Michael Zank

Jay Harris, in a review of Daniel Boyarin’s A radical Jew published in Commentary Magazine of June 1, 1995[1], cites Edward Gibbon to point out that the idea of Paul as a universalist transcending Jewish ethnic boundaries is, at best, only part of the story.

That Paul’s exclusivism was more “ecclesiocentric” than “ethnocentric” primarily means that, as the historian Edward Gibbon noted long ago, it was socially less narrow than some forms of Jewish exclusivism; but that is a difference in degree, not in kind.

Paul was also an apocalyptist who believed that faith in Christ was the only way to escape the coming wrath. That this way was open to both, Gentiles as well as Jews, marks his universalism. That the path was defined by faith in the Risen Christ marks his covenantal particularism.

Paul’s letters stand apart from other early Christian literature. His writing and thinking contrast with the irenic “proto-Catholicism” of the canonical gospels, the Book of Acts, and the other apostolic letters. It is Paul who enabled Protestant thinkers from Luther to Barth to justify their own radical theologies. Modern secular intellectuals such as Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben as well recognize Paul as one of the most profound and outrageous thinkers of the western tradition. Generation after generation, readers have taken inspiration from his writings, but also attempted to harness the words of this radical apostle and bend his words to their own doctrine. Daniel Boyarin is no exception, except that he bends Paul’s words openly, rather than tacitly, to his interests as a postmodern and post-Zionist Jewish reader. And yet, Paul emerges fresh from the piles of commentary and appropriation whenever one reads him. (Classical philologian Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorf once argued that it was Paul’s use of the Greek language that made him stand out. No one in antiquity wrote Greek in quite as lively a fashion as did Paul.)

Introducing Paul’s letters to first-time collegiate readers I was struck by three observations that I detail in the following. First, Paul represents a pre-70/pre-destruction voice of Christian discourse. This alone makes him unique among early Christian authors. Second, Paul’s reading of scripture is both instrumental in, and emblematic for, how his gospel inscribes Gentiles into the Judaic story of salvation. This assures him a place in the pantheon of hermeneutic genius. Third, Paul is an awkward fit for Jewish and Christian orthodoxies. This makes him a heretic to both, Jews and Christians.

1. Paul’s pre-AD 70 Voice

Paul’s letters, at least those widely considered authentic, represent a pre-AD 70 voice that is unique among New Testament writings. For the most part, early Christian literature was forged in the crucible of the turmoil of the Jewish war and its aftermath, which left Jews in public shame and Christians scrambling to explain in what sense they were heirs to the Israelite dispensation without being counted among those rebellious Jews. (Hence: “My kingdom is not of this world,” John 18:36)

Early Christian literature answers the question, who was Jesus of Nazareth, for believers baptized in his name. For these believers and their instructors, Jesus of Nazareth was son of God, son of man, and son of David. The Paul we meet in this literature, i.e., the Paul of the Acts of the Apostles, is not the Paul of his own letters. It is a usable Paul who receives his commission from, or in agreement with, the original apostles; a Paul who argues that he merely preaches what Pharisees believe as well (i.e., the resurrection of the dead); a saint protected by angels, and the instrument by which the good news is spread to the Gentiles.

The character of Jesus of the canonical gospels was shaped by the struggle to write the story of Christian origins into and out of a Jewish world that no longer existed by the time the anonymous authors of the canonical gospels did their work. (I am greatly simplifying the situation to underscore the contrast.) Paul was still part of the world that the canonical gospels reconstruct from an ideological and historical distance. The matrix of their writing is no longer the Judaism of Judea and the Galilee of Jesus and his apostles but a Roman Empire suspicious of Jews and their associates.

The post-70 gospels and Acts provide the students of the apostles with a usable past, an unassailable and unchallenged chain of authority from Jesus of Nazareth, son of God, man, and David, to their own contemporary leaders and beyond. None of that was of relevance to Paul who did not foresee the emergence of an institutionalized church. Paul taught and wrote with a view to an imminent parousia of Christ. Paul’s assertion to be an apostle by virtue of a divine calling challenges the privileged position of the original apostles as projected by the later gospels.

