1. Of course, Paul is ever designated such only in the highly unreliable account of Acts. I use the name here, therefore, for rhetorical purposes, rhetorical purposes similar to those of Acts. [BACK]

2. I first learned of this term through participating in the Cassassa Conference on Cultural Reading of the Bible at Loyola Marymount University in March 1992. [BACK]

3. Campbell has pointed out predecessors to Ruether but remarks, “However, it was only in the seventies that biblical scholars took up this theme with full earnestness, and Ruether's study was at least partly instrumental in causing them to do so” (1992, 12–13). [BACK]

4. Campbell is more precise. He refers to the “German Lutheran understanding of his [Paul's] theology” (Campbell 1992, iv). Two important pieces of this puzzle are that the Scandinavian Lutheran tradition has been quite different (Campbell 1992, 36n.6—Stendahl and Westerholm are prime examples) and that the Barthian tradition of Christian exceptionalism “Christianity is not a religion”) is not altogether different from the Bultmannian; Hamerton-Kelly is an excellent example here. (For my kinsmen according to the flesh, I add that Barth was a prominent Reformed [Calvinist] thinker.) The identification of the “old Paul” as a Lutheran one seems to go back to F. C. Baur himself (1876, 313). [BACK]

5. The mutual exclusiveness of these two propositions seems to have escaped most of these interpreters! [BACK]

6. I have tried as much as possible to confine technical discussions of other scholars' work to the notes. [BACK]

7. It is, in a sense, unfortunate that Gager's book, The Origins of Anti-Semitism (Gager 1983), has become so heavily identified with this thesis, which represents only a small part of what is otherwise a signally important and absolutely convincing piece of work. The many positive citations of this book throughout my work attest to its value in my eyes. [BACK]

8. To a great extent Davies is a real predecessor of this view: “There was no reason why Paul should not reject the view that Gentiles should be converted to Judaism before entering the Messianic Kingdom and at the same time insist that for him as a Jew the Torah was still valid. In so doing he was being true both to the universalist tradition of Judaism and at the same time showing his identification with Israel according to the flesh: he was being true to the ‘new’ and the ‘old’ Israel” (1965, 73). No reason why not indeed, but as lovely as this vision would be, I just do not see it in Paul's texts for reasons that I adduce all through the book. I do not share Davies's willingness to accord credence to reports in Acts which seem to me to contradict the doctrine and practice of the letters. This solution, I would add, is precisely that of rabbinic Judaism. [BACK]

9. By exegetically, I mean that it is founded and founders on the assumption that “works of the Law” means works that the Law does, as it were. Gaston could not know when he wrote that the Hebrew equivalent (perhaps original) for “works of the Law,” namely הרותה ישעמ, was to appear in Qumran as the title of a work detailing the requirements of the Law, just as the traditional interpretation of Paul would have it. See also Westerholm, who compares such phrases as τὰ ἔργα τοῦ θεοῦ in John 6:28, “deeds demanded by God,” and especially “works of the Lord” in Jer. 31:10 (Sept.) and Baruch 2:9, where “his works τὰ ἔργα αὐτοῦ are explicitly said to be ‘works which he has commanded us’” (1988, 116).

There seems to me, moreover, to be a fundamental implausibility at the heart of the Gaston-Gager hypothesis, namely, its assumption that gentiles could become part of Israel without observing the Law, and that this would not result in a fundamental redefinition of what being part of Israel meant! Thus Gager writes:

Peter Richardson, whose Israel in the Apostolic Church is a valuable contribution just because he carefully delineates the circumstances surrounding the Pauline letters, tends to lose sight of these circumstances in his concluding paragraphs. Thus after demonstrating that Paul's argument in Galatians is that Gentile Christians need not be circumcised in order to become part of Israel, his summary reads like a universal claim: “No more do Law and circumcision enter the picture.” But surely, as his own analysis has demonstrated, his sentence should read, “No more do law and circumcision enter the picture for Gentiles. ”

