I have been asked to comment on the significance of E. P. Sanders’s work for Pauline studies, which I am not just honoured but positively excited to do. In a sense, this is the very easiest of assignments. I would bet good money that, if you were to conduct a straw pool of SBL members and ask what is the most influential book in Pauline studies in the last 50 years, the leading answer, by a country mile, would be Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Fortress, 1977). That book is not just a classic, but a kind of bibliographic planet, with multiple moons orbiting around it. Although not actually part of the so-called New Perspective on Paul (many ill-informed histories of scholarship notwithstanding), Sanders’s book was certainly the catalyst for that entire movement, as it was, likewise, for a whole cottage industry of desperate rearguard defences of the Christian anti-Judaism that Sanders explicitly undertook to destroy.
Although such defences did follow, and still continue, in ever-smaller corners of the field, I think that Sanders’s main objective in Paul and Palestinian Judaism can, indeed, must be judged a great success. He really did “destroy the view of rabbinic Judaism which is still prevalent in much, perhaps most, New Testament scholarship” (Paul and Palestinian Judaism, xii), which is pretty cool. I like to think that he would—and I hope that he did, before his death last year—take some satisfaction in what his scholarship has accomplished in Pauline studies: an intellectual victory for our historical understanding of the primary sources, certainly, but also a moral victory for a vision of New Testament studies not predicated on Christian anti-Judaism. Sanders famously taught us not to imagine God keeping a meticulous ledger of moral merits and demerits. But if, just hypothetically, God did keep such a ledger, then the net good wrought by Ed Sanders in Pauline studies would surely count for a hell of a lot.
For the purposes of this short essay, I would like to reflect on two words that sound like they should be synonyms, but are not, both of which figure prominently in Sanders’s argument in Paul and Palestinian Judaism, namely: legalism and nomism. Legalism, like pornography, is one of those things people claim to know when they see it but for which they struggle to supply a definition. It is more felt than it is thought. The English word “legalism” and its cognates are first attested in the seventeenth-century theological writings of English nonconformist and Puritan thinkers. Thus, for instance, John Wheelwright: “He accuseth the Magistrates and Ministers… [of a] manifest addiction of theirs to Legalisme, whil’st he declares them commonly intended by that expression, under a Covenant of works” (Mercurius Americanus [1645] 19). And Richard Baxter: “To make Salvation the end of Duty, is to be a Legalist” (Saints Everlasting Rest [1651] 1.1.6.8). For some two hundred years, in fact, the word occurs almost exclusively in contexts of intra-Christian theological disputation, where it is a term of contempt for (what the respective writers judge to be) deficient forms of Christianity. Indeed, Bernard Jackson (“Legalism,” JJS 30 [1979]: 1–22) has suggested that it never occurred to anyone to accuse Jews of legalism until as late as 1861, when the charge appears in Bishop Trench’s Commentary on the Epistles to the Seven Churches in Asia. I have been able to find a few earlier nineteenth-century instances. But Jackson’s point stands: The “Jewish legalism” stereotype is not only (obviously) Christian, but very recent, too. Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, Christian writers traded in other anti-Jewish tropes, but not, for the most part, the familiar canard about legalism.
No matter who the target, though—Roman Catholics, establishment Anglicans, Jews, or otherwise—the English word “legalism” has long been and still is used as a term of abuse, not of analysis. To invoke legalism is to pick a fight. To call someone a legalist is to insult her. Indeed, this is precisely why Sanders resorted to the word “nomism” in his bombshell book of 1977: because, although in etymological terms “nomism” and “legalism” are effectively synonyms (from Greek νόμος and Latin lex, respectively, both meaning “law,” thus: law-ism), “legalism” has nasty connotations, whereas “nomism” does not. By using the latter term, then, Sanders was able to discuss serious theological and ethical issues pertaining to law without triggering a fight response in the lizard brains of his readers, as the word “legalism” would have done. But the fact that “nomism” has no such connotations is a proof that “legalism” need not have developed them. The nasty connotations are a superfluous value judgment, not anything inherent in the idea of a “law-ism.” In other words, it is only because particular groups of people (especially certain kinds of Protestant Christians) chose to heap scorn upon the word that the word strikes our ears in that way.
By ceding “legalism” to its naysayers, then, Sanders arguably missed the opportunity for a more radical criticism. As Philip Alexander has argued as far back as his 1986 review of Sanders’s Jesus and Judaism (JJS 37 [1986]: 103–106), we ought to ask ourselves: What’s so bad about legalism?
