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    In Galatians, Paul delivers the ringing declaration that there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. There is a great deal in Paul’s letters that suggests that the primary motivation not only for his mission, but indeed, for his very conversion as well, was a passionate desire that humanity be one under the sign of the one God. It was a univeralism born of the union of Hebraic monotheism and Greek desire for unity and university.

    My suggestion is what drove Paul from the beginning to the end was a passionate desire for human unification for the erasure of differences and hierarchies between human beings and that he saw the Christ event as he had experienced it, as the vehicle for this transformation of humanity. The text which establishes this understanding of Paul’s gospel most clearly is his letter to the Galatians which is entirely devoted to the theme of the new creation of God’s one people, the new Israel through faith and through the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.

    I believe that in that letter we can find two crucial principles for an interpretation of Paul. One, that the social gospel was central to his ministry, that is, that the eradication of human difference and hierarchy was its central theme and two, that the duality of flesh and spirit was to be the vehicle by which this transformation was to take place.  In the opening paragraph, the prescript, the major themes of Paul’s thought are introduced and are particularly I think the nexus, the connection, between christology and the social gospel. Paul says, "I am Paul, an apostle, not from men nor through a man but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead." Binary opposition is introduced in the very first sentence of Galatians. Paul says that he is not a human apostle, an apostle from a human being but an apostle of the risen Christ and of God the Father.

    As many commentators have pointed out, this form of the expression here is certainly strange and must be very pointed rhetorically. Paul, in the greeting of his letter, in his very identification of himself, who he is, provides a preview of his entire theme and argument. Paul is not an apostle from men, that is not from those who are authorities in the flesh as it were, those who have known or are related physically to Jesus a man, but he is the apostle through the resurrected Christ in the spirit, and from God who raised him. This interpretation does, in fact, provide an answer to the otherwise attested charge against Paul, namely, that his apostleship was inferior because he never had had contact with the historical Jesus.

    Paul’s argument could be taken as a direct counter to such charges as the following from the somewhat later Clementine Recognitions, a sort of fictional biography of Clement of Rome, expressing the religious view of third century Gallatian Christian-Jewish opponents of Paul, the spiritual heirs of Peter and James and they write like this: "To Paul: you see now, expressions of wrath are made through visions and dreams, but discourse with friends takes place from mouth to mouth openly and not through riddles, visions, and dreams as with an enemy. And if our Jesus appeared to you also and became known in a vision and met you, that was as angry as with an enemy, he has only spoken through visions and dreams or through external revelations. Can anyone be made competent to teach through a vision? And if your opinion is indeed that it is possible, why then did our teacher spend the whole year with us who were awake? How can we believe you even if he has appeared to you, and how can he have appeared to you if you desire the opposite of what you have learned? But if you were visited by him for the space of an hour and were instructed by him and thereby have become an apostle then proclaim his words." This is from the Clementine Recognitions. This text is a later Jewish-Christian text written as a rejoinder to Paul but I think it still indicates very well what the nature of the conflict between Paul and his Jerusalem opponents would have been like.

    Paul, I suggest, is contrasting the source of knowledge of his Jerusalem opponents, Peter and James, with his own and he finds them wanting. Why precisely does Paul mention his zeal and his advancement in learning of the traditions of his Jewish forefathers? I think it is because precisely that claim of Peter and James that they had made against him was, in effect, that they have a tradition of Jesus, which Paul does not. Paul then says, "If it is a tradition that you require then I have an even greater and older tradition than yours. I have the tradition of the Pharisees, of the ancient Hebrews." If all the coming of Christ means is some slight correctives to the teachings of traditional Judaism the traditions of the father than what did it all accomplish? If there has not been a fundamental change in the structure of salvation then the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross would have been in vain as Paul says openly later on. "The source of my knowledge is not of the same type as the knowledge I had when I was advancing in the traditions of the genealogical fathers but rather the source of my knowledge is the direct revelation in the spirit in Christ in me."

    If the Peter/Paul opposition, as I describe it, seems to prefigure the later controversies between Orthodox and Gnostic Christians that is no accident, as I read Paul as a moderate Gnostic, just as later on Clement of Alexandria would declare himself a moderate Gnostic -- somewhere between the monadic rabbinate-like corporeality of the Jerusalem Church and the extreme dualistic spirituality of the later true Gnostic heretics. As Wetterburn has written, "Views of Jesus’ resurrection of Christians seem to range through a whole spectrum from the accounts of the crucified body being restored to life, wounds and all, through Paul’s account in I Corinthians 15 which seems to suggest that the resurrection appearances were of the same kind as his own conversion experience, a vision on the road to Damascus." Wetterburn goes on, "As the Ephenians mock the Valencians, as denying the resurrection of the dead saying something mysterious and ridiculous that it is not this body which rises but another rises from it which they call spiritual." Mysterious and ridiculous, but perhaps still very Pauline. Moreover, this controversy between Peter/James on the one side and Paul on the other had similar political implications to those of that later schism as well.

    Paul’s next sentence in Galatians, "I did not confer with flesh and blood," is now intelligible, whereas until now it has been held by commentators to be puzzling. As Hans Deter Betz puts the problem, "Strangely, he does it negatively, saying what he did not do, it is obvious that Paul wants to under score his immediate reaction to the call. Why does he not simply state his obedience as he does in Acts 26, the negative statement is indeed mysterious." It is if you assume that all Paul wanted to say was that he jumped to the task immediately, but if we think that perhaps he wanted to say something else, then we can make sense of this and we can see now, following my argument, that Paul’s negative statement is exactly the essence of his argument. He is emphasizing the superiority of his gospel precisely because it has no human, flesh nor blood.

Dr. Daniel Boyarin at the podium at the University of St. Thomas. Dr. Calvin Roetzel, co-presenter,  and Dr. John Merkle, moderator of the program, are seated to the right.

    The famous and notoriously difficult reports of Paul’s two face-to-face confrontations with the leaders of Jewish Christianity must be understood in the light of an overall construction of Pauline thinking. The crux of the matter, to my mind, is the question of when or indeed whether Paul argued that circumcision and observance of such commandments as the laws of kashrut and the Sabbath was abrogated not only for ethnic Gentiles but for ethnic Jews as well. I suggest that for the logic of Paul’s theology, which was complete in its entirety from the first moment of his revelation, there was not the slightest importance to the observance of such rites for Jews or for Gentiles. This does not mean, however, that such observances and their historical meanings are coded by Paul as bad, they are simply lower on the hierarchy of values, and thus sacrificable to a higher cause.

    I would argue that Paul’s universalism was complete from the first moment, and that Galatians, one of the earliest of his letters, demonstrates this. On the other hand, his dual validation of both spirit and body did not allow him to discount entirely the claims of the literal physical Israel according to the body as well. And thus Romans 9-11. The tension is not a residue of unresolved inner conflict in Paul as some have claimed, so much as a necessary tension of his philosophy, his hermeneutics, his motive interpretation, his anthropology, even his christology which are, in my view, all strongly paralleled with each other, all predicated on a double articulation of a set of physical fleshly entities that have their counterpart in a spiritual interpretation: the physical Jewish people, the church, the human Jesus, the risen Christ, the literal meaning of the text, the allegorical interpretation, the physical commandments, their true spiritual meaning.

    Owing therefore to Paul’s conviction that literal observance was merely irrelevant, being only in the flesh, he didn’t claim observance was a sinful striving for works righteousness (ala the Lutheran traditions) he just claimed that it was irrelevant, not important. He was willing to allow Jews to continue observing such commandments if they chose to, until such observance conflicted with the fundamental meaning and message of the gospel as Paul understood it, namely the constitution of all the peoples of the world as one new people, the new people Israel.

    Paul says as much when he writes in I Corinthians 7:19, that neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything, it doesn’t matter one way or the other. The practices themselves are a matter of indifference according to Paul. It is there interference with the oneness of the new Israel that disturbs this apostle. It is important to note, however, that from a rabbinic Jewish perspective, this very stance puts Paul into direct conflict with Judaism. From our point of view it is not tolerance of Judaism, to say that for Jews it is a matter of indifference whether or not we circumcise our male children, whether or not we keep the Sabbath, whether or not we keep kosher. This is a dismissal of pharisaic rabbinic Judaism entirely.

    Now, the two most obvious contradictions of Paul’s gospel that there could be, would be any attempt to suggest to the Gentiles that they must observe the commandments of the law such as circumcision and the rules of kashrut in order to be full members of the people of God, or alternatively, such observance on the part of Jewish Christians which would lead to a social split or a hierarchical structure for the relations between ethnic Jews and Gentiles within the church, thus defeating Paul’s whole purpose of the creation of a new humanity in which there would be neither Jew nor Greek but all would be one in Christ Jesus.

