[MUST READ: Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity; reformatting and highlighting ours]
Paul was a Jew who did some very un-Jewish things.
- He converted Gentiles to the people of God–
- without imposing on them the normal requirements of the halachah for conversion.
- More, he actually strongly discouraged his converts from—
- undergoing circumcision
- or observing the Torah,
- substituting faith in Christ
- for adherence to the existing covenant and its requirements.
- It is also fairly clear that when among these Gentile converts,Where Jewish and Gentile Christians lived together, he seems, though not perhaps consistently, to have expected the Jews to give way to the Gentiles on points of observance that might have created difficulties for the unity of the new community.
- he himself lived as they did,
- without observing the specific requirements of the Torah falling only on Jews.
- (However, he apparently expected his converts to keep the ethical commandments, though on his principles the theoretical justification for this is not obvious, and was questioned at the time.)
From a Jewish point of view, all that adds up to apostasy.
These actions were undoubtedly largely responsible for the growing alienation between Gentile Christianity and the Jewish community.
PAUL’S ACTIONS
When Paul admitted Gentiles in considerable numbers to the people of God, without requiring them either to be converted according to the accepted Jewish standards, or to observe the Torah when they had become converts, these actions were altogether unacceptable for other Jews, including some other Christian Jews. They regarded them as destructive of the very basis of Judaism. They involved nothing less than a complete change in the prevailing understanding of Jewish identity and of the covenant with God on which it was based.
Existing Jews could not regard these converts as Jewish, although they appear to have supposed that Paul did. In fact, he did not encourage them to regard themselves as Jews either. But he did teach them that they belonged to the people of God, as much as or perhaps more than Jews themselves.
The importance of Paul’s action in making irregular converts of Gentiles, while acquiescing in, or actually supporting, the baptism of Jews by his colleagues in the Church, has perhaps been underestimated by more recent scholars, especially those who have concentrated on his theology, attempting to interpret it in more Jewish ways. The importance of what he did, whatever he thought, was certainly not underestimated at the time, either by Christians of Jewish origin who wished to remain Jews, or by the main body of the Jewish community.
We have no direct evidence of the latter’s opinion of Paul. He does not seem be mentioned in Jewish writings of the period.
The low opinion of Paul held by Christian Jews can be gathered from their own literature, where he sometimes appears in disguised form. In the New Testament, a letter attributed, probably wrongly, to James, the leader of the Jerusalem community, attacks a divorce between faith and action that could have been deduced from Paul’s teaching on justification through faith.
While Paul does not seem to have intended such a divorce as the writer of the letter attacks, we can see how Christian Jews, with a traditional Jewish understanding of the inseparability of faith and obedience to the commandments, might have interpreted Paul. Whoever he was, the writer of the letter certainly knew that Paul, while stressing faith, did not encourage his converts to observe the Torah.
WHO WAS A JEW?
To understand properly what Paul’s actions would have meant, we need to know how Jews think of their own identity, and therefore how converts, or proselytes, come to share that identity. In an expression famous in discussions among Jews today, we need to discover who is a Jew, and who was regarded as a Jew in Paul’s day.
A recent book by Lawrence Schiffman, Who Was a Jew?, appears to have answered these questions, setting the split between the Church and its Jewish parent in a clearer light than before. The split actually occurred, Schiffman believes, on the issue of Jewish identity, not on the beliefs of the Christian movement, unorthodox as these were.
- Jews could tolerate wide divergences of belief, so long as there was unity in observance of the obligations of the covenant.
- The Christian movement, by its abandonment of the Torah, threatened that unity at its roots.
Schiffman made a careful analysis of the texts in which the rulings of the tannaim on Jewish identity and conversion are to be bound. The tannaim are the Jewish scholars of the period between the destruction of theTemple in 70 C.E. and the codification of the Mishnah at about 200 C.E. Until then, the tradition had been handed down by word of mouth, possibly over many centuries.
Schiffman found that at least from approximately the time of the return of the Jews from exile in Babylon in the fifth century B.C.E.,—-
- it had been universally understood that Jewish identity was primarily hereditary.
- Being a Jew was the same as belonging to the people of Israel.
- Already at that time, the main requirement was to be born of a Jewish mother.
- Although status within the Jewish people, as priest, Levite or Israelite, was inherited from the father, Jewish identity itself was derived from the mother.
- If a male, the child of a Jewish mother was circumcised on the eight day, sealing his existing share in the covenant of Abraham.
- From that time on, he was obligated, along with the whole community, to observe the commandments of the Torah.
