Was Paul a Jew?
A new generation of scholars argues that the apostle long considered the progenitor of anti-Semitism never left his religion
| 7:00 am Nov 11, 2009 | Print | Email / Share
The apostle's many faces
CREDIT: Clockwise from top left: Rembrandt; statue from church in the Dolomites; Valentin de Boulogne or Nicolas Tournier; statue from Cathedral Notre Dame in Amiens; Greek mosaic; Weckmann; El Greco; statue from 16th century Austrian altar
Jews don’t like the apostle Paul. Jesus they can live with; he was a good-hearted rebbe whose words were twisted to say things he didn’t mean. But Paul was the twister, and can’t be forgiven. “Jesus, yes; Paul, never!” as one Jewish biographer of Paul puts it. As a zealous convert who equated the Torah with death, Paul is deemed the father of anti-Judaism (the theological critique of Judaism as a religion), the grandfather of anti-Semitism (the hatred of Jews as people), and the inventor of the theology of the Cross (an excuse for many massacres of Jews). Even Friedrich Nietzsche, no friend of the Jews, said Paul “falsified the history of Israel so as to make it appear as a prologue to his mission” and was “the genius in hatred, in the standpoint of hatred, and in the relentless logic of hatred.”
Me, I came late to the Jewish dislike of Paul. I loved the Paul I read in college, the one who taught St. Augustine and Martin Luther and Pascal and Kierkegaard how to gaze ruefully into their divided selves. This was the Paul who wrote, like a Freudian neurotic, “For what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I.” I was well into my 30s when I discovered the unpalatable Paul. One night over maybe a third glass of wine, I proposed a book about Paul to an editor friend. My Paul would be a precursor to modern assimilationist Jews—embarrassed by Judaism, dismissive of his yeshivish education, fiendishly good at reading texts against themselves, a little too eager to please the goyim. My friend laughed at what he took to be my stab at provocativeness. “Judith,” he said gently, “you can’t defend Paul as a Jew.”
But now it seems that you can. Just as historians studying Jesus have uncovered a more Jewish version over the past 50 years or so by trying to understand him as a creature of his own place and time (first-century Palestine in the grip of apocalyptic fever), so a new generation of Pauline revisionists have discovered a more Jewish Paul, a product of the same place and time. Paul Was Not a Christian is the title of a book published this fall; what he was—and never stopped being—according to New Testament scholar Pamela Eisenbaum and the revisionists she echoes was a law-abiding Jew. He never converted to Christianity, because no such religion existed in his day. (Paul came along shortly after Jesus died.) All Paul did was switch his affiliation from one Jewish denomination to another, from Pharisaism to Jesus-ism. (Some other recent works of Paul revisionism include Reinventing Paul by John G. Gager, What Paul Meant by Garry Wills, and Paul Among the People by Sarah Ruden, which is coming out in February.)
Paul didn’t nullify Jewish law, nor did he, as Luther would claim later, place grace above works (that is, to paraphrase crudely, the acceptance of Jesus over the performance of mitzvot), or justification by faith above justification by law (being seen as righteous by God by virtue of your belief, rather than by virtue of your good deeds). Or rather, Paul did do those things—a less Lutheran version of them, anyway—but he didn’t mean for the whole world to do them, too. He attacked Jewish law only in the context of a very narrow debate raging in the earliest decades of the Jesus movement. Some Jewish Jesus-movement activists said that their pagan acolytes had to convert to Judaism before they could join the movement. Paul disagreed in the strongest possible terms (he did everything in the strongest possible terms). He maintained that these gentiles had to follow only the pre-rabbinic equivalent of the Noahide laws—the seven edicts against idolatry, adultery, etc., that all non-Jews are expected to follow. After hearing Jesus’ call—the first and still greatest revisionist, Krister Stendahl, insists that Paul experienced a call, in the manner of a Protestant minister, not a conversion—Paul took it upon himself to roam Asia Minor and preach the gospel to gentiles, and he so opposed their becoming Torah Jews that he devoted most of his letters to assaulting all the other evangelists who thought they should. These, one deduces, had been following him from city to city and telling his congregants that he was wrong about Judaism, which naturally enraged him.
