1. For a somewhat different account of the interrelationships of these elements, see Smith (1990, 141).

2. For a very judicious discussion of the question of whether Paul responds to these documents or they are later polemics against Paul, see Davies (1965, 50–51). See also Gager (1983, 125).

3. Luke 1:32 is of significance here, for it simultaneously describes Jesus as the son of God and David as the father of Jesus. The formula is thus the same. Luke simply does not feel the need to supply the hermeneutic gloss, according to the flesh, with regard to Jesus' human genealogy.

4. This last argument was pointed out to me by Ruth Clements.

5. If the Peter/Paul opposition as I describe it seems to prefigure the later controversies between orthodox and gnostic Christians, that is no accident, as I read Paul as a moderate “gnostic,” somewhere between the monadic corporeality of the Jerusalem church and the extreme spirituality of the later true Gnostics. Cf. Wedderburn: “[Views of Jesus's resurrection] of Christians seem to range through a whole spectrum from the accounts of the crucified body being restored to life, wounds and all (cf. Lk. 24.37–42); Jn 20.25,27), through Paul's account in 1 Cor 15 which seems to suggest that the resurrection appearances were of the same kind as his own conversion experience ” (1987, 192–93 [emphasis added]). And again there: “Epiphanius mocks the Valentinians as denying the resurrection of the dead, ‘saying something mysterious and ridiculous, that it is not this body which rises, but another rises from it, which they call spiritual,’ (‘Mysterious and ridiculous’ perhaps, but still very Pauline)” (215 and see also 216–18). Moreover, this controversy between Peter/James and Paul had political implications similar to those of the later schism as well. See Pagels (1978, 415–30).

6. See, however, αι=!μα καὶ σάρκας contrasted with gods in Polyaen. Strat., III, 11, 1 cited in TDNT VII, 99.

7. See next section for further discussion of this point.

8. I absolutely agree with Betz (71) that Paul's ἐν ἐμοὶ here has to be understood as referring to a vision and will further support it later. The question of “internal” or “external” is irrelevant in my opinion. In either case, Paul is referring to a vision with the “eyes of the mind.” See further discussion below.

9. Elizabeth Castelli has asked what is at stake in this claim for me, since I make it so emphatically. The answer is that I wish to disrupt what I believe to be a false antithesis between theological and sociological understandings of Paul. While my reading of Paul is one that interprets his work as responsive to particular situations in the churches to which he is writing, and therefore within the modern sociological tradition of Pauline scholarship, at the same time I find it generated by a consistent theological mainspring as well. In this, again, I think that my method of reading Paul, as well as my particular constructions, are perhaps closest to those of F. C. Baur.

10. It is important, however, to note that from a rabbinic Jewish perspective, this very stance puts Paul into direct conflict with Judaism. It is not “tolerance” of Judaism to say that for Jews it is a matter of indifference whether or not they are circumcised. This is a dismissal of Pharisaic/ biblical Judaism entirely.

