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Paul and Rabbinic Judaism: Some Rabbinic Elements In Pauline Theology
Book by Davies, W. D.
403 pages, Paperback
First published December 31, 1970
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61 people want to read
About the author
William David Davies
33 books12 followersWilliam David Davies, often known as W. D. P. Davies, (18 January 1897 – 7 July 1969) was a Welsh Presbyterian minister and writer on theological topics. After becoming the first Welsh student to obtain a Bachelor of Divinity degree from the University of Oxford, he turned down an offer to become a theology tutor at Oxford, along with a college fellowship, preferring to become a Presbyterian minister. He wrote various theological works and was regarded as an excellent scholar as well as a powerful preacher.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 11, 2018
Welsh Congregational minister and theologian Davies (1911-2001) published his seminal work on the influence of the Apostle Paul's Jewish background to his Christian writings found in the New Testament in 1948. This book moved the general thrust of Pauline studies from a decidedly Hellenistic focus to a more balanced Jewish focus. In my opinion this book, a dense theological work, is best suited for Master's-level study and beyond.
February 21, 2012
Davies argues Paul was a Rabbi become Christian. His life and thought were primarily governed by Pharisaic concepts, which were baptized into Christ.
Important work. All discussions of the NPP are in one way or another indebted to this text.
Important work. All discussions of the NPP are in one way or another indebted to this text.
August 28, 2015
Though it has become somewhat overshadowed in popular scholarship by his student E. P. Sanders’ Paul and Palestinian Judaism, Davies’ masterful work still deserves careful attention. First published in 1948, the book is remarkably original and remarkably farsighted, offering insightful contributions to contemporary debates.
The thesis can be simply stated: Paul is “a Rabbi become Christian and was therefore primarily governed…by Pharisaic concepts, which he had baptized ‘unto Christ’” (16). Davies aims to demonstrate “that Paul belonged to the main stream of first-century Judaism, and that elements of his thought, which are often labelled as Hellenistic, might well be derived from Judaism.”
In what follows, I offer a chapter-by-chapter summary, finishing with the preface to the Fourth Edition in which Davies directly debates with Sanders.
1. Davies dismantles caricatures of first-century Judaism in which Palestinian Judaism is thought to be warm, intimate and self-contained in contrast to cold, Platonic, syncretistic Diaspora Judaism. In contrast, he notes that Palestine was occupied since 63 BCE by the Romans and was effectively bilingual. Judaism, even in Jerusalem, was irresistibly influenced by Hellenism. He also notes that one cannot separate Pharisaic thought from Apocalypticism. Though it was not until after 70 CE, according to Davies, that “Judaism disowned” apocalyptic, pre-70 Pharisaism was deeply influenced by apocalyptic thought (10).
2. Sin and the Flesh: Though many have thought that the opposition of sin and flesh stems from Hellenistic sources, the two are actually never juxtaposed in Greek literature. Davies raises the possibility of a Rabbinic source for Paul’s hamartiology. He finds in Romans 7 a Doctrine of the Two Natures close to that of 1QS, T. Levi, and the Didache. Davies divides “Paul’s” life into three stages in Rom 7: (1) his age of innocence before sin reigned, (2) when the commandment came and sin sprang to life, (3) when the Spirit arrived to deliver him. Davies cleverly maps this progression onto the moral maturation of a Jew: (1’) the yetzer ha-ra‘ does not come in the first thirteen years of life, but then (2’) moral responsibility comes upon the bar-mitzvah. Davies caps off the argument by conjecturing that φρόνημα τῆς σαρκός is an acceptable translation of yetzer ha-ra‘.
3. Adam and Christ: Davies seeks to show how pervasive reference to Adam was in Rabbinic literature. Davies believes that Paul introduced the Adam typology into the church, which Mark later incorporated into his enigmatic Temptation Narrative. As we’ve noted, Adam appears in 1 Cor 15 and Rom 5. For the Rabbis, all humankind was united in Adam. Indeed, his name formed an acronym: A for Ἀνατολή, D for Δύσις, A for Ἄρκτος, M for Μεσημβρία (East, West, North, South). So too Adam was neither male nor female (or, more precisely, both). Paul appropriated the unity of opposites in Adam in Rabbinic Judaism to draw his readers together into One Body, that of Jesus. Being “in Christ” meant being incorporated into the Second Adam.
