Four Centuries of Pauline Studies: From Luther to the New Perspective

Few figures in theology have been fought over as productively as the apostle Paul. Reading his letters has been the occasion for reinventing entire fields more than once — and the history of how scholars have read him is, in its own way, a history of theology itself over the last five hundred years.

It starts with Martin Luther, lecturing on Romans in Marburg from 1515 to 1517 and returning to Galatians in a 1535 commentary regarded ever since as one of his masterpieces. Luther's reading of Paul's distinction between a passive righteousness received by faith and an active righteousness earned by works became, in his own words, the material principle of the Reformation — an argument that split Western Christianity and made Paul, for the first time, the theological battleground he's remained ever since.

Three centuries later, Ferdinand Christian Baur reopened Paul in an entirely different key. Working at Tübingen in the 1830s and 40s, Baur applied a Hegelian dialectic to early Christian history, reading the New Testament as the record of a real conflict between a Jewish-Christian party around Peter and a Gentile-Christian party around Paul, resolved only later in a synthesis he called early Catholicism. His Tendenzkritik was radical in its conclusions — he accepted only Romans, Galatians, and 1–2 Corinthians as genuinely Pauline — and while few scholars today share his dating or his Hegelian framework, the habit he established, of reading Paul's letters as historically situated arguments rather than timeless doctrine, never went away.

The twentieth century split that historical instinct into several distinct schools, and three of them are worth knowing by name. Rudolf Bultmann read Paul through existentialist categories of individual human decision, and his student Ernst Käsemann broke with him publicly over the historical Jesus before relocating Pauline theology in Jewish apocalyptic expectation — the argument that runs through Käsemann's 1973 Commentary on Romans. W.D. Davies's Paul and Rabbinic Judaism (1948) insisted on reading Paul as a fundamentally Jewish thinker rather than a Hellenized one, a line his student E.P. Sanders carried into Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977), the book that launched what's now simply called the New Perspective on Paul and reshaped the field more than anything since Baur. And Abraham Malherbe, working from a different angle entirely, read Paul's letters against the shared toolkit of Hellenistic moral philosophy and rhetoric — not what Paul believed, but how he argued and pastored.

None of these approaches retired the others. A serious Pauline studies shelf today holds Luther next to Baur next to Käsemann next to Davies and Malherbe, not because scholarship failed to settle the question, but because each generation found something true that the last one had missed.