11. The perspective here is substantially the same as that of Sanders (1983, 177).

12. I find it impossible to follow the argument of Watson, who writes that “Paul claims in Gal. 2:14 that in eating with Gentiles, Peter has been living ‘like a Gentile’ (ἐθνικῶς), and if taken literally this would mean that Peter and the Jewish Christians of Antioch had abandoned the observance of the law and their Jewish identity. But it is hard to imagine the apostle to the circumcised doing this, and it is perhaps more likely that Paul has exaggerated the extent of Peter's departure from the law.…The example given—eating with Gentiles—perhaps suggests a relaxed attitude toward the law on the part of the Antiochene Jewish Christians, rather than a complete renunciation of the law” (Watson 1986, 33). Watson goes on to write, however: “It is therefore probable that at Antioch too, Gentile Christians were exempted from the Jewish food-laws,” a claim that certainly contradicts the first one. If Peter had been eating with those gentile Christians, then certainly it means that he was eating the same food as they, and if they were exempted from the Jewish food laws, then he also was eating non-kosher food, which constitutes in itself a renunciation of the Law. See also Sanders (1990, 170–89), who has completely discredited the view that James would have encouraged Peter to stop eating with gentiles because of a putative gentile impurity. As Sanders has shown, even the existence of such a category of impurity was very much contested—and apparently the Shammaites, to whom Paul is often assigned, were against the notion—while in any case, the fact of impurity would not prevent one from eating with a person, certainly not in Diaspora, where all are impure (172–76). Moreover, as Sanders demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt, only certain very extreme texts proscribe table fellowship with gentiles if the food is kosher (on this point, see also Segal: “There is no law in rabbinic Judaism that prevents a Jew from eating with a gentile” [1990, 231] and Fredriksen: “The discussions preserved in the Mishnah that detail the correct procedure on such occasions [of Jews and gentiles eating together] attest to the frequency with which they occurred” [1988, 151]). Of the alternatives which Sanders suggests for what Peter was transgressing in James's eyes, I find most attractive the notion that he was eating non-kosher food of some sort (185–86). Sanders's reason for assuming that the most plausible interpretation is that James did not want them to eat with gentiles, “because close association might lead to contact with idolatry or transgression of one of the biblical food laws,” seems to me less likely, precisely because the gentiles that Peter was eating with were Christians, and either their food was kosher or it was not. Presumably, it was not. Furthermore, it would hardly behoove James to choose the most extreme and marginal version of Jewish practice (precisely on Sanders's account). This is even more the case on the second of Sanders's choices, namely, that “some people had a general reluctance to eat any Gentile food.” This does not mean that Peter had necessarily eaten pork or shellfish of which Sanders is probably right in assuming that hardly any Jew would eat, but could easily refer to meat not slaughtered properly and the like. Any of these would count as “living like gentiles.”

13. As I argue below, this point provides key evidence, also, as to the identity of the “opponents” in Galatia. Sanders has put this in a somewhat more positive light: “It was probably Peter's responsibility to the circumcised, which might be hindered if he himself were not Torah-observant, not disagreement with Paul's mission as such, which led him to withdraw from the Gentiles in Antioch” (Sanders 1983, 19, and see there 177).

14. Compare the reading of Gager (1983, 33–35).

15. In spite of our generally different interpretations of Galatians as a whole, I quite agree with Cosgrove (1988, 133–39) on the interpretation of this passage.

16. The difference between Hays's view and mine is that he understands Paul's interlocutors here to be Jews who have adopted the doctrine of justification by faith but not abandoned the Law, whereas I see Paul as arguing against Jews who, having adopted the doctrine, initially drew the conclusion that the Law was no longer obligatory or important but then went back to Law observance for communal reasons to which Paul objects. I think that this interpretation renders his argument here and later more coherent and strong. I certainly agree with Hays when he says, “In both of these letters [Galatians and Romans], Paul treats the doctrine of justification by faith as an agreed-upon premise from which he can construct his position about the relations between Jews and Gentiles and the role of the Law in the life of the Christian community.”

17. For the position that Paul is referring to Peter's actions here, see Cosgrove (1988, 138), who interprets exactly as I do, and Barclay (1991, 80 and n.13).

18. My view is very close to that of Gaventa 1986.

19. For this interpretation, see below n.20.

20. Jewett (1970, 204–06) interprets in a similar fashion, adducing, moreover, a highly convincing historical background to this group. There are certain differences, however, between our interpretations, and while I think that there are some considerations which favor Jewett's, others favor my version. Jewett argues that the agitators truly believed in circumcision as a necessity for salvation, and that when Paul says they do not keep the Law, he means the Law as he (Paul) understands it (201). This accounts better than my interpretation for the statement that the agitators are promoting another gospel. On the other hand, it seems to me clear from these verses that Paul is claiming that were it not for their fear of persecution, the agitators would not be pressing the Galatians to convert at all. This tension in his account is exemplified in the following sentence: “The nomistic Christians in Judea would have ample reason to boast if they could induce the Gentile churches to enter the ranks of the circumcised, for such an achievement would release them from a mortal threat levelled against all who dared to associate themselves with the ungodly and the uncircumcised” (206). (Presumably, Jewett would argue that this only means that they would have no interest in converting gentiles at all nor care what they do, a proposition I for one find less than convincing.) Once it be admitted that the agitators wish to circumcise the Galatians to avoid persecution and not because they believe in the necessity of the gentiles being circumcised for salvation, then it seems best to consider them the anti-type of Peter as presented in the Antiochene parable—that is, essentially on Paul's side against James and the even more extreme Palestinian nomistic Christians but afraid of persecution. Finally, I am not persuaded by Jewett's quite brilliant argumentation that the Galatians were libertines. The entire rhetoric of the letter suggests the opposite, that they were strongly drawn to nomism, and as I have suggested elsewhere, that the last part of the letter has to do with a danger that Paul perceives of misunderstanding of his call to Christian freedom. Jewett reads too much, in my opinion, into the phrase “being completed in the flesh” and into the use of “days” for Sabbaths and holidays. The latter is actually quite attested in rabbinic Hebrew parlance.

