John Van Maaren on Paul Within Judaism
“Sociologists and anthropologists agree that identity, whether ethnic, religious, or national cannot be determined by a list of shared or defining characteristics exhibited by all group members. Rather, identity is primarily a matter of ascription—that is, a person is Jewish, Greek, Roman, or Syrian first and foremost because they think and claim they are.”
Readings of Paul’s letters, and other New Testament writings, that use the “within Judaism” label have continued to gain traction. Yet, what is meant when we say that Paul is “within Judaism”? Often, it serves as an umbrella term to collect a variety of readings that understand a given New Testament text “not as something to be understood against the background of Second Temple Judaism, but as an expression of it.”[i] This is a useful hermeneutical step, yet in order to develop a more nuanced understanding of the development of Judaism and the emergence of the Jesus movement, it is useful to take the next step and parse out more precisely what is being claimed about various writers and their texts with the use of this label. Specifically, (1) what is Judaism, (2) what is within it, and (3) what would it mean for something, especially a text, to be within it? Here I begin to develop a methodology that would allow us to move beyond binary distinctions (within/without) and talk more sophisticatedly about writers, their recipients, their texts, and their relationships to first century Judaism.
The first question is who, or what, is within Judaism. I see a number of possible referents: the writer, the intended recipients, and the writer and their intended recipients as a collective. In the recently published Perspectives on Paul: Five Views (2020), Magnus Zetterholm writes that “For scholars who work from a Paul within Judaism Perspective, Paul’s Jewishness means that he also practiced Judaism.”[ii] That is, for some, “Paul within Judaism” means Paul himself was and remained within Judaism, but it does not make a similar claim about his intended audience. In contrast, many readings of Matthew within Judaism emphasize the collective identity between the writer and intended recipients. For example, Anthony Saldarini’s much cited monograph argues that “the Matthean group and its spokesperson (the writer) are Jews who believe in Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God.”[iii] Saldarini is working with the shared identity of the writer and intended recipients. Accordingly, we have three main options: the writer, the intended recipients, and the shared identity of the writer and intended recipients. Any may be usefully described as “within Judaism,” but it is simply worth making this explicit (as Zetterholm, Saldarini, and many others do).
A second question concerns what it is that Paul, or Matthew’s audience, is “within”—that is, what is “Judaism”? This question has a long history of discussion with characterizations ranging from a religion, an ethnic group, an ethno-religion, or a nationality. We should also note that even in the above quotations from Zetterholm about Paul and Saldarini about the Gospel of Matthew, we seem to have two different understandings of what we are talking about. Zetterholm emphasizes that Paul’s Jewishness means he also practiced Judaism, and notes that this behavior is the major contrast between his reading and readings that emphasize that Paul no longer practiced Judaism. In both cases, Paul may be “within Judaism” insofar as he is born to Jewish parents, but for many using the language of “within Judaism,” what is meant is that Paul never stopped behaving like other Jews. In seeming contrast, Saldarini’s emphasis that the gospel of Matthew was written by and for Jewish persons emphasizes a received Jewish identity before noting their major difference with other Jews: belief in Jesus as the messiah. That is, we have a difference between Judaism as a shared way of behaving and thinking—let’s say “common Judaism”—and Judaism as a shared identity of a group of people. The former emphasizes shared practices, the latter emphasizes the persons who together make up a social group. Again, either meaning may be useful as long as it is made explicit.
