Review: Paul was not a Christian

Yes, the title is clearly meant to prod you into alertness. But the author—who is a Jewish university professor at a Christian university—actually means it, so this book is going to hold your interest, for sure! It is:

Paul Was Not a Christian: The original message of a misunderstood apostle by Pamela Eisenbaum (HarperCollins, 2009)

Eisenbaum maintains, convincingly, that Paul’s encounter with the risen Jesus on the Damascus road, never caused him to renounce his Jewish identity or his adherence to Torah—the Jewish law. By his encounter he was ‘called’, rather than ‘converted to Christianity’, because at the time Christianity as a distinct faith did not yet exist.

What Paul’s experience did was make him realise that God’s time had come for the ingathering of the nations, in accordance with his ancient promises to Abraham and the words of the prophets, and that he himself, Paul, was being called to be God’s instrument, as the ‘apostle to the Gentiles’, to bring it about.

The book chooses to look at Paul only through the seven letters widely accepted by scholars as written personally by him—Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon—and to largely disregard the portrait of him in the Book of Acts whose author, Luke, probably never met Paul.

Several chapters explore various social and religious aspects of the Judaism of Paul’s day, including Jewish sects, notably the Pharisees, because Paul was one. It shows that typical Christian views have become seriously skewed, especially since the Reformation.

Paul’s maintenance of his own Jewish orientation opens the door for the author to re-evaluate some Christian doctrines traditionally seen as core ones, notably justification by faith and original sin. Eisenbaum agrees wholeheartedly, for example, with the conviction of scholars embracing the ‘new perspective on Paul’ that the Greek phrase rendered ‘faith in Jesus Christ’ should be ‘the faithfulness of Jesus Christ’ to his Father’s calling. She looks in similar detail at the phrase ‘the righteousness of God’ and scrutinises key passages like Romans 9-11.

I find her arguments for the most part sincere, clearly presented and persuasive—but I already shared some of them anyway. Some questions remain, however. The ‘two-ways salvation’ she proposes—at least in the form she presents it—must be questioned. And the church canonised what she regards as the pseudonymous letters of Paul, so we cannot ignore them completely. As for the doctrines that emerged from the Reformation, if her rejection of them is news to you, you may need to chew on Eisenbaum’s proposals for a while before you feel able to swallow them.

But, overall, there is plenty that is thought-provoking, and even nourishing, in her work..

[Here is a selection of quotations, with page numbers]

The traditional story of Paul looks something like this: Paul was originally a zealous Jew who was persecuting the church, until something utterly miraculous happened: the resurrected Jesus appeared to him. This revelation led to Paul’s conversion from Judaism to Christianity, from being a zealous Pharisee to being an unstoppable preacher of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Once converted, he realized the futility of Judaism, with its endless demands of the law, and rejected it.  (p2)

Sure Paul was a Jew; he himself said so (see Gal 1:13, 2:15). Virtually any book on Paul that one might pick up in a bookstore will tell you that Paul was Jewish. But it is usually only mentioned in passing, by way of introduction and background perhaps. In fact, Paul is overwhelmingly called Christian by people who write about him.  (p5)

Ironically, Paul is especially emphatic about his Jewish identity in Galatians, the letter often regarded as the most anti-Jewish of Paul’s writings.  (p6)

Paul’s belief in Jesus did not make him less Jewish. Belief in a messianic savior figure is a very Jewish idea.  (p8)

Paul is portrayed as a missionary preacher and teacher in Acts. But his speeches often come at dramatic moments in the narrative—including passionate defenses of himself during trial—thus making the Paul of Acts a larger-than-life character and, ultimately, a more compelling figure for biography than the Paul who can be gleaned from the pieces of information in the letters.  (p11)

[One] problem in reading the apostle’s letters is that Paul sometimes appears to contradict himself. He makes statements about Jewish law that seem to be unequivocal condemnations. At other times, he expresses unmitigated praise for it.  (p27)

