In a recent conversation with a friend about the New Perspective on Paul, we were talking about the center of Sanders’ contribution to that school of thought, the point which N.T. Wright regards as “settled.” This is not to say that Wright agrees with Sanders on everything, of course, and you may insert all manner of other qualifications here as well. But Wright does believe that when Paul spoke of his blamelessness in Philippians 3, he was referring the same basic covenant status that is attributed to Zecharias and Elizabeth in Luke 1:6. And so my friend and I were talking about that.
What shook out in the conversation was this. Paul gives a list of things which were now dung to him, and most of the list consists of “boundary markers” of Jewish identity. Circumcised the eighth day, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, and so on. But near the end of the list, just before his claim of blamelessness according to the law, he describes himself this way — “concerning zeal, persecuting the church.”
This is is a boundary marker as well — it marks and identifies the seed of the serpent. This is why Ishmael mocked Isaac, the child of promise. The antipathy that God places between those who loved God and those who hated Him is always just as clear as the external markers are.
And this, in its turn, means that on the Damascus road, Paul needed much more than the realization that “Jesus is the Messiah after all, isn’t He?” He needed to be converted to God.