Sociologists and anthropologists agree that identity, whether ethnic, religious, or national cannot be determined by a list of shared or defining characteristics exhibited by all group members. Rather, identity is primarily a matter of ascription—that is, a person is Jewish, Greek, Roman, or Syrian first and foremost because they think and claim they are.[iv] This point, which represents a consensus among sociologists, relates to the primordialist/circumstantialist debate, which I will not rehash here.[v] While both circumstantialists and primordialists acknowledge that ethnic identity is an ascribed characteristic that exists in the mind rather than an ontological reality, it is the circumstantialist observation that not all members of an ethnic group share the same culture—that is, practices and beliefs—that elevated the importance of ascription in the study of identity.[vi] In other words, in order to study a social group, one must identify who claims a specific identity and only then consider the factors influencing particular expressions of that ethnic identity, which may or may not be shared by all co-ethnics. To relate this insight back to our study, the best data we have for whether a writer, their recipients, or their collective identity is “Jewish” is whether the textual sources we have present them as Jewish. That is, Jewishness is not first and foremost a matter of similarity of behavior/belief, but a matter of self-identity, of ascription. I suggest using the term “Jewish” for individual’s self-ascription—that is, an individual is Jewish if they claim to be Jewish—and “Judaism” for a description of their practices and beliefs. In this sense, a text could be a Jewish text if the writer claims to be, or we conclude that they self-identify as, Jewish and a text could be said to be “within Judaism” if its conceptual world and associated practices are—or we argue that they are—part of common ways of being Jewish, rather than a rejection of the same. This terminology, of course, does not answer the question of how similar or different a text’s conceptual world might be from other extant Jewish texts and artifacts. This fits with descriptions of “within Judaism” that see it primarily reacting against the idea of replacement.[vii]
A related point is that ethnic identity is nested—that is, individuals identify with multiple ethnic categories that are often arranged hierarchically with one inside another.[viii] For our purposes, this concerns the referent “Jew” (יהודי, ̓Ιουδαῖος, Iudaeus) and its relationship to “Israel” (ישראל, ’Ισραήλ, Israhel). Categories are flexible and can be used in different ways by different persons. This means that the relation between these terms should be considered separately in any text we address. However, I am convinced by Jason Staples’s recent argument that, in the extant evidence from the centuries surrounding the first-century CE, “Jew,” usually refers to descendants of the southern kingdom of Judah and almost always represents a subgroup of “Israel,” which designates the twelve tribes, wherever they are understood to be.[ix] I suggest, therefore that, for ancient writers that prefer the common proper name “Israel,” we adopt different terminology than “Jewish” or “within Judaism.” I am not wholly satisfied with the rather clunky “Israelite literature” and “within Israelitism,” and hope to solicit better suggestions.
The third question that arises from the label “Paul within Judaism” is what it would mean to be “within” Judaism. Here the social-scientific work on social boundaries provides a way forward. Among sociologists, a social boundary has two dimensions: categorical and behavioral.[x] Categorical boundaries refer to manners of classification (e.g., the statement “Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans”),[xi] while behavioral boundaries refer to everyday lived networks of relations (e.g., individual Jews and whether and how they interacted with individual Samaritans in actual practice). Behavioral boundaries are not concerned with whether persons interact across boundaries; they must in order to mark boundaries. Rather, behavioral boundaries are concerned with how persons interact: whether ethnic difference is marked by patterns of differentiation in everyday lived interactions. For example, while epigraphic evidence confirms that non-Jews participated in diaspora synagogues, it provides little information about how Jews and non-Jews interacted. Only when categorical and behavioral boundaries coincide can one speak of a social boundary.[xii]
This relates to our interest in describing the texts that are now contained in the New Testament because we have access only to the categorical boundaries of the writer. We do not have access to how other Jews categorized the writer and/or their intended recipients—that is, whether other Jews considered them Jews or sufficiently Jewish to be “within Judaism.” We also do not have access to the behavioral boundaries between the writers/readers and other Jews. My suggestion here is that, rather than assume that some criterion is too heterodox for other Jews, say Jesus as the messiah or perhaps the non-practice of ritual purity or dietary laws, we assume a space for diverse practice and belief unless there is evidence to the contrary. There seem to be two reasons for this as the null hypothesis: The first is our greater awareness of the diversity of ways of being Jewish, reinforced especially by the Dead Sea Scrolls, but even more so by evidence for Jewishness in parts of the ancient Mediterranean world where Jews represent minority groups. The second is the sociological observation that, upon increasingly close investigation, the level of diversity of any people group is similar to a coastline: there is greater diversity at every level one is able to see. While we lack access to detailed investigation of the past, it can be safely assumed that reality was more, not less, complex than our extant evidence indicates.