4. Nationalism: Was the church to be the New Israel? Here Davies helpfully avoids equating the church with the nation of Israel, noting instead that Paul’s “noble universalism” led him to welcome all in Christ. But Paul remained Jewish; indeed, this was necessary if he was to continue to have any ministry to his own people (74). Ultimately, Paul rejected nationalism for “in Christ” language, but he himself remained profoundly Jewish.
5. Paul as Preacher: In the wake of failed explanations of the Eucharist in terms of Mystery Religions (91), Davies defends the claim that participation in the death of Christ is analogous for Paul to participation in the history of the Exodus (e.g., the Passover Haggadah). Participants in the Passover festival were transported, as it were, to the original Exodus: “You shall tell your child on that day, ‘It was because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt.’” (Exod 13:8; cf. Josh 24; Passover Haggadah). Union with Christ in his death and resurrection can be explained along the lines of the Exodus account – as in the Exodus, we become participants in Christ’s history of death and resurrection. Thus, for Paul, Christ is “our paschal lamb (πάσχα)” (1 Cor 5:7). Davies concludes by pronouncing Paul the “κῆρυξ…of a new Exodus” (108).
6. Paul as Teacher: If Paul preached a new Exodus, he taught at the foot of a new Sinai. But if Paul was thoroughly Jewish, what would he teach predominantly Gentile converts? Here again Davies reaches into the resources of Rabbinica. Since Paul is dealing with Gentile converts, one may wonder if he resorted to the Noachian commandments, as does the so-called Jerusalem Council (Acts 15). Paul does not: “eat whatever is set before you.” Instead, Davies shows that Paul relied on the teachings of his master, Jesus, in instructing new baptisands (140). In sum, Paul “must have regarded Jesus in the light of a new Moses and recognized in the words of Christ a νόμος τοῦ χριστοῦ” (144).
7. Christ the Wisdom of God: Davies contends that “Jesus has replaced the Torah at the center of Paul’s life” and that “we should expect on a priori grounds that attributes ascribed to the Torah revealed on Sinai would by the Apostle be transferred to Christ” (149). He wisely draws upon traditions associated with Wisdom, which are numerous in Rabbinic literature. For Paul, the world is created through Christ, just as Wisdom provided the blueprint for creation (Prov 8:22). In light of this, attributes of Wisdom can be applied to Christ in Paul, as indeed we do find (1 Cor 1:24, 30). Thus there is a continuity between nature and grace, between God’s plan in Christ and creation (pace Karl Barth). Davies concludes with a theological point, that Christ can be revealed in nature since it was created through him. Thus to live according to the pattern of Christ is to live according to Nature, or, as Stanley Hauerwas put it in his Gifford Lectures, “with the grain of the universe.”
8. The Lord the Spirit: As in many of these chapters, Davies begins by clear cutting readings of Paul that use Hellenistic philosophy and religion to describe the backdrop of Paul’s thought, in this case on the Spirit. Davies shows that he is as conversant with these readings as he is unconvinced: Rabbinic pneumatology proves more promising. However, there is a key difference between Paul’s pneumatology and the Rabbis’: the presence of the Spirit. In most Rabbinic sources, the Spirit ceases to speak through the prophets because the Torah is normative – there is no need of further revelation because the written and oral Torah is sufficient. By contrast, the Spirit is active, present, and communicative in Paul. Davies turns to Joel 2:28 and its reception history (Num. Rab. 15:25) to explain this: In the world to come, all Israel will be prophets. Since Paul believes that the Spirit is once again active, it appears that the end of the Ages has come.
