© 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,
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
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
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
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
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
Though the competing sects
possessed irreconcilable differences, they did start out from certain common
assumptions about God’s dealings with
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
Both Paul's fidelity to his
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
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
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
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
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
Similarly, the contrast
between the Jerusalem Christians and Paul has probably been overdrawn.[21]
Paul was insistent upon his independence from the
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
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
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
Perhaps the hest way to
describe the attitude shared by Paul and the
Paul could not have
maintained relatively harmonious relations with the
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.
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
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
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
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
"
It is evident from the text
that Paul feared for his own safety in
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
According to both Munck and Nickle, Paul saw
his arrival in
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
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
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
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 "
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
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"
Paul's picture is clear. The
"old"
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
This unfortunate, but almost
inevitable, interpretation of Judaism is a direct consequence of Paul's insistence
that the Church is the true
In fairness to Paul, I must
repeat that there was no special malice involved in his critique. When, for example, Paul likened
However, Paul's insistence
that the "old"
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
[1] Günther Bornkamm, Paul, trans. D. M. G. Stalker (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).
[2]
See Markus Barth, “Was Paul an Anti-Semite?” Journal of Ecumenical Studies, 5
(1968) and Krister Stendahl,
“Judaism and Christianity,”
[3] See Peter Herger, The Sacred Canopy (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1969), pp. 3-51 for this insight.
[4] See I Thessaloniaans 2:14-16.
[5]
See Richard L. Rubenstein, After
[6] I Cor. 1: 18-29.
[7] See I Cor.1:18-28.
[8] The classic rabbinic tradition is the story of how R. Eliezer tried to validate his opinion in a discussion with R. Joshua by invoking a heavenly voiced (bat qol). The heavenly voice did indeed declare that the Law (Halakhah) is in accord with the opinion of R. Eliezer, but R. Joshua rejected this opinion, declaring, “It is not in heaven.” (Deut. 30:12). R. Jeremiah, who flourished two generations later, interpreted R. Joshua’s position: “The Law was given to us from Sinai. [Since then] we pay no attention to heavenly voices…” Baba Mezia, 59b.
[9]
There was a tradition that after the death of Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi,
“the Holy Spirit ceased from
[10] II Cor. 3:5, 6, (italics added).
[11] II Cor. 3:7-11, (italics added).
[12] II Cor. 3:13-15.
[13] See I Cor. 7:18-22.
[14] II Cor. 11:24.
[15] I Cor. 9:20.
[16] See Johannes Munck, Paul and the Salvation of Mankind (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1959), pp. 247-81.
[17] See Munck, op. cit., pp. 252f.
[18] This problem has been discussed by Munck , op. cit., pp. 69-86. He has shown that under the leadership of Ferdinand Christian Baur, the Tübingen school’s hypothesis dominated the interpretation of Paul’s relations with the JerusalemChurch and his own people.
[19] This view has been challenged by John Bligh, who believes that the tradition that Peter was instructed by God in the vision of the sail cloth to eat without regard to the Jewish dietary laws (Acts 10:9-16) is misplaced. According to Bligh, Paul rather than Peter had the vision. Bligh stressed the antagonism between Peter and Paul, but at the expense of the integrity of the received text. John Bligh, Galatians (London: St. Paul Publications, 1969), pp. 104-6.
[20] See I Cor. 1: 12ff.
[21] This is, of course, Munck’s thesis which I accept. For a persuasive argument against Munck, see Bligh, op. cit., pp. 31ff.
[22] In Acts 15 the Apostolic Council ruled that all that was necessary for Gentile converts was to abstain from anything polluted by idols, from fornication, from the meat of strangled animals and from blood” (Acts 15:20). In Galatians the agreement that Paul had been commissioned to preach to the “uncircumcised” and Peter to the “circumcised” is stressed. Nevertheless, the fact that the two accounts differ does not mean that there were two meetings. See Bligh, op. cit., pp. 144ff. Munck saw the accounts as “in agreement in essential details in The Acts of Apostles, rev. William P. Albright and C.S. Mann (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co. 1967), p. lxviii.
[23] Munck, op. cit., pp. 88-134.
[24] See W. D. Davies, “A New View of Paul-J. Munck, ‘Paulus und Heilsgeschicte’” in Davies, Christian Origins and Judaism: A Collection of New Testament Studies (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1962); Bligh, op. cit., pp. 32ff. Walter Schmithals, Paul and James, trans. Dorothy M. Barton (London: SCM Press, 1965), pp. 13-15 See also Rudolph Bultmann, “Eine Neues Paulus Verständnis?”, Theologische Literaturzeitung, 84 (Leipzig: 1959).
[25] Schmithals, op. cit., pp. 38-62.
[26] I Cor. 7:18-20.
[27] See Acts 9:15f.; 22:14f.; 26:16-18.
[28] Johannes Munck, Christ and Israel, An Interpretation of Romans 9-11, trans. Ingeborg Nixon (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967), pp. 116-43.
[29] See Acts 9:22-25, 29; 13:50; 14:2, 4-6, 19; 17:5-10; 18:4, 6; 18:12-17; 19:8-9; 20:18-35.
[30]
For example, the Dead Sea Scroll community was convinced that it alone
constituted “the Children of Light.” All the rest of
[31]
See II Cor. 8:1-9:1 5; I Cor.
16: 1;
[32] Johannes Munck, Christ and Israel, p. 11; Keith Nickle, The Collection: A Study in Paul’s Strategy (London: SCM Press, 1966).
[33] Davies, op. cit., p. 259.
[34]
Gal. 1: 1; 1: I 1; see I Cor. 1: 1; 11 Cor. 1: 1;
[35]
See Sidney Tarachow, “
[36] Baba Mezia, 33a.
[37] See Davies, op. cit., pp.177ff.
[38] See C. K. Barrett, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), pp. 180, 194.
[39] Barrett, op. cit., p. 213.
[40]
Munck, Paul and the Salvation of Mankind, p. 300; Christ and
[41]
See C. G. Montefiore and H. Loewe,
A
[42] See Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (New York: Random House, 1966), pp. 20f.
[43] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951), pp. 221-66.
[44]
See II Cor. 5:8ff.; 12:10f.; Phil.
[45] Richard L. Rubenstein, My Brother Paul (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).