In the light of this consideration I think we can read the accounts of the Jerusalem and Antioch confrontations between Paul and Peter and his associates. At stake in the Jerusalem Conference was the first of the two possible threats to the integrity of Paul’s gospel. Namely the claim of the Jewish Christians that gentiles must be circumcised, which alone counts as conversion to Judaism for males in order to join the people of God. Yielding or losing this point would have indeed resulted in Paul having run the race in vain. Just as losing the analogous point now with the Galatians who, as Dr. Roetzel as told us, were about to decide themselves to become circumcised would result in he and they having run in vain as well, because the whole content of Paul’s gospel as I’ve understood it is that the physical observances that constitute the physical Israel as the people of God had been transmuted and fulfilled in the allegorical signification in the spirit, thereby constituting the faithful gentiles as Israel in the spirit. This is why it is absolutely vital for Paul that he prove that he has not given in on the question of circumcision as a conversion ritual and requirement, and the visual proof of Titus’s uncircumcision makes that point as no other could, and so he says, "Yet not even Titus who is with me was compelled to be circumcised."

    In the incident at Antioch we see the conflict over the other possible threat to Paul’s gospel of inclusion of the Gentiles, qua-Gentiles in the people of God. That is the disruptiveness of Jews and gentiles having different and inherently divisive food practices when they are living together in the same community as they are at Antioch. According to the narrative that Paul presents, Peter himself had realized this originally, and he also had eaten together with the gentiles which certainly means that he had eaten non-kosher food of the gentiles for otherwise he wouldn’t have been violating Jewish law and there wouldn’t have been any complaint against him. Paul’s statement about the Jerusalem Conference to the effect that there were two gospels, simply reflects the compromise agreement that he had made and not his true theological understanding else how could he possibly object to Peter who was, after all, the apostle to the Jews, the apostle to the circumcision, continuing or returning to the performance of Jewish rites if Paul really felt that there were two gospels, a gospel for the Jews and a gospel for the Gentiles.

    Since Paul’s concern was to include the Gentiles and not to disabuse the Jews of their outmoded notions, he wasn’t worried about that, he was able to conclude the agreement with Peter on those terms as long as it did not threaten his mission. Peter, however, by exceeding to the demands of the people from James that he return to Jewish food practices at Antioch, in the presence of ethnic Gentile Christians, provided a threat and Paul met it vigorously. Paul’s message of a universal church, a fellowship of Christ in which all would meet as equals was to win the day and pave the way for Christendom as we have known it from Constantine to nearly our own time, and indeed for the resurgent Christianity of Asia and Africa in our own time. An attractive vision indeed. In a sense we could say that Paul was preparing the way for Vatican II, at least in part, and for the cultural diversity that marks the worldwide Catholic Church since Vatican II.

    But what about his opponents? Those men from James and Peter who get such bad press in Christian history owing to Paul’s victory. History is always written by the victors. What can we say about them? Do they have anything to teach us? Did they make a different contribution or could they have made a different contribution that might have been useful as well at Vatican II? In order to answer this question let us go back to that Jewish-Christian text that I cited about, the Recognitions. This is a remarkable document. Although it’s textural and historical problems are myriad, there seems to be powerful evidence that it was the product of a Jewish-Christian group in Galilee in the third century, followers of that other marginal Jew, Peter, the opponent of Paul. What is perhaps most remarkable about this work of Christian literature is its closeness to and respect for the rabbis. Let me give a quick example of the former point, that is the closest to it.

    In the Recognitions we find a midrashic synopsis of the Hebrew Bible in which the following point is made: The story is that Moses has just come down the mountain and found the people worshiping the golden calf. The text says, "Because of this even Moses as he came down from Mount Sinai and saw the crime, understood as a good and faithful steward that it was not possible for the people to easily cease and stop all the desire and love of idolatry." This thing which had been added to the people from the evil upbringing with the Egyptians where they had been a great length of time. Therefore, he allowed them to sacrifice but he told them to do this in the name of God so that it might be possible for one half of this desire to be cut down and rendered void. This midrashic passage represents a remarkable parallel to rabbinic midrash in three ways.

    One, its speaks of the people having an evil desire, yetzer harah, to worship idols and sacrifice to them just as rabbinic texts do. It understands the sacrificial cult as an educational tool, to wean the people away from idol worship, just as some rabbinic texts do. And three, it speaks of the evil desire being cut down by half in a stunning echo of another rabbinic text which uses exactly the same terminology in another context. I will present one further citation from this text that will demonstrate the difference between the type of Christianity that was observed by these Gallilean followers of Peter, and that which would have been observed by Paul’s converts in the third century. They write, "For again increasingly as if by the jealousy of God at all times we, that is the Christian Jews, the Messianic Jews, grew even more numerous than they, so that even their priests were afraid lest by the providence of God and to their shame the whole nation should come to our faith". They were frequently sending and asking us to speak to them about Jesus, right? They had interfaith dialogues. "Whether he is the prophet who was foretold by Moses, that is the eternal Christ. For concerning this alone is there a difference between us who believe in Jesus and those among our people who do not believe."

    These people were entire, full observers of the law exactly as other Jews, and they were followers of the rabbis exactly as other Jews except for one thing, they believed that Jesus was the Messiah. That was the only difference. There have been other times in history when Jews, rabbinic Jews, thought that someone was the Messiah. There were Jews just a generation or two later who proclaimed a Messiah. There were Jews in the Sixteenth Century who proclaimed a Messiah. There are Jews in our time very, very Orthodox Jews who think the Messiah was born, lived and died in Brooklyn five years ago! So there’s nothing all that unusual about a group of Jews believing that someone had been the Messiah. In other words, according to this text, there were Jews as late as the Third Century, and perhaps even the Fourth Century, who observed the law in every respect as the other Jews did and the only difference in their religion was that they believed that Jesus had been the Christ and would come again, while other Jews believed that the Christ had not yet come even once. We learn from this source moreover that these Christian Jews in Galilee, in direct contradiction to Paul, even observed circumcision and considered it an important ritual.

    What then made them Christian? First of all they believed that the time for sacrifice had ended and that God’s destruction of the Temple was not because he was angry at the Jews as Paul says in Thessalonians, and as Justin and others were to say, but simply struck the Jews that he, God, no longer desired sacrifice. He was continuing and completing the process of education begun at Sinai by now removing the second half of that yetzer harah, that desire for sacrificing.

    In lieu of the rituals of atonement that the Temple had provided there was now baptism. Not as in Paul a replacement and substitution for circumcision, but a replacement and substitution for the sacrifices in the temple which were no longer to be carried out because there was no more Temple. Secondly, these Jews emphasized perhaps more than others of their time that the time had come to bring the message of the Torah to the whole world thus carrying out in at least this respect the program that Paul intended for Christianity, for this new Judaism as well.

    In short, not a lot divided them from other Jews and yet they were clearly Christians and the text portrays them as engaging in very peaceful conversation and debate with other Jews and Jewish leaders of their time and seemingly never once accuses the Jews of being responsible for the crucifixion. We might say with only some exaggeration that if Peter, that other marginal Jew, had had his voice listened to also, some aspects of Vatican II, namely the very welcome gestures toward the Jewish people of erasing nearly two millennia of violent hostility might never have been necessary at all.

Thinking With Metaphors
October 21-22, 1998

Dr. Calvin Roetzel
Macalester College
St. Paul, Minnesota

The basic premise of this talk is that Paul did not begin his apostolic ministry with a fully developed theology, but that his theology evolved as he interacted with his churches, as he worked through issues, problems, questions, and challenges to his gospel and apostleship. My understanding of Paul as a marginal figure at many points parallels that outlined by bell hooks in her pregnant essay, "Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness." In that essay she spoke of growing up as black female amongst shanties, dirt roads and abandoned houses across the tracks from paved streets, and stores she could not enter and restaurants she could not eat in, and people she could not look directly in the face. The black women she knew could work in that world as maids, or janitors, or prostitutes, as long as it was in a service capacity but they could not live there. "We could enter that world," bell hook notes, but "we had always to return to the margin." (p. 149) As a young woman she left that world for the university, for an unsegregated neighborhood, for a space where she would see independent cinema, read critical theory, write critical theory and carve out a space as a faculty member in a university. She speaks poignantly of the alienation and estrangement she felt in both settings. Yet she distinguishes between those two margins - one imposed by oppressive structures and the other invented as a place of "radical openness and possibility." (p. 153) The margin she created offered new ways of constructing reality and frontiers of difference (p, 118). From that margin she not only constructed a world of possibility, she viewed her home as center in a totally different way, and from that center she viewed the margin as a space pregnant with possibility. From one came a strong sense of self and communal solidarity. From the other came a vision of a new creation.

