A Radical Jew” Revisited

Paul and the Universal Goyim: “A Radical Jew” Revisited

Ishay Rosen-Zvi & Adi Ophir

E.P. Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism opened a new era in Pauline scholarship by introducing two innovations. The first, and most central one, recasts Judaism in Paul’s time as a religion based on “covenantal nomism,” rather than on constant calculation of deeds and rewards (Buchhandlungsreligion), as it was commonly narrated.1 The second claim is that Paul worked backwards, forming his critique of contemporary Judaism according to his solution, the redemption in Christ. The two innovations were interconnected. If Pharisaic Judaism in Paul’s time was so close to Paul’s thought, what was he criticizing? It is due to this riddle that Sanders developed his “from solution to plight” theory, according to which, in his classic formulation, the only real issue Paul had with Judaism was that it was not Christianity. James Dunn expanded on Sanders’ “new perspective” (a name he gave to the trend he identified) while rejecting the latter’s thesis that Paul’s critique should be read as nothing more than a rhetorically lush consequence of his new conviction. Dunn claimed that Paul’s writings all demonstrate that he had indeed a substantive critique of the Torah, but that it was not centered on the law itself, but rather on its particularist, exclusivist character. Paul’s critique of the Torah should be read as referring specifically to commandments which function as “ethnic boundary markers,” especially circumcision and table fellowship.2 This allowed Dunn to resist the Bultmannian law-as-boasting theory, and other legalistic presentations of Judaism,3 while at the same time rejecting the claim that Paul completely distorted the image of the Jewish law.4

1 Ed P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1977; Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983. “The New Perspective on Paul was born of a new perspective on Second Temple Judaism” (James D.G. Dunn, “The New Perspective: whence, what and whither,” in The New Perspective on Paul: Collected Essays (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 7 n. 28). 2 Dunn, “New Perspective,”; Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998. 3 See e.g. C.E.B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, vol. 1. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1975. 4 As was claimed for example by Heikki Räisänen, Paul and the Law (2nd rev. ed. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1983).

Dunn’s reduction of Paul’s critique of the law to certain commandments only was highly criticized, as was his minimalistic reading of the “works of the law” (severely compromised by the publication of the Qumranic scroll 4QMMT, in which the phrase ma‘asei torah refers to the commandments in general).5 In his A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity, Daniel Boyarin devel- ops James Dunn’s theory that Paul’s critique centers on Jewish particularism.6 According to Boyarin, however, the urge for this critique derived quite para- doxically from Paul’s Jewish heritage itself: “Jewish culture itself was in ten- sion with itself, characterized both by narrow ethnocentrism and universalist monotheism.”7 But Boyarin’s most crucial contribution to Pauline scholarship was not the recontextualization of Paul’s critique itself but rather of the alternative he offered to it. According to Boyarin, Paul bypassed Jewish particularism with allegory. This, he claims, is the key, not only to Paul’s hermeneutics and atti- tude to the Torah, but to his ethnic and gender economy as well. His allegori- cal reading revises not just the meaning of the law,8 but also that of the Jews themselves, who “have been allegorized out of real historical existence.”9 The result is a complete erasure of differences. Like a brilliant psychoanalyst, Boyarin ascribed all the different symptoms in Paul’s thought to a single root: “ontology, hermeneutics, anthropology and Christology are all intimately related in Pauline thought [. . .] Paul understood both the dual nature of Christ’s person as well as the crucifixion in the light of the familiar platonic dichotomy of the outer and the inner, the material and the spiritual, or in Paul’s own terminology, the flesh and the spirit [. . .] the dual nature of Jesus provided a hermeneutic key to the resolution of that enormous

5 See his attempted rebuttal in Dunn, “4QMMT and Galatians,” New Testament Studies 43 (1997): 147–53. 6 On Dunn see Boyarin, A Radical Jew, 51–52. 7 Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 52. Boyarin fiercely rejects Alan Segal’s thesis that the critique was motivated by Paul’s personal experience. See Alan F. Segal, Paul the Convert (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 8 For a critique of the antinomian reading of Paul see Paula Fredriksen, “Paul’s Letter to the Romans, the Ten Commandments and Pagan ‘Justification by Faith’,” Journal of Biblical Literature 133 (2014): 801–8. 9 A Radical Jew, 156. Boyarin claims that the Jews function as the signifier of the church, but that this signification became redundant after the resurrection (151).