- The people had assumed these obligations when they entered into the covenant with God at Mount Sinai.
- The duty of observing the commandments fell on the people corporately and also on every individual according to his status and position.
- Women had different obligations from men, and priests from Levites and Israelites, or laity.
Jewish identity, once gained in this way, could not be lost. Neither heresy nor apostasy could cut the tie with Judaism, once established by birth and circumcision.
- Heresy was understood to mean beliefs not in accord with the prevailing understanding,
- while apostasy referred to a non-Jewish way of life, deliberate actions not in accord with the Torah.
Actions, however, were much more important than beliefs in determining a person’s status in the community.
BECOMING A JEW
How then did one become a Jew, if not born of a Jewish mother?
Jews in this period were not only willing to make converts but actively sought to do so. A reference to proselytism in the Gospels, whether or not it is an authentic saying of Jesus, clearly establishes the prevalence of Jewish missionary activity at this period, confirming what is known from elsewhere.
To become a Jew meant nothing less than—
- changing one’s hereditary
- and acquiring a new hereditary identity that would be passed on to one’s children.
- At the same time, it involved—
- sharing in both the benefits and the obligations of the covenant
- that God had established with the Jewish people at Mount Sinai.
- Further, it involved —
- sharing in the historical destiny of the Jewish people.
As a result of Roman persecution, beginning not long after Paul’s time, the decision to do so became a burden for the convert, as well as for the born Jew, not to be lightly undertaken.
To acquire this new hereditary, therefore, a prospective convert, if a male, had to meet four requirements:
(1) to accept the obligations of the Torah in full,
(2) to be circumcised,
(3) to be immersed in the ritual bath, the mikvah, and
(4) to bring a sacrifice to the Temple. (In the case of a female, circumcision was naturally omitted, and immersion became of central importance.)
After the destruction of the Temple, the requirement of sacrifice was discounted, since it could no longer be fulfilled. However, in Paul’s time it was still in force. No doubt converts from the Diaspora would eventually journey to Jerusalem to fulfill their obligation.
PAUL’S CONVERSION
Paul imposed none of these four requirements on his converts, unless we count baptism as fulfilling the requirement of immersion. In fact, it seems to have had a different meaning from Jewish immersion, though the rite itself was similar.
- He did not require acceptance of the Torah,
- he did not require circumcision,
- and he said nothing about sacrifice.
- Not only did he not require these steps, he forbade them, as the discussion of the matter in his letter to the Galatians shows.
What did he do?
- He had his converts immersed, or baptized,
- in the name of Jesus Christ,
- simply on profession of faith.
- Instead of accepting the obligations of the Torah,He did not and must not take on the obligation of fulfilling the commandments of the Torah in detail.
- the Gentile convert had to believe on the name of Jesus.
- For Paul, “love is the fulfilling of the law.”
Paul’s detailed ethical teaching does turn out to be closer to traditional Judaism than this theory might suggest. However, it would certainly not have been regarded by Jewish teachers as remotely fulfilling the requirement on a convert to accept the Torah as a whole and to share with the Jewish people in its obligations and benefits.
WHAT DID PAUL INTEND?
Did Paul himself think he was converting his Gentile followers to what today we call Judaism?
In our modern sense of the word, the term is out of place in Paul’s period. Where we do find it, in Paul himself and other ancient writers, it does not mean the Jewish faith; it means Jewish practices. He clearly did not intend to convert Gentiles to Judaism, in that sense of the word. He discouraged them strongly from adopting Jewish practices.
On the other hand, it does seem clear that he intended to bring them into the people of God, the people which had so far been defined by its acceptance of the Torah as its own side of a covenant with God. He must therefore have believed that the requirements for entry into the people of God had changed in some radical way as a result of what God had done in Jesus the Messiah.
Paul may have believed that though Jesus’ resurrection God had opened the covenant to the Gentiles on new and special terms. Now, for them at least, faith in the risen Christ had become decisive for admission into the people of God, replacing adherence to the community and acceptance of the Torah.
Paul himself could not have supposed that he was making converts to Judaism when he baptized the Gentiles who came to faith in Jesus Christ. He undoubtedly knew quite well what the halachah for conversion was. If he did not follow it, it was not by accident or by mistake, but because he meant to do something else. Nevertheless, Jewish authorities at the time seem to have assumed that it was his intention to make conversions to the Jewish people.
