In his recently revised Paul, Judaism and the Gentiles, Francis Watson offers a pithy summary of the agenda of the New Perspective. Sanders, he says, extended the critique that G. F. Moore mounted in 1921 against German Lutheran scholarship on Judaism; Moore basically argued that German scholarship was systematizing and apologetic rather than genuinely historical, and Watson suggests that Sanders’s work extended the Moore critique to the Strack-Billerbeck rabbinic collection and the scholarship that came from it.
Watson summarizes Sanders: "The crucial concept of ‘covenant nomism’ was set in polemical opposition to the familiar pejorative terminology - 'legalism,' 'externalism,' 'formalism,' 'earning salvation,' 'works-righteousness,' 'acquiring merit,' and so forth - whose overwhelmingly negative connotations eliminate from the outset all possibility of sympathetic understanding. It is easy to forget hw freely and unquestioningly such terminology was used prior to Sanders, especially in the field of Pauline studies. After Sanders, the whole conceptual apparatus underlying the terminology would have to be dismantled. And that mean rethinking all the polemical Pauline antitheses: faith and works, grace and law, Spirit and letter, life and death, blessing and curse, promise and flesh." (source)
As Watson goes on, he notes Dunn’s early and fundamental attacks on Sanders’s reading of Paul. Dunn argues that Sanders treats Paul as an un-Jewish theologian, rejecting not only covenant nomism but the whole apparatus of covenantal, biblical theology that the Jews built from. Dunn insists that Paul opposes covenant nomism (in Watson’s words) "on the basis of an expanded, inclusive, but still recognizably Jewish covenantal theology." Wright has made similar criticisms of Sanders, adding that Sanders’s view is vitiated by his avoidance of eschatology.
Watson concludes laconically: "it is ironic, then, that Sanders and Dunn are both commonly seen as representatives of a single 'New Perspective on Paul.' The reality is that a repudiation of Sanders’s reading of Paul is integral to the New Perspective as Dunn conceived it." (source)
Apologies to Peter Leithart for lifting two of his posts wholesale from his own blog. The trouble is I just couldn't find a sentence that I could cut out and I thought the comments to well put to just link to.
