©         Richard L. Rubenstein

 

 

THE APOSTLE AND THE SEED OF ABRAHAM

 

by

 

Richard L. Rubenstein

 

From,  My Brother Paul, (New York: Harper and Row, 1972); paperback, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1975

 

 

a. Apostle of the Messiah or Turncoat?

 

In the twentieth century Jewish students of the New Testament such as Martin Buber, Leo Baeck, and Hans Joachim Schoeps have sought to revise the negative evaluation that characterized the age-­old Jewish attitude toward Jesus of Nazareth.  These scholars have tended to regard Jesus as a representative of the prophetic tradition.  Buber even referred to Jesus as a brother.  Nevertheless, as Günther Born­kamm has observed, Paul is still regarded as a stranger outside of the mainstream of Jewish life of his time.[1] Whether Paul is seen as a Hellenistic Jew alien to the authentic traditions of the Palestinian heartland or as more pagan than Jewish, he is usually regarded as one of the personalities most responsible for the Judeo-Christian split.  There is also a very strong tendency to ascribe to Paul a large measure of responsibility for the religiously inspired anti-Semitism that has brought so much sorrow to the Jewish people.  "Jesus, yes; Paul, never!" would seem to be the watchword of much of the thoughtful Jewish New Testament scholarship in modem times.

 

I have never been able entirely to share that judgment.  It seems to me that the issues to which Paul addressed himself arose almost entirely within the religious and symbolic universe of the Judaism of his time and that he never ceased to regard himself as a believing, faithful Jew rather than as an apostate.  The fundamental issues dividing Paul from the Pharisees were the questions of whether Jesus was in fact Israel's Messiah and whether his resurrection had ushered in that period known as the "Days of the Messiah." Paul had no doubt that the Messianic Age had commenced.  His argument with his own people revolved around the question of how men ought to comport themselves in the new age. He did not reject the belief that God had made known His will to the prophets, teachers, and sages of Israel. Without belief in God’s revelation in Scripture, his theology would have been meaningless.  Paul's quarrel was over the question of where men stood in God’s timetable for the salvation of humanity.  He was convinced that the redemption his people had longed for had begun and that what they had seen obscurely could finally he understood clearly in the light of the Messiah's redemptive activity.

 

Paul was a Jewish messianist, not an anti-Semite.[2] Unfortunately, when men dwell in radically different “worlds" or symbolic universes they are likely to regard each other with great hostility.[3] Each correctly perceives the other's "world” as a challenge to the integrity of his own.  When brothers find themselves in such opposing spheres, as did Paul and the Pharisees, fraternal feelings are likely to become fratricidal.

 

Paul wrote some very harsh things about his fellow Jews after they ceased to share a common world. His harshness was not unlike that of the members of the Community of the Dead Sea Scrolls.[4] When Paul wrote that his fellow Jews had proven faithless to their   God, he was speaking of his own kin in what he regarded as a family dispute.  Things are often said within the family that have a very different meaning when repeated by outsiders.  It was not Paul but some of his spiritual heirs who interpreted his writings so that they contributed toward the climate of opinion that permitted Auschwitz.[5] Paul could not have anticipated the develop­ment of anti-Semitism, nor can he be held responsible for it. 

 

Paul never ceased to love his people in his own way.  When he de­clared: "For I would willingly he anathema and cut off from Christ if it could help my brothers of Israel, my own flesh and blood” (Rom. 9-3), he expressed his concern for what he honestly believed to be Israel's salvation.  Admittedly, Paul's conception of what constituted Israel's salvation was not one that most of his Jewish contemporaries would have accepted.  Nevertheless, there is no hint of malice in his attitude.  He is impatient, harsh, at times furiously angry, but his negative feelings are based upon his inability to understand why his fellow Jews cannot see what he has seen and believe what he has come to believe: that God has redeemed both Israel and the Gentiles through the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

 

We must not confuse Paul's impatience and anger with the de­grading attempts to force conversion upon the Jews in the Middle Ages.  Paul did not betray his own people, as did the apostates of a later time, by joining a larger, more powerful community.  He left a stronger Jewish community to join a fragile, persecuted sect that made claims for itself that the civilized world, when it deigned to take notice, regarded as folly.[6]

 

To this day, it is difficult for thoughtful Jews to see Paul as other than an apostate, applying to him the kind of animus Jews have understandably felt toward members of their community who became Christian in medieval and modern times, and who often became malevolent persecutors of their own people.  When Rabbi Solomon Ha-Levi (Saul) converted (c. 1390) and ultimately became Don Pablo de Santa Maria (Paul), bishop of his native city, Burgos, he proved to be one of the most hostile anti-Semites in all of Spanish history. The experience of the Jewish community with turncoats has been exceedingly bitter. Jews have tended to interpret Paul's conversion in that light.

 

Understandable as such feelings may be, they do not do justice to Paul.  The Apostle can only be judged against the religious and cul­tural background of his own rather than a later time.  In Paul's time the Jewish world was divided into a number of sects, each of which claimed that it alone was faithful to God's word as revealed in Sacred Writ. Today, the heirs of the Pharisees have won the spiritual battle within Judaism; their interpretation of Judaism is regarded as authentic and normative. The Pharisees were already exceedingly influential in Paul's day, but they were by no means unchallenged. In Paul’s time, rejection of Pharisaism was not equivalent to rejection of Judaism. Other groups, including the followers of Jesus, considered themselves loyal and faithful Israelites, although they offered competing interpretations of God's covenant with Israel. Paul offered one such interpretation.        

                                                                         

Though the competing sects possessed irreconcilable differences, they did start out from certain common assumptions about God’s dealings with Israel. Paul, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Community of the Scrolls, and the Jerusalem Church shared a common religious world based upon the biblical theology of covenant and election. Paul did not reject that theology either before or after his conversion. After his conversion, he gave a radically novel interpretation of what was meant by Israel's election and God's redemptive activity. Just as the Community of the Scrolls believed that only those faithful to its norms were the truly elect community, Paul and his fellow Christians were convinced that the people of God now consisted solely of those who were “in Christ.” Paul’s exclusivism paral­leled that of the Community of the Scrolls. Paul did not reject the Scripture as the vessel of God's word to his people, but be did insist that it had to be interpreted in the light of the Messiah's death and resurrection.

