W.D. Davies and the Jewish Paul

W.D. Davies (William David Davies, 1911–2001) wrote the book that quietly redirected an entire field. Paul and Rabbinic Judaism: Some Rabbinic Elements in Pauline Theology, published by SPCK in 1948, made the case that Paul's thought grew out of rabbinic and Hebraic tradition — not, as the dominant reading of the time held, primarily out of Hellenistic Greek philosophy. It's a quieter kind of landmark than Käsemann's or Pannenberg's — no controversy tour, no lecture-hall confrontation — but its influence runs at least as deep.

In 1950, two years after that book appeared, Davies was named Professor of Biblical Theology at Duke Divinity School, where his influence multiplied through the students he trained as much as through what he wrote himself. E.P. Sanders completed his doctorate under Davies's supervision at Union Theological Seminary in 1966, and Sanders's own Paul and Palestinian Judaism — the book that launched what's now called the New Perspective on Paul — is in direct dialogue with Davies's earlier argument. If you trace the line back far enough, the reframing of Paul as a fundamentally Jewish thinker runs through Davies before it reaches Sanders and the scholars who followed him.

His other major work, The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount (1964), extends the same instinct to Matthew's Gospel — reading it against its Jewish context rather than treating it as a Hellenized text. Read together with the 1948 book, it's a genuinely coherent research program spanning more than fifteen years, which is rarer in this field than it should be.

Davies never had the public profile of a Käsemann or a Pannenberg, which is part of why his books are less commonly stocked than their scholarly importance would suggest. For anyone working seriously on Paul, the New Perspective, or first-century Judaism, tracking down a genuine SPCK first printing of Paul and Rabbinic Judaism is worth the search.