Ed Parish Sanders (April 18, 1937 – November 21, 2022) was an American New Testament scholar and Protestant theologian, regarded as the main proponent of the "New Perspective on Paul". He was a major scholar in the scholarship on the historical Jesus and contributed to the view that Jesus was part of a renewal movement within Judaism. (Fortress Press, 1985).

Early life and education

Sanders was born on April 18, 1937, in Grand Prairie, Texas. He attended Texas Wesleyan College (now Texas Wesleyan University) (1955–1959) and Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University (1959–1962). He spent a year (1962–1963) studying at Göttingen, the University of Oxford, and in Jerusalem.

Between September 1963 and May 1966, Sanders studied at Union Theological Seminary, New York City, for his Doctor of Theology degree. His thesis was titled The Tendencies of the Synoptic Tradition (published in 1969 by Cambridge University Press; reprinted by Wipf & Stock in 2000), which used form criticism to examine whether the Gospel tradition changed in consistent ways. The thesis was supervised by W. D. Davies.

Career

Sanders taught at McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario) from 1966 to 1984. In 1968, he won a fellowship from the Canada Council and spent a year in Israel, studying Rabbinic Judaism. In 1984, he became Dean Ireland's Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Queen's College, positions he kept until his move to Duke University in 1990. He also held visiting professorships and lectureships at Trinity College, Dublin, and the University of Cambridge.

Thought and writings

As a biblical scholar, Sanders was known for his extensive research on the New Testament. His field of special interest was Judaism and Christianity in the Greco-Roman world. He was one of the leading scholars in contemporary historical Jesus research, the so-called "Third Quest," which places Jesus firmly in the context of Judaism. In contemporary scholarship, Jesus is seen as the founder of a "renewal movement within Judaism", to use Sanders' phrase. and that when his words are taken in context, it emerges that Paul advocates good works in addition to faith in Jesus. In a 2000 encyclopedia entry about Jesus, whom Sanders described as an "eschatological prophet", the subject avoids using the word "angel" but references two men "in dazzling clothes" at the empty tomb.

Sanders argued that more comparative studies are needed, with wider examinations of the relationship between New Testament texts and other available historical sources of the period. Speaking at a conference organized in his honor, he described the attractiveness of these types of comparative studies: "They are not all that easy, but they are an awful lot of fun."

Death

Sanders died on November 21, 2022, at the age of 85.

Selected works

Books

Articles and chapters

Festschrift

References

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Further reading

  • E. P. Sanders, "Intellectual Autobiography"
  • E. P. Sanders, "Jesus in Historical Context"
  • E. P. Sanders, "The Question of Uniqueness in the Teaching of Jesus"
  • The New Perspective on Paul