Cohen Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies

PAUL - FOUNDER OF CHRISTIANITY OR FAITHFUL JEW?

John T. Pawlikowski, OSM, Ph.D
Professor and Director, Catholic-Jewish Studies Program Catholic Theological Union Chicago

Visiting Professor-Spring Term
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Leuven, Belgium

President, International Council of Christians & Jews

The coming celebration of a Jubilee Year in honour of the ministry and writings of the Apostle Paul offers the Christian churches an opportunity to re-examine their perspectives on his role in Christian history. For centuries a master narrative rooted in the book of ACTS has tended to dominate Christian understanding of Paul’s outlook on Judaism and its Torah in terms of Christian belief.

This master narrative begins with Stephen’s decisive break with Judaism in chapter seven of ACTS. So-called Jewish Christians then begin to disappear from this master narrative until chapter eleven when they are totally removed from the story following Peter’s revelatory vision through which he is convinced to abandon his previous adherence to continued Jewish observance.

From that point onwards the master narrative focuses exclusively on gentiles as the new people of God and moves the geographic center of Christianity to Rome in place of Jerusalem. Thus in the account of Christian origins that has tended to dominate in the church’s vision Judaism is superseded and even annulled with Paul being viewed as the primary messenger for this teaching.

This master narrative from ACTS has also impacted Catholic liturgical life as it dominates in the readings during the Easter season.

This classical perspective on Paul and Judaism was significantly reinforced in the mid-nineteenth century in the writings of F.C. Baur. In his classical work PAUL THE APOSTLE (1845) Baur argued for the existence of only two factions in the early church. One was the Jewish Christians whose leader was Peter and the other the Gentile Christians who looked to Paul for spiritual leadership. The Jewish Christians, in Baur’s perspective, stood mired in a narrow legalism that blinded them to the universalistic elements in Jesus’ teachings championed by Paul.

Recent biblical scholarship, with much effort, has work to break out of the limitations imposed by the master narrative based solely upon ACTS as revived by Baur and his disciples. This effort is part of a much broader reinterpretation of the early years of the Christian-Jewish relationship.

A growing consensus within the new scholarship insists that there is no evidence that Jesus intended to establish a totally new religious institution apart from Judaism in his own lifetime and that we cannot really speak of a definitive break between Judaism and Christianity until at least the mid-second century and even later in sectors of Eastern Christianity.

Scholars involved in this new research paint a far more complex and nuanced picture of the first century Jewish-Christian relationship than argued by Baur. In reality many different groups existed within the then very wide tent of Judaism who combined continued Jewish practices within an acceptance of the way proclaimed by Jesus. Even so-called “Christ worship,” some of these scholars maintain, did not automatically sever the bond with Judaism for those engaged in such worship. Regrettably neither systematic theology nor liturgical studies has given much attention to the profound reorientation on the Christian-Jewish issue emerging in important sectors of contemporary biblical scholarship.

A striking comment on the new approach to Paul and Judaism in recent biblical studies came from the late Raymond Brown in a popular lecture shortly before his death. Brown said that he had now become convinced that if Paul had fathered a son he would have had him circumcised. This new thinking on Paul’s outlook on Judaism in terms of Christian faith began with the recently deceased Harvard biblical scholar and subsequently Lutheran Bishop of Stockholm Krister Stendahl. In a seminal article in the HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW in 1963 entitled “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West” Stendahl argued that the classical understanding of Paul as anti-Torah, an interpretation which played a central role in Christian theological self definition in Protestantism especially, bears little resemblance to what Paul actually believed about the continued practice of Jewish ritual by Christians. His work has been picked up by an impressive list of scholars who include, among others, E.P. Sanders, Peter Tomson, James D.G. Dunn, John Gager, Daniel Harrington, Jeryy L. Sumney and LloydGaston. They have been joined of late by several Jewish scholars, most notably Alan Segal.

What is beginning to emerge in important sectors of Pauline scholarship is a picture of a Paul still very much a Jew, still quite appreciative of Jewish Torah with seemingly no objection to its continued practice by Jewish Christians so long as their basic orientation is founded in Christ and his teachings, and still struggling towards the end of his ministry to balance his understanding of the newness implied in the Christ Event with the continuity of the Jewish covenant, something quite apparent in the famous chapters 9-11 of Romans cited by Vatican II in chapter four of NOSTRA AETATE where we find the conciliar declaration on the new understanding of the church’s relationship with the Jewish people. It is also possible, though far less certain, that some of the Pauline writings, particularly his Christological hymns, may have roots in Paul’s personal contact with the Jewish mysticism of the time, though Paul would have added his distinctive interpretations. A few of the biblical scholars involved in this new Pauline research even go so far as to maintain that Paul regarded Torah observance so highly that he feared that if Gentiles tried to practice it they would only corrupt its authentic spirit. Such a view admittedly pushes the envelope of scholarly evidence a bit far, but it is presently under discussion in some scholarly circles.

One of the scholars at the centre of the new picture of Paul is John G. Gager. He is a founder of the important Oxford-Princeton universities continuing study group on the “parting of the ways.” In a recent essay Gager has summarized the new vision of Paul that in his judgment must replace the dominance of the master narrative from ACTS that has dominated Christian theology and worship for so very long. And certainly this Jubilee celebration of Paul would be an excellent opportunity to present this new view to people in the pews as well as for serious discussion among theologians and liturgists about its implication for Christian self-understanding and worship in the churches.

