1. For exceptions, see Sanders (1983: 193–94). I agree with Sanders's reading, as far as it goes, against that of the Stendahl tradition. Altogether, let me say, with a certain amount of hutzpah, that I find the second section of Sanders's book on the Jews uniformly successful while, as will be clear from my discussions, I have some problems with the first part on the Law. [BACK]

2. It is thus very hard for me, a Jew, to see how Romans 9–11, even taken by themselves, “could be interpreted in a pro-Jewish sense” (Marxsen, quoted approvingly in Campbell [1992, 28; see also 40n. 37]). [BACK]

3. The point is that, for me, “upholding the special place of Jewish Christianity” (Campbell 1992, 51) is precisely the essence of supersession. This does not, however, make it illegitimate or “anti-Semitic.” My point is rather to maintain the distinctiveness of Paul's version of Judaism over against most other versions contemporary with it and the rabbinic Judaism that developed in the succeeding centuries which insisted on the special task of Jews precisely in maintaining the works of the Law and had no interest in faith in Jesus. This is—translated into our terms—a genuine commitment to the maintenance of cultural difference, not a pseudo-multicultural Christian hegemony in which it does not matter in what language the Mass is sung. Because, however, at any point in my dialectic its antithesis may be forgotten by readers, I emphasize yet again that it is a dialectic, and I will be arguing extensively in these two chapters that both thesis and antithesis have their perils and promises. [BACK]

4. There is an interpretative tradition that reads the “first fruits” as Christ himself; however, this interpretation is weakened considerably by the parallelism of the second clause. [BACK]

5. Note that Luther himself was very “friendly” toward Jews at first. He was not, therefore, an anti-Semite. But once he realized that he was not going to be able to convert the Jews, he turned against them with a vengeance. [BACK]

6. It is precisely at this point that I think that Campbell misses the mark in his reading. He takes v. 19, “You will say ‘branches were broken off so that I might be grated in,’” to be that which Paul is disavowing. In fact, Campbell argues, “It is to repudiate such formulations that Paul writes Romans 9–11 and possibly the entire letter” (71). This is simply not the case, however, as the context clearly shows. Paul himself has proposed that the branches have been lopped off only two verses before, and his response to this utterance is “granted!” He does not oppose the doctrine of the lopped-off branches; indeed, it is he who has proposed it; he just does not want the gentile Christians to draw “anti-Semitic” conclusions from the metaphor, a clear and present danger, realized only slightly after his death. [BACK]

7. A further argument for this point is the fact that Paul already knows of precisely twelve apostles. As Paula Fredriksen argues, the necessity for this precise (and clearly ahistorical) number is the association it bears with the twelve tribes and thus its implicit claim that the Christian community is the New Israel (Fredriksen 1988, 102). [BACK]

8. See below on Justin Martyr. The notion of particularist universalism is drawn and cited from the work of my brother, Jonathan Boyarin. Compare the interpretation of this passage in Gager (1983, 60–61). [BACK]

9. Below I will argue, however, that Paul was not responsible for that history, in that his position of power vis-à-vis Jews was entirely different from that of the Church—in fact, almost directly opposite. Discourses of resistance have entirely different political, ethical valences from discourses of domination, even when they share identical contents (Foucault 1980, 101–02)! [BACK]

10. Cf. Galatians 3:19. [BACK]

11. This should not be understood as an analogical relationship, i.e., of the body of the individual and the social body, but as an actual implication. If I am my body, then I am ontologically filiated with other bodies. The move from family to “nation” or “race” is, however, accomplished via the myth of origin of the cultural group in a single progenitor. For the close connection between “race,” filiation, and even place, see the quotation from Porphyry's Life of Plotinus in the next chapter. [BACK]

12. On the other hand, we must take very seriously the differences between the historical situation of Paul, persecuted by Jews (or Jewish Christians), Justin, a co-victim with Jews of Roman persecution but also in some ways underdog in the pagan world vis-à-vis Jews, and Augustine, at the threshold of Christian hegemony and Jewish marginalization. The very important analyses of John Gager are highly relevant here, especially: “We are now able to affirm that wherever Christianity developed abroad in the cities and towns of the Empire, it encountered a well-established, self-confident, and widely appreciated Judaism. Furthermore, this non-Palestinian encounter between the two religions took place at precisely the time when positive elements in pagan views of Judaism appeared with greatest clarity. Once again Christianity had to deal with Judaism from beneath, that is, from a position of cultural and social inferiority” (1983, 114). [BACK]

