I'm reading Krister Stendahl's classic book from 1976 Paul Among Jews and Gentiles.  I have not read Stendahl before, but I've read lots of Pauline scholarship in recent years influenced by Stendahl and others.  His work helps to lay the ground upon which the "New Perspective" developed.  I first encountered the New Perspective in N. T. Wright's Paul in Fresh Perspective and was struck by and persuaded by the radical reinterpretation of Paul.  At the time I said not only did it conclude that we had been wrong about Paul since Martin Luther, but that we'd been wrong about Paul since Augustine.  Wright himself didn't make that claim in his work, but Stendahl explicitly does in this book.

In one excellent paragraph he discusses the problem of the introspective conscience in Western history and how it has led us to misinterpret Paul.

Augustine, who has perhaps rightly been called the  first truly Western man, was the first person in Antiquity or in Christianity to write something so self-centered as his own spiritual autobiography, his Confessions.  It was he who applied Paul's doctrine of justification to the problem of the introspective conscience, to the question: "On what basis does a person find salvation?"  And with Augustine, Western Christianity with its stress on introspective achievements started.  It developed in the Middle Ages--with penitential practice and guidance for self-examination coming increasingly to characterize both monastic and secular life--and man became more and more clever in analyzing his ego.  Man turned in on himself, infatuated and absorbed by the question not of when God will send deliverance in the history of salvation, but how God is working in the innermost individual soul.  The Black Plague, the Black Death, added pressure, and in the piety of the late Middle Ages there were many honest souls.  We should not picture this piety only as running around shopping for indulgences and becoming ever more superficial.  There were those who took the Word seriously, and they suffered.  And one of those who suffered most was Martin Luther, who--not by accident--was an Augustinian.  In the grapplings of his introspective conscience, he picked up Paul and found in him God's answer to his problem, the problem of the West, and the problem of the late medieval piety of the West.  It is instructive that homiletical material and works on edification from the Greek Church, the Russian Orthodox Church, the Syriac Church, the Coptic Church, the Mar Thoma Church-all of which read their Bibles faithfully, some in languages close to the original tongues of Jesus or of the early versions--contain little of this interest.  The introspective conscience is a Western development and a Western plague.  Once the introspective conscience came into the theological bloodstream of Western culture, it tended to dominate the scene far beyond its original function.  It reached its theological climax and explosion in the Reformation, and its secular climax and explosion in Sigmund Freud.  But Paul himself was never involved in this pursuit.

Two observations.  Given that I'm currently reading Augustine as well, it is affirming of my own critical reading of him to be reminded of the wrong turns he sent Western thought down.

And it is amazing to consider how many Christians so dogmatically believe that their faith is about individual salvation.  I believed this for so long and was glad to be liberated, ultimately not by what was traditionally "liberal theology," which is also often very focused on the self, but by authentic reading of the scriptural tradition.