While there is an ocean of difference between Paul, a first century Mediterranean Jew and bell hooks, a twentieth century southern African-American woman, they share an experience of marginality. Paul, of course, nowhere calls himself marginal; yet his letters bear witness to him as a marginal figure. His letters contain numerous references to efforts by "those from James," from Peter, and Jewish Christian apostles to marginalize him (Gal. 2:11-16). He recalls and reflects on synagogue punishment when five times he took 39 lashes for deviant behavior (2 Cor. 11:24). He recites the recriminations and shameful treatment from "pagan" opponents in Philippi (1 Thess. 2:2) and Asia (2 Cor. 1:8-11).

Many scholars see in passages such as Galatians 4:21-31 and Philippians 3:4-11 evidence that Paul renounced his home in favor of a distant, alien land. J¸ Becker calls this Paul the "former Jew" and this previous part of his life becomes almost totally inessential as "dark background and as harshly drawn contrast to the beginning of his second, real life" (p. 33). He stands in the tradition of Adolf von Harnack who in 1900 asserted that "Paul delivered the Christian religion from Judaism" (1900; Meeks 302). His contemporary Wilhelm Wrede declared that for Paul "Christ is no more the Jewish Messiah, but the Saviour of the world; faith in him is therefore no more a form of the Jewish faith, but a new faith." And Rudolf Bultmann argued that Paul the Jew serves only as a foille against which to display Paul the Christian to advantage. We could add the names of Tom Wright, Alan Segal, Hyam Maccoby and even Ed Sanders to this list who though very different, nevertheless, emphasize the discontinuity between Paul and his native Judaism.

Side by side with these passages, however, one can find other passages in which Paul affirms his native religion. Without question, the God he addesses is the God of Israel. His scriptures are the holy writings of Israel, and nowhere does he let go of Torah as God's word though he certainly does reinterpret it. His Christ as the Messiah is Davidic. His forefather according to the flesh is Abraham; his foremother is Sarah. The prophets in which he finds allusions to the Messiah are the prophets of Israel. His eschatology was Jewish through and through, and his Pharisaism obviously a zealous form of Judaism. In 2 Corinthians which came rather late in Paul's apostolic career Paul answers his fierce rivals who question the authenticity of his apostleship. "Are they Hebrews?" he asks, "so am I?" he adds. Are they Israelites?" "So am I" he adds. "Are they descendents of Abraham?" "So am I" he counters. "Are they servants of Christ?" "I am a better one - I am talking like a mad man" he argues (2 Cor. 11:22-23). And in Romans, his last letter, Paul speaks autobiographically, "I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin"(11:1).

These apparent contradictions I will argue reflect the ambiguity of living on the margin, and are due in large part to the tension in the gospel of this liminal figure between what Victor Turner calls boundlessness and boundedness especially as it related to his gentile mission. By examining the points of friction between Paul and his critics we gain some sense of the issues worth fighting for and how his theology developed as he was engaged in this interactive process. Paul believed he stood on the final climactic cusp of history in a time of radical, dramatic, revolutionary, convulsive change, and that apocalyptic incandescent moment was inaugurated in the death and resurrection of Jesus. The theological implications of that epiphany I argue came gradually in the thick of the fray over the validity of his gospel, his call, and his apostleship. To illustrate this process I have chosen to trace the evolution of Paul's thinking about election which was surely one of the core convictions of his native Judaism.

Paul wrote 1 Thessalonians, the first letter we have from his hand, some weeks after his ministry there was cut short by local opposition. The apostle was in so much anguish about the church he left behind that he dispatched Timothy by foot from Athens to "strengthen and encourage" his converts in Thessalonica (3:1). Timothy returned some weeks later reporting that in Thessalonica great affection remained for Paul but it was mingled with deep suspicions. Some wondered if he was just another popular philosopher who breezed into town, wowed a circle of admirers, lined his own pockets, and then skipped town when opposition developed. Serious problems remained. Persecution threatened to lead to the defection of some converts; the premature death of some converts who expected to be alive to welcome the returning Jesus had produced a crisis, and the idleness of some had imposed a hardship on others.

To these gentile converts bereft of their native religion, extended family, friends, jobs, social location, and who now faced physical and psychological abuse, Paul offered a language of inclusion, consolation, and encouragement. With traditional language about God's election (1:4), he blended a rich array of family metaphors. He refers to his converts as the chosen of God, the elect (1:4); and later he noted that they were destined for salvation (5:9); he stated that they were called by God and given a high status as God's chosen. He names God as father, the converts as God's beloved children, and all converts as brothers and sisters (19 times in 5 short chapters).

While Norman Peterson has argued that the kinship metaphors are primary for Paul and therefore more important than the concept of election, there is no need to choose one over the other; for Paul the family is constitutive of the elect, and the elect are constituted by God as a family. The metaphors interact and each enriches the other. What is surprising is Paul's inclusion of gentiles qua gentiles in the family of God, or among the elect, without any reference to Jewish boundary markers - circumcision, the observance of the laws of purity, festivals and Sabbath observance. And he does so without a single citation of the Hebrew Bible, and with no reference whatever to Israel's election or its sacred story. It seems that Paul had simply not thought through the implications of his action - I.e. The inclusion of gentiles who to many were the irrational, chaotic, immoral other.

1 Corinthians

In many ways the family metaphors of 1 Corinthians resemble those of 1 Thessalonians. The term adelphoi occurs naturally and often in 1 Corinthians (37 times versus 19 times in 1 Thessalonians which is only a third as long). The salutation in 1 Corinthians offers the standard grace and peace "from God the Father (pathvr) and the Lord Jesus Christ" (1:3; cf. 1 Thess. 1:1). A formula in 8:6 contrasts the "many gods and many lords" with "one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist...." And, 15:24 looks to the end when Jesus will hand "over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every authority and power" (emphasis mine). As in 1 Thessalonians Paul refers to his spiritual siblings as "my beloved brothers and sisters" (15:58), and he appeals to his converts as "my beloved children" (4:14). Although 1 Corinthians mimics the use of Thessalonian familial metaphors at many points, it differs as well.

Written about two years after 1 Thessalonians, 1 Corinthians also blends family language with election language. Paul frames these verses in a setting in which hierarchical structures were the primary social reality of the day. One's status depended on one's location on the ladder, and one's power to broker power and favors of one's lord. Relationships were primarily client-lord relationships. Most of the Corinthian converts occupied extraordinarily weak positions in the society. One third of the Corinthian population was enslaved, one third freed, and one third free. Life for those on the lower rungs of that social order was excruciatingly difficult, and they were virtually powerless to alter their circumstance for the better. To be able through a mystagogue (whether Paul, Apollos, Peter, or Christ) to escape their lot and to share in the puissance of a cosmic Lord carried great power for attracting and energizing many of the weak, uneducated, underclass. Life Paul's gospel of the righteousness of God, i.e. God's intervention on behalf of the weak, would have had quite a different resonance in that context than it does today. The problem was that they compensated for their lowly, disadvantaged position in the social hierarchy by simply constructing another hierarchy that inverted that of the social order and placed them, or at least some of them, in the power position. With charismatic speech they probably claimed the status of angels; their celibacy in marriage and out connected them with a period of primordial innocence; their wisdom placed them in positions superior to the apostles and to scripture. At least that was Paul's reading of the situation.

In the beginning Paul's response seems to confirm their constructions of reality. Here, however, Paul puts the blend of election language and family metaphors to a wholly different use, namely to subvert a form of charismatic puffery that threatened to fracture the church. On the heels of the thanksgiving Paul orders his siblings in Christ to reflect on their calling or election:

Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God elected the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God elected the weak things of the world to shame the strong, and God elected the baseborn and despised, even the things that are not,to bring to nought the things that are (1:27-28, my translation, emphases added).

Dr. Calvin Roetzel, Dr. John Merkle
and Dr. Daniel Boyarin all listen
attentively to a question from the audience.

A key element in his subversion was the example of their own election. But when Paul says that "God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are" (2:28) it would seem that he had played into their hands, for that is exactly what they thought. But then again, he might have hoped with this reminder of their social location to expose the silliness of their inverted hierarchy.

