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Historical Puzzles in the Letters

Paul’s letters are important to the historian for several reasons. They offer the only direct access to a first-person voice in the New Testament. (Jesus left behind no writings; the Gospel narrators are anonymous; and the epistles that appear under the names of Peter, James, and John are considered by many scholars to be pseudonymous: see the introductions to those writings.) They are also the earliest writings from the nascent movement of believers in Christ (with the possible exception of the hypothetical document Q: see the introduction to the Gospels).

But it is the powerful story that lies implicit behind Paul’s letters that attracts and intrigues the historian, no less than the Christian believer. It is the story of a Pharisee, “zealous” for the law and ardent in his opposition to the earliest followers of Jesus, who was caught up short when “God revealed his son” to him and “called” Paul to be Christ’s apostle (Gal. 1:13–17). That language evokes Israel’s prophets, who were “called” and “sent” to deliver God’s word; and if Jeremiah could speak of the word of the Lord like a fire “burning” irrepressibly in his bones (Jer. 20:8–9), Paul could declare that he had been “crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:19–20). The intensity of the experience to which Paul repeatedly alludes has long attracted the attention of theorists of religion, whether or not they are sympathetic to Christian belief (Ashton; Meeks and Fitzgerald). Further, Paul’s sharp juxtaposition of his “earlier life in Judaism” (Gal. 1:13–14) with his newfound life “in Christ” has long been read as evidence of his “conversion,” his abrupt and total reversal from life under Torah to life in a new reality, though that understanding has been challenged and largely undermined, at least in scholarly circles, in the last half of the twentieth century (Stendahl; but see Kim).

Whatever its nature (a question to which we return below), the intensity of Paul’s experience is echoed in the intensity of concern he expresses for “all the churches” (2 Cor. 11:28), the assemblies that he founded in various cities in Asia Minor, Macedonia, and Achaia. (The Greek word ekklēsia is usually translated “church” in English Bibles, and the Latin loanword ecclesia gives us the adjective “ecclesiastical” for all things churchly, but ekklēsia was also used in Paul’s day for a civic assembly in a Greek city, and so a growing minority of interpreters prefer the translation “assembly.”) The letters provide us tantalizing glimpses onto landscapes of community life in very different congregations, landscapes that defy easy description or even harmonization with each other. Because Paul addresses a bewildering assortment of issues in his correspondence with the Corinthian believers, our 1 and 2 Corinthians, which probably represent a compilation of earlier, more fragmentary letters (see the entries for each letter), are irresistible to the historian, and have often been used as the primary evidence for generalizations about “Pauline Christianity” (see Meeks; Theissen). But what situation should we imagine prompted these letters: a rift between Paul and the (more law-observant) Jerusalem apostles and their adherents (Barrett)? The impulses of an incipient Gnosticism among the Corinthians (Schmithals)? Differences in economic status, reflected in theological conflicts (Theissen)? Tension between Paul’s social experience and that of inspired women in the congregations (Wire)? Each of these answers (and there are more!) grasps at real clues in the letters, but none has won universal recognition for its capacity to explain the whole. And the issues Paul encountered in Corinth are quite different from those he addressed in letters to other cities.

And how should we understand Paul himself? To take a single question as an example, Paul tells the Romans that the horizon of his concern for the assemblies is not just the calling to secure “the obedience of faith among all the nations” (Rom. 1:5, my translation): that obligation is based in a deeper anguish for his “own people,” that is, “Israelites” (Rom. 9:1–5). It is the clashing juxtaposition of what generations of readers have taken as Paul’s “conversion,” or from another perspective, his apparent apostasy from Judaism, with such expressions of abiding loyalty to the people Israel that generates some of the liveliest controversies in biblical scholarship today. Should we understand Paul as having left central aspects of his former life in Judaism behind, or, as a matter of principle, should we interpret his work and thought within Judaism? (See Nanos and Zetterholm.)

Stories We Tell about Paul

In the mid-twentieth century, Rudolf Bultmann wrote what stands as a crisp summary of Paul’s place in early Christianity:

Standing within the frame of Hellenistic Christianity, he raised the theological motifs that were at work in the proclamation of the Hellenistic church to the clarity of theological thinking; he called to attention the problems latent in the Hellenistic proclamation and brought them to a decision; and thus—so far as our sources permit an opinion on the matter—became the founder of Christian theology. (Bultmann, 187)

