Christianity
Paul, Jews, Judaizers
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 11 March 2008
Paul’s Anti-Jewishness
Revisionists of Christianity, like John G Gager, are busy trying to paint out the blots there are in the Christian picture of S Paul, most particularly his anti-Jewishness. Of course, Paul the apostle is not always easy to understand. He often writes obscurely and often seems to contradict himself. Some—mainly Christians—say he was a fine rabbinic scholar. Others—mainly Jews—say he was a rabbinical tyro much influenced by the popular religious fads of the day. Then the very thing Christians like about him, his sudden mystical conversion from being anti-Christian to being more important than Christ himself in Christianity, makes him look—to the dispassionate onlooker who evolves rather than suffers mental fissure—to be emotionally unstable or even neurotic. Naturally Christians cannot see it.
To all intents and purposes, S Paul rejected Judaism to become a Christian. That is what Christians have believed these last 2000 years. Today, Christians are not Jews or vice versa, and the split was effected by Paul. Before him, the Jews and Christians had not split. Mostly, Christians were still Jews. Christianity per se did not exist, though few modern Christians seem to notice. Now, the revisers say Paul was not a splitter from Judaism, he was not a Jewish apostate and did not hate the Jews. How could he? He was one!
Yet it is plain from the New Testament itself that Paul had disagreements with the apostles chosen by Jesus to succeed him, and with the so-called Brother of the Lord, James, who was the head of the Jerusalem Church after the crucifixion. He was even called the apostle of the heretics. This is the man who is now more important to Christians, theologically speaking, than God Himself, if it was God who spoke directly to humanity as the man who was crucified and titled Jesus Christ. Paul was so heretical that he succeeded in getting Christians to ignore the words that fell from God’s own mouth, and to ignore God’s own human acts in favour of a tortured scheme of mystical atonement imitating popular paganism.
Contradictions in Paul's Writing
It is charges like these that the revisionists have to defend against, and the plain evidence of Paul’s own writings that they have to overcome. Paul’s letters are full of manifest rejections of Jews and Judaism, and even certain wild accusations against them. Gager (Reinventing Paul, 2000) lists:
For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse.Gal 3:10
Now it is evident that no man is justified before God by the lawGal 3:11
For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.Gal 6.15
For no human being will be justified in his sight by works of the law, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.Rom 3:20
Israel who pursued righteousness which is based on the law did not succeed in fulfilling that law.Rom 9:31
As regards the gospel, they are enemies of God, for your sake.Rom 11:28
But their minds were hardened; for to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away. Yes, to this day, whenever Moses is read a veil lies over their mind; but when a man turns to the Lord the veil is removed.2 Cor 3:14f
Others point to passages that seem to refute these views and suggest a lasting affection for Judaism and sympathy for the Jews. Gager now lists:
What is the advantage of the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision? Much in every way.Rom 3:1
Do we overthrow the law through faith? By no means. On the contrary, we uphold the law.Rom 3:31
What shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means.Rom 7:7
Thus the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good.Rom 7:12
To the Israelites belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the Temple, and the promises. To them belong the patriarchs and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ.Rom 9:4
Has god rejected his people? By no means.Rom 11:1
All Israel will be saved.Rom 11:26
Is the law then against the promises of God. Certainly not!Gal 3:21
Pharisee of the Pharisees
Scholars of all persuasions have been bewildered by these glaring contradictions, and many Jewish ones have been unable to find any proper evidence of developed rabbinic belief among the confusion. It is, of course, a claim of the New Testament and even the epistles of Paul himself that he was a “Pharisee of the Pharisees”, but in view of his antics and unrabbinic, albeit Jewish, ways of arguing, must the New Testament be accepted on this? How could a Pharisee trained by Gamaliel say such foul things about the Jewish law and about Jews?