In summary, we should identify the writer, intended recipients, both, or their text, as the referent of ‘within Judaism’ and associated descriptions. We can also distinguish between Jewish texts—those that are written by self-ascribed Jews—and texts that are “within Judaism”—those that advocate an approximated Jewish way of believing and acting. Some of these may be better described as “Israelite texts” or texts that are “within Israelitism” (again, terminologically clunky). When attempting to locate the writer/intended recipients in relationship to the first-century Jewish ethnos, the categorical boundaries of the text provide the best entry point, but we must acknowledge that we lack evidence for other Jewish categorization of Jesus-followers and sufficient examples of the everyday lived behavioral boundaries between any of the variety of early Jesus-followers and other Jews.
In conclusion, I would like to use three approaches to Paul to illustrate some of the above distinctions. (1) Mark Nanos has been a pioneer in reading Paul within Judaism. His portrait of Paul, his letters, and his communities must be gleaned from his many studies. Here I try to summarize his portrait. For Nanos, Paul remains Jewish and behaves Jewishly. Paul claims to be an exemplary Jew (Gal 2:15; Phil 3:3–6; cf. 2 Cor 11:22). As a Jew by birth (Gal 2:15) he did not remove the sign of circumcision but remained in the condition in which he was called, just as he teaches all his assemblies (1 Cor 7:17–24).[xiii] As a Jewish Jesus follower, Paul is obligated to observe the whole law (Gal 5:3). Yet he writes his letters to gentile Jesus-followers who must remain gentile, rather than convert, so that God’s oneness is not compromised (Rom 3:29–31; Rom 15:5–12).[xiv] Still, these non-Jewish Jesus followers must behave Jewishly by avoiding pagan cults and observing the law (Rom 2:25–29).[xv] At a number of points Nanos also suggests that Paul’s sub-groups dwell within larger Jewish groups.[xvi] According to my above suggestions, Nanos’s Paul can be described as Jewish and his texts can be labeled “Jewish texts” insofar as they are written by Paul, but not insofar as his intended recipients remain non-Jews. Yet his letters and his audience can be described as “within Judaism” insofar as both Paul and his addressees practice (somewhat different forms of) Judaism and participate in broader Jewish communities.
(2) For Jason Staples, Paul anticipates that “all Israel will be saved” (Rom 11:26) only when the fullness of the nations has come into Israel (Rom 11:25; cf. Gal 3:8).[xvii] The ingathering of the nations into Israel is a necessary part of Jeremiah’s new covenant restoration (Jer 31:31), which encompasses the southern kingdom (Judah) and northern kingdom (Israel/Ephraim) but never hints at including the nations, for the northern kingdom “has been mixed among the peoples” (Hos. 7:8; cf. Hos. 8:8) through intermarriage. By welcoming “those who were not my people” (members of the nations) into “my people” (Israel; Rom 9:25–26; Hos 2:23), the intermingled descendants of the northern kingdom may be restored to Israel, and all Israel saved. Yet Israel’s regathering necessarily brings members of the nations into Israel, thus fulfilling Jacob’s blessing to Ephraim that his seed would become the fullness of the nations (Gen 48:19; Rom 11:25). The nations may come into Israel, for the law is written on the heart, as foreseen in Jeremiah’s portrayal of restored Israel (Jer 31:33). Jesus-following members of the nations and the intermingled descendants of the northern kingdom, then, are joined with the descendants of the southern kingdom—both Jesus-following and otherwise—to form a restored Israel.[xviii] Accordingly, Paul and his formerly gentile addressees are, for Paul, “Israel” and so Paul’s letters could be described as Israelite texts. Paul himself could be described as ‘within Judaism’ but many of his addressees are only “within Israelitism.”
