Source: “PAUL WITHIN JUDAISM: Restoring the First-Century Context to the Apostle”, Fortress Press 2016.
The Question Of Politics. Paul As A Jew Under Roman Law.wav
This podcast delves into the ongoing scholarly debate surrounding Paul's Jewish identity within the context of Roman rule. It critiques the "Christianizing" tendency to view Paul as fundamentally breaking from Judaism after his encounter with Christ, arguing that this perspective often minimizes the political and social realities of his Jewish context. The podcast examines various interpretations, including the "New Perspective" on Paul, highlighting how some attempts to understand Paul as a Jew still inadvertently perpetuate an "essentializing" view of Judaism, defining it as inherently separate from or even opposed to early Christianity. Ultimately, the podcast advocates for an understanding of Paul that sees his experiences and teachings as intelligible within the categories of first-century Judaism, emphasizing the need to consider the constraining force of Roman political and economic power on Jewish identity and the diverse ways individuals navigated their affiliations.
Topic 1: The Enduring Debate on Paul's Jewish Identity
The discussion surrounding Paul's Jewish identity is a deeply contentious area in contemporary scholarship, often stirring anxiety because it frequently serves as a forum where Christians, and sometimes Jews, define their religious identities. Despite the emergence of the New Perspective on Paul roughly three decades ago, which sought to move beyond restrictive, older "Christianizing" interpretations, many interpreters still struggle to break free from these ingrained frameworks. A significant consequence of this interpretive struggle is that crucial political dimensions of Paul's historical environment, as well as our own, tend to be downplayed or marginalized in scholarly discourse. The core tension in this debate lies between understanding Paul as someone whose thought and experience were fundamentally and decisively reshaped by his encounter with the risen Christ, leading him away from Judaism, and viewing him as an apostle whose identity and actions remained deeply rooted within the existing Jewish traditions and intellectual landscape.
Topic 2: The "Christianizing" Interpretation of Paul
This traditional viewpoint understands Paul primarily as a figure whose thought and life, though initially shaped by his Jewish background, were fundamentally and irrevocably transformed by his encounter with the risen Christ, which he described as a "revelation" of God's son. While contemporary interpreters generally acknowledge Paul's intellectual debt to Jewish traditions, many quickly qualify this by asserting that these Jewish elements acquired a new and distinct meaning for Paul after his "revelation," a meaning no longer compatible with Judaism. This "event" is often characterized as a disruptive "interruption" or "breaking in," implying that it defies explanation solely within the confines of Paul's Jewish heritage. A central pillar of this "Christianizing" perspective, particularly in centuries of Protestant exegesis and theology, is the stark, irreducible opposition between the futile striving for "righteousness" before God through "works of law" (historically seen as a definition of Judaism) and the reception of God's gracious offer of righteousness through Christ (seen as definitive of life in Christ). This opposition is ostensibly derived from various passages in Paul's letters where he appears to distance himself critically from his past conduct as a Jew, describing it as destructive "zeal" or his Jewish heritage as mere "loss" or "rubbish" in comparison to the supreme value of knowing Christ Jesus.
Topic 3: The "New Perspective on Paul" and its Critiques
The "New Perspective on Paul" arose from critiques, notably demonstrated by E. P. Sanders, challenging the traditional understanding that Jews in Paul's era believed they secured God's approval through "works of law." This perspective, a broad category encompassing various interpretive proposals, suggests that Paul's use of "works of law" did not refer to an individual's attempt to earn salvation, but rather to the collective efforts of the Jewish people to maintain their ethnic distinctiveness among other peoples through specific boundary-marking practices like circumcision, kosher diets, and Sabbath observance. According to this view, Paul's polemic against "works of law" stemmed from his desire to defend his largely non-Jewish congregations against attempts by certain Jewish contemporaries to impose these ethnic markers. This interpretation gained appeal because it appeared to absolve Paul of misrepresenting Judaism and presented him as a champion of modern multiculturalism, opposing ethnic chauvinism. However, this approach has faced significant criticisms. Critics argue that it often still portrays a collective insistence on ethnic distinctiveness as uniquely Jewish, sometimes in negative terms reminiscent of older Jewish caricatures. Even when careful to state that Paul is not pitted against Judaism itself, but rather champions a "universal" strand of Jewish tradition against a "narrowly ethnocentric" one, the outcome often implicitly frames Paul as the sole embodiment of the "good" universal strand, suggesting that Jews who did not follow him were held back by a "bad", ethnically prejudiced form of Judaism, thereby subtly perpetuating Christian supersessionist ideas.
Topic 4: The Problem of Essentializing Categories in Paul's Interpretation
A fundamental interpretive error identified in much contemporary scholarship on Paul, including aspects of the New Perspective, is the "essentializing" of ancient Judaism and Christianity. This involves defining each religion not based on the self-understanding expressed by actual adherents, but according to predefined terms that assume their inherent otherness and incompatibility. For instance, Christianity is often simplistically defined as "devotion to Christ," while Judaism is defined as "devotion to Torah." This framework posits Judaism and Christianity as mutually exclusive and immutable categories of religious identity, often leading to the assumption that devotion to Christ inherently requires a negative valuation of Torah. A second, intertwined error is the common interpretation of Paul as ethnically Jewish but not religiously or theologically Jewish. While interpreters acknowledge that Paul occasionally identifies himself as a Jew in "solidarity" with his people, they often insist that his experience of Christ so radically transformed him that he moved outside the bounds of Judaism, or at least ventured so far to the margins that his new identity was no longer recognizably Jewish. This is described as the "kata sarka camp" or "according to the flesh" interpretation, where Paul's Jewishness is reduced to a merely "ethnic" and vestigial aspect of his identity, subsumed by his primary identity as a Christian. This pervasive essentializing thinking often creates rigid, dichotomous categories that constrain a more nuanced and historically grounded understanding of Paul within his original context.
Topic 5: Reinterpreting Paul's Persecution of Early Jesus Assemblies
Jörg Frey, among other interpreters, views Paul's pre-conversion "zeal" in persecuting early Jesus followers as thoroughly "Pharisaic," a part of an inner-Jewish struggle to uphold the Torah against its perceived opponents in the early churches. This explanation appears to absolve Paul of anti-Jewish animosity by framing his actions as a Jewish sectarian dispute. However, this interpretation is criticized for projecting an essentialist dichotomy backward in time, implying that the early Judean assemblies were already moving away from and hostile to the law, particularly its boundary-setting function, thereby forming a proto-Christian community for Paul to later join. This assumption, though prevalent among Christian interpreters, is considered historically improbable. Scholars like Paula Fredriksen have convincingly demonstrated a lack of evidence for the idea that Paul or other Jews would have considered a crucified Jesus "cursed" by the law, noting that archaeological evidence suggests honorific burial for crucified Jews. Furthermore, early Jesus assemblies including non-Jews would not have inherently opposed the law, as Jewish traditions anticipated Gentiles turning to God in the last days without becoming legal converts. Fredriksen proposes a compelling alternative explanation: Paul's persecution was not primarily about halakha (Jewish law) but concerned the precarious political security of minority Jewish communities in Palestinian and Syrian cities under Roman rule. The enthusiastic proclamation of a messiah recently executed as a political insurrectionist, especially when preached to Gentiles, was a politically dangerous act that could threaten the entire Jewish community by attracting unwanted Roman attention. This politically informed interpretation avoids anachronism and the invention of unattested Jewish traditions, offering a more plausible historical context for Paul's initial actions.