The New Perspective: not the end of an era
Michael Bird begins 2008 by announcing the demise of the “New Perspective on Paul” era. While I regard NPP as a useful shorthand for describing a number of views, I’m not entirely sure the differences between many of its leading proponents aren’t nearly as great as those between “NPP scholars” and others. I’m not totally convinced there ever really was a single New Perspective, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t an era.
For Mike, the sign of the end is the publication of a single commentary which entwines some NPP views and some others. One swallow does not make a summer. The assigning of end points is highly unlikely to be remotely possible at only one year’s remove from them, and the assigning of a starting point is equally arbitrary. Why should Mike pick 1976, the publication of the collected essays of Paul among Jews and Gentiles, and not 1963, the publication year of the most seminal essay in that collection: “Paul and the Introspective conscience of the West”? Just as it took more than one essay to mark the beginning of the era, so also it will take more than one recent commentary to mark its passing.
In any case, this business about eras is largely pointless. It seems to owe its existence partly to the human proclivity for organising ideas, and partly to the discipline of the often tedious literature review. We have seen it again and again in the factually dubious declarations of numbered Quests for Jesus, which “begin” and “end” with remarkable regularity, while the work of historical research is continuously ongoing. There is some benefit to noting and grouping the emphases of particular phases, but it is a limited benefit.
The danger with classing things in eras is that it gives one scholar the opportunity to believe themselves intellectually fashionable, and dismiss another as hopelessly out-of-date. Eras usually tend to distract from arguments. Classifying someone is a poor substitute for engaging with them.
(Updated PS — I do not include Michael Bird in that latter comment: he is particularly good at constructive and eirenic engagement of those who hold different positions to his own)
January 1st, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Doug,
1. Stendahl’s essay was indeed first published in 1963 in HTR, but it was the 1976 collection that made it more accessible and well known.
2. Dating movements can be become largely arbitrary (e.g. like some descriptions of the “Third Quest”) but they still possess some utility for demonstrating the intellectual coherence that some strands of thought possess.
3. I never said there was a single NPP, in fact, I distinguished Sanders from Wright/Dunn (who can also be distinguished from each other), as well as from Gager and Stowers.
4. I also said that Jewett’s commentary comes on the tail end of similar points made by Byrne and Das who have been moving in a similar post-NPP direction for some time. Jewett’s commentary is a very visible indication that this is becoming more mainstream.
January 1st, 2008 at 6:29 pm
OK Michael, I accept a lot of that. However, I really don’t think we can say we’re at the end of an era when bits of it the scholarly perspective are only just beginning to draw real attention outside scholarship. If I were to predict (which would be foolish) I think we will continue to see some people who draw on aspects of NPP thinking and integrate it with other perspectives, and some who take it further. Bear in mind we still have Wright’s volume on Paul in his Christian Origins series to come.
January 3rd, 2008 at 5:49 am
It seems to me Bird’s simply found a new commentary that, like him, opts for a synthesis of NPP and Reformed views. Hardly a sign of things to come…
And personally I think that half of the “third quest” is actually the “fourth quest”:
3. The search for the criteria of historicity - endless and boring scholarly debates over methodological criteria and their application to get behind the gospels to the true provably-historical core;
4. Social-context research - assessing how the Jesus portrayed in the gospels fits with the realities of first century Palestine.