In a sudden lurch of the text in a new direction in 12:31b we may actually be watching Paul's mind at work. The sudden flash of insight appears to come just as Paul has placed the final piece of his model in place. For just when he had completed the construction of his hierarchical model that was to subvert that of the Corinthians that placed ecstatic speakers at the top, he drew back. Suddenly, he appears to have seen the contradiction and silliness implicit in his invention of a hierarchy to destroy a hierarchy. Instantaneously he abandoned his model just when he had come to the point of drawing an unfavorable comparison between it and that of the Corinthians. It is as if mentally he dashed his own model to bits and began anew:

I will show you a more excellent way. If I speak with the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. (12:30b-13:2)

The statement above is consistent with Paul's eschatological gospel that inverts the world's order. In Christ, Paul suggests, God constructs quite a different order. It goes beyond the one he had constructed earlier that privileges the uneducated, the powerless, the ill born, the weak, the despised, and even the nobodies in order to shame the wise, powerful, nobly born, strong, honored, and privileged (1:26-31). The crucial item in his advanced construction is love as the quintessential eschatological charism.

Thus love transcends and relativizes all charismatic gifts and makes a mash of the hierarchies the Corinthians constructed from them. Paul thus moves the discussion to a new level, a level that shows how love creates an order that encourages the exercise of gifts but undermines the claim to superiority by the spirit driven glossalalia. Instead Paul emphasizes the gifts that build up the body of Christ rather than providing excitement for the individual (12:12-26; 14:3, 5, 12, 17, 26). We can see in such remarks how Paul's election language redirects a Corinthian religiosity that was elitist by constructing a theology of the elect community that was concerned with nurture of the community of Christ. Identity is here largely corporate and located in the believers' positive reinforcement of each other. That represented a significant challenge in a community riven by petty rivalries and factious behavior. But still, Paul's election language seems unaware of the interrogation that is yet to come - not about the nature of the community, but the terms of inclusion he lays out for gentile converts. That was soon to come.

Galatians and Romans

Sometime after Paul wrote 1 Thessalonians, he faced sharp criticism for receiving the "pagan," immoral, lustful, irrational "other" gentile into the elect community without requiring the usual marks of conversion, namely law observance and circumcision (Gal. 1:6). Whether he had simply not thought through the implications of this inclusion or whether he believed the messianic age fundamentally altered these requirements we cannot say, but by the time he wrote Galatians he was alarmed by the dimensions of the Judaizing threat. In a flash, he recognized the implications of that challenge, and summoned up all of his rhetorical skill to persuade his "children" of the truth of his gospel.

His response was savage. Flashing darts of contempt, he cursed his rivals (1:8f.); he shamed his converts (1:6); he defended his apostolic claim (1:1, 11-17); he recalled a shared baptismal liturgy and turned it on his adversaries (3:27f.); and he called on two metaphors to rebut his critics - one was of Abraham as the mythical progenitor of gentiles believers as well as Jews, and the other was the metaphor of adoption.

He took the Abrahamic tradition used by his rivals to reinforce their requirement of circumcision of all male believers, and spiritualized it in such a way as to make the uncircumcised children of Abraham heirs of the promise, (though he nowhere uses the term "election" in Galatians, being made the progeny of Abraham and Sarah is, I take it, the same thing.)

Intimately linked with this metaphor of election was the language of adoption which through Christ. Pagans became "children of God" (3:26; 4:6, 7), "children of Abraham" (3:7), "children of the promise" (4:28) and "children of freedom" (4:31). He thus offered to pagans a status reserved for the elect of God which his rivals fiercely contested. Since there was no independent arbiter of this claim, no archimedean point, that could be called on to verify Paul's claim, the issue was resolved politically, that is by the art of persuasion. In the thick of this heated exchange and in a situation that was gentile specific Paul overextended himself in a way that seemed to make the Christian gospel and the Jewish rites of initiation into the community mutually exclusive.

In Galatians 4 especially Paul seems to drive an iron wedge between the Jerusalem above and the Jerusalem below, between the two wives of Abraham, between those in Christ and unbelieving Jews. Hagar "is from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery... She corresponds to the present Jerusalem for she is in slavery with her children. Sarah is the free woman, the Jerusalem above, that is free. And she is, Paul says, "our mother" begetting children of promise. The slave woman and her children are cast out for, Paul notes, "the children of the slave shall not inherit with the children of the free woman" (24-30). This passage seems so uncompromisingly negative. In it Paul appears to ignore altogether the positive aspects of the Sarah and Hagar story in Genesis 21. A jealous Sarah demands that Hagar be cast out, and Abraham complies, but Paul ignores the reference to God's promise to "make a nation of the son of the slave woman" (21:13), leaves unnoted God's protection of Hagar and Ishmael and the divine promise to Hagar to make of the descendents of Ishmael "a great nation" (21:18), and omits any allusion to Abraham's poignant burial scene. There Ishmael appears with Isaac to bury their father. Following the account of the interment genealogies of both Isaac and Ismael appear that seem to consolidate the place of the descendents of both in God's people (Gen. 25:7-21). The picture Paul paints is a dark and unpromising one for the descendants of Hagar whom he equates with the Jerusalem below. They shall be cast out.

The rumor soon spread that the notorious Paul was preaching that God had gone back on promises made to Abraham and his descendants. That suspicion provoked some sharp questions: If God reneged on those promises can other promises made be trusted? Does the acceptance of Christ require the rejection of the Israel as God's elect? Does Paul's stress on grace outside the law encourage immorality?

Romans 9-11 unfurls against these questions and charges that Paul calls slanderous (3:8). In these chapters Paul struggles with the implications of the inclusion of the irrational and despicable "other," I.e. gentile sinners, among the elect. Here more than anywhere else Paul focuses on election (9:11; 11l:5, 7, 28).

The argument of these chapters is so complex, so complicated, and so passionate that the letter practically vibrates in one's hands. From the beginning Paul's personal agony for his kin give his opening remarks great pathos: "I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people" (9:2f.). He avoids any spiritualization of membership in the people of God that ignores Israel's privileges (9:1-5). For to them belong the status as sons and daughters, glory, covenants, the giving of the law, worship and promises, and the Messiah "according to the flesh" (9:4). Instead of ignoring or diminishing that history, Paul praises God for it (9:5), and implicitly connects his gentile reader to it.

While the trail of Paul's argument is tortured and complex in 9-11, we may trace the contours of his theologizing by following his questions and metaphors. In offering the gospel to the gentiles has God rescinded the promise to Israel? Paul replies that God has always chosen to bless some over others (Jacob over Esau) and is therefore free to turn away from Israel to gentiles. But in his answer lurks another question: Is God fair to choose the rejected (gentiles) and reject the chosen (Jews; 9:14)? If God chooses gentiles how can Jews be condemned for rejecting the gospel (9:19)? If gentiles who did not pursue righteousness now achieve it by faith, and Jews who did seek righteousness are denied salvation, how can God be just? Paul replies that God is free to turn to gentiles but has not forsaken israel. In the present some Jews are joined with gentiles in one community, and in the future all Israel will be saved. Fearing gentile arrogance over their salvation, Paul warns, "If God did not spare the natural branches, neither will he spare you" 11:21).

While thus thumbnail sketch outlines the progress of the argument, the real breakthrough in Paul's thinking comes in a racing metaphor that offers a better clue to the tensions in his thinking, and the daring and innovative solution he improvises. The metaphor in question is the racing metaphor that appears in 9:30-33; 11:11-12; 11:26-7. better captures the progression of Paul's thought and the radicality of his conclusion about election.

The first occurrence of the racing metaphor occurs in 9:30-33, a major section in which Paul argues that God's elective process is not arbitrary and that salvation is open to all, Jew and non-Jew. The picture Paul paints for his readers presents a ludicrous scene of God actually fixing a race. Firstly, we see gentile competitors who did not run after the righteousness goal but who, nevertheless, attain the prize, and secondly, we observe Israel striving mightily to attain the righteousness goal but who fails because she stumbled over a rock that God placed in her path (9:30-33).

Paul's racing metaphor draws its evocative power from a venerable tradition of competitive sports in his native hellenistic culture. Each quadrennium thousands flocked to watch Olympic competition shrouded in legend since its inception in 776 BCE.

The games continued without interruption for centuries to great popular acclaim. And it was widely believed that the gods frequented the games and often influenced if they did not actually fix the outcome. In Homer's Iliad (XXIII) we have an example of divine involvement when Apollo and Athena intervened to influence the outcome of the games honoring the dead hero, Patroclus, a victim of the Trojan war. Held outside the walls of Troy under siege, there was first a chariot race in which Apollo knocked the whip from Diomedes' hand to give Eumelus the lead only to be frustrated by Athene's swift action bringing the prize to her favorite,Tydeus. Then came boxing, wrestling, and most importantly the footrace. Of the three contestants who toed the starting line, Aias, the swiftest of foot was favored over the older but wily Odysseus and Antilochus. As expected Aias surged out in front, but throughout the race Odysseus followed closely in his draft. Although he strove mightily, Odysseus still trailed Aias coming into the final stretch. Try as he would, however, he could not overtake Aias. In desperation he prayed to Athene, "Hear me, goddess, and come a goodly helper to my feet." (Loeb, XXIII, 770). Athene forthwith came to his aid either by tripping or pushing Aias sending him sprawling in the gore and waste from the bulls sacrificed in honor of Patroclus. As he lay wallowing in the mess with his mouth and nostrils filled with filth, Odysseus darted ahead with a light footed burst to win. Even though Aias recovered in time to finish second there was no honor in his prize. He protested that the goddess had cheated by tripping him to aid Odysseus but the spectators greeted his complaint with hoots of laughter and ridicule. His consolation prize brought not honor but shame and disgrace.