9. The Death of Jesus: In the longest chapter in the book, Davies attempts to explain Paul’s paradoxical repulsion and attraction to the death of Jesus. For a Rabbi like Paul, the cross would no doubt have been a σκάνδαλον. Were it not for the vindication of the resurrection which “compelled [Paul] to find a place in the divine economy for a crucified Messiah,” Paul would have never thought of Jesus as the Messiah (228). How did Paul receive traditions about the death of Jesus? Davies goes to the obvious place, 1 Cor 11, and notes Paul’s Rabbinic redaction. The tradition behind Mark’s formulation of the Eucharist (“this is my blood of the covenant,” Mk 14:24) would have been repugnant to any sensible Jew – drinking blood was strictly forbidden (Lev 17). Thus the dictum is altered by Paul (“this cup is the new covenant in my blood,” 1 Cor 11:25). Davies concludes that here “we are to trace the mark of the Rabbi who has moulded what he has found in the tradition into a form palatable to his own delicate sensibilities” (247). He moves on to examine Jesus’ death and the possibility of a suffering or dying Messiah in Rabbinic Judaism. That such traditions are present is not doubted; however, the dating of many of these traditions (especially in b. Sanh. 96b-98a) present significant problems for claiming suffering was part of first-century Jewish Messiaserwartungen.
10. Resurrection: Davies argues that just as the presence of the Holy Spirit was a sign that the end has arrived, so too does the resurrection indicate that “the Age to Come has come” (298). In this chapter, Davies is fighting on two fronts: against those who would claim that Paul’s body-soul dualism is completely Hellenistic on the one hand, and against Schweitzer on the other who imposes the eschatological system of the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha upon Paul. To the first group Davies responds again that a tidy demarcation between Judaism and Hellenism is not possible (320). To Schweitzer he notes that Paul’s eschatological schema is much simpler than its pseudepigraphical counterparts. Paul, for instance, does not appear to have space for a distinct Messianic Age; if he does, we are living in it:
2 Bar, 4 Ez, Rev: This Age Resurrection & Judgment Messianic Age Age to Come
Paul: “Now” Parousia General Resurrection & Final Judgment Consummation
Resurrection of JC (firstfruits of Age to Come)
This complex temporality, Davies notes, is anticipated already in Rabbinic literature, in which “there are two phases to the ‘olam ha-ba’ – it both IS and COMES” (316).
Preface to the 4th edition (1980): Davies comments on the many changes that took place since the first edition of PRJ in 1948. Research on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi library, and Rabbinic Judaism (under Neusner) had all come into their own. Hengel’s Judaism and Hellenism had confirmed the thesis of the first chapter of PRJ. Davies sums up this academic atmosphere as the “eclipse of dichotomies.” Greater nuance characterized the research of the day.
Davies devotes the most space to commenting on Paul and Palestinian Judaism, the work of his former student E. P. Sanders. Davies is appreciative of Sanders’ now-famous work. But he finds significant problems. En bref, where Sanders finds discontinuity between Paul and Palestinian Judaism, Davies finds “a continuity which we would now insist is rooted in the faithfulness of God” (xxxvii). Most devastatingly, Davies notes that Sanders, like Bultmann, never deals with Rom 9-11 in a sustained way: “extremes meet” (xxxv). This added introduction to the Fourth Edition shows the author fully aware of his contribution and his location in current scholarship. It is thus all the more regrettable that he was unable to make the projected revisions to the work for the planned Fifth Edition.
The thesis can be simply stated: Paul is “a Rabbi become Christian and was therefore primarily governed…by Pharisaic concepts, which he had baptized ‘unto Christ’” (16). Davies aims to demonstrate “that Paul belonged to the main stream of first-century Judaism, and that elements of his thought, which are often labelled as Hellenistic, might well be derived from Judaism.”
In what follows, I offer a chapter-by-chapter summary, finishing with the preface to the Fourth Edition in which Davies directly debates with Sanders.
1. Davies dismantles caricatures of first-century Judaism in which Palestinian Judaism is thought to be warm, intimate and self-contained in contrast to cold, Platonic, syncretistic Diaspora Judaism. In contrast, he notes that Palestine was occupied since 63 BCE by the Romans and was effectively bilingual. Judaism, even in Jerusalem, was irresistibly influenced by Hellenism. He also notes that one cannot separate Pharisaic thought from Apocalypticism. Though it was not until after 70 CE, according to Davies, that “Judaism disowned” apocalyptic, pre-70 Pharisaism was deeply influenced by apocalyptic thought (10).