As disciples of the Jerusalemite “poor” or evionim, the gospel authors had access to authentic traditions of Jesus whose sayings and parables they heard from their teachers who were among the original apostles. Given the disruptions wreaked in Jerusalem by the punitive campaign waged by Titus, the disciples may have feared that the traditions they had preserved may be lost unless they were recorded in an orderly fashion. Moreover, the proliferation of traditions and views attributed to Jesus made it necessary to create a measure and standard of faith, a kind of proto-orthodoxy. The evangelists’ job was to preserve and shape these traditions in keeping with the liturgical practices of baptism and eucharist and with the proclamation of the early proto-orthodox Christians: that the messiah suffered and died according to scripture, was resurrected on the third day, and taken up into heaven from whence he will return to judge the living and the dead.

Paul as well received that tradition and impressed it on his readers. (See 1 Cor 15). While Paul has no interest in the teachings of Jesus, he is familiar with the eucharistic elements of Christ’s passion  and persuades his interlocutors in and around Syria, Asia Minor, Macedonia, Greece, and Rome that Christ died and was resurrected according to scripture. Where he differs is in his mission to the Gentiles.

Like Boyarin, I believe much is to be gained by considering Paul as part of a conversation that indicates the range of Jewish possibilities of his time even though, in hindsight, Paul may be regarded as the unwitting founder of Christianity as a “world religion.” While to some, such as Paul’s student Marcion, Christianity was essentially a non- or post-Judaic religion that liberated men and women drawn to that very religion from its most egregious errors and falsehoods, Paul labored to keep the salvific dispensation articulated in his gospel from exploding the dialectic linkage between scripture and its true meaning as revealed in Christ. For Marcion, the Jews were already condemned, for Paul their “hardening” (Rom 11:25) was temporary.

Paul was not only an occasional writer but also an occasional thinker. Most of his letters speak to questions that arose after he left the communities he founded to travel to the next station on his missionary travels. (The exception is the letter to the Romans where Paul introduces himself to a community he did not found and that he is about to visit.) His discussion in Galatians of the problem of circumcision was occasioned by the confusion in the minds of the Galatians caused by emissaries from other apostles who insisted that the new brothers from among the Gentiles be circumcised in order to become full members of the community of the elect. Paul clearly thought otherwise. In the Letter to the Galatians he emphasizes that the apostles had never before obliged Gentile Christians to be circumcised. He also emphasizes the immediacy of his own authority and the divine commission of his apostolic office. In arguing against Gentile circumcision Paul cannot refer to it as an innovation and therefore odious in and of itself. Circumcision is, after all, the first covenantal obligation that applies to all male children of Abraham, according to the literal sense of scripture. Paul is therefore forced to make an argument from scripture as to why scripture itself may have obliged circumcision in the past but does not require it any longer now that the true sense of scripture has been fully revealed in Christ. He makes this argument in a world where Jews were still politically independent and where the apocalyptic expectation of Christ’s imminent return seems was driven less by a looming historical cataclysm than by an inner urgency to spread the gospel to the end of the earth.

By the time Paul writes his Letter to the Romans, the spontaneous and heated rhetoric of Galatians has matured into a comprehensive theory of redemption that makes room for both Jews and Gentiles. Paul’s apocalyptic urgency seems to have cooled as well. His plan is to complete his business in Jerusalem, visit Rome and go on to Spain. In the same process Paul honed his sophistication as a reader and interpreter of scripture.

2. Paul and Scripture

In order to bind god-fearing Gentiles and Jewish believers in Christ together into a single community of the redeemed, Paul strikes a balance between an affirmation of Jewish roots and the justification of Gentile branches. His point is not as much supersessionist as it is inclusivist, as the roots and the branches are combined in a single living organism. This “tree of life” – in Romans 11 Paul speaks of an olive tree and wild olive branches – is also an apt metaphor for the manner in which Paul and other early Christian authors approach scripture. In some sense this is like pouring new wine into old skins, or a turning of water into wine. For Paul it is a matter of disclosing the hitherto hidden true meaning of scripture that not only preserves scripture but elevates it from letter to spirit (2 Cor 3:6).

