness of recent scholarship on the historical Jesus, citing with approval the works of Winter, Hengel, Jeremias, Dodd, Vermes, Harvey and others. But there is something different about Sanders’ work, something exciting and innovative, that offers scholars a new way of doing things: not analysing material over and against its Jewish context, but firmly rooted within it, and treating the biblical material to the kind of rigorous historical enquiry that we would expect of any ancient evidence. Sanders’ work set out the contours for what would become known as the “Third Quest,” and it’s no surprise that others were quick to follow in his footsteps.[14]
Of course, not everyone was ready to accept all his findings or even his method. Some found his Jesus too Jewish, with not enough of the Hellenistic veneer that had permeated the eastern Mediterranean by this time. Others challenged his views of the Pharisees,[15] the sayings tradition, Jesus’ apparent lack of interest in social and economic reform, the suggestion that Jesus didn’t expect repentance from sinners,[16] and his attitude to the Law. Despite Sanders, some continued to analyse small units of tradition, whether sayings or actions.[17] Some wanted to broaden our range of sources to include non-canonical material, particularly the Gospels of Thomas or Peter, or even John’s Gospel (which is virtually ignored in Jesus and Judaism). Some queried the apocalyptic Jesus, favouring passages that talked of a more present Kingdom. Some offered less tranquil portraits of first century Galilee, and a less positive assessment of the role of Jerusalem, the Temple or the priesthood at the time. And many offered alternative labels for Jesus. Standing now at what is increasingly identified as the tail end of the Third Quest, we might want to supplement Sanders’ work with some more post-modern approaches: the study of memory, trauma and so on. We’d be even less confident today, I imagine, about our ability to detect different layers within the tradition, and keener to pay more attention to what Sanders rather dismissively terms “editorial additions.” Narrative approaches have trained us to treat the gospels as literary unities, historical artefacts that both preserve and interpret what they pass on. But after all the flurry of scholarly excitement that characterised the Third Quest, it seems to me that the one interpretation that has truly lasted the test of time is that of Sanders’.
More broadly, it's a tribute to Sanders’ work that crude and theologically-driven descriptions of Judaism - in contrast to the “good” and unique Jesus - have largely disappeared from the work of NT scholars. And while Sanders needed to spend a great deal of time in Jesus and Judaism arguing for his revolutionary understanding of the Temple incident, or for a historically-driven understanding of Jesus’ death, both of these are widely accepted – even assumed – today.
On a personal note, I’m sorry to say that I never met Prof Sanders, though we did have a brief email exchange after I’d published a book on the High Priest Caiaphas (I still have the emails in my inbox). But more importantly, his Jesus and Judaism featured heavily in a course that I took as an undergraduate in the late 80s. What struck me most about the book – in contrast to most other things that I was reading – was the way in which Sanders went about his work without any particular reference to Christian faith. For many of us, he modelled a certain kind of biblical scholar: someone fascinated by the ancient world and the origins of Christianity but not confined by (or, equally importantly, reacting against) any particular faith tradition. His work felt modern, uncluttered, and utterly truthful. And, of course, this insistence that Historical Jesus work could and should be done by people without a particular church commitment was a hallmark of the Third Quest and, I hope, of work on Christian origins more generally. For me, Sanders’ Jesus and Judaism is easily one of the most significant books on Jesus in modern times, and I’m very grateful to have had the opportunity to revisit it again for this conference.
[1] Jesus and Judaism (London: SCM, 1985; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985).
[2] The Historical Figure of Jesus (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1993).
[3] Philip Alexander, “Review of Jesus and Judaism by E. P. Sanders,” JJS 37 (1986): 103-106; here p. 103.
[4] John J. Collins, “Review of Jesus and Judaism by E. P. Sanders,” Journal of Religion 66 (1986): 203-204; here p. 204.
[5] Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, 132; for full discussion, see pp. 123-156.
[6] E. P. Sanders, The Tendencies of the Synoptic Tradition (SNTSMS 9. New York/Cambridge: CUP, 1969).
[7] See for example, Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels (London: Collins, 1973); Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician (San Francisco/London: Harper & Row, 1981); and Anthony Harvey, Jesus and the Constraints of History (London: Duckworth, 1982).
[8] For full argument, see Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, 61-90.
[9] See Luke 22: 28-30; also Mark 10:35-40 and Matthew 20:20-23.
[10] See pp. 91-119.
[11] See pp. 157-173.
[12] See both the introduction, pp. 1-58, and pp. 270-293. These would of course be areas explored in greater depth in Sanders’ hugely useful Judaism: Practice and Belief 63 BCE – 66 CE (London: SCM, 1992; Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992).
[13] See pp. 294-318.
[14] In fact, Tom Wright, who is widely credited with coining the term “Third Quest,” used the phrase to indicate a different methodology rather than a clearly defined phase; see Stephen Neill and Tom Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861– 1988 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 379–403.
[15] See here in particular the lengthy review of Sanders’ oeuvre in Martin Hengel and Roland Deines, “E.P. Sanders’ ‘Common Judaism,’ Jesus and the Pharisees,” JTS 46 (1995): 1-70.
[16] This has been one of the most controversial of Sanders’ claims. For counter-arguments, see for example Bruce D. Chilton, “Jesus and the Repentance of E. P. Sanders,” Tyndale Bulletin 39 (1988): 1-18; Mark Allen Powell, “Was Jesus a Friend of Unrepentant Sinners? A Fresh Appraisal of Sanders’ Controversial Proposal,” JSHJ 7 (2009): 286-310.
[17] This was particularly true of the Jesus Seminar, see for example Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1993); Robert W. Funk and the Jesus Seminar, The Acts of Jesus: the Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998).