One often hears it said that the apostle Paul’s discourse about the Jewish law – “Paul and the law” or “Paul and Judaism,” in industry-standard shorthand – is one of those classically intractable problems, like the problem of evil in philosophical theology or cold fusion in nuclear physics. In fact, however, it is very simple. Simple, but not easy, because the solution, although it is historically clear and compelling (as I shall argue in this book), has proved existentially intolerable to many of Paul’s readers. This is a shame, since it has effectively rendered unthinkable to us moderns what is, for its part, a very interesting, important idea, namely: that the world itself came to an end in the first century of the Roman Empire.

According to one Jewish writer from this period, when God sends his son the messiah in the fullness of time, the messiah’s job is: to die, so that all his people can participate in his death, and then to effect the resurrection of the dead and the new creation. The Jewish writer I mean is the anonymous author of the apocalypse 4 Ezra (7:28–32),Footnote ¹ although every word of that summary is also true of his near-contemporary Paul. Both 4 Ezra and Paul think that the messiah must come and die to put an end to the present age and bring about the new creation. Unlike 4 Ezra, however, Paul thinks that the messiah has just now – within his, Paul’s, own lifetime – come and died. Hence, Paul reasons, the end of the age has come, and the new creation is here. This idea is not just implied but expressly stated all over Paul’s letters. The ends of the ages have come (1 Cor 10:11). The form of the cosmos is passing away (1 Cor 7:31). Christ himself was the last man (ὁ ἔσχατος Ἀδάμ, 1 Cor 15:45), the last mere mortal. His resurrection during the reign of Tiberius triggered the resurrection of all the righteous, so that from the 30s CE onward all God’s people will enjoy the life everlasting promised to the patriarchs. Everything Paul says about the Jewish law follows from this premise.

So I shall argue in this book. To get there, we shall have to look closely at Paul’s letters (and a number of other ancient Jewish texts) on the themes of Jewishness, gentileness, and time – or, in other words, ethnicity and eschatology. In relation to the long, fraught history of research, my goal is to explain why Paul’s thought, which in its main lines is so conventionally Jewish (one God, his temple in Jerusalem, the promise to father Abraham, the giving of the Torah to Moses, the coming messiah, etc.), has also struck so many readers as so radical, so Christian, even so anti-Jewish. The answer lies in Paul’s particular understanding of time, which is also quite conventionally Jewish (the present age, the end of the age, the day of the lord, etc.), except that Paul perceives the end of the age as present, not future.Footnote ² If understood in a sufficiently vague way, this claim is perhaps relatively uncontroversial. But in the precise way that I mean it, it is quite different from any interpretation of Paul currently on offer. Hence this book.

Ethnicity and Eschatology

In the refrain of his 1889 poem “The Ballad of East and West,”Footnote ³ Rudyard Kipling, literary lion of the late British Empire, wrote what would become one of his best-known lines:

Which is followed immediately by a lesser known but equally significant line:

Commenting on this poem, Kingsley Amis once wrote that Kipling was indeed a racist, but less of a racist than any other English writer of his age.Footnote ⁴ I am not competent to judge Amis’s defense of Kipling.Footnote ⁵ But I do find “The Ballad of East and West” a helpful starting point for considering the racial attitudes not of Kipling, but of the apostle Paul.

Or, perhaps better, “ethnic attitudes.” “Racial” is arguably not quite right for an ancient such as Paul, suggesting, as I think it does nowadays, both a sheen of scientism and a preoccupation with skin color that are part of our modern inheritance.Footnote ⁶ But “ethnic” (from Greek ethnos, a word Paul uses some forty-five times in his small corpus of letters) is just right.Footnote ⁷ Following recent, creative theoretical work by Denise Kimber Buell, Caroline Johnson Hodge, Cavan Concannon, Adi Ophir, and Ishay Rosen-Zvi, among others, I am interested in the way Paul thinks ethnicity – in particular Jewishness and gentileness – in light of his belief in the imminent end of the world as he knows it.Footnote ⁸

I use the term “Jewishness” advisedly here. Part of the argument of this book is that Paul does not isolate and reify “Judaism” as a thing outside himself on which he could render judgment. (Hence the fatal flaw in the many studies of what interpreters have called “Paul’s critique of Judaism.”) Judaism is the air Paul breathes, so to speak, the water he swims in. He does not stand in a subject-object relation to it.Footnote ⁹ Most later Christians did and do stand in a subject-object relation to Judaism; hence their mistaken reading of the apostle as if he did too. But if we think, instead, of “Jewishness” in the sense Shaye Cohen sketches in his Beginnings of Jewishness, then we can get better historical purchase on a number of difficult texts in Paul’s letters. Cohen summarizes:

I actually do not think that the Greek word Ἰουδαϊσμóς (Ioudaismos) itself means either “Judaism” or “Jewishness”; so I argue in Chapter 2. But Cohen’s larger point that we should think of ancient Jews as sharing a sense of Jewishness (including ancestry, homeland, god, cult, etc.), as Romans did Romanness or Gauls Gaulishness, is well made in its own right and helpful for thinking the case of Paul.

