On Thinking Paul and Judaism
Matthew V. Novenson
Nowadays, in certain SBL sections, at least, we speak of “Paul within Judaism.” Historically, however, the predominant way, by far, that modern interpreters have tried to think Paul and Judaism has been to compare the former with the latter. But the glaring flaw at the heart of this longstanding tradition is the assumption that one can profitably compare a single person (Paul) with an entire ethno-religion (Judaism)—where, to skew the comparison even further, the person in question is himself a member of that ethno-religion. It is not that such a comparison is impossible; we can, of course, compare anything we like—apples with oranges, Paul with Judaism, Shakespeare with bioluminescence, etc.—because comparison is a mental operation performed by a thinking subject. Things do not compare themselves; thinkers compare things. But comparisons can be more or less profitable, more or less interesting, more or less instructive depending on the choice of comparanda and the particular questions posed about them. And it is here that the myriad scholarly comparisons of Paul and Judaism betray their conceptual deficiency. Every such study has to conclude with a claim about how, exactly, Paul differs from Judaism; the form of the conclusion is required by the set-up. But any claim of this form, no matter how well-researched or perceptive, is predicated on a gross generalization about (whatever the writer in question includes under the heading) “Judaism.” Comparisons of this type cannot do otherwise than find Paul to be unique or anomalous; they are purpose-built to find that. In fact, the supposed uniqueness or anomaly is not a discovery but a presupposition, not a conclusion but an unacknowledged premise.
As Brent Nongbri has pointed out, this is not how we normally go about trying to understand other Jews of the Hellenistic or Roman period. None of the great studies of Ben Sira, Salome Alexandra, Philo, Josephus, Babatha, or Rabbi Judah the Patriarch—let alone the many anonymous and pseudonymous Jewish texts from antiquity—is framed as a comparison of the lone figure on the one hand with all of ancient Judaism on the other. Because, in most cases, we recognize intuitively that that is an ill-formed kind of comparison, like comparing Jane Austen with all of English literature, or Gerald Ford with all of America. We can think those comparisons, but there is little to be gained by doing so. Much more profitable to compare Jane Austen with Walter Scott, or Louisa May Alcott, or Zadie Smith; or to compare Gerald Ford with Spiro Agnew, or Abraham Lincoln, or Phyllis Schlafly. In this connection, one recent, salutary trend has been a vogue of studies comparing Paul with just one other ancient figure on a topic of common interest. Examples include Bruce Longenecker’s study of Paul and 4 Ezra on covenant, John Barclay’s study of Paul and Philo on circumcision, Jonathan Linebaugh’s study of Wisdom of Solomon and Paul on grace, George Carras’s study of Paul and Josephus on diaspora, Niko Huttunen’s study of Paul and Epictetus on law, and Alexander Muir’s study of Paul and Seneca on consolation. One might reasonably complain—as Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre and Laura Nasrallah have done—that, at a disciplinary level, the enormous volume of attention devoted to Paul in contrast to other ancient figures is itself a corrupting influence on historical understanding. But at least the form of these recent comparative studies is a great improvement.
The one comparison of Paul and Judaism that towers over all others is E. P. Sanders’s 1977 Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion. Sanders is so brilliant an exegete that, when he gets down to the work of reading primary texts, he manages to be right much, even most of the time. But in the architecture of the project, Sanders goes astray in precisely the way detailed above. To give him due credit, he does not attempt to compare Paul with all of Judaism, but with all of Palestinian Judaism ca. 200 BCE to 200 CE (including the Mishnah, Tosefta, tannaitic midrashim, all the Dead Sea Scrolls, Ben Sira, 1 Enoch, Jubilees, Psalms of Solomon, and 4 Ezra), which is still more than enough to yield an absurd asymmetry. Another problem is Sanders’s notion of a “pattern of religion,” which turns out to mean something very close to “soteriology,” of which he finds one Pauline type (viz. participationist eschatology) and a different, pan-Jewish type (viz. covenantal nomism).
Sanders sets up his comparison as follows: “What is clearly desirable, then, is to compare an entire religion, parts and all, with an entire religion, parts and all… The problem is how to discover two wholes, both of which are considered and defined on their own merits and in their own terms, to be compared with each other” (Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 16). Writing at the time, Jonathan Z. Smith subjected this plan to stern but warranted criticism:
Allowing, for the moment, the language of ‘entire’ and ‘wholes’ to stand unquestioned, and setting aside the difficulty, indeed the impossibility, of comparing two different objects, each ‘considered’ and ‘defined in their own terms’—a statement which he cannot mean literally, but which he gives no indication as to how he would modify—Sanders compounds confusion by further defining the notion of pattern… I am baffled by what ‘entire religion, parts and all’ could possibly mean for Sanders. I find no methodological hints on how such entities are to be discovered, let alone compared. (Smith, “In Comparison a Magic Dwells,” 33–34)
Notwithstanding the enormous and almost entirely positive influence of Paul and Palestinian Judaism on the field of Pauline studies, Smith is quite right about the conceptual problems. If not even Sanders’s magnum opus could successfully compare Paul with Judaism, how much more is this true of the many lesser attempts at that ill-advised project.
