Francis Watson

Francis Watson (born 1956) is an English New Testament scholar, Professor in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University, and a critic of the New Perspective on Paul known for arguing that theological concerns belong inside, not outside, biblical scholarship.¹²

Life and Ministry

Watson earned an MA and a DPhil from Oxford, completing his doctorate in 1984.¹ He began his academic career at King’s College London before his appointment in 1999 to the Kirby Laing Chair of New Testament Exegesis at the University of Aberdeen. In 2007 he moved to Durham University, where he holds his current professorship in the Department of Theology and Religion.¹

Theological Contribution

Watson’s early monograph, Paul, Judaism, and the Gentiles: A Sociological Approach (1986), read Paul’s letters through the social dynamics of the early Christian communities that produced them. He revised and expanded this work as Paul, Judaism, and the Gentiles: Beyond the New Perspective (2007), a title announcing his break from a position he had once shared.² Aaron Thomas O’Kelley’s 2010 dissertation on the New Perspective on Paul describes Watson, “although formerly identified with the new perspective,” as someone who “now seeks to move beyond it,” and quotes a 2001 essay in which Watson laid out the New Perspective’s characteristic three-step argument before rejecting it: readers first notice Paul contrasting the gospel’s grace with a Jewish or Jewish-Christian law-keeping, then are told this cannot really be an antithesis between divine and human agency because “Sanders has taught us that Judaism was and is a religion of grace,” and are therefore pushed to read Paul’s “faith” and “works” language as a claim about who belongs to the people of God rather than about how a person is saved.² In Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith (2004), Watson argued that Leviticus 18:5, which Paul quotes in Galatians 3:12, states the law’s own “entire rationale” in a single sentence, and that the assumption that “life” there presupposes sinless, perfect obedience is, in his view, “irrelevant to Paul’s argument” and even “contradicts Leviticus itself.” Jason DeRouchie’s 2020 Themelios article and Micah John McCormick’s 2010 dissertation both take up and dispute this specific reading of Leviticus 18:5.³⁴

Watson has also written extensively on biblical theology’s own theological method, in Text, Church, and World: Biblical Interpretation in Theological Perspective (1994) and Text and Truth: Redefining Biblical Theology (1997). Michael Kruger’s The Question of Canon (2013) reports that “Francis Watson has pressed the case that, ‘Theological concerns should have an acknowledged place within the field of biblical scholarship,’” in the course of arguing that the canon itself is inescapably a theological, not merely historical, question.⁵ Kruger elsewhere credits Watson with tracing the modern scholarly suspicion of early Christian writing, over against oral proclamation, to the existentialism of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Rudolf Bultmann. Watson, as Kruger presents him, calls this suspicion a “neo-Marcionite rejection of Judaism,” since it identifies the written text with “Jewishness, the letter that kills,” and treats the recovery of an unwritten, immediate gospel as a purification of Christianity from its Jewish, textual roots.⁶ Andreas Köstenberger’s survey of the discipline reports a taxonomy of biblical theology, proposed by Edward Klink and Darian Lockett, that runs from “more theological” to “more historical” and names Watson as the sole representative of its most theological type, “Biblical Theology as Theological Construction,” alongside James Barr, D. A. Carson, N. T. Wright, and Brevard Childs as the representatives of the other four.⁷ Watson continued this project into Gospel studies in later monographs, including Gospel Writing: A Canonical Perspective (2013) and What Is a Gospel? (2022).

Historical Significance

Watson retitled his own 1986 monograph Beyond the New Perspective in 2007, announcing a break from a position he once held. O’Kelley treats Watson’s own account, that the New Perspective’s Pauline grace/law antitheses are really claims about Jew-Gentile ecclesiology rather than about divine and human agency, as independent confirmation, from a scholar who once held the position himself, that the movement rests on an assumption from Sanders it has never actually argued for.² Kruger draws on Watson’s case that theological concerns belong within biblical scholarship, alongside similar arguments from Iain Provan, Floyd Filson, and Kevin Vanhoozer, in arguing that the canon is inescapably a theological question and not only a historical one.⁵

Related Doctrines

References

“Professor Francis Watson,” Durham University, Department of Theology and Religion, accessed September 2026, https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/francis-watson/. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Aaron Thomas O’Kelley, “Introduction,” in “A Historical-Theological Critique of the New Perspective on Paul” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 22-23, quoting Francis Watson, “Not the New Perspective” (paper presented at the British New Testament Conference, 2001), as revised in Francis Watson, Paul, Judaism, and the Gentiles: Beyond the New Perspective, rev. and exp. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Jason S. DeRouchie, “The Use of Leviticus 18:5 in Galatians 3:12: A Redemptive-Historical Reassessment,” Themelios 45, no. 2 (2020): 240-59, quoting Francis Watson, Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 326. ↩
Micah John McCormick, “Humanity’s Obedience for Eternal Life After the Fall,” in “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 137-77, quoting Francis Watson, Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 314-15. ↩
Michael J. Kruger, The Question of Canon: Challenging the Status Quo in the New Testament Debate (Nottingham: Apollos, 2013), chap. 1, “The Definition of Canon,” 41. ↩ ↩²
Kruger, The Question of Canon, chap. 3, “The Writing of Canon,” 82-83, quoting Francis Watson, Text and Truth: Redefining Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 130, 135. ↩
Andreas J. Köstenberger, “The Present and Future of Biblical Theology,” Themelios 37, no. 3 (2012): 445-64, reporting Edward W. Klink III and Darian R. Lockett, Understanding Biblical Theology: A Comparison of Theory and Practice (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012). ↩