1. See the very similar points made in Segal (1990, xi ff. and 48). I think that Segal's remark there that “Paul's letters may be more important to the history of Judaism than the rabbinic texts are to the interpretation of Christian Scriptures” is right on the mark. Readers of both books will perceive both my debt to my distinguished predecessor (and colleague in graduate school) as well as my disagreements with him. Some of these will be pointed out in the notes. For the question of Josephus's alleged Pharisaism, see the excellent discussion in Segal (1990, 81–83). [BACK]

2. It is one of the distinct achievements of Jacob Neusner to have clearly seen this point. [BACK]

3. The idea of this analysis originally came to me when participating in a seminar of his at the School of Criticism and Theory at Dartmouth in the summer of 1987, where he referred briefly to Paul and Spinoza on circumcision. [BACK]

4. Cosgrove 1988 is an excellent example of a reading of Paul that is explicit and self-aware in its choice of starting point and the hermeneutic effects of that choice. See p. 2 of that book. I do not believe that the reading of Galatians offered in this book is incompatible with the one offered there; indeed, I hope that they complement each other with their significantly different emphases. Incidentally, this example shows how the choice of a center even within a single letter makes a big difference; where Cosgrove reads Galatians through 3:1–5, I read it through 3:28–29. There is absolutely no Archimedean point from which to adjudicate such choices—on this issue I quite disagree with Cosgrove who does seem to hold that there are criteria which enable such choices (6)—but they should not result, it seems to me, in mutually exclusive interpretations. [BACK]

5. Gager's remarks on “loose ends” as well as his comment that “I do not take it as a given that the interpretation proposed here is the new, correct view of Paul on these matters. I do assume, or rather will undertake to demonstrate that it is a good interpretation, a valid one” (1983, 208–09) could serve as hermeneutical models. I offer my somewhat different interpretation in precisely the same spirit. [BACK]

6. Obviously, I hold that the Gaston-Gager interpretation fits into the first category. Despite its appeal ethically and religiously, it ultimately leaves us with a very weak reading of Paul. Furthermore, as I will argue below in Chapter 2, it falls down on exegetical grounds as well. I believe that my own reading of Paul answers many of the same theological and ethical needs that Gaston's does, but in a way that preserves the enormous force of Paul's critique of ethnicity. By reading Paul as a Jewish cultural critic, criticizing aspects of Judaism from within, I can preserve the power of his critique without turning him into an “anti-Semite.” (I reserve the term “self-hating Jew” for pathological instances, such as Otto Weininger and those Zionists who detested European Jews and saw them in the same light as anti-Semites did.) [BACK]

7. The desire for the One seems, in fact, to go back to much earlier Indo-European roots, as witness the Rgveda (Kuschel 1992, 181–82). Note the contrast with biblical myth in which God begins his creative work with pre-existent matter. Completely incidentally, a rather bizarre moment in this book is the identification of Emil Schürer as “a great Jewish historian” (198), an artifact, I assume, of the translation. The error, however, ends up particularly grotesque given Kuschel's constant interpretation of scholars according to their religious affiliations. [BACK]

8. Some feminists may claim of my book—with justice—that it is interested more in the question of ethnicity than of gender, indeed, that it gives gender relatively short Schrift. While that is so, I think nevertheless that my argument has implications for feminist theory, since if I am right in certain ways the fates of ethnic and gendered “difference” are common in western culture without, of course, either one being epiphenomenal to the other. [BACK]

9. William S. Campbell's work begins with a very similar problematic and intuition, to wit, that Paul's situation and his texts have much to teach us about our own cultural situations and dilemmas (Campbell 1992, vii). In some ways, however, his reading of Paul is quite different from mine. My dialogue with Campbell will be specifically marked at several points in the book in footnotes. [BACK]

11. Thus, interpretations of Paul (such as Campbell's) that claim that he did not mind whether Jews continued to circumcise their children and keep kosher, i.e., that he allowed for Jewish Christianity, do not disturb my claims. Only interpretations such as that of Lloyd Gaston and John Gager, discussed in Chapter 2, that would have Paul arguing that Jews need not believe in Christ in order to be saved would disrupt my argument. [BACK]

12. Hays (1989). See now also Wright (1992a, 140). In future work, however, I intend to argue that Paul's exegesis of Torah is closer to rabbinic exegesis than Wright allows; nor is rabbinic exegesis to be identified with “fanciful” or arbitrary prooftexting, pace Wright 168 n. 45 and passim. [BACK]

13. Baur (1875) and see selection in Meeks (1972, 277–88). I had essentially arrived at my interpretation before coming upon the work of Baur and was quite astounded to discover how often I hit on his ideas and formulations. I hope that my reformulation, however, in modern critical terms—taking into consideration other more recent interpretations of Paul as well—will lead to a reconsideration and reevaluation of Baur's contribution. [BACK]

14. Compare the excellent formulation of John Gager: “We do not find a self-confident paganism aggressively and unanimously set against Judaism as a ‘barbaric superstition,’ but a prolonged debate within an increasingly anxious culture over the status of Judaism as a religion of universal humanity” (Gager 1983, 31). Gager is referring, of course, to the prolonged debate over the status of Judaism within “pagan” culture, but this is the “flip side” of seeing the internal Jewish debate within that “increasingly anxious culture,” over precisely the same issue. [BACK]