A more recent trend in this research area speaks not of “Paul and Judaism” but rather of “Paul the Jew.” Instances of this trend begin by granting (!) that Paul was a Jew but then add a descriptor qualifying what kind of Jew he was: “Paul, an [x] Jew.” There is some precedent for this rubric in older scholarship. Kaufmann Kohler classed Paul as an archetypal self-hating Jew, one who had internalized Greco-Roman anti-Judaism and thus wrote with contempt for his own ancestral traditions. Markus Barth, in a provocation to his mainline Protestant interlocutors, classed Paul as a good Jew. But studies of the form “Paul, an [x] Jew” have only really come in vogue since the 1990s. Daniel Boyarin classes Paul as a radical Jew: “a Jewish cultural critic… [with] a profound concern for the one-ness of humanity” (Boyarin, Radical Jew, 52). Calvin Roetzel classes Paul as a Jew on the margins, a member of his tribe but not of its orthodox, orthoprax center. Going further than Roetzel, Love Sechrest classes Paul as a former Jew, one who has dissociated from his Jewish identity in order to associate with the tertium genus, the third race, of the Christ-believers. Contrariwise, Mark Nanos classes Paul as a Torah-observant Jew, one who keeps the commandments that pertain to him and teaches gentiles-in-Christ to keep the (far fewer) commandments that pertain to them. Similarly but less specifically, Gabriele Boccaccini classes Paul as a Second-Temple Jew, full stop. “Paul should be regarded as nothing other than a Second Temple Jew. What else should he have been?” (Boccaccini, Paul the Jew, 2) But Boccaccini’s “nothing other than” is perhaps overstatement; he himself also regards Paul as a Pharisee and an apostle, among other categories. Most recently, Brant Pitre, Michael Barber, and John Kincaid have classed Paul as a new covenant Jew: “We follow Paul’s lead and refer to him as a ‘minister of a new covenant’ (2 Cor 3:6)—that is, as a new covenant Jew” (Pitre, Barber, and Kinkaid, New Covenant Jew, 62). Other critics have tried to explain Paul by classing him as a proselyte Jew, a Hellenistic Jew, a Palestinian Jew, a Pharisaic Jew, an apocalyptic Jew, an eschatological Jew, and other categories beside.
Perhaps the most interesting and most influential of these proposals is John Barclay’s mid-1990s classification of Paul as an anomalous diaspora Jew. Barclay rightly questions why his predecessors (e.g., W. D. Davies, E. P. Sanders, Alan Segal) had compared Paul with Palestinian Jewish sources if Paul’s social context was so obviously the diaspora. He writes, “Paul can properly be regarded as a Diaspora Jew and compared with other Jews living in this social environment… As we shall see, his position there is distinctly anomalous” (Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora, 381). There are two key moves here. Historiographically, Barclay situates Paul among other Greek-speaking diaspora Jewish writers, yielding real heuristic gains. But analytically, then, he argues that Paul is an anomaly relative to all of them. The first of these moves is a great advance on older scholarship, but the second, as Ronald Charles has argued, actually reproduces the conclusions of that older scholarship. Barclay explicates the Pauline anomaly thusly: “In his conceptuality Paul is most at home among the particularistic and least accommodated segments of the Diaspora; yet in his utilization of these concepts, and in his social practice, he shatters the ethnic mould in which that ideology was formed… By an extraordinary transference of ideology, Paul deracinates the most culturally conservative forms of Judaism in the Diaspora and uses them in the service of his largely Gentile communities” (Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora, 393). Barclay is too careful a thinker to call Paul unique, but nevertheless, in the respect that Barclay cares about, Paul stands on one side of a dividing line, all other diaspora Jews on the other. Only Paul “shatters the ethnic mould” and “deracinates” the tradition via an “extraordinary transference of ideology.” One wonders whether, as Charles suggests, this kind of anomaly is just uniqueness by another name.
Some of the “Paul, an [x] Jew” proposals are simply false. I am virtually certain, contra Hyam Maccoby, that Paul was not a Greek who turned proselyte in order to marry a Jewish woman. I am not certain but relatively confident, contra Michael Satlow, that Paul was not a Jew born and raised in Jerusalem. Many “Paul, an [x] Jew” proposals, however, are technically accurate, depending what point is being made; but the crucial question is what we actually gain from them. It is true—and most critics would agree that it is true—that Paul was a Second-Temple, diaspora, Pharisaic, apocalyptic, nonconformist (etc., etc.) Jew. But the fact that most critics would agree to this litany is proof that the application of the labels tells us relatively little, because they can mask huge differences of interpretation. Regarding Pitre, Barber, and Kincaid’s “new covenant Jew” proposal, I have argued elsewhere that it is both a welcome hedge against the imposition of ill-suited categories and a barrier to taxonomy, because neither ancient nor modern writers ever use “new covenant” to denominate a certain subset of ancient Jews. To identify Paul as a Hellenistic Jew is to say that he is like, for example, Philo of Alexandria in some relevant respect. Likewise, to identify Paul as an apocalyptic Jew is to say that he is like, for example, the Qumran covenanters in some relevant respect. But what does it mean to identify Paul as a new covenant Jew? Who are the other members of that set? Indeed, are there any? Paul only uses the label “ministers of a new covenant” of himself (and perhaps also Timothy, 2 Cor 1:1), not of the other apostles or other Christ-believers, let alone any other Jews outside the Christ sect. So perhaps to identify Paul as a new covenant Jew is simply to say that he is a Paulinist. But that is a tautology, or very close to one. To label is not to understand. Thus my goal in my own research is not to prove that Paul was an [x] Jew, as if proving such a thing could tell us very much. I do think that Paul was an apocalyptic Jew, and a Second-Temple Jew, and a diaspora Jew, and a great many other things—all suitably defined and qualified, of course. But I do not think that to apply any of those labels is to understand him.
This essay is excerpted and adapted from Matthew V. Novenson, The End of the Law and the Last Man (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
Matthew V. Novenson is Senior Lecturer in New Testament and Christian Origins at the University of Edinburgh, where he is also director of the Centre for the Study of Christian Origins.