Many, many books have been written on the subject of Paul and Judaism, but as I argue below, most of these books are predicated on a category mistake, or several category mistakes, in fact. Footnote ¹¹ Recent research, better attuned to Paul’s own ethnic reasoning, has tended to focus on gentiles and gentileness in the lettersFootnote ¹² – and rightly so, since Paul styles himself apostle to the gentiles and addresses his letters to gentiles. This recent research is all for the good, but it effectively leaves Jewishness in Paul unexplored (often, one suspects, in a spirit of polite avoidance).Footnote ¹³ A few studies have wanted to correct the recent preoccupation with gentiles in Paul by pleading for the more theologically useful category of the human.Footnote ¹⁴ There is something to this impulse, but in my view, it too hastily skips over Paul’s demonstrable concern with Jewishness and gentileness, which were theologically significant to him in a way they simply have not been to (gentile) Christian thinkers from the second century to the present. So we need an account of Jewishness in Paul. Not of “Paul and the Jews,” since, unlike most Christian thinkers through the centuries, Paul did not perceive “the Jews” as a problem, or even as an entity outside himself.Footnote ¹⁵ And not of “Paul and Judaism,” since, unlike most Christian thinkers through the centuries, Paul did not perceive “Judaism” as a rival religion, or even as a discrete thing. I am not aware of any account quite like what I am describing, so I have tried to give one in this book.

Thus far ethnicity; now to comment briefly on eschatology. My claim is that what interpreters have mistakenly called “Paul’s critique of Judaism” is actually just a feature of Paul’s imminent eschatology, which is to say, his very particular understanding of time. There has, of course, been more than ample research on Paul’s eschatology, much of which I find very helpful and discuss, passim, in the chapters that follow.Footnote ¹⁶ But a common (which is not to say ubiquitous) problem in this research is a tendency – characteristic of what Stanley Stowers calls “academic Christian theological modernism”Footnote ¹⁷ – to assume that Paul stands in the same relation to eschatology that his modern (mostly Christian) interpreters do, as if both Paul and, say, Geerhardus Vos were reflecting theologically on the same far-off subject matter. In fact, I argue in this book, that is emphatically not the case. The end of all things lay in the immediate future for Paul in a way it simply has not done for most people down through the ages, and certainly not for the modern, bourgeois guild of professional Bible critics (of which the present writer, alas, is a member).

A number of interpreters before me – Albert Schweitzer, late-career Krister Stendahl, Dale Allison, and Paula Fredriksen, among others – have argued along these lines, but they have often been dismissed with criticisms that are not really to the point. For instance: It is true that, because Paul does not expressly set a date for the coming of the kingdom,Footnote ¹⁸ his expectation is not, strictly speaking, falsified. But neither is it vindicated.Footnote ¹⁹ Paul’s “very soon” is not as specific or as vulnerable as “in the year x,” but it is far, far more specific and vulnerable than “God only knows” (cf. Mark 13:32). It is this “very soon,” not the red herring of a set date, that needs accounting for. Or again, it is true that the so-called delay of the parousia (Parusieverzögerung) does not arise as a problem in the letters of Paul as it does in 2 Peter or Porphyry. But by no means does it follow that questions of imminent eschatology are therefore irrelevant to the case of Paul.Footnote ²⁰ Quite the contrary, in fact. Paul’s letters are our only extant sources from the first generation of the Jesus movement, from that brief window before the delay of the kingdom became a fact of life for all Christians ever after. For purposes of history, we should want to understand how things looked to Paul and his contemporaries, not rush to elide their perspective on time with their successors’ – let alone our own – perspectives. But popular rubrics like “inaugurated eschatology” (à la Vos, Oscar Cullmann, G. E. Ladd, N. T. Wright, and many others) do precisely this; they make it quick and easy for moderns to imagine Paul’s perspective on time as identical with their own. One might argue that this makes for good theology – although whether it does so is debatable – but it certainly makes for bad history.Footnote ²¹ The goal of this book, therefore, is to undo this elision, to show how Paul thought ethnicity and eschatology differently from how his successors’ have thought them.

Paul Within or Without Judaism

I make my argument in the context of the recently minted and currently flourishing “Paul within Judaism” movement. Just as to write a book on Paul in the 1980s or 1990s was to reckon with E. P. Sanders’s bombshell Paul and Palestinian Judaism and the various “new perspective” proposals then current, so to write a book on Paul now is to reckon with a cluster of strong readings now emerging from Israel, Scandinavia, and North America, from the pens of revisionist interpreters such as Pamela Eisenbaum, Paula Fredriksen, Mark Nanos, Matthew Thiessen, and Magnus Zetterholm.Footnote ²² The present book makes its argument in the context of that movement, but it does not toe any party line. It is not a tract either for or against the Paul within Judaism Schule. It is just my own interpretation, which, I hope, does not make it “idiosyncratic” in the sense that one uses that word with scorn. On this issue, at least, I think it is best not to think in terms of party lines or Schulen, but just of so many interpretations of the relevant texts.Footnote ²³ The more idiosyncrasy, the better. Not “the new perspective,” but James Dunn’s reading, or N. T. Wright’s reading, or what have you. Not “the Paul within Judaism view,” but Pamela Eisenbaum’s reading, or Matthew Thiessen’s reading, or what have you. We will of course recognize some family resemblances between certain scholars’ readings, but boiling down these family resemblances into a single, easily labelled view is sloppy and confusion-making.

