THE New Testament scholar E. P. Sanders, who died last week, was a widely travelled Texan who held academic posts in Canada and Oxford, as well as in the United States. He was at the forefront of scholarship on Paul, and also contributed to the debate about the historical Jesus.

In Pauline studies, he argued against the demonisation of the Pharisees which he saw as having roots in Luther’s reading of Paul. For Luther, the Pharisees were forerunners of the Catholic hierarchy that he so bitterly opposed. Sanders insisted, along with other scholars, that Luther’s take was wrong. Paul’s concern was not to replace Pharisaic Judaism, but to show how Christ made it possible for Gentiles to enter into covenant with God. God, as he put it, “righteousesses” believers by faith in Christ, but they stay within the covenant by adherence to at least parts of the Jewish Law.

In contrast to those scholars of the mid-20th century who argued that we can know almost nothing about the Jesus of history, Sanders demonstrated that we could actually know quite a lot. Through a careful reading of the New Testament and other contemporary literature, we can make sense of Jesus in terms of the Judaism of his time. The historical Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet and reformer, who announced the advent of the Kingdom of God, and was arrested and crucified because of his violent attack on the Jewish temple.

I met Ed Sanders when he took part in The Lives of Jesus, a TV series that I produced in 1995. He arrived in Jerusalem overnight, and we were due to film with him the next day. When the morning came, it proved almost impossible to wake him, and, when he did finally get up, it was to confess that his fear of flying had driven him to overindulge in red wine on the flight and he was not feeling well.

But professionalism eventually overcame nausea, and we filmed him discussing the last supper with the presenter, Mark Tully. Later, we went on to the Temple Mount, where Tully asked him about the resurrection. He was rather cagey about his personal beliefs. (He has been described as a liberal, modern, secular Protestant.) I was fascinated by part of the conversation when he described the properties of the resurrected body of Jesus — the ability to pass through doors and appear and disappear in different places, the fact that he could eat and drink and touch and be touched.

As he concluded, Sanders laughed and said: “Well, Paul describes the resurrection body as a ‘spiritual body’ — I’m not sure what that is, but the body of Jesus seems a pretty good example of what Paul was getting at.”

I hope that there is champagne to greet Ed Sanders in the hereafter — but not too much, perhaps.