Redefining First-Century Jewish and Christian Identities

Essays in Honor of Ed Parish Sanders

Edited by Fabian E. Udoh, with Susannah Heschel, Mark Chancey, and Gregory Tatum

Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity

For nearly four decades, E. P. Sanders has been the foremost scholar in shaping and refocusing scholarly debates in three different but related disciplines in New Testament studies: Second Temple Judaism, Jesus and the Gospels, and Pauline studies. This collection of essays by an impressive array of colleagues and former students presents original scholarship that extends—or departs from—the research of Sanders himself. Both apologists and dissenters find their place in this volume, as the authors actively debate Sanders’s innovative positions on central issues in all three disciplines.

The introductory group of essays includes a substantive intellectual autobiography by E. P. Sanders himself. The next three parts examine in turn the three areas in which Sanders made his important contributions. The essays in part 2 engage Sanders’s notion of “common Judaism.” Those in part 3 deal with issues that Sanders raised respecting the historical Jesus and the Gospels. And the essays in part 4 debate Sanders’s contention that participation in Christ, rather than justification by faith, is the central theme of Paul’s soteriology. The volume concludes with a bibliography of Sanders’s works.

“This volume is a fitting tribute to the single most influential scholar in the fields of New Testament and early Judaism of the last half century. . . . A real strength of this volume is that most of the essays not only directly engage the work of Ed Parish Sanders but confirm, refine, and even extend various aspects of his innovative and widely debated positions on central issues in the study of Jesus, Paul, and Second Temple Judaism.”—Daniel C. Harlow, Calvin College

Contributors: Fabian E. Udoh, D. Moody Smith, E. P. Sanders, Jouette M. Bassler, Shaye J.D. Cohen, Albert I. Baumgarten, Cynthia M. Baker, Israel J. Yuval, Martin Goodman, Eric M. Meyers, Jürgen Zangenberg, Seán Freyne, Peter Richardson, Adele Reinhartz, Paula Fredriksen, Stephen Hultgren, John P. Meier, Craig C. Hill, Heikki Räisänen, Richard B. Hays, Stanley K. Stowers, John M. G. Barclay.

Fabian E. Udoh is on the Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill University in Montreal. He is author of To Caesar What is Caesar’s: Tribute, Taxes, and Imperial Administration in Early Roman Palestine.