The claim is never doubted by Christians but there are reasons why the claim could have been made, though false. Pharisaism became Judaism after the Jewish War and Paul’s death. Christians at this later date could have known Judaism only as Pharisaism—rabbinism. So the dichotomy between Christianity and Judaism, which arose after Paul, became an opposition of Christianity and Pharisaism. To this day, it has been a general assumption that mainstream Judaism of Jesus’s time was Pharisaism, though it could equally have been Essenism, or there could have been no mainstream, because the religion was spallated into many competing sects, of which Essenism and Pharisaism, besides the official priesthood of the Sadducees, were the largest.
This latter important Jewish sect—the Sadducees, the temple functionaries and their supporters, effectively the Jewish nobility—became redundant, and was destroyed, when the Romans closed the temple after the war. Paul was a leader of an official gang hunting the Nazarenes after the crucifixion of Jesus. It was the Sadducees who had the official gangs, the temple guards, not the Pharisees who were respected as scholars, teachers and diplomats, not as thugs. Paul could only have been acting for the Sadducees, if he was acting officially within Judaism, or he was acting directly for the Roman occupiers. Perhaps Paul would have claimed to have been a “Sadducee of the Sadducees” in readily doing their dirty work, and even too perhaps as an agent of the Romans, since the Sadducees were protected by the Romans and supported them.
In making the claim before the temple closed, Paul was claiming to be a Jewish ruler and noble, and a friend of the Romans. When the temple closed, Sadducees were left unemployed and destitute. They had to find alternative ways of making a living, and many could well have chosen to become Christians. Paul had preceded them at an earlier date, but now his claim to be a “Sadducee of the Sadducees” meant nothing when they were no longer the aristocracy of Jewish society. There were no Sadducees, and there was no temple. The nobility of the Jews had been scattered into the diaspora, and Judaism had become Pharisaism.
Only minor editorial adjustments were needed in Christian texts to make Paul into a Pharisee, and therefore make his conversion meaningful again to the Christians who knew Judaism only as Pharisaism. In many places in the gospels, Sadducee was changed to Pharisee, and even in some places the questions of Jesus’s own disciples were made to come from inquisitive Pharisees, trying to trap the messiah into error, when they could not have been present. Only in a few places was Sadducee left, as more appropriate or by careless editing.
In short, Paul’s attitude to the law is only particularly baffling if he is believed when he claims to be a rabbinic scholar. As a self admitted boaster, he possibly made the claim anyway, but the reasons to doubt it seem sound. That he was not a rabbi does not mean he was ignorant of Jewish tradition. Like many modern Christian converts, he was an enthusiastic amateur seeking an appropriate role for his ambitions, talents and obsessions. Like Josephus, he seems to have looked closely at different Jewish sects, opting for employment with the richest one, but then saw a better opportunity with the scattered Nazarenes, many of whom, like him, were Hellenized Jews who had fled, or returned, abroad after the uprising led by Jesus. He saw a chance to evangelize among them, and the Jerusalem Church seemed glad to be shot of a potentially dangerous troublemaker.
Judaizers
George Foote Moore reckons that Paul’s arguments rest on premises “alien to Jewish thought and repugnant to its spirit”. His answer to the conundrum of Paul is that he was not arguing in general about Judaism, but was specifically targetting the enemies even the bible shows him facing, the properly appointed apostles of Jesus speaking against him, whom Christians label as Judaizers. It might be comforting to the Christian conscience that Paul stood up against Judaizing apostles who must have been agents of Satan in their eyes, but the only apostles Christianity officially had were the ones appointed by Christ directly, or people appointed by them in the apostolic succession… Oh, and Paul who appointed himself.
The impression given by Christianity—or rather Paul’s version of it as it has come down to us—is that God, incarnated in the flesh, had accidentally appointed a load of imbeciles as apostles, so had to rush back in the spirit to appoint Paul to correct the errors the original apostles were making. It seems utterly absurd, but it is what Christians believe in their conviction that the more impossible or absurd any claim is, the more true it must be. Anyway, there is no doubt that Paul was defying apostles directly in line with those appointed by Christ, if not indeed, some of them actually appointed by him, such as Peter.
