I agree with your critique of scholarship that makes first-century "Judaism" nearly indeterminable, and I agree that the whole missing out on the Christ event for Jews who reject Jesus is a big problem for Paul. And you're right about the denial of supersessionism: it's right there in 1 Thessalonians 2:15 (likely the earliest piece of Christian literature) where the Jews killed Christ.
Yet I'd disagree with your statement about Paul "forbidding his followers to take part in any distinctively Jewish rituals." Certainly circumcision isn't to be forced on Gentiles; as I say in my intro class each semester, every first-century Jew would have said something along the lines of, "No shit, Sherlock." The issue in Galatians, though (going back to Peter & Paul's food fight at Antioch), is Paul's point about a Jew *compelling* Gentiles to live like Jews (2:14). Paul is definitely backtracking in Romans when he talks about how wonderful circumcision is, but the point is that the authentic Pauline letters presume that *voluntary* Torah observance is okay. So in Romans 14:5 if one day is special (i.e. I don't work on the Sabbath) or every day is special (i.e. you probably do), that's okay as long as we can get along with each other. By contrast, commandments like idolatry, murder, adultery, etc. are not up to everyone's individual conscience!
The shift, as I read it, comes in the disputed Pauline letters where Colossians and Ephesians don't sound as though voluntary Torah observance is okay anymore. Torah was just Platonic shadow puppets, and now the real thing has come in the form of Christ; baptism supersedes circumcision etc.
But this debate keeps playing out: Ignatius of Antioch makes it explicit that you're not allowed to keep Sabbath even if you want to; Christians have to differentiate themselves and not "Judaize." But a few decades later, Justin Martyr (despite his rabid supersessionism) returns to the 'compulsion' argument in Galatians/Romans to say that it's perfectly fine for Jewish-Christians to continue keeping distinctively Jewish practices ... as long as they don't force anyone else to do so.
But eventually we end up in the late-fourth and early-fifth centuries when Ephrem will say not to celebrate Passover with Jews because they're trying to poison Christians by serving them unleavened bread, and then Augustine and Jerome will agree that "those who consider themselves to be both Jewish and Christian are neither."
Anyway, I agree with the overall contours of your argument, namely that the New Testament is inherently supersessionist and that it's incumbent to oppose supersessionism today but that we should also acknowledge it where it stands in the text; moreover, Paul sure seems to have a big problem with Jews who don't believe that Jesus is Lord, Messiah, and Son of God. I just think that we can plot the back-and-forth over the permissibility of voluntary Torah observance, and the "stop doing anything remotely Jewish" line of reasoning doesn't seem to me to start with Paul.
I'll edit the post -- I mean his *Gentile* followers are forbidden to seek circumcision. I think that's pretty clear from Galatians. It's not just that they shouldn't be forced, he definitely *does not* want them to do it. As for his Jewish followers, it would already be too late to forbid circumcision, unless they heard and responded to his preaching on days 1-7 of their life, immediately after birth.
agreed: it's the logic in 1 Corinthians 7 not to change your status; don't undo your circumcision (which was actually a thing), but don't go out and get circumcised. I still think there's some wiggle room for voluntary observance of other Torah commandments even among Gentiles; e.g., if keeping kosher is a sure-fire way not to eat anything sacrificed to a pagan god or goddess, then knock yourself out, but you really shouldn't force those convictions on me (even though I'll oblige you if you're really that upset about it ... again from 1 Corinthians). and with Sabbath it's hard to imagine Paul forcing Gentiles to work on Saturday, but I can definitely imagine Ignatius doing that!
Nice job. I'm still chewing on PWJ, but I absolutely agree with your assessment of some of their goals. A few years back at SBL there was an exchange between Paula Fredriksen and Douglas Campbell which was interesting. She quipped, "Douglas, Paul is just a first century Jew who thinks God is finally returning as promised. That's what he's writing about. He's not writing to teach people two thousand years later to be nice to each other!" Interesting times!
I'm sympathetic on the post-Holocaust point, which I think is fair—though not unique to PWJ. But that point alone does not substantiate the rest.
I take some responsibility for pointing you to Novenson's work, which, while IMO quite good, might understandably give you the impression that there's some motivation in PWJ to protect the goodness of scripture. But I don't think you can convincingly make this charge of PWJ as a whole. The PWJ school is widely charged with being overly historicist and undermining the normativity and goodness of scripture by opposing groups. Moreover, a sizable contingent of PWJ scholars have formed a complementary school called Paul Within Paganism. Surely, it would be absurd to argue they are trying to protect pagan practices and norms. The far simpler explanation here is that these are historical-critical scholars who are using the tools of historical analysis to read these texts in an extremely fine-grained, historically situated way, and what they find makes the traditional categories of "Judaism" and "Christianity" (not to mention "faith," "religion," etc.) heuristically useless.