21. An attractive alternative explanation for this passage is that offered by Segal:

If you receive circumcision, you are bound to follow the entire law because you have converted to Judaism. Paul says that what is necessary is that all be transformed by the spirit, which is in modern parlance a different kind of conversion. It follows that if you are not circumcised you do not have to keep the whole law. But it does not follow that you do not have to keep parts of it; we have seen that many Jews and Christians assumed that part of the law was encumbent upon non-Jews who wish to live with Jews. He even tells us that the Christians who are making this deal are not as pious as Pharisees. And as an ex-Pharisee he has nothing but contempt for that position.…So his argument appears to us to be very subtle, but it may have been exceedingly clear to those living in the social situation he addresses. He says that if you want to be Jewish you have to go way beyond what the circumcisers are doing. You need to become a Pharisee, as Paul himself was a Pharisee. Evidently, he sees their ordinary Judaism as a kind of watered-down Judaism. They keep some of the laws but not others. And they do not practice the pieties of the Pharisees. This is a kind of hypocrisy. (Alan F. Segal, “Universalism in Judaism and Christianity,” unpublished paper, 1992)

I have the following difficulties with this elegant reading. First of all, what evidence is there that a sort of partial observance of the Law was characteristic of an alleged “ordinary Judaism”? Second, what evidence is there that when Paul says the “whole law,” he is referring to the “pieties of the Pharisees” and not to those observances which were the province of all groups of first-century Jews, at least in Palestine? Third, I find that this interpretation is less responsive to the context of the letter to the Galatians than mine in that it does not account for the analogy between the situation of the circumcisers and that of Peter in the Antioch encounter and thus makes the appearance of the narration of that incident less compellingly relevant. On at least some hermeneutic principles, that alone would lead to preference for the explanation offered in the text.

22. I do not think therefore that “justification” has so much to do with “getting in” or “staying in” (pace Sanders) as in being saved at the end. It is conceivable that according to some versions of Christianity (and indeed, some versions of Judaism—not rabbinic), being in is sufficient for being saved, but they are still logically distinct categories. Cf. Wright (1992a, 2 and esp. 148), who conflates the two concepts. As its Hebrew contexts show, “justified” simply means, “declared just,” which may or may not be a function of membership in the covenantal community. Although I find much exciting and necessary in Wright's work (which reached me just as I was completing this manuscript), his understanding of justification seems to me to seriously weaken his overall claim that Paul is not dealing with soteriology. Somehow the two elements of covenantal theology and individual salvation will have to be integrated in future work. I, moreover, think that “justified” works perfectly well as a translation of the Greek (and Hebrew). See below in this chapter for an actual Hebrew source for this usage in Paul.

23. But Sanders also quotes approvingly Heikki Räisänen's comment: “The Jews' establishment of their own righteousness…is…identical with their rejection of Christ,” and “the root of the evil lies in a christological failure, not in an anthropological one” (Räisänen 1980, 71). Sanders has seemingly abandoned his correct (in my opinion) insight that “their own righteousness” means the righteousness which devolves on them simply by virtue of being Jewish, and thus contains a trenchant critique of Judaism—not, I agree, on the basis of the false merit-grace distinction—and has, therefore, nothing to do with their “rejection of Christ.” It is precisely an “anthropological” (read ethical) failure, but not one of works-righteousness! See also Sanders: “It is the Gentile question and the exclusivism of Paul's soteriology which dethrone the law” (1977, 496–97). Once we have admitted the first (the gentile question), however, we have no need of the second (Paul's exclusivism), and I would argue that the latter is, therefore, an epiphenomenon of the first factor.

