On a certain tendency in Pauline studies

Academic inside baseball that I promise will eventually turn out to be relateable

Recently some academic writing I have been working on required me to dip back into the scholarly literature on the Pauline epistles. My last serious excursion into those debates was in graduate school, when my late doctoral advisor Ted Jennings was working on his magnum opus, a commentary on Romans, and when the “Paul and philosophy” trend was at its peak. Returning now, I had the sense that the field had painted itself into a very strange corner. The story begins with a shift in emphasis in the post-Holocaust scholarship on Paul, whose goal—a laudable one, to be sure!—was to counteract the history of Christian anti-Judaism, which had all too often drawn on Paul’s writings to lend biblical authority to destructive bigotry. And the early steps in that direction were true paradigm shifts from any perspective, disentangling Paul’s intention from Luther’s much later reappropriation of his writings and establishing the norm that any statements about the Judaism of Paul’s time had to be supported by direct evidence, not simply “read off” from Paul’s critique.

All of those developments are, in my view, unambiguously good. Since then, though, things have gotten a little strange. It’s almost as though the field has become an elaborate thought experiment in how little relevance Paul can have for Judaism whatsoever. At times, it feels like an indulgence in kettle logic: Paul’s only criticism of the Jews of his time was the small, almost negligible fact that they did not accept Jesus as the Messiah; other than that small matter, he was in perfect continuity with Judaism; indeed, he would not have had any idea what “Judaism” (in the sense of a defined religion) was in the first place. The latter requires especially bizarre mental gymnastics, creating a tissue of fine distinctions all meant to disallow any sense of a recognizable Jewish tradition in the first century. The most frequently used technique is to claim that the Greek term Ioudaismos does not refer to a body of belief (like our modern “isms”), but is instead “directional,” indicating that someone is taking on the traits of that group. Hence “Hellenism” would mean not an official canon of Greek belief, but the adoption of Greek customs. But this distinction cannot do the work they want it to do. First of all, how can a “directional” designation make sense unless there is something identifiable to imitate? Second, and more relevantly, most uses of “Judaism” in the literature, including the inaugural appearances of the term in 2 Maccabees, refer primarily to Jews who are being particularly militant in their Jewish practice, not foreigners imitating Jews. And again, even if we read this as “directional,” there has to be something identifiable that they’re doubling down on!

There’s a similar disconnect in the notion that Paul’s “only” critique of his contemporary Jewish brethren was their rejection of Christ. Oh, so you’re saying he thinks they’ve merely missed the most important thing ever to happen in human history? No big deal! Other than that, he presumably views himself as completely in continuity with the tradition of his birth—except for the part where he’s actively preaching to non-Jews and forbidding his Gentile followers to take part in any distinctively Jewish rituals. He has nothing but respect for the religious observances of his people, as he shows by declaring that he wishes people who are obsessed with circumcision would just cut their entire dicks off (I’m not joking: see Galatians 5:12).

These passages, mostly but not exclusively found in Galatians, are supposed to stand in a confusing tension with passages, primarily from Romans but also from Galatians, where Paul speaks highly of the law. Presumably we need to choose between the two, and contemporary scholars choose the positive passages and generally try to explain away the harsher passages. But the solution is obvious and has been available to readers of Daniel Boyarin’s very well-known book A Radical Jew for many decades: namely, that Paul thinks the Law is good because and insofar as it points forward to Christ and bad if pursued as an end in itself apart from Christ. From that perspective, everything just snaps into place. But that solution is not allowed, because it would imply that Paul viewed Christianity—or “being a Christ-follower,” or whatever other euphemism we’re supposed to use—as something different and better than the dominant understanding of Jewish practice in his day, which he very obviously did.

Obviously all the major players in the field of Pauline studies are very smart and erudite, and I’ll admit I may be being a little unfair insofar as I am not capturing the subtle nuances or textual support for their arguments. But as an outsider to the field, it seemed immediately obvious to me that this whole pursuit was a case of motivated reasoning to avoid any conflict with anything construable as related to contemporary Judaism at all. And the hidden premise that made that intense activity of avoidance necessary was, it seems to me, that if Paul was in any sense anti-Jewish, if we detected the slightest hint of supercessionism in his writings, then that would be binding on all Christians and we’d be back down the path to the Holocaust once again.

In more general terms, the axiomatic assumption is that Scripture cannot have evil implications and we must read as hard against the grain as necessary to make sure it doesn’t. In my mind, a more interesting and productive approach would be to admit that Scripture says what it says and to think a little harder about what it means for the authority of Scripture in Christian life if we judge its implications to be unethical—but no. The more desirable strategy is to erect a whole Rube Goldberg machine of euphemisms and prohibitions around the reading of Paul.

This journey into “the literature” left me wanting a palate cleanse, and so I decided to read some more balanced and plausible works on Paul and Judaism—among them, Boyarin’s A Radical Jew, a book I remember as being somehow formative when I read it in Ted Jennings’ seminars. Imagine my shock when I pulled my copy off the shelf and found absolutely zero notes or underlines of any kind. Annotation is central to my practice of reading and central to my pedagogy. To find that I had failed to annotate, even decades ago before my habits had fully formed, was unthinkable. It had to mean something.

And as I read the first few pages of Boyarin’s argument, I realized what had happened. His overall notion that Paul saw a conflict between the universal implications of the Torah and its narrow focus on a particular ethnic group made perfect sense to me. But I must have audibly heard a record scratch when I got to the part where the key to reading Paul was his appropriation of Platonistic styles of thought and particularly allegorical interpretation. For me at that time, that was a big nope. Platonism, with its anti-body polemic and its focus on the transcendent realm as opposed to the here and now, was the source of all that was bad and damaging in Christianity, including its failure to actualize the radical political potential that I was just absolutely sure was there. Nothing Platonist could be authentically Christian—and therefore it was just impossible that Paul was even remotely Platonist. Hence I probably mostly skimmed the book and faked my way through discussion, certain Boyarin just had to be wrong.

The attentive reader may detect a certain irony at this point. What strikes me, though, is how determined I was, even at that relatively late date, to find a good version of Christianity—and to find a straightforward culprit for “what went wrong.” Platonism was an especially attractive candidate for the latter, given not only the role of anti-body (and hence anti-sexuality) ideas in making me feel consistently guilty and miserable basically ever since puberty, but also its centrality for my great nemesis of the time, Radical Orthodoxy. I would probably be embarrassed to review some of the footnotes to Politics of Redemption from this perspective—I’m almost certain I wanted to argue that Gregory of Nyssa (who I viewed as good) wasn’t “really” a Platonist (even though he 1000% totally was in historical reality).

My motivation for that kind of motivated reasoning fell by the wayside once I was no longer meaningfully part of any Christian community, even the relatively easy-going version afforded by a mainline liberal seminary. I probably gave the game away even then by not giving any liberal church a try—clearly I was on my way out. But I’m grateful for my time in that weird and sometimes annoying community of Chicago Theological Seminary, and not only because they tolerated me even though I was weird and often annoying. Being among those sincerely good people who worshipped an accepting God of justice—and in many cases did take the step of rethinking the nature of Scriptural authority—kept me from sliding into another form of reductive motivated reasoning by concluding that because Christianity was bad for me, it was always and everywhere bad for everyone. I no longer feel invested in the project of constructing a good Christianity, but I am glad some people are—my complaints about the knots they sometimes have to tie themselves in to get there notwithstanding.