Here is an example: My 2012 book Christ among the Messiahs,Footnote ²⁴ in which I argued, contrary to a longstanding critical orthodoxy, that the apostle Paul thinks of Jesus as the messiah, met with a mixed reception among Paul-within-Judaism interpreters. For some of them, my sketch of Paul as a Jewish messianist comparable to the Qumran covenanters or the Bar Kokhba partisans was a success, a marquee demonstration of the apostle’s situatedness within Judaism. For others, however, my argument raised the troubling possibility that Paul imagined Jesus, as messiah, somehow effecting redemption for Israel, a bridge too far for those interpreters committed to a so-called Sonderweg or two-covenant view.Footnote ²⁵ How to interpret this mixed reception? Is my interpretation of “Christ” in Paul a Paul-within-Judaism interpretation, or is it not? I like to think yes, but the fact that other people in a position to answer this question thought no just goes to illustrate the conceptual problem.

As is often the case in discussions like this, the nub of the matter lies in the implied contrast term. Fifty or a hundred years ago, to talk about “Paul within Judaism” would have been to imply a contrast with Hellenism, as, for instance, in Albert Schweitzer’s classic Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, whose second chapter is entitled “Hellenistic or Judaic?”: “When any attempt is made to explain the Pauline doctrine [of Christ-mysticism] as Hellenistic, it finds itself confronted with the greatest difficulties.”Footnote ²⁶ Or, a generation later, in W. D. Davies’s Paul and Rabbinic Judaism: “We shall not seek to deny all Hellenistic influence upon him; we shall merely attempt to prove that Paul belonged to the main stream of first-century Judaism, and that elements in his thought, which are often labelled as Hellenistic, might well be derived from Judaism.”Footnote ²⁷ Schweitzer and Davies framed their arguments in this way because, for much of the twentieth century, interpretation of the letters of Paul was locked in a strange, zero-sum debate over the relative degree of influence on the apostle of these two supposed cultural streams. Nowadays, happily, we seem mostly to have gotten over this strange habit of thought,Footnote ²⁸ and we argue about other things.

In the twenty-first century, to talk about “Paul within Judaism” is to imply a contrast not with Hellenism but with Christianity. This is clearest of all in the title of Pamela Eisenbaum’s important 2009 book Paul Was Not a Christian,Footnote ²⁹ but it is also a leitmotif in numerous works of the Paul-within-Judaism Schule. Paula Fredriksen, for instance, characterizes her Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle as a counterpart to certain “works arguing that Paul is a Christian theologian who repudiates Judaism.”Footnote ³⁰ Fredriksen’s rhetoric here is by no means tilting at windmills. The view to which she is reacting is evident not just in the unconscious habit whereby exegetes refer to Paul and his auditors as “Christians” but also in major efforts such as N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God: “My proposal is that Paul actually invents something we may call ‘Christian theology.’”Footnote ³¹ Whereas Wright, here representing the majority, views Paul in continuity with a tradition that came after him (“the inventor of Christian theology”), Paul-within-Judaism interpreters have wanted to view the apostle strictly with reference to categories available to him. And “Christian,” which word is earliest attested around the turn of the second century, was not such a category.Footnote ³² For my part, I have no problem with calling Paul a Christian in a redescriptive sense for certain heuristic purposes, as Daniel Ullucci, for instance, has done quite fruitfully.Footnote ³³ For the purposes of this study, however, such usage would confuse rather than clarify, because one main effect of reading Paul as Christian is to elide the very phenomenon that we are here concerned to examine: his thoroughgoing eschatology.Footnote ³⁴

A main contribution of the present book is to give attention to some key Pauline texts that have gone largely neglected in recent Paul-within-Judaism research. The movement has been around long enough now that critics have begun to suggest that neglect of certain texts is significant, possibly intentional, and in any case incriminating. For instance, James Dunn, reviewing Nanos and Zetterholm’s Paul within Judaism, complains as follows:

To Gal 2:16 (“a person is not put right from works of the law except through trust of Jesus Christ”) and Gal 1:13 (“you heard of my former occupation in Ioudaismos”), we may add at least Gal 2:19 (“through the law I died to the law”), 2 Cor 3:6 (“we are attendants of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit”), and Rom 10:4 (“Christ is the end of the law unto righteousness for everyone who trusts”) to the list of texts brandished by recent critics of the Paul-within-Judaism hypothesis.Footnote ³⁶ It is fair to ask for a discussion of these texts but wrong to assume that they could not admit of new, alternative interpretations. In this book, I will offer a number of such interpretations. I do so in the rather pollyannish belief that, although it is impossible to convince everyone, it is nevertheless possible and desirable to argue one’s case to the widest range of colleagues in the field. If taking this approach means that no particular school is likely to rally around the account I offer here, well, I can live with that.