I think, moreover, that the interpretation of Paul offered here goes a long way toward answering the objections and contradictions that have led Räisänen to his extreme position on Paul's alleged “incoherence.” To take one example: Vis-à-vis Romans 2, Räisänen has argued that it is inconsistent to claim on the one hand that all have sinned and, on the other, that there are gentiles who have kept the Law. This is, however, no contradiction at all once we realize that it is not individuals of whom Paul speaks but groups. All have sinned, Jews and gentiles alike, but individual Jews as well as gentiles have kept the Law. Therefore, all—Jews and gentiles as groups—are equal in the sight of God! Incoherence (as well as coherence) is an artifact of hermeneutics (pace Räisänen 1986, 103ff.).

24. Below I will argue that rabbinic Judaism, which we know, of course, only from post-Pauline writings, elaborated a different response to this ethico-spiritual challenge.

25. See also Segal (1990, 277 and 281). Campbell, citing Davies, seems also to have gotten this just right:

Although Paul exploits Hellenistic forms and literary genres, he takes seriously the scriptures of his people and seeks to deal with the problem in their terms—employing rabbinical and other methods to do justice both to this new emergence, the Christian community, and its matrix, the Jewish people.

26. First, I am not persuaded of the necessity for the interpretation that Paul substitutes “all flesh” for “all that lives” as an interpretative gloss and then derives from that the principle that works do not justify, since works are of the flesh. (To be sure, it is not impossible that such a midrash lies behind Paul's interpretation here. Dunn has made as good a case for it as can be made, here and also in Dunn [1988, 155].) I find it most plausible that in Paul's Bible the text had πασα σάρξ and not the πας ζῶν of the Septuagint. This position is certainly supported by the fact that Paul's version of the text is cited in 1 Enoch 81.5 as well (Charles 1913, 169). I read Paul's argument, therefore, as both deeper and more straightforward than this.

27. Indeed, it is not to be excluded that “faith of Jesus Christ πίστις Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ ” here means Jesus Christ's faithfulness, and then Paul is not even making this exegetical extravagance. This would bring the interpretation in line with the use of the same psalm in Romans 3, for which see Hays 1980. Against this interpretation, however, is the fact that Paul here does seem to be strongly asserting the necessity of human faith in Jesus Christ: Even we have had faith in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by the faith of Christ καὶ ἡμεῖς εἰς Χριστὸν Ἰησοῦν ἐπιστεύσαμεν, ἵνα δικαιωθῶμεν ἐκ πίστεως Χριστοῦ. I do not dispute, therefore, the notion that there is a faithfulness of Jesus Christ of which Paul speaks; rather I wish to disclaim a view that would hold that it follows from this that the faith of humans in Jesus is not, for him, significant.

One could easily interpret that the human faith in Christ is answered by his faithfulness, a perfectly rabbinic notion of measure for measure הדימ דגנכ הדימ, one of the most frequently attested of all theologoumena in rabbinic thought. Westerholm has adduced several other passages (curiously, not this one) in which it is quite clear that the faith in question is human faith in Christ and not Christ's faithfulness toward humans (1988, 111–12). It may be that in all of these places the same movement of הדימ דגנכ הדימ is present. Indeed, even Romans 3:22 can be taken to show this very movement from the faith of the human to the answer of God's faithfulness: The righteousness of God through the faith of Jesus Christ for all who believe δικαιοσύνη δὲ θεοῦ διὰ πίστεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ εἰς πάντας τοὺς πιστεύοντας. (See the discussion of the analogous Galatians 3:22 by Richard B. Hays [1987].) Although in the earlier work, Hays did not pay attention to this double or dialogical movement of faithfulness, in his later work he does (1989, 40–41). The doctrine of justification by faith remains intact—although, to be sure, not in its Reformation form of sola gratia. See also Watson (1986, 199n.89) and especially Barclay (1991, 78n.8).

28. I accordingly think that Thielman (1989, 64–65), who sees here a Pauline argument that no one can keep the Law, has quite missed the point. Also, this interpretation completely obviates Segal's claim that justification has to do with conversion in first-century Judaism or that “Paul could have learned the language of justification from his Christian compatriots after he entered the Christian community” (1990, 177).

