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the word “Judaism” refers, not to a “religion,” but to an activity: the zealous propagation and defense of the ancestral way of life.
But once you say you’re looking for original meanings, you will always find surprises. History is always a matter of trying to think into the minds of people who think differently from ourselves. And ancient history in particular introduces us to some ways of thinking very different from those of the sixteenth or the twentieth century.
Another obvious barrier stood between my teenage Bible-reading self and a historical reading of Paul. I assumed without question, until at least my thirties, that the whole point of Christianity was for people to “go to heaven when they died.”
Looking back now, I believe that in our diligent searching of the scriptures we were looking for correct biblical answers to medieval questions. These were not, it turns out, the questions asked by the first Christians.
It never occurred to my friends and me that, if we were to scour the first century for people who were hoping that their “souls” would leave the present material world behind and “go to heaven,” we would discover Platonists like Plutarch, not Christians like Paul.
For Paul and all the other early Christians, what mattered was not “saved souls” being rescued from the world and taken to a distant “heaven,” but the coming together of heaven and earth themselves in a great act of cosmic renewal in which human bodies were likewise being renewed to take their place within that new world.
What God had done in and through Jesus was, from Paul’s perspective, the launching of a heaven-and-earth movement, not the offer of a new “otherworldly” hope.
The kingdom of God.
And unless we understand Paul’s Jewish world in particular, we will not even know how to ask our second question: what it meant for Paul to change from being a zealous persecutor of Jesus’s followers to becoming a zealous Jesus-follower himself.
Tarsus, a noble city in Cilicia, ten miles inland on the river Cydnus in the southeast corner of modern Turkey, was on the major east–west trade routes.
World-class generals like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar had recognized its strategic importance; the emperor Augustus had given it extra privileges. It was a city of culture and politics, of philosophy and industry.
Everybody else in Saul’s day, in regions from Spain to Syria, had to worship the goddess Roma and Kyrios Caesar, “Lord Caesar.” Augustus Caesar declared that his late adoptive father, Julius Caesar, was now divine, thus conveniently acquiring for himself the title divi filius, “son of the deified one,” or in Greek simply huios theou, “son of god.”
Some Jewish leaders proposed to Rome that, instead of praying to Caesar, they would pray to their One God for Rome and its emperor. Would that be enough? Yes, said Caesar, that will do.
Despite this, however, I think it is clear that Saul and his family were indeed Pharisees. They lived with a fierce, joyful strictness in obedience to the ancestral traditions.
The story was the story of Israel as a whole, Israel as the children of Abraham, Israel as God’s chosen people, chosen from the world but equally chosen for the world; Israel as the light to the Gentiles, the people through whom all nations would be blessed; Israel as the Passover people, the rescued-from-slavery people, the people with whom the One God had entered into covenant, a marriage bond in which separation might occur but could only ever be temporary.
Israel was called to be different, summoned to worship the One God, but Israel had failed drastically and had been exiled to Babylon as a result. A covenantal separation had therefore taken place. Prophet after prophet said so. The One God had abandoned the Jerusalem Temple to its fate at the hands of foreigners.
A great many Jews around the time of Paul—we have the evidence in book after book of the postbiblical Jewish writings—read those texts in that way too; they believed that the exile—in its theological and political meaning—was not yet over.
Through those long years of puzzlement, the complaint of the (“postexilic”) books of Ezra and Nehemiah sounded out: “We are in our own land again, but we are slaves! Foreigners are ruling over us.”9 And slaves, of course, need an Exodus. A new Exodus.
At the center of this longing for rescue, for the new Exodus, stands one text in particular that loomed large in the minds of eager, hopeful Jews like Saul of Tarsus. Daniel 9, picking up from Deuteronomy’s promise of restoration, announces precisely that idea of an extended exile: the “seventy years” that Jeremiah said Israel would stay in exile have been stretched out to seventy times seven, almost half a millennium of waiting until the One God would restore his people at last, by finally dealing with the “sins” that had caused the exile in the first place.
And many of them believed that the time was drawing near. They knew enough chronology to do a rough calculation. And if the time was near, strict obedience to the Torah was all the more necessary.
The Temple was therefore also the focal point of Israel’s hope. The One God, so the prophets had said, abandoned his house in Jerusalem because of the people’s idolatry and sin. But successive prophets (Isaiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah, Malachi) had promised that he would return one day. That list is significant, since the last two prophets named, Zechariah and Malachi, were writing after some of the exiles had returned from Babylon, after they had rebuilt the Temple and restarted the regular round of sacrificial worship. We will never understand how someone like the young Saul of Tarsus
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Two of the greatest scenes in Israel’s scriptures are moments when the divine glory filled the wilderness Tabernacle and then the Jerusalem Temple with a radiant presence and power.
Isaiah had promised that this would happen once more, indicating that this would be the moment when Jerusalem would be redeemed at last and Israel’s God would establish his kingdom in visible power and glory.12 At no point do any later Jewish...
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No, the point was that it hadn’t happened yet. The God of Israel had said he would return, but had not yet done so.
In Paul’s day, “religion” meant almost exactly the opposite. The Latin word religio has to do with “binding” things together.
Religion was about a way of living, which is how first century Christian's would have seen themselves. The idea of just beliefs is a twenty century point of view.
The Jewish equivalent of this was clear. For Saul of Tarsus, the place where the invisible world (“heaven”) and the visible world (“earth”) were joined together was the Temple. If you couldn’t get to the Temple, you could and should study and practice the Torah, and it would have the same effect.
It wasn’t simply a matter of head knowledge. Far from it. Jewish life was and is centered on the rhythm of prayer.