Given then that the Judaizers were really the apostles appointed by Christ, and Paul alleged that Christ had appointed him too, albeit a bit fishily, who was right in the dispute? We know that Christianity has opted for Paul, but Peter and the so-called Judaizers had every reason to think they knew what Jesus had taught better than anyone else. After all, they had lived with him and minstered with him for several years. Paul made his claim to know what Christ taught because he had received it in dreams or ecstatic visions, an all together superior way of knowing anything Christians have believed since. Paul had the bigger audience once he had abandoned the law, and won converts all the more easily, until eventually the Judaizers died out and only Paulists—Christians—remained. Christians had backed Paul with his easy message against the apostles of God with a harder one. Who then is saved?
This division, revisers say, is the source of the confusion in Paul’s writing. He is not attacking Judaism, but the Christian Judaizers, the followers of Christ! Though the dispute is the basis of modern Christianity, the winning doctrine of sole fide was nothing that Christ had taught. Paul invented the notion that faith alone was sufficient for salvation. Christians frantically scream that it was what Christ taught too, but they remain ignorant by putting their faith in ministers and priests who interpret the bible for them as the easiest ways of extracting dollar bills from the impoverished.
Simply reading the early gospels, the synoptic ones written in a simple and homely style—deliberately easy for ordinary people to understand themselves—reveals that God as Christ taught nothing at all like faith alone. Yes, faith was essential—faith in God and His mercy—but faith alone was not sufficient for salvation. It simply cannot be disputed by reference to the genuine words of God, the ones that fell from his own mouth, Christians supposedly believe. Christ is quite explicit about what is necessary for salvation. It is not sole fide!
Christ told a rich young man who specifically asked him what he had to do to be saved. Christ replied that he had to obey the law—the gospels say “commandments”, meaning all of God’s commandments not just the ten the Christians accept. The young man, said he already did, and so Christ elaborated that he had to give his wealth to the poor, and follow him. That he said he could not do, and Christ, in an unmistakeable metaphor, taught that the rich could not be saved. The rich young man’s refusal proved that he put his wealth before his faith, and that was typically the reaction of the rich. Nor can it be dismissed as Christians do as an aberation because he repeats it over again in several different ways, the simplest being that no one could serve both God and mammon, this latter word, deliberately left untranslated to leave the clear meaning obscure, is the Phœnician and Syriac (Aramaean) for wealth.
Faith was necessary according to Christ, but no one who put riches first had any faith. The Christian God taught that Christians had to do something. They had to have faith, no doubt, but it was not sufficient. Christians had to show they had it, and the necessary criteria Christ offered, in extensive sermons like the Sermon on the Mount, included love and poverty.
The Law
What then of the law? According to Paul, Christians had no law to obey. The law was for the Jews, and this is where the revisionists come in. Paul did not deny that the law was for the Jews but it was not for his own converts. Whether Jews or gentiles, they were saved by faith, and all of Paul’s tirades against the Jews were really against the apostles of Christ trying to tell them the truth about what Christ had taught.
Paul may rest all on faith but still maintain the validity of the Jewish faith including the Torah. That would be in keeping with the mature rabbinic view of the second century that salvation for Jew or gentile alike is based upon righteousness and repentance.Alan Segal
Why Segal has to pick out “the mature rabbinic view of the second century” when Paul was teaching a hundred or more years earlier is puzzling, unless it is to obscure the obvious fact that it is the view plainly expressed by John the Baptist then by his successor, Jesus Christ, in the Christian gospels before Paul taught anything. Both called sinners to repentance. Sinners were the lost sheep. The sheep already in the fold—those already saved—were the righteous.
Again there is no doubting it. Sinners are not saved, because they have sinned. They have done bad things, contrary to God’s will. The righteous have obeyed the law and followed God’s will, so they are saved. Sinners had to repent sincerely to be saved, then continue their lives in righteousness! Indeed, all can still rest on faith—it is necessary, but is not sufficient. How can it be sufficient when righteousness or sincere repentance was necessary too? The teaching of Christ and the Baptist were unequivocal, but what of Paul?