2. Sin and the Flesh: Though many have thought that the opposition of sin and flesh stems from Hellenistic sources, the two are actually never juxtaposed in Greek literature. Davies raises the possibility of a Rabbinic source for Paul’s hamartiology. He finds in Romans 7 a Doctrine of the Two Natures close to that of 1QS, T. Levi, and the Didache. Davies divides “Paul’s” life into three stages in Rom 7: (1) his age of innocence before sin reigned, (2) when the commandment came and sin sprang to life, (3) when the Spirit arrived to deliver him. Davies cleverly maps this progression onto the moral maturation of a Jew: (1’) the yetzer ha-ra‘ does not come in the first thirteen years of life, but then (2’) moral responsibility comes upon the bar-mitzvah. Davies caps off the argument by conjecturing that φρόνημα τῆς σαρκός is an acceptable translation of yetzer ha-ra‘.
3. Adam and Christ: Davies seeks to show how pervasive reference to Adam was in Rabbinic literature. Davies believes that Paul introduced the Adam typology into the church, which Mark later incorporated into his enigmatic Temptation Narrative. As we’ve noted, Adam appears in 1 Cor 15 and Rom 5. For the Rabbis, all humankind was united in Adam. Indeed, his name formed an acronym: A for Ἀνατολή, D for Δύσις, A for Ἄρκτος, M for Μεσημβρία (East, West, North, South). So too Adam was neither male nor female (or, more precisely, both). Paul appropriated the unity of opposites in Adam in Rabbinic Judaism to draw his readers together into One Body, that of Jesus. Being “in Christ” meant being incorporated into the Second Adam.
4. Nationalism: Was the church to be the New Israel? Here Davies helpfully avoids equating the church with the nation of Israel, noting instead that Paul’s “noble universalism” led him to welcome all in Christ. But Paul remained Jewish; indeed, this was necessary if he was to continue to have any ministry to his own people (74). Ultimately, Paul rejected nationalism for “in Christ” language, but he himself remained profoundly Jewish.
5. Paul as Preacher: In the wake of failed explanations of the Eucharist in terms of Mystery Religions (91), Davies defends the claim that participation in the death of Christ is analogous for Paul to participation in the history of the Exodus (e.g., the Passover Haggadah). Participants in the Passover festival were transported, as it were, to the original Exodus: “You shall tell your child on that day, ‘It was because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt.’” (Exod 13:8; cf. Josh 24; Passover Haggadah). Union with Christ in his death and resurrection can be explained along the lines of the Exodus account – as in the Exodus, we become participants in Christ’s history of death and resurrection. Thus, for Paul, Christ is “our paschal lamb (πάσχα)” (1 Cor 5:7). Davies concludes by pronouncing Paul the “κῆρυξ…of a new Exodus” (108).
6. Paul as Teacher: If Paul preached a new Exodus, he taught at the foot of a new Sinai. But if Paul was thoroughly Jewish, what would he teach predominantly Gentile converts? Here again Davies reaches into the resources of Rabbinica. Since Paul is dealing with Gentile converts, one may wonder if he resorted to the Noachian commandments, as does the so-called Jerusalem Council (Acts 15). Paul does not: “eat whatever is set before you.” Instead, Davies shows that Paul relied on the teachings of his master, Jesus, in instructing new baptisands (140). In sum, Paul “must have regarded Jesus in the light of a new Moses and recognized in the words of Christ a νόμος τοῦ χριστοῦ” (144).
7. Christ the Wisdom of God: Davies contends that “Jesus has replaced the Torah at the center of Paul’s life” and that “we should expect on a priori grounds that attributes ascribed to the Torah revealed on Sinai would by the Apostle be transferred to Christ” (149). He wisely draws upon traditions associated with Wisdom, which are numerous in Rabbinic literature. For Paul, the world is created through Christ, just as Wisdom provided the blueprint for creation (Prov 8:22). In light of this, attributes of Wisdom can be applied to Christ in Paul, as indeed we do find (1 Cor 1:24, 30). Thus there is a continuity between nature and grace, between God’s plan in Christ and creation (pace Karl Barth). Davies concludes with a theological point, that Christ can be revealed in nature since it was created through him. Thus to live according to the pattern of Christ is to live according to Nature, or, as Stanley Hauerwas put it in his Gifford Lectures, “with the grain of the universe.”
