Welcome to The Paul Page archives. The Paul Page was a site dedicated to academic study of the apostle, with a special focus on the work of N. T. Wright. The site was hosted by Logos and managed by Mark M. Mattison until it was retired. In an effort to make the archives easily accessible and searchable again, they have been imported into the Logos Word by Word blog. This page is currently under construction. Please bear with us as we work to bring this content back to life.

Over the last few decades, a revolutionary breakthrough in New Testament scholarship rocked the academic Christian world. The scholars at the forefront of the revolution—E. P. Sanders, James D. G. Dunn, N. T. Wright, and others—pioneered a new approach to the letters of the first-century apostle to the Gentiles, Paul of Tarsus.

These Protestants engage first-century Judaism on its own terms, not in the context of the Protestant-Catholic debates of the sixteenth century. The result: A new historical perspective on the meaning of Paul’s polemic against the Judaizers which occupies so much of his recorded correspondence.

What is this new perspective? At its core it asserts that Judaism is not a religion of self-righteousness whereby humankind seeks to merit salvation before God. In this view, Paul’s argument with the Judaizers was not about Christian grace versus Jewish legalism. His argument was rather about the status of Gentiles in the church. The implication is Paul’s doctrine of justification, therefore, had far more to do with Jewish-Gentile issues than with questions of the individual’s status before God.