This summary makes clear that Paul did not develop his views from nothing, as some sort of theological genius: he joined a movement already in the lively process of developing beliefs and practices, and he received its most important traditions (see 1 Cor. 11:2, 23–26; 15:3–7). Scholars differ, however, among themselves and with Bultmann, regarding the key phrase in this summary. What were “the problems latent in the Hellenistic proclamation”? Bultmann recognized that Paul did not invent a movement that welcomed non-Jews without requiring Torah observance of them; that is, he already stood “within the frame of Hellenistic Christianity.” But as Bultmann understood it, that frame appeared more a strategy of opportunity than a theological principle, and talk of freedom from the law could easily be construed by one or another Hellenistic church as mere libertinism. For Bultmann (as for many Protestant interpreters before and after him), Paul’s grappling with the Hellenistic church required him to resolve tensions between the characteristically Jewish understanding of the human before God—which had been Paul’s own understanding—and the understanding to which Paul had been brought “in Christ,” especially regarding the role of the law in the human’s obedience to God’s claim. Even “within the frame of Hellenistic Christianity,” then, the apostle was preoccupied in letter after letter by an implicit debate with Judaism. The eventual prevalence of a law-free “gentile” church is not a historical accident or an aberration, but the triumph of Paul’s own ideas. Thus, although he did not write the Letter to the Ephesians, its calm assurance of the Torah’s irrelevance to those who are “in Christ” could be regarded, on this view, as “the quintessence of Paulinism” (Peake).

Here a note on the translation of a Greek term ethnē is important. The word, a plural, literally means “peoples” or “nations,” and is used throughout Jewish Scripture to mean the nations other than Israel. In many English New Testament translations, however, it is rendered “Gentiles.” The capitalized form is potentially misleading since it suggests a coherent ethnic identity, like “Scythian” or “Egyptian,” though no individuals in the ancient world called themselves “Gentiles.” Furthermore, the same word is sometimes translated two different ways in the same Bible. For example, the NRSV uses “nations” in Isaiah, but “Gentiles” in Romans 15:9–12, even where Paul is quoting the same passages from Isaiah. The effect is subtle, but meaningful: it suggests that Paul imagines two sorts of people in the world, “Jews” and “everyone else,” and is preoccupied with the boundary line that distinguishes them.

Just this understanding of Paul has been hotly contested in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, however. We may broadly distinguish three “stories” that interpreters now tell about the apostle.

Paul as Convert from Judaism

The first story prevailed in Bultmann’s day, as it still does today in much of Christianity. Paul received a preeminent education as a Jew. (Acts names him “Saul” in this period and makes him a student of the famed Rabbi Gamaliel II: 5:34; 22:3.) Indeed, his self-professed credentials, “as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless” (Phil. 3:5–6), “zealous for the traditions of my ancestors” (Gal. 1:14), are an accurate self-appraisal as an exemplary Jew. It is as a representative Jew that he sought “a righteousness of [his] own that comes from the law” (Phil. 3:9), for all Israel characteristically strove for “the righteousness that is based on the law … as if it were based on works” (Rom. 9:31–32). On this view, Paul (Saul) the Pharisee persecuted the early believers in Jesus because they had, in some way he found intolerable, flouted or ignored the law. The reversal occasioned by the “revelation” of Christ to him was nothing less than a conversion, a personal about-face from one who now abandoned any effort at achieving his own righteousness through works of law and accepted instead the righteousness “on the basis of faith,” meaning trust in Jesus (Rom. 9:32).

From this point on, Paul was opposed by other Jews because he adamantly insisted the law had no positive role in salvation: it provided only the knowledge of sin (Rom. 7:7). His resolve to approach those outside the law “as one outside the law” (1 Cor. 9:19–21) and his judgment that “nothing is unclean in itself” (Rom. 14:14) show his rejection of the Torah’s binding authority. Even the Jerusalem apostles (and their delegates) fought Paul on these points, refusing to accept shared meals between Jews and “Gentiles” at Antioch (Gal. 2:11–14; for the view that the law forbade even social “associations” between Jews and gentiles, see Acts 10:28). Paul saw this failure as hypocrisy on the part of the apostles (Gal. 2:14), and could only regard with anguish his fellow Jews’ stubborn insistence on that righteousness “as if based on works.” Though Paul (in Gal. 2:1–9) and Acts (15:1–29) agree that the Jerusalem apostles accepted his mission to the “uncircumcision,” they apparently acquiesced when Paul was accused by other Jews of flouting the law himself and teaching other Jews to do the same (see Acts 21:17–36). Jewish antagonists further accused Paul (falsely, according to Luke) of bringing gentiles into the temple court, a capital offense—but James and the other apostles play no further role in the narrative. Paul’s subsequent pleas before kings and Roman magistrates are eloquent arguments that he represents the true legacy of Israel’s Scriptures, but by the end of the story he has convinced only a minority of Jews who hear him. The “parting of the ways” between Judaism and Christianity is already evident in the response to Paul. The anguish he expressed for his “kindred according to the flesh” (Rom. 9:1–4) was his response to their final failure to obey his gospel.

