Stendahl launched a frontal attack on the way Luther, Lutherans and Western scholars in general interpreted Paul. Paul ‘has been hailed as a hero of the introspective conscience’,26 wrestling with his personal awareness of sin under the condemnation of the law until he found the answer in Christ through ‘justification by faith’. But, argues Stendahl, this whole picture of Paul has far more to do with Luther’s struggle with his conscience in the sixteenth century than with Paul’s real interest in