 

Even in his radical reinterpretation of Scripture, Paul was indebted to his rabbinic teachers. His belief that Scripture could only be understood in the light of the Messiah's career was in some respects derived from the rabbinic doctrine of the twofold Law. According to the Pharisees, the true meaning of the written text of Scripture could only be apprehended in the light of their own inter­pretative traditions, which they designated as the oral Law. They insisted that the written and the oral Law were completely in harmony.  However, they were frequently at odds with the Saddu­cees, who contended that the written text alone yielded an authoritative understanding of God's will. Thus the Sadducees rejected the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead because they saw no evidence for it in Scripture.  By contrast, the Pharisees interpreted the Law by means of their oral traditions so that it yielded the doctrine of resur­rection although one searches Scriptures in vain for explicit evidence of this belief.  When Paul contrasted the "letter" and the "Spirit" of the Law (II Corinthians 3:6), he was pursuing an interpretative strategy that had been suggested by his rabbinic teachers.

 

By interpreting Scripture in the light of their own experience, the Pharisees made it a living document for their community while preserving a sense of continuity with the past.  This is exactly what Paul, the former Pharisee, did in the light of his own experience.   Paul's vision of the Risen Christ became the prism through which all of life took on new meaning.  He never asserted, "I reject the Law and the covenant because of Jesus Christ." The sacred traditions of his people never ceased to be divinely inspired for the Apostle.  His problem was that of harmonizing a tradition he regarded as holy with his own experience.  Things would have been very different had Paul really thought of himself as an apostate or believed that he was creating a new religion. He did what any other religious Jew at the time might have done had he been similarly affected.  Admittedly, Paul's experience entailed so radical an alteration in his spiritual cosmos that the new meanings he ascribed to Scripture seemed to his former peers and their successors to be a total rejection of Israel's sacred traditions.

 

Both Paul's fidelity to his Damascus experience and the Jewish claim that the Apostle was deluded exemplify one of the most difficult problems faced by any religion of revelation.  When men and women believe that God reveals his will to them, a potential conflict is introduced between those religious institutions that claim a monopoly of interpretative authority and those charismatic individuals who claim that God has bypassed the institutions to reveal his will directly. Established institutions tend to limit God's revelation to the distant past.  They look with the gravest suspicion on "latter-day saints" and personalities like Paul.  Nevertheless, there is absolutely no reason why God's revelation must be confined to any time, place, or person.  Nor are there irrefutable criteria by which a claim such as Paul's can be judged to be less credible than the claim of Moses or Isaiah, There are, of course, practical reasons why insti­tutions are compelled to reject latter-day revelations.  Once charisma has become routinized, to use Max Weber's phrase, it can only regard the bearer of a new revelation as a disturber of the peace.

 

Paul was such a disturber of the peace.  He understood the profound contrast between his revelatory experience and the traditions of the Pharisees[7]. Ironically, he felt compelled to be faithful to his encounter with the Risen Christ because of the very conception of a revealing God that he had received from his Jewish teachers. After Paul's time, and perhaps in reaction to him, the rabbis expressed the direst warnings about heeding "heavenly voices."[8] They also were to insist that prophecy had long since departed from Israel.[9] In Paul's time, however, the situation still retained a measure of fluidity.  Since God had made known his will to other Israelites before him, Paul may have asked himself whether there was any possible basis for rejecting what had been so overwhelmingly revealed to him.  He resolved the conflict between tradition and experience in favor of his own experience.

 

An echo of Paul's conflict may be discerned in II Corinthians: "Not that we are capable, of ourselves to put anything to our credit; for our qualification comes from God.  He it is who empowered us to be Servants of a new covenant, not of the letter, but of the Spirit.  For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life."[10]

 

Paul understood the encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus, as well as his subsequent revelations, to be gifts of the Holy Spirit.  They had completely transformed his understanding of God's covenant with Israel, so much so that it had become "a new covenant." When he asserted "the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life," there was an implied biographical reference. By "letter" Paul undoubtedly meant Scripture as interpreted by the Pharisees in spite of their doctrine of the twofold Law. Before Damascus, Paul had known only the "letter" as his fundamental religious guide; after Damascus, his understanding of Scripture had been radically transformed by the gift of the Spirit, his vision of the resurrected Messiah.

 

Nevertheless, Paul did not at any time question the Law's abiding holiness. Even his negative comparison of Moses with himself was not inconsistent with his view of the Law.  To traditional Jews, Paul's assertion of his own superiority over Moses has the aura of arrogance if not blasphemy, yet Paul was moved by no such intent.  He wrote to the Corinthians: "Now if the ministry of death, engraven letter by letter on tablets of stone appeared surrounded by such glory that the children of Israel could not fix their gaze upon Moses' face because of its glory (although it was only transient) how much more glorious will be the ministry of the Spirit. . . . for if the transient ministry had its time of glory, how much more is the enduring ministration glorious!"[11].

 

No Jew can read Paul's characterization of Moses' leadership as a "ministry of death" without initial offense.  The characterization became even more offensive when these words were later used by non-Jews to foster anti-Semitic violence.  In fairness to Paul, we must recognize that his harsh words were motivated by his belief that the God who appeared to Moses had revealed himself more completely to the Apostle.  Paul was convinced that Christ as Messiah had placed the giving of the Law in proper perspective.  He saw Moses as having presented a version of God's revelation that could not bring salvation without proper interpretation.  He did not disagree with the Pharisees on this issue. He was, however, convinced that he,  not they, was empowered properly to interpret Scripture,  declaring that those who remained faithful to the old under­standing were blind to Scripture’s true import:

 

We do not act as Moses did, who put a veil over his face (so that the people of Israel could not perceive the ulti­mate significance of that which was to be abolished).  But their minds became hardened (and that is why) the same veil remains drawn, even today (in spite of every­thing) at the reading of the Old Covenant.  But until today, every time that Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds. It cannot be removed because it is only through Christ that it is abolished.[12]

 

The text is difficult, the imagery rich.  Paul contended that what had been veiled over in pre-messianic Judaism had been unveiled by faith in Christ.  This would accord with the psychoanalytic conception, which I accept, that the Christian religious revolution brought to the surface unconscious feelings about divine-human figures that had been re­pressed or sublimated in Judaism.

 

In any event, Paul wanted to contrast the old and his new way of understanding God's Law.  That is very different than rejecting the Law entirely.  Furthermore, although Paul strenuously objected to the circumcision of non-Jewish Christians, he did not normally object to the observance of the Law by Jews or Jewish-Christians.[13] Paul himself apparently remained to a degree an observant Jew.  He sub­mitted five times to the punishment of thirty-nine stripes inflicted upon him by Jewish officials.[14]  Had he really broken with his people he would not have submitted to this punishment.  The extent of Paul's observance of traditional Jewish Law re­mains a matter of scholarly debate, but he apparently maintained a semblance of observance when among Jews:  ". . . to the Jews I was like a Jew, to gain the Jews.  To those who live under the Law, as if I were under the Law-although I am not under the Law-to gain those who live under the Law."[15]  Of course, no Pharisee could have written that he lived "as if  I were under the Law .... to gain those who live under the Law," but the fundamental issue was where men stood in the divine timetable.  Paul behaved "as if" he were under the Law because he did not wish to give initial offense to religiously compliant Jews. His ultimate object in dealing with them was to reveal the Good News of the coming of the Messiah.

