Second-Temple Judaism Was Not a Religion of Earning Salvation by Law-Keeping

A lot of sermons on Paul start from an assumption that goes something like this: first-century Judaism was a legalistic religion of merit — keep the law, earn your standing with God — and Paul broke from it to preach grace received by faith alone. It’s a tidy contrast, and it maps neatly onto Reformation categories most of us grew up with. The trouble is that this picture doesn’t survive contact with the actual Jewish literature of the Second Temple period. In 1977, American New Testament scholar E.P. Sanders forced the field to reckon with that gap, and the argument that followed — now known as the New Perspective on Paul — has run for nearly fifty years.

Where the Old Picture Came From

The traditional reading has Reformation roots. Martin Luther, wrestling with the medieval Catholic system of merit he had inherited, read his own struggle back into Paul’s “works of the law” in Galatians. That lens shaped Protestant commentary for centuries. In the early twentieth century, the German scholar Ferdinand Weber’s study of rabbinic sources gave the picture academic weight, and towering mid-century figures like Rudolf Bultmann worked within the same framework: Judaism as a religion of earning righteousness through law-keeping, Christianity as a religion of grace received by faith.

The problem, as later scholarship showed, is that Weber’s rabbinic citations were frequently pulled out of context and drew heavily on sources from the third through fifth centuries CE, projected backward onto first-century Judaism as though nothing had changed in the intervening centuries. Sanders went back to the primary sources to test the picture directly.

Sanders and the Primary Sources

In Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Fortress Press, 1977), Sanders worked through the full range of Jewish literature from roughly 200 BCE to 200 CE — the Tannaitic material behind the Mishnah and Tosefta, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the pseudepigrapha — on its own terms. What he found overturned the inherited picture. Nowhere in this literature does he find a pattern where law-keeping is the means of getting in to a relationship with God. What he finds instead, repeated across sources, is a consistent structure: Israel already belongs to God by virtue of a covenant God initiated — election, the exodus, Sinai. Obedience to the law is not the entry requirement; it is the response that keeps a person within a relationship already established by grace.

Sanders named this pattern covenantal nomism. Its core claims run roughly as follows:

1. God elected Israel and gave the law as part of that election.
2. The law is Israel’s obedient response to election, and it is also the means by which one remains within the covenant.
3. God rewards obedience and punishes transgression, within the terms of the covenant.
4. The law itself provides for atonement — through repentance and sacrifice — when obedience fails.
5. All who remain within this covenant framework are reckoned as belonging to the community of the saved.

In short: you don’t keep the law to earn your place; you keep the law because you already have a place, and keeping it is how you stay there. Sanders went further, arguing that this structure is not so different from Protestant grace theology as inherited caricature suggested — and that generations of New Testament scholars had been reading their own polemical categories back into ancient Jewish sources rather than reading those sources on their own terms.

Dunn and “Works of the Law”

Sanders’s own study stopped short of reworking how Galatians and Romans themselves should be read. That task fell to British scholar James D.G. Dunn, who coined the phrase “the New Perspective on Paul” in a 1982 Manchester lecture, published the following year (Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library 65, 1983).

Dunn’s central move is a reinterpretation of the phrase Paul repeatedly targets in Galatians and Romans: “works of the law” (ἔργα νόμου, erga nomou). The traditional reading takes this as shorthand for law-keeping in general — Paul rejecting any attempt to be justified by doing rather than believing. Dunn argued instead that in Paul’s actual argument, the phrase points specifically to the practices that functioned as ethnic boundary markers separating Jew from Gentile: circumcision, dietary law, Sabbath observance. Read against the real controversy in Galatia — whether Gentile converts needed to be circumcised — Paul’s target isn’t legalistic self-righteousness in the abstract. It’s the insistence that Gentile believers must adopt Jewish ethnic markers to count as full members of God’s people.

If Dunn is right, the actual fault line in Paul’s argument shifts. Old reading: Jews trying to earn salvation by works, versus Paul’s gospel of grace. New reading: a demand that Gentiles take on Jewish identity markers to belong to the covenant people, versus Paul’s insistence that Gentiles already belong through faith, apart from those markers.