Comparing Things

The predominant way, by far, that interpreters have tried to think of Paul and Judaism has been to compare the former with the latter.Footnote ³⁷ But the glaring flaw at the heart of this entire tradition is the assumption that one can profitably compare a single person (Paul) with an entire ethno-religion (Judaism)Footnote ³⁸ – where, to skew the comparison even further, the person in question is himself a member of that ethno-religion. It is not that such a comparison is impossible; we can, of course, compare anything we like – apples with oranges, Paul with Judaism, Shakespeare with bioluminescence, etc. – because comparison is a mental operation performed by a thinking subject. Things do not compare themselves; thinkers compare things.Footnote ³⁹ But comparisons can be more or less profitable, more or less interesting, more or less instructive depending on the choice of comparanda and the particular questions posed about them.Footnote ⁴⁰ And it is here that the myriad scholarly comparisons of Paul and Judaism betray their conceptual deficiency. Every such study has to conclude with a claim about how, exactly, Paul differs from Judaism; the form of the conclusion is required by the set-up. But any claim of this form, no matter how well-researched or perceptive, is predicated on a gross generalization about (whatever the writer in question includes under the heading) “Judaism.” Comparisons of this type cannot do otherwise than find Paul to be unique or anomalous; they are purpose-built to find that. In fact, the supposed uniqueness or anomaly is not a discovery but a presupposition, not a conclusion but an unacknowledged premise. As Brent Nongbri has aptly put it:

Regarding Nongbri’s counterfactual “If one were to carry out a similar exercise by isolating another Jewish document and comparing it with all other Jewish literature…,” in bibliographical fact this is almost never done. (It has occasionally been done with Jesus, but this is the exception that proves the rule. What is more, because Jesus left no writings, his is a quite different case, more like Socrates than Paul in this respect.) None of the great studies of Ben Sira, Salome Alexandra, Philo, Josephus, Babatha, or Rabbi Judah the Patriarch – let alone the many anonymous and pseudonymous Jewish texts from antiquity – is framed as a comparison of the lone figure on the one hand with all of ancient Judaism on the other. Because, in most cases, we recognize intuitively that that is an ill-formed kind of comparison, like comparing Jane Austen with all of English literature, or Gerald Ford with all of America. We can think those comparisons, but there is little to be gained by doing so. Much more profitable to compare Jane Austen with Walter Scott, or Louisa May Alcott, or Zadie Smith; or to compare Gerald Ford with Spiro Agnew, or Abraham Lincoln, or Phyllis Schlafly. In this connection, one recent, salutary trend has been a vogue of studies comparing Paul with just one other ancient figure on a topic of common interest. Examples include Bruce Longenecker’s study of Paul and 4 Ezra on covenant, John Barclay’s study of Paul and Philo on circumcision, Jonathan Linebaugh’s study of Wisdom of Solomon and Paul on grace, George Carras’s study of Paul and Josephus on diaspora, Niko Huttunen’s study of Paul and Epictetus on law, and Alexander Muir’s study of Paul and Seneca on consolation.Footnote ⁴² One might reasonably complain that, at a disciplinary level, the enormous volume of attention devoted to Paul in contrast to other ancient figures is itself a corrupting influence on historical understanding.Footnote ⁴³ But at least the form of these recent comparative studies is a great improvement.

The one comparison of Paul and Judaism that towers over all others is E. P. Sanders’s 1977 Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion.Footnote ⁴⁴ Sanders is so brilliant an exegete that, when he gets down to the work of reading primary texts, he manages to be right much, even most of the time. But in the architecture of the project, Sanders goes astray in precisely the way detailed above. To give him due credit, he does not attempt to compare Paul with all of Judaism, but with all of Palestinian Judaism ca. 200 BCE to 200 CE (including the Mishnah, Tosefta, tannaitic midrashim, all the Dead Sea Scrolls, Ben Sira, 1 Enoch, Jubilees, Psalms of Solomon, and 4 Ezra), which is still more than enough to yield an absurd asymmetry.Footnote ⁴⁵ Another problem is Sanders’s notion of a “pattern of religion,” which turns out to mean roughly “soteriology,”Footnote ⁴⁶ of which he finds one Pauline type (viz. participationist eschatology) and a different, pan-Jewish type (viz. covenantal nomism).

Sanders sets up his comparison as follows: “What is clearly desirable, then, is to compare an entire religion, parts and all, with an entire religion, parts and all; to use the analogy of a building, to compare two buildings, not leaving out of accounts their individual bricks. The problem is how to discover two wholes, both of which are considered and defined on their own merits and in their own terms, to be compared with each other.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Writing at the time, Jonathan Z. Smith subjected this plan to stern but warranted criticism:

Notwithstanding the enormous and almost entirely positive influence of Paul and Palestinian Judaism on the field of Pauline studies,Footnote ⁴⁹ Smith is quite right about the conceptual problems. If not even Sanders’s magnum opus could successfully compare Paul with Judaism, how much more is this true of the many lesser attempts at that ill-advised project.