(3) One final example shows how the above distinctions can extend beyond Jewish and Israelite literature. Matthew Thiessen argues that, for Paul, non-Jewish Jesus-followers need not convert, for they have really and materially become descendants of Abraham through their reception of Christ’s pneuma (Gal 3:29). Those non-Jews who have confidence (pistis) in God receive the pneuma (Gal 3:1–5), which is the pneuma of God’s Son, Christ (Gal 4:6; cf. Gal. 2:20). Christ, as the singular seed of David whose kingdom God would establish (Rom 1:4; 2 Sam 7:12), is also the singular seed of Abraham (Gal 3:16; cf. Gen 12:7; 13:15; 17:7; 24:7). Accordingly, non-Jews who receive Christ’s pneuma receive Abraham’s seed and become real descendants of Abraham according to the promise (Gal 3:14; Gen 15:5; 22:16–18) by a fusion of the material pneuma of the seed of Abraham (Christ) with their human bodies. Paul remains Jewish (e.g., Gal. 2:15), for Jews (both Jesus-following and otherwise) remain Jews and non-Jews (both Jesus-following and otherwise) remain non-Jews, but it is only the descendants of Abraham according to the promise (i.e., those who have received the pneuma of Christ) who are saved (not our focus here; Gal 2:7; Rom 9–11).[xix] For Thiessen, Paul may be said to be “within Judaism” and his intended audience ‘within Abraham’, a category that is broader than Israel through its focus on descent from Abraham rather than Jacob.[xx]
The next step, I think, is to develop a typology for what a text is doing with Jewishness, but I am sure that the above distinctions need further refinement first, and so I look forward to the continuing discussion.
[i] Anders Runesson and Daniel M. Gurtner, “Introduction: The Location of the Matthew-within-Judaism Perspective in Past and Present Research,” in Matthew within Judaism: Israel and the Nations in the First Gospel, ed. Anders Runesson and Daniel M. Gurtner (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2020), 1–26, esp. 10.
[ii] Magnus Zetterholm, “The Paul within Judaism Perspective,” in Perspectives on Paul, ed. Scott McKnight and B. J. Oropeza (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2020), 171–93, esp. 177.
[iii] Anthony J. Saldarini, Matthew’s Christian-Jewish Community, Chicago Studies in the History of Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), introduction.
[iv] This was famously termed an “imagined community” by Benedict Anderson. Anderson speaks of nations, but the same expression is often repeated for the closely related concept ethnicity. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 6. Fredrik Barth, “Introduction,” in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference, ed. Fredrik Barth (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), 9–38, esp. 13. For a methodologically rigorous application of this approach to Jewishness in Ptolemaic Egypt, see Stewart A. Moore, Jewish Ethnic Identity and Relations in Hellenistic Egypt: With Walls of Iron? (Boston: Brill, 2015), 33–34. Jonathan Z. Smith advocates a similar approach to religious identity in Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 1–18. Cf. Michael L. Satlow, “Defining Judaism: Accounting for ‘Religions’ in the Study of Religion,” JAAR 74 (2006): 837–860.
[v] This observation is taken from sociological and anthropological approaches to identity and is closely tied with the major shifts in sociological theory of ethnicity. Therefore, the basic lines of development are worth outlining here. The classical debate was between primordialism and circumstantialism. A term closely related to primordialism is “essentialism.” Both emphasize the givenness of ethnic ties. Whereas primordialism emphasizes the emotional ties binding members from birth and rooted in the ancient past (hence, “primordialism”), essentialism more generally approaches ethnicity as an ontological given. A term closely related to circumstantialism is “instrumentalism.” Both emphasize ethnicity as something used by ethnic actors towards particular means. Whereas circumstantialism emphasizes the contextual factors influencing ethnic actors’ use of ethnicity, instrumentalism places the focus on the goal to which ethnicity is utilized. Stephen Cornell and Douglass Hartmann, Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World (Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge, 1998), 59. On the one hand, primordialists emphasized the strong primordial bonds that form between co-ethnics, often due to (putative) common descent, and the perceived immutability of ethnic identity. On the other hand, circumstantialists emphasized the way that individuals employ ethnic categorization toward practical ends and the mutability of ethnic identity in changing circumstances. Circumstantialism was able to integrate the basic primordial observation by noting that, while ethnicity adapts fluidly to changing circumstances, ethnic actors often experience it as primordial and fixed. This resulted in a new focus on how ethnic identity is constructed.