Put another way, what PWJ scholarship aims to do is *not* to protect the innocence of the Bible but to make it so historically strange that people are unable to assimilate the text into their own communities and practices today. No PWJ scholar I'm aware of denies the morally problematic aspects of these texts. They have no vested interest in protecting scripture from moral criticism (see Emma Wassermann's work for instance). But they want to go further and subject the text to a thoroughgoing criticism that highlights just how alien the past is.
I'll grant that this research makes it very difficult for the average person to read these texts in a historically accurate way. That is precisely the charge that many biblical scholars level against PWJ—that it makes scripture too strange and obscure. But surely we should embrace this strangeness as part of what scholarship is meant to do. That seems to be something you would agree with. For this reason, I find your claim that the "obvious" (i.e., the traditional Christian) reading of these texts is the right one to be bizarre, given how much that reading was highly motivated by an obviously anti-Jewish bias. It doesn't pass the smell test to say that medieval Christian scholars saw scripture clearly and we're only blinded today by post-Holocaust sensitivity. There are other more convincing explanations for how things developed.
David, It has occurred to me that seldom has one been made to regret a book recommendation as much as you have! In any case, I don't embrace the "traditional" account if by that you mean straight Lutheranism. I embrace Boyarin's approach of endorsing the postwar paradigm shift while being less solicitous to downplay Paul's critique of the Law.
As for the motives of different scholars, I admit I overgeneralized. But the non-apologetic PWJ figures you allude to are, in my view, even worse. It's clear that the axioms about the relationship of Paul to "Judaism" have taken on a life of their own and at this point it's largely a self-enclosed language game. To me, the agenda of reducing the text to gibberish so that no one can appropriate it is not one that makes much sense. Yes, I get wanting to let the text be "weird," but the Rube Goldberg machine of interpretation isn't "weird," it's just arbitrary. They are reducing the text to nonsense in order to meet randomly chosen criteria (such as disallowing any reference to "Judaism").
As a Great Books instructor, I *cannot* admit that ancient texts are intrinsically not understandable from a modern perspective. No one seems to want to say this about Homer or Plato or Philo or Josephus, though. Only Paul gets the unique honor of being read against the grain to the point of incomprehensibility. In my mind, it's not interesting because it's not generative -- and the other works I've read from outside the immediate field that refer to it seem to bear that out. They always basically say, "Yeah, they make some good points but they painted themselves into a weird corner I don't want to get stuck in." And that was my experience as well -- following their strictures would have made my project simply impossible to even consider. Why render the Pauline corpus a black hole of meaninglessness?
I disagree about the arbitrariness. There’s nothing arbitrary about discouraging the use of the category of “religion” in discussing 1st century Jewish practices—something Boyarin argues for himself. I’m not sure I see why the category of “Judaism” shouldn’t be treated in a similarly nuanced way.
Be that as it may, I think your point about the “Great Books” approach to ancient literature highlights the disciplinary divide here that best explains the conflicting approaches to these texts. I can certainly appreciate your perspective, having once been an English lit major. But these days I ultimately side methodologically and hermeneutically with the historians.
Im not sure if Alan Segal is PWJ or not but I really enjoyed his Paul the Convert. Is that close to Boyarin in your opinion? On the broader question of constructing categories like Hebraism and Hellenism, I’m curious what you make of the work by Erich Gruen. His Heritage and Hellenism was really helpful for me.
Segal predates the PWJ movement quite a bit. I haven't read his work but summaries make it sound somewhat close to Boyarin -- interestingly, though, Boyarin doesn't cite him much, at least halfway through my reread.
Have you read any of Douglas Campbell's work on the book of Romans? It seems interesting, viewing many of the "problematic" Paul passages as part of an unmarked dialog where Paul is setting up and then critiquing a view he disagrees with. But I don't have a lot of experience in the academic literature on Paul and I'd love your more informed take.
As a Lutheran pastor, I’m trained in a very specific Pauline tradition, to say the least! But on an adjacent point to your post we in the liberal mainline tradition try hard to protect Pauline innocence concerning the problematic statements of Romans and Corinthians concerning same sex acts/relations. There is room for nuance about the hierarchical and abusive power dynamics that are implied in Paul’s statements concerning same sex acts. But it seems a better tact for liberal Christians to simply say ‘yeah Paul probably wasn’t on board with same sex relationships, and we have a different view now.’
You should read Ted Jennings' book "Plato or Paul" if you're interested in that approach. He takes an even harder line, saying that Paul basically doesn't even mention homosexuality in any recognizable sense. Not sure how plausible I'd find it if I sat down and reread today, but it seemed pretty compelling back when I was his research assistant for it.