How is it that Paul claimed that one cannot be justified by works of the law and yet also said—right there in Romans, the document that contains Paul’s most profound, most influential discourse on the doctrine of justification by faith—that it is the doers of the law who will be justified? Any interpretation that does not make sense of both kinds of claims does not do justice to Paul.  (p30)

Even though there were differing images of Paul in the early church, eventually one biographical portrait of Paul came to dominate the collective consciousness of Christianity: Paul the convert.  (p38)

Paul does not use the language of conversion of himself in his undisputed writings. He never even uses the language of repentance in reference to himself. Paul only uses such language to coax his Gentile followers to repentance. To be sure, Paul refers to his having persecuted the church prior to his encounter with the risen Jesus. But this appears to be the only prior behavior of which Paul feels shame. In all of his autobiographical reflections, Paul portrays himself as sinless.  (p42)

…Augustine, who may be credited more than anyone else with solidifying the image of Paul the convert in Christian tradition.  (p43)

In the twentieth century another trajectory of interpretation began to emerge. Although initially ill formed and still very much a perspective in progress, it has evolved into the great challenge to the existing paradigm—a challenge on two fronts: that Paul did not reject his Jewish identity because Judaism was a religion of works, and that justification by faith is not the gospel Paul preached, both of which undergird the argument of this book.  (p54)

As theologians and scholars began to reflect on the past from a post-holocaust perspective, some called for a critical re-evaluation of Christian anti-Judaism. At the center of this effort were a handful of Protestant biblical scholars who pioneered something that would eventually be labeled the “new perspective” on Paul.  (p59)

Since only Jews are commanded to be circumcised, Gentiles are following the will of God by not being circumcised. I would paraphrase 1 Corinthians 7:19 as follows: “When Jews are circumcised and Gentiles remain uncircumcised, both are following the will of God, so neither group can claim superiority by virtue of the practice (or nonpractice) of circumcision.”  (p62)

P. Sanders’ 1977 book, Paul and Palestinian Judaism… served to demonstrate that when Jewish literature was allowed to speak for itself, unaffected by the polemics of the New Testament and other early Christian writings, Judaism hardly appeared as the legalistic system of works-righteousness that Christian scholars had for so long assumed it to be. (p63)

In spite of the semantic variation, the best way to capture the range of meanings contained in the word “Torah” in English is to understand it as teaching or instruction, that is, God’s instruction… What may be most important for modern Christian readers to understand is that Torah constitutes the covenant between God and the people.  (p75)

Overwhelmingly, Jews did not perceive an irresolvable conflict between “grace” and “works” that would plague Christian theologians of later centuries.  (p80)

The characterization of Jewish law as the expression of virtues to which any human being could or should aspire is an idea expressed in numerous Jewish texts of the era.  (p84)

Ancient Judaism is not what one would call a religion of salvation. This is perhaps the most fundamental misconception that informs the Christian view of ancient Judaism.  P88)

As E. P. Sanders argued thirty years ago, the vast majority of Jewish sources from the time of Paul understand that participation in the covenant is salvation.  (p91)

The idea that early Judaism (or later Judaism, for that matter) promulgated the notion of salvation by works is a Christian misunderstanding. Salvation is not conceived as something earned, but something graciously granted to all who enjoy participation in the covenant.  (p94)

The image of Jewish communities dedicating themselves to maintaining impregnable ramparts and walls of steel so as to keep themselves segregated from the rest of humanity is both historically false and insidious in its stereotyping of Jews and Judaism. Therefore Paul’s interaction with Gentiles should not be seen as the radical step it is typically perceived to be.  (p115)

I suspect that it may come as a surprise when I say that the gospel writers view the Pharisees as too lenient—a surprise precisely because the Christian stereotype of the Pharisees is that they are legalistic and literalistic, following every precept of the Torah to an exacting degree.  (p120)