[vi] Barth, “Introduction,” 11, 13. Rogers Brubaker states “Today, few if any scholars would argue that ethnic groups … are fixed or given; … This holds even for those who … have sought to revive and re-specify the primordialist position by explaining the deep roots of essentialist or primordialist thinking in everyday life. In this sense, we are all constructivists now.” “Ethnicity, Race, and Nationalism,” Annual Review of Sociology 35 (2009): 21–42, esp. 28. Summarizing studies of ethnicity in antiquity, Todd Berzon writes “scholars of the ancient Mediterranean have shifted their discussions of ethnicity away from essentialist, instrumentalist and primordialist conceptualizations of the category and instead have moved toward an understanding of the ideological, historical and discursive processes by which notions of national or ethnic kinship were constructed, maintained, altered and refashioned.” “Ethnicity and Early Christianity: New Approaches to Religious Kinship and Community,” CurBR 16 (2018): 191–227, esp. 192.
[vii] Mark D. Nanos, “Introduction,” in Paul within Judaism: Restoring the First-Century Context to the Apostle, ed. Mark D. Nanos and Magnus Zetterholm (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 1–29.
[viii] Wimmer, Ethnic Boundary Making, 23–25, also 139–173. In relation to ancient ethnicity, Teresa Morgan writes “it is often—perhaps typically—accretive.” Teresa Morgan, “Society, Identity and Ethnicity,”, 38–80, esp. 60. Cf. David G. Horrell, “Judaean Ethnicity and Christ-Following Voluntarism? A Reply to Steve Mason and Philip Esler,” NTS 65 (2019): 1–20, esp. 7–8; Joseph Geiger, “Language, Culture and Identity in Ancient Palestine,” in Greek Romans and Roman Greeks, ed. Erik N. Ostenfeld, Aarhus Studies in Mediterranean Antiquity 3 (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2002), 233–46. See especially: Judith Nagata, “What Is a Malay? Situational Selection of Ethnic Identity in a Plural Society,” American Ethnologist 1 (1974): 331–50; Jonathan Okamura, “Situational Ethnicity,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 4 (1981): 452–65. Michael Moerman, “Ethnic Identification in a Complex Civilization: Who Are the Lue?,” American Anthropologist 67 (1965): 1215–30.
[ix] Jason Staples, The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism: A New Theory of People, Exile, and Israelite Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
[x] Cf. Michèle Lamont and Virág Molnár, “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences,” Annual Review of Sociology 28 (2002): 167–195. Alternatively, the categorical boundary can be designated “symbolic,” or “structural” and the behavioral boundary called “cultural.” J. Clyde Mitchell, “Perceptions of Ethnicity and Ethnic Behaviour: An Empirical Exploration,” in Urban Ethnicity, ed. Abner Cohen (London: Tavistock, 1974), 1–35, esp. 15.
[xi] John 4:9. English translations, unless noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version.
[xii] Cf. J. Clyde Mitchell, “Perceptions of Ethnicity and Ethnic Behaviour,” 1–35.
[xiii] Mark D. Nanos, “The Myth of the ‘Law-Free’ Paul Standing between Christians and Jews,” in Reading Paul within Judaism: Collected Essays of Mark D. Nanos Vol. 1 (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017), 77–107.
[xiv] Mark D. Nanos, “Paul and the Jewish Tradition: The Ideology of the Shema,” in Reading Paul within Judaism: Collected Essays of Mark D. Nanos Vol. 1 (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017), 108–26.
[xv] Mark D. Nanos, “Paul’s Non-Jews Do Not Become ‘Jews,’ but Do They Become ‘Jewish’?: Reading Romans 2:25-29 within Judaism, alongside Josephus,” Journal of the Jesus Movement in Its Jewish Setting 1.1 (2014): 26–53, esp. 40–51.
[xvi] Mark D. Nanos, “Paul and Judaism: Why Not Paul’s Judaism?,” in Reading Paul within Judaism: Collected Essays of Mark D. Nanos Vol. 1 (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017), 3–59. Mark D Nanos, “The Jewish Context of the Gentile Audience Addressed in Paul’s Letter to the Romans,” CBQ 61 (1999): 283–304.
[xvii] Jason A. Staples, “What Do the Gentiles Have to Do with ‘All Israel’?: A Fresh Look at Romans 11:25–27,” JBL 130 (2011): 371–90. (note: his second book is an expansion of this; he offered to send me a pre-publication version when my essay is close)
[xviii] Staples, “Gentiles,” 388.
[xix] Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem, 120.
[xx] Matthew Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
John Van Maaren is an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg.