The Fortress E.P. Sanders Collection (7 vols.)
This collection is not available in the UK or Europe. See The Fortress E.P. Sanders Collection (6 vols.).
Overview
Discover the complexities of Judaism and early Christianity with E.P. Sanders. From Judaism’s influence on the Apostle Paul to the realities of rabbinic traditions and the Mishnah, this collection will provide an extensive overview of Judaism and Christianity in the Roman era. Were early rabbinic legal materials rules or debates? What we can know historically about Paul, and what we can only conjecture? Explore these issues and more in this faciniating collection.
Learn more about Paul with the Pauline Studies Library (35 vols.).
Key Features
- Provides an overview of the interaction between Judaism and Christianity
- Examines Paul’s relationship with Judaism
- Explains the realities of rabbinic traditions
Product Details
- Title: The Fortress E.P. Sanders Collection
- Author: E. P. Sanders
- Publisher: Fortress Press
- Volumes: 7
- Pages: 4,020
- Resource Type: Monographs
- Topic: History
Individual Titles
- Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People
- Paul and Palestinian Judaism
- Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah: Five Studies
- Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE–66 CE
- Comparing Judaism and Christianity: Common Judaism, Paul, and the Inner and the Outer in Ancient Religion
- Paul: The Apostle's Life, Letters, and Thought
- Jesus and Judaism
Partially includedIn the Logos editions, these volumes are enhanced by amazing functionality. Important terms link to dictionaries, encyclopedias, and a wealth of other resources in your digital library. Perform powerful searches to find exactly what you’re looking for. Take the discussion with you using tablet and mobile apps. With Logos Bible Software, the most efficient and comprehensive research tools are in one place, so you get the most out of your study.
This book is devoted both to the problem of Paul’s view of the Law as a whole, and to his thought about and relation to his fellow Jews. Building upon his previous study, the critically acclaimed Paul and Palestinian Judaism, E.P. Sanders explores Paul’s Jewishness by concentrating on his overall relationship to Jewish tradition and thought. Sanders addresses such topics as Paul’s use of Scripture, the degree to which he was a practicing Jew during his career as apostle to the Gentiles, and his thoughts about his “kin by race” who did not accept Jesus as the Messiah. In short, Paul’s thoughts about the Law and his own people are re-examined with new awareness and great care.
Sanders addresses an important chapter in the history of the emergence of Christianity. Paul’s role in that development—especially in light of Galatians and Romans—is now re-evaluated in a major way. This book is in fact a significant contribution to the study of the emergent normative self-definition in Judaism and Christianity during the first centuries of the Common Era.
Paul and Palestinian Judaism compares Judaism—understood on its own terms, with Paul—understood on his own terms. In this book, E.P. Sanders aims to consider methodologically how to compare two (or more) related but different religions and destroy the view of Rabbinic Judaism which is still prevalent in much, perhaps most, New Testament scholarship.
He also seeks to establish a different view of Rabbinic Judaism, argue a case concerning Palestinian Judaism as a whole, as well as for a certain understanding of Paul, while carrying out a comparison of Paul and Palestinian Judaism.
This landmark volume makes a contribution not only to the understanding of Paul and his relationship to Judaism, but also to the study of Judaism itself.
In the past three decades reasons have accumulated for a transformation of our whole picture of Judaism in the first-century Palestine. Sanders has listened to those reasons; he has done his homework; and he undertakes here to shift the question about Paul's relation to that Judaism into a fundamentally different perspective. For New Testament students still trapped in Billerbeck-and-Kittel scholarship, the book will be revolutionary. For everyone who tries to understand early Judaism or the Christian movement that emerged from it, Sanders' work requires a thorough re-thinking of our assumptions.
—Wayne A. Meeks, Yale University
Professor Ed Sanders is dissatisfied with the two prevalent modes of explaining Paul: one, to pit the supposedly essential elements of his preaching against supposedly comparable ones in traditional Judaism; the other, to inspect as many particular motifs as possible with a view to establishing dependence or independence. His method is holistic, i.e., he focuses on the basic functioning of religions, on patterns which, he holds, are revealed chiefly in how you become and continue a member of the community. His profound, novel analysis of a vast material makes this one of the few truly creative, exciting works on the subject.
—David Daube, University of California, Berkeley
In this volume, E. P. Sanders presents five studies that advance the re-examination of the nature of Jewish law that he began in Jesus and Judaism (Fortress Press, 1985). As usual, he is able to shed new light on old questions and demonstrate that many accepted interpretations are misguided.
A chapter on “The Synoptic Jesus and the Law” considers how serious the legal issues discussed between Jesus and his opponents would have been, had they been authentic. Two chapters explore whether the Pharisees had oral law, and whether they ate ordinary food in purity (the thesis of Jacob Neusner). A study of Jewish food and purity laws in the Greek-speaking Diaspora bears on the particular point of law which led to the argument between Peter and Paul at Antioch. Finally, Sanders turns to a pointed essay that sets his own approach to rabbinic traditions and the Mishnah in distinct contrast from that of Jacob Neusner. A new preface points to the enduring contribution of these compelling and influential studies.
In this now-classic work, E. P. Sanders argues 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 legal material not as rules, but as debates within the context of real life. He sets Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes in relation to the Judaism of ordinary priests and people. Here then is a remarkably comprehensive presentation of Judaism as a functioning religion: the temple and its routine and festivals; questions of purity, sacrifices, tithes, and taxes; common theology and hopes for the future; and descriptions of the various parties and groups culminating in an examination of the question “who ran what?” Sanders offers a detailed, clear, and well-argued account of all aspects of Jewish religion of the time.
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 relationship to Judaism and the Jewish law. Sanders addresses matters of definition (“common Judaism,” “covenantal nomism”), diversity (the Judaism of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Diaspora), and key exegetical and historical questions relative to Jesus, Paul, and Christian origins in relationship to early Judaism.
These essays show a leading scholar at his most erudite as he carries forward and elaborates many of the insights that have become touchstones in New Testament interpretation.
E. P. Sanders offers an expansive introduction to the apostle, navigating some of the thorniest issues in scholarship using language accessible to the novice and seasoned scholar alike. Always careful to distinguish what we can know historically from what we may only conjecture, and these from dogmatically driven misrepresentations, Sanders sketches a fresh picture of the apostle as an ardent defender of his own convictions, ever ready to craft the sorts of arguments that now fill his letters.
This work takes up two related questions with regard to Jesus: his intention and his relationship to his contemporaries in Judaism. These questions immediately lead to two others: the reason for his death (did his intention involve an opposition to Judaism which led to death?) and the motivating force behind the rise of Christianity (did the split between the Christian movement and Judaism originate in opposition during Jesus’ lifetime?). Sanders’ earlier book Paul and Palestinian Judaism argued that Paul’s polemical writings were against the ecclesiology, not the soteriology, of Second Temple Judaism. This work follows in the same vein and argues that, while Jesus inaugurated an eschatological Jewish movement, he was not fundamentally at odds with first-century pharisaical Judaism.
About E. P. Sanders
E. P. Sanders is the Arts and Sciences Professor of Religion Emeritus at Duke University. He previously taught New Testament studies at McMaster University and at Oxford University as Dean Ireland’s Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture and as fellow of The Queen’s College.