13. In a very important communication, Richard Hays writes:

Right. Your analysis is brilliant and telling [I trust I will be forgiven the narcissism that leads me to leave this phrase in.]. The question—the huge question that runs through the whole book—is to what extent that disavowal has actually taken place in Paul. I say it hasn't, you say it has. I think that Paul's thought is dialectical, complex, full of contradictory impulses. A later Christian-Platonist-allegorizing tradition develops one side of Paul's dialectic to the exclusion of the other and thus produces precisely the result you describe. But I would contend that the one-sidedness of the development produces a position fundamentally unfaithful to Paul's vision.

I would agree that any understanding of Paul, as of any truly great and complex cultural production, is likely to be a reduction, but, I would argue, this interpretation of Paul responds to so much that is there that it can hardly be a position “ fundamentally unfaithful to Paul's vision.” To argue such is to (somewhat triumphantly) suggest that the Fathers could not understand Paul and that only we can! Rather, I would suggest that in order to be adequate to Paul's dialectics, our interpretations should be allowed to enter into their own dialectics, as precisely the controversy for the sake of Heaven that perdures. For the notion of interpretation as constant dialectic, see Boyarin 1990b. In other words, I am saying that strong readings that develop one side of Paul intensely are more likely to be of hermeneutic usefulness than others. Either we are revealing unresolvable tensions within Paul, or at another level, the dialectic will resolve itself into a synthesis. [BACK]

14. Compare, however, the readings of these chapters, which I have offered above in Chapters 1 and 2, respectively, of this book. [BACK]

15. I would like to see what evidence Käsemann has for the malice in this joy at finding a verse which clearly discredits the Reformation Paul. [BACK]

16. “I regard most of the quoted material [from Käsemann] to be more or less blatant eisegesis, even if eisegesis which rests on long and venerated (perhaps too venerated) tradition. The finding that Paul criticized his kinsmen for zeal for good works is simply bewildering” (Sanders 1983, 155–56). [BACK]

17. Käsemann would probably detect some “malicious joy” here as well. See also Wilckens (1982, 1:177 and passim). [BACK]

18. That this is a correct reading of Romans 2 is practically proven by Paul's rhetorical question at the beginning of 3. “Then what advantage has the Jew?”! [BACK]

19. I do not, therefore, accept Watson's conclusion from his excellent analysis that “Paul does not attack Judaism because of any theoretical incompatibility between his own emphasis on grace and the alleged Jewish emphasis on achievement. He attacks it because Jewish failure to respond to the gospel has led him to proclaim a law-free gospel to the Gentiles, and to form congregations living in sectarian separation from the Jewish community. His attack on Judaism serves to establish and maintain that sectarian separation” (113). The first sentence of these two seems impeccable to me; the second could not be less convincing. And they are a non sequitur, because rejection of the Lutheran premise that Paul attacks Judaism as works-righteousness does not yet lead to a conclusion that therefore his critique was not theological or ideological but sociological (Watson makes it almost sound petulant—You don't play by my rules, I'll take my football). I can see nothing in the Pauline texts or even in Watson's reading of them that necessitates such an extreme conclusion, rather than the assumption that Paul turned to the gentiles out of ideological conviction, abandoned the Law (or effectively those parts of it which mark off Jewish identity) because it did not fit his theology, and critiqued those very aspects of the Law as non-salvific. In other words, I am arguing that the formation of a sect comes as a result of Paul's theology and not as the effective cause of that theology. I also find implausible his suggestion that Paul is, in effect, throwing back a Jewish charge—Let us do evil that good may come—at the Jewish leaders “who stress the divine gift of the covenant as the guarantee of salvation to such an extent that obedience to the law becomes superfluous” (113). As Watson himself admits, were this the content of Paul's attack it would be more like a parody than a convincing representation of most authentic views of the Covenant. Much more likely, I think, is an interpretation which simply argues (as most Jews would have argued) that membership in the covenant community without works is meaningless. Once more, Paul would secure the assent of that very Jew whom at the end he is going to accuse. The real payoff of the diatribe is at its end, where Paul redefines entirely what “works” means. On this last point, see next section below. [BACK]

