Where scholars have overplayed rhetoric is in seeking to structure Paul’s letters as if they were speeches. Rhetorical handbooks in this period do not address letters, but when they later do, they do not treat them like speeches. Most genuine speeches do not fit the precise outlines we find in rhetorical handbooks, and we should expect such outlines to prove even less relevant to letters. They do not even fit the letters of rhetorically sophisticated letter writers like Cicero, Pliny, or Fronto.
Nevertheless, Paul’s extant letters are not normal letters (though they are comparable in some ways to some letter-essays, e.g., by Seneca).4 While Paul often includes conversational elements, many of his letters include substantial argumentation—which was characteristically the domain of rhetoric rather than of letters. While rhetoric may rarely provide us detailed outlines for his letters, therefore, it does provide abundant insights into how Paul argues his case.5
Scholars differ as to whether Paul had any rhetorical training or simply absorbed practices dominant in his environment.6 Certainly Paul did not have advanced (tertiary) training in a Greek rhetorical school with the goal of becoming a Greek orator; orators exhibited their skills by lavishly citing classical Greek texts, which appear in Paul only very rarely. By contrast, many of Paul’s letters (notably including Romans) lavishly display the Jewish Scriptures, typically in the forms dominant in the Greek Diaspora. Paul’s display of biblical knowledge suggests the combination of a brilliant mind with the best of training in the Scriptures, probably in the ancient world’s best center for such training, namely Jerusalem. If Paul, presumably from a well-off family who could afford such training, studied with Gamaliel in Greek (as suggested in Acts 22:3; cf. t. Sotah 15:8), he probably also had some additional training in delivering sermons in acceptable Greek style. Today’s equivalent might be advanced study in Bible with a few homiletics courses. If so, Paul masterfully developed the basic skills he received at this level of training.
If Paul used Greek techniques because they were a part of the milieu in which he and Diaspora Judaism (and to a somewhat reduced extent, Palestinian Judaism) moved, Paul’s more specifically “Jewish” context informs what he would have viewed as the core of his cultural identity (cf. Rom 9:1–5; 11:1).
Paul, Judaism, and the Law
When we speak of Paul and “Judaism,” we are usually thinking in anachronistic terms. Paul, like most of the earliest Christian movement even in the Diaspora, was Jewish. Modern Western readers distinguish “Judaism” and “Christianity” as distinct religions, but the Christian movement, as it came to be called, viewed itself as carrying on the biblical faith of patriarchs and prophets in view of end-time fulfillment in Christ, demonstrated by the eschatological gift of the Spirit.
As scholars today emphasize, first-century Judaism was itself highly diverse; some even speak of “Judaisms” (though emphasizing the wide variation in Jewish practice should make the point sufficiently). Its rabbinic form (which evolved into traditional Orthodox Judaism as we know it today) evolved from Pharisaism, but that evolution postdates Paul’s ministry. Paul’s faith is, in a sense, an earlier development of Pharisaism (albeit a minority one) than rabbinic Judaism is, as some Jewish scholars have recently pointed out. Jews as a people affirmed circumcision, the temple, the Torah, and other traits (many of these, like distinctive food customs, highlighted over the previous two centuries as costly marks of distinctive Jewish identity). Yet some (more often in the Holy Land) expected the imminent end of the age, whereas others denied it. The degree of Jewish Diaspora assimilation to the surrounding culture varied from one place to another and according to the attitudes of their host cultures.7 Views about messianic figures varied more widely than we have space to narrate here. Paul has been compared to apocalyptic, mystic, and Pharisaic streams of Judaism, among others.
E. P. Sanders on “the Law”
The dominant current arguments surrounding Paul’s relationship with his Jewish context most relevant to Romans, however, involve his own approach to the law versus that of his contemporaries. Views of Paul’s relationship to what we call Judaism have varied widely over the centuries, from Marcion’s proto-gnostic Paul (who rejected anything Jewish) to W. D. Davies’ Paul (who was a Pharisee who believed that the messianic era had dawned). Most scholars today would agree more with Davies than Marcion, but some aspects of Paul’s relation to Judaism—and the character of ancient Judaism—remain debated.
E. P. Sanders’s work Paul and Palestinian Judaism, published in 1977, shook New Testament scholarship in general and Pauline studies in particular. Many New Testament scholars (particularly in the German scholarly tradition—at least according to Anglophone scholars), depicted Judaism as legalistic and seeking to be justified by works. (This grid for reading the sources persisted from debates at the time of the Reformation.) Scholars of Judaism had long challenged the sufficiency of such a paradigm (which pervaded works like Strack-Billerbeck’s widely-used rabbinic commentary on the New Testament),8 but it was Sanders’s forceful polemic that shook the old paradigm. He argued that nearly all of ancient Judaism affirmed that Israelites as a whole were graciously chosen as part of the covenant, and remained members of the covenant unless cutting themselves off through apostasy. Judaism was thus a religion of grace, and works confirmed rather than earned a place in the covenant.
One complication of revisiting ancient Judaism’s approach to works and grace is that one must then revisit Paul’s approach to the views of his contemporaries on these matters. Paul does in fact sound like he regards his contemporaries’ approach as based on human effort rather than grace, so New Testament scholars set out to reinterpret Paul based on this new interpretation of ancient Judaism. Many found Sanders’s reconstruction of ancient Judaism more plausible than his interpretation of Paul, but James D. G. Dunn, Hans Hübner, Heikki Räisänen, Francis Watson, N. T. Wright, and others also offered new readings of Paul in his Jewish setting.9 Some of these new interpretations became known as the “New Perspective,” but the new perspectives are in fact so diverse on various points of detail that the main characteristic of their newness is that they reject the older caricature of Judaism.
While Sanders’s challenge to caricatures of Judaism proved to be an important watershed, many of the details of his approach have come under increasing challenge. Sanders’s primary thesis, the prevalence of grace in Judaism (and perhaps especially rabbinic Judaism, where it was often least appreciated), won the day, and there is little likelihood, barring a nuclear holocaust or other cataclysmic event that wipes out the current generation of scholars and our work, that the bulk of nt scholarship will backtrack on that point. Yet scholars have increasingly noticed that another side of the picture, “works righteousness,” remains in the Jewish sources. A number of scholars argue that Sanders’s way of framing the questions (in response to more traditional ways of framing them) and arranging the data downplayed the sources’ emphasis on earning merit or even eschatological salvation.10
Synthesizing Various Factors
Part of the debate depends on the meaning of “legalism” and “works righteousness.” Thus, Sanders would point out that the nt sources themselves often speak of reward and even eternal salvation on the basis of works, yet in the larger context of God’s covenant grace. With some critics, one helpful approach to the varied evidence of Jewish