As every good preacher knows, context is everything. Taking a verse out of its context can be quite dangerous (in relative terms, that is – no one’s going to die because you do it). Crucial to the New Perspective on Paul, therefore, is reading Paul in his own cultural context.

Second Temple Judaism (formerly known as the ‘intertestamental period’) is the period that covers the time both Jesus and Paul walked the earth and did their stuff. NPP thinkers believe that in order to truly understand Paul you would have to understand what the general Jewish thinking of the time was – for if he is arguing against them or agreeing with them, it is crucial to know what Jewish theologians of the time were saying.

And there is a lot of literature available to us from that time – including the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, and other less well-known works such as 1 Enoch and the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs. Traditionally we have interpreted Paul in the context of the Old Testament and while the NPP people still think this is important they would insist that the key is to understand how the OT was understood by Judaism in this period, i.e. in the 1^st century A.D. Paul, they say, would have read the OT with his 1^st century glasses on and so we have to understand this period’s interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures.

A negative to this approach is that there is no one common way of interpreting the OT in this period. There are many interpretations and NPP scholars don’t always agree on which interpretation to use.

A positive, however, is that this approach rightly places Paul very firmly within his Jewish context. Just like Jesus, Paul was a Jew and there is no evidence that he turned his back on his upbringing. Rather, he understood the message about Jesus as a continuation of the true Jewish faith.

The first post on the NPP can be found here.