I agree with your critique of scholarship that makes first-century "Judaism" nearly indeterminable, and I agree that the whole missing out on the Christ event for Jews who reject Jesus is a big problem for Paul. And you're right about the denial of supersessionism: it's right there in 1 Thessalonians 2:15 (likely the earliest piece of Christian literature) where the Jews killed Christ.
Yet I'd disagree with your statement about Paul "forbidding his followers to take part in any distinctively Jewish rituals." Certainly circumcision isn't to be forced on Gentiles; as I say in my intro class each semester, every first-century Jew would have said something along the lines of, "No shit, Sherlock." The issue in Galatians, though (going back to Peter & Paul's food fight at Antioch), is Paul's point about a Jew *compelling* Gentiles to live like Jews (2:14). Paul is definitely backtracking in Romans when he talks about how wonderful circumcision is, but the point is that the authentic Pauline letters presume that *voluntary* Torah observance is okay. So in Romans 14:5 if one day is special (i.e. I don't work on the Sabbath) or every day is special (i.e. you probably do), that's okay as long as we can get along with each other. By contrast, commandments like idolatry, murder, adultery, etc. are not up to everyone's individual conscience!
The shift, as I read it, comes in the disputed Pauline letters where Colossians and Ephesians don't sound as though voluntary Torah observance is okay anymore. Torah was just Platonic shadow puppets, and now the real thing has come in the form of Christ; baptism supersedes circumcision etc.
But this debate keeps playing out: Ignatius of Antioch makes it explicit that you're not allowed to keep Sabbath even if you want to; Christians have to differentiate themselves and not "Judaize." But a few decades later, Justin Martyr (despite his rabid supersessionism) returns to the 'compulsion' argument in Galatians/Romans to say that it's perfectly fine for Jewish-Christians to continue keeping distinctively Jewish practices ... as long as they don't force anyone else to do so.
But eventually we end up in the late-fourth and early-fifth centuries when Ephrem will say not to celebrate Passover with Jews because they're trying to poison Christians by serving them unleavened bread, and then Augustine and Jerome will agree that "those who consider themselves to be both Jewish and Christian are neither."
Anyway, I agree with the overall contours of your argument, namely that the New Testament is inherently supersessionist and that it's incumbent to oppose supersessionism today but that we should also acknowledge it where it stands in the text; moreover, Paul sure seems to have a big problem with Jews who don't believe that Jesus is Lord, Messiah, and Son of God. I just think that we can plot the back-and-forth over the permissibility of voluntary Torah observance, and the "stop doing anything remotely Jewish" line of reasoning doesn't seem to me to start with Paul.
I'll edit the post -- I mean his *Gentile* followers are forbidden to seek circumcision. I think that's pretty clear from Galatians. It's not just that they shouldn't be forced, he definitely *does not* want them to do it. As for his Jewish followers, it would already be too late to forbid circumcision, unless they heard and responded to his preaching on days 1-7 of their life, immediately after birth.
agreed: it's the logic in 1 Corinthians 7 not to change your status; don't undo your circumcision (which was actually a thing), but don't go out and get circumcised. I still think there's some wiggle room for voluntary observance of other Torah commandments even among Gentiles; e.g., if keeping kosher is a sure-fire way not to eat anything sacrificed to a pagan god or goddess, then knock yourself out, but you really shouldn't force those convictions on me (even though I'll oblige you if you're really that upset about it ... again from 1 Corinthians). and with Sabbath it's hard to imagine Paul forcing Gentiles to work on Saturday, but I can definitely imagine Ignatius doing that!
Nice job. I'm still chewing on PWJ, but I absolutely agree with your assessment of some of their goals. A few years back at SBL there was an exchange between Paula Fredriksen and Douglas Campbell which was interesting. She quipped, "Douglas, Paul is just a first century Jew who thinks God is finally returning as promised. That's what he's writing about. He's not writing to teach people two thousand years later to be nice to each other!" Interesting times!
I'm sympathetic on the post-Holocaust point, which I think is fair—though not unique to PWJ. But that point alone does not substantiate the rest.
I take some responsibility for pointing you to Novenson's work, which, while IMO quite good, might understandably give you the impression that there's some motivation in PWJ to protect the goodness of scripture. But I don't think you can convincingly make this charge of PWJ as a whole. The PWJ school is widely charged with being overly historicist and undermining the normativity and goodness of scripture by opposing groups. Moreover, a sizable contingent of PWJ scholars have formed a complementary school called Paul Within Paganism. Surely, it would be absurd to argue they are trying to protect pagan practices and norms. The far simpler explanation here is that these are historical-critical scholars who are using the tools of historical analysis to read these texts in an extremely fine-grained, historically situated way, and what they find makes the traditional categories of "Judaism" and "Christianity" (not to mention "faith," "religion," etc.) heuristically useless.