This is the account most familiar to readers today, and it still predominates in Christian preaching. Since the last quarter of the twentieth century it has been challenged, however, because of several landmark developments. One is the discovery in the 1940s and 1950s of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which bore abundant witness to a form of Judaism that could not be identified with the “works-righteousness” Paul presumably opposed, and that often sounded “Pauline,” as in its insistence that “by [God’s] righteousness alone is a human righteous” (e.g., 1QH 5.18; 8.12). Because the scrolls also included multiple copies of some Jewish texts that had previously been known, but marginalized in biblical interpretation (e.g., Jubilees, 1 Enoch), they sparked renewed interest in such “pseudepigraphic” writings and a growing awareness that Second Temple Judaism was a far richer and more complex array of religious expressions than the traditional account had allowed.

Second, in the wake of the mass murder of European Jews (the Shoah or “Holocaust”), many European and US churches turned to processes of institutional soul-searching, seeking to identify and repudiate aspects of Christian teaching that traded in stereotype and caricature of Jews and Judaism (see, notably, the Roman Catholic document Nostra Aetate). In this changed environment, older Jewish objections to Paul’s rhetoric suddenly gained new attention from Christian and other interpreters.

Third, these developments provided the space in which new and innovative scholarly monographs appeared that reconfigured the relationship of Paul, Judaism, and the origins of Christianity (Ruether; Stendahl; Sanders). E. P. Sanders’s demonstration that the traditional understanding of “works-righteousness” was not current in Paul’s day issued in a changed climate, sometimes called the “post-Sanders era,” in which a “new perspective on Paul” began to take shape (Dunn 1983; 1998).

Paul as the Champion of a Law-Free Church

The “new perspective” (now more than thirty years old) actually includes a variety of different interpretations, united by their acceptance of the agenda posed by Sanders. We may nevertheless sketch the outlines of a coherent second narrative in this array of new-perspective readings. Here, Paul is not assumed to have been a representative Jew, but (taking him at his word) is seen to have persecuted the early churches out of an extreme hyperobservance, having been “far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors” than his peers (Gal. 1:13–14, emphasis added). Paul did not suffer the sort of introspective anguish regarding his own salvation that would later preoccupy Martin Luther and subsequent Western interpreters; rather than being “converted” to a new understanding of redemption, Paul experienced a “call” similar to the call of Israel’s prophets (Stendahl). This calling was specifically to bring a biblical, that is, Jewish message of salvation to the nations (or “gentiles”). The proper focus of interpretation, on this view, is thus not “soteriology” (the salvation of individuals) but the sociological behavior of groups. The “works of law” against which Paul repeatedly inveighed (Gal. 2:16; 3:2, 5, 10; Rom. 3:27–28; 4:2, 4–6; 9:32; 11:6) are now relieved of the burden of summarizing a Jewish theology of redemption; they should instead be identified with specific “boundary-maintaining” practices that distinguished Jews from their non-Jewish neighbors, especially circumcision, kosher diet, and Sabbath observance. Rather than opposing a Jewish understanding of “redemption” or “justification from works,” Paul was defending the “gentile church” from Jewish opponents who sought to incorporate Paul’s converts into Jewish life according to more traditional channels—the acceptance of circumcision and observance of Torah. The difference between Paul and other Jews, then, involved a question of the scope of salvation, rather than its mechanism. Was the covenant people limited to Israel (and “converts” or proselytes to Judaism), or did it, on Paul’s innovation, include non-Jews as full members?

Challenges have been raised to this second narrative as well. Except for a few voices who have concluded that Paul’s own thought was “inconsistent” or “incoherent” (Sanders; Räisänen), many new-perspective interpreters still put Paul forward as the pioneer of an intelligible and appropriately inclusive faith—the indispensable ancestor of contemporary Christianity. But this also means that Paul is not infrequently contrasted with negative characterizations of Jewish “ethnocentrism” or exclusivism. His identity as a Jew is affirmed, and his conflicts with other Jews are regarded as “inner-Jewish” controversies, but the often unavoidable implication is that Paul and his associates alone represented the open, inclusive, “right” legacy of Judaism, in contrast to the narrow and ill-fated insistence of the rest of his Jewish contemporaries on ethnic boundaries of the covenant people. The “parting of the ways” between Christianity and Judaism still appears here to be foreshadowed in Paul’s controversies with other Jews.

