Paul in Jewish Thought
I am studying the apostle Paul in Jewish thought within the first century AD. Does anyone who has The Jewish Annotated New Testament be willing to copy this page from the resource? Daniel R. Langton Paul in Jewish Thought In The Jewish Annotated New Testament, eds. Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
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Christian Alexander said:I am studying the apostle Paul in Jewish thought within the first century AD.
Given the available data, you should be able to do an exhaustive study quite quickly. [;)]
Asking for an entire essay is stretching the fair use provision to its limit but:
Daniel R. Langton said:PAUL IN JEWISH THOUGHT
Daniel R. Langton
Jewish interest in the apostle Paul is largely a modern phenomenon. Generally speaking, Jews have regarded the apostle to the Gentiles suspiciously as a kind of self-hating Jew and as the “real” founder of the Christian religion. In particular, he has commonly been held responsible for Christianity’s traditional antagonism toward the Law.
Rabbinic literature never mentions Paul by name, though a small number of rabbinic texts may refer to him. Paul may be the background for the following statements: “[He who] profanes the Hallowed Things and despises the set feasts and puts his fellow to shame publicly and makes void the covenant of Abraham our father, and discloses meanings in the Law which are not according to the Halakhah” (m. Avot 3.12); “This man … estranged himself from circumcision and the commandments of the Torah” (Ruth Rab. Petikha 3); a pupil of Gamaliel who “scoffed” at his master’s teachings and who exhibited “impudence in matters of learning” (b. Shabb. 30b; Acts 22:3). All of these texts postdate 200 CE and, if they refer to Paul, reflect vague knowledge of Christian teaching rather than specific knowledge concerning Paul himself.
In a similar vein, one might hope to find early Jewish views of Paul among the Ebionites, Jewish followers of Jesus in the first few centuries of the common era who accepted the messiahship of Jesus but not his divinity. These were reported by the fourth-century bishop Epiphanius to have believed that Paul, a Gentile convert from Tarsus, was a disappointed lover of the daughter of the High Priest, who, “when he failed to get the girl, flew into a rage and wrote against the circumcision and against the Sabbath and against the Law” (Panarion 30.16.6–9). But such scraps of propaganda are hardly to be trusted as historical accurate, and, in any case, there is no evidence of influence on Jewish thought more generally.
Nor does Paul feature in medieval Jewish refutations of Christianity, despite his importance for Christian theology. This might reflect simple ignorance, a deliberate policy to ignore a dangerous opponent, or, more likely, an awareness of the political danger of engaging with such an authoritative Christian figure. Those few authors that do make brief mention tended to be Karaites (i.e., Jews who rejected rabbinic authority and law, such as the tenth-century Iraqi Jacob Kirkisani, or Judah ben Elijah Hadassi of twelfth- Constantinople, or the sixteenth-century Lithuanian Isaac Troki), or minor figures living in the relative safety of Muslim lands (e.g., Ibn Kammuna in thirteenth-century Baghdad), or converts (e.g., the ninth-century Iraqi Al-Mukammis, who converted to Christianity before returning to Judaism, or the fourteenth-century Spanish forced convert to Christianity Profiat Duran). One exception is a brief, confused reference in the anonymous Toledot Yeshu or Story of Jesus, a notorious, popular polemic composed sometime in Late Antiquity on the basis of earlier traditions, some of which may go back to the second century CE. (See “Jesus in Medieval Jewish Tradition,” p. 735.) Versions of the Toledot dating from the thirteenth century record that the Jewish sages “desired to separate from Israel those who followed Yeshu as the Messiah, and that they called upon a learned man, Simeon Kepha, for help.” Simeon Kepha is Simon, called Peter, Jesus’ apostle. Claiming to speak on behalf of Yeshu, Simeon Kepha introduced new festivals, and rejected circumcision and the dietary laws. The Toledot here confuses Peter with Paul: “All these new ordinances which Simeon Kepha (or Paul, as he was known to the Nazarenes) taught them were really meant to separate these Nazarenes from the people of Israel and to bring the internal strife to an end.”
A rough, composite image of the minimal and highly fragmentary premodern Jewish traditions concerning Paul finds him portrayed as the innovator of non-Jewish teachings such as the Trinitarian conception of God, the atoning death of Christ, and celibacy, who had modified the calendar, and whose antinomian (anti-Torah) misreading of Scripture had led him to set aside practices that traditionally separated the Jews from the other nations. But such an image was by no means widespread.
