Romans In Recent Study
ROMANS IN RECENT STUDY
Recent scholarship on Romans has focused on three issues: its nature/genre, its purpose, and its treatment of the Jews and the Mosaic law. We have considered the first two in previous sections; here something must be said about the last.
Study of Romans in this regard must be seen against the background of what has been hailed as the new perspective on Paul. 52 This way of looking at Paul is the result of a new understanding of the Judaism that Paul opposed, and against which he hammered out so much of his theology. In the past, it is argued, most Christian scholars assumed that Paul was dealing with legalistic Jews who counted up their good works in order to get into heaven. But many modern scholars are convinced that first-century Judaism was nothing like this. While this case has been argued in the past, E. P. Sanders’s 1977 monograph Paul and Palestinian Judaism is the touchstone for the contemporary discussion. 53 The heart of Sanders’s argument is that the Judaism Paul knew was not a religion in which works were the means of becoming saved, or justified. Rather, in a pattern Sanders calls "covenantal nomism,” first-century Jews believed that they were saved by means of their corporate election as a covenant people. Works or obedience to the law in this scheme does not save the Jew but maintains his or her status in the saving covenant relationship. If Paul’s Jewish opponents were covenantal nomists rather than legalists, quite a different picture of Paul’s teaching on fundamental issues such as justification and the law emerges. In fact, contemporary scholarship witnesses several different, and sometimes mutually exclusive, pictures of Paul’s teaching about this covenantal nomism. And since Romans from beginning to end contains teaching about justification, Jews, and the law, these revised pictures of Paul are evident in many recent studies of Romans. 54 While Sanders’s view of Judaism is a necessary corrective to unfair caricatures of Jewish theology in some Christian circles, his own reconstruction has not met with universal acceptance. Questions about sources, method, and his interpretation of key documents have been raised. 55 It has been pointed out that his own covenantal nomism continues to give such a role to works that they are still, in some sense, necessary for salvation. 56 And we may justly question whether Sanders has ruled out the possibility that there were some Jews in the first century who were more legalistic than nomistic. 57 Second, and most important, is a methodological point: Sanders’s reconstruction (or any other reconstruction, for that matter) of the background against which Paul wrote should not dictate our exegesis of Romans. That it might, and should (if we accept it), influence our exegesis is acknowledged. But when all is said and done, we must interpret the text as we have it, not force unnatural meanings on it in order to conform to Sanders’s reconstruction. Some current exegesis, in our opinion, succumbs to this error. When Paul, for instance, insists that justification is by faith and not by works of the law, the Reformers and most of their heirs have taken him to mean that a person is declared right before God only by faith and not by anything that that person might do. This interpretation, which is now often criticized as assuming a view of Judaism out of keeping with Sanders’s Judaism, still seems to be the most natural way to read the relevant texts. 58 Similar things could be said about other passages and issues, such as
the nature of Paul’s criticism of the Jews in Rom. 2, and the contrast between "the righteousness of God/of faith” and "the righteousness of their own/of the law” in 10:1-8.