 

In reality, it was not Paul but Jesus who instituted the irreparable breach with established Judaism.[16] The conflict between the claims of charisma and the authority of tradition that Paul's career elicited were far less intense than those involved in the career of Jesus.  The often-repeated assertion that the Jerusalem Church was largely tradi­tional save for its belief in Jesus as the Messiah can only be main­tained if one assumes that Jesus' own disciples were ignorant of the extent to which Jesus himself was in conflict with any of the more established Jewish movements of the time.[17] Jesus' extraordinary assertion of his own authority over that of the Law, especially as interpreted by the Pharisees, rendered any religious consensus with established Judaism unthinkable.  When Jesus claimed the priority of his own authority in the Sermon on the Mount, "You have heard how it was said . . . but I say unto you . . . . “ and when he asserted that "The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath" (Matt. 12:8), he was claiming that he was the Lord of the Law.  Jesus' followers regarded him as the absolute authority for their understanding of what obedience to God's Law truly involved. Jesus' contemporaries were compelled to take sides when confronted by his claims. Within the sphere of a religion of revelation, claims such as those Jesus made for himself are either true or  blasphemous.  From the point of view of the Pharisees, Jesus was an am ha-aretz, one ignorant of the intricacies of traditional Law, who had the incredible audacity to claim an authority greater than that of Israel's wisest men.  Neither the Pharisaic nor the Sadducean parties were prepared to accept such claims. Jesus may indeed have been one of Israel's greatest teachers, but it is difficult for traditional Jewish teachers so to regard him. Within the context of Judaism as a revealed religion, he was either much more or much less.

 

Those who minimize the break between established Judaism and the primitive Church tend to interpret Paul's relations with the Church, and especially with Peter, in terms of mutual antipathy.[18] The Jerusalem Church has been depicted as committed to circum­cision and the observance of the Law as preconditions for entry into the new community.  It was supposed to have sent out emissaries to discredit Paul's work among the Gentiles, especially his opposition to the circumcision of Gentile converts to Christianity.  Paul's "Judaizing" opponents are pictured as Jews zealous for the Law, whether or not they were actually emissaries of Jerusalem.  What is at stake in this interpretation is the question of Paul's relations with his own people.  Those who stress his hostility to those Jewish Christians who insisted on circumcision as a precondition to entry into their community usually picture him as turning his back on his own kin and creating a rival Gentile religion that was destined to maintain an antagonistic posture not only toward Judaism but toward Jewish Christianity as well.  This view is consistent with the image of Paul as the turncoat and founder of Christian anti-Semitism. In all probability, the conflict between Paul and the Jerusalem Church and between Paul and Peter has been exaggerated.  On Paul's first visit to Jerusalem three years after his conversion, he stayed with Peter for fifteen days (Gal. 1: 18).  We have no record of their discussions, but it is difficult to imagine them ignoring the Christian religious revolution and they must have compared ideas. At a later date, Paul recognized Peter's mission to the Jews as somehow paralleling his own mission to the Gentiles (Gal. 2:27).  There is reason to believe that Peter shared Paul's conviction that Christ was the "end of the Law." Peter is known to have dispensed with the dietary laws in his en­counter with Cornelius the Roman centurion (Acts10:1-48) and at the church at Antioch (Gal. 2:12).[19] While it is true that Paul bitterly criticized Peter for having withdrawn from table fellowship with Gentile Christians when "certain friends of James" arrived on the scene, the basis of Paul's criticism was that Peter was acting out of expediency rather than principle (Gal. 2:12-14).  Paul does not suggest that there were theological differences between them either in Galatians or in Corinthians[20]. Furthermore, at the Apostolic Council described in Acts 15:7-11, Peter is pictured as taking a position similar to Paul's with regard to the sufficiency of baptism without circumcision for the admission of Gentile con­verts.  There is no need to draw too great a contrast between Paul and Peter.

 

Similarly, the contrast between the Jerusalem Christians and Paul has probably been overdrawn.[21] Paul was insistent upon his independence from the Jerusalem Church, but inde­pendence must not be seen as opposition.  Paul's autonomy vis-à-vis the Jerusalem Church was based on the same conviction that motivated his independence over against the Pharisees.  Paul believed that he had received both his commission as an Apostle and the content of his Gospel "through a revelation of Jesus Christ" (Gal. 1:12).  At the Apostolic Council he was anxious not to cause a breach in the unity of the Church of Christ, but there is little doubt that he would have done so had the leaders rejected his position on the mission to the Gentiles.  Even when Paul wrote that the leaders of the Church had accepted his position, he quickly added that it was of little consequence to him that the "pillars" were regarded as leaders "since God has no favorites" (Gal. 2:6). The fundamental issue for Paul at the time of conversion and in the presence of the Jerusalem leaders was the word of God versus the word of man.  No worldly preeminence could give any man the authority to add or detract from what God had revealed to Paul.

 

Although Paul insisted on his independence of all human authority, his account of the Apostolic Council in Galatians em­phasized the Council's agreement that "the Gospel of the uncircumcision" was committed to him. Paul described that accord: "And when they perceived the grace that was given to me, James and Cephas and John, who were reputed to be pillars, gave to me and Barnabbas the right hand of fellowship, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised" (Gal. 2:9).  There are some differences between the meeting described in Acts 15 and the one Paul described as an eyewitness in Galatians 2. It is possible that we have the record of two meetings rather than one.[22]  In any event, both Acts and Galatians agree that Paul and the leaders of the Jerusalem Church arrived at a viable accord after a serious discussion of the issues between them.  When Paul prepared to return to Jerusalem at the con­clusion of his final missionary journey, he regarded that agreement as still binding (Romans 15).

 

We know, of course, that Paul met with bitter opposition throughout his career.  Some of it came, understandably enough, from the leaders of the Jewish mainstream.  Much of it may also have come from overzealous Gentile converts.  According to Johannes Munck, the “Judaizing” antagonists at Galatia, who demanded the circumcision of Gentile converts, were not Jewish Christians but Gentiles who had become overly zealous for the observance of the traditions of the "old" Israel after they had entered the "new" Israel.[23] We need not dwell at length on Munck's arguments; they have been debated by scholars since their publication.[24] What is significant is Munck’s contention that there was a far smaller gulf between Paul and the Jerusalem Christians than most scholars had pre­viously conceded.  There was, of course, a major difference in em­phasis.  The Jerusalem Church was primarily interested in bringing the Gospel to Israel; Paul's concern, at least initially, was to proclaim the Good News of Israel's Messiah to the Gentiles.  While this placed him in a very different sphere of activity, neither Paul's letters nor Acts suggest that Paul and the "pillars" of the Jerusalem Church were at odds on this division of labor or on the requirements for entry into the Church.

