Reading the Signs of Jewish Time: The Eschatological Elusiveness of the Apostle Paul

Tim O’Leary on Matthew Novenson's Paul and Judaism: At the End of History

Paul Preaching at Athens, Raphael (16th century)

Paul not only lifted the Christian religion out of the narrowness of Judaism, but tore it loose from Judaism itself, and gave the Christian community for the first time the consciousness of being a new religion.

So wrote the famous German-Lutheran New Testament scholar William Wrede in his short work on Paul from the year 1904, Paulus. As Matthew Novenson argues in Christ Among the Messiahs: Christ Language in Paul and Messiah Language in Ancient Judaism (2012), Wrede and other German Liberal Protestant scholars of the New Testament largely set the tone and laid the foundations of modern biblical studies. And ever since Wrede (and also before him), scholars of Paul have set up the dichotomy of Paul and Judaism, almost always to demonstrate how Paul valiantly tore himself and his religious movement free from the “narrowness,”—or the legalism, works-righteousness, ethnocentrism, irrationalism, general benightedness—of his native religion, Judaism.

As a graduate student studying the Pauline epistles, I found this traditional scholarly interpretation of Paul difficult to square with what Paul himself writes, for example, in Romans 9:3-5. Here Paul refers to himself, and his own flesh and blood, as “Israelite,” and gives a litany of good things that “belong” to the Israelites: the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, the promises, the patriarchs, and from them comes the Christ. It seemed rather obvious to me that Paul thought all these things were good, and more than that, perhaps they were gifts given by God to Israel, and through Israel, to the world. And thus, Paul thought that a) he was still an Israelite and b) that was a good thing. But Pauline scholars through the centuries have insisted that Paul must have believed there was something wrong with Judaism. Surely the great founder, or “second founder” of Christianity, as Wrede dubbed Paul, saw something or many things wrong with his own native religion Judaism. Why else would he, along with his risen Lord Jesus, have created the new religion of Christianity?

If we want to make progress towards perceiving Paul with historical accuracy, Mathew Novenson argues in Paul and Judaism: At the End of History, then we must try to identify the source of all this confusion. Why has Paul been so systematically misunderstood in his relationship to “Judaism” and especially to the Law or Torah? The key lies in Paul’s eschatology, or put more simply, his belief about what time it is. Perhaps the scholar to see this most clearly in the past was Albert Schweitzer in his The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle (1931). Novenson provides deep historical context, based on his expertise in messianism in ancient Judaism, to explore what Paul’s belief that the end of the ages had come really meant.

The promised resurrection of the dead and messianic age had begun. This meant a fundamental rearrangement of the relationship between Jews and gentiles, where gentiles as gentiles would be welcomed into the righteousness of Israel without becoming Israel. In Novenson’s words:

“In the dawning new creation, Jews are perfected in righteousness and made to live forever, like the angels, in fulfillment of God’s long-ago promises to the patriarchs; meanwhile, gentiles are transformed from their natural state of debauchery into the same pneumatic existence promised to the Jews.”

It is this eschatological, messianic view about what time it is that determines Paul’s understanding of everything he considers important: Jews, gentiles, Israel, Torah, righteousness, and of particular importance, the transformation from mortality into immortality, because of the Messiah Jesus.

Novenson addresses the traditional way of thinking about Paul and Judaism. He systematically works through those famous verses in Paul that make up the foundation of Paul’s apparent opposition to Judaism. First up is the word itself: Ioudaismos. It looks like our word Judaism, but according to Novenson, it is not. The word occurs twice in the entire New Testament, and that is in the same sentence. That sentence is Galatians 1:13-14, where Paul is describing his “former occupation in ιοὐδαισμός” when he was prosecuting “the assembly of God aggressively…and excelling in ιοὐδαισμόςbeyond my peers among my people…” (Novenson’s translation).

The RSV, NRSV, NASB, NIV, KJV and Luther’s Bible all translate this term as something akin to “Judaism”—i.e. the religion of Jews. Because of Paul’s passionate disapproval in Galatians appears directed at those who are “judaizing” (presumably by getting themselves circumcised), Galatians itself has often been read as a “manifesto" against Judaism. Building on the work of Steve Mason in his much-cited article “Jews, Judaeans, and Judaizing: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History,” Novenson argues that ιοὐδαισμός refers not at all to the laws, customs, ancestral traditions etc. of the Jewish or Judaean people (ethnos) but to a political and sectarian minority movement of Jews advocating forcefully for the preservation of their ancestral customs in the face of a perceived threat to them.