The revisionists say he allowed the Jews to be saved by the law… as long, that is, as he had not taught them otherwise. Law to a Jew identifies with righteousness. It is God’s own measure of righteousness. Righteousness is obedience to the law. Paul argues at length that faith can replace the law, but he sometimes seems to add works. Thus he agrees with Christ in some places that love of others embodies the law, and he also lists sins that meant damnation, and elsewhere lists rules for living righteously. He abolished the law and replaced it with his own rules! So, it is certain that even for Paul faith was not enough in practice, though he goes on and on suggesting it is. Faith was not enough for God, so, if Christ is God, the apostle who teaches against him is the apostle of Satan.
Was Paul Misunderstood?
Yet the revisers seem to want Paul not to have suggested any split with Judaism, even though everyone thought he had. Paul’s message included the mutual rejection of God and the Jews, and God’s adoption instead of the Christians as the new Israel. It has been the dominant Christian view held by everyone who wants to be a Christian, and it was Paul’s view, they say. The revisionists say it was all a mistake because Paul was only castigating Judaizers within his sect of the Nazarenes.
When the small numbers of Jewish Christians were dispersed into Arabia, they were effectively lost to the Roman world, and therefore to the gentile church which became increasingly dominated by Paul’s sect, which quickly misunderstood that the Jewish references in Paul’s polemics were not intended as general ones. And it suited them because Jews were unpopular with Romans, and Christians had some trouble throwing off the associations they had with the Jews, and particularly with Jewish rebellion. Paul became the Christian theologian of anti-Judaism.
Jewish scholars, as already noted, cannot often see rabbinical scholarship in Paul, and that would not be surprising if Paul never was a Pharisee. Buber and Schoeps did not see his arguments as rabbinical, but rather as impure Hellenized Judaism at best, such as that a Jew brought up in a great Hellenistic city might be expected to follow, and Klausner and Montefiore, among others, concur. In any event, Paul was not so devoutly attached to Judaism as a Pharisee would be. He chose to missionize Hellenized Jews and gentiles in the Greek world because he understood them, and the problems the law offered them in an alien environment. That is why he was the apostle to the gentiles, and that is why he found it easy to abandon the law with little compunction or sentiment. Dying and rising gods were popular in Greek cities, and so were demi-gods and mystery cults. Paul melded these with what he liked in Essenic Judaism and it proved a potent and popular brew.
The Jewish prophets had preached God’s message of repentance. If any sinner was sincerely repentant, then God forgave him his past sins. God still loved His wayward children and was merciful towards them, but having wiped the slate clean, the repentant sinner was meant to keep it clean. Any further sin immediately left its mark on the clean slate. Christ and John the Baptist were pious Jews expecting the world to end, and their message to Jews was that of the Jewish prophets—repent and avoid sin to enter God’s kingdom.
A Law Unto Death
It was not what Paul taught. As Jewish scholar, H J Schoeps, observed, Paul (Rom 8:2-3; Gal 3:21) declared the law to be “a law unto death” and not the measure of God’s will. Is Paul really saying the law is death for the Jews? For 2000 years Christians have believed it, but now that Jews are politically important to Americans, Christian revisionists have a different story. It is that Paul had one set of rules for Jews—the law—and another set of rules—the atoning sacrifice of Christ—for gentiles. Not that this opportunism necessarily means the Pauline revisers are wrong.
They are not entirely wrong. Paul’s audience was Hellenized Jews. The godfearing gentiles were caught up in his preaching, but were not his original audience. Hellenized Jews were Jews! They were notionally subject to the law but had little chance of living according to it. Yet Paul points out (Gal 3:10) that the Jew is cursed who does not do the words of the law (Dt 27:26). So, quite unable to observe the law in their everyday lives, the law was “a law unto death” for Hellenized Jews. As Jews who did not observe the law, they were sinners by definition, and so were doomed, or rather damned. Faith in the salvific death of Christ relieved them of this worry.
