LUTHER AFTER THE STENDAHL/ SANDERS REVOLUTION: A RESPONSIVE EVALUATION OF LUTHER'S VIEW OF FIRST-CENTURY JUDAISM IN HIS 1535 COMMENTARY ON GALATIANS

As early as Karl Barth and Peter Wiener, new scholars and theologians have accused Luther's theology of carrying devastating implications and incalculable events of being inherently antiSemitic, and of flat leading to the Holocaust.1 Barth himself believed that Luther's theology was individual of the key factors that prepared the way for Hitler and his regime.2 While the cause-andeffect link connecting Luther and Hitler has lengthy since been discredited,3 the same allegation continues to be made in novel scholarship. Perhaps more important, charges that Luther's theology mischaracterizes first-century Judaism and is inherently anti-Semitic not solitary continue, but appear to be at a crescendo.4

The particular area of scholarship in which these accusations have become greatest in quantity pronounced is in the area of Pauline studies, particularly above the course of the past forty years. What began this tend (beyond, of course, the occurrence of the Holocaust itself and German theologians' complicity in it) was a discourse made by the accomplished Dead Sea schedules scholar, Krister Stendahl, in 1963 -a discourse subsequently published under the now famous title, "The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West."5 In that discourse and article, Stendahl blamed Luther for misinterpreting the pair Paul and Judaism by reading his have psychological struggles with the Law into Paul and his possess context of a legalistic sixteenthcentury Roman Catholicism into the Judaism of first-century Palestine.6 In the wake of this massive claim, a whole "new perspective" upon Paul-really, a new perspective upon first-century Palestinian Judaism which has drastically affected Pauline interpretation-has bloomed taking its critical impetus (and at least a part of its formative shape) from Stendahl's proposal.7 For Stendahl's thesis about Luther remains to this day a critical touchstone of the fresh Perspective on Paul.8

All of these charges from Barth to Stendahl to the near are, indeed, serious charges, and have not rarely flowed from the pens of serious theologians. And from these charges, as we have said, a whole motion in NT scholarship has arisen in reaction to Luther's reading of Paul and the Law.9 on the contrary what is striking about this fresh view in Pauline studies is the cursory manner in which Luther's views are typically characterized and by what means casually Luther is minimized as an interpreter of Paul. Stendahl's thesis upon Luther was quickly accepted as a sort of "given" (especially in the wake of Sanders) and it is presum as a theological starting-point that Luther's theology of justification is fundamentally anti-Semitic and stations forth "the Jew" as the chief representative of worksrighteousness, and thus as "the type of all that is false and dangerous in religion."10

In the paper to tread in the steps of we will survey Luther's treatment of first-century Judaism in his 1535 commentary upon Galatians - the piece of writing in which the mature Luther greatest in quantity fully works out and elaborates his theology of justification.11 In this observe we will limit ourselves to sum of two units questions: (1) Did Luther-as Stendahl and those who have followed him assert-construct his view of first-century Judaism by means of simply reading sixteenth-century Roman Catholicism back into the first-century? (2) Is Luther's theology of justification-as many scholars now assume-inherently anti-Semitic, demonizing "the Jew" as the worst of all religious people? In our investigation, we find that, at least in the case of Luther's 1535 commentary upon Galatians, the first charge is not authentic to Luther's ostensible exegetical methodology, and the next to the first (while complicated by Christianity's inherent theological anti-Judaism) is not fair to Luther's theology of justification as he here not aways it. In short, it is shown that recent Pauline studies, at least the fresh Perspective wing of it, fail sufficiently to appreciate Luther the couple as an exegete and as a theologian, and thus misconstrue the course by which Luther arrives at his picture of first-century Judaism and unfairly characterize Luther's treatment of "the Jew" as a religious someone in his theology of justification.12

I. THE "NEW PERSPECTIVE upon PAUL" AND ITS ANTI-LUTHER POLEMIC

Before turning to Luther's view of first-century Judaism in his 1535 commentary upon Galatians, we should first pause to elucidate at least the general shape of the charges in Pauline scholarship as they now stand against the Reformer; that is, we must direct the eye a little more deeply into the novel Perspective on Paul. It is my belief that a number of other preliminary matters-regarding Luther, his time, and our definitions of "anti-Semitism" (a form of racism, since ethnocentric) versus "anti-Judaism" (not at all a form of racism, since theological)-should be considered before doing this, on the other hand I have relegated these discussions to an appendix.

As is many times noted in surveys of the of recent origin Perspective, the New Perspective upon Paul is by no means monolithic; consensus is not a word that really characterizes the motion with its many participants and its varying proposals.13 There are, however, no les than sum of two units points that unite all the major proponents: first, the belief that Luther read himself into Paul, and sixteenth-century Roman Catholicism into first-century Judaism; next to the first the conviction that first-century Judaism was not a legalistic religion in which human obedience was seen as meriting divine favor, acceptance, or salvation. These sum of two units fundamental points were established as cornerstones of the burgeoning change (as we have already implied) in the controversial works of Krister Stendahl and E P Sanders, respectively. To these and to their adherents we now true briefly turn.