In contrast, early Enlightenment Jewish discussions of Paul were remarkably positive. The Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–77) in his Theological-Political Treatise stressed that Paul spoke from reason rather than revelation and regarded him as the most philosophical of the apostles; Spinoza wrote as a philosopher, not as a theologian. Although he had been expelled from the Amsterdam Jewish community in 1656, Spinoza did not convert to Christianity, and it is reasonable to see his views on Paul as reflecting at least one possible Jewish assessment. The German rabbi Jacob Emden (1697–1776) argued in his Seder olam rabbah vezutai that Paul had not sought to denigrate Judaism, had “never dreamed of destroying the Torah,” and was in reality “well-versed in the laws of the Torah.” While Spinoza wrote for a Gentile readership, and Emden wrote to advise the Polish Jewish authorities, both appreciations of this key Christian figure can be seen as strategic in terms of connecting with the wider Gentile world.
In the nineteenth century, German Protestant biblical criticism increasingly viewed Christianity as brought about by Paul’s universalistic teaching. As the cliché states, Paul turned the religion of Jesus into the religion about Jesus. Among the earliest Jewish proponents of this view was the German scholar Heinrich Graetz (1817–91), whose immensely influential History of the Jews (1853–76 [English translation 1891–98]) presented Paul as the “inventor” of Christianity, distinguished Paul’s superficial Jewish learning from Jesus’ high-mindedness and moral purity, and argued that Paul’s antinomian theology made him “the destroyer of Judaism.”
As German Christian scholarship emphasized Paul’s role in injecting pagan elements into the religion of Jesus, it comes as no surprise that the prominent American Reform rabbi, Kaufman Kohler (1843–1926), in his Jewish Encyclopedia (1901–16) article on “Saul of Tarsus,” found Gnostic influences and Hellenistic mystery religions to account for many of Paul’s teachings. Even the German philosopher Martin Buber (1878–1965), whose credentials in interfaith relations were impeccable, contrasted the faith (Heb ʾemunah) of Jesus, a Jewish faith that implied relation with and trust in God, with the faith (Gk pistis) of Paul, a Christian faith that was premised upon belief in a proposition.
Insofar as it is legitimate to speak of a popular modern Jewish view of Paul—for he barely registers on the Jewish cultural radar—the apostle is regarded not only as the creator of Christianity but also as a Jewish self-hater. In 2012, the North American Orthodox rabbi and broadcaster, Shmuley Boteach (1966–), denounced Paul in his popular book Kosher Jesus as “a probable convert to Judaism ignorant of the Torah, who even preaches the Torah’s abolishment and does not preach the teachings of Jesus,” whom Boteach regards as a wise and learned rabbi. More substantial criticism can be found in the writings of the former Chief Rabbi of the United Synagogue in the United Kingdom, Jonathan Sacks (1948–). In Not in God’s Name (2015) he observes that when a Jew reads certain passages in Paul’s writings, such as the discussion of Abraham’s sons by Sarah and Hagar and the claim that Paul’s own followers are the children of the free woman while those under the law are children of the slave woman (Gal 4:21–31), then, as a Jew, “It feels like being disinherited, violated, robbed of an identity. This is my past, my ancestry, my story, and here Paul is saying that it is not mine at all, it is his and all who travel with him.” Worse still, what Paul writes about the Law in Rom 9–10; 13 suggests to Sacks that Paul not only believed that Jews who remained true to their faith were rejected by God, but that they were hated by him. Sacks’s strongest condemnation, however, was to identify a genocidal ring to the apostle’s teachings in his 1993 One People?: Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity, in which he describes Paul as “the architect of a Christian theology which deemed that the covenant between God and his people was now broken.… Pauline theology demonstrates to the full how remote from and catastrophic to Judaism is the doctrine of a second choice, a new election. No doctrine has cost more Jewish lives” [Italics added].
