Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle

by Pamela Eisenbaum

Therefore Paul’s interaction with Gentiles should not be seen as the radical step it is typically perceived to be.

Paul and Josephus are the only two men who claim to have been Pharisees and whose writings were preserved for posterity; they then stand as the only firsthand witnesses to Pharisaic Judaism,

Although readers of this book are much more likely to have familiarity with the portrayal of the Pharisees in the Gospels than in the Scrolls, I suspect that it may come as a surprise when I say that the gospel writers view the Pharisees as too lenient—a surprise precisely because the Christian stereotype of the Pharisees is that they are legalistic and literalistic, following every precept of the Torah to an exacting degree.

The Pharisees’ intricate knowledge of Torah enables them to twist and turn the law in their interpretations so that they end up defying the law while making it seem as if they are heeding it—this is precisely the critique that the Gospels and the Scrolls share.

In a document commonly called the Covenant of Damascus, which includes extensive discussion of the proper rules for living in perfect accord with Torah, a critique of other teachers, here nicknamed “the builders of the wall,” are collectively condemned as “fornicators” because “they take two wives in their lives,” a clear violation of God’s law because the “principle of creation” is that “male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27).

Josephus also says that the Pharisees believe in divine providence, but not at the expense of free will. Put another way, individuals bear responsibility for the choices they make and thus have a measure of control over their lives, but providence is also at work in a complementary sense. This “middle way” distinguishes the Pharisees from the Sadducees, on the one hand, who think everything that happens is determined solely by human action, and from the Essenes on the other, who claim that nothing whatsoever happens unless it is in accord with fate.

Pharisaic piety, in other words, is rooted in a democratized understanding of cultic piety, reflecting a kind of “priesthood of all believers” vision for Israel.

“The Pharisees thus arrogated to themselves—and to all Jews equally—the status of the Temple priests, and performed actions restricted to priests on account of that status.

it is not necessary to see his Damascus road experience as the point of origin for the apostle’s more creative interpretations of Scripture. His more adaptive teachings on Torah as apostle to the Gentiles were most likely learned while he was a Pharisee.

In his 1990 book, Paul the Convert, Alan Segal argues that Paul could properly be called a convert not because he converted from Judaism to Christianity, as has been traditionally assumed, but because his mystical encounter caused him to switch from being a Pharisee to being a believer in Jesus.

Stendahl’s language of “call” better captures Paul’s Damascus road experience, especially as Paul himself describes it,5 but one must also account for the way in which Paul sometimes speaks of having given up his past life.

As is the case in Philippians and Galatians, what most often triggers Paul to spell out his Jewishness through these various identity markers is the perceived need to reassert his authority over other leaders who are either directly challenging him or who are held in esteem because of their Jewish credentials.

The frequency with which Paul engages in one-upmanship with other leaders and teachers who circulate among Christ-believing communities indicates that Jewish identity carries with it a certain cachet. That Paul and Paul’s rivals share claims to Jewish ancestry and an advanced degree in Torah means that Jewish identity is, in fact, a status marker recognized within at least some early communities of Jesus-followers.

Paul never even uses the language of “conversion” of himself. He never calls himself a “proselyte for Christ,” and he never refers to his belief in Jesus as a form of metanoia, literally “repentance,” a common label for someone who has traded an old degenerate life for a newly reformed one.

Gentiles constitute the axis around which Paul turns from persecutor to persecuted.

In my view, it is this utopian vision that inspired Paul to translate his faith in Jesus into his charge as Apostle to the Gentiles. As a result, he could no longer concern himself with the kinds of purity regulations that preoccupied many Pharisees (assuming that he was so preoccupied to start with), because turning the Gentiles from idolatry to the knowledge and worship of the one, true God trumps any need to separate the spheres of Jew and Gentile.

idolatry is the quintessential flaw of the Gentile, and the abandonment of idolatry is the sine qua non of being a righteous Gentile in the eyes of a Jew.

The Wisdom of Solomon, an Alexandrian Jewish text virtually contemporary with Paul, sums up the connection between idolatry and sin rather matter-of-factly: “For the worship of idols…is the beginning and cause and end of every evil” (Wis 14:27).

Sexually immoral behavior in particular seems to go hand in hand with idolatry, for it is almost as characteristically “Gentile” as idolatry itself.

“For the idea of making idols was the beginning of fornication” (Wis 14:12).

This text is important today for many Christian denominations debating the acceptability of same-sex practice. To be sure, Paul does not look upon it favorably. What is often missed, however, is the context of this passage. It is crystal clear from Romans 1 that what Paul is speaking against is the sin of idolatry.

Jewish attacks on Gentile idolatry, frequently vicious and extreme, are commonplace and predictable. That is to say, they reflect Jewish stereotypes of Gentiles, and that stereotype includes the idea that Gentiles are prone to sexual licentiousness.

Paul’s belief in Jesus did not lead him to adopt a radically new system of values. It led him to tweak his existing one,

Perhaps one could say that even Paul’s tweaking of his Jewish tradition was itself indebted to a Pharisaic ethos, which tended toward flexibility in certain interpretations of Torah because of a desire to accommodate new circumstances as they arose.