20. Cf. Watson (1986, 118) who has exposed Käsemann's incoherence and embarrassment. [BACK]

21. In other words, what I am suggesting is that Käsemann also understands (consciously or unconsciously) that the Pauline text does not support his theology and weasels out of this (again consciously or unconsciously) by treating as identical two things (one that Paul says and one that Luther says) that are entirely different. [BACK]

22. This is even more shocking when one remembers that this text was originally a radio broadcast. Nor is Käsemann alone in this form of expression, even among postwar German critics: “For Paul, the Jew represents man in general.…This man is indeed not somewhere outside, among unbelievers; he is hidden within each Christian,” to which my only response can be: No, I'm not. The quotation is from Bornkamm in Watson (1986, 198n.78). Note that Käsemann's usage of the hidden Jew is precisely opposite to Paul's, for whom the hidden Jew is a positive term. It is the ἐν τῷ κρυπτῷ Ἰουδαῖος who is the true Jew for Paul! [BACK]

23. Which is not to say that I ascribe the Nazi genocide of the Jews entirely to the Lutheran theological tradition. [BACK]

24. See, e.g., my comparison with John Chrysostom below. Hamerton-Kelly's book is the very antithesis in every respect, both morally and scholarly, of the work of his teacher, W. D. Davies! [BACK]

25. See citation below. [BACK]

26. It is entirely unclear from where Hamerton-Kelly derives his notion that fulfilling the Mosaic Law would have led to the killing of Christ. Cf. on this point the devastating comments of Paula Fredriksen (1988, 108). [BACK]

27. That is, the sort of violence that Hamerton-Kelly seems to wish to essentialize as “Jewish” per se did exist in certain extreme groups in the first century, but those very groups were marginalized by the terms of opprobrium assigned to them by other groups, including notably the Pharisees! [BACK]

29. His rhetorical move reminds me of that of John Chrysostom who in his violent attacks on Judaism pauses to remark, “I know that some will condemn me for daring to say that the synagogue is no better than a theater” (cited in Gager 1983, 119), but “he will not be deterred.” Such also is Hamerton-Kelly's “courage,” vaunted in the blurbs on the jacket. Compare also the discussion of Tertullian's anti-Judaism in Gager, “For him the Jews are the very anti-type [sic] of true virtue: they resisted the prophets and Jesus; they insult and persecute Christians; they rebel against God. Their crimes are manifold. They embody the principle of vetustas, or obsolescence. In short, what emerges in Tertullian [Hamerton-Kelly] is a rekindling of traditional Christian anti-Judaism in which the full burden of Marcion's assault of the God of the Jews is deflected onto the Jews themselves. And in his case, the intensity of language clearly crosses the boundary between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism” (164). [BACK]

30. Girard and Oughourlian have tried to guard against the sort of misreading that Hamerton-Kelly engages in; on pp. 174–75, they explicitly refer to the transformation “of the universal revelation of the founding murder into a polemical denunciation of the Jewish religion”—precisely that which Hamerton-Kelly engages in and which Girard refers to as “a new form of violence, directed against a new scapegoat—the Jew.” Not only a bad reader of Paul, therefore, Hamerton-Kelly is also, owing to his anti-Semitic passion, a highly selective and superficial reader of Girard as well! Girard himself also falls into supersessionist patterns of thought and expression. The following quotation is exemplary:

I think it is possible to show that only the texts of the Gospels manage to achieve what the Old Testament leaves incomplete [in the transumption of Sacred Violence into harmonious community]. These texts therefore serve as an extension of the Judaic bible, bringing to completion an enterprise that the Judaic bible did not take far enough, as Christian tradition has always maintained.

This is supersessionist because it refuses to recognize that there was/is another “extension of the Judaic bible,” which has also continued historical cultural processes that began within the biblical period. Insofar as Girard will refer to Christianity as “the religion which comes from God,” while Judaism (and everything else) is relegated to being “religion which comes from man,” he can hardly expect non-Christians to be very interested in his work (166), which is ultimately theologically based Christian apologetic triumphalism. However, nothing in Girard's writings, to the extent that I know them, prepares one for the virulence of Hamerton-Kelly's anti-Judaism, which is all his own. Just comparing Girard's account of the crucifixion as having been given “explicit or implicit assent” by “the crowd in Jerusalem, the Jewish religious authorities, the Roman political authorities, and even the disciples” (Girard 1978, 167) with Hamerton-Kelly's “the impulse to fulfill the Mosaic Law [that] made him [Paul] a persecutor and had killed Christ” (141) makes the disparity apparent.