A more recent trend in this research area speaks not of “Paul and Judaism” but rather of “Paul the Jew.” Instances of this trend begin by granting (!) that Paul was a Jew but then add a descriptor qualifying what kind of Jew he was: “Paul, an [x] Jew.” There is some precedent for this rubric in older scholarship. Kaufmann Kohler classed Paul as an archetypal self-hating Jew, one who had internalized Greco-Roman anti-Judaism and thus wrote with contempt for his own ancestral traditions.Footnote ⁵⁰ Markus Barth, in a provocation to his mainline Protestant interlocutors, classed Paul as a good Jew: “His was the life of a good Jew: a struggle for the rights of the neighbor.”Footnote ⁵¹ But studies of the form “Paul, an [x] Jew” have only really come in vogue since the 1990s. Daniel Boyarin classes Paul as a radical Jew: “I read Paul as a Jewish cultural critic, and I ask what it was in Jewish culture that led him to produce a discourse of radical reform of that culture… My fundamental idea… is that what motivated Paul ultimately was a profound concern for the one-ness of humanity.”Footnote ⁵² Calvin Roetzel classes Paul as a Jew on the margins, a member of his tribe but not of its orthodox, orthoprax center.Footnote ⁵³ Going further than Roetzel, Love Sechrest classes Paul as a former Jew, one who has dissociated from his Jewish identity in order to associate with the tertium genus, the third race, of the Christ-believers.Footnote ⁵⁴ Contrariwise, Mark Nanos classes Paul as a Torah-observant Jew, one who keeps the commandments that pertain to him and teaches gentiles-in-Christ to keep the (far fewer) commandments that pertain to them.Footnote ⁵⁵ Similarly but less specifically, Gabriele Boccaccini classes Paul as a Second-Temple Jew, full stop. “Paul should be regarded as nothing other than a Second Temple Jew. What else should he have been? Paul was born a Jew, of Jewish parents, was circumcised, and nothing in his work supports (or even suggests) the idea that he became (or regarded himself as) an apostate.”Footnote ⁵⁶ But Boccaccini’s “nothing other than” is overstatement; he himself also regards Paul as a Pharisee and an apostle, among other categories. Most recently, Brant Pitre, Michael Barber, and John Kincaid have classed Paul as a new covenant Jew: “We follow Paul’s lead and refer to him as a ‘minister of a new covenant’ (2 Cor 3:6) – that is, as a new covenant Jew… [This label can] account for elements of both continuity (‘covenant’) and discontinuity (‘new’) with Judaism in Paul’s theology.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Other critics have tried to explain Paul by classing him as a proselyte Jew, a Hellenistic Jew, a Palestinian Jew, a Pharisaic Jew, an apocalyptic Jew, an eschatological Jew, and other categories beside.

Perhaps the most interesting and most influential of these proposals is John Barclay’s mid-1990s classification of Paul as an anomalous diaspora Jew.Footnote ⁵⁸ Barclay rightly questions why his predecessors (e.g., W. D. Davies, E. P. Sanders, Alan Segal) had compared Paul with Palestinian Jewish sources if Paul’s social context was so obviously the diaspora. He writes, “Paul can properly be regarded as a Diaspora Jew and compared with other Jews living in this social environment… By observing him in this, his primary social context, we can plot his social and cultural location amongst other Diaspora Jews. As we shall see, his position there is distinctly anomalous.”Footnote ⁵⁹ There are two key moves here. Historiographically, Barclay situates Paul among other Greek-speaking diaspora Jewish writers, yielding real heuristic gains. But analytically, then, he argues that Paul is an anomaly relative to all of them. The first of these moves is a great advance on older scholarship, but the second, as Ronald Charles has pointed out, actually reproduces the conclusions of that older scholarship.Footnote ⁶⁰ Barclay explicates the Pauline anomaly thusly: “In his conceptuality Paul is most at home among the particularistic and least accommodated segments of the Diaspora; yet in his utilization of these concepts, and in his social practice, he shatters the ethnic mould in which that ideology was formed… By an extraordinary transference of ideology, Paul deracinates the most culturally conservative forms of Judaism in the Diaspora and uses them in the service of his largely Gentile communities.”Footnote ⁶¹ Barclay is too careful a thinker to call Paul unique, but nevertheless, in the respect that Barclay cares about, Paul stands on one side of a dividing line, all other diaspora Jews on the other. Only Paul “shatters the ethnic mould” and “deracinates” the tradition via an “extraordinary transference of ideology.” One wonders whether, as Charles suggests, this kind of anomaly is just uniqueness by another name.Footnote ⁶²

