Paul Within Judaism Within Paganism

Abstract

Judaism was not Paul’s background, but his context, and much of his gospel’s content. Modern Pauline Studies, however, often see Paul’s mission as an expression of what he found wrong with Judaism, a Judaism that supposedly discouraged relations with Gentiles. This essay investigates all the various ways that Jews and Gentiles comfortably cohabited the Graeco-Roman Diaspora. What spurred Paul’s mission was not a critique of an ethnically exclusive Judaism, but his conviction that, in Christ, the end times had arrived. Accordingly, he taught that Gentiles should repudiate their own gods and commit exclusively to the worship of Israel’s god. Paul’s contest was not with Jewish law. It was with pagan gods. Both his mission and his message place him firmly within the pluriform Judaism of his time, a Judaism that took its place within the god-congested world of first-century Mediterranean paganism.

“The modern critical study of Paul has often taken for granted what Luther took for granted: that the interpretation of Paul consists in explaining where, how and why Paul departs from Judaism.” Matthew V. Novenson, Paul: Then and Now.

(Novenson 2022)

“My own suspicion is that what Paul finds wrong with Judaism was first … its anti-Gentile ethos, which was inhibiting the revelation of the Messiah to the world.” Michael Bird, Paul within Judaism.

(Bird 2023)

Paul declares himself to be a Hebrew (Phil 3:5), an Israelite (Phil 3:5; Rom 9:4 and 11:1), a Benjaminite (Rom 11:1), a Jew by nature (physei; Gal 2:15), a Pharisee by interpretive commitment (Phil 3:5; cf. Gal 1:14), and a flawless observer of Jewish law (Phil 3:6). He boasts of his own eighth-day circumcision (Phil 3:5), and teaches that circumcision is of “much value” (Rom 3:1). He praises the giving of the law, the covenants, and the temple cult (Rom 9:4). He proclaims that Jewish law is “holy, just, and good” (Rom 7:12), upheld and in this sense validated by the gospel message (Rom 3:31). “It is not the hearers of the law, but the doers of the law” who will be made righteous (Rom 2:13). The law itself leads to Christ (Rom 10:4).

Further, Paul urges on his non-Jewish auditors a Jewishly conceived end of history—the resurrection of the dead and the establishment of the kingdom of Israel’s god—about to be realized at the victorious advent of the god of Israel’s son, the Davidic messiah (1 Cor 15:20–28; Rom 1:3; 15:12). He exhorts his Gentile hearers to fulfill Jewish law (1 Cor 7:19; Gal 5:14; cf. Rom 13:8–10). He insists that they live according to idealized standards of Jewish behavior: chaste marriages, support for the poor, settling disputes within the assembly (e.g., 1 Cor 6:1–8). He bases his teachings on the sacred scriptures of Israel. And he asks for contributions to take back to Jerusalem (1 Cor 16:1–3; Rom 15:25–27).

“Judaism” was not Paul’s “background” or his “heritage”. It was his context and much of his evangelion’s content. Interpreting Paul “within Judaism” should be the easiest and most obvious thing in the world. Why isn’t it?

Part of the problem, as our epigram from Matthew Novenson states, goes back to the birth of modern New Testament studies in the sixteenth-century battles of the Reformation. Defying Rome, Reformers saw themselves as resisting the “Jews” and “Pharisees” of their own day, the original enemies of Jesus and of Paul. Just as Paul repudiated the “works of the law” in favor of “the grace of the gospel”, so Luther repudiated his Catholic contemporaries. What was wrong with sixteenth-century Catholicism—and, for that matter, with sixteenth-century Judaism—coincided with what was wrong with first-century Judaism: its legalism, the conviction that salvation could be earned. This was the Judaism that Paul, in Luther’s view, had condemned with conviction.

From there, these ways of reading Paul’s letters, and of reconstructing his social context, traveled into academic traditions of modern New Testament scholarship.1 Paul’s primary battle was not with pagans, in this view, but with fellow Jews. Paul’s mission was directed, even propelled, by what Paul rejected in his native traditions. Something was wrong with Judaism, and Paul set out to fix it. What resulted (whether Paul knew it or not) was a new, post-Jewish religion. Since Paul had principled objections to core aspects of contemporary Jewish practice, so goes this argument, then even if he continued to think of himself as a Jew, the modern scholar knows better. Paul may have remained ethnically Jewish, but religiously he was something else—that is, a Christian. Paul’s theology placed him outside of Judaism, even if he himself did not realize it.2

What was the problem with first-century Judaism? Legalism, answered generations of New Testament scholars. Exposed by E.P. Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism for the scholarly mirage that it was, however, legalism after 1977 lost its explanatory value. Scholars then needed to find something else that was wrong with Judaism. The New Perspective on Paul provided the answer: ethnic pride. Jewish ethnic particularism, as opposed to Christian inclusive universalism.3 Circumcision, Sabbath, purity laws, foodways: all these practices functioned to separate Jews from Gentiles. This separation was expressed and reinforced by Judaism’s generalized “anti-Gentile ethos”—an ethos, according to Michael Bird (our second epigram), that the post-Damascus Paul particularly repudiated as wrong.

