Sanders was born and grew up in Grand Prairie, Texas. He attended Wesleyan College, Fort Worth (1955-1959) and Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University, Dallas (1959-1962). He spent a year (1962-1963) studying at Gottingen, the University of Oxford and in Jerusalem. Between September 1963 and May 1966 Sanders studied at Union Theological Seminary, New York for his Th.D. His thesis was entitled The Tendencies of the Synoptic Tradition (published in 1969), which used "form criticism" to examine whether the Gospel tradition changed in consistent ways.