Some of the “Paul, an [x] Jew” proposals are simply false. I am virtually certain, contra Hyam Maccoby, that Paul was not a Greek who turned proselyte in order to marry a Jewish woman.Footnote ⁶³ I am not certain but relatively confident, contra Michael Satlow, that Paul was not a born and raised Jerusalemite Jew.Footnote ⁶⁴ Many “Paul, an [x] Jew” proposals, however, are technically accurate, depending what point is being made; but the crucial question is what we actually gain from them. It is true – and most critics would agree that it is true – that Paul was a Second-Temple, diaspora, Pharisaic, apocalyptic, nonconformist (etc., etc.) Jew. But the fact that most critics would agree to this litany is proof that the application of the labels tells us relatively little, because they can mask huge differences of interpretation. Regarding Pitre, Barber, and Kincaid’s “new covenant Jew” proposal, I have argued elsewherethat it is both a welcome hedge against the imposition of ill-suited categories and a barrier to taxonomy, because neither ancient nor modern writers ever use “new covenant” to denominate a certain subset of ancient Jews. Footnote ⁶⁵ To identify Paul as a Hellenistic Jew is to say that he is like, for example, Philo of Alexandria in some relevant respect.Footnote ⁶⁶ Likewise, to identify Paul as an apocalyptic Jew is to say that he is like, for example, the Qumran covenanters in some relevant respect.Footnote ⁶⁷ But what does it mean to identify Paul as a new covenant Jew? Who are the other members of that set? Indeed, are there any? Paul only uses the label “attendants of a new covenant” of himself (and perhaps also Timothy, 2 Cor 1:1), not of the other apostles or other Christ-believers, let alone any other Jews outside the Christ sect. So perhaps to identify Paul as a new covenant Jew is simply to say that he is a Paulinist. But that is a tautology, or very close to one. Simply to label is not yet to understand. Thus my goal in this book is not, for instance, to prove that Paul was an eschatological Jew, as if proving that could tell us very much. I do think that Paul was an eschatological Jew, and a Second-Temple Jew, and a diaspora Jew, and a great many other things – all suitably defined and qualified, of course. But I do not think that just to apply any of those labels is yet to understand him. My goal in this book is to explore how Paul (who was of course an x, y, and z Jew) thinks ethnicity and eschatology. That is a different and, I think, much more productive project.

Speaking of Paul

For the purposes of this study, I mostly use “Paul” as a shorthand for the author of the seven (almost) undisputedly authentic letters: 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1–2 Corinthians, Romans, Philippians, and Philemon. Of course, this shorthand masks numerous problems. Not even these seven letters are really undisputed; even today, a few interpreters would defend only F. C. Baur’s list of four, or Bruno Bauer’s list of zero, or other permutations besides.Footnote ⁶⁸ With the majority, however, I think that we can attribute these seven letters to Paul, or better: to Paul and his colleagues. As Laura Nasrallah has rightly emphasized, all but one (viz. Romans) of the seven letters are expressly co-authored:Footnote ⁶⁹ Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy in 1 Thessalonians (1:1); Paul and Sosthenes in 1 Corinthians (1:1); Paul and Timothy in 2 Corinthians (1:1), Philippians (1:1), and Philemon (1); Paul and “all the brothers” in Galatians (1:1–2). And even Romans comes from the hand of Tertius the scribe (Rom 16:22), not Paul the author.Footnote ⁷⁰ What is more, not only are the letters products of Paul’s network; the letters as we have them are products of the third-, fourth-, and fifth-century tradents of our best manuscripts. We are necessarily ignorant, for the most part, about the text of the letters for the roughly two centuries between their composition and the earliest extant witnesses.Footnote ⁷¹ At least one of the letters – 2 Corinthians – was very probably not written in the form we now have it but is a composite of two or more shorter communications. And while we have good reason to trust that our critical text of Paul is mostly free of later interpolations,Footnote ⁷² the case of the doxology at Rom 16:25–27 should keep us on our toes.Footnote ⁷³ All of which is to say that even the so-called undisputed letters cannot transport us directly to the apostle himself.

That being the case, one might be tempted to abandon the authentic/pseudonymous distinction altogether and simply let “Paul” mean the whole late ancient corpus Paulinum, including at least 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, 1–2 Timothy, and Titus. Luke Timothy Johnson, to cite one eminent example, has recently proposed something along these lines.Footnote ⁷⁴ And for reception-historical and theological purposes, such an approach has much to commend it. But it has significant liabilities, too. Most importantly, there is no such thing as the late ancient corpus Paulinum; rather, there are several of them, at least.Footnote ⁷⁵ Do we include Hebrews, which counted as “Paul” in the Greek East but not the Latin West, and in modern Bibles sits awkwardly between the Pauline letters and the Catholic letters? Or 3 Corinthians, accepted among the Syrian and Armenian churches but not elsewhere? Or the Pastoral Epistles, absent from the early ten-letter corpus of church letters attested in P46? It is not a simple choice between a seven-letter critical corpus and a thirteen-letter ecclesiastical corpus. What we actually have are some twenty-odd ancient letters attributed to Paul, preserved in several partly overlapping ancient editions (a ten-letter corpus, a thirteen-letter corpus, a fourteen-letter corpus, and so on), none of which includes all of those twenty-plus extant letters. So there is just no getting around the obstinate historical questions about the relative proximity of each of these texts to the apostle, even if we must abandon the naïve hope of access to the mind of the man himself. In this study, therefore, I appeal to the seven letters, minus some textually dubious passages, as first-order evidence for Paul (in the sense stipulated above), while in the footnotes I also comment selectively on relevant passages from 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, 1–2 Timothy, and Titus, as well as Hebrews, 3 Corinthians, Laodiceans, Paul and Seneca, Apocalypse of Paul, Prayer of Paul, Acts of the Apostles, Acts of Paul, and more. These are sources of a different order, much less proximate to the apostle, but they are sources nonetheless, part of the “Pauline archive” with which we have to work.Footnote ⁷⁶