 

There were probably practical reasons for the division of labor.  For one thing, Paul may have been an embarrassment and a danger to the primitive Church.  The Church’s situation was precarious enough without Paul’s theological radicalism, as the stoning of Stephen had demonstrated.  The party of the Pharisees in Jerusalem could hardly have felt well disposed toward a man they regarded as a turncoat.  According to Walther Schmithals, the Jerusalem Church was as convinced as Paul that the Law was no longer necessary for salvation even for Jews.[25] However, they were compelled to main­tain at least the appearance of being observant Jews.  Living in Jeru­salem, the leaders of the Church realized that they could not challenge the observance of the Law by Jews and remain free from persecution. Their attitude was probably similar to Paul's when he testified that he lived "as if" under the Law in order to win people to the Gospel. (I Cor. 9:20)  They too lived "as if" under the Law.  They had little choice if they were to remain in Jerusalem.

 

Perhaps the hest way to describe the attitude shared by Paul and the Jerusalem Church concerning the Law is that both were indifferent to its observance by Jews or Jewish Christians as long as those who ob­served it understood that salvation came from Christ, not the Law.  Paul wrote to the Corinthians urging both the circumcised and the uncircumcised to "remain in the state (klēsis) in which he was when he was called."[26]  He argued that "circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing" (7:19), by which he meant that there was nothing either good or bad in observing or failing to observe the details of the Law.  The Law was no longer the path to salvation.  Whether it was observed or not in the Age of the Messiah was a practical rather than a religious matter. For the Christians of Jerusalem, observance was a matter of prudence.  Such considerations could be justified theologically.  The Church could not have been free to win souls for Christ in Jerusalem had it openly challenged the Law. Nevertheless, both Paul and the leaders of the Church agreed that outside of Palestine gentile converts need not accept the Law. Paul's counsel that both the circumcised and the uncircumcised ought to continue as they were before conversion was relevant to the situation of the Church.  It is also evidence that he understood and approved of the stand of the Jerusalem Christians on the Law; it is very likely that they also understood and approved of Paul's doctrine that Christ was the telos of the Law.

 

Paul could not have maintained relatively harmonious relations with the Jerusalem Church if, as some of his harsher critics have suggested, he had been a disloyal apostate. In all likelihood, there must have been some tension, but no matter how un­comfortable the men of Jerusalem may have felt with Paul, they must have understood something of what had happened to him.  The irreparable breach with established Judaism had occurred the moment the Lordship of Jesus supplanted all other authorities within the Jewish community.  Both Paul and his peers had been overwhelmed by the same redemptive experience; all believed that they had en­tered a radically new eon; all were convinced that God's Word could not possibly he understood as it had been before Christ's career.  And all knew how extraordinarily difficult it was to communicate what they had received to the “unredeemed” among their own kin. Willy-nilly, they had been irrevocably wrenched out of all that had been customary in the "unredeemed" world.

 

Nevertheless, though estranged from the world of pre-messianic Judaism, Paul cannot justly he regarded as in any sense lack­ing in loyalty to his own people.  He may have been deluded in believing that the Age of the Messiah was dawning, but there was neither malice nor infidelity in his commitment.  Unfortunately, there was tragedy, because equally sincere men were convinced that to follow the Christian way would he to explode the very foundations of God's covenant with his people.  Living in two very distinct worlds, Paul and his erstwhile rabbinic colleagues were condemned to become irreconcilable enemies, for each believed that what the other regarded as simple fidelity was in reality gross rebellion against the Lord of Creation.

 

 

b. Israel's Conversion and Mankind's Salvation

 

In spite of the agreement at the Apostolic Council that Peter would “preach to the circumcised” and Paul to the “uncircumcised,” Paul never ceased to hope that his own kin would accept Jesus as their Messiah.  Although Paul regarded the mission to the Gentiles as his distinctive calling, his desire to bring about the conversion of the Jews was at least as powerful as that of the Jerusalem Chris­tians.  Some Pauline scholars have suggested that the Apostle had his own plan for Israel's conversion that differed radically from the more direct methods of proclaiming the Christian message used by the Jerusalem Church. Apparently, Paul believed that the success of his mis­sion was a precondition for the conversion of the Jews, who would only accept Christ after the conversion of the Gentiles. Thus Paul's conception of himself as Apostle to the Gentiles involved his hopes for his kin as well. Paul's description of his call to be Apostle to the Gentiles (Gal. 1:15) was reminiscent of similar calls to Isaiah (49:1-6) and Jeremiah (1:4) in which God is depicted as designating his servant from the womb to be his messenger unto the nations: "Then God, who had specially chosen me, while I was still in my mother's womb called me through his grace and chose to reveal his Son in me, so that I might preach the Good News about him to the Gentiles" (Gal.1:15-16). The italicized words are apparently quoted from Isaiah 49:1. Jeremiah had a somewhat similar conception of his own commission: "Now the word of the Lord came unto me saying ‘Before I formed you in the belly I knew you and before you came forth out of the womb, I sanctified you and appointed you a prophet to the nations.’” (Jer.1:4). Not only did Paul regard himself as greater than Moses, but he saw God's call to the prophets as an anticipation of his own commission as Apostle.  There were, of course, differences in the message, the time, and the manner of delivery. Nevertheless, Paul regarded himself as God's "Chosen instrument" to carry Christ's name before the Gentiles.[27]

 

Paul's claim that he had been designated for his role from his mother's womb is an example of his rich symbolic consciousness. Paul was intuitively aware of some of the archaic emotional forces that had impelled him to his vocation. Long before psychoanalysis gave conceptual expression to the idea that unconscious forces having their inception in the history of the race begin to express themselves in the individual in utero. One might argue that Paul's use of the phrase was stylistic and dependent upon the older imagery of the prophets. There are, however, too many instances in which we have found Paul's symbolic consciousness at work for it to be likely that he was merely resorting to a literary convention.  On the contrary, it is more likely that he used the symbolic conventions of his time to express the intuition that the forces that had impelled him to his role were at least as old as he was. One wonders whether this was one of the passages Freud had in mind when he referred to the "dark traces of the past" that lay ready to break forth into con­sciousness in Paul's soul.

 

According to Munck, Paul was convinced that Christ would not return to complete the work of salvation until the Apostle had first completed his labor of carrying the Gospel to the Gentiles and thereafter bringing about the conversion of the Jews.[28] Paul thus regarded his commission as Apostle to the Gentiles as part of a greater work, the redemption of both Jew and Gentile in Christ.  If Munck is correct, Paul be­lieved that the final consummation of the Messiah's labors depended upon him!