Stories such as these stand in the background of Paul's metaphor. Their basic premise was that winners require losers, and that losing was not just disappointing but shameful and disgraceful. Winners were hailed and honored as heroes, and losers were shunned and shamed as failures. Against this backdrop Paul stages his metaphor. Israel stumbled, he says, not for lack of zeal (10:2), but rather from following the wrong strategy in the race and not seeing Christ as the goal of the law (10:4) and that God's righteousness is "for everyone who believes" (10:4). With this statement the racing metaphor drops out of sight until 11:11 when Paul almost as an afterthought asks, "have they stumbled so as to fall?" He answers emphatically, "Absolutely not!" Then he ends with a discussion of God's strategy for intervening in the race to cause israel to stumble. The strategy is to make Israel jealous of the winning gentiles (11:12-16) and lead to their "full inclusion" (11:12). By placing the gentiles first in the race, making Jews jealous and reversing the order of entry (Jew first then gentile, 1:16), and then announcing, nevertheless, that "all Israel will be saved," Paul extends the logic of his sports metaphor to the breaking point (11:26). Incredibly, both Israel which zealously ran the race toward righteousness, but tripped over the rock which God sneaked onto the track, and the gentiles who were not even in the race both emerge as winners! Making a mash of the rules of the game and the popular understanding, Paul argued that the eschatological race is entirely different from traditional athletic events. Winners do not require losers. The gentile prize does not require that Israel endure its loss in shame, nor do Israel's laurels leave the gentiles empty-handed and wanting. Although in 11:23 Paul does make belief a pre-condition of Israel's participation in the eschatological community, Sanders is correct that in 11:26-32 Paul envisions the salvation of both Israel and the gentiles in an eschatological future with no preconditions whatsoever. And he states decisively of Israel, "As regards the gospel they are enemies of God for your [I.e. Gentiles] sake; for as regards election they are beloved, for the sake of their ancestors; for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable"(emphasis added, 1128f.). Even Paul does not seem to know how his preposterous game plan will be played out. The solution to his dilemma is "hidden in the mystery of the Godhead itself" (11:25). In sheer wonderment Paul launches spontaneously into a marvelous benediction:

O the depth of the riches, and wisdom and knowledge of God! How inscrutable are his judgments and untraceable his ways! 'For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?''Or who has given a gift to him, to receive a gift in return?' For out of him and through him and in him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen (11:33-36).

Dr. Calvin Roetzel, left, and Dr. Daniel Boyarin , right, admiring
one another's books while Rabbi Barry Cytron, center, looks on
during a book signing at Saint John's University.

We see, therefore, how the racing metaphor contains tensions so great and suggests solutions so radical that they would bring both Jew and Greek into the presence of a new and dramatic reconfiguration of the familiar world. This reconfiguration was no abstract exercise, but came through Paul's reevaluation of an election tradition in light of the shifting contexts of his churches and his place on the margin, and in light of the death,resurrection and expected imminent return of the Messiah. The election was a constant, but for Paul its meaning was emergent. Helmut Koester has noted that Paul's efforts to "establish a new Israel on a foundation that could include both Jews and Gentiles were an attempt to "accomplish the impossible." To be sure Paul does bring into proximity assertions that seem irreconcilable, but in his mind not impossible, for literally, his argument is that "with God all things are possible."

The Invention of Paul, the Christian
November 5, 1998

Dr. Paula Fredriksen
Boston University

TIME LINE

Paul the Apostle

The historical Paul was a mid-first-century Jewish visionary. He was convinced that he and his generation stood poised upon the cusp of a great change, when God would accomplish the definitive defeat of evil through the return from heaven of his Son. Paul described himself as a Jew learned in the Law, Pharisaic in interpretive orientation (Phil. 3:5) and enthusiastically observant (Gal. 1:14; Phil 3:6 "blameless"). Since his experience of the Risen Christ (1 Cor. 15:8), when God had revealed his son to Paul (Gal. 1:16), Paul’s life had taken an unexpected turn. In the time between that event and the period of the composition of his letters — that is, from roughly 33 to 55 CE — Paul had devoted his considerable energies to bringing the good news of Christ’s resurrection and the impending return to Gentiles.

Who were these people? Some scholars think that they were simply residents of the cities Paul found himself in as he traveled with his message throughout Asia Minor and Greece. Other scholars (myself included) think that Paul’s Gentile audience would have been found within the synagogue communities likewise resident in these cities: this would account for their familiarity with Jewish scripture that Paul’s letters presuppose. (In Paul’s lifetime and for more than a century thereafter, the only Bible was the Jewish Bible; and this collection of books --in many scrolls, not a single codex — was the possession of communities, not individuals. The only place to hear the Bible, and so to become familiar with its ideas of God, redemption, and Israel, was the synagogue.)

Diaspora synagogue communities routinely encouraged and welcomed the interest and sympathy of outsiders: benevolent neighbors might always have a positive effect on relations with the larger pagan community. Some from among this group might chose eventually to convert to Judaism, though evidently synagogues did not solicit this level of commitment. (Such an effort would be politically destabilizing, since Gentiles who converted to Judaism would no longer take part in the traditional cults native to their cities and enacted at every town council meeting, day in court, or civic theatrical or athletic festival.) No: such sympathetic Gentiles would remain Gentiles, and as such would voluntarily assume as much or as little of Jewish practice and belief as they chose.

The consequences of Paul’s preaching to these Gentiles were thus radical, both for them and for the local synagogue community (which perhaps explains Paul’s receiving a synagogue disciplinary flogging, thirty-nine lashes, no fewer than five times, 2 Cor. 11:24). If these Gentiles were to be "in Christ", baptized into his death and resurrection, then, Paul insists, they absolutely, unequivocally had to cease their native worship. Repeating a theme frequently found in Jewish moral teachings, Paul equates Graeco-Roman cults with idol worship and, thus, fornication (porneia). "Do not associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of immorality (literally, ‘if he is a fornicator,’ pornos) or greed, or is an idolator," (1 Cor. 5:11). In the brief time remaining before Christ returns, Paul’s Gentiles were to pray, restrain from sexual relations (understood: with and only with spouses) if they chose, for a time, save contributions for the collection Paul was making for the poor in Jerusalem, and conduct themselves in a seemly way — ideal behavior that Paul characterizes most simply as "fulfilling the Law," (Gal. 5:15; 1 Cor. 7:19, 14:34; Rom. 8:4, cf. 2:26, 13:8-10).

Within this charged context of immediate apocalyptic expectation, Paul presents his message to his Gentile communities by using contrasting pairs of words and ideas. These binary opposites structure his message around sharp temporal, moral, cultural, historical, and cosmic contrasts. As a Jew himself, Paul naturally divides the world up into Jews and Gentiles, or "the circumcised" and "the uncircumcised." Often these are value-neutral; sometimes not. When condemning idolatry and the sins he associates with it, however, Paul unselfconsciously urges his Gentiles not to act like Gentiles! (See for example, 1 Thes. 4:5, which the RSV obscures by translating ta ethne, "the Gentiles," as "the heathen.;" similarly Gal. 2:15 where, in conversation with Peter, Paul says they are "Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners".) This may seem harsh, or unfortunately ethnocentric. But Paul lived in an age were the worship of the True God (as he saw it) was restricted to Israel, and the gods of the nations were demons. His own legacy was the creation of a new social category — Gentiles who worshiped exclusively the God of Israel — but in his own lifetime this was scarcely so. For sound social reasons, Paul instinctively saw most non-Jews as idol-worshipers.

