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December 7, 2023 - January 2, 2024
The traditional story of Paul looks something like this: Paul was originally a zealous Jew who was persecuting the church, until something utterly miraculous happened: the resurrected Jesus appeared to him. This revelation led to Paul’s conversion from Judaism to Christianity, from being a zealous Pharisee to being an unstoppable preacher of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Stated generically, the problem to which I refer concerns the relation of particularity to universality.
to paraphrase Krister Stendahl, was “called rather than converted.”
Paul also believed the resurrection of Jesus signaled that the world to come was already in the process of arriving and that it was time to reconcile non-Jews to God.
Paul not only tells us who he is; he tells us who he is not. He says he is not a Gentile sinner—not simply not a Gentile; he is not a Gentile sinner. By so doing, Paul makes clear to us that the terminology of Jew and Gentile does not merely refer to one’s ethnic or cultural heritage; the terms Jew and Gentile also refer to one’s morality and one’s disposition vis-à-vis God.
Paul typically wrote in a brash, almost staccato style characterized by ellipses, rhetorical questions, sarcasm, and impromptu arguments issued in response to complaints and inquiries from his followers.
In the case of the example just discussed, the language of having already been saved connects better, once again, with the proto-orthodox writers of the late first and early second centuries.
Letter of Paul to Seneca and 3 Corinthians. These texts were so disputed by church authorities that they were never canonized. Eventually, it became common knowledge that they were phony and therefore came to be regarded as forgeries, so that no scholar today would even attempt to defend them as Pauline. Thus, it is virtually a historical certainty that people produced and promulgated texts using Paul’s name pseudonymously.
Perhaps because Paul came to know Christ only after Christ’s death and resurrection, the apostle’s life seemed to many Christians to resemble their own lives. Paul’s experience of the risen Jesus could serve as a model for later Christians, who felt spatially and temporally removed from the human Jesus and the world he inhabited.
While 1 Corinthians affirms the practice of celibacy for men and women and lauds it as spiritually superior to marital life, the Pastorals deny the legitimacy of the celibate life, especially for women.
Although no scholars today would argue for the authenticity of the Acts of Paul and Thecla, the author who composed that text must have had a different mental image of Paul than Tertullian’s. As Tertullian himself reports, when the presbyter who forged the text was caught, he said he did it “for the love of Paul.”
In short, there is clear evidence that different Christians had different, competing images of Paul and that one of the major points of contention in these competing images was Paul’s attitude toward women.
Augustine develops something known as the “doctrine of witness,” which helped ensure a view of Judaism as a paradigm of the wrong kind of religion,
Augustine rooted the doctrine of witness in Psalm 59:12: “Slay them not, lest at any time they forget your law; scatter them in your might.”
In contrast to Augustine’s belief that evangelistic efforts should not be directed to Jews because Jews had to remain Jews in order to function as witness to the truth of Christianity, mendicant friars in the medieval period actively sought to convert Jews.
Man is no more than the mere object of God’s activity, of grace or damnation; he does not recognize God, God merely recognizes him; he becomes a child of redemption or destruction, “forced into disobedience” or raised up to salvation. He is the object of virtue and of sin—not its producer, its subject. One feels like saying: man does not live but is lived,
Through Paul they argued for a view of Christianity as an eviscerated religion in which its adherents become hopelessly passive and incapable of living ethical lives.
Thus Jewish interpreters of Paul tended to promote the view that Paul was the true founder of Christianity, a view first advocated by Nietzsche, and since followed by many others.
Jesus did not intend to found a new religion or a new church; he only strove to bring about among his people Israel the Kingdom of Heaven,
Not so Paul. He was the clearly self-conscious creator and organizer of Christianity as a new religious community. He made Christianity a religious system different from both Judaism and paganism, a system mediating between Judaism and paganism but with an inclination toward paganism.
To Him he [Moses] persuaded all to look, as the author of all blessings, both those which are common to all mankind, and those which they had won for themselves by prayer in the crises of their history.
In other words, they viewed their own desert community as the real temple, the place where God dwelled with the people.
That the covenant endures forever is itself perhaps the greatest indicator of the profound role grace plays in the theology of ancient Judaism.
That Jews described Torah as an ancient constitution,
Moses is frequently referred to as nomothetes, “lawgiver,” by Josephus, because he is the one to whom God gave the law and the one who instructed the people in its precepts.
is no surprise that Moses, as the “lawgiver of the Jews,” is the most well-known figure among non-Jews, since the Greeks admired such persons and lionized their own lawgivers as heroes.
the vast majority of Jewish sources from the time of Paul understand that participation in the covenant is salvation.48
As Sanders sums up, “If there is a doctrine of salvation in Rabbinic religion, it is election and repentance.”
