Another catchphrase of the New Perspective is "boundary markers." If Christianity were not about the Law in any fundamental sense, insofar as Judaism presented the Law in more benign terms than Christians thought it did prior to our time, then it was about the Law in a penultimate and less deep-reaching way. The real issue in early Christianity was not the relation between Jews and Christians, but rather the relation between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians. This means that the "heat" that is found in Paul's letters comes from the boundary markers that separate Jewish Christians from Gentile Christians, and specifically three things: Sabbath observance, the dietary rules, and circumcision. These boundary markers are what Paul's letters, especially Galatians and Romans, are all about-not the Law in some larger or more essential sense. It is no wonder that the New Perspective on Paul gives the impression, as Ernst Käsemann pointed out in 1991, that Christianity is just a variant of Judaism.
The idea that Paul was really thinking principally about boundary markers is a very old and familiar idea. This is the concept that there is a distinction between law as the reigning dynamic in religious ceremony and law as regnant within humanity's moral life. It has always been a point of contention: the meaning and extent of Paul's words in Romans 10:1-4. The issue has never been resolved to everyone's satisfaction, but it resonates in the minds and hearts of those who study Paul.
One could argue that the main problem with the New Perspective on Paul is that its proponents have not looked widely and broadly enough in their work. They do not know their theology in historical context. These adherents do not seem to realize that Paul is writing to real people, and that human interactions have not fundamentally altered since the first century. How else can we explain that Paul's letters still speak to people today? People often come up to me to say what the seventh chapter of Romans, for example, means to them in their daily lives. The experience of working with people must be factored in if we are to understand what Paul is really saying.
E. P. Sanders and his adherents know a great deal about one thing (i.e., Second Temple Judaism), but not enough about other things that relate to it. We might say that their knowledge is deep but not broad. It is certainly not broad enough. Because the New Perspective is not rooted in reality, the reality of human experience and the long Christian tradition of engaging with that reality, it will probably suffer the fate of the Soviet Union's famous "five-year plans." They came to nothing, because they had disconnected from the reality of real people.
