The time is right for reassessing what Paul's letters have to say about sin. Modern scholarly treatments of the topic usually assume that Paul had a unified and coherent doctrine of sin that somehow lay behind all of the many things that he says about sin, including the rich and varied metaphorical language. I will call this the “invisible meta-narrative.” This habit arises at least partly as a holdover from ancient and medieval Christian thinkers who constructed unifying narratives by synthesizing from all parts of scripture in light of their assumptions about human moral psychology, cosmology, physics, and Christian tradition. I will argue that Paul employed a number of distinct discourses about sin among which he made certain connections, but without condensing these into one theology of fallen human nature as Augustine did. These discourses, known to have been prevalent in Paul's time account for letters’ language about sin. Further, I will argue that the eclipse of the discourse about moral psychology in modern scholarship has led to distortions in understanding Paul's thought about sin.

A number of new assumptions and perspectives that are an outgrowth of scholarship in the last forty years motivate my conviction about a need for reassessing Paul on sin. I will list some of these that I consider most important.

• 1. The persuasive critique of the binary opposition between Jewish and Hellenistic (or Jewish and Persian, Babylonian, “Canaanite,” and so on) that rendered anything Jewish or “of the Old Testament” sui generis, unique and therefore incomparable, has enabled research into the complex cultural mix of which Paul was heir. Many of the numerous studies claiming to show “the origins of Paul's theology” regarding sin and other matters “in the Old Testament” and in Judaism are ways of reading contemporary theological convictions into Paul's letters.

• 2. Now a substantial amount of historical work has been done on the various discourses that may have contributed to Paul's thinking about sin. Discourses do not respect boundaries that writers and authorities claim for or seek to impose upon particular populations (such as the thought of Syrians, Greeks, Judeans, Romans, Christians). Such discourses above all circulated among networks of literate experts, and the networks crossed ethnic boundaries.