Book Note | Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle

Paula Fredriksen. Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017

At the theological school where I teach, even the (not so new) “New Perspective” on Paul is still unfamiliar to many students. Since many of these students work or will work in leadership within Christian communities, one of my constant challenges is to disorient students from their imagined “Christian convert” Paul in order to recognize Paul’s context as a Jew living within the diversity of Second Temple Judaism and under the control of the Roman Empire. The stakes are high: the use of New Testament texts to articulate anti-Jewish and supersessionist theologies is still all too common in contemporary Christian communities – often with violent results.

Paula Fredriksen’s Paul: The Pagan’s Apostle, then, is a very welcome book for classrooms like mine. In accessible yet rich writing style, Fredriksen describes a “Jewish world incandescent with apocalyptic hopes…and a Mediterranean world thick with ancient actors: pagans and Jews, healers and prophets; angels and demons; Greeks and Romans; and, not least, angry superhuman forces, divine powers, and hostile cosmic gods. Both worlds are Paul’s, and his convictions about the first shaped his actions in the second. Paul held these convictions as a committed Jew, and he enacted them as a committed Jew. In brief…Paul lived his life entirely within his native Judaism” (xii).

Organized into five chapters and an introduction, Pagan’s Apostle begins with a narrative section, which poses a variety of questions that lay the groundwork for the project. How does Paul come to understand himself as a messenger of Jesus? How did that message change in those hazy decades between the life of the historical Jesus and Paul’s co-writings? To answer these questions, Fredriksen argues, requires situating Paul’s letters scripturally and socially. These two contexts frame the first two chapters.

In Chapter 1, “Israel and the Nations,” Fredriksen explores “the sacred texts and traditions of Israel and the ways that late Second Temple Jews would have interpreted these especially in light of apocalyptic hopes…an explicitly and idiosyncratically Jewish context, though one in which the idea of non-Jewish nations played various prominent roles” (7). Fredriksen focuses on how “master narratives of Israel’s impending redemption” (9) encompass, among other themes, exclusive worship of Israel’s God and participation of other nations in the eschatological redemption of Israel. Both of these themes will loom large in the co-writings of Paul and in Fredriksen’s argument throughout the book.

Fredriksen turns to the social context of Paul within the Roman empire in Chapter 2, “Fatherland and Mother City,” highlighting the diversity of diaspora Judaism. Fredriksen describes how divine beings “thickly inhabited the ancient city, structuring human time, space, and social relations” (33). She foregrounds the multiple ways both civic and familial identities were shaped by relationships to particular divinities, and argues that “Even in this...unprecedented instance of integrating pagans into a dawning Jewish apocalyptic movement, the relationship…between pagan peoples and Israel’s god still depended upon the idea, the language, the structure, and the authority of the patriarchal Mediterranean family” (37). Fredriksen also describes the multiple ways Jews and “pagans” regularly interacted in one another’s spaces, including cultic areas. This section of the book is particularly valuable for students. Fredriksen seamlessly weaves together literary and material evidence to counteract assumptions that Jews in the Second Temple period were in any way a monolithic community.

Chapters 3-5 turn toward the letters of Paul more directly. In Chapter 3, “Paul: Mission and Persecution,” Fredriksen takes up two themes that have garnered significant attention from scholars: circumcision and persecution. She argues that the two are deeply intertwined, since “It was a male pagan’s circumcision together with his making an exclusive commitment to the god of Israel that was most obvious to pagan observers, and that occasioned their most hostile comments. A proselyte, offended patriotic pagans complained, turned his back on family, on ancestral custom, and on the gods” (68). Fredriksen also argues that, given outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence in the first century CE, the teachings of Paul to early Christ assemblies have caused anxiety among both pagan and Jewish communities. In particular, his directive that men should offer exclusive worship of Israel’s god without circumcision might cause significant problems: “Alienating the gods put the city at risk; alienating the pagan majority put the diaspora synagogue at risk—especially when the behavior occasioning that risk, an exclusive commitment to the god of Israel, was so universally and uniquely associated with Jews themselves” (92).

Frequently, scholars working on the topic of Paul and the Law within a Protestant theological framework use Paul’s negative statements about the Law to create a foil of “grace.” While recent work has complicated this notion, including work on Paul and gift-exchange, the theme of Paul as “Law-free” still persists. In Chapter 4, “Paul and the Law,” Fredriksen clears away much of the scholarly brush by reading the varied rhetorical valence of the Law across the letters of Paul. Fredriksen argues that Paul asked three things of Christ-following pagans: 1) exclusive worship of Israel’s god, 2) no switching ethnicity (and therefore no circumcision for males), and 3) living as holy pagans according to community standards derived from the Law (111). Thus, Fredriksen reads more negative valences in the letters of Paul as rhetoric directed at gentiles, not as related to himself or other Jewish Christ-followers.

In Chapter 5, “Christ and the Kingdom,” Fredriksen treats Paul’s understanding of Christ within the framework of his eschatological convictions. For Fredriksen, Paul’s message to pagans intertwined with his explanation for the delay of Jesus’s return. The participation of pagans, not as Jews, but as worshippers of God who remained gentiles, helped to fulfill the redemption narrative of history. As she writes, “Paul linked his own gentile mission to Israel’s divinely assured destiny. By working to turn pagans from their gods to his god, Paul worked as well, beneath a canopy of biblical promises, for the redemption of his own people” (165).

Finally, in a brief postscript, Fredriksen narrates the period after Paul during which “the gospel movement…continued to thrive in vigorous variety” (169). She surveys early Christian literature to show how depictions of Paul ranged from the organizationally focused “Paul” of the Pastoral Epistles to the speechifying, prison-breaking “Paul” of Acts. As a cumulative effect of these portraits, Paul emerged as a towering figure within the Christian imagination. Expansions of Paul also coupled with theological developments among Christian theologians such as Valentinus and Justin Martyr, who began to “make God the father of Christ no longer Jewish” (170). Such readings led to a Christianization of Paul and interpretation of Pauline literature as a source for Christian anti-Jewish theologies.

“Paul lives his life – as we all must live our lives – innocent of the future. As historians, we conjure that innocence as a disciplined act of imagination, through appeals to our ancient evidence” (xii). I am not the first to highlight this quotation or to note the importance of Fredriksen’s book to the study of both ancient Judaism and ancient Christianity. While the book could have participated more in the broader trend of moving beyond a scholarly obsession with the heroic Paul towards a focus instead on the people beside Paul, Fredriksen’s project powerfully undercuts some of the most pervasive narratives about Paul. This makes it invaluable for teaching. After all, my students, innocent of how their own futures in Christian and civic leadership might turn out, benefit from learning about the pervasive legacies of the past and their implications for the present, in order to imagine a future that might be better.

Jennifer Quigley is Assistant Professor of New Testament and early Christian Studies and Louisville Postdoctoral Fellow at Drew University Theological School. Contact her at jennifer.aileen.quigley@gmail.com.