For them, this would have been the natural interpretation of his actions. Christianity was not yet regarded as a new religion, with different membership rules from Judaism. Later, they would have accepted that Christian baptism had nothing to do with conversion to Judaism. At the time, they correctly saw that Paul meant to incorporate his converts into the people of God and drew the conclusion that he had done so improperly. They naturally did not share Paul’s messianic faith in the arrival of the new age, and the new form of the people of God.
They could only suppose that Paul was purporting to bring his converts into the existing covenant people. If so, his converts were irregular and had not become Jews, and Paul was seriously at fault in what he was doing. He was deceiving himself and his converts alike, and in fact creating a schismatic community. In the latter respect at least, they were correct in their judgment. After the excitement of messianic expectation died down and Jesus did not return, Gentile Christianity did rapidly become a new religion, quite distinct from its Jewish origins.
Paul seems to have thought he was making converts to a new form of the same people of God, growing out of the old in fulfillment of prophecy. Membership in this renewed people was open to Jews and Gentiles on the same terms, faith and baptism. Paul himself did not intend or expect to found a new religion. He never expected history to last long enough for that to happen. In his own mind, he was doubtless initiating his converts into the people of the age to come, beyond history, but now, as it were, overlapping with history.
As a result of these actions, as Paul himself tells us, he was five times compelled to submit to the punishment of the makkot, the thirty-nine lashes. He himself calls what happened to him persecution, not punishment, and associates it with Jewish rejection of his activity as a missionary to the Gentiles. In fact, the Jewish community must have punished him for making converts without imposing the proper requirements on them. Since in their view Paul’s Gentile converts were converts improperly made, they had not been converted at all and remained Gentiles. The Jewish authorities would have had no objection at all to conversions performed according to the halachah, even if such converts were taught to believe that Jesus was the Messiah.
Paul could have avoided the punishment by totally separating himself from the Jewish community. His acceptance of the sentence of the courts shows that he must have maintained his membership in the synagogue. He must have accepted the authority of Jewish judges, even though the strongly disagreed with them, and was not prepared to obey their rulings. The fact that he referred to these floggings as “persecution” is not likely to have increased regard for the Jewish leaders among his Gentile readers.
Beyond question, however unorthodox his actions, Paul continued to think of himself as a Jew. He may have become an apostate for the sake of his mission to the Gentiles, but an apostate was still a Jew. Paul thus invoked in a new context the analogy of Christ’s shameful death, by actions of his own that were shameful in the eyes of other Jews.
PAUL’S SELF-REVERSAL
It seems quite possible that Paul was now being “persecuted” for the very same practice for which he had himself earlier persecuted the Church, before he joined himself to the new movement. Perhaps, as Lloyd Gaston suggests, this is what he meant when he said in the letter to the Galatians that he was now building up what formerly he pulled down. This makes his actions more, not less, remarkable. It shows that he fully understood the implications of what he was doing.
If so, why this 180 degree self-reversal? It certainly arouse from the event in which he believed himself called to be the Apostle to the Gentiles. Since he is reticent about its nature, we cannot tell if the event was a vision, a mystical experience, or something that happened while he was studying the Scriptures, as Gaston thinks possible. (The famous account in Acts in which Paul “sees the light” is much later and conflicts in several respects with the little Paul says himself.) Paul ranks it with the resurrection appearances received by the other apostles before he himself joined the Church. It seems to have convinced him that Jesus was indeed the Messiah, presumably because he did experience him as risen from the dead.
The same experience of the risen Christ had convinced him that it was his own calling to preach the Messiah Jesus among the Gentiles. In the final days of history, the Gentiles, according to prophecy, were to be brought in and would worship one God in Jerusalem, along with the people of Israel. As we saw earlier, it would be Paul’s personal task to bring them in, and so prepare the way for the return of Jesus.
But why should this entail the abandonment of the normal requirements of conversion? As we saw, Maccoby argues that it was at this point that the Christians myth sprang more or less fully formed into Paul’s conscious mind. The myth does view salvation differently from the way Jews had always done. If so, conversions to the Jewish people and joining in its covenant with God might not, in Paul’s eyes, have been the way for the Gentiles to find salvation. He no doubt saw their lot, and if more traditional interpreters are correct, the lot of the whole human race, Jewish as well as Gentile, as hopeless apart from faith in the work of Christ.
Nevertheless, abandoning the requirements of conversion was (I believe) the very practice that had previously aroused his passionate indignation, because it was so destructive of Jewish identity. Even if Paul supposed that he was introducing the Gentiles into a new stage in the history of the people of God, why not do as the Jewish Christians did, and make proper proselytes of the Gentiles, so that they could enter the new age along with the covenant people?