Even setting aside the problem of the sources, which is not easily set aside, there is an equally thorny problem with the word “author” in my breezy “shorthand for the author of the seven authentic letters.” Margaret Mitchell helpfully distinguishes between what she calls the historical Paul – “the actual flesh-and-blood human person in his finite and complicated life, as best as we can reconstruct him” – and the historical-epistolary Paul – “the mini-corpus of the seven scholarly homologoumena, which has itself had many lives since.”Footnote ⁷⁷ We would, of course, be delighted to have straightforward access to the historical Paul (and likewise the historical Socrates, the historical Cleopatra, and so on), but in fact we only know him by way of the historical-epistolary Paul, which is not the same thing, because, as Mitchell puts it, “no person is equivalent to or reducible to a selective body of his or her rhetorically forceful and occasional writings.”Footnote ⁷⁸ The two are related, because there is good reason to think that at least the seven letters do come, via whatever slings and arrows of composition and transmission, from the historical figure himself. But not even an (ostensibly) undisputed passage in an (ostensibly) undisputed letter is a transparent deliverance of the mind of Paul. As Mitchell rightly notes, our author “was strategic and canny, often deliberate and acting aforethought, but also inclined to antithetical reasoning, combativeness, and hyperbole, often followed by or associated with, forms of conciliation, whether tonal pauses, shifts from categorical to temporal arguments, and types of diction.”Footnote ⁷⁹ As will become clear in the argument below, I am more optimistic than Mitchell is about the possibility of synthesizing at least some of Paul’s main ideas. She is absolutely right that “Paul’s letters never did and still do not have a single, unequivocal meaning.”Footnote ⁸⁰ In fact, I would go further still and do without talk of meaning(s), whether singular or plural, altogether.Footnote ⁸¹ I do not claim to pronounce on the meaning of the letters, only to offer one reading that I think makes good historical-contextual sense.Footnote ⁸²

The Past and Its Uses

I come to interpret Paul, not to praise him. I have no interest in perpetuating the Great Man approach to the letters, a hermeneutical stance that assumes that Paul is the upright party in all his disputes, the hero of the story of which he is part. Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre and Laura Nasrallah have perceptively identified and criticized this commonplace in their excellent essay “Beyond the Heroic Paul.” Over against such a hermeneutical stance, Johnson-DeBaufre and Nasrallah urge, “There is much to gain from reading the letters of Paul – in their writing, reception, and afterlives – as sites of debate, contestation, and resistance rather than as articulations of one individual’s vision and heroic community-building efforts.”Footnote ⁸³ That is, we can read Paul’s letters in order to understand not just his ideas and goals, but also the (different, sometimes contrary) ideas and goals of Cephas, Apollos, Phoebe, Euodia, Syntyche, the Corinthian women prophets, and others. Following Johnson-DeBaufre and Nasrallah, I try in what follows “to turn away from the question of whether the ancient Paul was a hero or a villain and instead to imagine him and his interpreters as fully engaged in the messier political subjectivities of the diverse communities to which he wrote.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Now, inasmuch as the present study does focus on Paul’s own ideas and goals, rather than those of Apollos or Phoebe, it runs the risk of appearing to be another drop in the sea of “heroic Paul” readings. But I consider that a risk worth taking, for I think that we have not yet understood Paul on ethnicity and eschatology precisely because we have cast him as a hero. Only by allowing ourselves to imagine Paul otherwise than as heroic or villainous, perhaps even as tragic, can we think our way to the end of this particular problem.

