A Jewish Paul

I’m going to give a really brief analogy. Someone recently on social media posted a picture of, you know, those little tacky plaques you can get at craft stores. And it said, “Be sure to lick the bowl.” And it’s sort of like, you know, really enjoy your food. Well, that’s one thing when it’s in the kitchen. This picture was taken right with it sitting on top of the toilet. So the message becomes a very different message, a much more odious message. Disgusting message. And I think that’s not actually really… It’s not bad for thinking about Paul and James. If we get their audiences wrong or we get the location wrong, we’re going to misunderstand them.

Hey, everybody, my name is Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we try to increase the public’s access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and also combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Oh, I’m excited. We got a great guest today. It’s a beautiful day. Life is good.

Yeah. And speaking of that guest, we have with us today a friend of mine, Matthew Thiessen, who is the associate professor of religious studies at McMaster University and oft confused for the Relient K singer. Matthew is the author of, a couple years ago, Jesus and the Forces of Death, a wonderful book. Subtitle is The Gospels’ Portrayal of Ritual Impurity within 1st-century Judaism. But more recently, A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles. And that’s what we’re here to talk about today. How are things going apart from your recent haircut, Matt?

It’s a gorgeous early fall day here in Ontario, so the… The leaves are slowly turning colors and it’s awesome.

Awesome.

Yeah.

I love it. I bet it’s very nice. A little briskness in the air.

Yes, just a little bit. Yep.

All right, well, we’re… We’re gonna get close to that soon. It’s in the mid-60s today here, which is… Which is novel. It’s been in the 80s or the 70s for the last little while.

That’s like, I don’t know, 20 or 11 degrees. I don’t know what that is for you. I don’t know how to translate that to… Yeah, it’s either 112 or 6. It’s hard to know with Centigrade.

Something stone. Right.

Or shorts. I don’t know. I…

All right, well, we’ve had… We’ve asked you here to discuss your new book. It’s fascinating. It’s a super interesting dive into this, this cat Paul, who seems to have been wandering around, saying some stuff, writing epistles left and right. You never know what that guy was going to do. Tell us a little bit about, about your book, about what the impetus was for you to write it, and, and, and, and give us a jumping off point for it.

Yeah, you know, this, this really started about three and a half years ago, right when COVID hit. Our semester here in Canada was ending and I had taken home a whole bunch of books from the library, was going to do a new research project and realized I don’t have any of the right books, couldn’t get into the library to get the books I needed. So I thought, well, I’ve had a couple of people suggest we need a book on Paul that sort of gives a new take on Paul, but that’s accessible to whether it’s undergrads or seminarians or clergy or just lay people who are interested in Paul. And so this really springs out of that time and a couple people making the suggestion that this sort of school that gets called the Paul within Judaism school, trying to make some of the work that these people have done more accessible to a broader audience, talk about that. Beecher: So talk about what that is.

And, and yeah, so pretty much every scholar would say, oh, Paul, Paul was a Jew. And you hear it over and over again, you’ll hear it on social media. And then often what happens is someone will come along and say Paul was a Jew. But then he rejected this and this and this and this and this about Judaism. And it turns out to be sort of all the things, well, frankly, all the things that modern Christians generally reject about ancient Judaism themselves. And so, you know, for instance, a very popular writer, biblical scholar and sort of theologian, Tom Wright, N. T. Wright, frequently says Paul was Jewish. He just radically redefines, you know, circumcision, temple, what it means to be a Jew, etc. Etc. And all you get is sort of 20th or 21st century Anglican Christianity at the end of it. And I, I and others have said, well, that’s convenient, but it sure doesn’t seem historically plausible. And so a number of people already in the 80s really coming out of the work of E. P. Sanders, who used to teach here at McMaster, have tried to rewrite and rethink who Paul was with a sort of firm conviction that he never abandoned Judaism.

And so how do we talk about him? How do we talk about all the things he says in his letters in a more sort of historically plausible and sensitive way?

Now I recall hearing, when I was at Trinity Western University in British Columbia 12, 13 years ago, I recall hearing about the NPP, the New Perspective on Paul. And we actually had N. T. Wright visiting the campus a couple of times. And so I heard from him a little bit, but my focus wasn’t on Paul. Could you possibly talk a little bit about what this new perspective is and what makes it better than the classic perspective on Paul? If it is better than the classic perspective?

Yep. As a fellow grad of Trinity Western, I remember some of that, although I was there a few years earlier than you, Dan. So this new perspective on Paul, this so-called New Perspective on Paul really goes back to the early 80s and it’s coming out of reacting to E. P. Sanders’s work saying Judaism, contrary to so much, especially Protestant theologizing, Judaism wasn’t a religion of works-righteousness. You didn’t have to earn God’s favor, you didn’t have to live a perfect life to be saved or anything else. That Judaism had a very rich, thick understanding of God’s graciousness. And it was sort of a bombshell in Pauline studies in 1977. Well, in the early 80s, a couple of scholars, Tom Wright, who you just mentioned, and James Dunn, sort of leading scholars, said, okay, if Judaism wasn’t a religion of works-righteousness, well what was Paul’s problem with it? And their answer was, and a few others have joined, many others have joined this sort of school of reading Paul.