 

Paul's dream of a unified mankind in which tribal and creedal differences would finally be obliterated was consistent with a com­pelling strain in Jewish thought that has persisted from the days of the prophets to our own time. Nowhere is Paul more proto­typically Jewish than in his strenuous pursuit of this ideal. Perhaps the very stringency of Judaism's definition of itself over against the "Gentiles" helped to generate the vision of a unified mankind.  When carried to an extreme, any particularism flies in the face of the yearning for union and community that has frequently moved men. That yearning may be utopian, but it re­mains powerful to this day and it was probably especially intense in Paul.

 

It is also likely that Paul's upbringing in Tarsus influenced his desire for humanity unified in Christ.  Living as a member of a minority community in a predominantly non-Jewish city, Paul was probably more sensitive to the problems of ethnic and religious division than he would have been had he been reared in Jerusalem. Diaspora communities depend on the sufferance of the host community, a fact that conditions their social and economic status, their behavior, and even their self-perceptions. It would be stretching the point to suggest that Paul shared many of the complex psychological attitudes that have conditioned diaspora Jewish identity in modern times. Nevertheless, Paul's overriding concern for the ultimate unity of Jew and Gentile has had historical parallels among those Diaspora Jews who dreamed of the unification of humanity as a way out of their own isolation as Jews.

 

Paul's dream of the unity of humanity "in Christ" was not one that the majority of his kinsmen shared. Acts is full of reports of Jewish opposition to his missionary work.[29] Usually when Paul came to a new community, he preached in the local synagogue.  With predictable regularity the synagogue authorities became hostile and compelled him to establish his own churches.  In some communities the traditionalists sought to kill him; in others they incited the populace and the authorities against him. 

 

A typical incident is depicted in Acts 17.  After Paul and Silas arrived in Thessalonika, he preached in the synagogue for "three consecutive sabbaths," developing his arguments "from Scripture . . . proving how it was ordained that the Christ should suffer and rise from the dead" (17:2-3).  Some Jews were convinced, as were some Greeks. Paul's success and the controversial character of his preach­ing soon impelled the Jewish authorities to stir up the populace against him. As recorded in Acts, their complaint has a ring of truth about it: "The people who have been turning the whole world up­side down have come down here. . . . They have broken every one of Caesar's edicts by claiming that there is another King, Jesus" (17:6-7).  To the extent that the special circumstances of Paul's startling conversion became known, the opposition of the Jewish community must have been further aggravated.

 

The hostility between Paul and his kinsmen was mutual.  Perhaps the most savage expression of Paul's anger is to be found in Thessalonians.  Paul wrote to the Church at Thessalonika, apparently at a time of persecution:

 

For you my brothers, have been like the churches of God in Christ Jesus which are in Judaea, in suffering the same treatment from your countrymen as they have suffered from the Jews, the people who put the Lord Jesus to death and the prophets too.  And now they have been persecut­ing us, and acting in a way that cannot please God and makes them enemies of the whole human race, because they are hindering us from preaching to the Gentiles and trying to save them . . . but retribution is overtaking them at last (I Thes. 2:14-16).

 

In a later generation Jews were to be regarded by anti-Semites as “enemies of the whole human race" without qualification.  In Paul's outburst, their enmity consisted in impeding his mission to the Gentiles.  Since Paul was convinced that nothing less than the salvation of humanity was at stake, it is not surprising that he regarded any opposition to his work as enmity against mankind.

 

Paul's bitter condemnation of his own people in I Thessalonians lacks any moderating qualification. In fairness to Paul, we must re­member that his hostility was entirely consistent with his people's way of handling religious conflict at the time.[30] The same methods often continue to be employed today by those who are convinced that their distinctive tradition alone, whatever it may be, expresses the word of God.

 

Nevertheless, Paul's anger reveals only one aspect of Paul’s complex feelings towards his kinsmen.  In spite of that anger, Paul fully ex­pected "Israel after the flesh" to be converted to faith in Christ.  Moreover, Paul expected to play a crucial role in their conversion.  In order to understand Paul's role as he anticipated it, we must con­sider the significance he ascribed to the collection of money he had gathered from the churches of Greece and Asia Minor to present to the Church in Jerusalem.  Romans 15 was written by Paul after he had gathered the collec­tion from the Gentile churches but before he set out from Greece, presumably from Corinth, to journey to Jerusalem.  He wrote that he expected to present the collection upon arriving in Jerusalem on behalf of the "poor among the saints" (Rom. 15:26) (i.e., the "saints" within the Church).  This chapter is one of our best sources for understanding Paul's preoccupations immediately before he set out with the all-important gift for the Jerusalem Church.

 

It is evident from the text that Paul feared for his own safety in Jerusalem.  He asked his readers to pray that he might "escape the unbelievers in Judaea." He also asked that they pray that the gifts he brought be "accepted by the saints" (15:31). Paul was well aware of the hazards of his enterprise. In view of the variety of interests Paul had challenged, as well as the unfortunate example of the stoning of Stephen, the visit to Jerusalem was indeed a precarious venture.  Nevertheless, Paul felt compelled to make the journey because of the  importance he ascribed to collection.  Both Nickle and Munck emphasize the fact that Paul did not regard the collection as a gift of earthly valuables.  It was to be Paul's proof to all in Jerusalem, Christian and non-Christian alike, that the Gentiles had found salvation in Christ.  Paul had gathered the col­lection with difficulty over a period of several years.  The venture had met with opposition in Corinth and perhaps in Galatia.[31]  According to Acts, Paul was accompanied by at least eight companions representing the Gentile Churches (20:4f.). Munck held that the presence of so large a delegation was Paul's way of making the delivery of the collection “an uncon­cealable public affair.”[32] Paul wanted all Jerusalem to learn of the mighty deeds wrought by Christ for the humanity’s salvation by the conversion of the Gentile world.

 

Both Munck and Nickle argue that Paul believed that the pres­entation of the collection would be one of the culminating acts in the drama of salvation preceding Christ's glorious return. Paul believed that the Messiah had appeared in Jerusalem. Even after conversion the city remained for him what it was for his rabbinic contemporaries, the omphalos, the navel of the universe, the very center of the cosmos.[33] It was in Jerusalem that the final acts in the drama of salvation were expected to unfold.  As Isaiah and Micah had prophesied, it was to Jerusalem that the nations would come in the last days and it was from Jerusalem that the word of the Lord would finally flow (Isa. 2:2f.; Mic. 4.1f.).