Gager’s summary includes the following elements: (1) He strongly emphasizes the plurality of practice among followers of Jesus who continued to observe Torah. They were far from uniform in their continued observance of the Torah. ( 2) Jewish Christians in fact did not disappear from the scene after Peter’s so-called revelatory vision as the author of ACTS would have us believe. They remain a significant force in the Christian churches for many centuries, especially in the regions of Syria and beyond where they were far from a tiny minority and were not considered heretical in their outlook or practise. (3) Early Christianity, unlike what is presented in ACTS, did not simplistically reorient its geographic focus uni-directionally towards Rome. Rather it moved multi-directionally into every area of the Mediterranean region and beyond. In places such as Syria Jewish Christianity seemed in fact to occupy the dominant position in the church. (4) Together with other scholars such as Brown Gager repudiates any notion that Paul rejected Judaism and those we term Jewish Christians. Rather he chose to devote his energies to the outreach to Gentile believers whom, for whatever reason, he felt did not have the obligation to pick up Torah observance in their faith expression. The author of ACTS, according to Gager, enlisted Paul in his own effort to downgrade Jewish Christianity. Gager this implies, though he does not say it explicitly, that the author of ACTS rather than Paul is in fact the founder of the anti-Jewish form of Christianity that has been so powerful (and negative) a force throughout Christian history which has so often witnessed the manifestation of sinful anti-Judaism and even outright anti-Semitic hatred in various Christian communities. Paul in fact advocates a “two door” policy in terms of salvation with distinctive paths for Jews and Gentiles. 5) Largely due to the image of Paul created by the author of ACTS, Paul became known as the arch-enemy of Jewish Christians, as the person who totally undermined their legitimacy as an authentic expression of Christianity. This image also infected Jewish circles where he also has traditionally been regarded even by scholars favourably disposed towards Jesus and his teachings as the founder of a Christian church anti-Jewish at its core. The Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt once spoke of the chasm she felt between the teachings of Jesus in the gospels and the Christ of the Pauline texts. (John G. Gager, “Did Jewish Christians See the Rise of Islam,” in THE WAYS THAT NEVER PARTED: JEWS AND CHRISTIANS IN LATE ANTIQUITY AND THE MIDDLE AGES, eds. Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, 2003, 366-367)

Gager also adds a point relative to the revelatory experience which, according to ACTS 11, led to a basic change of heart on the part of Peter regarding the continuation of Jewish practices by followers of Jesus. He questions the actual historicity of this account, believing it was a story developed by the author of ACTS to buttress his own anti-Judaic perspective.

Gager argues this view from a section in the later Pseudo-Clementine writings where Peter complains that “some have undertaken to distort my words, by certain intricate interpretations, into an abolition of the Law, as if I myself thought such a thing–God forbid! For to take such a position I to act against the Law of God which was spoken through Moses and whose eternal endurance was attested to by Our Lord.” (Cf. the translation and discussion in Wayne Meeks, THE WRITINGS OF ST. PAUL, 178ff) Gager interprets this as “Peter’s wrath” against the author of ACTS.

To bring this brief survey of the new perspectives on Paul to a close, we need to return to the original question, Was he the founder of Christianity or merely a faithful Jew? In some ways the answer is he was both. There is little doubt anymore that Paul took a very positive attitude towards Judaism and its Torah. He personally probably continued to adhere to many of its provisions and likely would have been aghast at the “denuded” form of Christianity separated from its Jewish soul that eventually emerged in many quarters of the church enhanced, especially within a major part of the patristic tradition, without right contempt for the Jewish People and their faith. In that he remained a “faithful Jew.” But he did believe that the coming of Christ had resulted in a fundamental reorientation of faith into a belief system rooted in the experience of Christ. For Paul the experience of the resurrected Christ was personally transforming. Paul certainly wanted Jews to recognize Jesus as the Messiah of Israel as well of the nations, but for Paul this did not mean any repudiation of the Torah. In fact, from the Pauline perspective, a contradiction between Jesus the Messiah and the Torah would in fact be rather ridiculous as he sometimes appears to draw a parallel and even identify the law with the gospel of God’s acts in Jesus Christ.

Paul’s battle with the so-called “Jewish Christians” which Baur erroneously built into a fundamental confrontation was in fact a much more limited dispute restricted to those Jewish Christians who refused to accept Paul’s view of a fundamental reorientation for believers in Christ. For Paul the Jewish Torah genuinely mattered; but Christ mattered more. And this was why he felt he could extend covenantal membership to Gentiles without requiring of them a commitment to Jewish ritual practices as highly as Paul regarded such practices. For Paul Israel will ultimately be saved through God’s eschatological Messiah. Romans 9-11 clearly shows that Paul expected all Israel to attain salvation. He appeared to regard the present “disobedience” of the Jewish people as in fact an integral part of the divine plan for human salvation. There was even a way in which the Jewish rejection of Jesus as the expected Messiah of Israel could be seen as a “Christological sacrifice, “paralleling Jesus’ separation from God the Father on Calvary. In this sense Paul can be termed the founder of Christianity. But in a far different way than the classical portrayal of him in this regard as one who expunged Judaism and its practices from Christian faith, who favoured Christ over Torah in an absolute sense.