Cavan Concannon has argued still further along the lines sketched by Johnson-DeBaufre and Nasrallah. In a bracing manifesto entitled “Paul Is Dead. Long Live Paulinism!” Concannon pleads, “We have to kill Paul… I am calling for an overthrowing of Paul as the representative of the Platonic One in favor of the creation of a vibrant, polyvalent Pauline archive… In other words, and to paraphrase Marx, let’s stop interpreting Paul and start creating Paulinisms that can change the world.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Concannon is understandably weary of the modern project of historicizing the apostle and rightly suspicious of the many claims of Pauline warrant for various theological and ethical visions. He proposes, therefore, that we abandon the quest for the historical Paul and mine the whole, vast Pauline tradition (“authentic,” pseudo-, deutero-, trito-, apocryphal, and otherwise) for anything we find ethically useful. “Let’s not start with the presumption that the Pauline archive will provide us with answers once we have revealed the real Paul; rather, we should allow our work to ask if anything from the Pauline archive (or any early Christian text for that matter) might yet become weaponizable in the struggle for a more just future.”Footnote ⁸⁶ My reading of Paul in the present book is more old-fashioned than what Concannon proposes in one respect and more radical in another. It is more old-fashioned in that I do not abandon the (hermeneutically chastened) quest for a historical Paul. I think that there is still much to be gained from Spinoza’s (and Albert Schweitzer’s, and Paula Fredriksen’s) historicizing project.Footnote ⁸⁷ But my reading is more radical in that, while I am a comrade in Concannon’s “struggle for a more just future,” I am even more willing than he is to leave Paul (and Paulinism) out of that struggle. After all, it is our struggle, not Paul’s. Christians will of course have good reason to invoke Paul as an authority and a resource. But others will not, and I see no reason why students of religion in antiquity, in their capacity as such, should do. Like Concannon, but even more so, I am happy to let Paul be useless for our modern projects, and I think that by doing so we stand to understand him better. In contrast to the dominant approach to Paul, which Stanley Stowers rightly diagnoses as “academic Christian theological modernism,”Footnote ⁸⁸ the historical reading offered in this book reckons with the fact that Paul is irremediably different from us in certain fundamental respects.Footnote ⁸⁹

With those methodological parameters in place, the argument of this book unfolds as follows. Chapter 2 considers the only passage in any of the books comprising the New Testament that contains the word Ἰουδαϊσμóς, Ioudaismos, often transliterated “Judaism”: Gal 1:13–14. I show that that word does not actually mean (what we mean by) “Judaism” and explain how exactly Paul positions himself in relation to it. Chapter 3 examines that Pauline bugbear “justification from works of the law” and asks who in antiquity actually argued for such a thing. Chapter 4 mines the letters for evidence regarding the ethnicity(s) of Paul’s opponents. I show that the centuries-old and still-popular image of Paul versus “Jewish Christianity” is not tenable. Chapter 5 starts from the traditional picture of Paul as an anti-legalist and proceeds to show a mass of evidence for (what anywhere else we would call) legalism in Paul’s own letters. Chapter 6, similarly, starts from the traditional picture of Paul as an anti-ethnocentrist and proceeds to show a mass of evidence for (what anywhere else we would call) ethnic chauvinism in Paul’s own letters. Chapter 7 considers all those passages where interpreters have thought that Paul redefines Israel to mean Christ-believers, demonstrating that he never does so. Chapter 8 explores why Paul sometimes says that Christ effects righteousness for gentiles, other times for all people, giving a summary account of what Paul thinks Christ does for gentiles and Jews, respectively. The concluding Chapter 9 explains the logic of Paul’s controversial claim that Christ is the end of the law, proving its relation to ancient Jewish and Christian speculation about the physics of immortality.

Conclusion

Let us return, briefly and finally, to Rudyard Kipling. I suggested above that, but did not explain how, the opening lines of Kipling’s “Ballad of East and West” help to illustrate Paul’s way of thinking Jewishness and time.

Some ancients did, like Kipling, perceive the peoples of the world in terms of east and west, ἀνατολή and δύσις, oriens and occidens. “The eastern group are more masculine, vigorous of soul, and frank in all things… Those to the west are more feminine, softer of soul, and secretive” (Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos 2.2.9 LCL). “Many shall come from east and west and recline with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 8:11). And so on. Paul does not classify peoples in this way, but he does presuppose another binary just as fundamental: Jews and gentiles, or, in the singular, Jew and Greek. Although in actual social practice, Jews and gentiles did meet all the time and everywhere in the ancient Mediterranean world,Footnote ⁹⁰ Paul, like some other Jewish thinkers of his day, thought of the two as deeply, even ontologically different – Jews are Jews, and gentiles gentiles – in a way not bridgeable otherwise than by the re-creation of the universe itself.

But – and here Kipling’s second line comes in – Paul also believed in the re-creation of the universe itself, not in the distant future as an article of faith, but in his immediate present as an empirical fact. Whereas Kipling, like most Christians down through the centuriesFootnote ⁹¹ (and, mutatis mutandis, most Jews, too), imagines God’s great judgment seat as a feature of the dim and distant future, Paul perceives it as a reckoning about to happen right now. The end of the ages has come. East and west, Jew and Greek, finally meet in the presence of the one God who is over all. In fact, not coincidentally, Kipling’s phrase “God’s great Judgment Seat” is itself a Paulinism: “We shall all stand before the judgment seat of God” (Rom 14:10); “We must all be revealed in front of the judgment seat of Christ” (2 Cor 5:10). In the dawning new creation, Jews are perfected in righteousness and made to live forever, like the angels, in fulfilment of God’s long-ago promises to the patriarchs; meanwhile, gentiles are transformed from their natural state of debauchery into the same pneumatic existence promised to the Jews. Because of this peculiar combination of ethnicity and eschatology, the religion of Paul is neither what we normally think of as Judaism, nor what we normally think of as Christianity. And that fact is the cause of most of the confusion in the long history of Paul-and-Judaism debates. That is to put the thesis of this book. Now it only remains to prove it.