 

According to both Munck and Nickle, Paul saw his arrival in Jerusalem accompanied by the representatives of the Gentile churches as the fulfillment of the prophecies of Isaiah and Micah. He was convinced that God had designated him to be the "light unto the nations" anticipated by the prophets. Paul saw the delivery of the collection as a demonstration of the love of the converted nations for their Jewish brethren in Christ.  He believed that when he returned in triumph the gift would testify to all Jerusalem that God had bestowed his saving grace upon the Gentiles.  The Jews would thereupon he converted and God would do the rest!

 

Although the Munck-Nickle hypothesis has been challenged by some very distinguished scholars, over the years I have regarded it as very plausible because it rings true psychologically.  Consider Paul's post-conversion situation: He had turned his back on everything he had previously believed. He was undoubtedly regarded by his former teachers and colleagues as either a madman or an apostate.  Even his new col­leagues were less than unanimous in their praise.  Many rejected his claim to be an Apostle.  Others offered a host of ungenerous com­ments about him.  Even the leaders of the Jerusalem Church were probably more comfortable with him in faraway Greece and Asia Minor than in Judaea, Paul's extraordinary sensitivity to the under­lying dynamics of the Jewish religious world was paralleled by his awareness of the way others reacted to him.  His apologia in II Corinthians 10:1-13:10 exhibits his acute sensitivity to the opin­ions of others.  Only one conviction permitted him to transcend that sensitivity: He believed his authority came directly from Christ.[34] He also believed that it had been used to "build up" rather than "pull down" his followers (II Cor. 10: 8). Even if the entire world rejected his message, Paul would have persevered.

 

Nevertheless, no man who worked as tirelessly for the conversion of others-literally for the conversion of the entire family of man-could have been without hope of vindication.  Paul may have anticipated that the delivery of the collection would be the occasion of his final vindication.  One psychoanalyst views the journey to Jerusalem with its predictable perils as evidence of Paul's masochism, but there is no reason to regard the enterprise as unduly masochistic.[35] Paul's quest for vindication and his conviction that he would ultimately achieve it are enough to explain why he not only ignored the dangers awaiting him but spent so much time assembling the collection and preparing to return to Jerusalem.

 

Rejection of his teachers’ wisdom was a more serious matter for Paul than rejection of his natural father.  The importance of fidelity to what had been transmitted was so great in rabbinic Judaism that long lists of successive rabbinic traditionaries were often cited in establishing the authority of a given tradition.  Paul's rejection of his teachers’ authority and his assertion of the primacy of his own even over that of Moses must have created an enormous conflict within him.  To the extent that there was a corner of his psyche that never ceased to he a Pharisee, Paul must have retained some feelings of unease for having departed from what he had received. 

 

Such feelings would have been emotionally akin to the guilt engendered by parricide. To reject the authority of one’s spiritual fathers is in a way to kill them, especially in a religious system in which  spiritual fathers were regarded as more important than natural fathers. There is a rabbinic tradition that if a son finds both his father and his teacher in mortal danger, he must first rescue the teacher. In Jewish teach­ing, while the father brings the son into this world, the teacher brings him into the World-to-Come.[36] The- teacher's act of paternity is thus regarded as the greater.

 

Paul was only able to "kill" his old fathers emotionally after he had found a "new obedience" in Cbrist.[37] Although comparisons of Paul and Luther can be overdrawn, both men were able to free themselves of the injunctions of their biological fathers-in Luther's case Father Hans, in Paul's his rabbinic teachers and perhaps his natural father-because they had found a new submission, Luther as a monk and Paul as Christ's Apostle.  Nevertheless, I believe that Paul never ceased to yearn for a reconciliation with his old teachers, not on their terms, of course, but on his own.  Paul hoped the day would come when they would acknowledge that he, not they, had been right.  Just as he expected that, in Christ, humanity would obliterate the old distinctions of Jew and Gentile, he may also have hoped that his teachers' conversion would release him from a residual sense of unease and perhaps guilt that he had betrayed them.  Paul hoped to find a way to be loyal to both his old and his new fathers.  One of the virtues of the Munck-Nickle hypothesis is that it fits together with a plausible reconstruction of Paul's motivations for making a journey so fraught with hazard.

 

At first glance, Paul's expectation that the presence of non-Jewish Christians laden with gifts would bring about Israel's conversion seems overly optimistic, especially in view of the fact that neither Jesus nor the preaching of the "saints" had achieved this end.  Objectively, Paul was mistaken, but, as we shall see, his ex­pectation was not without a certain psychological plausibility.  The key to Paul's optimism can be found in his conception of the conflict between the Church and the Synagogue: The imagery that Paul utilized to describe that conflict is that of fraternal strife.

 

Paul introduced the theme of fraternal conflict in Romans 9-11 after expressing his sorrow that Christ had been rejected by his own "flesh and blood" (Rom. 9:5).  He held that God would only bestow salvation on those who are truly worthy to be reckoned among Abraham's seed. Nevertheless, Paul argued that  physical descent from Abra­ham by itself is insufficient for inclusion among those chosen by God for salvation.  Paul used a series of Christian midrashim or homilies to make his point.  He cited the examples of Isaac and Jacob to rein­force the idea that physical descent from the first patriarch by itself is insufficient for membership in God's elect community.  Both patriarchs were chosen by God to be "true" descendants of Abraham, although each had a brother who might have inherited Abraham's blessings. In Paul's homilies, Isaac and Jacob become prototypes of the Church, whereas the rejected brothers, Ishmael and Esau, become prototypes of the Synagogue.  For Paul the Church was the chosen brother; the Synagogue the rejected brother (Rom. 9:6­-13).

 

Paul marveled at what he believed to be God's choice of the Gentile Christians to become the true "Israel." He saw it as a fulfillment of Hosea's prophecy: "I will say unto them that were not my people, 'Thou art my people' and they shall say, 'Thou art my God"' (Hosea 2:23; see Rom. 9:25-26).  For Paul, the people who "were not my people" were the non-Jews who by their faith in Christ said “Thou art my God.”  According to Paul they were called "Children of the living God" (Rom. 9:26).  Thus election has passed from Abra­ham's descendants "according to the flesh" to those who were his spiritual descendants (See Rom. 4:13-17). For Paul Christians alone were spiritual descendants of Abraham and, as such, the favored sons. The "unbelieving" Jews were, of course, the rejected offspring.

 

From the Jewish point of view, the most controversial aspect of these homilies was Paul's radical reinterpretation of the doctrine of the election of Israel so that uncircumcised Gentiles were regarded as Abraham's true descendants.  Paul's identification of Jewish "un­belief" with Pharaoh's enmity toward both God and Israel was even more startling to religious Jews.  Paul argued in another midrash that just as God had his hidden reasons for hardening Pharaoh's heart, he now had his reasons for treating Israel as he had once treated Pharaoh (Rom. 9:14-18).  The hardening of Pharaoh's heart was necessary so that God could display his mighty deeds of redemption against Egypt; so, too, God had hardened Israel's heart against belief in her Messiah so that the Gentiles might first be redeemed  (Rom.  11: 12).

