Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle (Chap. 1: Was Paul Really Jewish)

CHAPTER 1 - Was Paul Really Jewish

Paul lived and died a Jew-that is the essential claim of this book. For some readers, the claim that Paul was a Jew is counter intuitive. Who could possibly be more Christian than Paul? For others, especially many scholars, Christian clergy, and lay devotees of Paul, the claim that Paul was Jewish is an entirely pedestrian observation. Sure Paul was a Jew; he himself said so (see Gal 1:13, 2:15). Virtually any book on Paul that one might pick up in a bookstore will tell you that Paul was Jewish. But it is usually only mentioned in. passing, by way of introduction and background perhaps. In fact, Paul is overwhelmingly called Christian by people who write about him.

So, what exactly does it mean to read Paul as a Jew? In this book it means primarily three things: (1) Most basically, it means to take seriously Paul's religious identity as a Jew and not merely pay lip service on it, It means reading his letters with the working assumption that they were written by a Jew, specifically a Hellenistic Jew, that is, a Jew from the Greco-Roman era who speaks Greek and has been influenced by Greek thought and culture. (2) Reclaiming Paul as a Jew means to reclaim a historically plausible image of Judaism so as to combat the long history of Pauline interpretation that has bolstered Christian Judaism. (3) Demonstrating Paul's Jewish world-view helps clarify much that is perceived to be inconsistent, contradictory, or just plain confusing in Paul's writings.

I have occasionally given lectures titled "Reading Paul as a Jew," and people have asked me about the title-"Does the phrase 'as a Jew' refer to Paul or to you?" "Both," I would say. I'm Jewish and Paul's Jewish-simple, right? Sort of The religious labels we ascribe to people, institutions, and texts are more slippery than one might think, and religious identity is a more complicated question than at first it may seem. Let me explain.

While people intuitively think of the New Testament-of which Paul's letters are a significant part-as Christian, the vast majority of the twenty-seven documents that currently comprise the New Testament were written by Jews at a time before there was any such thing as Christianity. Because of the subsequent canonization of these texts, including Paul's letters, all these documents are now considered Christian. But in their own historical contexts, scholars think of them at least most of them, as Jewish sectarian literature. Paul clearly identifies himself as a Jew in his letters. Ironically, Paul is especially emphatic about his Jewish identity in Galatians, the letter often regarded as the most anti-Jewish of Paul's writings. He says that he is a Jew "by nature" or "by birth," as it is usually translated (Gal 2:15).1 It is very important to stress that Paul does not use the designation "Jew" of himself as a label of his religious past. He speaks in the present tense; that is, Paul's self-identification is a description 0£ himself at the time he wrote the letter to the Galatians. Interpreters have sometimes' argued that when Paul calls himself a Jew, he means only that he is ethnically, and not religiously, Jewish. This is an incorrect view on several grounds. When Paul calls 'himself a Jew "by nature" in his letter to the Galatians, he contrasts it with another identity: he says he is not a "Gentile sinner." By speaking •this way, Paul not only tells us who he is; he tells us who he is not. He says he is not a Gentile sinner-not simply not a Gentile; he is not a Gentile sinner. By so doing, Paul makes clear to us that the terminology of Jew and Gentile does not merely refer to one's ethnic or cultural heritage; the terms Jew and Gentile also refer to one's morality and one's disposition vis-a-vis God.

In terms of religious identity, Paul is representative of the Jews who produced the writings that now make up the New Testament. They were, to be sure, Jews who believed in Jesus, but they did not proclaim their religious identity as Christian. They thought of-Jesus as the realization of classical Jewish hopes, and they thought of themselves as the true Israel or the faithful remnant of Israel, although those hopes were understood somewhat differently among different groups of Jews. This description of the religious identity of New Testament texts in historical context makes them analogous to other Jewish sectarian writings of the period, like the Dead Sea Scrolls. We have scores of Jewish texts from antiquity, may of which reflect a sectarian perspective, that is, a distinctive perspective on what it means to be Jewish. Sometimes this perspective overlaps with other Jews' points of view; sometimes it is idiosyncratic.