If all this is true, it follows that when Paul condemns Jews, he is aiming his barbs at my meddling fellow Jewish missionaries of Christ, not the Jews, a people I harshly reject. And when he speaks of Judaism having been superseded, he means Judaism as a lifestyle to be aspired to by pagans, not Judaism as practiced by Jews. (In Acts, Jews do persecute Paul for preaching the gospel. But Acts doesn’t count as a source for Paul, since the man who probably wrote it, Luke, came along nearly half a century after him, by which point the Jesus movement was busily suppressing its Jewish roots.)
If Paul thought he was a Jew, why did he fight the conversion of the gentiles? It wasn’t just that making Greeks and Romans adopt the demanding Jewish lifestyle made his evangelizing harder, though it did. It was that Paul had a unique theory about Jesus and what he meant to gentiles. If you’d been able to ask the revisionist Paul what he thought, he’d have said something like this: When Judgment comes (and Paul thinks it’s coming any day now), God will still redeem Jews who have obeyed his commandments. What Jesus has changed is God’s plans for the non-Jews. No longer will they be barred from the Kingdom to Come on account of their sins—their promiscuity and idolatry and so on. God sent them Jesus and he died for their sins and now they, too, can be saved, as long as they accept him and live good, clean Christian lives.
Paul is supposed to be the genius who overcame Jewish particularism and invented religious universalism, but the new Paul didn’t do that. He didn’t believe that the Jewish God stopped being Jewish. Nor did he think Jesus superseded God’s covenant with his chosen people. What Jesus mainly did was die for the goyim: “What Torah does for Jews, Jesus does for gentiles,” writes Eisenbaum.
So what are we, as Jews, to make of the Jewish Paul? I instinctively agree that he must have seen himself as a Jew. It belies everything we know about human nature to imagine Paul converting from highly educated Greco-Roman Jew to anti-Jewish Christian who rants about Jewish law like someone encountering it for the first time. But do we have to let him off the hook for anti-Semitism? Was he a Jew whose message was distorted, presumably by the Gospel writers and early church fathers, or was he a demagogue who hurled distortable insults with reprehensible abandon? This is a question that won’t be answered easily. Paul was a difficult writer and a non-systematic thinker, dashing off letters in response to crises in his congregations rather than laying out his ideas in expository fashion. Whether you’re seen as critiquing lovingly from the inside or attacking coldly from the outside depends a lot on your tone, and even the best scholars of first-century Greek don’t agree about Paul’s tone.
One counterintuitive possibility that Jews will have to grapple with is that Paul’s may have been a Jewish gospel—which suggests that maybe it is Jewish to preach to the non-Jews, after all. The Jewish thinker Michael Wyschogrod, for one, thinks it is. In a very brilliant essay about what Paul means to Jews he says that we learn from Paul that “Israel has a responsibility to enable gentiles to obey its God and live in covenant with him.”
My take on the new Paul, though, is that I kind of miss the old one. In my college days I thought Paul’s insight into the paradoxical nature of desire endowed early Christianity with a precocious depth. I thought that when Paul says, in Romans, “I had not known sin, but by the law; for I had not known lust, except the law had said, ‘Thou shalt not covet,’” he was grasping that what is forbidden is also acutely alive, called into being even as it’s placed out of reach. It would be close to a millennium before the rabbis would indulge in first-person self-revelation like that.
But according to the revisionists, this tormented Paul never existed. Or, if he did, he was no more than a useful fiction for people like Augustine, who needed someone to justify his own conversion and war against sin. For if Paul didn’t repudiate the Law, then Paul can’t be talking about his own difficulties with it. Nowhere other than in Romans does Paul call himself a failed Jew. Indeed, there are passages in which he brags about his excellence as a Pharisee.
So why does he speak in the first person? Revisionists say he’s employing a figure of Greek rhetoric called prosopopeia, which would have been familiar to his contemporaries but invisible to readers not trained in Hellenistic modes of discourse. That is, he’s pretending to be someone he’s not for the sake of argument. He’s imagining his way inside the head of a pagan who is, for the first time, trying to live within the Law, and discovering that under the Law, he’s actually a terrible sinner. How discouraging that would have been for him! How remote he would have felt from God!
