Appendix I : Paul in Modern Scholarship

Appendix I : Paul in Modern Scholarship The Traditional Paul Thus not only was he the first to lay down expressly and distinctly the principle of Christian universalism as a thing essentially opposed to Jewish particularism . We cannot call his conversion . anything but a miracle; and the miracle appears all the greater when we remember that in this revulsion of his consciousness he broke through the barriers of Judaism and rose out of the particularism of Judaism into the universal idea of Christianity. 1 In the epistle to the Romans Paul argued that the hardening and blinding of the Jews were included within God’s purpose for the salvation of the world. It was a temporary divine dispensation to enable the Gentiles to hear and accept the gospel and so to stimulate the Jews, in their turn, to claim their rightful place within the true Israel of the Church. The obedience of faith abrogates the Law as a mediator for salvation, sees through the perversion of understanding it as a principle of achievement. 2 The alleged aim of the Law, that is has been given for life, and its alleged effect, that it creates sin and death. 3 The Revised Paul Paul’s alleged anti-Judaism has been under intense scholarly scrutiny during the last three decades: It is the task of exegesis after Auschwitz precisely to expose the explicit or implicit anti-Judaism inherent in the tradition, including the New Testament itself. It is a task in which I have willingly participated, and when I began I expected to find anti-Judaism particularly present in Paul. That is not, however, the conclusion to which my own studies have led me.4 226 Appendix I When his letters came to be read by Gentiles who little understood Judaism, the misinterpretation became almost inevitable. 5 Why letters specifically addressed to Gentiles should have been understood as opposing Judaism is not hard to explain. 6 Christian theologians have often in the past developed a theology of Judaism on the basis of Pauline epistles. Judaism was whatever Paul opposed or even the opposite of everything Paul said positively. Only in recent times have the scholarly maxim “ad fonts” and the religious injunction not to bear false wit- ness been combined in the ideal of writing about Judaism solely from Jewish sources, read from the perspective of those sources. After the work especially of E. P. Sanders, it will never be possible to return to old habits. Whatever positions Paul was opposing, none of them could be called Judaism as such. How, then, can twenty centuries of interpreters be so wrong? The answer is that the misreading is not only understandable but inevitable, given the framework within which Paul has been read in the time following his death. When people lost sight of the immediate circumstances of the letters and began to assume that his opponents were Jews outside the Jesus movement instead of other apostles within, when Paul was read through the lens of Acts and the New Testament, when Paul’s intense eschatological worldview had to be abandoned, then the old traditional reading of Paul became inevitable. It is the result of reading Paul within a distant, alien framework, rather than the apostle’s own, and of forgetting that Paul is the apostle to the Gentiles and is dealing with Gentiles and their new status in Christ. 7 When we lose sight of the immediate settings of Paul’s letters and assume- with all subsequent readers-that his audience and opponents were Jews rather than anti-Pauline apostles within the Jesus-movement. When we read Paul through the lens of the book of Acts and the New Testament canon. When we read back into Paul the rejection-replacement and triumphalist theology of early (and later) Christianity. When we ignore the intense eschatological framework of Paul’s thought and action. When we read Paul with no eye or ear for his rhetorical strategies. When we come to Paul with a preconceived notion of Judaism that is an unrecognizable parody of historical reality. When we discard efforts to invent a “new” Paul due to the fact of their “fateful con- sequences for the whole of Christianity.” In short, when we read Paul within alien frameworks, the old view becomes not just explicable but inevitable. 8 In the end, we might decide to conclude that Paul was wrong, period. And put him aside altogether. But for many readers this is not an attractive option. He occupies more than one half of the Christian Bible. For some this has meant leaving Christianity altogether and moving into a post-Christian stance. For others, however, it has seemed impossible to shake the Pauline foundations of Christianity without destroying the faith completely. 