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

by Pamela Eisenbaum

Both Paul and Abraham become alienated from their communities of origin as a result of this divine commission. In Abraham’s case, God literally calls him away from his family and kin, and, as is familiar to Jews and Christians, Abraham never lives to see the establishment of his family in the land that God promised. Instead, his life is marked by nomadism in the extreme.

Like Abraham, God’s call of Paul resulted in his living an itinerant life among people who were not his kin.

while modern scholars appropriately distinguish between Israelite religion and Judaism, the Jews of postbiblical antiquity did not—they saw an unbroken thread of continuity between themselves and the people spoken of in Scripture as Israelites or Hebrews. In other words, while it may be anachronistic to call Abraham a “Jew,” the “Jews” of the Hellenistic era did not know that and thus thought of Abraham as the first Jew.)

both Philo and Josephus consider Abraham not just the patriarch of Israel but the first proselyte, for Abraham was originally a Gentile, a Chaldean to be precise.

many ancient exegetes, including Josephus and Philo believed that Abraham came to monotheism through his precocious study of the stars, since the Chaldeans were famous for their skill at astronomy.

His study of the poikilia of the heavens led him beyond the lights to the author of light

although he remains Jewish, Paul no longer lives among Jews, partly because his call to go to the nations requires this of him, and partly because of the hostility toward him on the part of at least some Jews and Jewish authorities.

When God invades your life and assigns you a mission, it’s disruptive! But it was not a rupture in his religious identity as a Jew. The critical disruption for Paul was the realization of what time it was in history.

Heard this before: it's a rehash of Jesus as Jewish eschatological prophet

Paul is not operating with the doctrine of the incarnation as it was defined in the Council of Nicea (CE 325) or the Christian doctrine of the Trinity as it was hammered out in the Council of Chalcedon (CE 451).

At the same time, Paul’s letters already reflect a surprisingly high Christology that appears to anticipate later orthodox views.

Hurtado argues that devotion to Christ developed within a Jewish monotheistic framework and that that framework is at least partly responsible for the constraints maintained by proto-orthodox Christians, constraints that kept devotion to Jesus from developing into a “separate cultus devoted to Jesus as a new second god.”

Hurtado has identified four convictions held by early followers of Jesus, all of which are well attested in Paul’s letters and about which there is no evidence that Paul differed in any significant way from other leaders in the Jesus movement.

these convictions are manifest in the formulaic sayings that scholars generally agree represent citations of common “Christian” tradition of the earliest strata.

Nor does Paul the apostle of Jesus Christ deny the special relationship God has with Israel.

Using Romans as an example, Dunn points out that the “attentive reader cannot but be struck by the steady sequence of genitive phrases” that mark its opening chapter: “gospel of God,” “son of God,” “beloved of God,” “the will of God,” “the power of God,” “the righteousness of God,” “the wrath of God,” “the glory of God,” and the list continues.

It is worth noting that Paul uses the phrase “gospel of God” almost as often as he uses the phrase “gospel of Christ.”

Gal 1:15).

Ho theos there is a likely scribal gloss to make explicit the understood subject of eudokesen

Paul attributes virtually everything that happens in the entire cosmos to God’s agency. There are many descriptive appellations of God that make clear God is fully in charge of the unfolding of history:

To be sure, Paul sometimes speaks of Jesus in ways that sound strikingly similar to ways he describes God. Most obvious is that Paul’s favorite title for Jesus is kyrios “Lord.”

kyrios appears in formulaic expressions that reflect common pre-Pauline tradition of the earliest generation of believers. For example, in Romans 10:9, Paul appeals to a common confession or profession of faith among believers: “If you confess with your lips Jesus as Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

While the oldest (i.e., pre-Christian) extant copies of the Septuagint write out the divine name in Greek or Hebrew letters, there is evidence from Aramaic sources, as well as from Philo and Josephus, that Jews did not pronounce the name, but instead spoke the word kyrios.

Some scholars have suggested that Paul’s use of the title kyrios for Jesus derives exclusively from these kinds of Hellenistic uses.

Just about every aspect of Paul's belief is completely contested

(The use of kyrios for Jesus could also have been a challenge to the Lordship of Caesar, and therefore a critique of Roman imperial ideology.)

In recent years, several scholars have commented in regard to 1 Corinthians 8 that it is astonishing that Paul invokes the Shema—thus unequivocally embracing traditional Jewish monotheism—and then unself-consciously uses it as the basis on which to defend the lordship of Christ.

