I’ve just learned about this controversy, and am trying to get up to speed on it. No, it’s not an RC thing – it’s a theological dispute within Protestant denominations, especially of the Reformed traditions (I think) about interpreting Pauline theology.

Am I right so far?

From The Paul Page, dedicated solely to the "New Perspective"

Over the last three decades, a revolutionary breakthrough in New Testament scholarship has been rocking the academic Christian world. The scholars at the forefront of the revolution — E.P. Sanders, James D.G. Dunn, N.T. Wright, and others — have been pioneering a new approach to the letters of the first-century apostle to the Gentiles, Paul of Tarsus.

These Protestants are engaging first-century Judaism on its own terms, not in the context of the Protestant-Catholic debates of the sixteenth century. The result: A new historical perspective on the meaning of Paul’s polemic against the Judaizers which occupies so much of his recorded correspondence.

What is this new perspective? At its core is the recognition that Judaism is not a religion of self-righteousness whereby humankind seeks to merit salvation before God. Paul’s argument with the Judaizers was not about Christian grace versus Jewish legalism. His argument was rather about the status of Gentiles in the church. Paul’s doctrine of justification, therefore, had far more to do with Jewish-Gentile issues than with questions of the individual’s status before God.

Okay, the "during the past three decades" part makes me feel, frankly, stupid and myopic, but I’ll try to move on.

A bit more about what’s at stake, from an article (one of many good ones) linked on the site

Secondly – and this is amply catalogued, in Re-reading Paul – there is the centrality of Paul and Paul’s writings to the Reformation, the most significant event in Western Christianity since the Middle Ages. It is well known that the original Reformer, Martin Luther, came to believe that what he found objectionable – and therefore clamouring for reform – in certain aspects of late medieval Catholicism was exactly what Paul found objectionable in certain aspects of his own ancestral Judaism. Luther believed that in his personal struggle for righteousness by faith he was recalling Christians to the truth of the gospel as preached by Paul. This means, of course, that Paul – or a distinctive understanding of Paul – stands at the heart of the Reformation and so is absolutely central to the self-understanding and identity of the Christian confessions that are heirs of the Reformation. Touch Paul and you touch their very identity and self-understanding. Hence the controversy – and the delicacy – of the “New Perspective on Paul” for these churches, especially those of an Evangelical persuasion.

And from N.T.Wright, one of the central figures:

I end with a plea. I have lived most of my life in and around evangelical circles in which I have come to recognise a strange phenomenon. It is commonly assumed that Luther and Calvin got Paul right. But often when people think of Luther and Calvin they see them, and hence Paul, through three subsequent lenses provided by western culture. The Enlightenment highlighted the abstract truths of reason over against the messy facts of history; many Protestants have put Lessing and Luther together and still thought they were reading Paul. The Romantic movement highlighted inner feeling over against outer, physical reality; many have thence supposed that this was what Paul, and Luther and Calvin, were really saying (hence the knee-jerk protestant anti-sacramentalism). More recently, existentialism has insisted that what matters is being true to my inner self, rather than being conditioned by history, mine or anyone else’s; many people, not only Rudolf Bultmann, have read Paul and Luther in that light.

At a popular level, this mess and muddle shows up in a general sense that anything inward, anything to do with strong religious emotion, anything which downplays outward observance, must be striking a blow for the Pauline gospel of justification by faith. This is as worrying as it is absurd. All these movements are forms of dualism, where Paul believed in the goodness and God-givenness of creation, and in its eventual promised renewal. Together they reinforce that gnosticism which is a poison at the heart of much contemporary culture, including soi-disant Christian culture.

It is time to turn away from all this; to rub our eyes, and look clearly at the path by which we and our culture have come.

Finally, a response from Dr. Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Convention here, from his blog, with some links

Controversy over the so-called ‘New Perspective’ on Paul has grown in recent years, as revisionist understandings of Paul and his understanding of the Gospel have gained ground among some evangelicals. In my judgment, the New Perspective represents a repudiation of the Gospel as it was recovered, taught, and defended by the Reformers in the 16th century. In other words, I believe that Luther, in his own time, understood Paul better than the New Perspectivists do now. No doubt, those promoting the New Perspective intend to recover what they believe to be the biblical Gospel. Nevertheless, good intention is no assurance of good effect. In rejecting some of the misunderstandings of the Gospel common among some evangelicals, this group has gone on to do great damage to the Gospel itself. Nothing less than the doctrine of justification is at stake.

This is quite interesting to me, and while I’ll be looking into it more and trying to understand it more deeply, if anyone can explain it briefly, especially addressing the following points…

1)Is this "new perspective" closer to the traditional Catholic understanding of Paul (if there is such a thing as a single Catholic understanding of Paul)

2)Are there any Roman Catholic scholars interested in this, or is it only a Protestant/Anglican thing?

3)Is Mohler right? Is this a serious challenge to the traditional Reformation concept of justification?