JBL 134, no. 3 (2015): 637–650 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.15699/jbl.1343.2015.2974 Why Should a “Law-Free” Mission Mean a “Law-Free” Apostle? paula fredriksen
[email protected] The Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91905, Israel “Law-free” is a phrase habitually used to describe both the Pauline mission itself, and Paul’s own personal repudiation of traditional Jewish practices. The present essay argues that the phrase misleads on both counts. Paul demanded of his gentiles a much greater degree of Judaizing than either the synagogue or the Jerusalem temple ever required or presupposed of theirs; and gentile involve- ments in Jewish community institutions, whether ekklēsiai, synagogues, or the temple, in principle can tell us nothing about Jewish levels of Torah observance within these same institutions. The essay concludes that much of the Pauline mission was Jewishly observant and traditional, and that Paul’s Judaizing demands of his gentiles are to be understood as an aspect of his absolute conviction that he lived and worked in history’s final hour. “Law-free” is a phrase habitually used to describe the Pauline mission, even by scholars (like me) who think it is wrong.1 The phrase seems historically useful because it serves to signal, economically, what long scholarly tradition has con- sidered to be the identifying characteristics of Paul’s gentile mission: no to cir- cumcision, no to “the works of the law” (Sabbath, food ways, circumcision), no to Torah, no to “Jewish ethnic pride.” For Paul and for his communities, as one of our colleagues has phrased it, the criterion of revelation and thus of salvation was “grace, not race.”2 And not only did Paul promote this message (so goes this 1 Paula Fredriksen, “Judaizing the Nations: The Ritual Demands of Paul’s Gospel,” NTS 56 (2010): 232–52, esp.