This is, to my mind, a very problematic claim on several grounds: (1) As I have said, the notion that one could be part of Israel and not be subject to the Law issues in a fundamental redefinition of the notion of Israel; (2) The possibility that Paul intended that there would be mixed Christian communities in which some would observe the Law and others not, resulting, e.g., in inability to eat together, is structurally implausible and directly contradicted by the report of the Antioch confrontation as I interpret it below in Chapter 5; (3) This interpretation of Paul is contraverted by such characteristic Pauline expressions as “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any avail, but faith working through love” (Galatians 5:6). In short, I think that Richardson is correct. Where Gaston and Gager (and their predecessors and followers) are clearly correct, in my opinion, is in their stipulation that Paul was not critiquing some essential fault in the Law or in the Jews' observance of it but passionately trying to extend it to all folks. This extension, however, could not but result in a fundamental, cataclysmic redefinition of the Law and of the People Israel. So, once more, Paul was not in my opinion anti-Judaic, but he did undermine any traditionally understood notions of what being Jewish meant, just as Sanders has claimed. [BACK]

10. Watson has strongly argued this case (1986, 94–96). The Alexandrian Jewish philosopher and predecessor of Philo, Aristobolus, refers to those who are committed to the literal interpretation of the Law as “having neither strength nor insight,” τοῖς δὲ μὴ μετέχουσι δυνάμεως καὶ συνέσεως ἀλλα τῷ γραπτῷ μόνον προσκειμένοις (cited in Hengel [1974, 164], who has no occasion there, of course, to refer to the possible Pauline parallel). Willingness to leave the literal, the written (note the similarity with Paul's terminology), was thus referred to as a sign of intellectual and spiritual strength. See also Jewett 1971, 42–46. The three categories of Jews for Paul, then, are those who have been lopped off, because they have no faith in Jesus; those who are Christian but keep the Law because they are weak; and those—like he himself—whose faith is so strong that they no longer need to keep the Law. Jewish Christians who keep the Law thus take a place in Paul's value hierarchies similar to the married who marry, because of porneia! This is no anti-Judaism in the later sense, of course, but it is certainly not a valuing of Judaism either. Lest I be misunderstood, once more, the point is not to judge Paul but to see in what way his cultural theory can be useful for us. [BACK]

11. Although Sanders later substantially revises this impression, at this point in the book one could easily conclude that the issue of inclusion of the gentiles has still not been recognized by him as central to Pauline religion. [BACK]

12. This point has already been made by Charles H. Cosgrove (1988, 12). However, in spite of the impressive vigor and clarity of Cosgrove's argumentation (23–38), I am equally unconvinced that his decision to hang the entire letter on the beginning of chapter 3 is necessary. Paul's argumentation from the ecstatic gifts the Galatians have shared with him is a very significant point in the letter, and I have tried to treat it as such, but I also think it is secondary to the motivating force of Paul's gospel. Moreover, I do not think that it is so neatly isolatable from the question of Jews and gentiles in the People of God. In short, I stand by my claim that the choice of starting point is essentially arbitrary, although some will generate stronger readings than others. [BACK]

13. Sanders quotes Georg Eicholz very approvingly: “The encounter with Christ has for Paul the consequence that Christ becomes the middle of his theology, just as previously Torah must have been the middle of his theology” (cited 1983, 151). But at the risk of belaboring the point, what then caused the encounter with Christ if we are not prepared to accept supernatural explanations or ones drawn from the realm of psychopathology? [BACK]

14. Indeed, I would suggest that the only place in which we find solution to plight explicitly encoded in Paul's writing is a passage in which he is granting an assumption to his opponent (Peter) in order to persuade him of the absurdity of his position. Sanders himself senses the anomaly of Paul's utterance here in the context of Pauline expression: “Although Paul has shown in Gal. 2:15 that he knew the standard distinction between being a Gentile ‘sinner’ and a righteous Jew, his general tendency, in evidence in Rom. 6:1–7:4 as well as in Gal. 3: 19–4:10 was to universalize the human plight. All were under sin and in need of redemption; all were under the law” (1983, 72). To my mind, these positions are so fundamentally incompatible that it is impossible to accept 2:15 as Paul's statement of his own position, though it reads perfectly as granting Peter a point in order to catch him in a sort of reductio argument. [BACK]

15. Toward the very end of his book, Sanders allows this as a possible alternative to the thesis he has been defending throughout:

We can never exclude with certainty the possibility that Paul was secretly dissatisfied with the law before his conversion/call. If one is to look for secret dissatisfaction, however, it might be better to look to his stance toward the Gentiles than to his possible frustration with his own situation under the law, or to his analysis of Jews under the law. It is by no means inconceivable that he had native sympathy for the Gentiles and chafed at the Jewish exclusivism which either ignored them or which relegated them to second place in God's plan. (153)

