E. P. Sanders

Ed Parish Sanders (April 18, 1937 – November 21, 2022) was an American New Testament scholar and a principal proponent of the "New Perspective on Paul". He was a major scholar in the scholarship on the historical Jesus and contributed to the view that Jesus was part of a renewal movement within Judaism. Sanders identified himself as a "liberal, modern, secularized Protestant" in his book Jesus and Judaism; fellow scholar John P. Meier called him a postliberal Protestant. He was Arts and Sciences Professor of Religion at Duke University, North Carolina from 1990 until his retirement in 2005. Sanders was a Fellow of the British Academy. In 1966, he received a Doctor of Theology degree from Union Theological Seminary in New York City. In 1990, he received a Doctor of Letters degree from the University of Oxford and a Doctor of Theology degree from the University of Helsinki. He authored, co-authored, or edited 13 books and numerous articles. He received a number of prizes, including the 1990 University of Louisville and Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary Grawemeyer Award for the best book on religion, Jesus and Judaism (Fortress Press, 1985). Biography Sanders was born on April 18, 1937, in Grand Prairie, Texas. He attended Texas Wesleyan College (now Texas Wesleyan University) (1955–1959) and Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University (1959–1962). He spent a year (1962–1963) studying at Göttingen, the University of Oxford, and in Jerusalem. Between September 1963 and May 1966, Sanders studied at Union Theological Seminary, New York City, for his Doctor of Theology degree. His thesis was titled The Tendencies of the Synoptic Tradition (published in 1969 by Cambridge University Press; reprinted by Wipf & Stock in 2000), which used form criticism to examine whether the Gospel tradition changed in consistent ways. The thesis was supervised by W. D. Davies.