EP Sanders' legacy

Ancient Jew Review is posting memoria to EP Sanders. Annette Reed is talking the Second Temple, wherein Sanders forced other scholars to consider Judaism as actually practiced. Matthew Novenson dilates upon Judaism as justified at the time - whether we are fair to call it "legalism".

Sanders' findings appear to have crossed over to researchers into Second Temple Judaism itself, such that now Yonatan Adler can doubt that the average Judaean monotheist even practiced this until the Hasmonaeans. It also appears that Sanders' intent was not to discredit Judaism but to defend it against the bugaboo of his time, namely the 1950s-era Sunday-School canard that Judaism was stagnant and text-based.

For the biblical-maximalists, Sanders forced Joslin McDowell to read Jewish sources, and to disseminate their existence among the Christians. McDowell, no antisemite himself, judged the best form of Judaism - Conservatism as of the late 1970s - as an imperfect Christianity. He might even have been right.

Sanders' influence, I think, went a bit far, to introduce modern canards into Sunday-Schools (thank you, Shelby Spong). Inasmuch as Gospel attacks on "Pharisees" read like strawmen, Saint Mark is in the company of the Rabbinic sages themselves. Sadducees existed, as did Qumran, and Samaritans, and Shammai and Ben Peraḥya deep in the rabbinic community itself. If you can read the Damascus Document and not immediately think "he's a legalist" then I cannot help you.

Also I wonder if Sanders (accidentally) ended up inspiring modern Unz-style antiJudaism anyway. His work gave a second-wind to the Muslims, who figure that the Jews misinterpreted G-d's Torah, even falsified it; Unz's antisemites have read Vridar and correctly interpret an alliance between biblical-minimalists and quranic-maximalists. Christians thereby got into the Toledoth and Paul Schäfer's "Jesus in the Talmud". Some of those reading all this got further into Talmud, at least as summarised in Shulhan Aruch. Again: Judaism as actually practiced, not Judaism as "logically-" determined (by goys) nor Judaism as Spong and, perhaps, Sanders would wish it to be.