[Sanders’s] answer to the charge of ‘legalism’ seems, in effect, to be that Rabbinic Judaism, despite appearances, is really a religion of ‘grace.’ But does this not involve a tacit acceptance of a major element in his opponents’ position—the assumption that ‘grace’ is superior to ‘law’? The correct response to the charge must surely be: And what is wrong with ‘legalism,’ once we have got rid of abusive language about ‘hypocrisy’ and ‘mere externalism’? It is neither religiously nor philosophically self-evident that a ‘legalistic’ view of the world is inferior to one based on ‘grace.’ If we fail to take a firm stand on this point we run the risk of seriously misdescribing Pharisaic and Rabbinic Judaism, and of trying to make it over into a pale reflection of Protestant Christianity.
Further to this final point about “a pale reflection of Protestant Christianity,” Alexander argues in a 2001 essay (“Torah and Salvation in Tannaitic Literature,” in Justification and Variegated Nomism, Volume 1, ed. D. A. Carson et al. [Mohr Siebeck, 2001], 261–301) that not only Sanders but his predecessors, too—Jewish as well as Christian scholars—were beholden to a Christianizing bias in this respect. Alexander writes:
These works, to a greater or lesser degree, have been influenced by liberal Protestantism. All seem tacitly to regard it as axiomatic that a religion of works-righteousness is inferior to a religion of grace. [Ferdinand] Weber had accused Judaism of legalistic works-righteousness. They [viz. Moore, Schechter, Montefiore, Sanders] set out to defend it against this charge, but nowhere does any of them radically question the premise that there is something wrong with a religion of works-righteousness.
As is clear from these excerpts, Alexander disagrees with Sanders on the religious value judgment in question, but he gives Sanders the benefit of the doubt nonetheless. Jacob Neusner, writing around the same time (“Mr. Sanders’s Pharisees and Mine,” SJT 44 [1991]: 73–96), does not:
It is condescending because Sanders affirms that, if the Pharisees practiced ‘ritual,’ then they, and the Judaism that claims descent from them, would be subject to condemnation by Jesus and Paul… It is clear Sanders is embarrassed by the particular rituals of Judaism. But I am not, and I do not thank him for apologizing for the rituals of my religion. As a believing Jew, I practice Judaism, and I do not require a gentile’s defense of my religion that dismisses as unimportant or inauthentic what in my faith is very important indeed: the observance of rituals of various kinds. They are mine because they are the Torah’s. I do not propose to apologize for them… Nor do I value a defense of my religion that implicitly throughout and explicitly at many points accepts at face value what another religion values and rejects what my religion deems authentic service to the living God… With friends like Sanders, Judaism hardly needs any enemies.
Now, I think I understand Neusner’s sentiment here, but I also think that he seriously underplays just how many and how mortal Christian enemies of Judaism there have been down the centuries. In light of that history, one might be forgiven for thinking that friends, even erring ones, are preferable. And as for Sanders’s ostensible error, Neusner is right to say that Sanders defends ancient Jewish ritual, but wrong to say that Sanders apologizes for it (a subtle difference, but an important one). To be sure, Neusner, being Jewish, has a kind of knowledge of Judaism that Sanders, being a gentile Christian, simply cannot have. But neither Neusner nor Sanders is a first-century Pharisee or Qumran covenanter, so to that extent they are both—as are we all—foreigners to the strange old world of the early Roman Empire. It may well be (and it probably is true) that Sanders reads too much liberal Protestantism into his ancient Jewish sources. But it may also be (and it probably is true) that Neusner, in his zeal to get the better of Sanders, swallows too uncritically the nineteenth-century axiom that ancient Judaism was in fact a legalism.
We should, however, take the point that legalism could, in principle, be a virtue rather than a vice. If we strip the term “legalism” of all the layers of abuse and contempt that have attached to it over the centuries, we might arrive at something like the way James Kugel describes the role of the Torah in the history of Judaism under the rubric “a religion of laws” (How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now [Free Press, 2007], 261). Kugel writes:
This was the genius of a religion of laws. In all the little encounters of daily life… the Pentateuch set out the precise form of behavior that God had prescribed… It seemed like there was no area of life about which the Torah did not have something to say—and that, for later Judaism, was the beauty of it. In doing each thing according to the way that God prescribed, a person could, as it were, turn life into a constant act of reaching out to God.
One is tempted to say: If that kind of legalism is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
Ed Sanders did not quite say that, but he did have within him a strong strand of (what Krister Stendahl, writing in a different context, called) holy envy: a recognition of the power, even the truth, of aspects of a religious tradition not one’s own. And a corollary to this: a steadfast refusal to think the worst of others and a resolution to assume the best. It was this posture that allowed Sanders to see and to state clearly (what is, to my mind) the single most important truth in all the Paul and Judaism debates, namely: that the issue for Paul is not any supposed qualitative deficiency in Judaism, but the simple fact of the appearing of Jesus. Full stop. Interpreters of Paul still struggle to see and to say this clearly, but we are all miles better off than we were before 1977, or than we would have been were it not for the mind and the conscience of Ed Parish Sanders.
Part of this essay is excerpted and adapted from Matthew V. Novenson, Paul and Judaism at the End of History (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).