It is not necessary to see Paul’s Damascus road experience as the point of origin for the apostle’s more creative interpretations of Scripture. His more adaptive teachings on Torah as apostle to the Gentiles were most likely learned while he was a Pharisee.  (p131)

[Re Galatians 1:11-17 and Philippians 3:2-9]  Many anachronistic assumptions are made when reading Paul’s text… most significantly that there exists something called “Christianity” to which Paul had the option of converting. At this point in history, however, Christianity does not yet exist as a separate and distinct religion.  (p135)

If Paul is sincere—and I see no reason to think he isn’t—when he says he counts all his Jewish privileges and credentials as a loss, then they must be things people ordinarily count as valuable. If Paul considered his past life one of sin and degradation, then he would not call giving up that life a loss; on the contrary, giving up that kind of a life would count as a gain.  (p140)

There is no evidence that Paul’s Jewish identity is any less robust, or any less intact after his encounter with the risen Jesus than it was before.  (p142)

As several scholars have recently demonstrated, when Paul subsequently went around proclaiming Jesus as Lord, his message was anti-Imperial. Thus, Paul turned from persecutor to persecutee because he turned from having a complacent attitude toward the Romans to preaching a message of defiance.  (p146)

His perspective is limited by who he is, a Jew whose historical context is the Greco-Roman world, and he holds certain biases based on that identity, some of which are rather distasteful. Even his openness to Gentiles had limits. In his biases toward others, Paul is a typical Jew.  (p150)

Paul maintained a Jewish value system throughout his life. Paul’s belief in Jesus did not lead him to adopt a radically new system of values. It led him to tweak his existing one, but the essential principles of a recognizably Jewish value system are still intact.  (p154)

Readers assume that Jewish Scripture already has effectively become the “Old Testament” for Paul, divested of its authority because of the coming of Christ. Its only purpose is to point to Jesus as the Christ. Nothing could be further from the truth.  (p169)

In extremely simple terms, Paul objects to the appropriation of the Mosaic law by Gentiles, whether that appropriation is motivated by Gentiles who express a heartfelt desire to undertake Torah observance or because of some sort of coercion by other Jewish teachers. There is not a single instance in which Paul condemns circumcision or food laws or any other specifically Jewish laws as practiced by Jews (whether those Jews follow Jesus or not). Every single derisive remark about circumcision, for instance, is a condemnation of any endeavor by Gentiles to circumcise.  (p170)

The question is, if Paul did not write a systematic theology, can one identify a coherent message from reading his letters? Along with Christiaan Beker, I believe the answer is yes and that the framework that provides this coherence is Jewish Apocalyptic.  (p172)

In contrast to the traditional view, I assert that the most important theological force motivating Paul’s mission was a thoroughgoing commitment to Jewish monotheism and how to bring the nations of the world to that realization as history draws to a close. In simple terms, Paul is motivated by his faith in God, whom he believes has charged him with a prophetic mission to Gentiles. Christ is an essential part of the prophetic message, but Christ is not the primary cause from which we can explain all subsequent effects that manifest themselves in the apostle’s life and work; God is. In theological terms, Paul’s theology is fundamentally not christocentric; it is theocentric.  (p173)

Paul’s tendency to refer to God as the God who raised Jesus indicates that the phrase functioned as an explanatory epithet that was helpful in distinguishing Paul’s God—the one, true, living God—from all the other gods floating around in Greco-Roman culture.  (p189)

Every instance in which the phrase “faith in Christ” (or its variants) appears in the undisputed letters would be better translated “faithfulness of Christ.”  (p191)

The most literal translation of pistis iesou christou is “faithfulness of Jesus Christ”… Nevertheless, the phrase is consistently rendered “faith in Jesus Christ” in English translations. Why don’t English translations render the phrase as the “faithfulness of Jesus Christ”? The historical answer is that the tradition of English translation has been deeply influenced by the debates that defined the Reformation. Martin Luther’s German translation has been especially influential here.  (p192)