Interesting in light of what she said earlier about how the gospels criticize Pharisees not for their strict legalism but for their loosenss of interpretation of torah

biblical holiness may be defined as the space within which God can dwell.

Paul regularly addresses his congregants as hagioi, usually translated “saints” or “holy ones.”2

when God says to Israel “You shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation” (Exod 19:6), holiness is the distinguishing feature that makes Israel both different from other nations and able to mediate between God and humanity.

There is a very close connection between holiness and spirit—hence Paul’s frequent use of the phrase pneuma hagion, “Holy Spirit” (e.g., Rom 15:13; 1 Cor 6:19),

Paul’s use of the language of purity and sanctity, and his likening of the community of believers to the temple, is typical of the tendency among so many Jews of this era “to expand the realm of holiness” it reflects a practice of imitatio Templii, in which “channeling the sanctity” of the temple into other forms of worship

individuals must behave in such a way as comports with their sanctified status; if they don’t, they threaten the sanctity of the community.

While the terminology of holiness can apply both to God and human beings, the terminology of purity applies almost exclusively to human beings. Purity works in conjunction with sanctity, but it is not its equivalent.

Earlier in his letter, Paul says the Lord “establishes the hearts” of the faithful as “blameless in holiness” (1 Thess 3:13). The “Lord” in 3:13 appears to be Jesus, and thus it seems that Jesus functions as a kind of mediator of holiness, thereby making it possible for humans to experience the Spirit of God.

The primary purpose of the system of ritual purity/impurity appears to have been to regulate the boundaries between the divine and human realms, and, analogously, to maintain the boundaries between Israel and the nations, since Gentiles were not obliged to follow the laws of ritual purity.9

In biblical literature, moral impurity pertains specifically to three kinds of egregiously sinful behavior: idolatry, sexual immorality, and bloodshed.

Instead of ritual purity functioning to distinguish God’s sanctified people from other peoples, as in biblical tradition, Paul uses moral impurity to make the distinction.

the overall context of 1 Corinthians make clear that the dominant issues Paul addresses are sins related to worship and sex, and it is these two arenas of human action through which Paul’s Gentile followers define themselves over against other Gentiles.

For biblical tradition itself made a similar distinction. The Canaanite nations were driven out of the land because they had committed abominable acts through which they had defiled the land.

Paul’s teaching that one cannot associate with a sinner within the community of believers, but one can associate with such a person if that person is not a member of the community, strikes many modern Christian readers as counterintuitive. Indeed, the counsel found in most subsequent Christian tradition is just the opposite.

This particular aspect of Paul’s teaching, namely that one cannot associate with immoral persons inside the church, while it is okay to do so outside the church, is one of the most obvious signs that Paul is thinking in terms of Jewish moral purity and pollution and not just moral-ethical terms.

When a system of moral purity is operative, sexual sins in particular cannot be separated from the sinner or from the religious community to which the sinner belongs. The reason that an insider who commits such sins is more dangerous than an outsider is because the former entered into a sanctified state when he or she was baptized. As already noted, Paul frequently calls his Gentile charges “holy ones.”

It is not uncommon to hear Pauline scholars say that Paul “thought with Scripture.” By that they mean that Paul was steeped in Jewish Scripture.

Indeed, the public reading of Scripture seems to be the primary reason Jews gathered on the Sabbath.

the general population of Jews was better educated about their ancestral laws and traditions than most of the other peoples around the Mediterranean, including the venerable Greeks and Romans, who possessed no mechanism to facilitate similar kinds of public readings to the masses.

Paul never condemns Torah. Neither does he devalue, diminish, or degrade it; it remains the Word of God and the means through which human interpreters may discern the will of God. Paul’s infamous remarks are always condemnations of non-Jews adopting Torah observance.

his comments are directly aimed at Gentiles, because his letters are explicitly addressed to Gentiles.26

I don't buy that argument

In order for God to be recognized and glorified as God of the whole world on the “Day of the Lord,” the various nations of the world must gather as the nations. In other words, it is necessary that Gentiles remain Gentiles on the Day of the Lord, when the God of Israel is shown to be the one God of the world.

One cannot extract from the corpus of Paul’s letters a set of essential or even well-defined distinctly “Christian” doctrines

As his theology is rooted in Christ Jesus, I disagree

In contrast to the traditional view, I assert that the most important theological force motivating Paul’s mission was a thoroughgoing commitment to Jewish monotheism and how to bring the nations of the world to that realization as history draws to a close.6

Paul is motivated by his faith in God, whom he believes has charged him with a prophetic mission to Gentiles.

Christ is not the primary cause from which we can explain all subsequent effects that manifest themselves in the apostle’s life and work; God is. In theological terms, Paul’s theology is fundamentally not christocentric; it is theocentric. Inspired by the fundamental conviction of aniconic monotheism, best captured by the Shema, the closest thing Judaism has to a creed: “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One” (Deut 6:4),

But at 1 Cor 8:6, Paul inserts Jesus into the Shema