E. P Sanders

In this now-classic work, E. P. Sanders argued against prevailing views regarding the Judaism of the Second Temple period, for example, that the Pharisees dominated Jewish Palestine or that the Mishnah offers a description of general practice. In contrast, Sanders carefully shows that what was important was the "common Judaism" of the people with their observances of regular practices and the beliefs that informed them. Sanders discusses early rabbinic...

This landmark work, which has shaped a generation of scholarship, compares the apostle Paul with contemporary Judaism, both understood on their own terms. E. P. Sanders proposes a methodology for comparing similar but distinct religious patterns, demolishes a flawed view of rabbinic Judaism still prevalent in much New Testament scholarship, and argues for a distinct understanding of the apostle and of the consequences of his conversion. A new foreword...

Few scholars have so shaped the contemporary debate on the relation of early Christianity to early Judaism as E. P. Sanders, and no one has produced a clearer or more distinctive vision of that relationship as it was, expressed in the figures of Jesus of Nazareth and Paul the apostle. Gathered for the first time within one cover, here Sanders presents formative essays that show the structure of his approach and the insights it produces into Paul's...