They argued that while it wasn’t about works-righteousness, it was that Jews were—early or ancient Jews were—ethnocentric and particularistic. And so the problem with—for Paul, the problem with Judaism wasn’t they thought you had to earn your salvation, it was that they were ethnocentric and thought Jews and Jews only were God’s people. And so if you wanted to be saved, you had to be a Jew. And their take on Paul was that Paul came to realize this ethnocentricity and particularism was bad. God is the God of the universe. Something that apparently Jews hadn’t noticed before in this take. And so he is now preaching a message of universalism for Jews and non-Jews. And it’s apart from these sort of the ethnic specificities of the Jewish law like circumcision, Sabbath, dietary laws and so on. On the one hand it’s great, you’re no longer talking about Judaism as this arrogant religion or group of arrogant and misled people who think they are perfect or can be perfect and are doing it. or can be perfect and are doing it.

But on the other hand, it’s also very insidious in its way, and I think much more insidious given our current cultural values. Ethnocentrism and particularism are bad. We talk this way. And so to code Judaism as this very big bad thing now is no better and arguably potentially worse than the sort of old, what’s been called the Lutheran reading of Paul. And so, and I should say they’re both structured very similarly. There has to be something wrong with Judaism and Paul solves it. Paul fixes it. And the Paul within Judaism school would say very strongly that Paul didn’t see anything wrong with Judaism. So there’s a structural difference there between those schools and the Paul within Judaism school.

Now, in your book, one of the things you talk about pretty early on is that Paul is very difficult to interpret. And you bring up a great point that actually resonates with some of the work that I do within cognitive linguistics, where you talk about the fact that, let’s see, words on the papyrus place constraints on readers, but they are weak and loose constraints. Interpretive possibilities are not infinite, but they are also not singular. And the way I kind of put a very similar idea is that we have to negotiate with the text. We are not able to just access the pristine, unadulterated truth or data. We are kind of constructing the meaning ourselves. And frequently we read some of ourselves into this construction. And so it strikes me that a lot of these ideas about Paul are primarily serving the interests of Christian scholars today who are trying to make Paul fit the way they see the world and their relationship to Judaism and the Scriptures.

Is that something you— Is that something you’d agree with totally?

No. No one sits—I mean, not no one, almost no one sits down with Paul’s letters because they think they’re a good time. Most of us come with some sort of, you know, whether it’s theological engagement or interest or ecumenical interests. Sometimes it’s—it’s antiquarian or merely antiquarian. And that’s fine. All of that’s great. It’s important to know what you’re coming with and why you’re coming. I think that’s really important. And like you say, we’re trying to—we’re trying to sort of provide coherence to these letters. These are not—even if they’re not a systematic theology, they’re nothing—you know, “Here’s Paul’s mind. Boom.” It’s these seven to, well, 13 letters he wrote in very specific situations. And we’re trying to give sort of a larger coherence to them and how we do that, you know, there are multiple ways to do it. How we do it sort of tells a little bit about what we’re up to and who we are, I think.

Give some examples, if you will, of some of the ways that people have traditionally looked at Paul and maybe some of the ways that you’d like that to sort of be redone, or ways that you enjoy seeing Paul read, that might run afoul of sort of more traditional readings. Is that fair? Is that a fair— I don’t even know if that’s a fair question to ask. I’m the non-scholar in the room, so I’m just—

And I want to give it its due. So I don’t just want to rush an answer. I want to think a bit about it. But yeah, you know, so part of it is we do—we come with our own interests, we come with our own questions. And I think one of the first things we have to do is say Paul isn’t writing to answer our questions. Just not. He wrote 2,000 years ago.rs ago. And I have my doubts that he could ever have imagined that 2,000 years later, some three guys are talking on a podcast about his letters in North America. Right. There’s no chance he could think that far ahead and that far out. And so that sort of. It takes humility to realize he’s not centering us. So if we have questions, great, but we have to first wrestle with Paul in his world. And so, you know, Catholic-Protestant debates about the precise role of works in salvation, for instance, that’s a very important question for Protestants and Catholics.

Nothing wrong with asking that. But knowing that’s not where Paul’s—like, that is not the heart of Paul’s thinking, actually, that’s not the heart of his letters. And so backing up and first asking, okay, what can we know? Why is Paul writing this here? To, like, these people in Galatia, it is really important. And I think the other key thing, and this goes in tandem. There’s a really great New Testament article by Nils Dahl, this Scandinavian scholar, about the problem of particularity in Paul’s letters. As soon as they become scripture, they’re universal, they’re for everybody, but they weren’t for everybody. And so there’s a gap that needs to be left there in the sort of hermeneutical process of trying to use Paul’s letters for theology as soon as they’re outside of the sort of initial communities they were written to. And I think one thing that is really important to remember is the ethnic specificity of the addressees of this letter.

