or rather group of interpretations, of the Pauline letters. Wright contends that Paul cannot be ignored by any serious Christian and that, through his central place within the New Testament canon, Paul has come to be abused, misunderstood, imposed upon, and approached with incorrect or inappropriate questions about the Christian faith. According to Wright, "Paul in the twentieth century, then, has been used and abused much as in the first. Can we, as the century draws towards its close, listen a bit more closely to him? Can we somehow repent of the ways we have mishandled him and respect his own way of doing things a bit more?" This question reflects the key consideration for the New Perspective on Paul and a fundamental aim of Wright's scholarship: to allow the apostle Paul to speak for himself without imposing modern considerations and questions upon him and in so doing, seeking to ascertain what St. Paul was really trying to say to the people he was writing to. From this, Wright contends that by examining the Pauline corpus through this unique perspective, difficult passages within the text become illuminated in new ways, his letters gain coherence both in their particularities as well as with one another, and it provides an overall picture of what Paul was about, without doing violence to the little details within the letters. The beginning of the "new perspective" is the work of E. P. Sanders and his book Paul and Palestinian Judaism. In this 1977 work, Sanders argued that the prevailing view of first-century Judaism in the New Testament was inaccurate. He described it instead as "covenantal nomism", which emphasised God's election of a people and adherence to the Torah as a way of "staying in" the religion (rather than a way of "getting in"). Wright found that Sanders supported the picture he himself had been forming, but nevertheless for the next decade much of what Wright wrote was in disagreement with Sanders on various points. Wright agrees with other "new perspective" scholars that the assumption that the Jews were guilty of a kind of "works-righteousness" is untrue, and that the story of God and the covenant people Israel comes to a climax with Jesus. Paul and justification In speaking on justification, Wright contends, “the discussions of justification in much of the history of the church, certainly since Augustine, got off on the wrong foot – at