From a Jewish point of view, this interpretation of 1 Corinthians 8:4–6 sounds like Paul puts the Shema to blasphemous use.

But this reading of 1 Corinthians 8 represents, in my view, either a misreading or perhaps simply an overreading of what Paul is saying.

!!!!

even as Judaism progressed toward a more serious degree of monotheism through the Second Temple period, Jewish imagination simultaneously envisioned a growing number of intermediaries and exalted figures.

My concern is not so much to establish particular lines of influence as it is to emphasize that highly exalted figures do not threaten the monotheistic religious system that characterizes Judaism in this period.

Just look at the way the Palestinian targums treat the divine Memra

While the nations have had various lords to whom they have given loyalty, by relinquishing those allegiances in favor of an exclusive and singular allegiance to Christ as Lord, they participate in the redemptive process that reconciles all peoples to God, and, as I shall argue in the next chapter, the various nations become reconciled to one another because they become part of one divinely ordained family—they become descendants of Abraham.

Paul never refers to Jesus as theos, “god.”

See footnote though Romans 9:5 is a whole discussion

As already mentioned, words of worship are not directed to Christ; they are directed to God through Christ.

the exaltation of Jesus serves the purpose of glorifying God the Father.

As Dunn says of hymns like Philippians 2:6–11 where Jesus seemingly forms the content of the worship: “they are not addressed to Christ, but give praise to God for Christ.”

As noted by many scholars, Paul carefully distinguished between Jesus and God and did not worship Jesus as if he were a god, nor does the apostle treat Christ as the equivalent of God, the use of similar language notwithstanding. Rather, confessing Jesus as Lord was supposed to point people toward God; it was not meant to distract people from God nor to complicate the unitary nature of God.

Jews took the existence of God for granted; it was not a debatable point.

For example, in Romans 3:22 Luther rendered pistis iesou christou as den Glauben an Jesus Christus, and by so doing, he removed the ambiguity present in the Greek text, so that it clearly meant “faith in Christ.”

even if we translate the phrase literally as “faith of Christ,” there remains grammatical ambiguity, because there are two basic ways to understand the relationship between the genitive noun and the words it stands in relationship to.

the righteousness of God [which has come] through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ for all those who are faithful. Certainly in this context reading the phrase as a subjective genitive makes better sense than the objective genitive.50 If God is making manifest God’s righteousness, when Paul says that righteousness comes through the pistis iesou christou, can Paul mean that God’s righteousness would come through people having faith in Jesus? It makes little sense to say that God’s righteousness is revealed in the world because of what human beings do.

Interpreting pistis christou as an objective genitive and translating it as “faith in Christ” leads the unsuspecting reader to believe there is no other interpretive possibility.

This in a nutshell is the problem with translations

The point is that, technically speaking, the Greek equivalent of the phrase “faith in Christ” never occurs in the undisputed Pauline letters (even though it appears seven times in English translations).

If Paul did not ever speak of having faith in Christ, that is, having faith in Christ on a par with having faith in God, then Paul’s monotheism remained uncompromised.

A very Jewish assessment

There were inherent tensions in ancient Jewish conceptions of God as God of the universe and also God as God of Israel.

Israel’s election did not constitute a contradiction to the claim of universal monotheism.

the doctrine of election, which received its classical formulation in the book of Deuteronomy and the oracles of Second Isaiah.”2 What Dahl means is that Israel plays the role of God’s specially designated servant who mediates between God and the Gentile nations.

The difference is that Paul’s vision of the risen Jesus meant the end of the world was near.

Paul understands his role as Apostle to the Gentiles to be a microcosm of Israel’s role as God’s servant to the nations.

The primary difference between Paul and other diaspora Jews, Jews who either knew nothing of Jesus or attached no real significance to him, lies more with a different understanding of time and history than with theology. To be more precise, Paul’s experience of Jesus led him to believe he was witnessing the first manifestations of the eschaton,

Serving as a light to the nations, the people of Israel would facilitate the eschatological ingathering of the nations.

Hellenistic Jewish writers like Philo and Josephus hoped that one day God would be recognized by all peoples, but they were content simply to wait for that day. It was a far-off utopian vision.

John’s statement is intended as a warning to Jews who may not have lived up to what God expects—Jews should not be presumptuous about counting on their kinship to Abraham to make up for their bad behavior.

Paul is no different from his Jewish contemporaries in thinking of Abraham primarily as father Abraham.