So everybody wants to say these are for people all across the world, everywhere in all time. Well, okay, that’s maybe how they function as Christian scripture and as a canon. But these were also letters written to very specific people almost always and almost exclusively, if not exclusively, to non-Jewish readers. And that’s, I think, one of the really important components to this Paul within Judaism perspective is that Paul’s a Jew, but he’s writing to non-Jews almost exclusively, if not exclusively, and trying to navigate this thoroughly Jewish message to non-Jewish audiences. And that’s. That takes a lot of work to pick that apart for what that means.

Would you say. You mentioned earlier that we’re trying to kind of impose a coherence on this corpus, but do you think even that is perhaps a little misguided? If these are texts that are being written to different groups for different reasons, responding to different circumstances, and also written at different time periods in Paul’s life, would you say even that kind of misses the mark a little bit?

It could. You know, I’m. I’m. I think I’m maybe more optimistic than others that there’s still something that can be done here.

Yeah.

And I tried to do that in the book to some degree. Right. I haven’t given up Paul’s mind from A to Z.

Right.

But I’m trying to give some of it, and I’m, I think, picking from different levels.

Sanders did that, didn’t he?

Yeah.

With Paul and his life and all that kind of stuff.

Right. So I think. I don’t want to say we shouldn’t try to do it, but there has to be so much care taken in doing it and knowing you’re always trying to do something that the texts themselves are sort of resistant to.

Yeah. And I want to bring up one potential example of this, something that I think is interesting. We had our mutual friend David Burnett on the show a little bit ago, talk about resurrection.rrection. You have a chapter in here where you talk about resurrection, and I think an important qualification of how we think about Paul’s notion of resurrection, where you talk about the difference between… Well, in the text, it talks about different types of bodies, and you make an important point about the kind of philosophical frameworks that were in circulation at the time regarding the difference between a body of flesh and blood and a body of spirit or pneuma. Can you talk a little bit about what people might not understand about the way Paul is distinguishing these different types of bodies?

Yeah, yeah. This is one of those things again, where you sort of pick up an ancient text and you don’t realize that you don’t know what you don’t know or you’re bringing in your own understanding. So Paul talks about stars in 1 Corinthians 15 , this resurrection chapter. Well, we bring our modern conceptions of stars, not ancient conceptions of stars, to the text. And the same goes with the word spirit that you used, the English translation for the Greek pneuma. When we think spirit, I think almost all of us, if not all of us, think something non-material, non-physical.

A ghost.

Yeah.

I mean, I think this raises questions of what are—for those people who conceptualize and think about ghosts—what are these things?

Right?

Are they non-material? Like, air is material. So I think it gets into some of this. And ancient people thought about spirit generally in materialistic terms. And so we already hear from Aristotle on a discussion of not just the four traditional elements we hear about in ancient science—air, fire, earth, and water—but you hear about a fifth element, aether. And it’s this celestial, heavenly element. And it is perfect, it’s the best. It doesn’t corrupt, it doesn’t decay. Unlike all the other ones. It’s just perfect. And Aristotle and then later the Stoics frequently seem to equate or connect very closely, at least, aether to pneuma, spirit. And so, you know, when they say things like God is pneuma, which they do, they’re not saying God is this non-material being out there.

They’re saying God is this perfect material that’s out there and it permeates the entire cosmos because God is just everywhere. And so, you know, when we hear about spiritual bodies and flesh and blood bodies, we think it’s easy to think material versus non-material. And I don’t think Paul thinks that way. Both are material bodies, but only one is the kind of body you want to have if you get to heaven. Otherwise you’re the equivalent of a fish out of water and you’re going to die. Your body’s not going to be able to sort of bear the systemic pressures of this new ecosystem.

That’s probably one of the more famous parts of the Pauline epistles for folks who approach the text as authoritative, as scriptural. 1 Corinthians, particularly 1 Corinthians 15 , a lot of discussion of the body stuff, but this is focused on resurrection. This is one of Paul’s big points in 1 Corinthians 15 . And you’ve got a chapter on resurrection as the culmination of the Messiah’s coming, which sounds like a fairly different take on resurrection from how most people think about it today. Could you talk us through how resurrection represents the culmination of the Messiah’s coming?

Yeah, so let me try to answer that a couple different ways. You know, I think in—I guess I can speak mostly to Protestant theologizing here—in Protestant readings of Paul, which I think are the predominant ones, because Paul’s like the central…

Saint of the quintessential Protestant.’s theology and Protestant theology are really justification by faith.