Put another way, what PWJ scholarship aims to do is *not* to protect the innocence of the Bible but to make it so historically strange that people are unable to assimilate the text into their own communities and practices today. No PWJ scholar I'm aware of denies the morally problematic aspects of these texts. They have no vested interest in protecting scripture from moral criticism (see Emma Wassermann's work for instance). But they want to go further and subject the text to a thoroughgoing criticism that highlights just how alien the past is.
I'll grant that this research makes it very difficult for the average person to read these texts in a historically accurate way. That is precisely the charge that many biblical scholars level against PWJ—that it makes scripture too strange and obscure. But surely we should embrace this strangeness as part of what scholarship is meant to do. That seems to be something you would agree with. For this reason, I find your claim that the "obvious" (i.e., the traditional Christian) reading of these texts is the right one to be bizarre, given how much that reading was highly motivated by an obviously anti-Jewish bias. It doesn't pass the smell test to say that medieval Christian scholars saw scripture clearly and we're only blinded today by post-Holocaust sensitivity. There are other more convincing explanations for how things developed.
David, It has occurred to me that seldom has one been made to regret a book recommendation as much as you have! In any case, I don't embrace the "traditional" account if by that you mean straight Lutheranism. I embrace Boyarin's approach of endorsing the postwar paradigm shift while being less solicitous to downplay Paul's critique of the Law.
As for the motives of different scholars, I admit I overgeneralized. But the non-apologetic PWJ figures you allude to are, in my view, even worse. It's clear that the axioms about the relationship of Paul to "Judaism" have taken on a life of their own and at this point it's largely a self-enclosed language game. To me, the agenda of reducing the text to gibberish so that no one can appropriate it is not one that makes much sense. Yes, I get wanting to let the text be "weird," but the Rube Goldberg machine of interpretation isn't "weird," it's just arbitrary. They are reducing the text to nonsense in order to meet randomly chosen criteria (such as disallowing any reference to "Judaism").
As a Great Books instructor, I *cannot* admit that ancient texts are intrinsically not understandable from a modern perspective. No one seems to want to say this about Homer or Plato or Philo or Josephus, though. Only Paul gets the unique honor of being read against the grain to the point of incomprehensibility. In my mind, it's not interesting because it's not generative -- and the other works I've read from outside the immediate field that refer to it seem to bear that out. They always basically say, "Yeah, they make some good points but they painted themselves into a weird corner I don't want to get stuck in." And that was my experience as well -- following their strictures would have made my project simply impossible to even consider. Why render the Pauline corpus a black hole of meaninglessness?
I disagree about the arbitrariness. There’s nothing arbitrary about discouraging the use of the category of “religion” in discussing 1st century Jewish practices—something Boyarin argues for himself. I’m not sure I see why the category of “Judaism” shouldn’t be treated in a similarly nuanced way.
Be that as it may, I think your point about the “Great Books” approach to ancient literature highlights the disciplinary divide here that best explains the conflicting approaches to these texts. I can certainly appreciate your perspective, having once been an English lit major. But these days I ultimately side methodologically and hermeneutically with the historians.
From what you're saying, you don't have any hermeneutics to do -- the texts are irreducibly foreign and irrelevant.
Being irrelevant to people today doesn't make them inscrutable. Two different hermeneutical tasks.
Im not sure if Alan Segal is PWJ or not but I really enjoyed his Paul the Convert. Is that close to Boyarin in your opinion? On the broader question of constructing categories like Hebraism and Hellenism, I’m curious what you make of the work by Erich Gruen. His Heritage and Hellenism was really helpful for me.
Segal predates the PWJ movement quite a bit. I haven't read his work but summaries make it sound somewhat close to Boyarin -- interestingly, though, Boyarin doesn't cite him much, at least halfway through my reread.
Have you read any of Douglas Campbell's work on the book of Romans? It seems interesting, viewing many of the "problematic" Paul passages as part of an unmarked dialog where Paul is setting up and then critiquing a view he disagrees with. But I don't have a lot of experience in the academic literature on Paul and I'd love your more informed take.
I have not -- I'll have to check that out.
As a Lutheran pastor, I’m trained in a very specific Pauline tradition, to say the least! But on an adjacent point to your post we in the liberal mainline tradition try hard to protect Pauline innocence concerning the problematic statements of Romans and Corinthians concerning same sex acts/relations. There is room for nuance about the hierarchical and abusive power dynamics that are implied in Paul’s statements concerning same sex acts. But it seems a better tact for liberal Christians to simply say ‘yeah Paul probably wasn’t on board with same sex relationships, and we have a different view now.’
You should read Ted Jennings' book "Plato or Paul" if you're interested in that approach. He takes an even harder line, saying that Paul basically doesn't even mention homosexuality in any recognizable sense. Not sure how plausible I'd find it if I sat down and reread today, but it seemed pretty compelling back when I was his research assistant for it.