Scripture, considered authoritative and immutable (i.e., no longer open to rewriting), provides the justification for Paul to argue that what appears like an innovation is not an innovation, but a meaning always intended by scripture, though unrecognized until the advent of Christ. It is this advent that, in hindsight and only for those who are not blinded or read scripture with a veil before their eyes (as most Jews do according to 2 Cor 3:14), disclosed and revealed the true meaning of scripture. It provided the hermeneutical key to unlock the scriptures.

Paul’s arguments from scripture affirm the authority of scripture, while scripture confirms his interpretation. The Jews are not rejected as a whole or forever; their temporary rejection of Christ merely makes room for the implantation or grafting of Gentiles into the “cultivated olive tree.” Scripture’s literal referent (i.e., Israel) is therefore reaffirmed rather than transcended and superseded. It remains real and valid (see Rom 9:1-6). The literal meaning of scripture is not abandoned, just as the Jews are not abandoned, or the covenant dissolved. This capaciousness on Paul’s behalf must be contrasted with his own early expressions of frustration with the unbelief and rejection of his message by his fellow Jews, such as summary condemnation of the Jews found in 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16 [NRSV], a passage rich with allusions, including to Gen 15:16:

¹⁵ Who killed both the Lord Jesus, and the prophets, and drove us out; they displease God, and oppose everyone ¹⁶ by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved. Thus they have constantly been filling up the measure of their sins; but God’s wrath has overtaken them at last.

Paul eventually comes to believe that the providential hardening of the Jews (see 2 Cor 3:14, Rom 11:7.25) to the idea that redemption extends to the believers among the Gentiles without making them into Jews, does not erase their privileged position in this economy of salvation (see Rom 11:11). In contrast to the later ecclesia triumphans, Paul’s thinking remains firmly framed by an apocalyptic temporality. But while Thessalonians still operates with the dualistic notion of an absolute opposition between the children of light and the children of darkness (1 Thess 5:5), by the time he writes his letter to the Romans Paul seems to have abandoned his contempt for the Judean authorities that wished to prevent the spreading of the gospel to the Gentiles.

In the end, Paul regards the blindness or hardening of the Jews to the gospel of Christ as a temporary scenario, a providential ruse that, in fact, makes it possible for the gospel to be preached to the Gentiles. In later times, Christian theology turned to a more schematic approach. Orthodox Christian doctrine, empowered by the Roman state, legally cemented the Jews’ diminished place in society and forced them forever to enact their exile from salvation. But that is not Paul who preached faith, hope, and love as preparation for a return of creation to the ideal state that prevailed in the beginning. He did not imagine that his all-important message of divine salvation might be absorbed into a new ideology of monarchic rule.

3. Paul the Heretic

In the above, I compared Paul  with what became of the Christian movement. Others, including Boyarin, are more interested in whether Paul was a good Jew or a bad Jew, or whether his gospel was within or beyond the range of Judaic possibilities of his time. Both of these debates are somewhat beside the point. They presuppose that Christianity and Judaism are different religions, and that mixing the two is illegitimate, as it muddies clearly established boundaries.

We take it for granted that Paul was a Christian. But Paul asserts that he wants to be understood as a Jew, even a good Jew, and better than most. We can accept this as an indication that, for Paul at least, the ways of Judaism and Christianity had not yet parted. His whole purpose is to argue that his mission to the Gentiles was the necessary extension of the gospel, just as the gospel was the true meaning of the scriptures. In other words, what he was doing was, in his mind at least, continuous with the meaning and essence of Judaism, biblical revelation, scriptures and divine purpose all along. He may have been operating on the margins of the Judaic possibilities of his time and to some he clearly crossed a line. But in his own mind he was simply true to God’s personal revelation to him, which he understood as a prophetic calling.