And, and this atonement view of Jesus dying on the cross for one’s sins. And so that in, in that system, the culmination of the Messiah’s coming is really his death. That’s where these sins that have alienated people from God get paid off and everything’s good. And it’s not like that’s not in Paul. But even in 1 Corinthians 15 , Paul claims actually you’re, you’re still dead in your sins unless something else happens. It’s actually resurrection. That’s for Paul, the culmination of the Messiah’s coming. The death is necessary, but it’s insufficient to do the sort of salvific work that Paul thinks needs to get done. And so, I mean, I think you see it in Romans 4 as well that that justification gets closely connected not to, not to Jesus’s death, but to his resurrection. And so there’s sort of an odd, not that Protestants reject Jesus’s resurrection as a rule, they don’t. But I think there’s a very different emphasis in Paul than there is in a lot of more contemporary theology.

And so I think that’s really important when talking about Paul to think of it that way. And then of course there’s just this like really weird thing in Paul that the Messiah gets raised from the dead and nobody else does. And that’s just unexpected. And so Paul is, you know, and he thinks it’s coming very soon quite clearly. And this is, you know, maybe a little bit embarrassing, but Paul thinks, okay, there’s some sort of weird gap between the Messiah’s resurrection and the resurrection of those in the Messiah. But it’s going to happen. It’s going to happen very soon. And you can even see in 1 Corinthians 15 , Paul thinks some of the people he’s writing to and possibly himself are going to be pulled up into this resurrection narrative even before they die. So this, this is this, you know, Paul still viewing the Messiah’s coming as not just paying off for sins, but also dealing with a mortality problem and bringing humanity out of the vice grip of death.

And it seems like a lot of Paul’s writings, there’s kind of an urgency. For instance, he talks about how a rule that he sets down in every single congregation is whatever state you were in when God called you, stay in that state. If you’re unmarried, don’t get married. If you’re married, don’t get divorced. If you don’t have kids, don’t have kids. If you’re a slave, unless you can buy your freedom or something like that, stay a slave. The expectation is that this is imminent, this is going to happen really, really soon. Do you think this changes? Well, do you think that this urgency has a lot to do with the way Paul is structuring his ethics, how he’s doing things? Because he’s expecting this to be like, you know, we don’t have a whole 2000 years of Christianity saying, hey, everybody, don’t have kids if you don’t already have kids. I mean, that kind of counsel is something that works, you know, in a very short time period, but not in a long time period.

Have we, have we misread a lot of Paul because we’re not seeing him checking his watch, going, okay, any day now, everybody be ready.

Yeah. So either we’ve misread—well, I think, I think we have misread him. And it’s either we misread him by sort of domesticating him. And so we sort of avoid those ethical components in Paul or those claims that we don’t like that don’t quite match, don’t fit, or a little bit embarrassing, whatever. So there is some of that going on. And I think, you know, knowing the, the urgency for him, he’s not trying to set up the church as, you know, people think about it now. not trying to set—he’s not a community organizer in any real sense of the term, or at least not—it’s more like we’ve had a massive catastrophe or something massive has happened. We’re responding to that right now. But this isn’t about sort of, you know, city bylaws he’s trying to put down for the next hundred years. He thinks this is over. And so it’s, it’s. Let’s. What do we do in the meantime? And we’re not going to think too much beyond that because we’re not going to have to think beyond that.

Do you think that the Pastoral Epistles give people an excuse to reread those, those other passages as… …as kind of writing a constitution, setting a foundation for a church that is going to extend far into the future?

And before you answer that, maybe talk a bit about what the Pastoral Epistles are as opposed to the— Because, you know, some of us don’t know all of the— That’s all these things.

That is a. That’s a good reminder. You don’t all spend your lives reading Paul. What do you do with your free time, people?

Right.

Yeah. So the Pastoral Epistles are First and Second Timothy and Titus. And I would say the majority of— Well, the majority of critical scholars on Paul would argue Paul didn’t write these letters. They’re written by a later hand in, in Paul’s name, which was a very common practice in antiquity. And in Christian antiquity, Christians accuse each other of doing this. It’s clear it was happening. And Bart Ehrman has a really good book called Forged on it, on this, this phenomenon. And so I, like most critical scholars would say Paul didn’t write these letters. They’re later. And I think, you know, the further you get out from Paul, but you even see it in Paul as his. If, if we can, you know, he doesn’t give us the dates. They’re not, they’re not postmarked, unfortunately. But it seems like. Seems like the further you get out from Paul’s earliest letters, the more you see efforts to sort of A, explain this delay in Jesus’s return and B, maybe start backfilling in some.

Okay, let me give some more guidelines now. And so the Pastoral Epistles give a much more structured account of what, you know, church life ought to look like and what church leadership ought to look like. If the world’s going to end very soon, you don’t need a whole lot of structure, but the longer it goes on, you need more structure. And you begin seeing that in the, in the Pastoral Epistles. And then obviously later, Christian literature, Harold.

