Markus Barth (1915–1994) is best-known for his pioneering work in Jewish-Christian dialogue, and his Anchor Bible commentaries. Convinced that Ephesians 2:14–16 is the core of Paul's gospel, Barth concluded that the ‘one new man’ in Christ not only necessitates an indissoluble solidarity between Christians and Jews, but entails that all enmities have been negated by Christ's reconciliatory work. Ironically, this conviction provoked in him an antagonism towards many of his Jewish interlocutors. Their refusal to ‘forget Auschwitz’ caused Barth to accuse them of not being sufficiently conciliatory, and in turn led him, with sadly supersessionistic logic, to eschew reconciliation with them, because he did not think they took reconciliation seriously enough.

What role has the “Old Testament” played in the self-understanding of Christians over the centuries, and what can we learn from the fact that Israel’s scriptures are often cited in early Christian texts? Using the Acts of Philip as a case study, this article argues that we should not assume all early Christian writers thought of these as “my own scriptures.” When we encounter citations from Israel’s scriptures in Christian texts, a variety of interpretive options should be considered, including the possibility that some writers saw Israel’s scriptures as “other people’s scriptures, not ours,” or would have consigned them a limited role in the Christian life, treating them as relevant for apologetics and evangelism—or for talking about apologetics and evangelism—but not for ongoing Christian discipleship. The article offers a new interpretation of Acts Phil. 5–7 and also examines Qur’anic citations in the Dialogue of Timothy I and the Caliph.

Joel Kaminsky and Mark Reasoner offered a concerted critique of N. T. Wright’s account of Israel’s election as well as Wright’s description of the apostle Paul’s messianic atonement theology. They allege that Wright treats Israel’s election as instrumental rather than intrinsic and his exegesis of Rom 5:20‒21 results in a rehearsal of anti-Jewish tropes. This essay responds to them by 1) claiming that many of their criticisms are inaccurate representations of Wright’s views; 2) defending a missional perspective of Israel’s view of election; 3) asserting that Wright’s reading of Rom 5:20 about the Torah multiplying sin within Israel is neither immoral, nor implausible, nor idiosyncratic; and 4) offering some final thoughts about Wright and Jewish-Christian relations.

This rejoinder to Michael Bird’s critique of our argument in Joel Kaminsky and Mark Reasoner, “The Meaning and Telos of Israel’s Election: An Interfaith Response to N. T. Wright’s Reading of Paul,” HTR 112 (2019) 421–46, acknowledges that Wright recognizes a dimension of intrinsic value in God’s election of Israel, while it shows how Wright’s metanarrative is not only unduly skewed toward an instrumental view of Israel’s election but also, in effect, totally redefines Israel. Our rebuttal first reiterates some of our original claims and also presents new arguments against an exegesis of Second Isaiah that portrays Israel as divinely called to bring light or Torah to the nations. Later Second Temple sources also did not understand Israel as failing to fulfill a divine call to missionize the gentiles. Bird’s own inconsistency on the mission orientation of Israel weakens his defense of Wright here. Wright’s exegesis of Rom 5:20–21 as teaching that God intentionally gave Torah to draw the world’s sins onto Israel and Bird’s defense of this on the basis of Isaiah 53 are anomalous and untenable in the light of other scholars’ readings of Romans and the rest of the New Testament. Finally, against Bird, Wright does indeed read non-Christ-confessing Jews out of Israel in a highly problematic way. Bird’s agreement with us against Wright that “all Israel” in Rom 11:26 refers to corporeal Israel strengthens our original critique of Wright’s redefinition of Israel in Rom 9–11.

N. T. Wright offers a systematic and highly influential metanarrative to account for Paul’s theology of Israel. However, Wright overlooks or underemphasizes important dimensions of Paul’s thinking, leading to problematic distortions. Thus, Wright claims that God rejected the historic people of Israel due to their failure to missionize the gentile nations, an idea not easily found in the Hebrew Bible texts Paul utilizes or in Paul’s own statements concerning his fellow Jews. Wright relies heavily on the diatribe of Rom 2 to build a Pauline theology of Israel, but he downplays the many positive things Paul says elsewhere about Israel’s status. Particularly troubling is Wright’s use of Rom 5 to argue that Paul characterizes Torah as divinely intended to draw sin onto Israel, with the expected consequence that human sin would reach its zenith within Israel, a view that moves Wright toward the very supersessionism against which Paul cautioned his gentile followers. These exegetical decisions, which form a tightly structured messiah-oriented understanding of Israel’s election, ignore what the Hebrew Bible and Paul affirm: while God accomplishes certain larger aims through Israel, God’s election of Israel is ultimately grounded in God’s inalienable love for Israel and Israel’s ancestors.

This article forms a response to Bryan Cheyette’s essay in this journal, “Against Supersessionist Thinking: Old and New, Jews and Postcolonialism, the Ghetto and Diaspora,” and focuses on the dialectics of comparing minority experiences in a climate of implicit and explicit violence toward minorities. Agreeing with Cheyette’s invocation of such threatening environments, I speak to what he characterizes as the importance of nonbinary thinking by gesturing to similar work unfolding in Black studies, specifically in the theorization of anti-Blackness and the work of Christina Sharpe. I end with a brief discussion of the Modern Jewish-Indian poet Nissim Ezekiel to focalize the practice of the comparative work between Jewish and postcolonial studies in threatening environments. I argue that Ezekiel’s approach highlights the “fluidity” and in-built multiplicity of such environments, and so undermines the seemingly rigidity of violent and singular binaries.

This essay focuses on the liberatory possibilities and political and disciplinary difficulties of bringing together Jewish and postcolonial studies. It begins and ends with Adorno’s critique of “actionism” in order to see what is lost when the clarity and certainty of political action is privileged over scholarly nuance and complexity (“praxis” over “theory”). This loss is surveyed through a set of related binaries (supersessionism, foundationalism, and disciplinarity), which, it is contended, reduces critical thinking to polemic and makes it all but impossible to explore interconnected Jewish and postcolonial histories. The argument is illustrated with reference to postcolonial literature and by examining the disciplining of postcolonial and memory studies in relation to the Holocaust. A way out of the binary impasse, it is suggested, is to utilize as “traveling concepts” transcultural and transnational histories (such as “diaspora” and “ghetto”) that Jewish and postcolonial studies have in common.

The emergence of Scriptural Reasoning (SR) as a movement and a society of scholars was made possible by the hospitality, influence and cohort of two Anglican theologians, the late Revd Daniel Hardy and Professor David Ford. In this essay, I offer a Jewish commentary on several Anglican theological dispositions that might contribute to this hospitality: among them are ‘found theology’ (as I label it), responsiveness to the powers of divine attraction, concern to repair obstructions to the healing work of the Spirit, and attentiveness to Scripture as host and source of reparative reasoning. While the primary subject of the essay is a species of Christian theology, the method of the essay emerges from a recent approach to Jewish philosophy we call ‘textual reasoning’ (TR), one of the antecedents of SR. In the style of TR, I encounter theology as a ‘disposition’, or mode of practice, displayed in particular in practices of reading and interpreting Scripture and of responding to the call of Scripture in societal action. The essay is structured as a series of brief accounts of Anglican theological dispositions, each one followed by a Jewish ‘commentary’, culminating in a sample of Anglican-Jewish dialogue as it might be overheard within a session of scriptural reasoning.