Paul himself, who also claims, “all Israel will be saved” (Rom 11:26, NRSV). The question is, Who is Israel?
The naming of exclusions is not a naming of bad Israelites; it is a naming of those who are no longer a part of Israel.
As is typical of early rabbinic texts, this text does not address whether the nations (Gentiles) who are not now and never have been part of Israel are included in the world to come.
As Paula Fredriksen points out, most biblical texts fall into one of two categories. “At the negative extreme, the nations are destroyed, defeated, or in some way subjected to Israel.”53 At the other extreme, all nations participate in the final redemption, known as the Day of the Lord, envisioned as all the nations converging on Jerusalem along with Israel, in order to worship the God of Israel, the one God.
One scholar has argued that differing attitudes toward Gentiles, especially with regard to Gentiles’ access to Jewish identity—through conversion, intermarriage, etc.—may be the single greatest factor that led to the sectarianism of the late Second Temple period.1
Only those who are party to the covenant are obligated to observe these special laws. Thus Gentiles are exempt and there is no expectation that Gentiles observe these laws or even that they should observe these laws.
Because Gentiles are not party to the covenant, they have never been sanctified or consecrated to God, and thus they are in no danger of a close encounter with the divine, so to speak, so they cannot be at risk of ritual impurity.6 Put another way, the susceptibility to ritual impurity correlates to sanctity. The greater the degree of sanctity, the greater scrupulousness is required in observing purity.
“In other words, the Israelite semen retains its defiling capacity within a Gentile woman, whereas the Gentile semen does not acquire the capacity to defile within an Israelite woman.”8
The stated rationale, “For the life of every creature is its blood…,” as well as the punishment “whoever eats it shall be cut off,” indicates that this is a form of moral impurity, and it is therefore an ethic that applies to all peoples.
the Hebrew word ger in rabbinic literature comes to mean “proselyte,” i.e., someone who has converted to Judaism. In sum, the
Jubilees’ polemic against miscegenation relies on a literalist interpretation of Exodus 19:5–6, where God declares that Israel shall be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.
it is likely that writings like Jubilees and 4QMMT are reactionary responses to the very thing they seek to prevent: a high degree of permeability between Jew and Gentile resulting in the incorporation of Gentiles into the Jewish community to varying degrees.
The books of Maccabees and the Letter of Aristeas provide evidence that sometime during the Hasmonean period Jewish identity was reconceptualized; it began to break away from dependence on geography and genealogy and instead became dependent on the notion of belonging to a common politeia.
for most Jews of the late Second Temple period, to be a Jew meant that one regarded oneself as a citizen of the Jewish politeia, and that politeia was enshrined in the Torah.
There is no way to acquire accurate figures, but significant numbers of Gentiles took an interest in Judaism. Toward the end of Contra Apion Josephus waxes effusively on the widespread influence of Jewish customs, beliefs, and laws.
and there is not one city, Greek or barbarian, nor a single nation, to which our custom of abstaining from work on the seventh day has not spread,
Josephus no doubt speaks hyperbolically; the statement that “there is not one city…to which our custom of abstaining from work on the seventh day has not spread…” cannot be taken literally.
Having been wont to flout the laws of Rome, they learn and practice and revere the Jewish law…. For all of which the father was to blame, who gave up every seventh day to idleness.”
Later interpreters, however, saw a potential interpretive problem in an ancestral matriarch of Israel being an Egyptian. Joseph and Asenath addresses the problem by filling the gap in the biblical story with a romantic tale in which Asenath “converts” to Judaism by dramatically foreswearing idols and pledging her exclusive devotion to the God of Israel. Her transformation is marked by prayer and mystical experiences, rather than standardized rituals as later Jewish law would require.
We have already mentioned Josephus’s claim in Contra Apion about the widespread observance or partial observance of the Sabbath by non-Jews as well as Jews all around the Mediterranean.
Besides Juvenal (quoted earlier), the poets Horace and Ovid attest to pervasive Sabbath observances among Gentile plebs.
While the primary motivation for the Septuagint may well have been that many Jews had lost Hebrew and now spoke Greek as their primary language, it had the added benefit of making Jewish tradition, history, and law available to a non-Jewish audience, and of this Josephus and Philo and others were very proud. As Eric Gruen observes, Jews in many ways saw diaspora communities not as groups of victimized Jewish exiles but in terms more analogous to how the Romans viewed their colonies.
