Paul's Three Paths to Salvation

Gabriele Boccaccini

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780802839213
• eBook ISBN: 9781467459280
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

"We no longer need to separate Paul from Judaism in order to claim his Christianness," writes Gabriele Boccaccini, "nor do we need to separate him from the early Jesus movement in order to state his Jewishness." With this guiding principle Boccaccini unpacks the implications of Paul's belonging simultaneously to Judaism and Christianity to arrive at the surprising and provocative conclusion that there are in fact  three paths to salvation: 

1. For Jews, adherence to Torah.
2. For gentiles, good works according to conscience and natural law.
3. For all sinners, forgiveness through faith in Jesus Christ.

Paul's Three Paths to Salvation is an attempt to reconcile the many facets of Paul's complex identity while reclaiming him from accusations of intolerance. Boccaccini's work in reestablishing Paul as a messenger of God's mercy to sinners is an important contribution to the ongoing conversation about Paul's place in the contemporary pluralistic world.

Chapter 1

Paul the Jew and Paul the Christian

Paul the Hatred Hater

In an age of resurgent religious intolerance, Jews, Christians, and Muslims are challenged to prove that monotheistic religions are not intrinsically intolerant and exclusive but are indeed capable of inspiring and uniting people of goodwill in peace and coexistence. Centuries of conflicts demonstrate that this has not always been the case. Made aware of the problem by their own experience as victims and perpetrators of violence, the children of Abraham are compelled to examine themselves and face their own evil and the roots of hatred and intolerance lurking in their own religious traditions and beliefs.¹

It is only a matter of intellectual honesty to admit that on the road to interfaith dialogue and mutual respect, Paul of Tarsus looks more like an obstacle than a facilitator. Born a Jew, he became a Christian, making manifest with his own conversion and teaching that all unbelievers (or believers in other religions) are doomed unless they also convert and submit themselves to the Christian messiah in the same way he did. Among those condemned by their guilty unbelief are his fellow Jews, once the chosen people of God but now deprived of all dignity, since the new covenant in Christ superseded and made obsolete the old covenant with Moses. At least, this is what we are commonly told.

To be sure, Paul in his letters never spoke the language of hatred, nor “followed the modern fundamentalist tactic of first convincing people that they were sinners and in need of salvation.”² At the center of Paul’s preaching was a message of inclusiveness and salvation—the good news of the grace of God revealed in Christ, the “message of reconciliation” given to the world (2 Cor 5:19). Acknowledging Paul’s goodwill, however, doesn’t exonerate him from the hateful consequences of his message or from building an impenetrable wall of intolerance between believers and unbelievers. Everybody (Jew and gentile, male and female, free and slave) is called and welcomed, but there is only one path to salvation in Christ for converts.

Should we then accept the paradox of a message of grace that generated hatred and a message of inclusion that generated exclusion? Or should we deny Paul and expose him as a champion of intolerance—the “genius of hatred,” as Friedrich Nietzsche denounced him,³ or to put it in more colorful contemporaneous vocabulary, “a racist, chauvinist jerk”?⁴ Should we hate the hater? Or should we just forget Paul and choose a more tolerant path in spite of him? Or should we pursue with renewed commitment the task of recovering his authentic message, test it with the fire of modern criticism, and see if it can be redeemed from a long tradition of intolerance?

Paul against Judaism

In the context of first-century Judaism, Paul’s figure appears to be among the most enigmatic and difficult to grasp. A halo of mystery, if not the curse of an ancient taboo, still hovers around him, making a firm understanding of his experience difficult. Already in 2 Peter we are warned that in the letters of Paul “there are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction” (2 Pet 3:16). In hindsight it looks more like a prophecy than a warning.

On Paul weighs not only the cumbersome reputation of being the first great systematic theologian of nascent Christianity, but also the suspicion—if not the accusation—of having laid the foundations of a poisonous polemic against the torah and the people of Israel, a harbinger of prejudice, intolerance, and discrimination, up to the tragedy of the Holocaust.

It can’t be easily overlooked that for centuries Paul has been praised by Christians, and blamed by Jews, for separating Christianity from Judaism. “None has produced more animosity between Jews and Christians…. Paul has long been regarded as the source for Christian hatred of Jews and Judaism…. [He] turned his back on his former life as a Jew and became the spokesman for early Christian anti-Judaism.”⁵ Paul appeared to Christians as a theological giant, the convert who unmasked and denounced the futility and weakness (if not the wickedness) of Judaism, but to Jews as a traitor who made a mockery of the faith of his ancestors and became the father of Christian anti-Semitism.⁶

According to the traditional view, Judaism, the (bad) religion of works, was the antithesis of Christianity, the (good) religion of grace. Many aspects of Paul’s thought might be rooted in Judaism, but ultimately Paul rejected Judaism because of its many faults.⁷

There were two elements that Paul found especially wrong in Judaism—its legalism and its particularism. For early twentieth-century New Testament scholars, whose knowledge of Judaism was mediated by the works of Ferdinand Wilhelm Weber and Wilhelm Bousset,⁸ it could not have been otherwise. In order to affirm the grace of Christianity, Paul had to denounce Judaism as a legalistic religion—faith could shine only by rejecting works. And in order to affirm his universalistic project, Paul had to fight against Jewish particularism—his teaching represented a decisive transition from religious particularism to religious universalism.