29. See Dunn (1990, 207), where he replies to Räisänen on this precise point but fails to use this (to my mind) decisive argument.

30. Westerholm has also made the point that the inability of humans to be justified by works, because they could not or would never fulfill the Law adequately, was a traditional prophetic claim (1988, 163–64). In a sense, his argument about Paul is similar in structure to mine, although very different in conclusion. Taking this traditional theological motif as primary, he argues that Paul went beyond the Prophets in discovering a radical solution. I hardly think that the fact that inability to keep the Law was not an invention of Paul should be relegated to a “postscript” (pace Westerholm 1988, 163); it is crucial to realize that, this “plight” having become a common theme of Jewish writing, Paul alone—or nearly alone—arrived at the conclusion that faith was now a fully adequate surrogate for keeping the commandments.

One point that must be made clear, however, is that my reading of Paul as motivated by the question of the inclusion of the gentiles is most emphatically not a sociological one that locates his writing in the practical problems of the first-century church (pace Wrede, as cited by Westerholm 1988, 167), but one that is as theologically based as Westerholm's account of a Paul motivated by the failure of the Law to provide an antidote to the poison of sin. Where Westerholm writes that the “fundamental principle” affirmed by “Paul's thesis of justification by faith, not works of the law, is that of humanity's dependence on divine grace; and that conviction, it may safely be said, underlies everything Paul wrote,” I would substitute for the fundamental principle the conviction that all humanity is one in the eyes of God and must be saved in the same way, a conviction that, it may safely be said, underlies everything that Paul wrote. The alternative, then, between Paul the profound theological thinker and Paul the practical church politician is, in my view, a false one. I find Westerholm's interpretation compelling, as I do, of course, find my own as well. The question remains whether they are incompatible. Perhaps the ultimate solution will be an understanding of Paul that sees him as operating on both levels at once.

31. In Romans 3:22, which I have discussed briefly in note 27 above, this motive is explicit also, for immediately after asserting that God's righteousness comes to all who believe through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ, Paul asserts: For there is no distinction οὐ γάρ ἐστιν διαστολή, a declaration that prepares the way for the end of the chapter, in which he insists that there can be no discrimination in the way that God justifies Jews and gentiles, because he is the God of the whole world, and therefore the circumcised and the uncircumcised are all justified on account of their faith.

32. Dunn misses this point again when he writes that the “phrase ἐν σαρκί used in the same passage (Rom. 2.28) denotes not merely the physical as opposed to the spiritual, but also the people of Israel in terms of physical identity and racial kinship” (1990, 222). In my view, these are not two separate meanings at all, but two sides of the same coin. The physical is the people of Israel in terms of physical identity and racial kinship, and the spiritual is the allegorical interpretation of that identity and kinship in the Body of Christ.

33. “Thus, when Paul writes in Rom. 3:21 that ‘now, apart from Law the righteousness of God has been manifested, witnessed by the Law and the Prophets,’ he is making a claim that anyone who had ever prayed Psalm 143 from the heart would instantly recognize: God's saving righteousness, for which the psalmist had hoped, has at last appeared. The witness of the Law and the Prophets to the righteousness of God is not merely, as Christians have sometimes strangely supposed, a witness concerning a severe retributive justice; rather, it is a witness concerning God's gracious saving power, as Psalm 143 demonstrates” (Hays 1989, 52).

34. Menahem Lorberbaum has made an interesting alternative suggestion, namely, that what Paul is saying here is that his former life under the Law was equivalent to a crucifixion which prepared him for the resurrection with Christ.

35. In this sense Alan Segal's characterization of Paul's experience as “conversion” is certainly justified.

36. Bultmann himself, after setting out the parallels, claims to discredit them. While I do not think that Paul was influenced by so-called Mystery Religions, particularly because they are unattested so early, I do think that there are very strong parallels here. Paul could very well have been the source of the influence, or common religious developments could have produced both. The parallels are nevertheless illuminating, despite Bultmann's disclaimers (1967, 23–30). Thus, Bultmann's claim that “of course Paul experienced ecstasy, but for him it is a special charism and not the specifically Christian mode of life (cf. 1 Cor. 12–14)” (24) ignores in my view the very next verses of Galatians, which I am about to discuss. What, after all, is the outpouring of the Spirit to which Paul refers, if not ecstasy?