The revisionists may be right that Paul was playing a part, but I’m still not convinced that he didn’t also mean what he said. For whether Paul was an early Method actor or a convert repudiating his past as a Jew, his words have the weight of truths wrung from a wayward body: “For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.” Christian or Jew, Paul understood that what God had demanded of his people was supremely difficult, and in some ways impossible, to deliver. Coming to terms with Paul as a Jew may also mean admitting that such ambivalence is also part of the Jewish experience.
Judith Shulevitz was the editor of Lingua Franca and the founding culture editor of Slate. She wrote a daily column for Slate and a biweekly column for The New York Times Book Review. Her book, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time, will be published in March by Random House. This article is the first in a series rethinking the lives and legacies of prominent Jews.
19 Responses to “Was Paul a Jew?”
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Dear Judith,
I enjoyed this article on Paul (saul). Though to use topical language – “jesus movement” in an argument on first century Saul fails to recognize his torment to reconcile the profound affection for Jewish thought with his awareness of the person Jesus. Modern language weakens your premise. This Rebbe was not a movement as that phrase is used today, did not create or foment hatred of anyone – nor was Paul Anti-Semitic. His message (revelation)about Jesus and his teaching was a tough choice to consider; was not accepted by many or by His people. He was compelled even charged(as Michael W states)to share it with the world. He did just that. It was contrary to peer reviews and other intellectuals of his day, for which he suffered greatly. Wise minds can disagree which does not equate to Paul´s hatred – of self, of heritage, of Jews, nor can his transition be compared to systemic Anti Semitism writ large. Jesus is a Jew. Simply, Paul’s message on Jesus is very clear: both are and always will be Jews and we (Jew and Non-Jew) must live in covenant with G d. How this is attained is based on profound thought and respect for G d. Anti – blank is not sacred, profound nor transformative. Happy Holidays
This article is very interesting to me. My hope is that all the world’s religions will come to see their basic similarity. None would disagree with the law of Moses through the ten commandments (hard or almost impossible for us to keep). That would be the outward path of living a good life. Paul was well schooled in this law. However, when Jesus the Christ took over his life on “the road to Damascus” (this like much in scripture seems to me to be allegorical) he turned from seeking to lead an exemplary life according to the old law to a life of the spirit (I imagine a more meditative path along the lines of the Essenes). Jesus represents a Christ consciousness beyond our normal everyday consciousness, which we can all seek (Jew or Greek, pagan or whatever.) I think that’s what is meant by judgment day or apocalypse–the time when this higher consciousness dawns on on each person individually. It was so powerful in Paul’s life that he was impelled to his prodigious work, which was a continuation of Jesus’ effort to reform Judaism from the worldly religion of some Pharisees to a more spiritual path (some would surely call it unworldly) leading to “the Kingdom of God.” Hindus would call it samadhi, Buddhists nirvana, I don’t know what Muslims might call it, but their poets seem to have written from that consciousness.
Thank you for digging so deeply into Paul’s thinking. May it help to uplift the interdenominational conversation.
Judith, are you related to Uri Shulevitz?
Dear Judy,
Whatever Paul may have meant in his writings, the message that he conveyed was by no means uniformly hostile to Jews. Here is an instance where his words were used to save Jewish lives. In March 1943, as the Germans were getting ready to deport the Jews of Greece, Archbishop Damaskinos, the titular head of the Greek Orthodox church,strenuously opposed the deportations in a series of memoranda to the German occupation authorities and the Greek quisling government. In all these documents Damaskinos quoted Paul, the founder of the Greek church: “There are no Jews and no Greeks, no men and no women, all are equal in front of the Lord”. Damaskinos then opened to the Jews the gates of Greek churches and monasteries allowing several of them -alas, too few- to escape the Holocaust. Among them was the father of Shimon Peres, Israel’s current president.
I was always under the impression that Paul was not Jewish but that is neither here nor there. I feel the constant arguments between Jews and Christians is an exercise in futility and the larger picture is being missed. If anybody will take it upon him self and look into the Edgar Cayse material will see that our very being here on earth, be it Jews, Christ or any religions, falls neatly into place.