Early Jewish interpreters were puzzled by the weight of Jewish elements in Paul’s thought but nonetheless generally accepted the Christian idea that Paul rejected the torah and abolished the distinction between Jews and gentiles, which from the Jewish point of view made him a renegade and apostate.⁹

The rediscovery of the Jewishness of Jesus, which since the end of the nineteenth century engaged Jewish and Christian scholars in a joint effort, contributed to further digging the furrow. The more the figure of the Master proved to be compatible with the spirit and the practices of Judaism, the more his most famous disciple appeared to be a divisive man, the founder of a religion incompatible with Judaism. “Jesus, yes; Paul, never!” is how Richard Rubenstein in My Brother Paul (1972) summarized the Jewish attitude toward Paul.¹⁰ Already in the tenth century, the Karaite leader Yaqub al Qirqisani opposed Jesus to Paul, the unjustly persecuted Jewish teacher to his unfaithful disciple, whom he considered the authentic creator of Christianity.¹¹ The idea has remained popular in Jewish circles up to the present, still offered as a viable scholarly thesis in the 1980s by Hyam Maccoby.¹²

Early Criticism of the Traditional Paul

Yet there’s something not quite right about this view of Paul. Among the leaders of the early Jesus movement, Paul was the one who most strongly claimed his Jewishness against his opponents (“Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they descendants of Abraham? So am I,” 2 Cor 11:22), defended the irrevocability of the divine promises (“Has God rejected his people? By no means!” Rom 11:1), and most readily reiterated the privileges of Israel in the face of the zeal of the new converts among the gentiles (“You, a wild olive shoot … do not boast over the branches…. Remember that it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you,” Rom 11:17–18).

As a result, the traditional view of Paul has never been without its critics. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish specialists in rabbinic Judaism and New Testament, such as Solomon Schechter and Claude G. Montefiore, repeated in their work that Judaism hardly fits the features of legalism and hatred of the world that Christian scholars like Weber and Bousset identified as its major (and timeless) features.¹³ According to Montefiore, Paul might have been right in his criticism of what he knew as Judaism, but he was a Hellenistic Jew who had only a limited and distorted knowledge of mainstream (rabbinic) Judaism.

William Wrede and Albert Schweitzer took a different direction to recover the Jewishness of Paul.¹⁴ They found little continuity between Paul and Hellenism. In their view, Paul was an apocalyptic Jew who “expected his Christ to vanquish the evil powers of the world, including the demons, and to inaugurate a new condition of things.”¹⁵ Montefiore and Schweitzer were outspoken in denouncing the bias (and anti-Semitism) of many of their colleagues, and so were George Foot Moore in 1921 in the United States and James Parkes in 1936 in England.¹⁶ However, any call to change the terms of the conversation remained unanswered. In an era of rampant anti-Semitism, Christian anti-Judaism fed, and was fueled by, popular prejudice against Judaism. Anyone who emphasized Paul’s Jewishness, the value of Judaism, and the debt of early Christianity to Second Temple Jewish culture and religion was and remained an isolated voice. Pauline scholars and Second Temple specialists were then on the same page, in perfect agreement in describing Judaism in the age of Jesus as Spätjudentum (“late Judaism”)—an age of religious decadence after the spiritual heights of biblical prophecy.¹⁷ The Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life,¹⁸ directed by Walter Grundmann between 1939 and 1945, may be disregarded today as an aberration of anti-Semitism, but at the time was viewed by many beyond the boundaries of Nazi Germany as a respectable theological enterprise.¹⁹

The New Perspective on Paul

The war and the Holocaust forced Christians to rethink their relations with the Jews and Judaism. The Jewishness of Jesus immediately became a central point of discussion in the work of Jules Isaac and in the Jewish-Christian agenda defined at Seelisberg.²⁰ At the same time, the rediscovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls was leading specialists in Second Temple Judaism to a new path—a path of vibrant diversity, very different from the stereotypes of the past.

Pauline scholarship remained initially (and surprisingly) unaffected by these changes. The same old clichés about Jewish legalism and particularism were commonly repeated in the 1950s.

The English translation of Rudolf Bultmann’s Theologie des Altes Testament, published in 1951, reiterated the same basic contrast between grace and law:

The contrast between Paul and Judaism consists not merely in his assertion of the present reality of righteousness, but also in a much more decisive thesis—the one which concerns the condition to which God’s acquitting decision is tied. The Jew takes it for granted that this condition is keeping the Law, the accomplishing of “works” prescribed by the Law. In direct contrast to this view Paul’s thesis runs—to consider its negative aspect first: “without works of the Law.” … The negative aspect of Paul’s thesis does not stand alone; a positive statement takes its place beside it: “by, or from, faith.”²¹

And without any consideration of the recent tragedy of the Holocaust, William Barclay reaffirmed the traditional stereotype that the hatred of the world against the Jews only mirrored their own hatred against the world: “Christianity began with one tremendous problem. Clearly the message of Christianity was meant for all men…. But the fact remained that Christianity was cradled in Judaism; and, humanly speaking, no message which was meant for all the world could even have had a more unfortunate cradle. The Jews were involved in a double hatred—the world hated them and they hated the world.”²²

These words by two of the most respected and influential theologians and exegetes of the twentieth century, Bultmann and Barclay, demonstrate that the traditional interpretation of Paul in the works of Weber and Bousset continued far beyond the end of the Second World War. The attitude of Jewish scholars in the 1950...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by David Bentley Hart
• Preface
• 1. Paul the Jew and Paul the Christian
• 2. Paul the Convert Who Never Converted
• 3. Paul the Apocalyptic Jew
• 4. Paul the Messianic Jew
• 5. The Eschatological Gift of Forgiveness
• 6. The Divine Christology of Paul the Jew
• 7. Justified by Faith, Judged by Works
• 8. Paul the Apostle to the Lost Sheep among the Nations
• 9. Paul the Herald of God’s Mercy toward Sinners
• Bibliography