Camping can identify with that.

Well, I don’t know if y’all remember, but yesterday was supposed to be the Rapture.

Oh, that’s right. That’s right.

This is being recorded on September 21 and for the last few weeks because of signs in the heavens, so to speak. There, there have been claims that the Rapture was going to take place.

Very disappointing that it didn’t happen. Very, very frustrating.

Who could have, who could have seen this?

There have been, there have been so many great disappointments throughout, throughout the centuries. But it does seem that Paul kind of paved the way on that particular front.

Yeah. And I mean, I think you already have comments in the Gospels, the Synoptic Gospels, that, that go back to Jesus, most likely about, you know, this generation will not pass away.way. So you get these claims and I think there was this really heightened apocalyptic sense that the end is near and that, you know, the world will be transformed and it’s going to be phenomenal. And then whatever happens, it’s certainly not phenomenal. This isn’t hitting the front page of the Roman Times, what’s going on. And so then there’s this anxiety around an effort to theologize why it hasn’t happened yet.

Yeah. I wanted to talk a little bit about the Gentile problem, which you also address here. And I think a wonderful way to approach it is your discussion of Romans 1 , which is something that I deal in my public scholarship a lot with, particularly Romans 1:26 and 27. But you talk a little more broadly about what Paul is doing with this vice list and with what he is saying about the Gentiles. Can you talk a little bit about how that fits into the Gentile problem as you understand it?

Yeah. So if you open up a Bible to Romans 1:18 through 32, almost always you’re gonna see the sinfulness of humanity or something like that, the wickedness of people. And it’s very generic. This thing, this passage codes so clearly to anybody who knows 1st century Jewish literature, codes so clearly as actually addressed or not addressed to, but describing the non-Jewish world.

Oh, wow.

We see things very similar to this, especially in the Wisdom of Solomon, but other texts as well, that the problem with the non-Jewish world is that these are people who abandoned God. And because they abandoned God, God has now handed them over into ever-increasing, well, sin or vice. And so there’s this cyclical pattern that keeps happening in Romans 1:18-32 .

If I can interrupt real briefly, I think it’s interesting to note that the word there, “God handed them over,” this is the same verb that’s used to refer to Judas handing over Jesus. And I think it kind of gestures in the direction of this idea that there is kind of a governor or a limiter placed on human behavior and desire and that God kind of curates that limit. And then here God is just saying, all right, I’m pulling the chocks out and y’all are just going to run wild. And a lot of what Paul is talking about is the Gentiles don’t worship God appropriately. Therefore God is allowing them to just overflow and bubble over in all that they’re doing wrong. And what he’s listing is this is how far gone those people are.

That’s right. Yeah. It’s very similar to sort of like consequence-based parenting. And the whole point is, if you worship dead idols, guess what happens to you? You become what you worship. And so you’re going to become dead and you’re going to become morally and sort of intellectually dead doing dead things. And so it’s, it’s—so this is, I think, really important for a couple of reasons. One, you get so much rejection that this is about Gentiles. And I think partly because it’s ethnic stereotyping. And we all know that’s bad.

Yeah.

And the New Perspective would say, well, that’s what Jews do. Paul would reject that. Well, Paul’s doing it in Romans 1 .

Yeah.

And so, you know, there’s sort of a backlash against wanting to see Paul do this because it’s not—we know it’s not nice behavior, but Paul’s doing it. But he’s doing it to set up the situation of, look, your Gentile situation. He’s writing to Gentiles in Rome. And he says it over and over in Romans, especially Romans 1 and Romans 15 . …atthew Thiessen: And the whole point is to sort of set up this, like, stark, you guys are in deep trouble. The problem is so severe that you think applying the Jewish law to your Gentile problem is going to solve it. You’re nuts. It’s a banana solution. It doesn’t fit. You need something bigger than that. And Paul thinks he’s got that in his gospel about Jesus.

So when you say the subtitle of your book, The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles, you’re suggesting that Paul feels he’s got a special calling.

Yeah.

To act as God’s herald to the Gentiles. Can you talk a little bit about why, why that might be necessary and also what, what Paul thinks the best approach is.

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, we all know Paul gets called the apostle. Right. And it’s, that’s just a transliteration of the Greek apostolos. And so that’s one reason I tried, I tried to avoid some of the sort of Christianese language. And so I went with herald, I wasn’t sure, envoy, herald, whatever, but messenger of some sort on behalf of a sort of political or public figure, the Messiah. Repeatedly Paul says in Romans 1 , Robert. Robert Jewett. Yeah, Robert Jewett has argued that Romans 1 with the first 13 or 14 verses I think are an ambassadorial letter. And they’re sort of… He doesn’t know people, these people in Rome, and he didn’t found this community. And he’s trying to assert his authority. You don’t know me, I don’t know you. You know of me. I’m writing to you. And here’s why. Because God appointed me specifically to non-Jews. And in Galatians he does the same thing. He talks about having the gospel to the foreskin is the actual Greek.