Until recently the majority of Jewish commentators, influenced by the traditional Lutheran teaching that Paul taught freedom from the oppressive yoke of the Law through faith in the Messiah’s redemptive sacrifice, denounced Paul’s apparent derogation and abrogation of the Torah as reflected in statements such as “the power of sin is the law” (1 Cor 15:56) and “For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse” (Gal 3:10). The Rumanian scholar and leader of North American Conservative Judaism, Solomon Schechter (1847–1915), captured perfectly in his Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology (1909) the Jewish puzzlement at Paul’s apparent hostility toward the Law: “Either the theology of the Rabbis must be wrong, its conception of God debasing, its leading motives materialistic and coarse, and its teachings lacking in enthusiasm and spirituality, or the Apostle to the Gentiles is quite unintelligible.” Jewish scholars understood Paul’s antinomian stance as either an opportunistic strategy to convert Gentiles (Graetz and Joseph Klausner), or the result of embittered conflict with contemporary Jews (Kohler), or a mistaken reaction against legalism or “works-righteousness” (Buber and Claude Montefiore), or a consequence of Paul’s own frustrated inability to observe its commandments (Hyam Maccoby, Emil Hirsch, Samuel Sandmel).
A few, however, including the German Reform rabbi Leo Baeck (1873–1956), argued that Paul remained authentically Jewish. In his 1952 article “The Faith of Paul,” Baeck suggested that like many of his contemporaries, Paul had expected the Law to be transcended (not abrogated) when the messianic age began; the only difference was that this new age had arrived with Jesus. Thus it had not been un-Jewish for him to exclaim, “All things are lawful for me” (1 Cor 6:12) since this closely paralleled the rabbinic teaching that in the “Days of the Messiah … there will be no merit or guilt” (b. Shabb. 151a). Many noted that Paul’s apparent readiness to prioritize a universal dimension at the expense of the more particularistic elements of the halakhah (religious law) was somewhat similar to the attitude of nineteenth century Reform Judaism. While Traditionalists were condemnatory (in 1925, the Anglo-Orthodox Chief Rabbi Joseph Hertz denounced the Reform movement as “an echo of Paul, the Christian apostle to the Gentiles”), some Progressives such as Montefiore, Hans Joachim Schoeps, Samson Raphael Hirsch, Joseph Krauskopf, and Isaac Mayer Wise argued that Paul’s concern to bring the essential teachings of Judaism to the Gentiles was a profoundly Jewish concern, and, admiring his success, they speculated whether there were lessons to be learned from his methods.
Modern scholars have also been interested in issues relating to gender and Paul’s attitude toward women. Against Christian feminists who see the apostle as placing restrictions on women as a result of his rabbinic training, Amy-Jill Levine (1956–) points out the anachronism of the charge; Paul belonged to no rabbinic school, and the rabbinic literature cited to buttress this claim is of a much later date. She further suggests that Paul would have been familiar with women leaders in Diaspora synagogues, and thus recognized women leaders in his churches (e.g., Phoebe the deacon and Junia the apostle [Rom 16]). One might even begin to talk of a sort of Jewish reclamation of the Jewish Paul. Daniel Boyarin (1946–) maintains that despite the fact that Paul had found the Law problematic, his letters (“the spiritual autobiography of a first-century Jew”) show him to be a Jew facing many of the same kinds of challenges that Jews face today; furthermore, as a fellow “cultural critic” Paul had asked the right questions (regarding universalist and gender issues in particular) in terms of how Jews should relate to the non-Jewish world. This scholarly tendency finds its logical conclusion in Pamela Eisenbaum (1961–), who maintains in her book, Paul was not a Christian (2009), that “Paul was unambiguously Jewish—ethnically, culturally, religiously, morally, and theologically.” She even suggests that the “two-ways salvation” that she sees Paul as having taught—a process promoting distinct paths to God for Jews and Gentiles—offers important implications for thinking about religious pluralism, since he implies a kind of universal salvation where there is no need for “conversion” from one religion to another.
The classic, negative view of Paul tends to emphasize Paul’s Diaspora roots and to locate him within an essentially pagan environment. Kohler and Buber, among others, locate “Paulinism” (i.e., the pessimistic exaggeration of the power of sin and the belief in enslavement of the cosmos) in a heathen world of idolatrous sacrifice, mysteries, and demonic forces. This perspective found its final expression in the eccentric theory of the Ukrainian Zionist writer Micah Berdichevsky (1865–1921), who, determined to expose the essentially non-Jewish origins of the apostle and hence of Christianity itself, argued that Saul and Paul were different people, one a Jew and the other a pagan priest from Damascus. The Anglo-Orthodox scholar Hyam Maccoby (1924–2004) also argued for the Gentile origins of the “inventor of Christianity,” maintaining that his poor emulation of rabbinic arguments (e.g., in Rom 7:1–6, where he discusses the limits of the Law) showed that he could not have been a Jew, and certainly not a Pharisee.