Paul’s experience of Jesus led him to believe he was witnessing the first manifestations of the eschaton.  (p198)

Paul emphasizes Abraham’s divinely promised role as the father of a multitude of nations, instead of the father of the Jewish people in particular.  (p201)

Through his preaching, Paul makes willing Gentiles legitimate members of Abraham’s family, which is the equivalent of making them children of God. By informing Gentiles of the blessings promised to Abraham and his seed, they become heirs of the divine promises, and Paul, as the bestower of the inheritance, has become their father. Insofar as Paul establishes this newly constituted family of God, he functions as a founding father, just like Abraham.  (p202)

The emphasis for Paul both in Galatians and Romans, is not on the way Gentiles can be like Abraham if they emulate his faith; rather, it is on their existing relatedness to him, which they are now entitled to claim because of Christ. Once they recognize their relatedness, they will in fact display similar characteristics to their father Abraham; they will renounce idolatry and become monotheists.  (p204)

The “doctrine” of justification by faith is a product of the Reformation; it is not inherent in Paul’s letters, even if Reformation theologians are indebted to Paul for the idea.  (p204)

[Re Galatians 3:6-9]  If Paul meant to say “those who believe” are the children of Abraham, surely he wouldn’t have used the obtuse phrase hoi ek pisteos when there are so many common alternatives, which he uses whenever that is what he means. Paul’s choice of words in Galatians 3:7 and 9 indicates that he is not here speaking of the personal belief of individuals but of an external source of faith from which others derive benefit. It is not the believers’ own faith to which Paul refers in this passage but most likely Abraham’s faith. Being a descendant of Abraham entitles one to certain benefits, namely, receiving the blessings God promised to Abraham and his descendants, as Paul reminds his audience in v. 8. This interpretation is corroborated by Romans 4:16, in which the expression to ek pisteos Abraam appears, which means “those descended from the faith of Abraham.”  (p206)

The theological dichotomy between works and faith was taken by Protestant Christians as so self-evidently true that it became a kind of standard of measure for assessing the spiritual value of religion in general, as well as any particular religion.  (p211)

Readers have largely presumed that Paul’s embrace of Christ necessarily involves a rejection of Torah, and so they have read his letters through this lens.  (p212)

The majority of modern readers do not even realize that Paul makes as many positive statements about the law as negative ones, because scholars and religious leaders have largely ignored them.  (p213)

It is difficult for readers to read Paul without the lenses of the Reformation, that is, without assuming that Paul is all about justification by faith and that justification by faith is the theological opposite of justification by (works of) the law. The new perspective has made progress toward seeing Paul differently, but its explanation of the problem as Jewish ethnocentrism still falls short.  (p216)

Paul’s audience is made up of Gentiles, so everything he says about law applies to Gentiles, unless specified otherwise.  (p216)

When Paul says, “It is clear that no one is justified before God by the law, for ‘the righteous one shall live by the faithfulness’” (Gal 3:11, citing Hab 2:4), he does indeed mean all people—Jews and Gentiles alike—are made righteous by faithfulness, but his point is that Jews always stood righteous before God because of God’s faithfulness to the covenant, not because Israel observed the law in perfect obedience.  (p218)

Torah is for Jews but provides a standard for all.  (p219)

For Jewish thinkers, who pondered the nature of cosmic redemption, the status of Gentiles would eventually need to be solved. Typically this vision took one of two forms: either the nations would be condemned for their bad behavior—their worship of other gods and their persecution of Israel—or they would be reconciled to God in the final ingathering of the nations, as we discussed earlier. Paul obviously subscribes to the latter vision.  (p223)

Paul understands Torah to be God’s provision for humanity to be in relationship with God. It is given to the Jews, due to their election, but because it is integral to the natural order of God’s created universe, some Gentiles were able to follow it. Torah thus was God’s answer for how humanity could be in relationship with God. It was a divine system. Since Gentiles could not follow it, God had to find an extrasystemic means of incorporating Gentiles into God’s family. That extrasystemic means was Jesus Christ.  (p224)