The evidence for this understanding of the term lies in the literary accounts of the Maccabean revolt, especially 2 Maccabees. In all its occurrences in 2 Maccabees, ιοὐδαισμός is a neologism that refers to the “defense under duress of Jewish ancestral traditions by a certain subset of Jews”. As such, it is a post-Antiochene persecution linguistic development which only makes sense in light of some perceived threat to Jewish custom and practice rather than all the things Jews normally do in normal times. And it refers strictly to a small subset of Jews who affiliate with a political party that defends this ancestral tradition, even if it means “harassing” other Jews who they think are endangering these traditions. Paul, Novenson suggests, was part of such a Jewish group, and this was the source of his initial opposition to the “assembly of God.” He certainly had a transformative encounter with the risen Christ which changed his life (and perhaps his political affiliations), but there’s nothing called Judaism which he formerly participated in but abandons after his Christ encounter.

Novenson then addresses “justification from works of the law,” an idea Paul references in Galatians 2:16 and Romans 3:20, 28 especially. What does this phrase mean and was it actually a common idea among Jews of Paul’s time, that one could be “justified” through works of the law? Mountains of theological energy have been devoted by Christians like Wrede to prove Paul is attacking the apparently Jewish idea that we can be justified by works of the law. But, alas, there is exactly zero textual evidence in any ancient Jewish source for this apparently very Jewish idea. The concept is nowhere to be found in the Bible (for example in the particular cluster of phrases dikaiosune, erga, nomos in the LXX). It’s not in Philo or Josephus. Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakai doesn’t use it; nor do Rabbi Akiba or Judah the Patriarch. It’s not in the Mishnah, the Tosefta, Talmud Yerushalmi, Talmud Bavli or any classical midrashim or targumim.

Matthew Novenson, Paul and Judaism: At the End of History. Cambridge University Press, 2024. pp 306. $39.99

So where do we actually find this phrase? In the letters of Paul. The phrase is a polemical invention of Paul to designate those gentile believers in Christ who encourage other gentiles to voluntarily observe certain acts of Torah, especially male adult circumcision, which Paul likely viewed as a violation of Torah because it did not take place on the eighth day after birth, the only permissible kind of circumcision (Genesis 17:10-12). It was a derogatory term Paul invented to refer to his gentile Christ-believing opponents who were misunderstanding, in Paul’s view, the eschatological positioning of gentiles viz-a-viz Christ and Israel.

In his final two chapters, Novenson sketches out Paul’s understanding of the messianic event. Paul believed the time had come when both Israel and the gentiles were being transformed by God’s Son from the state of mortality and sinfulness into the state of immortality, possessing glorious bodies capable of perfect liberty and justice, and the ability to effortlessly and completely follow every “iota” of Torah. Paul’s wrestling with Torah is entirely shaped by his belief that humans in Christ are no longer sinful and mortal but immortal and fully righteous. He believed, as did other Jews of his time and later, that the Torah could change and adapt in the messianic age. Certain laws governing the mortal condition of human beings might appear different in the age of immortality. A key idea here is that Jesus himself is the Last Man, i.e. the last mere mortal human, to live in the pre-messianic age and to be guided by that age’s relationship to Torah. Everyone after Jesus is immortal and therefore the question of certain Torah regulations becomes apparent (i.e. those related to death, procreation, and other “mortal” realities). Jesus is the end of the law because he is the last mortal human to live under its guidance. All human beings after him must live as immortals under the guidance of Torah. And Paul’s many arguments and discussions have to do with precisely this state of affairs. Paul’s attitude towards, or his wrestling with, the messianic transformation of Torah is therefore thoroughly Jewish and thoroughly eschatological.

Novenson leaves us with the tantalizing question of how we square Paul’s view of the immortal messianic era with what we know all too well about our world: we sin, we suffer tremendous pain and we die. Where is the immortal, glorious and sinless life which Paul promised his students?

Perhaps it is this apparent contradiction that has lead to most (but not all) Christian interpreters through the centuries to come up with some other way to interpret Paul by ignoring the historical facts about his identity. As Brent Nongbri points out, if we took any ancient Jewish writer and compared their texts with all other Jewish texts of the time, we would surely find some differences or unique ideas in that one writer. But it would not be correct to say that writer is not Jewish. This view of Paul has tragically and shamefully lead to the most gruesome hatred, violence and persecution of Jews, and to the fact that antisemitism is a foundational feature of Christianity. “Judaism” has been a convenient scapegoat for the hermeneutical and spiritual struggles Christian theologians have with Paul’s eschatological, apocalyptic Jewish beliefs about immortality and the end of time.

As Novenson’s careful work shows, achieving an accurate sense of Paul’s writings is a difficult task. It is tragically far simpler to create a convenient enemy rather than face the complexity of history, in which Paul, like Jesus, is a Jewish teacher, thoroughly embedded in his broader Jewish context. Christianity and Judaism, as separate religions, are not to be found in this context.

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Tim O'Leary is the is the Rector of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. He received a BA in History from Princeton University and an MDiv from Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. He has been working at the intersection of Jewish Christian relations for several years, and he is actively shaping a new dialogue in his parish community around the history of Christianity and Judaism. Partnering with Marginalia as the Director of Dialogue and Development at Marginalia's Center for Jewish Christian Understanding is an expansion of this urgent work.