E. P. Sanders - Biography

Biography

Sanders was born and grew up in Grand Prairie, Texas. He attended Wesleyan College, Fort Worth (1955-1959) and Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University, Dallas (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 for his Th.D. His thesis was entitled The Tendencies of the Synoptic Tradition (published in 1969), which used form criticism to examine whether the Gospel tradition changed in consistent ways. The thesis was supervised by W.D. Davies.

He taught at McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario) from 1966 to 1984. In 1968 he won a fellowship from the Canada Council and spent a year in Israel, studying Rabbinic Judaism.

In 1984 he became Dean Ireland's Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Queen's College, positions he kept until his move to Duke University in 1990. He has also held visiting professorships and lectureships at Trinity College, Dublin, and the University of Cambridge. Sanders identifies himself as a "liberal, modern, secularized Protestant" in his book "Jesus and Judaism;" fellow scholar John P. Meier calls him a postliberal Protestant. In any case, he is wary of Albert Schweitzer's indictment of liberal theology's attempt to make Jesus in its own image, and seeks to keep his religious convictions out of his scholarship.