And it’s very clear Paul thinks he’s not supposed to bring the gospel to non… or sorry to his fellow Jews. He’s supposed to bring it to the non-Jewish world. And he’s this, this divinely appointed instrument who can do this. And so that is I think a key, a real interpretive key to unlocking Paul’s letters and the arguments he makes within them.

Now in… You say this is an ambassadorial or at least Jewett does, I believe that’s the Hermeneia commentary on Romans where he says that and then immediately pivots to. You all can’t recognize God in nature even though everybody else can. And you are worshiping the created and not the, the Creator. You are all deserving of death. And an odd choice when, when trying to win over the audience. So what is he? Is he trying to set up folks who are followers of Jesus as already departing from that world? Is he? Or is he trying to say you need to depart from that world?

Yeah, so right. Romans. This is not something Paul’s saying on the street corner. Right. He’s not a street preacher. At least in Romans he may be, it may have been in real life, I don’t know. Although I imagine he was mostly at synagogues. We started there, but he is already speaking to the in-crowd here. And so when he’s talking about Romans 1:18 through 32, these Gentiles have already been shaped, informed to think of themselves as deeply sinful. They’re seeing it and so they’re probably agreeing all the way through but thinking in their heads, well we’re better than that now or we have a different solution.0:34:44.290] Matthew Thiessen: And so part of it is Paul is trying to build common ground. I know it sounds really odd. Hi, I’m the apostle of the Gentiles, you all suck.

But then he’s going to say, it’s okay, the Jewish folks suck too. Yeah, more or less.

Right. So that’s how he gets taken. But he’s really trying to trap especially Gentiles who think there’s a different solution here to our problem. And the solution is if we apply the Jewish law to ourselves, it becomes this liberative thing that gives us now the power, the moral power really, to do the things we weren’t doing before. And Paul is. So this is, I think. And it’s not that they’ve come up with this on their own necessarily. There are other people who’ve taught them this. And we see things like this in some Jewish literature of the time, like Fourth Maccabees. And Philo very much talk about the Jewish law in sort of a disciplinary, educative sort of role that allows you to transcend the, the vices and desires that are natural to flesh and blood humans, which was a very common question in antiquity. And that’s what a lot of philosophical schools addressed. How do you transcend these things to live a virtuous life?

And some Jews at least thought the Jewish law did that for them. And some Jews, Philo for instance, mentions this. Maybe Gentiles who are so vice-ridden if they take the Jewish law, they immediately become virtuous. And so I think this is sort of lurking in the background for Paul. And so when he sees Gentiles who have already believed in Jesus, that he’s the Messiah. And now they’re saying, let’s throw some Jewish law or throw the Jewish law on top of this. That’s where he starts getting very, very upset. Because it seems to suggest in his mind at least that what they’ve received in the Messiah is sort of like the start, but they need to top up or perfect it with the Jewish law. And that’s where he really starts sort of losing, you know, things and starts writing pretty strongly worded letters.

Something that I’ve been thinking about, something that comes up a lot on my own content when I’m talking about, particularly the way that some of the different New Testament authors and biblical authors are maybe disagreeing with each other, is the Epistle of James, which in, in chapter two we have James saying we see, see that, talking about Abraham, we see that a man is justified not by faith, not only by faith, but by works as well. And it seems to me that James is going so far as to quote Paul and more or less refute Paul’s comments in Romans where he says the opposite uses Abraham as an example of how we see that a person is justified by faith alone. Could you talk a little bit about what’s going on here with, with Abraham? And, and do you think James is on the other side of this or, or do you think the two are just sharing the same perspective with different words?

I mean, surely this whole faith slash works thing can’t be that big a deal, right?

See, we’ve gotten to it. We’ve gotten back to this Protestant, Catholic, that well, caricatured Protestant debate. So let me, let me answer this. A few different, a few different angles of this. I, so I definitely think James knows Paul’s argument and I think he’s alluding to it in James 2 . So there’s some pushback there. And it’s a really, really nice example of how difficult Paul was. Well, potentially how difficult Paul was to understand. And even in his own day, it’s possible that James is, is responding to misunderstandings of Paul. It’s possible he disagrees with Paul.. I think at the very least he’s responding to a misunderstanding and maybe, maybe more. I think another really key factor in talking about James versus Paul is again, the audience. And I think my take, at least—I’m not alone, I know it’s not a unanimous agreement among scholars—is that James is actually written to Jewish believers in Jesus.

That would be my take. And so already there’s a difference in audience. In how those words are sort of playing out, even though they’re very similar words, it is really important. I’m going to give a really brief analogy. This isn’t about audience. Someone recently on social media posted a picture of a little, you know, those little tacky plaques you can get at craft stores. And it said, “be sure to lick the bowl.” And it’s sort of like, you know, really enjoy your food. Yeah, well, that’s one thing when it’s in the kitchen. This picture was taken right with it sitting on top of the toilet. So the message becomes a very different message, a much more odious message, a disgusting message. And I think that’s not actually really—it’s not bad for thinking about Paul and James. If we get their audiences wrong or we get the location wrong, we’re going to misunderstand.