Did such a general anti-Gentile Jewish ethos actually exist?

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Ethno-religious practices—customs specific to a particular people—were ubiquitous in Mediterranean culture. The concept cluster of shared gods, land, language, kinship, and ancestral custom defined all ancient people groups. Jews had their nomoi and patria ethē and paradoseis tōn paterōn; other cultures/ethnicities had theirs. Patriotism for one’s own group and gods was normal (“Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” Acts 19:28): one’s own gods, language, homeland and customs were always the best. Declarations of heis theos en ouranoîs (“one god in heaven”) or of heis kai monos theos (“one and only god”) were assertions, not of “monotheism”, but of the superiority of one’s own god relative to the gods of others (cf. Exodus 15:11).4

Jewish ancestral custom, in brief, functioned exactly the way that Egyptian ancestral custom or Athenian ancestral custom functioned: to express the identity of the group. Patrioi nomoi implied no necessary hostility toward other groups, and outsiders’ adoption of cross-ethnic behaviors suggests the opposite.5 Ancestral practice expressed what was specific and ancient (thus, prestigious) about one’s own customs. This is not to say that a cheery ecumenism always prevailed.6 Invidious comparison—a specialization of elite classical ethnographers—sharpened claims for the superiority of one’s own group. Stereotypical accusations of dishonesty, effeminacy, or sexual profligacy were leveled against ethnic others. In the contest over whose traditions were best, these calumnies functioned as contrast to confirm one’s own identity.7

Ridiculing each other’s gods likewise expressed this competitiveness, to the point where God in Greek Exodus warned against it (Ex 22:28 LXX; reviling each other’s gods, cautioned Philo, always leads to war, QE 2.5).8 High rhetoric condemning pagan worship indeed sounds loudly in scriptural sources. But other biblical traditions taught otherwise. In Deuteronomy, recounting God’s dividing up the nations after the flood, Moses relates that God appointed subordinate divinities (his “sons”) to be the gods of the nations (Deut 32.8).9 Pagans may worship celestial beings, though Jews may not (Deut 4.19).10 The gods of the nations are seen as lower and lesser to Israel’s god, though gods they (still) are (cf. Ps 95:5 LXX, daimonia; 1 Cor 8.6, on many gods and lords). That non-Jews worshiped non-Jewish gods was, in this perspective, entirely normal. Pagans were, after all, the vast majority of humankind.

Gods might be ranked variously, but in antiquity all gods were assumed to exist. How did Jews deal with these other gods? They funded pagan liturgies; they obeyed the commands of gods who manifested in dreams; they invoked pagan gods as witnesses to manumissions performed in Jewish assemblies. They joined professional associations that might involve a god as its patron. Herod the Great not only sponsored pagan spectacles; he also built temples to the god Augustus. The complaints of the ethnographers about Jewish asebeia and amixia notwithstanding, (many? most?) Jews were hardly uninvolved, in positive ways, with pagan gods.11

What about Jewish views on non-Jewish Graeco-Roman culture more generally? Hellenistic Jewish writers, far from eschewing pagan culture, actually claimed that its sources were Jewish. Artapanus, who lived sometime in the later Ptolemaic period, held that Abraham had introduced astrology to Egypt, and that Moses established the Egyptian animal cults. According to another Hellenistic Jewish writer, Aristobulus, Moses was the font of Greek philosophy and culture. Some Hellenistic Jews manufactured spurious Greek poems, attributed to Greek literary figures, so that “pagans”—Jews under false colors—praised Jewish traditions.12 Other Hellenistic Jews concocted a story about one of Abraham’s granddaughters having relations with Heracles, the Spartans’ divine ancestor. They thus forged (at least literarily) a kinship relation between Sparta and Jerusalem.13

The existence of this rich literary evidence attests to a social fact: Jews could and did receive good gymnasium educations. That means that they dealt both with pagans and with their gods at close quarters. As ephebes, young Jewish males would have exercised in the nude with their non-Jewish fellows in institutions overseen by Hermes and Heracles.14 Jewish athletes would also have competed (again, in the nude) in games dedicated to specific deities. As members of city councils, Jews would have been at least present at cult acts offered to the presiding gods.15