Naturally godfearers in the synagogues heard Paul’s message too, and it was just as important to them. They no longer needed even to take up the minimal law of Noah prescribed for gentiles, if indeed these laws in the Talmud applied as early as this. In fact, circumcision is not among them, yet gentiles seemed to require to be circumcised at this time, and that was a fearful operation for adult converts. There were more than ten times as many gentiles as Jews in the Roman empire, so the emerging audience for Paul was vastly greater. So it was that Paul founded Christianity.
Jesus was an orthodox Essenic Jew, and so were his disciples. They preached the message of repentance followed by a life free of sin—obedience to the law. It is these orthodox followers of Christ that are the Judaizers of Galatians—Paul’s enemies. The Pauline revisers think Paul had no thought of starting a new religion, but he would have had to be brainless to have such a view and act the way he did. Like the revisers, Paul was an opportunist. He knew from experience that Jews in the wider empire could not practically observe the law conscientiously. It was hard enough to do in the tiny camps of wilderness Essenes, as Paul probably knew, having failed his three years’ as a novice. History was on his side, though, when he combined Hellenism and Judaism into Pauline Christianity.
Certainly Paul could have considered that pious Jews who managed to stick obediently to the law remained God’s elect, but God had a new standard, and those who adopted it were God’s new elect. Impious Hellenized Jews living in a Hellenized world could not change back to the old legalistic standard, so God had provided a new one, and Paul was adamant that Hellenized Jews and godfearing gentiles had no need to revert to the old one. It was entirely pragmatic, entirely opportunistic—but it was not what God had Himself taught when He took the trouble to incarnate as a man and speak to humanity directly.
Apostle to the Gentiles
Acts is clear that Paul preached in synagogues, yet his self-appointed title is “apostle to the gentiles”. Of course, any gentiles he was likely to convert were already godfearers, and attended synagogues in that capacity, but would the president of any synagogue allow a man to preach blasphemy to people being groomed as potential converts? The synagogues evidently were ready to receive him, at least initially, and, if we are to believe his own story, they accepted him as an envoy of the Jerusalem church. So, these synagogues were Essenic synagogues, evidently having some affiliation with the church of James the Just, whose permission Paul claimed to have in preaching to the nations, subject to certain conditions. Paul broke the conditions and that is why James had to send out the actual disciples of Jesus, such as Peter, to try to undo the mischief of Paul.
The very word “synagogue” might not have been a general place of worship of Jews, but specifically a place for Essenes to assemble. The split of Christianity from Judaism left synagogues associated with Jews generally in the mind of Christians, and so it remained. Moreover, the word translated “gentile” from the Greek is the word ethnos used in the Septuagint to translate the Hebrew goyim, meaning “nations”, the nations of other people living outside of Judah.
Besides ethnos, the New Testament uses another word translated as gentile. It is Hellene, which means “Greek”. In fact, in the New Testament, “gentile” most often means “Greek”, so Paul was “the apostle to the Greeks”. But the Greeks meant were actually Jews! How so? Because it meant Hellenized Jews, the Jews who lived among the nations, among the gentiles.
The clearest evidence is that in Acts of the Apostles a dispute arose over the widows of the Greeks and the Jews, the Greek widows feeling left out. These widows were the widows of the rebels who had died in the uprising against the Romans skated over in the gospels, and the Greeks were Jews, but were Hellenized, Greek speaking Jews, who were less observant than “Jews”, the local Jews who spoke Aramaic and were observant. The same is true of Paul’s designation and duties. He was not sent out to convert non-Jews but to bring back into observance the Hellenized Jews called Greeks. Thus “the apostle to the gentiles” was not necessarily an apostle designated as a preacher to to non-Jews, but a preacher who travelled and taught apostate Jews living in other countries.