 

Pharaoh was, of course, regarded by Jews as the archetypal enemy, who sought to exterminate the entire people.  Paul's identification of the "unbelieving" Synagogue with Pharaoh was therefore a matter of profound offense.  The offense was compounded when Paul also identified the "old" Israel with the worshipers of Baal who killed the prophets, broke down the altars, and attempted to slay the prophet Elijah with whom Paul identified himself. (Rom. 11:3-6)

 

Paul's picture is clear. The "old" Israel has become God's enemy.  The enmity will not last forever, although it can only be terminated by the "old" Israel confessing Jesus Christ as Lord.  If Jews fail to make this confession, they deserve and can expect no better fate than that which befell Pharaoh, the followers of Baal, Sodom and Gomorrah (Rom. 9:29), any other enemy of God.

 

Because of its enormous emotional power, Paul's image of Israel as the unfaithful brother rejected by God has strongly influenced both the Church's self-understanding and her interpretation of the her relationship to Judaism. One of the most depressing aspects of my research on Paul has been the dreary regularity with which even well-meaning Chris­tian commentators, following in the spirit of Paul's interpretation of the conflict, have seen Israel's inability to accept Jesus as the Messiah as deliberate, willful offense against God.  Thus C. K. Barrett wrote of Israel's "defection," calling Israel "an apostate people.”[38] As a Jew who has remained faithful to my own tradition, I hardly appreciate being characterized by Barrett as mired in "Jewish apostasy.”[39] The same bias is found in Munck, who wrote of Israel's "guilt" and "im­penitence" in rejecting Christ.[40] The examples could be endlessly multiplied. Unfortunately, the refusal to accept Judaism as other than an apostate form of Christianity has had the direst consequences for Jews throughout their history and, most especially, in the response of the pre-Vatican II Christian Church to the destruction of the European Jews during World War II. As the history of the Inquisition has demonstrated, the Church has been infinitely more hostile to those it regarded as apostates and heretics than to unbelievers.

 

This unfortunate, but almost inevitable, interpretation of Judaism is a direct consequence of Paul's insistence that the Church is the true Israel and that the "old" Israel could only be saved by conversion to faith in Christ. The effect of this inter­pretation of has been to widen immeasurably the gulf between Christianity and Judaism. To be a Jew faithful to the traditions of the Pharisees and rabbis, the religion of the Jewish mainstream, was for Paul and his spiritual heirs to be in willful enmity, rebellion, and apostasy against God. Nevertheless, we must remember that Paul wrote as a member of a competing Jewish sect seeking to discredit its rivals, not as an outsider. Unfortunately, when Christianity became an independent, overwhelmingly non-Jewish religious tradition, it carried over Paul’s harsh critique and refused to acknowledge Judaism as an authentic religious tradition with an integrity that is in no sense dependent on any other tradition.

 

In fairness to Paul, I must repeat that there was no special malice involved in his critique.  When, for example, Paul likened Israel to Sodom and Gomorrah, he merely quoted Isaiah 1:9, in which the prophet offered a comparable denunciation of Israel in his own time (Rom. 9:29).  On the contrary, Paul was trying to be as generous toward his spiritual adversaries as the logic of a supersessionary religion of revelation would permit.  My own dissent from that kind of religious ideology, especially after Auschwitz, is motivated by my conviction that there are no false gods, that all gods are true, at least in the sense that the sacred traditions of mankind are functional expressions of the life and values of the peoples who maintain them. This posi­tion arises very largely out of my emphatic rejection of the exclusivism embedded in a literal reading of biblical religion.

 

However, Paul's insistence that the "old" Israel has become like Ishmael (Rom. 9:6-9; See Gal. 4:21-31) can also be seen as yet another example of the working of Paul's symbolic consciousness. The idea that the conflict of the "descendants" of Isaac and Ishmael or Jacob and Esau is largely a matter of fraternal rivalry was already implicit in the original biblical narratives.  In rabbinic Judaism the conflict between Rome and Judaea was often depicted symbolically in terms of the strife between Jacob, the studious, contemplative brother, and Esau, the ruddy, violent hunter.[41] The interpretation of religious strife in terms of sibling rivalry is by no means the only component in the age-old Judeo-Christian conflict, but it is an important one, particularly when the conflict is focused, as it was for Paul, on the question of who is God's favored child.

 

At a later date, the psychological power of these images was immensely strengthened when the Crucifixion came to be regarded as a deicide.  Jews in every generation were then accused of being veritable murderers of God.  There is no comparable defamation of one religious tradition by another. Behind the twin assertions that the Church was the true Israel and that the "Old" Israel had been cast of as Christ-killers lay the implied asser­tion, "We Christians are the Father's favorites, You Jews have been rejected by the Father.  You tried to murder Him by murdering His Son.”

 

Such an accusation translates the emotions of religious conflict into the emotions of family strife.  Admittedly, there is much more involved in religious conflict than family strife.  Nevertheless, the oldest and most abiding sources of both love and hate are to he found within the context of the family.  It is therefore not sur­prising that the conflicts of great religious communities have often repli­cated the emotional conflicts of the family on a grand scale.  Norman 0. Brown has suggested that ultimately all fraternal conflict is over the father's inheritance and perhaps even his body, at least at the level of the underlying emotional content.[42] This description is certainly in harmony with Paul's symbolic representation of the Judeo-Christian conflict.

 

We can now understand why there was a certain psychological plausibility to Paul's belief that the conversion of the Jews would begin in earnest when he arrived in Jerusalem with the collection.  Paul believed that by stirring his own kinsmen to envy the Gentile Christians he would move them to adopt the new faith.  Paul asserted that God's ultimate purpose in making him Apostle to the Gentiles was to make the Jews jealous of the "new" Israel and thereby to move some to conversion.  Thus, Paul saw his mission to the Gentiles as the prelude to his culminating task, that of winning over the Jews.  According to Paul, God's purposes would not he ful­filled until Jew and Christian became one people of God.  He ex­pressed his purpose as Apostle to the Gentiles: "I have been sent to the Gentiles as their Apostle, and I am proud of being sent, but the purpose of it is to make my own people jealous of you, and in this way save some of them." (Rom. 11:14; italics added)

 

Envy or jealousy hardly seems an appropriate motive for religious conversion until one reflects on the extent to which Paul interpreted the Church-Synagogue conflict in terms of fraternal strife.  The source of fraternal rivalry is almost always envy lest the parents bestow a greater measure of love on the rival sibling.  Paul's plan to stir his kinsmen to jealousy was psychologically consistent with his underlying intuition of what the rivalry between Church and Syn­agogue was all about.  Although we lack any way of validating the conjecture, it is reasonable to assume that Paul's perception of the nature of the conflict reflected his own experience.  We know that he had a sister living in Jerusalem (Acts 23:16).  Although we have few other details concerning his family background, it is possible that as a Pharisee, Paul experienced the very same kind of envy of Christians, perhaps subliminally, that as a Christian he hoped to stir up in his kinsmen.

