Paul the Apostle has been placed within Second Temple Judaism by recent scholarship since the 1970s. A main point of departure with older scholarship is the understanding of Second Temple Judaism; the covenant with God and the role of works as a means to either gain or keep the covenant. A central concern for Paul was the inclusion of Gentiles into God's New Covenant, and the role of faith and commandments in the inclusion of Gentile converts. Paul did not deem circumcision necessary, as witnessed throughout his writings, but thought that God included Gentiles into his New Covenant through faith in Christ. This brought him into conflict with the Judaizers, a faction of the Jewish Christians who demanded strict observance of the Mosaic Law by Gentile Christians. Eventually the less strict view prevailed, and led to the separation of Gentile Christianity from Judaism. Overview Paul's influence on Christian thinking is considered to be more significant than that of any other New Testament author. According to Krister Stendahl, the main concern of Paul's writings on Jesus' role, and salvation by faith, is not the individual conscience of human sinners, and their doubts about being chosen by God or not, but the problem of the inclusion of Gentile (Greek) Torah-observers into God's covenant. Paul draws on several interpretative frames to solve this problem, but most importantly, his own experience and understanding. The kerygma from refers to two mythologies: the Greek myth of the noble dead, to which the Maccabean notion of martyrdom and dying for one's people is related; and the Jewish myth of the persecuted sage or righteous man, c.q. the "story of the child of wisdom." The notion of 'dying for' refers to this martyrdom and persecution. 'Dying for our sins' refers to the problem of Gentile Torah-observers, who, despite their faithfulness, are not Jewish by birth, and are therefore 'sinners', excluded from God's covenant. Jesus' death and resurrection solved this problem of the exclusion of the Gentiles from God's covenant, as indicated by . The inclusion of Gentiles into Judaism posed a problem for the Jewish-Christian identity of some of the proto-Christians, since the new converts did not follow all the tenets of the Mosaic Law; circumcision in particular was regarded as a token of the membership of the Abrahamic covenant, and the most traditionalist faction of Jewish Christians (i.e., converted Pharisees) insisted that Gentile converts had to be