The law is not meant to condemn humanity; it serves a positive pedagogical function.  (p224)

The doing of good works is not the opposite of having faith.  (p233)

When Paul claims that justification cannot come from works of the law, it means that the Torah does not benefit Gentiles, at least not in the way it benefits Jews. Whereas once it surely would have been of benefit to them, that is no longer the case because the final judgment is imminent. Put in simple terms, it is too late. So that now, because Gentiles are outsiders to the Torah, it cannot provide the grace they need to stand before God, righteous, at the final judgment.  (p234)

Paul does not literally see in humanity hopeless depravity. Not everyone is the same kind of evildoer. Not everyone has fallen into such moral turpitude as to be incapable of doing anything good. Paul is exaggerating the situation in Romans 3:10–18 much as the psalmists (whom he’s quoting) did.  (p235)

[Re Romans 2:12-13]  If a person’s deeds matter, how do we account for Paul’s saying that one cannot be justified by “works of law”? The broad answer is that Paul thought about faith, works, and grace as part of an integrated theological vision for how one relates to God.  (p237)

When Luther chose to add the word “alone” to Romans 1:17, so that it read “the one who is righteous shall live by faith alone,” he imposed an opposition between works and faith into the theology of Paul that is not otherwise there.  (p238)

The Pauline notion of justification by faith does not mean that one is justified by one’s own faith in Jesus; rather, Jesus’ faithfulness puts right Gentiles and incorporates them into the family of God.  (p240)

Just as Abraham and the patriarchs’ great acts of faithfulness enabled Israel to enjoy God’s grace through the merit of the fathers, so, too, Jesus’ faithfulness means that God will look favorably upon the nations and not hold them accountable for their accumulated sin.  (p241)

The death and resurrection of Jesus has achieved the reconciliation between Gentiles and God that was envisioned by Israel’s prophets. To put it boldly, Jesus saves, but he only saves Gentiles. By that I do not mean that Paul believed that Jesus is irrelevant for Jews. Paul hoped his fellow Jews would eventually recognize the cosmic significance of Jesus as marking the beginning of the messianic age. But the significance was not that Jews needed to be saved from their sins. The efficacy of Jesus’ sacrificial death was for the forgiveness of the sins of the nations.  (p242)

Paul’s point is simply that while Jews’ possession of Torah enabled them to stay in good stead with God, this is not true of Gentiles. What the Torah does for Jews, Jesus does for Gentiles.  (p244)

Paul’s message is that God has now extended grace to Gentiles. The apostle’s pounding on about grace is not because he himself had never experienced God’s grace as a Pharisee and he found it in his experience of Jesus. Paul knew of grace firsthand as a member of Israel, and now that history was coming to its cataclysmic end, Paul wanted to extend the same grace Israel had enjoyed to Gentiles.  (p247)

For those who want an answer to the question, Does Paul really think there are two ways [Torah for Jews, Jesus for Gentiles] to salvation? my answer is yes, for those who see Paul from within the traditional paradigm; it is no for those in the new paradigm.

The starting assumption of the new paradigm is that it is not about personal salvation. Paul’s letter to the Romans is not an answer to the question, How can I be saved? Rather, it is his answer to the question, How will the world be redeemed, and how do I faithfully participate in that redemption?  (p252)

Luther, and millions of Christians since, may have seen Romans as the answer to the question, How can I be saved? But that is not Paul’s question. Paul’s question is, Now that the end of time is at hand, how will God reconcile all people, Jews and Gentiles, collectively?  (p253)

Paul does not collapse Jew and Gentile into one generic mass of humanity. All will be kin; none will be strangers, but the Gentile will not become Jew, and the Jew will not become Gentile.  (p254)

• I have done a synopsis of this book, which you can read here.