Acts of the Apostles has a largely apologetic purpose, to harmonize the differences between Paul and Christ’s appointed apostles, and to emphasize Paul as by far the most important of them all, as apostle to the gentiles. The expression is suitably misleading, implying that he was sent out to convert non-Jews, when that was merely incidental to his original mission, even if historically it became the important aspect of it. Godfearers indeed did receive Paul’s message as gladly as the stumbling Hellenized Jews, and in a few decades Paul’s new religion was appealing exclusively to gentiles proper in the Roman empire. Certainly Paul’s clashes with Judaizers involved the circumcision of converts, necessary according to Abrahamic tradition, but not according to Paul.
Who Were Paul's Bitter Enemies?
The “men from Judaea” (Acts 15:1) and Paul’s opponents, the apostles of Galatians and Philippians, taught that circumcision was necessary for salvation. It does not obviously contradict the idea that uncircumcised gentiles could participate in the life of the synagogue. The plain idea was that godfearers could join to learn the praxis of Judaism as half proselytes, leading eventually to circumcision and full proselyte status for those who were suitable and fully convinced. A third century inscription from Aphrodisias in Anatolia refers to a “committee of ten students of the law and those who fervently praise God”. The Jewish quorum is of ten men (minyan) and is now no less rabbinic than Essenic, and indeed is mentioned often as the ten men of renown in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Among the members of this minyan in the Aphrodisias synagogue were Jews, proselytes and godfearers. Jews comprised the three fully Jewish castes of Priests, Levites and Israelites, but presumably the priests and Levites were present in name only after the destruction of the temple, and so only Jews were specified as such. Yet even still, the caste order is maintained in Jewish liturgical precedence.
Acts depicts Paul as concentrating on the godfearers, but the later church will have wanted to suggest that gentiles were always his main target. Moreover it also suggests that Paul was opposed to Jews, another view that suited the later church. 1 Thessalonians 2 gives the same impression, and opponents are mentioned as “hindering us from addressing the gentiles that they be saved”. Apostate or semi-apostate Jews (Greeks) could more appropriately have been meant. Christians also began to claim to be the true Israel, citing Paul.
Paul might well have been less anti Jewish than the church later made him out to be, taking advantage of the lack of clarity in his letters, but his stance was untenable if it were really some sort of happy medium. Essentially, he must have been preaching one law for Hellenized Jews and gentiles, and another, the law of Moses, for devout Jews, if the revisers are to be believed. If it is true, neither side was likely to have accepted the other as its equal, and it is most likely that Paul knew it. His acknowledgement of equality for the law of Moses as the mode of salvation for Jews seems likely to have been opportunistic—he did not want to antagonize unnecessarily the Jewish leaders whom he needed for access to the backsliders. He was being all things to all men—Jew to Jew and Greek to Greek. In reality, he was keen to keep to himself the converts he had made to the new religion he had created, and he desperately opposed the attempts by Peter, James, Barnabas and others—all delegates from the proper and original church in Jerusalem—to bring him back to the path of Essene orthodoxy.
The revisers are right that misunderstanding has occurred because the ancients did not have our more precise system of punctuation. Thus Paul would adopt a rhetorical voice to argue a point, yet this has been overlooked because his amanuenses have not indicated it by quotation marks as we now would. When he seems to write, “I was living without the law”, was he making a personal confession, or arguing the part of an illustrative character in his argument? Modern revisers see his character as being once a non-Jew, but non-Jews could not have been concerned with the law. It was more likely to have been a guilt ridden Hellenized Jew anguishing that he could not observe the law as a Jew should. He was the cursed one.