Thank you for an excellent and concise article on a difficult subject. Sums up my conclusions about Paul but adds insight on passages I had difficulty interpreting. A piece I’ll gladly share with Christians and others.
Paul proclaimed himself to be a pious Jew and a learned Pharisee, but there are good reasons to believe that he was neither of these. For one, in his book “The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity,” the late Hyam Maccoby raised serious questions about Paul’s knowledge of the Hebrew language; he showed that when Paul recited passages from the scriptures, the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the bible, was the version he quoted, even when its translation from the Hebrew was not correct. Further, Maccoby showed persuasively that Paul’s form of argumentation was seriously deficient for what would be expected of a trained Pharisee. He also related historical accounts, which showed that according to early Jewish-Christians who were members of the Jerusalem Council following Jesus’ crucifixion, Paul had become a Jewish convert only as an adult, and, moreover, they regarded him as an impostor and a fraud. And finally, Maccoby emphasized that some of Paul’s most notable innovations, including the Eucharist and the conception of Jesus as a deity who descended to earth to suffer and die to redeem mankind, were utterly foreign to Judaism, but were well-established practices of Greek mystery religions and Gnosticism. So when Paul turned his attention to the gentiles, he may well have actually reverted to his earlier Greek roots. My forthcoming novel, “The Alexandria Letter, incorporates these conceptions extensively.
This is only another proof that Jews created Christianity and suffered for it through the centuries !!! What an irony!!! The first 200 years only Jews were Christians. Of course Paul was a Jew with a new ideas to change Judaism.
Being a Russian Jew and cut off from all Jewish for years, I was always wondering what is the source of antisemitism? Definitely not Jesus Christ though he was used to reinforce it.
Please read Lion Feuchtwanger and Josephus Flavius, particularly his article
“On antisemitism” written before Jesus (!!) He gives 10 reason why.
Thank you for this well reasoned article. It has spurred me to re-think the role Paul played in the first century under the domination of Rome, and in the context of cultural ferment in Israel. The reference to the Noahide Covenant provisions correlates with my understanding of the intention of the first Jerusalem conference, to guide Jews in reaching out to Gentiles with a message of conciliation and hope. Both Paul and Jesus were clearly identified as Jews living within their cultural norms. Paul took Jewish oaths of consecration. He invariably went first to the synagogue in each town he entered. The line of reasoning of Ms. Shulevitz could provide a bridge for right-thinking Christians and Jews to come together in our dangerous, fragmented world. Every Christian has the duty to pray for the peace of Jerusalem. We need each other more than ever today.
Interesting piece, but it ignores the long tradition of Talmudic vituperation against a magician who was quite properly put to death.
May I quote Wikipedia:
Although Nietzsche has famously been represented as a predecessor to Nazism, he also criticized anti-Semitism, pan-Germanism and, to a lesser extent, nationalism. Thus, he broke with his editor in 1886 because of opposition to his anti-Semitic stances, and his rupture with Richard Wagner, expressed in The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche Contra Wagner (both written in 1888), had much to do with Wagner’s endorsement of pan-Germanism and anti-Semitism — and also of his rallying to Christianity. In a March 29, 1887 letter to Theodor Fritsch, he mocked anti-Semitics, Fritsch, Eugen Dühring, Wagner, Ebrard , Wahrmund, and the leading advocate of pan-Germanism, Paul de Lagarde, who would become, along with Wagner and Houston Chamberlain, main official influences of Nazism [3]. This 1887 letter to Fritsch ended by: “— And finally, how do you think I feel when the name Zarathustra is mouthed by anti-Semites?
So may I ask you from where did you take “Even Friedrich Nietzsche, no friend of the Jews”?
A very thoughtful, provocative article. I am considering coverting to Judaism. I’m still a bit conflicted about leaving Christianity. The notion that Jesus died for the gentiles and that that was the thrust of Paul’s apostalate is worth consideration. Thanks for the additional resources listed. Romans 9-11 seem to reveal Paul’s own inner conflicct about being Jewish yet desiring his people to accept him and his message about Jesus. Perhaps there is little middle theological ground upon which to stand. Lots to consider in the article. This website is a great discovery.
