Paul Was Not a Christian Quotes

“[F]rom the perspective of outsiders to the Christian tradition, Paul has sometimes been ridiculed for having abandoned monotheism. Such ridicule is part of a more general theological critique, advanced for centuries by Muslims and Jews, against the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, namely that God became human, and the notion of a triune God, namely that God is three-in-one, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. To reduce a long tradition of theological dialogue and debate to one sentence, Muslims and Jews believe that devotion to Christ renders the Christian claim to monotheism misguided at best and idolatry at worst, while Christians see no contradiction between their affirmation of the oneness of God and the doctrine of the Trinity.

But, to once again reiterate a point made several times already in this book, Christianity does not yet exist as an independent religious system in Paul’s time. 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. That is to say, Paul’s letters manifest a belief in Jesus’ divinity that came to characterize the full-out identification between Jesus and God of later official Christian doctrine. Jesus is clearly a divine figure of unique status in Paul’s letters, and this has led many historians to conclude that devotion to Christ as developed by Paul must have come from outside—that is, non-Jewish—influences.”
― Pamela Eisenbaum, Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle

“Paul believed that the recognition of the one God by Gentiles was necessary so that they might have a share in the world to come. Thus, Paul was not a Christian—a word that was in any case completely unknown to him because it had not yet been invented. He was a Jew who understood himself to be on a divine mission. As a Jew, Paul believed himself to be entrusted with the special knowledge God had given only to Jews. However, 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. Reconciling non-Jews to God also meant reconciling non-Jews to Jews, not because they were necessarily hostile to each other but because, if all people were potentially children of God, Jews and Gentiles must now be considered part of the same family; this entailed a new level of interaction and intimacy.”
― Pamela Eisenbaum, Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle

“The image of Paul in this book portrays a man who, to paraphrase Krister Stendahl, was “called rather than converted.”
― Pamela Eisenbaum, Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle

“According to Buber, while Israel had previously enjoyed the love and protection of a God who had created human beings in God’s own image and thus had no special need of reconciliation, now there seemed to be an unbearable enmity between humans and God. For Paul (and other Hellenistic Jewish writers), the fusion of Hellenistic fate with the Jewish belief in God created an enormous chasm between human beings and God and, thereby, a need for reconciliation.6 Since humans were understood to be hopelessly under the power of fate, however, they can do nothing to effect reconciliation themselves; salvation from this grim situation must be initiated by God by some magnificent event of apocalyptic proportion. For Paul, it is the death of God’s Son.”
― Pamela Eisenbaum, Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle

“Idolatry is the Jewish equivalent to the Christian concept of original sin in that it is the first and primary cause of every other sin.”
― Pamela Eisenbaum, Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle