A Former Jew: Paul and the Dialectics of Race

by Love L. Sechrest

Sechrest describes Pauline Christianity as a nascent ancient racial group, drawing on a Jewish understanding of race in Second Temple Judaism.

With analysis of nearly five thousand Jewish and non-Jewish passages about identity from around the turn of the era, the models presented describe ancient Greek and Jewish ethnic and racial identity. Further, these models become resources for examining the racial character of Paul's self-identity and the continuities and discontinuities between the three races in his social Jews, Gentiles, and Christians.

Using historical and literary methods of exegesis for passages in the Pauline corpus, Sechrest describes Paul as someone who was born a Jew, but who later saw himself as a member of a different race. Analyzing Christian identity in Galatians in terms of membership criteria, membership indicia, and inter-group dynamics, a final section of the book con­trasts the portrait of Paul that emerges from this study with those in Daniel Boyarin's A Radical Paul and the Politics of Identity and Brad Braxton's No Longer Galatians and African American Experience. This section engages all three of these descriptions of community and identity, and illuminates the problems and opportunities contained in a modern appropriation of a racial construction of Christian identity.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published December 24, 2009

About the author

Love L. Sechrest (PhD, Duke University) is vice president for academic affairs, dean of faculty, and associate professor of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary. She previously served as associate professor of New Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary, and she is the author of A Former Jew: Paul and the Dialectics of Race. Sechrest served two terms as cochair of the African American Biblical Hermeneutics section in the Society of Biblical Literature, and gives presentations on race, ethnicity, and Christian thought in a variety of academic, business, and church contexts.

Reviews

[Christopher Hutson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sechrest takes a social-sciences approach to analyzing the logic of Paul's argument in Galatians. She presents thorough and very helpful surveys of sociological and anthropological theories about race and ethnicity. She also offers detailed exegetical readings of key passages in Galatians. In the end, however, her interpretations are still tied too closely to the New Perspective on Paul, and her argument for a "third race" does not quite escape the problem of supersessionism. While I lean more toward the Paul within Judaism movement, and so would not view Paul as "a former Jew," I did learn a lot from reading this book.

[Zachary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vitally important for current scholarship on pauline theology and ethnoracial identity in the ancient world. She may too quickly make dichotomies such as Jew/Greek and Christian/Jew.