That reminds me, if I may interject, somebody wanted to create an AI image and said “Jesus flipping over the tables of the temple.” And the image is Jesus doing a backflip over the tables of the temple. This was a… A reader, a less than informed reader. Didn’t have all the context.

But in fairness, that is a better Jesus. I think we can, we can say just without question that… That… That Cirque du Soleil Jesus is the best of all the Jesuses, a little closer…

To the Buddy Christ that we all know and love.

Yeah.

Sorry I interrupted.

It’s okay. I… I’m… I guess I’m… I’m probably a person who looks more for coherence than one who looks to break things up. And so I’ll acknowledge bias in my own mind. My own take would be that I think James doesn’t disagree with Paul per se, or at least he doesn’t think he does. He’s trying to correct misunderstandings. If you read through Paul and you come away thinking there’s no place for good works, I don’t know what you’ve been reading. There’s tons of places for good works, but I don’t think that’s what Paul’s debate is. And so when he talks about works, he’s really talking especially about the sort of distinctive aspects of the Jewish law that distinguish Jews from non-Jews and that…

Identity markers.

Yeah. And that’s not what James is talking about. So it’s a very different debate than “you’ve got Jesus, now add the Jewish law because Jesus didn’t give you everything you needed,” which is Paul with Gentiles. And James, who seems to be suggesting, you know, you just… If you’re not living righteously—and it’s not, you know, circumcision, Sabbath… Not that those aren’t important, they’re just not on the table. It’s actually how you treat the poor. It’s actually socioeconomic social justice. We would say James is a social justice warrior, and you can yak on about faith all you want, but if you’re not treating the marginalized and oppressed in your world justly and fairly and kindly, your faith is not very good. I was going to say something different.

James says dead.

Yeah, there we go.sen: Dead. That’s a good one.

I wanted to pick on something that Dan said in his comment or in his question earlier, which was about the deployment of Abraham in both of those two arguments, because it occurs to me that using the name of Abraham to a Jewish audience would have had a much different effect than using it on a Gentile audience.

Yeah, yeah. So Paul talks about Abraham in both Galatians and in Romans, and especially in Galatians. It’s clearly in the context of Gentiles who believe in Jesus, who think we need to follow Abraham’s footsteps, specifically as it relates to the rite of circumcision, which is a perfectly intelligent position. Abraham was not a Jew. He was, well, potentially an idol-worshiping non-Jew. And so what did he have to do? Or what did he do? What does Scripture tell us? He believed in God in Genesis 15 and two chapters later he gets circumcised. And so it could easily be used as evidence, okay, Gentiles, you’ve believed in Jesus, your faith is like Abraham’s, but now here’s the next step in Genesis 17 , get circumcised. And so I think that’s what’s happening from Paul’s opponents or competition or whatever it is in the background in Galatia.

And Paul is adamant in saying, oh, you’re right, Abraham, we have to follow Abraham, but you’re doing it wrongly. And so there he makes a really dense argument in Galatians 3 and 4. It’s very complicated, but it’s also very interesting because he doesn’t say you don’t need Abraham as your father. He actually says, yeah, you need to have Abraham as your father because God made a whole series of promises to Abraham and to his seed. And if you want those promises, you have to become Abrahamic seed and Abrahamic sons to inherit them. And so there’s a very, again, ethnocentric, if we want to use that word, I think it’s a dangerous word to use, but I don’t mind using it. About Paul, there’s an ethnocentric component that Abraham and descent still matter for Paul and genealogy matter. And so the way that Paul gets, well, creatively gets around it or creatively, you know, thinks through it, is Jesus is Abraham’s seed through David.

And if the Messiah’s pneuma, his spirit, his stuff gets into you and you are placed in the Messiah, then you have also taken on a messianic identity. So you’ve become messianic and you’ve become sons and seed of Abraham too. And not, not in sort of like a wishy-washy spiritual way, the way we mean it, but spiritual in the way the ancients meant it. This pneuma has been inserted into you. I, there’s a chapter where I, I talk about it as pneumatic gene therapy. And so I think in a sense Paul’s really thinking your genealogy, your whole DNA structure has changed radically because the spirit of the Messiah has invaded your body quite, quite physically. And now you’ve got this connection and you get everything, including resurrection.

That’s, that’s interesting. I see some resonances with, with some of my own work on the idea of divine agency as something communicable that is closely tied with how divine images function, that they are able to presence the deity because they have been endowed with some kind of vehicle for divine agency. Usually the name very anciently, but it seems to be kind of a, a take on this. That’s interesting. I think that’s. I’ll have to read that chapter again because I didn’t come away with it thinking about that the first time around. So we’ve talked a lot about a Jewish Paul, Messianism, how he functioned as a herald to the Gentiles. What are you hoping to accomplish with this book? What are the next steps? How do you think, how would you like to see folks respond and react to this?ct to this?

