A new way of understanding Paul arrived in the second half of the 20th century.
This was in no small part because of the tragedy of the Shoah and the systemic
10 Ferdinand Christian Baur, “Die Christuspartei in der Korinthischen Gemeinde, der Gegensatz des petrinischen und paulinischen Christentums in der ältesten Kircher, der Apostel Petrus in Rom,” TZTh 5 (1831) 61–206, and then further developed in Das Christenthum und die christliche Kirche der drei ersten Jahrhunderte (1853). See also Robert Morgan, “The Significance of ‘Paulin-ism’,” Paul and Paulinism: Essays in Honour of C.K. Barrett, ed. M.D. Hooker and S.G. Wilson (London: SPCK, 1982) 320–338.
11 See James D.G. Dunn, The Partings of the Ways Between Christianity and Judaism and their Significance for the Character of Christianity (London: SCM Press; Philadelphia: Trinity Press In-ternational, 1991) 1–17 for an overview of the trends in modern biblical scholarship with regard to the origins of earliest Christianity.
failure within biblical studies to treasure the Jewish roots of Christianity.12 A first step towards rectifying this problem in Pauline studies was to dismantle the cen-turies of interpretive layers that had been superimposed onto the historical Paul.
In what would become a seminal article,13 Krister Stendahl argued that it was actually Luther’s introspective search for salvific grace, concentrating on the individual’s relation to God, which had been read back into the mind of Paul, ignoring the apostle’s more social concerns of relations between Jews and Gen-tiles that had been made possible in Christ. Similarly, Paul’s critique of a Jewish legalistic ‘works-righteousness’ was really a reflection of Luther’s own battle against the Church’s reliance on paid-for indulgences.
Stendahl’s article came to greater recognition in a 1976 reprint,14 a year before another prominent figure, Ed Sanders, published a monumental work that highlighted the deleterious effects of reconstructing Judaism from Paul’s rhetor-ical presentation of it in his epistles.15 The legalistic caricature of Judaism that emerges from an unbridgeable gulf between Law and Gospel is responsible for viewing Rabbinic Judaism as Spätjudentum, ‘late Judaism’, implying that after the dawn of Christianity nothing further of serious note occurs in surviving Judaism.
Refuting this, Sanders set out to show that Judaism is an equally grace-filled reli-gion by virtue of ‘covenantal nomism’, the notion that God elects Israel into his covenant as an act of grace (‘getting in’) while Israel obeys the commandments (‘staying in’) to remain faithful to that covenant.16 While this is a huge advance upon the previous paradigm that saw Paul leaving behind a legalistic Judaism, Sanders’ presentation of Judaism looks oddly like a form of Christianity without Christ.17 And, in fact, when pressed as to why Paul still chose to break with
12 Cf. Jules Isaac, The Teaching of Contempt: Christian Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964).
13 Krister Stendahl, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” HTR 56 (1963) 199–215.
14 Reprinted in id., Paul Among Jews and Gentiles and Other Essays (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976) 78–96.
15 Ed Parish Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Lon-don: SCM Press, 1977).
16 Ibid., 75: “Briefly put, covenantal nomism is the view that one’s place in God’s plan is estab-lished on the basis of the covenant and that the covenant requires as the proper response of man his obedience to its commandments, while providing means of atonement for transgression.”
17 Clearly articulated by Pamela Eisenbaum in “Paul, Polemics, and the Problem of Essential-ism,” Biblical Interpretation 13.3 (2005) 224–238, p. 236: “What is not helpful, however, is the quest for the essence of Judaism. Whether this essence is negative as in the traditional model (legalism), or whether it is positive as in the New Perspective (covenantal nomism), Judaism still ends up looking like a form of Christianity without Christ.”
such a grace-filled Judaism, Sanders could say nothing more than that it simply was not Christianity.18 In this way, Sanders ended up reintroducing a pattern of Paul versus Judaism, and remains indebted to the interpretive framework of two (Lutheran) spheres of influence, Law and Gospel.
