The New Perspective on Paul (Part 1)

What I take to be the 'consensus', in NT circles, is the notion that Judaism of the first century was not the ugly step sister of Christianity. This is developed in a number of ways, but essentially Sanders looked at the Second Temple literature of the first century, and determined that Second Temple Judaism was no more legalistic than the Christianity in which Paul proclaimed (which is to say it is not a religion based on the notion of legalism, not that there were no legalists within the religion). There have been corrections to Sanders thought since 1976 (one wonders when the word new will cease to signify?). The most important and often most overlooked is that there was no monolithic, normative, orthodox Judaism of the Second Temple period; so we should use the nomenclature that corresponds to this (Judaism(s) is just such an attempt to clarify the historical situation). There has been an attempt to highlight this fact as if it destroys the NPP, where in reality, it neither adds nor subtracts to the NPP, it just rectifies a methodological mistake made by Sanders. So the NPP really started with a new perspective on Second Temple Judaism(s)(at least from the Christian scholars perspective). It was with this new insight that commentators on Paul started to reconstruct and correct this defect by asking the question:

If Paul was not deriding the Judaic people for being legalists, then what was Paul on about?