37. Later in Romans 6 Paul will interpret this dying and resurrection of the individual Christian as taking place in baptism, which is certainly (already in older Judaisms, as well as in later) a ritual of death and rebirth.

38. See my discussions below in Chapters 7 and 8.

39. Cp. Gaston and Gager (1983, 234) on this verse. Gager himself seems somewhat skeptical.

40. Cp. again the passage quoted above: Now, my child, you see me with your eyes, but what I am you cannot understand when you look at me with your body's eyes and with the physical sight. It is not with those eyes that anyone can see me now, my child (Bultmann 1967, 19).

41. This is how Murray Krieger describes this figure as used by Phillip Sidney with reference to Psalm 114: “Enargeia, the verbal art of forcing us to see vividly. Through the ‘eyes of the mind'—an appropriately Platonic notion—we are shown the coming of God and his ‘unspeakable and everlasting beauty.’ Here, then, are words invoking a visible presence, though, of course, to ‘the eyes of the mind’ alone. Though God's may be only a figurative entrance through His personified creatures, the poet makes us, ‘as it were,’ see this entrance. He is there, in His living creation, and absent no longer” (Krieger 1979, 601).

42. This important point was suggested to me by my student, Cecilia Mahoney, who thus independently arrived at one of the important insights of Cosgrove's book (1988), namely, that Paul and the Galatians shared a charismatic experience. I accordingly disagree with Betz (133) who writes: “Paul does not reflect upon the difference between himself and the Galatians; his conversion was the result of a vision of Christ and not, as it is for them, of the hearing of the Christian message.” I would argue that Paul is explicitly connecting the two experiences via the eyes of the mind. Cosgrove and I, however, reach very different interpretations of Galatians starting from our independently arrived at common assumption that the Galatians have had important pneumatic experiences similar to those of Paul and occasioned by his preaching. For these differences, see below passim.

43. Note that this simply obviates the distinction between πίστις Χριστοῦ as faith in Jesus or Jesus’ faith, as both are necessary moments in the same motion. See above, n.27. I reject as well the opposition between “imitating Abraham's faith” and “participating in Christ, who is Abraham's seed,” which Boers sets up, as cited in Dunn (1990, 202).

44. I entirely agree with Cosgrove that there is no reason to assume that the Galatians “must be turning to the law without thought for the Spirit.” Paul's argument would lose its entire force were that the case. They believe that Law is compatible with spirit, and Paul is proving to them that it is not, because the Law is of the flesh, while the Spirit (Holy) is of the spirit.

45. I therefore disagree with Cosgrove, who claims that circumcision is not mentioned in Galatians 3–4 (51).

46. There is one part of Cosgrove's argument that, if I have understood it, seems to me singularly weak. His interpretation of 2 Corinthians 3:6 requires that we assume that the Super Apostles in Corinth hold that keeping the Law is a precondition for the continued experience of the spirit (111–12). In other words, they hold that Law and spirit are not ontologically on the same level. But Paul opposes law and spirit as terms which are ontologically (although not axiologically) equal. His assumptions, then, would be so incompatible with those of his opponents that they could hardly even understand each other. In other words, were Cosgrove's reading correct, it seems to me that Paul should have said something like: “The letter kills but faith gives the Spirit,” since on his reconstruction the desirability of the spirit is equal to both groups and the issue is whether Law or faith brings the spirit. On my understanding, the verse makes better sense, because the question is indeed whether the letter or the spirit is the desirable means to life. I do not dismiss, however, the possibility that life itself means life in the Spirit, in which Spirit has already a somewhat different sense from “spirit” opposed to letter.

47. Understanding the participle οἱ περιτεμνόμενοι of 6:13 in the sense of “those who advocate circumcision” (Jewett 1970, 202–03).