9 The loss of Paul’s historical and cultural context and the concerns of later Christianity led to a different Paul. 10 Appendix I 227 The supposed objection to Jewish self-righteousness is as absent from Paul’s letters as self-righteousness itself is from Jewish literature.11 Paul writes to Gentile Christians, dealing with Gentile problems, foremost among which was the right for Gentiles qua Gentiles, without adopting the Torah of Israel, to full citizenship in the people of God. It is remarkable that in the endless discussion of Paul’s understanding of the Law, few have asked what a first-century Jew would have thought of the Law as it relates to Gentiles. 12 For Paul, Jesus was neither a new Moses nor the Messiah, nor the climax of the climax of the history of God’s dealing with Israel, but the fulfillment of God’s promises concerning the Gentiles, and this is what he accused the Jews of not recognizing. Paul never accused the Jews of lacking zeal for the Torah, and certainly not of legalism, but rather of disobedience to the new revelation he (Paul) had received. 13 I will argue that Paul need not, indeed cannot, be read according to the contradictionists and that he is entirely innocent of all charges lodged against him by his critics: 1. He is not the father of anti-Judaism. 2. He was not the inventor of the rejection-replacement theory. 3. He did not repudiate the Law of Moses. 4. He did not argue that God had rejected Israel. 5. His enemies were not Jews outside the Jesus-movement but compet- ing apostles within. 6. He did not expect Jews to find their salvation through Jesus Christ. 14 “Paul thus speaks not to the exclusion of Judaism, but rather to the inclusion of Gentiles. Christ does not abrogate Torah. Rather, God has a double cov- enant with humanity, to the Jew first and also the Greek; through the Torah with Israel; and, now that the end of the ages is upon humankind, through Christ with the Gentiles . Scholars need neither endorse a caricature of Judaism nor invent reasons rooted in Paul’s psyche to make sense of his hos- tile statements: he directs them against Judaizers, not Judaism per-se. Also, it accounts for his seeming contradictions . This interpretation allows Paul to be a first-century Jew rather than a misplaced fifth-century Augustinian, sixteenth-century Lutheran, or twentieth-century existentialist theologian. That is its great strength. Additionally—an advantage in this age of increased ecumenicalism—it clears Paul of the charge of Anti-Semitism and so makes him an attractive figure theologically. But can we responsibly “reinvent” an ecumenical Paul?” 15 The question for Paul is not mainly the significance of the Torah for Jews but its significance for Jesus-believing Gentiles . The nasty things Paul says about the Law are intended to discourage Gentiles from embracing the Law and are thoroughly misunderstood if they are read as expressions of Paul’s opinion about the value of the Law for Jews. 16 228 Appendix I for Paul, as for other Jews, the Law was and remained valid for Jews.17 Paul does not envision Israel’s eschatological salvation as its absorption into the Gentile-Christian Church. 18 Loss of Paul’s historical and cultural context and concerns of later Christianity led to a different Paul. 19 Paul Consistent or Erratic His reaction to the possibility that his Galatian converts might accept the Law was so forceful that one expects him to have had a clear and decisive reason for responding as he did. And yet, to repeat, there is no agreement among scholars as to what that reason was, and still less is there agreement as to how to understand the relationship of his numerous statements about the Law to the position which he took in the Galatian controversy. What is interesting is how far Paul was from denying anything that he held deeply, even when he could not maintain all his convictions at once without both anguish and finally a lack of logic.20 Paul was a theologian in that he reflected on his gospel, but he was not a systematic theologian, not even when he wrote Romans. His theology is not his religion, but his own effort to express it in the circumstances which the various letters reflect. Further, I view Paul as a coherent thinker, despite the unsystematic nature of his thought and the variations in formulation. 21 I happen to believe that there is, at least sometimes, a significant congruence between words and intentions, but I cannot prove this. In any case, dealing with the words alone is already a difficult task, as we shall see . we need to be able to admit, in the end, that he was self-contradictory, inconsistent, unclear, irrelevant, and even wrong.

Load more