Yeah, so I think there are sort of two basic reactions to Paul. People either love him or they hate him. I mean there are some indifferent people and they’re probably not going to pick this book up. And I don’t hate that you’re not interested, you’re not interested, but you either love him or you hate him. And for the people who hate him, I want them to maybe say, well, let me give him a different try. And maybe the way I’ve been taught to read Paul is what sucks so bad. I’m not saying Paul is without problems. Regardless, I’m not trying to turn him into, you know, a perfect ancient figure who fits beautifully into our world. And for the people who love him, I want to complicate him a bit. But I mean, connecting both of those, it’s really Paul gets used so easily in Christian discourse, especially as evidence for sort of anti-Jewish theologizing and supersessionist theology. And you know, Paul’s not here, but I have a feeling he would be, pardon the very bad pun,

he would be appalled at how he gets used. That’s awful. I try not to pun, but there it is. Appalled. How his letters have been used to do things. I think well beyond to say things and also I mean obviously to do things. Christians have harmed Jews for well almost 2,000 years now. And so ultimately, you know, I guess I have the small ambition of changing the world and ridding it of Christian anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism.

So are you hoping to forward the Paul within Judaism school so that it can kind of take responsibility for the implications and the effects of what it’s doing? Presenting a specific idea of Paul, or are you hoping to create a new school the way that Paul created a new religion?

You know, I don’t love the category Paul within Judaism because everybody says Paul is within Judaism, so it’s sort of… it’s a little bit unhelpful. But people within the biblical studies world know what that means generally, and so it’s okay. I’m not trying to create a new school per se, but I’m trying to help create a new group of readers who will do their own things with Paul beyond what sort of feels natural when reading Paul, whether it’s sort of a Lutheran reading or the New Perspective reading. And I think once you get stuck in those ways of reading, it’s really hard to get out. And maybe, maybe a book like this will get to people earlier before they’re too embedded in those interpretive paths.

Yeah, and it’s easy to get embedded into them when they’re so central to your social identity and when they’re so helpful in structuring values and power.

Exactly.

And I see a lot of resonances between this book and your previous book, Jesus and the Forces of Death, particularly in the way you suggest there that it’s common to think of Jesus as coming to overturn all these ideas about ritual purity and things like that. But… But you offer readings that present Jesus not as overturning things, but suggesting that the… The frameworks are still the same, but Jesus is there to fulfill or to be the intended solution to the problems that arise within those… Those frameworks. So it strikes me there’s a bit of a trend that we, within Christianity, we have set up Judaism as kind of this foe that Jesus is there to defeat, and even Paul is there to defeat. But we need to rethink that. It’s not so much a revolution as it is just kind of incremental elaborations and innovations on shared themes.

Yep, yep. Yeah. And why do we need… And it says something very bad about Christianity.bout Christianity, I think, if we need Judaism as a foil or anything as a foil—and of course, foils, they’re caricatures. So as soon as we have to caricature something in very negative terms, what does that actually say about how attractive or positive or beneficial what Christians hold to is? If it’s only good in light of something very, very bad? I think that’s sort of a rhetorical problem there, but it’s much deeper than that.

Yeah. I think we all kind of understand ourselves and define ourselves in terms of others. I think that’s inescapable as the social creatures that we are. But I think when we dig down and say, “All I’m going to do is define myself as not the other,” or by suggesting that the other is all wrong and I’m here to correct that, I think that creates a pretty stagnant identity and a pretty stagnant approach. So here’s to hoping that these ideas gain some purchase and that we have some more serious and some more kind of public-facing discussions on this. I think this is a remedy to a lot of the supersessionism that arises from Christianity. I think, treating itself, thinking about itself in very ethnocentric terms—if we can think of it as an ethnos, which is stretching things a little bit.

Well, Matt Thiessen, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. Tell us, where can people find your book? Where can people find your scholarship?

Yeah.

Guide us to you.

Yeah. The, you know, Baker Academic is the publisher of my last two books, but everything’s on Amazon or wherever, you know, books of whatever quality are sold. And I’m on social media. I’m primarily still on Twitter, which is where I spend half my day now. That’ll change in the future. But for now, I’m still on Twitter, if anybody looks for random silly comments during the day.

Love it. Yeah, love it. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. Friends at home, thank you for joining us as well. If you’d like to become a part of how we make this show go, you can become a patron. You can also get an ad-free version of every show by finding us on patreon.com/dataoverdogma. If you’d like to contact us, you can write into us at contact@dataoverdogmapod.com. This is an Airwave Media podcast. Goodbye, everybody.

Bye, everybody.