Sanders’s legacy was further taken up by James Dunn who proposed a ‘new perspective on Paul’.19 Dunn saw himself in broad agreement with Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism, but there was one crucial difference. Dunn claimed that Paul’s problem with Judaism was that its ritual identity markers (food laws, cir-cumcision, Sabbath observance) were functioning as ethnic ‘badges of covenant membership,’ denoting privileged ethnicity and nation status. “Covenant works had become too closely identified as Jewish observances, covenant righteousness, as national righteousness.”20 Dunn’s Paul, unlike Sanders’s, continues to stay within the Jewish covenant, but advocates that this covenant should be broad-ened to also include Gentile members without need of ethnic identity markers.
Within this new perspective, Paul is no longer divorced from Judaism since the
‘the Parting of the Ways’ between Judaism and Christianity would only occur a century later, after the Bar Kokhba Revolt of 132–135 CE.21
With the recovery of Paul’s Jewishness over the past 50 years (similar in trend to the rehabilitation of the Jewishness of Jesus22), biblical scholarship of Paul’s letters has advanced towards situating the theological content of his writ-ings within a matrix of Paul’s relationship to late Second Temple Judaism. These strides have run parallel to advances made in the field of early Judaism, aided by the discovery and publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the flourishing diversity of
18 Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 552: “In short, this is what Paul finds wrong in Ju-daism: it is not Christianity.” Sanders later clarified this position by saying that Paul attacked viewing observance of the law as a sign and condition of favoured status. E.P. Sanders, Paul, the Law and the Jewish People (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983) 45–48.
19 James D.G. Dunn, “The New Perspective on Paul,” BJRL 65 (1983) 95–122. See also the col-lected essays in id., The New Perspective on Paul: Colcol-lected Essays, WUNT I/185 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005).
20 Dunn, “The New Perspective on Paul,” 114 (emphasis his).
21 This became Dunn’s central contention in The Partings of the Ways Between Christianity and Judaism and their Significance for the Character of Christianity. That argument (from 1991) has since been challenged by the contributors in The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 95 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003) who argue for a slower pro-cess and a much later date to an eventual parting of ways.
22 For example, Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels (London: Col-lins, 1973), building on the legacy of such towering figures as Abraham Geiger, Jules Isaac, Martin Buber and Samuel Sandmel before him.
Jewish Studies programs, and the explosion of interest in pursuing cross-discipli-nary research projects.
The success of this paradigm shift can hardly be underestimated. Put simply, within the space of a decade of scholarship (the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s), Paul went from being a Christian to a Jew. There was now no longer talk of his ‘con-version’, but instead his ‘calling’. The Law was no longer futile for Paul. In fact, Paul was Torah-observant. Instead of righteousness (or, to put it more, strongly, justification through God’s free grace) being the center of Paul’s gospel, the main goal of Paul’s mission was to extend to the Gentiles entry into the Jewish family, which they could obtain through faith in Christ. And yet. The question of Paul and Judaism really being about Paul versus Judaism still haunts this ‘new perspective on Paul’. Whereas before Paul’s perceived problem with Judaism was its legalism, now it was its ethnocentrism. Paul now comes across as finding Judaism, with all its practices, just a little too particular (too Jewish?) to successfully peddle along-side his gospel in the marketplaces of the Roman Empire.
Aware of this residual binary dichotomy, the last 15 years has witnessed alter-native perspectives that attempt to move beyond this no-longer new perspective on Paul.23 The question has no longer become that of Paul and Judaism, since that still presumes Paul leaves Judaism behind eventually. One should rather simply speak of Paul’s Judaism, without any qualifiers.24 So it is Paul’s continu-ing Judaism, both before and after his encounter with Christ, which defines these recent endeavors in Pauline scholarship. To return to Pamela Eisenbaum, “belief in Jesus does not make Paul a Christian”.25 His entire gospel, apostolic ministry, and writings were in fact irreducible aspects of Paul’s Judaism.