On the other hand, Girard's text is sufficiently problematic on its own, at least in part because of the dialogical (literally as a dialogue) way that it is presented. Girard speaks of a founding murder which lies behind all culture—that is, it is constitutive of hominization, something which is hidden since the foundation of the world, while his interlocutor (Oughourlian) transmutes this into “cultural differentiation develops on the basis of the founding murder” (165, emphasis added), and Girard does not protest. It is thus easy to see how a personality dedicated to the erasure of difference and imposition of Christianity on all could find his (mistaken) point of origin in Girard. Girard's text hovers around the pit of a Christian triumphalism (and implicit anti-Semitism) which it avoids, while Hamerton-Kelly jumps right in. [BACK]

31. He dismisses the challenge of modern Christian New Testament scholars (such as Mack) to the simple veracity of the gospel accounts. He also simply reads Luke into Paul. [BACK]

32. The discussion of Lyotard and Nancy here owes much to two essays and in general to the thought of my brother Jonathan: “Der Yiddisher Tsenter; or, What Is a Minyan?” (forthcoming), and Jonathan Boyarin and Greg Sarris, “Jews and Native Americans as Living Voice and Absent Other,” presented at MLA, December 1991. In general, it has been startling to watch our work converging in recent years. He begins with the present and looks for its genealogies; I begin in late antiquity and observe its effects even now. Much of the language of this and the next section on Nancy has been adapted from a joint paper of ours (Boyarin and Boyarin 1993). Here, typically, the account of Lyotard and Nancy is his; its connection with Paul is mine. [BACK]

33. Lest there be confusion, I of course endorse Isaac Deutscher's actual point that modern Jewish radicals who do not practice the Jewish religion nevertheless represent an appropriate way of performing Jewishness in the contemporary world (Deutscher 1968). [BACK]

34. I am not here pursuing the issue that Fuss argues so well, namely that all constructivist positions are founded on essentialism, and my account of Lacan and Derrida is largely derivative of hers. My concern is rather to demonstrate how “deconstructive” positions are complicitous with idealizations that go back to Paul for Christian Europe and ultimately deeply back into Greek culture. [BACK]

35. She argues, of course, that the distinction ultimately collapses back on itself, an important point, which is, however, not relevant for my argument here. My entire next book (tentative title Antiphallus) will be devoted to this subject. [BACK]

36. Of course, this remark of Derrida's presupposes a certain interpretation of psychoanalysis, one dissented from by Johnson herself, as well as others. The argument may prove thus more compelling with regard to patristic allegoresis than to Lacanian psychoanalysis. [BACK]

37. A disclaimer is necessary here to ward off misunderstanding. I am not suggesting that Jewish culture is eo ipso anti-logocentric simply because it retains the literal sense of circumcision, or for any other reason. In fact, I would argue, and have argued elsewhere, that from the early Middle Ages onward, Jewish culture is virtually indistinguishable from Christianity in its hermeneutic stances; by then, both cultures have significantly evolved, so that Christianity has developed material practices and communal identities and memories similar to those of the Jews, while Judaism has been thoroughly imbued with platonism. The result is often a Judaism in the Middle Ages that is quite similar in structure to that of Philo. For a somewhat more extensive version of this claim, see the first chapter of Boyarin 1993. I say this in part in response to two recent critics of my work, who have read an essentialist characterization of “Jewish” versus “Greco-Christian” cultures here. I would hope that the larger context of the argument in this book will displace such misunderstandings. I am proposing rather that Paul emphasized certain strands in the Greco-Jewish culture that he inherited, thus yielding his “universalist” variety of Christianity, while rabbinic Judaism reacted against those very strands, producing a “particularism” even more pronounced than that of the Bible. Both are thus products of the interaction of ancient Hebrew culture with Hellenism. Finally, I have mightily tried to expel any vestiges of a Jewish triumphalism from this dialectical co-critique. I may not have entirely succeeded, for obviously I make no bones about being a critical but committed Jew. [BACK]