Others have had less difficulty placing Paul in an explicitly Jewish context. Among those who regarded him as a Hellenistic Jew, for example, were the founder of Anglo-Liberal Judaism, Claude Montefiore (1858–1938) and the American leading scholar of Jewish-Christian relations, Samuel Sandmel (1911–79). Montefiore suggested that Paul’s apparent complaints concerning Judaism and the Law had reflected his experiences of this inferior form of Judaism; thus Paul should not be regarded as an enemy of rabbinic Judaism. Others, from Wise in 1883 to the American scholar Alan Segal (1945–2011) in 1990, attending to Paul’s vision of paradise in 2 Corinthians 12:2 (“I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know”), attribute to Paul an education in Jewish mysticism. Hugh Schonfield even argued in his 1946 The Jew of Tarsus: An Unorthodox Portrait of Paul, that Paul’s Letter to the Romans parallels parts of the Jewish liturgy.
More recently, mainstream New Testament scholarship has questioned the assumed antinomian character of Paul’s thought. A number of Jewish scholars are associated with this trend. For example, Mark Nanos (1954–) has gone so far as to claim that Paul was entirely Torah-observant and that he expected other Jewish followers of Jesus to be so as well. Nanos interprets the apostle’s negative remarks about the Law in Romans as expressing the right of Gentiles to follow Jesus without observing the Law, rather than expressive of dissatisfaction with the Law per se, although, in the apostle’s schema, righteous Gentiles would be expected to observe the stipulations of Acts 15, which approximate the Noachide laws. Paula Fredriksen (1951–) likewise points out that Paul speaks against circumcision to Gentiles (Galatians), against sacrifice to Gentile gods (1 Cor. 10), and that he writes of justification apart from the Law to and for Gentiles (Galatians). At the same time, he cites the Torah as God’s “oracles” (Rom 3:2) and that the God of Israel is the only living and true God (1 Thess 1:9). The proper context for understanding Paul, Fredriksen suggests, is to recognize that the Jesus movement was simply one of many varieties of late Second Temple Judaism; thus the apostle’s conviction that Gentiles-in-Christ are not required to become Jews by no means negates the possibility that he himself was Torah observant, and his Law-free mission to the Gentiles can be reconciled with Jewish apocalyptic hopes for Gentiles to enter the Kingdom of God as Gentiles.
Broadly speaking, the Jewish relationship with the apostle to the Gentiles has been, and remains, a bitter one. He was largely ignored until the Enlightenment, with Jewish interest gathering real momentum only in the nineteenth century, in tandem with the growth of Protestant biblical scholarship. Thereafter Paul was frequently lambasted as the real founder of Gentile Christianity, under whose influence the lachrymose history of the Jews unfolded. In contrast to the figure of Jesus, who has, in the main, been reclaimed as a good Jew of one sort or another, Paul typically remains an object of hostility and suspicion. While there have been a number of scholarly exceptions to this rule, one should not expect Paul, whose likening of the Law to “sin” and “death” still echo down the centuries, to enjoy a more general Jewish reclamation any time soon.
Daniel R. Langton, “Paul in Jewish Thought,” in The Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version Bible Translation, ed. Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, Second Edition (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 741–744.Searching scholar.google.com for --Paul in "first century" Jewish thought-- brings up several articles that may interest you e.g. The Pauline movement and first-century Judaism: a framework for transforming the issues | Neotestamentica (journals.co.za) OR Paul’s jewish identity in: Jewish Identity in the Greco-Roman World (brill.com) OR Paul Within Judaism - Google Books etc.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Hi MJ thanks as this is great. It helps me to see Paul in a different view. Can you tell me what he cites of Daniel Boyarin and Mark Nanos? Those two scholars seem to be upcoming in Jewish thought within New Testament Studies.
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Christian Alexander said:
Can you tell me what he cites of Daniel Boyarin and Mark Nanos?
No, there are neither footnotes nor bibliographies to be more specific although they both have articles within the book. Factbook and Amazon would be your friends here.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Yep. Got this gem of a book by Levine and Brettler just for the essays!
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