The trouble was, of course, that God’s people seemed bent on wandering off in their own direction, again and again. That’s where the sex and the violence came in. It always seemed to go that way. They wanted to be like the goyim, the nations, instead of being distinct, as they had been summoned to be.
And that is why some Jews, and he among them—one of the first solid things we know about young Saul—followed the ancient tradition of “zeal.” Violence would be necessary to root out wickedness from Israel.
Why did it happen? The prophets made it clear. It was because Israel sinned. That was the deal God established in the first place: “Now that I’ve rescued you, stay loyal to me and you’ll live in the land. Turn away from me, worship other gods, and I’ll kick you out.” Just like Adam and Eve in the Garden.
Idolatry and immorality went together, as they always did. Israel was supposed to be the One Bride of the One God, in an unbreakable marriage bond. Breaking human marriage bonds was a sign and symptom of the breaking of the divine covenant.
One man brought his Moabite girl into his tent, in full view of Moses and everybody else.2 That did it. Phinehas, one of Aaron’s sons, took a spear, followed the man into the tent, found the pair already in the act, and killed them both with a single thrust. That was the defining moment of “zeal.” It had immediate results: the plague stopped; the rebellion was over.
phrase: “And the LORD reckoned it to him as righteousness”4 Abraham’s faith, in other words, was the hallmark of the covenant that God established with him. It was the sign, the badge, of his covenant membership.
The books of the Maccabees tell of zeal for Israel’s God, zeal for God’s Torah, zeal for the purity of Israel, and all of it rooted in the story that stretched back to Abraham and included Phinehas and Elijah among its key moments.7
Against all probability, they succeeded. They beat off the Syrians, reconsecrated the Temple, and established, for a century or so, an independent Jewish state. Zeal worked. It demonstrated utter loyalty to the One God. It brought freedom. And for those who suffered or died in the struggle, a new vision of the future shimmered on the horizon: resurrection.
It meant Ioudaïsmos: as we saw, not a “religion” called “Judaism” in the modern Western sense, a system of piety and morality, but the active propagation of the ancestral way of life, defending it against external attacks and internal corruption and urging the traditions of the Torah upon other Jews, especially when they seemed to be compromising.
Gamaliel, at least as portrayed in Acts, advocated the policy of “live and let live.” If people wanted to follow this man Jesus, they could do so.
His “zeal” would have placed him in the opposing school, following Hillel’s rival Shammai, who maintained that if God was going to establish his reign on earth as in heaven, then those who were zealous for God and Torah would have to say their prayers, sharpen their swords, and get ready for action.
From Saul’s point of view, if the compromisers in the old biblical stories had been bad, this was worse. This could set back the coming kingdom. This could call down further divine wrath upon Israel.
“Hope” and “optimism” are not the same thing. The optimist looks at the world and feels good about the way it’s going. Things are looking up! Everything is going to be all right! But hope, at least as conceived within the Jewish and then the early Christian world, was quite different. Hope could be, and often was, a dogged and deliberate choice when the world seemed dark. It depended not on a feeling about the way things were or the way they were moving, but on faith, faith in the One God.
“Hope” in this sense is not a feeling. It is a virtue. You have to practice it, like a difficult piece on the violin or a tricky shot at tennis. You practice the virtue of hope through worship and prayer, through invoking the One God, through reading and reimagining the scriptural story, and through consciously holding the unknown future within the unshakable divine promises.
Their slavery, in Saul’s day, was more complicated. For a start, nobody in the ancient stories had ever suggested that Israel’s time in Egypt was a punishment for wrongdoing. But Israel in Babylon was a different story. Read the prophets—it’s hard to miss.
The story of Israel, starting with Abraham himself, had always been, and in Saul’s day was seen to be, the start of a rescue operation, the beginning of a long purpose to put humans right and so in the end to put the whole world right again. The human project, the humans-in-the-garden project, had to get back on track.
And, since the exile was the result of Israel’s idolatry (no devout Jew would have contested the point, since the great prophets had made it so clear), what they needed was not just a new Passover, a new rescue from slavery to pagan tyrants. They needed forgiveness.
According to the prophets, Israel’s God had abandoned Jerusalem, had departed from the Temple, leaving it open to invasion and destruction. But the prophets didn’t leave it at that. They promised a great restoration.
Jerusalem’s Temple, like the wilderness Tabernacle before it, was designed as a small working model of the entire cosmos. This was where the One God of creation would live, dwelling in the midst of his people. When the Temple was destroyed, this vision was shattered, but the prophets declared that God would one day return.
A throne vision, a Temple vision, would be about heaven and earth coming together; in other words, it would have to do with the long-awaited renewal of creation itself—the ultimate prophetic vision.
Upward again, from the chest to the face. He raises his eyes to see the one he has worshipped and served all his life . . . And he comes face-to-face with Jesus of Nazareth.
This moment shattered Saul’s wildest dreams and, at the same split second, fulfilled them. This was—he saw it in that instant—the fulfillment of Israel’s ancient scriptures, but also the utter denial of the way he had been reading them up to that point. God the Creator had raised Jesus from the dead, declaring not only that he really was Israel’s Messiah, but that he had done what the One God had promised to do himself, in person.
Not for one second did Saul cease to believe in the One God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It was just that . . . well, what had happened was . . . how could he put it? Twenty years or so later he would write of glimpsing “the glory of God in the face of Jesus the Messiah.”14 That was one way of putting it.
There was nothing called “Christianity” in the first century, only groups of people who believed that Jesus of Nazareth was Israel’s Messiah and the world’s rightful Lord. There was nothing corresponding to what we now call “Judaism” in the first century (the word then, as we saw, had an active force meaning “the zealous propagation of the Jewish way of life”), only the many communities of Jews around the world, praying to Israel’s God, studying the scriptures, focusing on Temple and Torah.