The disciples of James from the Jerusalem Church taught:
Unless you are circumcvised, according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.Acts 15:1
Paul had no respect for this view and no Christian politeness for these envoys of James, writing:
Look out for the dogs, look out for the evil workers, look out for the mutilators of the flesh.Php 3:2-3
Gager writes that, judging by the narrative in in Galatians 2:11-14, the teachers, who had bewitched (Gal 3:1) and had amazed Paul in their success in persuading (Gal 1:6) his Galatian converts, were “false brethren” so were fellow Nazarenes (Christians), “men from James” the Just, leader of the Jerusalem Church, and Peter himself. Paul rages that “those who receive circumcision do not themselves keep the whole law” (Gal 6:13), and “everyone who receives circumcision is bound to keep the whole law” (Gal 5:3). Plainly Paul is here recommending that no one accept circumcision because it commits them to the law, and that he wants to avoid, but it also condemns the Judaizers themselves as blatantly selective in their observance.
The gospels say Jesus abrogated the law, something contrary to his own statements and so unlikely, but what was likely is that he meant his followers not to slavishly follow the law at personal risk to their lives. In such risky circumstances, pureness of heart and intent saved them from the consequernces of an unavoidable lapse. It was no abrogation of the law but a pragmatic measure for men who might find themselves in desperate circumstances and facing a dilemma of conscience. Then, when proper observance meant danger, they were relieved of the duty of observance as a temporary measure. In previous recent history, Jews had refused to fight on the sabbath and been massacred.
Paul, if he knew of it, took it to be a total abrogation of the law for Hellenized Jews who were in a position where practical observance was impossible, though no immediate risk was involved. For Paul, the risk of damnation was much greater and justified his new dispensation. He argued that his was the correct interpretation and Peter, James and the other false brethren were hypocrites, even saying they were “from the Pharisees”, the Jewish party considered to be archetypal hypocrites by Jesus and the Essenes generally.
Peter in Antioch ignored the taboo on table fellowship with gentiles, presumabnly as too impracticable under the circumstances, but then was persuaded by other brethren from James that he was in error, and he refused table fellowship with those who were not observing the law—Hellenized Jews.
It is not only James in his epistle in the New Testament who criticises Paul. The author of 2 Peter also does (2 Peter 3:15f), saying that Paul wrote words that were hard to understand and which “the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction”. It is ambiguous, as the bible often is. Is it that because it was hard to understand, the interpreters tortured the text, distorting it further, and innocently getting the wrong meaning to their own cost, or that they used the obscurity of the text deliberately to twist it because it did not suit them, thus getting something that did suit them, but the wrong one. Christians have often committed both of these errors with little concern as long as they liked the interpretation that emerged. Paul’s message could have been right or wrong, but his obscurity gave every opportunity to exegetes to get what they liked.
Reinterpreting Actuality
The thesis of these pages is that the early church consistently reinterpreted the “news” from Judaea emerging with expatriate Jews displaced by Roman punitive measures. The purpose was to make the “news” acceptable, and therefore “good”! The destruction of a Roman legion by the Galilean rebels became the exorcism of a legion of demons. But the banner of the legion was even known, it was a boar, so they demons were sent into swine to destroy themselves. A famous Jewish victory was converted into a magic trick—a puzzling miracle.
Paul was similarly deliberately misinterpreted. Either he did not bring the correct message of the Christ, hardly surprising when he did not know him, or the church read Paul as it wanted to. Either way, the outcome was not the proper and original message of Christ, as anyone with a brain cell can see by reading the gospels and comparing it with what their priests and pastors tell them.
In Romans 1:18-32, Paul catalogues the sins of the gentiles, though he soon includes Jews too in specifying salvation under the law. Then as Gager and the revisers point out, he turns to address a rhetorical opponent—one of those of the Jerusalem Church he had accused of hypocrisy by calling them Pharisees. Christians have always understood it to be a general attack on Jews as hypocrites (Romans 2:1ff). Jewish contemporary scholars did not offer any concessions to backsliding, and nor did the leader of the Jerusalem Church, but the footsoldiers of the Nazarenes perhaps too easily used Jesus’s advice that they should not risk their lives to observe the law as an excuse for avoiding observance when it was merely inconvenient. Paul highlighted their hypocrisy, though they will have felt justified by Christ. They will have felt secure in their own heartfelt knowledge that they were not abrogating the law, but were being simply pragmatic about it pro tem. Paul, on the other hand, was openly flouting the law on the grounds that it was no longer necessary, and he too perhaps felt justified in his view.