Paul as a (Non-Christian) Jew

A third narrative has emerged from a small group of interpreters—many of them Jewish scholars of the New Testament—who seek thoroughly to interpret Paul’s work and thought within Judaism, without appeal to a dramatic interruption (Paul’s vision of Christ) that somehow set him on a course that necessarily led him away from it. On this account, Paul the Pharisee persecuted the early ekklēsiai not because of any deviation on their part from Jewish observance, but because their (thoroughly Jewish) proclamation of a messiah who had been crucified by Rome was potentially threatening to the precarious stability of other Jewish communities under Roman rule (Fredriksen, 133–76). As Alan F. Segal shows, Paul’s vision of the crucified Jesus in heaven (as obliquely reported in 2 Corinthians 12) was formally similar to other Jewish visionary experiences. While Segal himself did not pursue the implications, we can extrapolate what such a vision might have meant for Paul, on purely Jewish terms, by examining the consequences for earthly life that other Jewish apocalypses drew from comparable visions of heaven. The confirmation of God’s sovereignty in heaven generally informed how the apocalyptists understood the possibilities for living under oppressive Hellenistic or Roman rule (Portier-Young). Similarly, the vision of the crucified Jesus as heavenly Christ likely would have had immediate political implications for Paul (Elliott 1994, 140–80). This vision involved no halakhic “conversion”: Paul remained a Jew (and never became a “Christian”: Eisenbaum). These interpreters (in his essay in this volume, Lawrence M. Wills calls their view a “radical new perspective”) point out that there is no evidence anywhere in his letters that Paul himself relinquished observance of Torah or taught other Jews to do so. (Paul’s comment about acting “as one outside the law” in 1 Cor. 9:19–21 does not mean apostasy, on this view, but only a tactical choice to socialize with non-Jews.)

Paul’s vision did involve Paul’s perception of non-Jewish adherents to the proclamation of Jesus as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. They were the “nations” who would turn to Israel and Israel’s Messiah at the last day. (Note here that the term ethnē is given its more natural meaning “nations”: Paul’s concern is not with the un-Jewish ethnic identity of individuals but with relations between the world’s nations and Israel, and with the biblical vision of international harmony to be achieved in the messianic age.) That is, Paul’s resistance to the pressure to “normalize” these converts by making them Jews had nothing to do with any perceived insufficiency in Judaism or the law. It had everything to do with his expectation that morally converted non-Jews—rare enough, in Diaspora Jewish eyes—united around obedience to Israel’s Messiah, and in solidarity with Israel—would be as clear a signal to other Jews as they were to him that the messianic age had dawned. His organization of a collection for “the poor among the holy ones” in Jerusalem (Rom. 15:25–28), which he perceived both as a gesture of reciprocity and as a sacred “offering” that he presented as a priestly service (Rom. 15:14–16, 27), was motivated by this expectation.

On this interpretation, already foreshadowed in some ways by Johannes Munck, Paul’s disagreements with the Jerusalem apostles (e.g., in Antioch: Galatians 2) are not deep theological fissures but tactical or rhetorical differences (see Nanos 1996; 2002). His differences from Jews outside the assemblies arose, on one side, from his belief that the messianic age has arrived, and on the other, from the concern of Jews who did not share that belief to protect their communities from scrutiny or suspicion—the sort of unwanted attention that messianic agitation on the part of Paul’s non-Jewish newcomers might prompt. As to the question of justification from works of law, interpreters in this third perspective hew methodologically to the principle that any of Paul’s statements regarding the law made in letters addressed primarily to non-Jews should be read narrowly as statements about the significance of the law for non-Jews, rather than generalized statements about the Torah’s role in salvation. The nature of Jewish opposition to Paul is less the focus of attention here than in the preceding two perspectives; on the other hand, the possible motivations of non-Jews in Paul’s assemblies to adopt some Torah observances—but not all (see Gal. 5:2–3)—is a paramount consideration. Here, interpreters explore possible reasons for anxiety on the part of non-Jews who may have seen in the Torah the promise of achieving the goal of “self-mastery” (enkrateia) so highly prized in post-Augustan culture (Stowers 1994), or (in Galatia) might have sought to “pass” in Roman society, taking on some of the mystique of the synagogue in order to make their refusal of customary Roman worship (“idolatry”) more palatable to their Roman neighbors (Gaston; Nanos 2002, 257–71; Kahl 2010). Paul’s resistance to “Judaizing” is seen here as his thoroughly Jewish reaction to aberrant behavior on the part of non-Jews.

Similarly, the Letter to the Romans has been read as an admonitory warning to non-Jews not to show disdain or contempt for Jews. That warning is evident enough in Rom. 11:13–32, but in earlier interpretation, that passage was often seen as an isolated aside. When chapters 9–11 are read as the “climax” of the letter and the whole letter is read as rhetoric directed to a primarily non-Jewish audience, the brief address to a hypothetical Jew in Romans 2–3 is no longer seen as an attempt to “explode Jewish privilege”; rather it supports the overarching purpose of the letter to correct non-Jewish error. Here, too, Paul appears to offer a fundamentally Jewish response to aspects of the emerging Hellenistic church (Elliott 1990; 2008).