This is absolutly wonderful. Perhaps if Christians would be willing to learn about and respect the Jewish origins the their religion antisemitism would cease to exist in the Christian community.
I grew up as a Christian, and was never taught that Paul hated the Jews. I think he hated hypocrites – be they Jewish or Christian. However, I believe he was willing to abandon circumcision and other Jewish observances in order to follow Christ. In Philippians 3:3-7 he stated: “If anyone else thinks he has reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless. But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ.” He loved Christ more than his Judaism or his standing in the Jewish community.
Thanks very much for the article.
Good article. You should also read up on the fact that there are those of the opinion that the halakha to fast on 9 Tevet was for Peter who had agreed to go to Rome and change Christianity so much so that it could no longer be confused with Judaism. His hebrew name would then be Shimon haKalpos changed later to Simeon Peter and he is the hero in Toldot Yeshu. Rashi in Avoda Zara includes Paul and John as well. Also, there are those who claim that he is the author of Nishmat that is said on Shabbat.
Regarding George Honig’s post, I have a few corrections to his take on first century Judaism and the versions of the Bible available then. First, there seems to be an assumption that a learned and pious Jew of the time would speak and read Hebrew as his primary (or only) language. What we know about first century Jews is that most of them lived outside of the Land and spoke Greek or some other local dialect native to their location. So, there is no real correlation between piety and language spoken for Jews of that time period. Second, there really was no canon of scripture in Paul’s time. Things were still in flux with regard to the boundaries and versions of the Hebrew scriptures at that point. Yes, there was a center to it (the Torah and the major Prophets and some other books like the Psalms), but there was diversity even in the versions of the books at the center. And the Septuagint that Maccoby says Paul was quoting was not the Septuagint that we posit today. That is because it did not exist yet. There were several different Greek translations of the Hebrew scriptures (all made by pious and learned Jews, by the way), but we know very little about what versions were available to Paul. The “Septuagint” is a scholarly reconstruction of the original translation, but that reconstruction is built upon the faulty notion that there was just one original version created all at the same time. We know this is not the case. Uniformity is not found at the originating moments of translation but only after the diversity is eliminated. Furthermore, the notion that many of Paul’s innovations were actually from mystery religions and gnosticism is simply wrong. Jewish apocalyptic writings of the time are quite diverse, but there are a number of them (including Daniel) that have the notion of a heavenly figure coming to redeem Israel as part of God’s plan for human history. It is now standard scholarly opinion that gnosticism did not exist as a social or religious movement until 100 years after Paul. Maccoby’s ideas are outdated and wrong and should not be used without a critical eye.
Thank you for your fine article. I am not Jewish, and as you can probably tell from my choice of words here, not a scholar; not even much educated. But I am a Christian and I love anything I can find on Paul. Thanks again.
Mrs. Shulevitz:
I truly enjoyed the intellectual gold nuggets, from writer’s such as yourself. Paul inspiration to the early church through his episoles/letters also has profound abilities to engulf the lives of many today. Paul served with such love for the churches and gentiles; it’s my opinion that he was totally committed to complete a good work, which was started through the Holy Spirit. I wish I knew more of the word of God, I love writers that have strong beliefs. What about the full amour of God, could you give me some understanding on this scripture. I’m writing a 10 page on the Ephesian church, and the full amour of God. Thank you for your input.
Margarita Kent
To paraphrase a section of your article: “God sent them (the Gentiles) Jesus and he died for their sins and now they, too, can be saved, as long as they accept him and live good, clean Christian lives.”
This central concept of Christianity, where Jesus is sacrificed for the sins of others, is completely at odds with Judaism and the Torah. The “Akeidah”, where Abraham is dramatically prevented from killing his son Isaac as an offering on Mt Moriah, is a potent demonstration of the fact that God abhors human sacrifice, as practiced by the pagans, who would, for example, sacrifice their children in a fiery death to Moloch.
If Paul saw the death of Jesus as a sacrifice for the sins of man,he was a million miles away from being a Jew.