The question of Sanders' legacy as far as Paul himself is concerned is an interesting one.I want to comment properly on Simon's article in Christianity Today, all the more so as I am currently teaching Paul, and will do so in due course, and bear the above in mind, though I won't be apologizing for my Sanders-centric view!
I suppose I'm of the view that Sanders' Pauline exegesis was much less successful than his treatment of Judaism: as William Horbury put it in his review of PPJ, Paul and his Jewish contemporaries end up - on Sanders' approach - 'passing like ships in the night'. There are some who have nevertheless followed this approach - in his own way, Lou Martyn does. But it seems to me to have been the Dunn-Wright trajectory of Sanders interpretation that has really taken off.
But we're all shaped by our own locations in this. I studied in Durham, so perhaps am bound to think this way. You - being an Oxford and a Duke man - might be just as bound to have a more Sanders-centric view!!!
Monday, September 10, 2007
Simon Gathercole on Sanders
Simon Gathercole comments with respect to recent comments here (Simon Gathercole on the New Perspective on Paul and E. P. Sanders's Relationship to W. D. Davies):
I myself (another Durham grad - that's Durham ENGLAND, of course) feel that Dunn provided an appropriate revised understanding of Paul in relation to Sanders' work on Judaism. I would go so far as to say that Sanders only really offered a new perspective on Judaism in Paul's time, and that it was Dunn who offered a new perspective on Paul.
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