23 The key players in this have been helpfully outlined by Magnus Zetterholm in “Beyond the New Perspective,” Approaches to Paul: A Student’s Guide to Recent Scholarship (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2009) 127–163. Zetterholm also lists many other approaches to Paul (in his chapter,
“Breaking Boundaries,” 195–224), including those by recent philosophers, most notably Agam-ben, Badiou and Žižek, who I will not be treating in this contribution (since they are dealt with in Gesine Palmer’s contribution to this volume).
24 Mark D. Nanos, “Rethinking the ‘Paul and Judaism’ Paradigm: Why Not ‘Paul’s Judaism’,” May 28, 2008 online version available at: http://www.marknanos.com/Paul%27sJudaism-5-28-08.pdf (accessed June 11, 2015).
25 Eisenbaum, “Paul, Polemics, and the Problem of Essentialism,” 232. Eisenbaum uses this label to categorize scholars who do not compromise on Paul’s Jewish identity. Within this group she lists Mark Nanos, Neil Elliott, Paula Fredriksen, Lloyd Gaston, Krister Stendahl, Stan Stowers (and also Nils Dahl and W.D. Davies). As a survey article she does not include herself in this list, but it is clear from her article and its conclusion that her sympathies lie with this group, and that this article laid the groundwork for her later book, Paul Was Not a Christian. See also now the latest volume along these lines: Mark D. Nanos and Magnus Zetterholm (eds.), Paul within
In order to understand just how radical this latest trend in Pauline studies is, it is worthwhile to pause briefly and consider that only a century prior (towards the end of the 19th century) Paul was understood as the great Hellenizer of Judaism.26 As a Diaspora Jew deeply influenced by the Hellenistic world, Paul ‘invented’
Christianity in order to fully assimilate Judaism into the Greek mainstream. In this manner (primitive) particularity gave way to (enlightened) universalism. At the beginning of the 21st century, however, a complete reversal has taken place:
Paul never intended to universalize Judaism. In advocating that his Gentile fol-lowers abandon worship to native gods, Paul was no different than his rivals who were also engaging in ‘Judaizing the nations’, the type of proselytizing action that the pagans of Paul’s time would have understood as leading straight to Judaism.27 So it appears that within the span of a century, we have managed to achieve a complete overhaul in how we view Paul and Judaism.28 It is perhaps worth men-tioning that among the latest advocates of such a move are Jewish scholars of early Christianity, among them Mark Nanos, Pamela Eisenbaum, and Paula Fre-driksen, to name just a few. First of all, and positively, this indicates how much the field of Pauline studies has opened up to accommodate scholars from differ-ent backgrounds, and particularly from the Jewish fold that 19th century Protes-tant scholarship was only too happy to shun. It also indicates, equally positively, the ‘reversal of the gaze’ that Susannah Heschel highlighted when discussing Abraham Geiger’s Jewish Jesus.29 I shall return to this insight a little later, but for now I want to focus upon two, equally Jewish, portrayals of Paul that go to the heart, I think, of the continuing struggle in Pauline studies to situate the Apostle between ‘Law’ and ‘Love’.
Judaism: Restoring the First-Century Context to the Apostle (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2015) with contributions from Nanos, Zetterholm, Caroline Johnson Hodge, Paula Fredriksen, Neil Elliott, Kathy Ehrensperger and Terence Donaldson.
26 Indebted of course to F.C. Baur, but also taken on by such Jewish scholars as Heinrich Graetz and, by extension, the movement of Wissenschaft des Judentums.
27 Such is the claim of Paula Fredriksen, “Judaizing the Nations: The Ritual Demands of Paul’s Gospel,” in Paul’s Jewish Matrix, ed. Thomas G. Casey and Justin Taylor, Bible in Dialogue 2 (Rome: Gregorian and Biblical Press, 2011) 327–354.
28 It should be noted that this has not gone without challenge. Magnus Zetterholm devotes a whole chapter surveying the robust (Protestant) rebuttals that have been mounted: “In Defense of Protestantism,” Approaches to Paul, 165–193.
29 Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998).