48. For much more evidence to this effect, as well as an interpretation and consideration of the gender issues involved, see D. Boyarin 1992b. I think that these data are much more to the point than general claims to the effect that Torah observance is necessary for the Holy Spirit, pace Barclay (1991, 84). Note that Balaam, who was not Jewish and not a Law observer, was vouchsafed the Holy Spirit. According to rabbinic tradition, he was born circumcised!

49. Here, of course, only “his” is possible. Circumcision is accordingly a very problematic moment in the constitution of gens and gender from my feminist point of view. All I can do, however, it seems to me at present, is record that problematic. My next book is intended to be a cultural poetics of rabbinic Jewish manhood, centering around circumcision as a psychic structure.

50. Justin Martyr provides an excellent example of a late-antique platonic version of seeing God with the mind's eye (Justin Martyr 1989, 196).

51. Much of the following section is dependent on the material he has gathered in Wolfson 1987a and b.

52. For an almost identical use of Job, see D. Boyarin (1990b, 86).

53. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz's God's Phallus (1994) is a brilliant phenomenology of Judaism along these lines.

54. As Wolfson so persuasively demonstrates, however, the dominant kabbalistic trend was to understand the mystic as male and the Divine element he encountered as female, The Shekhina, or even the Torah represented as female. Then, the circumcision was necessary for penetration of this female, just as it is required for human sexual intercourse (1987b, 210–11). For the Rabbis (of the pre-medieval period), such a divine female as a solution to the paradox of mystical gender was excluded, and only feminization of the male mystic was possible.

55. For a much fuller account of the rabbinic interpretations and views, see D. Boyarin 1992b.

56. The distinction between ἐν σαρκί as referring to circumcision or to the works of the Law in general is a false one in my view, pace Barclay (1991, 86). The immediate issue is circumcision, according to my hypothesis, the fleshy observance par excellence, but circumcision itself is a synecdoche for all of the works of the Law.

57. This is a modification of a point made by Barclay (1991, 224, and see there, 228).

58. For this term, see Ortner 1973.

59. Sanders simply refuses to apply to Paul the very logical consideration that he utilizes in regard to Philo's allegorizers: “They did not observe the literal law, but they observed its ‘real’ intent” (118n.32). Thus even when he decides that a moment in Paul (Romans 2:29) is similar to Philo's allegorizers (131), he does so only to deny the genuine Pauline character of the passage. The question in my mind is what is at stake in denying this hermeneutical dimension in Paul? Why do nearly all modern interpreters wish to exclude it?

60. See Chapter 8 below. Also, in Chapter 6 I will argue that the specific usage that Paul made of a verse of Leviticus in Galatians 3:13 could easily have “misled” those who heard his preaching into thinking that incest was permitted to Christians. I think it is this “misreading” of his intentions that Paul is trying to guard against. I am not “siding” with Paul here, but I do assume that the Corinthian crisis can be explained, without assuming outside agitators in Corinth, simply as an interpretation of Paul's preaching of freedom in the spirit as in most of Galatians, an interpretation which he, already here, is at pains to denote as a misinterpretation. It must be remembered that Marcion (the “heretic” who rejected the “Old Testament” entirely) built his edifice on Galatians, and it is not entirely surprising that he could do so. Once more, it seems that unknowingly I have reproduced a position very similar to that of F. C. Baur (1873–75, 1, 263).

61. I thus decline the very opposition between these two possibilities suggested by Barclay when he writes, “This genitive should not be taken in the sense of a law promulgated by Christ but in the looser sense of the law redefined through Christ ” (134). My interpretation here is thus virtually the same as—but subtly differentiated from—his (132–34). Or rather, I should say that the hermeneutic perspective I have been defending lends considerable weight, in my opinion, to the interpretation that Barclay proposes. Note how this interpretation subtly shifts (while substantially accepting) the view of Hays (1987, 275) that the Law of Christ “is a formulation coined (or employed) by Paul to refer to this paradigmatic self-giving of Jesus Christ.”

62. This interpretation also has the virtue of making sense of the talk of spirit in the continuing verses, which are now understood as carrying both senses, that of the human spirit as opposed to the human flesh which sins, as well as the spirit of the Law (love) as opposed to its flesh (circumcision). See also Barclay (1991, 115), who has provided what seems to me by far the best account of the end of v. 17. See also my discussion in Chapter 6 of Romans 13:8.