The revisionists try to have their cake and eat it. Paul was not flouting the law for Jews, they say, only for gentiles, but many of Paul’s gentiles were Jews anyway, at least initially—near apostate Hellenized Jews who found it impracticable to observe the law, but felt guilty and fearful about it. He was telling them—Jews—they had no need to bother about the law, for the new dispensation of Christ abrogated its necessity. Hearers of this message among the godfearers felt equally relieved that circumcision was no longer obligatory. So, Paul was indeed advocating the flouting of the law for those Hellenes—Greek Jews—the Greeks of Acts—often the “gentiles” of the New Testament!
He might well have been ready to recognize that pious observant Jews were already saved by their piety before the law. Like Christ pushing the message that he was concerned for the lost sheep—the apostates and sinners—not those who were devout, Paul taught that his new vision of a redeemer Christ—a Hellenistic concept—saved the Hellenized Jews and even non-Jews, but those already saved by their righteousness remained saved without any need of appealing to Christ.
Equally, in Romans 2:12-16, gentiles proper, knowing nothing of any law, are saved by naturally being righteous, and having a pure heart and a clear conscience at Judgement day. No mention here of faith at all, simply doing the right thing. Indeed, the implication of this short passage is that neither faith nor law is needed for salvation. Living righteously does the trick. Most of us who live honest lives without religion will concur with Paul here!
That being so, the faith Paul is urging on Christians seems to be the equivalent of repentance for sin. If someone is naturally good, naturally righteous, then they need no salvation. If they are devout observers of the law, they need none. But if they are sinners they had better put their faith in Christ, and practice loving others!
The fact remained, though, that because faith in Christ saved even sinners, even the devoutly observant need not spend their days worrying about the law. They could take the nostrum Paul offered and live less angst ridden lives. It is all very well except for one thing. It is not what God taught when He appeared in person as a man on earth.
So Did He Flout the Law?
Gager points out that Paul in Galatians 4:12 urges his converts to “become like me, for I have become like you”. He is confessing pretty clearly that he no longer needed to to observe the law any more than they did, and, indeed, he did not. He practiced what he preached, and the message was directed at Hellenized Greeks for, if he were a genuine Jew, he could not be like a gentile, but he could easily be like a Hellenized, non-observing Jew. He began as one. There is at least consistency in this, though he ought, if he were an observant Jew as he claimed, to have been confident of his own salvation through that, assuming the revisionists are right about his dual salvation theory. He had no such dual theory. He proves that he believed that observance of the law was unnecessary, and he readily gave up his vaunted Jewish piety for his new conviction that his theory of salvation by faith in the body of Christ was sound.
In justification of his views, Paul often quoted scripture, though his scriptural citations were also obscure. Gager cites Harold Bloom:
Paul is so careless, hasty and inattentive as a reader of the Hebrew bible that he rarely gets any text right.
Partly, it will be because Paul had trained as an Essene for three years, if that is the meaning of his three years in Arabia. Essene exegesis was a curious business, being based on many connexions we would regard as spurious including puns, analogy, word association, and indeed almost any chance similarity that the exegete noticed. Equally, Essenes were indifferent to precise citation of texts, being quite ready to make changes, usually relatively minor, but sometimes even merging different passages to make the sense they were seeking.
Christians originally were similar, and scriptural citations in the New Testament are often far from precise. Paul was much more one of this school. He was no rabbi, nor Pharisee of the Pharisees, unless he meant it self deprecatingly. Pharisees were hypocrites to Christ, and so the Pharisee of the Pharisees would be the arch hypocrite, a frank restatement of being all things to all men.
At the end of it all, Paul was like Christ in one important respect. Both expected the end of the World, and both were wrong. The End was not nigh and no one needed saving, anyway!