Other pairs speak to both anthropological and cosmic principles. Spirit and flesh, or soul and body, or inner man and outer man: the first term in all these pairs has a positive moral valence — they are "good" — while the second term has one that is negative, or at least inferior to the first. And then, finally, Paul describes his own personal situation, the quarrels he has had with the Jerusalem apostles or with rival Christian missionaries to Gentiles, through other antimonies, especially in Galatians: Freedom vs. Slavery, Gospel vs. Law or Grace vs. Law, the original apostles (certainly James, Peter, and John, Gal. 1-2) vs. Paul himself. In a particularly charged and difficult passage, he contrasts the heavenly Jerusalem and the freedom of the Gospel with the earthly Jerusalem and slavery (Gal. 4:21-31). But Paul’s rhetoric is inconsistent across his letters — in Romans, for example, "law" appears frequently as a positive as well as a negative term, and instead of lauding freedom Paul speaks of the person in Christ being "a slave to righteousness" (6:18).

Paul the Champion of Gentile Christianity

Marcion of Pontus belongs no less than Augustine or Luther in the group of major theological interpreters of Paul. His name, however, is much less familiar than these others, which is an oblique way of noting an historical fact: other factions within second-century Gentile Christianity, the ones that would ultimately triumph in the fourth, condemned Marcion as a heretic. But even "orthodox" Christianity owes much to Marcion, not least of all for his invention of the idea of a specifically Christian canon, a "new" testament, superseding and indeed replacing for the church the Jewish scriptures -- now an "old" testament.

Marcion saw the warrant for such a collection in the letters of Paul. He understood Paul’s contrast between "law" and "gospel" literarily: these terms, for Marcion, attested to two different bodies of writings. "Law" referred to Jewish texts, most particularly the first five books of Moses. But unlike in Paul’s time, "gospel" in Marcion’s also referred to texts. By c. 130, numerous gospels — narratives about Jesus’ life and teachings, as opposed to simple proclamation about him (which was Paul’s sense) — circulated in the Christian world. Marcion chose one from among these, and added to it the seven letters of Paul, plus two of the deutero-Pauline epistles, Ephesians and Colossians. He designated this collection Christian scripture.

Marcion’s metaphysics, and the binary opposites informing the Graeco-Roman worldview, likewise informed his reading. Paul’s dualities were read through the contrasting values implicit in Greek intellectual culture: Eternal and Temporal, One and Many, God and Cosmos, Mind and Matter. As a Gentile Christian, Marcion contrasted Jew and Gentile and (unlike Paul) saw the Gentile category as intrinsically positive. The God of this cosmos, the material realm, was in Greek thought by definition a lower god, a demiurge whose relative status was indicated precisely by his work as the arranger of matter. For Greeks, the High God, the single highest divine principle, had nothing to do with time, change, or matter. The god of Genesis, accordingly, had little to do with Him. The god of genesis was the god of the Jews — a lower, cosmic god. But the single pure unchanging High God, the God above god, the god who was revealed only through revelation, was the father of Jesus Christ. Let the Jews keep their god and the books that described him, declared Marcion. Thanks to the revelation of the High God, God the Father, through the mission of Jesus, the Christian would keep to his own scriptures.

Those Gentile Christians who reacted against Marcion’s dualism insisted that the Jewish bible really was a Christian text — the Jews just did not realize it. The problem was not with the text, but with the Jews. They, not it, were carnal, fleshly people. They understood their text literally, and so missed its philosophical or allegorical meanings. When God said, "Circumcise," he meant the heart, not the foreskin. His food laws were not about what to eat, but coded instruction for how to act. ("Don’t eat pig" really means "Do not display the moral characteristics associated with pigs," and so on.) Understood allegorically, the Jewish Bible actually spoke about Christ. According to Justin Martyr, the main character in the Jewish Scriptures actually was Christ, in his pre-Incarnate state. Not the Jews’ texts, but the Jews’ interpretation of these texts, was wrong. Jews read and understood kata sarka or secundum carnem, "according to the flesh," "in a fleshly way," and thus were perennially concerned with rites, sacrifices, food, Sabbath, circumcision. By contrast — contrasts drawn of course from Paul — the Christian understood kata pneuma or secundum spiritum, "in a spiritual way," philosophically. The Christian understood what God had meant, as opposed to what he had merely said. The great Alexandrian theologian Origen, two generations after Justin, expounded on this interpretive principle with a further Pauline image. The literal or narrative meaning of a biblical text corresponded, he said, to the text’s body, its outer appearance. Christian allegory revealed its higher, intellectual meaning, spiritual and thus eternal (On First Principles, Book 4).

The intellectual prejudices of Graeco-Roman high culture, paideia, constructed and supported this understanding of Christianity and, thus, of Paul. But the vicissitudes of Jewish history reinforced it. Much had happened since the death of Jesus — a death understood and presented in the later gospels as an act of Jewish hostility and rejection. In the generation after Jesus and Paul, Jews in the Galilee and Judea had fought and lost the war with Rome. As a result, the Temple and Jerusalem were no more.

With the exception of Paul’s letters, all the other writings comprising the New Testament canon were composed after (and occasionally, indeed, in light of) this fact. Marcion and his orthodox opponents stood to the far side of yet another catastrophic rebellion, the Bar Kochba revolt, in consequence of which the emperor Hadrian had forbidden Jews to go into Jerusalem at all.   He founded a pagan city, Aelia Capitolina, upon its ruins.

Dr. Vincent Smiles, Karen Schierman, Rabbi Barry Cytron,
Dr. Paula Fredriksen, and Dr. John Merkle at the University of St. Thomas.

Augustine on Paul

These historical details might be exotic, but the story they tell is too familiar. These views are the cradle of Christian supersessionism. But in the late fourth/early fifth century, after the empire itself had been Christian for generations, we find a much more complex and more interesting posture toward Judaism and its relation to Christianity in the writings of Augustine of Hippo. Accordingly, we find as well a more complex image of Paul.

In the first decades of his long career as bishop, Augustine fought bitterly against the Manichees, the late Latin avatars of Marcion’s type of Pauline dualism. He had waged war exegetically, and his opening salvo was traditionally allegorical, a commentary on Genesis wherein he expounded the text in a spiritual sense. In the mid- to late 390s, restless, evidently, with this approach, he returned repeatedly to the task of interpreting Paul. This work led him to a theologically innovative stance on scripture, where to interpretation secundum spiritum he contrasted, not "fleshly" understanding, but understanding ad litteram — as he defined the term, "according to the historical sense of the text." As he spelled this out in the contra Faustum and in his master work, the City of God, Jewish "carnal" practice in the time before Christ was not to be condemned, but to be praised.

Why? Because, argued Augustine, whatever other sense the scriptures might have, they first of all must have an historical meaning. To think of Scripture chiefly as elaborate allegory robs it of this historical dimension. But God sanctifies history by working within it, and the Jewish scriptures, says Augustine (taking careful aim at the Manichees, who like Marcion had argued that the Christian should have nothing to do with them), are the record of these divine acts. On Sinai, then, God had not said one thing but meant another: circumcision meant circumcision, Sabbath meant Sabbath, and so on.

Further (and to Jerome, shockingly), this meant that both Jesus and Paul, and indeed all of the Jewish apostles of the first generation of the Church, had been pious Jews who kept Torah. Jesus was circumcised, kept the food laws, and worshiped in traditionally Jewish ways at the Temple. (This may not seem like such a shocking view, but it’s a lot more than the Jesus Seminar, and many of my NT colleagues, are willing to grant!) Likewise Paul. This was because they enacted and so taught the principle of Christianity’s double-scriptures, Old and New Testament: the Law and the Gospel stood on the same continuum of salvation.

Do not confuse Augustine with Krister Stendahl: the fourth-century bishop is not affirming anything resembling interfaith dialogue. But Augustine’s interpretation created as a point of theological principle, and uniquely in antiquity, a portrait of a genuinely Jewish Paul.

For the view that Paul’s Gentiles were to be found within the synagogue as loosely affiliated sympathizers, see Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ (Yale, 1988), pp. 142-159; against, E.P. Sanders, Paul (Oxford, 1991) pp. 19-25. John Gager’s accessible study, The Origins of Antisemitism, provides a good overview of the anti-Jewish construction of Gentile Christian identity in the second through fourth centuries. I have come upon Augustine’s creative and original theology of Jews and Judaism in the course of researching my forthcoming study, Augustine and Israel. Two preliminary essays have been published: "Excaecati Occulta Iustitia Dei: Augustine of Jews and Judaism," Journal of Early Christian Studies 3 (1995) pp. 151-183; and "Secundum carnem: History and Israel in the theology of St. Augustine," The Limits of Ancient Christianity: Essays in Honor of R.A. Markus, ed. W. Klingshirn and M. Vessey (Ann Arbor, Michigan: 1999), pp. 26-41.

