Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle (Introduction)

Introduction

Once when visiting a large wealthy, metropolitan church on Easter Sunday, I listened to a man give a testimony about his conversion to Christianity. He spoke of how he yearned for spiritual meaning and sought eagerly for religious truth throughout his life(he seemed to me to be On the young side of middle-aged) but was always disappointed with the answers given to him; that is, until recently, when he discovered Christ. Suddenly he realized his former life was a life of sin. Before his conversion, he explained, he had been Jewish. But now he had accepted God's unconditional loving act of grace in Jesus Christ and had given up the sin of Judaism.

Admittedly, I can no longer remember the details of the man's speech, which was rather lengthy, but I am certain he associated, if not equated, a life in Judaism with a life in sin. When he began to speak of his sordid past, I was expecting something more stereotypical-at least what I imagined to be stereotypical-of Christian testimonies in the American Protestant evangelical context. I thought he would say that he had been an alcoholic or a drug addict or had abused members of his family or had been obsessed with money and prestige and lived a vain, empty life, but he never mentioned any of these things. His description of his former, so-called sinful life sounded perfectly respectable to me. The mention of the words Judaism and sin in-the same sentence came as a painful shock, to say the least.

As a Jew, the idea that Judaism is a flawed religion inherently linked to sin is deeply offensive. Unfortunately, this idea has been linked to the apostle Paul, but it really comes from a long history of Christian interpreters of Paul. While Christians of virtually every stripe, catholic and Protestant, mainline and evangelical, now willingly accept that Jesus was a Jew, Paul is typically viewed as the first true Christian. The image of Paul as the first true Christian also requires him to be the first true convert to Christianity. The traditional story of Paul looks something like this: Paul was originally a zealous Jew who was persecuting the church, until something utterly miraculous happened: the resurrected Jesus appeared to him. This revelation led to Paul's conversion from Judaism to Christianity, from being a zealous Pharisee to being an unstoppable preacher of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Once converted, he realized the futility of Judaism, with its endless demands of the law, and rejected it.

Combining assumptions about Paul's biography with the theology of his letters as they understood them, 'Christian interpreters came to believe that Paul's conversion experience led him to articulate the doctrine of justification by faith, a doctrine that stands at the core of Christianity and, at the same time, constructs Christianity as the antithesis of Judaism typically considered a religion of works. According to this view, Christianity correctly recognizes the inevitable failure of human beings to achieve righteousness and thus the necessity of accepting God's grace-in the form of Jesus Christ-while Judaism mistakenly puts its faith in the ability of human beings to achieve salvation through their own efforts. Christian theologians throughout the ages have varied as to whether they see Jews as merely misguided or willfully defiant, but there has generally been agreement that a theology that endorses "salvation by works" reflects a bad religion because it denies the grace of God. Thus, the man who described his conversion from Judaism to Christianity as a move from sin to grace had followed the traditional Pauline script to near perfection.

Because the negative image of Judaism is so closely linked to the apostle Paul, most Jewish interpreters of Paul have not had good things to say about him. However, my interest in writing a book on Paul began not out of spiteful resentment toward him, but because I passionately identify with his perspective on the world. Like Paul, I live as a Jew among Gentiles. Although I am Jewish, my scholarly expertise in the origins of Christianity landed me a teaching position in a Christian theological school. To be sure, not all my students are Christian and not all are studying for the Christian ministry, but many of them are. Although I never envisioned teaching in such an institution when I began my scholarly career, I now consider it a privilege. Being in a Christian institution has made me more self-consciously Jewish; remarkably enough, it has also contributed to my ability to see Paul as a Jew. Moreover, I have come to regard Paul as a Jew who wrestled with an issue with which many modern American Jews wrestle: how to reconcile living as a Jew with living in and among the rest of the non-Jewish world.

I think it safe to assert that this issue transcends the peculiar situation of modern American Jews. Stated generically, the problem to which I refer concerns the relation of particularity to universality. Anyone who wishes to maintain the particularity of his or her ethnic or religious identity without denying the validity of another's particular identity faces this problem. I think Paul reflected on this problem and ultimately developed some powerful insights on the subject, insights that have largely been overlooked because of the traditional image of Paul as a Christian. Unless one first recognizes that Paul was a Jew, both before and after his experience of Christ, and that he struggled with the cognitive and physical dissonance of being a Jew in a world with non-Jews, one cannot see how Paul confronted the problem of human difference. Thus, this book is an attempt to resurrect, if you will, Paul as a Jew in order to offer a constructive, alternative reading of Paul's letters that Christians, Jews and perhaps others will find compelling.

I also write this book as a challenge to the portrait of Paul that has reigned for heady two millennia. I intend to expose the bias embedded in the traditional portrait of Paul and the ways in which it has contributed to gross misrepresentations Judaism and played no small role in the history of anti-Semitism. At the same time and just as important, I intend to demonstrate that I can explain Paul's letters compellingly and thereby construct a more credible and more persuasive portrait of Paul for readers interested in having a better grasp of Paul's life and work.

The image of Paul in this book portrays a man who, to paraphrase Krister Stendahl, was "called rather than converted." In other words, Paul was called by God to fulfill a particular mission, one that was foretold in the Hebrew prophets: to bring knowledge of the one God-the God of Israel-to all the nations of the world. 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.

Contrary to prevailing opinion, I think Paul's theological orientation to the world can be used productively for thinking about religious pluralism. I hope to demonstrate this claim successfully in the pages that follow. Furthermore, I hope this book will enable Jewish as well as Christian readers to develop an appreciation for Paul's theological pluralism. Jews have typically portrayed Paul as the great betrayer of Judaism. I think this image is as much mistaken as the traditional Christian image. Viewing Paul as a Jewish heretic has resulted in nothing more than Jewish ignorance of an important theological resource. Given the history of Jewish-Christian relations, Jewish antipathy to Paul is no surprise. At the same time, the history of Jewish-Christian relations seems to me to warrant crossing the traditional boundary between the two faiths along with a refashioning of what constitutes Jewish and Christian identity in particular and interfaith relations in general. Just as the God of biblical history is a dynamic and not a static force, so, too, are our religious traditions.