St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate (Icons)

by Karen Armstrong

But if Hagar represented his former self, her husband, Abraham, symbolized the way forward. According to Jewish tradition, Abraham had once traveled along the spice route, making a ritualized circuit of the land that God had promised his descendants.21 Now as he traveled in Arabia, Paul found himself walking in Abraham’s footsteps. Long before the Torah had been revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai, God had declared Abraham to be a just man because of his trust (pistis) in God.22 Before Abraham had been circumcised, God had promised that all the nations of the world would find blessing in him.23 As he thought about his mission to the gentile world, Paul would naturally have seen Abraham as a pivotal figure. Abraham had not been born a Jew, yet he became the ancestor of the Jewish people and so he was in some sense both Jew and gentile.