It is interesting to me that, in many ways, Paul also seems out of the doctrinal bounds established by the later orthodox councils of the bishops. His Christology is “adoptionist,” or perhaps Arian, i.e., he sees the crucified Christ as a “son of God” in the ancient sense of a divine son, a royal title. It is not evident that he has a Trinitarian understanding of the nature of God. The exact relation between God and “our Lord Jesus Christ” seems of little concern to him. It is not an issue for him because he believes in the efficacy of Christ’s death and resurrection as an eschatological event that erases the boundaries between human beings and undoes the cosmic catastrophe of sin, which came about through the transgression of the first man. He is therefore neither a typical theologian in the later sense nor entirely orthodox. In a sense he is both a bad Jew in that he believes that the eschaton has dawned, and a bad Christian in that he does not regard Christ as equivalent to God. This makes him a skandalon, a stumbling bloc, a writer difficult to stomach if and when we are concerned with established orthodoxies. This explains why, even in his own time, he caused consternation not just among the Judean authorities who accused him of various transgressions and, willy-nilly, handed him over to the Romans, but also among the apostles. The Letter of James attests to the fact that Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith was offensive to the pillar of the church in Jerusalem. And yet Paul’s letters are in the New Testament. It is this fact, among others, that elevates this body of early Christian literature to the level of complexity we would expect from its inclusion in what we call the Bible.

Conclusion

What, then, is the place of Paul in the history of early Christianity? To whom may we compare him? Unlike the other apostles, he did not know Jesus in the flesh. Unlike James the Righteous, he was not a member of the family of Jesus. His milieu was the diaspora Judaism of Tarsus in Asia Minor (in the coastal Adana-Mersin region of modern Turkey), not the Galilee or Judea with their respective anti-Roman sentiments. Like Philo of Alexandria, Paul read and wrote Greek, though the Book of Acts wants him to have been tutored by a great rabbinic sage, Rabbi Gamliel, and Paul emphasizes that he was an outstanding, even zealous, student of Jewish law. Like Hillel the Elder, one of the founding figures of rabbinic Judaism and a contemporary of Jesus, Paul came from the outside and ran afoul of the dominant schools of Judea. (His alleged association with Gamliel puts Paul in the tradition of Hillel.) His teachings are informed by apocalyptic assumptions and visions that must have been more widely shared among rabbinic Jews than we may assume if we measure rabbinic theology solely by the standards of what became normative in Mishnah and Talmud. Palestinian midrash and Hekhalot literature offer ample evidence of the continued relevance of elements of the apocalyptic worldview, though stripped of their messianic urgency. Paul projects an apocalyptic urgency that remains evident in Palestinian Judaism until and perhaps past the Bar Kokhba revolt (132-135 CE), as attested in Fourth Ezra and in the biography of the great R. Akiba b. Joseph who hailed Bar Kokhba as the messiah and was himself martyred in the struggle for the freedom of Jerusalem.

Perhaps Paul was a kind of John the Baptist for the Gentiles. He was not himself the messiah, or a son of God, but he prepared the way for the second and last coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, the divine messenger of human salvation. Like John, he preached the forgiveness of sins. Unlike John, he preached to both Jews and Gentiles. His proclamation anticipated, and wanted to usher in, a new humanity founded on Christ’s resurrection, a humanity where it no longer mattered whether you were a Jew or a Gentile, free-born or slave, male or female.

Perhaps it is most telling, in this respect, that Paul himself denies that he was sent to baptize (1 Cor 1:17). He says this right after he acknowledged that he did baptize some of the Corinthians. His point, as usual, is polemic. Paul’s worries that the believers in Corinth are losing the main point over questions of ritual and party affiliation. Clearly, his message made little sense to those who tried to press his meaning into the forms of conventional religion. In response he admits to his folly.

²⁰ Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? ²¹ For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. ²² For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, ²³ but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, ²⁴ but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. ²⁵ For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. [1 Cor 1: 20ff NRSV] 

No wonder Paul is difficult to classify. Radical Jew, inventor of Christianity as a world religion, whatever we call him, his voice still rings fresh.

[1] https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/a-radical-jew-by-daniel-boyarin/