The theater—another activity dedicated to Gentile gods—provided a venue for Jewish actors and audiences.16 Jewish gladiators fought in pagan spectacles, Jewish soldiers in foreign armies. Jews sponsored athletic competitions dedicated to pagan gods. Jews (even, eventually, rabbis) availed themselves of Roman baths—again, more public nudity (often in mixed company!) in the presence of pagan images. In short, in the cities of the Diaspora, Jews mixed and mingled, sometimes quite intimately, with pagans both human and divine.17

Some of this mixing also occurred in Jewish spaces. In cities throughout the Diaspora, Jewish communities (“synagogues” or “prayer houses” or “assemblies”) were open to outsiders. These pagan sympathizers and synagogue patrons were sometimes labeled “pious ones”, that is, “God-fearers”.18 The centurion Cornelius of Acts 10, fictive or not, provides a ready example: though a Roman army officer, he “fears God” (Acts 10.22; cf. Luke’s centurion, 7:5). Juvenal excoriates the metuens Sabbata, the “Sabbath-fearing” pagan whose sons themselves receive circumcision and thus “become” Jews (Satires 14.96–105).

Inscriptions support the literary data. Julia Severa, a Roman contemporary of Paul’s and a priestess in the imperial cult, built the Jewish community’s “house” in Acmonia in Asia Minor. Jews and God-fearers sat together in the theater of Miletus. In a city under the protection of Aphrodite, a fourth/fifth-century Jewish inscription gave the names of fifty-four God-fearers among those of native Jews and of proselytoi (our “converts”). Later Christian authors like Commodian complain of pagan “half-Jews” who rush between the traditional altar and the synagogue. (Christian Gentiles frequent synagogues too, much to the disapproval of ecclesiastical writers.) And until the outbreak of the first rebellion against Rome (66 CE), Jerusalem welcomed pagans into the largest courtyard of the temple complex.19

This Mediterranean mixing, attested in such a broad range of literary, epigraphical, and papyrological data, can come as a surprise in light of the warnings against contact with pagans that appear in such Jewish writings as Jubilees, or 1 and 2 Maccabees, or in various Jewish “novellas” (Aristeas, Aseneth, or Judith, for example). These ideologically charged texts acclaim the purity of Jewish customs, while themselves revealing much inner-Jewish variety. Such claims for the purity of one’s own customs characterize Graeco-Roman ethnographic writings more generally.20 Actual social practice rarely conforms to pristine ideology.

Negative comments about pagan religious practices do indeed stand in Jewish traditions. Paul’s invective in Romans 1:18–32 is a parade example of such. This invective characterizes especially those writings that predict the establishment of God’s kingdom. Apocalyptic prophecies emphasize the difference between “us” (those who know the right god, and the proper worship of that god) and “them” (those—the human majority—who will not attain such knowledge until God’s self-revelation at the end of days).21 But the tone and tenor of these prophecies are belied by the daily—and comfortable—accommodations that Jews, especially in the Diaspora, made to and within their pagan Umwelt.

Some New Testament scholars, nonetheless, will explain Paul’s mission to pagans as compensating for or rebelling against a generalized Jewish anti-Gentile ethos. His outreach then supposedly places him “outside”, not within, a Judaism hobbled by ethnic pride. But the evidence just reviewed points to a social fact: there was no such ethos. Jews, in general, were not avoiding contact with non-Jews in general—something that would hardly be possible in a diasporan city in any case. Quite the contrary: Jews worked out ways to live with their pagan neighbors while expressing their own Jewish identities as well. If we want to set Paul within contemporary Judaism, then, we must first set that Judaism within its wider cultural and social matrix, Mediterranean paganism.22

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The argument that Paul combats a supposed anti-Gentile ethos bolstered by Jewish law not only misdescribes Roman-period Jewishness. It also misidentifies Paul’s motivation for going to Gentiles in the first place. Paul’s conviction that he worked in the closing hours of history is what propelled his outreach to pagans. Gentile inclusion in God’s kingdom was a trope in Jewish eschatological traditions. Gentiles would be included as gentiles (hence Paul’s opposition to proselyte circumcision). Their inclusion, however, depended upon their leaving their old gods behind. God’s eschatological sovereignty would entail his universal worship. Apocalyptic eschatology—never a majority mentality—problematized the normal paganism of the quotidian.23