8. The Lord the Spirit: As in many of these chapters, Davies begins by clear cutting readings of Paul that use Hellenistic philosophy and religion to describe the backdrop of Paul’s thought, in this case on the Spirit. Davies shows that he is as conversant with these readings as he is unconvinced: Rabbinic pneumatology proves more promising. However, there is a key difference between Paul’s pneumatology and the Rabbis’: the presence of the Spirit. In most Rabbinic sources, the Spirit ceases to speak through the prophets because the Torah is normative – there is no need of further revelation because the written and oral Torah is sufficient. By contrast, the Spirit is active, present, and communicative in Paul. Davies turns to Joel 2:28 and its reception history (Num. Rab. 15:25) to explain this: In the world to come, all Israel will be prophets. Since Paul believes that the Spirit is once again active, it appears that the end of the Ages has come.
9. The Death of Jesus: In the longest chapter in the book, Davies attempts to explain Paul’s paradoxical repulsion and attraction to the death of Jesus. For a Rabbi like Paul, the cross would no doubt have been a σκάνδαλον. Were it not for the vindication of the resurrection which “compelled [Paul] to find a place in the divine economy for a crucified Messiah,” Paul would have never thought of Jesus as the Messiah (228). How did Paul receive traditions about the death of Jesus? Davies goes to the obvious place, 1 Cor 11, and notes Paul’s Rabbinic redaction. The tradition behind Mark’s formulation of the Eucharist (“this is my blood of the covenant,” Mk 14:24) would have been repugnant to any sensible Jew – drinking blood was strictly forbidden (Lev 17). Thus the dictum is altered by Paul (“this cup is the new covenant in my blood,” 1 Cor 11:25). Davies concludes that here “we are to trace the mark of the Rabbi who has moulded what he has found in the tradition into a form palatable to his own delicate sensibilities” (247). He moves on to examine Jesus’ death and the possibility of a suffering or dying Messiah in Rabbinic Judaism. That such traditions are present is not doubted; however, the dating of many of these traditions (especially in b. Sanh. 96b-98a) present significant problems for claiming suffering was part of first-century Jewish Messiaserwartungen.
10. Resurrection: Davies argues that just as the presence of the Holy Spirit was a sign that the end has arrived, so too does the resurrection indicate that “the Age to Come has come” (298). In this chapter, Davies is fighting on two fronts: against those who would claim that Paul’s body-soul dualism is completely Hellenistic on the one hand, and against Schweitzer on the other who imposes the eschatological system of the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha upon Paul. To the first group Davies responds again that a tidy demarcation between Judaism and Hellenism is not possible (320). To Schweitzer he notes that Paul’s eschatological schema is much simpler than its pseudepigraphical counterparts. Paul, for instance, does not appear to have space for a distinct Messianic Age; if he does, we are living in it:
2 Bar, 4 Ez, Rev: This Age Resurrection & Judgment Messianic Age Age to Come
Paul: “Now” Parousia General Resurrection & Final Judgment Consummation
Resurrection of JC (firstfruits of Age to Come)
This complex temporality, Davies notes, is anticipated already in Rabbinic literature, in which “there are two phases to the ‘olam ha-ba’ – it both IS and COMES” (316).
Preface to the 4th edition (1980): Davies comments on the many changes that took place since the first edition of PRJ in 1948. Research on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi library, and Rabbinic Judaism (under Neusner) had all come into their own. Hengel’s Judaism and Hellenism had confirmed the thesis of the first chapter of PRJ. Davies sums up this academic atmosphere as the “eclipse of dichotomies.” Greater nuance characterized the research of the day.
Davies devotes the most space to commenting on Paul and Palestinian Judaism, the work of his former student E. P. Sanders. Davies is appreciative of Sanders’ now-famous work. But he finds significant problems. En bref, where Sanders finds discontinuity between Paul and Palestinian Judaism, Davies finds “a continuity which we would now insist is rooted in the faithfulness of God” (xxxvii). Most devastatingly, Davies notes that Sanders, like Bultmann, never deals with Rom 9-11 in a sustained way: “extremes meet” (xxxv). This added introduction to the Fourth Edition shows the author fully aware of his contribution and his location in current scholarship. It is thus all the more regrettable that he was unable to make the projected revisions to the work for the planned Fifth Edition.
June 17, 2017
Chapters on the Holy Spirit, "Wisdom," and Torah as categories for understanding Paul's theology and particularly his view of Jesus are most interesting. Great resource with a ton of relevant parallel passages in the Talmud that I'll keep looking back to, I'm sure.
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