Paul the Jew, But How Jewish?

One of the more pressing questions among those who study Paul today is How Jewish he was. Which leads to the question, Did Paul observe Torah? Or, Would his fellow Jews have considered Paul a Jew? We can widen this somewhat: Did Paul expect Jewish believers to follow the Torah? Or did he expect them to go flexible on Torah observance? Did he expect Gentiles to observe those bits in the Torah that were for Gentiles, as seems the case in Acts 15:28-29?

N.T. Wright, in Paul and the Faithfulness of God, weighs in with his perspective-defining set of lines:

Contra the many “post-supersessionists” and contra the many obliteration-of-Israel approaches to Paul, NT Wright finds both continuity and discontinuity, all of it revised through Jesus as Messiah and the Spirit. By the time he’s done with this important section on Paul’s Jewish identity question, he sees a “third entity” — the church, the fulfillment of Israel in Jesus and the Spirit.

Would Paul’s Jewish contemporaries have considered him a ‘Jew’? This is not just about things that he believed. Many Jews no doubt believed many strange things, including the identification of strange people as ‘Messiahs’. But Jews then as now have seldom made niceties of ‘belief’ the main criterion. The question would have been, what was he doing, or perhaps not doing? Paul admitted people to Abraham’s family without requiring the covenant sign of circumcision. Paul spoke of the ‘temple’, referring not now to the shrine in Jerusalem but to the fellowship of Jesus-followers and even to individuals among them. Paul treated the Messiah-faith ‘family’ as an extended family, insisting on people ‘marrying within’ that family in the way he would previously have insisted on Jewish endogamy. Paul does not seem to have bothered about the sabbath, regard- ing it as something that Messiah-followers could observe or not as they chose. All this must have raised not only eyebrows but also hackles among the Jewish populations in the Diaspora.

Notoriously, Paul went further. He shared table fellowship with non-Jews who were Messiah-believers. If that caused problems even for Peter and Barnabas, as it seems to have done (we can hardly suppose that Paul invented the awkward ‘Antioch incident’ out of thin air), we can be sure that it would have caused serious problems for the young Saul of Tarsus. He advised the Messiah-people in Corinth to accept dinner invitations from anyone and everyone, and to eat unquestioningly what was provided, the only exception being if someone’s conscience was still ‘weak’ at the thought of eating idol-meat. Not only, then, did he advocate eating with uncircumcised and even with unbelieving Gentiles, but on an apparently straightforward reading of the relevant passages (we shall discuss them further in a moment) he advocated, in principle, eating their non-kosher food, on the scriptural grounds that ‘the earth and its fullness belong to the lord’. Since it is clear from the discussions in both 1 Corinthians 8—10 and Romans 14—15 that Paul considered himself emphatically among the ‘strong’ who were happy to see the world this way, as opposed to the ‘weak’ who still had scruples (to whom he none the less deferred where appropriate), it would appear not only that Paul was advising Gentile Christians in Corinth to eat non-kosher food but that he was happy to do so himself, and that he was happy to see other ‘Jewish Christians’ following this pattern. And at this point some today might say, as some of his contemporaries certainly did, that he had stopped being a ‘Jew’ altogether. He had abandoned the most basic markers of Jewish identity.

Above all, there is Galatians 2. Right after saying ‘We are Jews by birth, not “Gentile sinners”’, Paul proceeds with a radical but of redefinition: ‘But we know that a person is not declared “righteous” by works of the Jewish law, but through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah’. Then, in the most dramatic of redefinitions (in a passage we have studied many times already but which remains strangely absent from the discussions of those who want to claim that Paul remained a ‘Torah-observant’ Jew), he says, ‘Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God,’ explaining that this has come about through his co-crucifixion with the Messiah. How much clearer do things need to be? (1428-1430)

This is heavy stuff in the contemporary scholarly scene. Wright is not backing down.

1433: And the upshot of it all is that if one were to accuse Paul of no longer observing Torah, he would roundly declare that though he had come out from under the rule of Torah, ‘dying to it’ by being co-crucified with the Messiah, the spirit-driven life in the Messiah was in fact the true Torah-observance, the thing towards which Deuteronomy had been pointing all along. It led, not least, to the deep and heart-felt keeping of the Shema: one God, therefore one people of God.

A few pages later, from 1446:

A strong case can be made, following Sanders and others, for seeing Paul himself as advocating, if not the phrase ‘third race’ itself, nevertheless some- thing approaching it. Sechrest concludes ‘that Pauline theology constructs a change in religious belief and practice as a change in ethno-racial identity’. The evidence for this is scattered across several sections of the present book. It is already present when Paul speaks in Galatians 3 of Abraham’s single family, his ‘heirs’, marked out by Messiah-faith. A good deal of what we argued in chapter 10, and in the last section of chapter 11, is heading in this direction. But the notion comes into full view, quite sharply, in two or three key passages. The first is the one with which we closed the previous sub- section:

Jews look for signs, you see, and Greeks search for wisdom; but we announce the crucified Messiah, a scandal to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike, the Messiah – God’s power and God’s wisdom. God’s folly is wiser than humans, you see, and God’s weakness is stronger than humans.

This spectacular little passage compresses a great deal into epigrammatic form. Above all it emphasizes something often neglected in the relevant discussions: that the focus of Paul’s life and work is not a ‘system’, not a ‘religion’, not an attempt to forge a new social reality in and of itself, but a person: the crucified Messiah. All else is defined in relation to him. Any attempt to water down the ‘scandal’ that this posed for Jews, or the ‘folly’ that it presented to Greeks, is a large step away from Paul.

This opening statement in 1 Corinthians already means that those who belong to the Messiah are defined, are given an ‘identity’ if we must use the term, that is (a) rooted in Israel’s Messiah, and hence in that sense inalien- ably ‘Jewish’, but (b) redefined around the crucified and risen Messiah and hence in that sense inalienably ‘scandalous’ to Jews. Rooted and redefined: continuity and discontinuity. Those are the classic marks of Paul’s thought and life. And those are the ways in which he thought of the Messiah’s people. They remain Abraham’s family: ‘our fathers’, he says to the mostly gentile Corinthian Christians, came out of Egypt with Moses. The Corinthians used to be ‘Gentiles’ but are now no longer (12.2). But for Jews, like Paul, the rule is: ‘I am crucified with the Messiah’. Scandalous. A third entity.