N.T. Wright and “the Righteousness of God”

No one has done more to popularize and systematize the New Perspective than the British scholar and former Anglican bishop N.T. Wright. In What Saint Paul Really Said (1997) and the massive Paul and the Faithfulness of God (2013), Wright redefines Romans’s central phrase, “the righteousness of God” (δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ), as God’s covenant faithfulness rather than a moral quality transferred to individual believers. On this reading, “justification” shifts weight: less a courtroom transaction converting a sinner’s status before God, more a declaration of who already belongs to God’s covenant people. The center of gravity moves from “how does an individual get saved” toward “who counts as a member of the covenant community” — with real consequences for how a sermon on Romans 3-4 gets structured.

Rembrandt, “The Apostle Paul in Prison” (1627), Staatsgalerie Stuttgart · Public Domain.

The Pushback: Judaism Wasn’t That Uniform

The New Perspective has never held the field uncontested, and the sharpest resistance has come from Reformed and evangelical scholarship. The most substantial rebuttal is the two-volume collection edited by D.A. Carson, Peter T. O’Brien, and Mark A. Seifrid, Justification and Variegated Nomism (Baker Academic / Mohr Siebeck, 2001-2004). The title makes the argument: the editors contend that Sanders flattened a genuinely diverse body of literature into a single pattern. Look closely, they argue, and the texts don’t agree with each other. 4 Ezra, for instance, contains passages where individual merit at the final judgment carries far more weight than covenantal nomism allows for, and the Dead Sea Scrolls’ own community rule documents vary in how they balance grace and works depending on which text you’re reading.

Stephen Westerholm’s Perspectives Old and New on Paul (Eerdmans, 2004) makes the case that the old reading captured something real: Paul’s argument in Romans 3, that “all are under sin,” is still fundamentally about individual guilt and human inability before God, whatever else it’s also doing. Simon Gathercole’s Where Is Boasting? (Eerdmans, 2002) pushes further, arguing that the “boasting” Paul confronts in Romans 2 is not merely ethnic privilege but boasting in one’s own deeds at the final judgment — a direct challenge to one of the New Perspective’s load-bearing claims.

A further strand pushes past both camps entirely. Drawing on Swedish scholar Krister Stendahl’s influential 1963 essay, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West” (Harvard Theological Review 56), the “Paul within Judaism” school argues that Paul never understood himself as having left Judaism at all — he remained a Torah-observant Jew who believed he had received a specific prophetic calling to bring Gentiles into the people of God, on Gentile terms, without requiring them to become Jews. Paula Fredriksen’s Paul: The Pagan’s Apostle (Yale University Press, 2017) and the work of Mark Nanos represent this line.

What This Means for the Pulpit

Settling this debate isn’t the point of this post, and it wouldn’t be honest to pretend it’s settled — Dunn and Wright themselves disagree on real points, and the critics don’t all argue the same way either. Papers on this exact question still get presented every year at SNTS and ETS. But there are things a preacher working through Galatians or Romans can take from it with confidence.

First, the flat caricature — “first-century Judaism was a legalistic religion of works” — no longer has solid scholarly ground under it, and it’s worth taking seriously that this caricature has a real history of reinforcing anti-Jewish stereotypes that outlived any academic usefulness it once had.

Second, when a sermon leans on “works of the law” in Galatians or Romans, it’s worth doing the exegetical work to ask what Paul’s actual argument requires in context — general law-keeping, ethnic boundary markers, or some combination — rather than assuming the phrase carries one fixed, timeless meaning across every occurrence.

Third, the debate as a whole is a useful reminder that Paul’s theology didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It came out of a real argument inside a real, specific first-century Jewish world. The better we understand that world, the more honestly we can locate the distance — and the continuity — between the questions Paul was actually answering and the questions we bring to his letters today.

References

• E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977).
• James D.G. Dunn, “The New Perspective on Paul,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library 65 (1983): 95-122.
• N.T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997); Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013).
• D.A. Carson, Peter T. O’Brien, Mark A. Seifrid, eds., Justification and Variegated Nomism, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic / Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001-2004).
• Stephen Westerholm, Perspectives Old and New on Paul: The “Lutheran” Paul and His Critics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004).
• Simon Gathercole, Where Is Boasting? Early Jewish Soteriology and Paul’s Response in Romans 1-5 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002).
• Krister Stendahl, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” Harvard Theological Review 56 (1963): 199-215.
• Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagan’s Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).

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