Despite Sanders's disclaimer that “This, like other attempts to penetrate Paul's precall thought, is entirely speculative,” I obviously find it a much more satisfactory account than one that assumes that “out of the blue” Paul had a mystical vision for which nothing in his past had prepared him. I believe there is ample evidence in Paul's preoccupation with this theme in both Galatians and Romans to support the construction of this prior-to-Christ dissatisfaction with Jewish ethnocentricity, particularly as I have already suggested, when we consider the evidence for widespread concern with this issue among Greek-speaking Jews in the first century. [BACK]

16. See especially the summary on pp. 143–44, where Sanders argues that Paul had definite ideas about soteriology and christology but never solved the problem of the Law in a way that he deemed adequate. His “contradictions” on this question are the record of a life-long struggle never resolved. This position is, in itself, a possible but by no means necessary one as I hope to be showing throughout this book. In the latter book, Sanders claims that his former work was misunderstood to imply that “Paul had no substantial critique of his native faith” (154) and refers the reader to Sanders 1977 (550–52). This very reference, however, only demonstrates further what a marginal role this critique plays in Sanders's account of Paul! [BACK]

17. Cf., however, Westerholm (1988, 114–15). [BACK]

18. Note that commentators otherwise as opposed to each other as James Dunn and Charles Cosgrove both observe this principle implicitly and explicitly (Cosgrove 1991, 90ff.; Dunn 1983 and 1990). [BACK]

19. With regard to Judaism we are not in the situation that we are in with regard to the Superapostles of 2 Corinthians or the women prophets of 1 Corinthians, where we have only Paul with which to reconstruct his opposition. Wire 1990 is a simply brilliant example of just how much can be accomplished convincingly using such methods in the absence of actual data. But where there are data, it is impossible to rely on reconstructions through Paul's rhetoric. Wire's reconstruction, moreover, of these Corinthian women is more sympathetic and more critical of Paul's view of them than the reconstructions of Judaism that most Pauline scholarship has produced. [BACK]

20. For extensive discussion of this book, see now Campbell (1992, 122–32). On the whole, I am much more inclined to Campbell's interpretation of Romans than to Watson's, although I dissent from the conclusions of Campbell's studies regarding the valence of Paul's “tolerance.” [BACK]

21. See, however, p. 165, which is then undercut on p. 167. It is, it seems to me, quite impossible to see Paul as a universalist and then identify his primary motivation as causing his “readers to distance themselves from the Jewish community.” See also p. 183, n.16. [BACK]

22. Sanders, already in 1983, had demonstrated, to my mind quite successfully, the inadequacy of the view that Paul tried first to preach to Jews and only turned to gentiles after failing with the Jews that is one of the pillars of Watson's sociological reconstruction of the origins of Paul's alleged “sectarianism” (Sanders 1983, 187–88 and esp. 190). [BACK]

23. Davies (1965, 61–68) is a model itself of a cultural criticism which is not anti-Judaic. Neither apologizing for Jewish “particularism” nor condemning it as an essentialized exclusiveness or innate sense of superiority, Davies anticipates as well my thesis that Paul's critique arose in an environment in which many Jews were increasingly feeling an “uneasy conscience.” He well understands that Jewish isolation was a fence that preserved Jewish difference, and also that “a fence while it preserves, also excludes. The Torah, which differentiated the Jew from others, also separated him from them.” See also Kuschel (1992, 202). [BACK]

24. For Epictetus, conversion to Judaism was used as an analogy for becoming a true Stoic, suggesting, as Gager argues, that it was so common as to have become virtually proverbial. [BACK]

25. See also Thielman (1989, 24) and Westerholm (1988, 117–18). Westerholm makes some remarkable claims in support of his thesis, e.g.:

Nor do the occurrences of the phrase in Romans (3:20, 28) support Dunn's contentions. Dunn claims that, since Paul has just refuted “Jewish presumption in their favoured status as the people of the law, the ‘works of the law’ must be a shorthand way of referring to that in which the typical Jew placed his confidence, the law-observance which documented his membership of the covenant.” But the only commandments of the law mentioned by Paul before his reference to “works of the law” in Rom. 3:20 are taken from the Decalogue (2:21–22), and do not refer to Jewish “identity markers.” Circumcision has been touched upon, but it is treated (rather curiously) as though it were not a part of the law to be observed (2:26–27); in this context at least it can hardly serve as a prime referent of the phrase “works of the law” in 3:20. (118–19)