Thus, texts themselves do not inherently possess a static religious identity. Paul's letters are appropriately called Christian because Christians chose to canonize them, and Christians continue to value them as authoritative and incorporate them in their worship. Complementarily, Jews do not recognize them as authoritative and do not use them in worship. From a Christian and a Jewish perspective, then, Paul's letters are an essential feature of Christianity and thus a marker of Christian identity.

But in the first century the letters could not possibly have functioned as a marker distinctive of Christian identity. First, there is the obvious reason that there was no such religious category "Christian." As far as can be determined by historians, archaeologists, and biblical scholars, there were no distinctively Christian institutions, buildings, or symbols in the first century, and a few scholars believe that Christians did not materially distinguish themselves until the late third or early fourth century.3 Beyond that, there were other believers in Jesus who were not part of the Pauline circle; some of them even seemed to have opposed Paul. Thus, for the first several generations of believers in Jesus, Paul and Paul's letters did not inform all Christians' belief in Jesus. Most important, Gentiles of the Roman world who knew nothing of Jesus-those whose practice today would fall under the loose category of Greco-Roman religion-would have regarded the letters as Jewish letters, because they were authored by a Jew, and they contain Jewish language, imagery, and concerns.

If a Roman centurion had intercepted Paul's letter to the Romans, he would have quickly spotted it as Jewish. Consider how the letter opens: Paul says he is in service to someone named Jesus, which is the Greek form of the Hebrew name Joshua, and this Jesus is descended from the Davidic dynasty, the most glorious of the ancient monarchies of Israel. And if the first few lines didn't tip off the centurion, when he saw the language of Jew and Gentile-language Paul uses over and over again in Romans (and elsewhere)-the centurion would know that this letter reflected a Jewish perspective on the world. For who else divides up the entire world into these two kinds of people, Jews and Gentiles, those who are Jewish and those who are not? It is certainly not how the Romans divide up the world: their operative categories were Romans and barbarians.

Moreover, Paul's letters would have been regarded as Jewish by other Jews of the time, including Pharisees. They might not have thought the letters contained correct views, and they might well have thought Paul a bad Jew, but a Jew nonetheless. The fact that Paul says he was subject to forty lashes (less one) five times from synagogical authorities (2 Cor 11 :24) means that the synagogical authorities as well as Paul himself understood that he remained subject to Jewish authority. Similar to the illustration of the Roman centurion, Paul's letters-would have been regarded as Jewish by other Jews because the writer was Jewish. Even if they never met him in person, other Jews of the first century would have recognized the author of these letters as Jewish because so many of the signature marks of Jewishness appear in them.

Modern readers of Paul tend to assume that Pharisees and other Jews would have considered Paul an apostate, a Jewish heretic who was no longer part of the Jewish community because of his belief in Jesus, and thus not really Jewish. In the context of the first century however Paul's belief in Jesus did not make him less Jewish. Belief in a messianic savior figure 'is a very Jewish idea, as can be demonstrated by a historical analogy. Only a half century after Paul wrote his letters, R. Akiba, One of the most revered of all rabbis of antiquity, believed that the Messiah had come in his day, only his name was not Jesus, it was Bar Kokhba. Not all Jews thought Bar Kokhba was the Messiah at the time and after Bar Kokhba failed in his revolt against the Romans and died, it became clear that R. Akiba had been wrong. But R. Akiba has never been judged a heretic, and his teachings continue to this day to be authoritative because they are preserved in the Mishnah and the Talmud. Thus, Paul's belief in Jesus would not have branded him a heretic-a pain in the neck perhaps, but not a heretic. So if we of the twenty-first century are willing to take account of the opinions of first-century persons such as Romans, Jews, and Paul himself, we must conclude that Paul 1ived and died a Jew, because his Jewish identity is represented in his letters. Even though, because Paul's letters have become essential to Christian tradition and self-understanding, in our contemporary context they are appropriately labeled Christian, in their own historical context this label would not have attached to them; it could not possibly have attached since it did not yet exist. Rather, the teachings contained in the letters as well as their author would have-been considered Jewish.

One point of clarification, however: it is obvious that Paul played a critical role m the development of Christianity and that his letters are regarded as an essential part of the Christian canon. I do not in any way Wish to deny Christians their claim on Paul. But in this book Paul is unambiguously Jewish-ethnically, culturally, religiously, morally, and theologically.