 

Mutual envy probably plays an important role in the Judeo-­Christian encounter to this day. In spite of their insistence on the ­unique destiny of Israel before God, traditional Jews often envy non-Jews their greater security and liberation from nonfunctional be­havioral constraint.  It would also seem that non-Jews often envy Jews by taking seriously Israel's pathetic claim to be God's favored child, yet claiming that the election has passed to the Christian Church.  Hannah Arendt has observed that both the Pan-Slav and the Pan-German forms of tribal nationalism that flourished in the first decades of the twentieth century claimed that God had elected their respective tribes and had ordained the tribe's right to dominate its neighbors.  Arendt claimed that much of the extraordinary virulence of the Pan movement’s anti-Semitism was due to their envy and fury at Israel's older claim to be the elect of God.[43] Paul's apparently naive desire to move his kin to jealousy is fully consistent with the Apostle’s intuitive psychological depth manifest elsewhere in his letters.

 

Paul was also convinced that conversion would lead to the general resurrection and the final salvation of mankind: “Since their rejection meant the reconciliation of the world, do you know what their acceptance will mean? Nothing less than life from the dead!” (Rom. 11:15).  Thus, Paul saw Israel's conversion as the supreme event within God's re­demptive plan.  Once Israel was “saved,” at least representationally, the final sequence of eschatological events would commence:  Christ would return.  The dead would be resurrected and Christ would then hand over the kingdom to God the Father, "having done away with every sovereignty, authority and power" (I Cor. 15:25).

 

It should be obvious that, whatever the merits of Paul's eschatological vision, it was not the expression of an apostate's malice.  Rightly or wrongly, Paul regarded himself as playing a role in the redemp­tion of both his own people and mankind second only to Jesus. If this interpretation of Paul's conception of his role and Israel's place in the divine economy has merit, one must ask whether there was not something inflated and  grandiose in Paul's extraordinary understanding of himself and what he believed he could accomplish.  It is possible that Paul's identification with Christ was so complete that he will­ingly set in motion the chain of events leading to his own martyrdom.[44]  In any event, things did not turn out as Paul had anticipated.  When he arrived in Jerusalem, his kinsmen were stirred to anger rather than jealousy and conver­sion.  He was attacked in the Temple and taken into custody for his own safety by Roman soldiers, thereby initiating the events leading to his eventual death.

 

Paul's mission to convert his own people ended in failure.  Never­theless, the Apostle cannot he regarded as a deluded visionary whose pretensions were finally destroyed by a contemptuous world.  In the light of history, Paul's perception of himself as Apostle to the Gentiles proved correct to a degree that far exceeded his most grandiose expectations.  No other figure in the history of the Church has been as influential in interpreting the meaning of the Christian message from generation to generation.  Nor is it likely that Christendom will ever again know an interpreter of comparable authority and in­fluence.  Ironically, Paul's rabbinic teachers provided their pupil with much of the training he used to argue so persuasively against them. The Pharisees were Judaism’s foremost interpreters of Scripture and they taught Paul the interpreter's skills and methods. Paul's spiritual gifts, es­pecially his symbolic consciousness and his ability to make manifest the unmanifest, were, of course, his own.  Where the Pharisees taught Paul how to unveil the deeper meanings embedded in the text of Scripture, he sought to uncover the deeper meanings to be discerned in the life, death, and Resurrection of the one he believed to he Israel's Messiah.  In any event, Paul could only build on what he had received.

 

This essay is a revision of a chapter in a book I wrote thirty years ago entitled My Brother Paul.[45] In that work, I re­marked that I had called the book My Brother Paul with considerable sadness.  I recognize Paul as a brother; I concur in his judgment that the Judeo-Christian encounter is fraternal.  Regrettably, I cannot pretend that I find fraternity devoid of fratricide.  There has always been a fratricidal element in the meeting of Church and Synagogue.  I find no malice in Paul's identification of the Synagogue as the wayward, unfaithful brother.  Nevertheless, I believe the identifica­tion has had predictable results from which Paul might have shrunk in horror.  Paul's insistence that before God men are divided into collectivities of faithful and perfidious brothers, an insight he had perhaps acquired from his rabbinic teachers and the biblical doctrine of Israel's election, helped to release fratricidal emotions that everntually became regnant in Judeo-Christian relations.

 

The sorry story of Christian violence and Jewish contempt (for Christian violence reinforced the negative opinion Jews had of their brother religion as well as their own sense of chosenness) ultimately derived from the fact that human beings are born incomplete and seek throughout life to replicate the protective enclaves they knew in infancy. Men and women apparently find it difficult ever to leave entirely behind the loves and hatreds of the world of childhood.  Para­doxically, it was Paul's genius that he repressed that world less than did his former peers among the Pharisees.  Where men find no familial relationships, they must apparently create them lest they be stricken with the terrifying sense of their own hopeless solitude in an unfeeling cosmos. They project the image of a Heavenly Father who chooses among brothers as the protective capacities of their earthly fathers diminish in credibility. They turn their fellows into brothers so that they can war over the illusory patrimony of earthly or heavenly progenitors.  In every age they re­peat the tale of Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau and Joseph and his brothers.  Even the sacrificial death of Jesus may contain an element of fratricide.  After all, Paul described him as "the first born of many brothers" who must endure death's perils so that the younger brothers may live.

 

Was Paul's dream of one humanity united in Christ a hopeless illusion?  Not entirely.  Paul maintained that the final end to fra­ternal strife was inseparable from overcoming suffering and mor­tality.  Like most apocalyptic visionaries, Paul's dream was based on a thoroughly realistic assessment of the existential limitations of the world he lived in.  He was, of course, far more optimistic about the imminent abolition of the world of the Old Adam than the evidence of history would seem to justify.  Two thousand years after the Apostle's career, the world of suffering and mortality continues to hold sway.  Furthermore, fraternal strife exists within the "body of Christ" as well as between the Church and other religious communities.  Nevertheless, I believe Paul was correct in believing that fraternal discord would cease when the drama of human history was terminated, when death was overcome, and when God would become "all in all." Before strife and suffering can come to an end, the Old Adam must give way to the new.  Thus Paul was indeed correct in his insight that fratricidal strife would last as long as humanity as we know it endures.