The verses Romans 2:25–29 hardly just “touch upon” the question of circumcision; they are central to the entire argument of the chapter, namely, that circumcision—i.e., mere membership in the physical People of Israel and bearing its identity markers—does not justify, while adherence to the Law does. The “curious” contrast between the Law and circumcision, far from being a refutation of Dunn, provides in fact very strong support for Dunn's contention that Paul's target is those practices that mark off Israel as separate and saved alone. Romans 3:20 does mount a theoretical attack on “works of the Law” in a general sense (as do other verses as well); the purpose of this critique, however, is once more immediately revealed in 3:27–30, where again circumcision is emphasized and devalued. Verse 4:16 is even more explicit: “That is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants—not only to the adherents of the law, but also to those who share the faith of Abraham, for he is the father of us all. ” In Romans, no less than in Galatians, Paul's primary motive is the universalization of soteriology.

And again: “That Paul supports his rejection of the ‘works of the law’ in Rom. 3:20, 28 by showing that Abraham was justified by faith, not works (4:1–5), is positively fatal to Dunn's proposal.…For the ‘works’ by which Abraham could conceivably have been justified, and of which he might have boasted (4:2), were certainly not observances of the peculiarly Jewish parts of the Mosaic code” (119). I just do not know what Westerholm is talking about here, since circumcision and attendant Jewish privilege is the central issue in Romans 4. When Westerholm interprets Romans 4 (170–71) he simply elides the crucial verse 16. Salvation must rest on grace and not on works so that it will be granted to all and not only to ethnic Jews, those for whom Abraham is “ancestor according to the flesh”; this simply continues Paul's cry from the heart in 3:27: “Is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also?” Paul does not mention universal sinfulness here as the explanation at all. These passages are as sturdy a support for Dunn as he could want. On the other hand, Westerholm's argument here and throughout that Paul condemns failure to keep the Law and not wrong attitudes, boastfulness, or self-righteousness attendant on keeping the Law seems to me absolutely convincing. Of course, Dunn overstates his case when he claims, as he sometimes seems to, that “works of the law” lexically means only the identity markers. His insight, however, that this is what Paul has in mind as the letter which kills, opposed to the spirit which gives life, seems to me absolutely sound. For discussion of this last issue, letter ~ spirit, see the next chapter. [BACK]

26. Schreiner sums up his interpretation of Paul thus:

When Paul says that no one can receive the Spirit or obtain righteousness by “works of law,” his argument is directed against those who thought such righteousness could be merited by performing the law. Paul rules out righteousness by “works of law” because no one can obey the law perfectly. He does not oppose obeying the law in principle. What he opposes is the delusion of those who think they can earn merit before God by their obedience to the law, even though they fail to obey it.

The ultimate problem with this thesis is that there do not seem to have been any Jews who thought that works were sufficient for salvation or that perfect performance was possible for anyone. Accordingly, if that were the force of Paul's critique it would be bursting through an open door, and Jews could answer easily: We agree. No one (least of all us) can keep the Law entirely. God's grace is necessary, but trying to keep the Law is a necessary condition for God's grace to come. His critique would be then no critique, and ineffective. The great advantage of the interpretation that the focus and force of Paul's critique is on the ethnocentrism of Jewish doctrine and practice is that it is a critique of a real Judaism and not one that has to be made up ex nihilo to explain Paul. The issue is, as Schreiner correctly observes, not whether the critique is anti-Semitic but whether it made sense! [BACK]

27. It seems that here again I have reproduced Baur's intuitions as summed up in Bultmann (1967, 14). See also Barclay (1991, 94). [BACK]

28. Alan Segal has phrased this particularly well:

Paul does not distinguish between ceremonial laws and moral laws exactly. He distinguishes between flesh and spirit. But the effect of his distinction, as I will show, is to valorize moral life while denigrating ceremonial life. In other words, it is Paul's opinion that the gentiles must be transformed by their faith in the risen, spiritual Christ so that they are to be treated as righteous gentiles and not to be made to observe any part of the ceremonial law.