Retracing Our Steps
November 5, 1998

Vincent M. Smiles
College of Saint Benedict/Saint John's University
St. Joseph, Minnesota

There's a story told of a group of people relaxing beside a river. Suddenly their peace is disturbed when a man comes floating down the river obviously in danger of drowning. One of the group plunges into the river to rescue the drowning man, but no sooner has he pulled him to shore than another person, near to drowning, comes floating down the river. Once again, the hero plunges into the river to save the victim, but once again, no sooner is that person pulled to shore than another one comes floating down the river. When this happens yet a fourth time, the rescuer begins running up river. As he does so, the others shout to him, "Wait! Where are you going? Here comes another one!" "You pull that one out," he shouts back over his shoulder, "I'm going up river to find out who's throwing these people in."

What we are engaged in tonight is a journey back, up river, so to speak. Our common history has produced a lot of victims; in a real sense, we ourselves are victims. We have to work our way through, but also past, Paul's interpreters. The ultimate goal, in my view, has to be a better understanding of the man himself as well as a better understanding of how his ideas have been used, and sometimes used badly, in the course of history. I maintain that Paul believed himself to be a faithful Jew. He would have fought might and main to avoid the split between Judaism and Christianity, which came after his death, and yet paradoxically his own writing certainly contributed to that split. As was discussed here a couple of weeks ago, Paul was in some sense "marginal," and, to use the title of Daniel Boyarin's book, he was also "a radical Jew," but he was a Jew, at least in his own mind. But there's the problem. What Paul wrote and how others have interpreted what he wrote have not by any means always coincided. 2 Peter (3:16), one of the later books of the New Testament, says of Paul's letters, "There are some things in them which are hard to understand ." That certainly is true. Perhaps no other Biblical writer, whether of the Tanak or the New Testament, presents more challenges than does Paul. What Martin Luther in the 16th century made of Paul is an issue I will turn to presently.

Paul is both difficult and controversial for all kinds of reasons having to do both with his peculiar place in history and with his radical understanding of his task as an apostle. First, his place in history: Paul lived and taught very close to that point on the tree where the branch of Christianity diverged from Israel. At our point in the story the gap, tragically, is sufficiently wide that many hardly recognize how intimately the two religions are in fact related. I still remember what a revelation it was to me, as a teenager, when I found out that Jesus was not a Roman Catholic. Jesus, in fact, was born, lived and died as a Jew. I would say that the same was true of Paul, but in his case there is a difference. He died as a believer in Jesus. Whereas Jesus spent his ministry among, and on behalf of Jews, Paul spent his among Gentiles (Gal. 1:16). And that made all the difference. I make no claims to be able to provide a definitive interpretation of Paul's letters, but of one thing I am certain: we will never arrive at a responsible interpretation of them unless we take carefully into account the context within which he wrote those letters. The failure to consider context is one of the things which, in my view, has most skewed interpretation of Paul over the centuries and even into our own time. When we come to him, it will be apparent that this was true of Martin Luther.

Paul wrote his letters in the 50's, at a time when believers in Jesus ­ Paul never uses the word "Christian" ­ still functioned within the parameters of Judaism. There were not yet two separate religions, even though the issue of the relationship between greater Israel and that part of the vine (cf. Rom. 11:13-24) which professed Jesus as Messiah, was becoming more and more controversial. What was driving this controversy was an important question, which Jesus had not resolved prior to his death, and which those who knew him personally were unable to settle definitively in his name ­ the question of the place of the Torah/the law within the church. As long as members of the church were all Jews, or Gentiles who were willing to take on the yoke of the Torah, the issue of the law was a non-issue. As soon, however, as Gentiles began to enter the church with little or no recourse to the law ­ and this may have happened early, even before Paul became an apostle in the early 30's (Acts 2:11; 8:1-5; 10:1­11:3 & 11:19-26) ­ then the tension, both for Jews who did believe in Jesus and for others who did not, became considerable.

Paul tells the Philippians (3:5-6) that he used to be a Pharisee, and in the same breath, that he was so "zealous" [for the law] that he had "persecuted the church." This does not tell us precisely why he persecuted the church. What was it about the church's stance regarding the law that he found so offensive? The trigger may have been the church's too easy compromising of the boundaries of Israel with the Gentile world. In my view, that is the best explanation, but there is no certainty on the issue.

The next step in the story is the most dramatic. In or near the environs of Damascus, Paul became a believer in Jesus, and was convinced that God "had set [him] apart from his mother's womb," to preach the gospel to the Gentiles (Gal. 1:15-16). The persecutor became an apostle. The upshot of this amazing turnaround was that one who described himself as having been so zealous for the law that he had persecuted the church, now compromised even his own law observance in order to preach to Gentiles. He did his early preaching, he tells us, in Arabia, Syria and Cilicia (Gal. 1:17-21). How liberal Paul's attitude to the law became at this early point is impossible to say. But certainly later on, in response to strong opposition to his teaching, his views, by any measure, were very radical. He swung, one might say, quite far on the spectrum of Jewish beliefs about the law. Perhaps the strongest statement of his views is found in Galatians 2:15-16:

We, though Jews by birth and not sinners of the Gentiles, [16]who know [nevertheless] that no human being is made righteous [='justified'] by works of law but [only] by faith in Christ Jesus, even we became believers in Christ Jesus, so that we might be made righteous by faith in Christ and not by works of law, because by works of law no flesh shall be made righteous.

I wrote about 46 pages and 84 footnotes trying to explain those two verses. I promise to spare you some of the details! But what is most crucial in trying to understand them is their context. And for that we have to survey briefly some major episodes of opposition to Paul's law-free gospel.

About 15 or so years after Paul's conversion, ­ presumably at a point where a certain critical mass of Gentiles had entered the church ­ some Jewish Christians began openly opposing the mission to Gentiles as conducted by Paul and Barnabas. In Antioch, one of the earliest centers of Gentile Christianity (Acts 11:26), they preached that Gentile members of the church must be instructed to follow the law, including the law of circumcision (Acts 15:1-5). A conference was held in Jerusalem where, according to both Paul and Acts, it was decided that no such imposition should be made (Gal. 2:1-10; Acts 15:1-29). As Paul understood the matter, his preaching of a law-free gospel to Gentiles was accepted; Jerusalem meanwhile would continue sponsoring a mission among Jews which would fully respect the law. But you can see the trouble which was brewing. Two parallel churches were developing; one essentially Gentile and comparatively relaxed regarding issues such as Sabbath observance and food laws, the other largely Jewish and law-observant. What will happen when members from both communities meet together as one church? Whose traditions and understanding of the gospel will prevail? That brings us to the "Antioch Confrontation" (Gal. 2:11-14). Peter at first "used to eat with the Gentiles." That in itself is remarkable. He was a representative of the mission to Jews, but somehow he accommodated himself to the tradition of the Gentile community. Then, however, Paul tells us, "a delegation arrived from James" in Jerusalem. We have no idea what they said, but whatever it was, it had the effect of Peter "withdrawing and separating himself." And that, in turn, led to "even Barnabas," Paul's longtime companion, and the rest of the Jewish Christians, abandoning table-fellowship with Gentiles. In his letter, Paul then rehearses for the Galatians his rebuke of Peter. This must have been a very painful experience for Paul. What reconciliation, if any, there was later on is impossible to know.

But now we arrive at the immediate occasion for the letter to the Galatians. Some time later, perhaps as little as a year or two, more likely closer to 4 or 5 years, Jewish Christians preached in Galatia and tried to convince the Gentile Galatians that they must obey the Jewish law in order truly be sharers in the inheritance of Abraham. For Paul this was a threat to the gospel and indeed to the very salvation of the Galatians (5:2-4). It was such because it suggested that Christ's death for the salvation of the world was inadequate; Paul therefore describes it as a betrayal of Christ. It is in such a vein that he wrote Galatians. What is radical about this letter is its direct attack on the law itself. It is easy to see how it could have been quoted against him by his opponents, forcing him to explain himself rather more carefully in the letter to the Romans.

What this study in context enables us to do, I hope, is to see the conflict and therefore Paul's words at least a little from his perspective. Two points. First, his words were formed in the heat of battle. I do not mean by that, that he was not serious in what he said, and that therefore we can dismiss his words as the passion of the moment. Not at all. But we certainly have to be very circumspect about any interpretation which, without regard for this polemical context, treats Paul's words as though they were timeless doctrine, or as though the mirror image of his harshest statements against the law were an accurate description of the faults of Judaism. That latter mistake has been made all too often. Second, we have to recognize that Paul was intent not merely on making the positive point to the Galatians that they were in fact, by faith, members of the people of God; he also, after all those fights, had to make a negative case against the law itself. This is the aspect of Paul which is most painful to deal with. It has caused scholars, Jewish and Christian alike, to stand on their heads, somehow to make Paul as palatable as possible in the modern context of Jewish Christian relations. All kinds of interpretations have been concocted to make Paul somehow say what we wish he had said or what we believe he should have said. Such interpretations, in my view, miss the point. Paul has to be Paul, a difficult, radical Jew who believed in Jesus. Judaism is more than strong enough to deal with a rebel within its ranks. Christianity is not served by claiming that one of its foundational thinkers really didn't say what he said or was confused or full of self-contradictions and the like.