Paul goes to Gentiles not because he takes a stand against some ethnically over-determined Judaism, but because of his encounter with the risen Christ. On the merit of that moment, he was convinced that he lived and worked in history’s closing hours: God’s kingdom was to be established in his lifetime and in the lifetime of his auditors (1 Cor 10:11; 15 passim; cf. 1 Thes 4:13–17). This conviction set him, and his messiah, against the gods of the nations. Pagans would be retrieved for the Kingdom by becoming eschatological Gentiles, Gentiles who rejected their own gods, and who focused their worship solely on Israel’s god—just as Isaiah had predicted long ago.24

What then do pagan gods have to do with the Jewish Paul? Much in every way. They had formerly enslaved his ex-pagan auditors (Gal 4:3,8). They partner with his Christ-following Gentiles who sacrifice to them (1 Cor 10:20). They frustrate his mission (2 Cor 4:4). They resist his message. Errant angels unite with hostile cosmic forces (Rom 8:38–39). They figure prominently in Paul’s projected end-time theomachy, when they will be defeated, destroyed, or subjected to Christ when he manifests in triumph (1 Cor 15:24–25; Phil 2:10). Pagan gods, in brief, provide the combatants necessary to Christ’s return as the conquering Davidic messiah (Rom 1:3; 15:12).

Paul doubts neither the existence nor the social agency of pagan gods. The difference between him and his pagan auditors—whom he seeks to make into ex-pagan Christ-followers—is not a difference between “monotheism” and “polytheism”. It is a difference between his god and their gods. In their cosmic competition, Paul vigorously asserted, his god through his son the messiah would prevail. Paul’s contest is not with Jewish law. It is with pagan gods.

Setting Paul within contemporary paganism clarifies both the reasons for and the message of his mission. It also reconfigures his place within Judaism, a Judaism imagined not as a body of rigid trans-local doctrinal abstractions (“monotheism”; “aniconism”; “purity”) but as a pluriform and interpretable set of practices—as Paul himself exhibits (1 Cor 9:19–22).25

Different Jews enacted Jewishness differently. Variety of practice (then as now) was not the exception but the rule. We see this throughout the Diaspora, with its Jewish actors and athletes, its ephebes and town councilors. We see this in Jerusalem, with its mix of Sadducees, Pharisees (of different persuasions), priests, and those affiliated with no party. We see this in the city of Alexandria, where the Therapeutae did things their way, Philo his way, Tiberius Julius Alexander his way, Alexandria’s radical allegorizers theirs. The allegorizers dropped eighth-day circumcision and some form of Sabbath observance precisely because of the way that they construed their law-observance: they were, in their own view, being true to the higher meanings of the law. Philo concurred with their hermeneutics, but not with their behavior. And he never accused them of being “outside” of Judaism. To the contrary: he criticized them precisely because he (as they themselves) saw them as still “within Judaism” (de migr. Abr. 89–93).

True for these radical allegorizers; true too for the apostle Paul. He would not have “persecuted” the ekklēsia of God if he had considered its Jewish members to be “outside” of Judaism. And he himself would not have been subject to disciplinary lashing had his activities placed him “outside” of Judaism (2 Cor 11:24): “punishment implies inclusion”.26 To the contrary: both in the view of these synagogue authorities and in Paul’s view of himself, he belonged “inside”.

What does it mean, then, to interpret Paul “within Judaism”? De minimis, it means challenging the old consensus that his gospel undermined the Jewish observance of Jewish law. And it means imagining Paul himself as continuing to live according to Jewish law. But what indeed does that mean? It means acknowledging that different Jews enacted their Jewishness differently. It means seeing Paul’s own behavioral flexibility in his outreach to pagans not as a breach with or a rejection of his own traditions, but as an expression of the energetic diversity of observance that characterized this period. Accommodation was not eo ipso transgression. It was a register of the flexibility that characterized late Second Temple Jewish behaviors more generally, especially in the Diaspora.27

Reconstructing Paul’s message by asking what he found “wrong with Judaism” may have made rhetorical sense in the context of sixteenth-century intra-Christian polemics. It makes no historical sense in the context of the twenty-first century academy. Paul did not object to Jewish law itself, or he would not have exhorted his Gentile assemblies to “fulfill” it (1 Cor 7:19; Gal 5:14; Rom 13:8–10),28 nor would he have praised it as one of Israel’s God-given privileges (nomothesia, Rom 9:4), nor would he have held that it leads to Christ (the law’s telos, Rom 10:4). And Paul did not object to Judaism’s anti-Gentile ethos, because Judaism harbored no such general anti-Gentile ethos: Jews were well settled in and integrated into their Graeco-Roman environment. Non-Jews were welcomed within Jewish assemblies, and in the temple precincts themselves. We do better, then, to interpret Paul not against Judaism, but within it—a pluriform Judaism that took its place within the god-congested world of first-century Mediterranean paganism.