Actually, what has led to scholarly embarrassment about Paul is not simply what the apostle himself wrote, but the way he has been interpreted in the aftermath of the Reformation and the interpretation of Martin Luther. In brief, that interpretation is as follows: that Paul (supposedly) accused Judaism as a whole of the sin of conceit and self-righteousness, and this sin was prepared for by Israel's forgetting the reality of grace, and thus coming to regard God as a remote judge, who demanded exact observance of the law, and who would punish those who did not produce a sufficient quantity of good deeds to counterbalance their transgressions. George Foot Moore, in a famous article, documented how Christian scholars, since the 19th and into the 20th century, came up with such distorted views on Paul quite contrary to the trends of earlier and more responsible scholarship. Martin Luther cannot be completely exonerated of blame for the distortion.

My conscience could never achieve certainty but was always in doubt and said, 'You have not done this correctly. You were not contrite enough [in repenting of your sins]; you omitted this [in confessing them].' Therefore, the longer I tried to heal my uncertain, weak and troubled conscience with human traditions, the more uncertain, weak and troubled I continually made it.

Dr. Vincent Smiles responding to a question from the audience. 
Seated to his left are Dr. John Merkle, moderator of the program, and
Dr. Paula Fredriksen, copresenter.

But there is, of course, also a negative side, deriving from Luther's interpretation of Paul's words: "No human is made righteous by works of law," (Gal. 2:16; Rom 3:20). It is this negative side of Luther's doctrine which has been most mischievous in the history of interpretation. Luther made that fatal mistake of regarding this Pauline statement as an accurate mirror of the beliefs of Judaism. If Paul denied that works lead to righteousness, then Judaism must have affirmed that they did. This misinterpretation, both in Luther and in subsequent scholarship, was accompanied by anti-Semitic sentiments which easily accommodated a negative caricature of Judaism. This is apparent in Luther's preface to his Galatians commentary:

But these [i.e. Humankind's presumptuous attempts 'by his own works to redeem himself'] are nothing in comparison with that people of God, Israel, or the Synagogue, who were blessed beyond all others, not only with the sure promise given to the Fathers and with the Law given by God through angels, but also with the constant testimony of the words, miracles and examples of the prophets. Yet even among them, Satan (i.e. the fury of self-righteousness) had such success that after killing all the prophets they killed the very Son of God himself, their promised Messiah. And all for the same reason, namely, that the prophets taught that we humans are received into the favor of God by the grace of God, not by our own righteousness. This is the sum of the doctrine of the devil and the world from the beginning: 'We will not appear to do evil, but whatever we do, God must approve of it and all his prophets must agree. If they do not, let them die. Let Abel perish and Cain live. Let this be our law.' And so it is.

Notice how he presumes that the "fury of self-righteousness" was simply characteristic of Judaism. It is cause for hope that the Lutheran World Federation and the Lutheran Church of America have both repudiated this anti-Judaism of Luther. And yet Luther's doctrine was not originally aimed first and foremost at Jews, but at "Papists," that is, Catholics. As his own words about his "uncertain, weak and troubled conscience" indicate, he was plagued with a theology as a monk which lent itself to envisaging God as a demanding taskmaster. In the Catholicism of Luther's day, grace may have been free, but it still had to be earned. Luther's dissatisfaction with his theological tradition rose to the level of angry rejection when its worst abuses became apparent in the preaching of Johannes Tetzel (1517). In Tetzel's preaching on indulgences it was, for all the world, as though the grace of God was on sale. Luther was certainly correct to protest.

In his protest Luther followed Paul in having a very pessimistic view of sinful human nature. For Luther there is absolutely nothing any human can do even slightly to enhance her chances of gaining salvation, except, of course, have faith in Christ. The law ­ whether the law of Sinai or the law of the Pope ­ has no role in enabling humans to gain salvation. The law could have no such role because humans are fundamentally and irrevocably corrupt. In his commentary on Galatians Luther wrote:

You are an evil tree, and therefore all that you think, speak or do is against God. You cannot therefore deserve grace by your works, and if you try to do so you double your offense, for since you are an evil tree, you cannot but bring forth evil fruit, that is to say, sins. 'For whatsoever is not of faith is sin' [Rom. 14:23]. Therefore, whoever tries to earn grace by works preceding faith, is trying to please God with sins, which is nothing else but to heap sin upon sin, to mock God and to provoke his wrath.

Why, then, for Luther, the law? We can answer the question quickly. It has two purposes: the first is civil, to put some kind of check on the wickedness of humans. The second use of the law is what Luther is remembered for most. The law is a mighty hammer to beat down human arrogance which imagines it can earn God's favor by good deeds:

[The law] reveals a man to himself, that he is a sinner, guilty of death and worthy of God's everlasting wrath. For what purpose, then, is this humbling, this bruising and beating down by this hammer, the law? For this purpose, that we may have an entrance into grace. So then the law is a minister that prepares the way for grace.

What, might we ask, was wrong with Luther's interpretation? First, and most fundamentally, Luther utterly ignored the difficult polemical context in which Paul wrote his letters. He interpreted Paul as though his words were pure doctrine, and that has denied them their necessary nuance. There is no text of Paul which suggests that the very doing of the law is sinful. Rudolf Bultmann, a very famous and influential theologian of the 20th c., accepted Luther's view almost verbatim and perpetuated this idea right into our own time. But, for instance, Romans 14 makes clear that Paul could envisage obedience to the law as a normal part of Christian living. As far as Paul was concerned, in my view, Jewish Christianity was always a viable option. To be sure, he objected to the imposition of the law on anyone. Nevertheless, in Romans 14 Paul urges obedience to the law where that is necessary in order not to offend the conscience of a law-observant Christian. Luther carried his interpretation of Paul's view of the law too far because of his own context of opposition to the 16th c. Catholic church and its heavy handed legal structure. Further, Luther did not recognize the context within which Jews, both of the 1st century and of the 16th, place the law, the context of the covenant. Luther's view of the law, as the hammer of human conceit, easily lent itself to the distortion that for Jews the law somehow had become in Paul's day detached from the covenant, and thus was simply a legalistic system, devoid of the heart of true religious faith.

The irony is that it was not Judaism or Paul's opponents who detached law from covenant; it was Paul himself. In Galatians 3:15-18 he speaks of the law coming 430 years after the promise. That enables him to separate the law of Sinai from the covenant with Abraham, and thereby to subordinate law to covenant and declare law to be merely a temporary measure which now "in Christ" no longer holds the same authority (3:23-26). This leads to the conclusion ­ painful for Jews and Christians alike -- that Paul did abrogate the law as necessary for salvation. On the other hand, the covenant with Israel is presumed by Paul to be eternal (Rom. 11:1-2, 28-29). It has to be, otherwise the grafting of the nations onto the vine of Israel (Rom. 11:17-24), and his assuring Gentiles that they belong to the inheritance of Abraham (Gal. 3:1-29), would be meaningless. The separateness of law and covenant is presupposed by Paul in Romans 9:30-32 when he speaks of Israel's fault being that it has lived the covenant too much in terms of the law of Sinai, and thus has sought righteousness "as if it were a matter of works" whereas, for him, it was always only a matter of grace and of faith. Let me emphasize this point: the change in Paul's life was not from "Judaism" (see note 4 above), but from an understanding of Judaism which, from his new perspective in Christ, he regarded as having identified the covenant too much in terms of "works of law." The covenant in fact, he now believes, should always have been understood radically in terms of grace and faith. That, for him, is the heart of the human relationship with God, and that was not something which he learned first as a believer in Christ. What the revelation of Christ added was that now the Gentiles also were to be included in that covenant, and included just as they were, without recourse to law. That, in my view, was what Paul fought for. That is the context we have to remember as we try to understand his difficult letters. But however difficult and controversial he may be, it is not Paul who has been throwing people into the river of our tragic history. That blame belongs far more to ignorance of Paul on the part of Christians than to knowledge of him. If only Christians had taken to heart Paul's heartfelt expressions of affection for his people (Rom. 9:1-5; 10:1). Daniel Boyarin, in his recent book, expresses the hope that Jews might reclaim Paul as "an important Jewish thinker" who "has left us an extremely precious document for Jewish studies, the spiritual autobiography of a first-century Jew." I have the hope that Christians will discover Paul as a Jew who believed in Jesus, and who in doing so never lost his love for Israel."