(PDF) Paul Without Judaism: Historical Method over Perspective

In honour of Terry Donaldson's fundamental work on Paul, I have here expanded for publication my 2016 T. W. Manson Memorial Lecture in the University of Manchester. Hearty thanks to Prof. emer. George Brooke for hosting me. This is the AAM (author's accepted manuscript) or typescript of the chapter, likely to be in production for a while. As for content: this basically applies some long-developing themes of my research on Roman Judaea and Judaeans to Paul. Paul's relationship with Judaism has been among the most basic questions in research on this important figure in Christian origins. But what if 'Judaism' was not a thing, which he could have had a view of (or been in or out of)? The essay deals first with what it meant to be a Ioudaios, then separately inquires into Paul's relationship with his Judaean heritage, not a religion.

Paul Without Judaism: Historical Method over Perspective1 ‘Looking back on Pauline research in the last decades there is one trend which is generally accepted in international scholarship, namely that Paul is a Jew, and that he must be understood on the background of Judaism and the O.T.’ Johannes Munck 19652 ‘A nomenclature which is thrust upon the past will always end by distorting it, whether by design or simply as a consequence of equating its categories with our own, raised, for the moment, to the level of the eternal. There is no reasonable attitude toward such labels except to eliminate them.’ Marc Bloch 19433 When I left a chair in ancient history to take up a New Testament post (2011), my world changed in many ways. What struck me most about the graduate-student cadre in the new setting was their fascination with ‘the new perspective on Paul’ (hereafter NP). This impressed me, first, because the ‘new’ perspective was older than most of them. Second, it seemed a tiny boat, lashed to the already small ship of Paul’s corpus, for so many researchers. Third, most seemed at least as concerned about alignment with a Paul-guru or theological tradition as with the open-ended project of understanding the historical Paul. This last impression was strengthened during research for an SBL panel on part of N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God (2013). I found the internet heaving with debates about whether Wright’s Paul fit the NP and, more earnestly, whether Wright was sound in relation to a theological standard. Any distinction between Wright’s own theology and that of Wright’s Paul was hard to detect. I could not help thinking: ‘Some of you say I belong to Sanders, some to Dunn, some to Wright, some to Campbell (Douglas or William). What about me, Paul?’ The NP was inaugurated by James Dunn’s 1982 T. W. Manson Memorial Lecture.4 Challenging E. P. Sanders’ then-recent Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977), Dunn argued that Paul’s turn to Christ had to be more intelligible from Jewish-biblical sources than Sanders had suggested (Part IV below). The NP has endured in part because understanding Paul as a scriptural exegete, more or less ‘within Judaism’, catalysed the long-developing, widespread, and multi-faceted evolution of scholarship captured by the quotation from Munck above.5 Once Paul is housed securely within Judaism, the classical assumption that he laid the foundation of a distinctive ‘Christian’ theology crumbles, and a new question about when Christianity and Judaism ‘parted ways’ opens for bids.6 Although studying Paul as a Jewish exegete has been the prevailing direction of scholarship for more than a generation, some scholars have found the NP and its ilk still too encrusted with vestigial church 1 This essay adapts my 2016 T. W. Manson Memorial Lecture in the University of Manchester. I am grateful to my host, Prof. emer. George Brooke, and to the lively if sceptical audience. 2 Johannes Munck, ‘Pauline Research since Schweitzer’, in J. Philip Hyatt, ed., The Bible in Modern Scholarship (Nashville: Abingdon, 1965), 166–177 (174). 3 March Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. P. Putnam (New York: Vintage, 1953 [manuscript ca. 1943]). 4 James D. G. Dunn, ‘The New Perspective on Paul’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library 65 (1983), 95–122. 5 E.g., Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Terence L. Donaldson, Paul and the Gentiles: Remapping the Apostle’s Convictional World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997); N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 2 vols. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013). 6 E.g., Lloyd Gaston, Paul and the Torah (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987); Alan F. Segal, Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Gabriele Boccaccini, Middle Judaism: Jewish Thought 300 BCE to 200 CE (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991); James Dunn, Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways, A.D. 70 to 135 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1992); Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Pamela Eisenbaum, Paul was not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2009). 1 language, in continuing to speak of pre-70 ‘Christianity’, ‘Christians’, ‘churches’, ‘missionaries’, ‘faith/belief’, and the like. They have called for a more ‘radical’ perspective, which begins from the assumption—and happily ends with the conclusion—that Paul lived wholly ‘within Judaism’. They want a new vocabulary that does not traffic in distinctively Christian language, which they view as anachronistic.7 In what follows I do not mean to suggest that, while everyone has been searching for Paul, I have found him: ‘Relax everyone: He is over here!’ Rather, I propose that the normal sense of what it means to study a figure historically seems almost impossible with Paul because the theological stakes are so deeply internalised. E. P. Sanders, my first Paul teacher, was genuinely concerned to understand the historical figure, irrespective of theological consequences. But Jacob Neusner challenged his portrait of Palestinian Judaism for being far too theological,8 whereas Dunn, who thought Sanders’ Judaism about right, found his Paul unhistorical (below). Now the ‘Paul within Judaism’ (PWJ) group finds the NP theological, imagining its own work to be, at last, historical: restoring Paul at long last to his proper firstcentury Jewish setting.9 Notice that ‘historical’ here means accurate in relation to a particular understanding of how things really were. It is easy for scholars of all backgrounds and persuasions to say sincerely that they seek the real Paul, meaning the historical figure. It is more difficult to accept what historical research—into all events, conditions, and personalities—requires. Since Herodotus ‘fathered’ historiē, and again after its revival in the Humboldtian research university, history has meant the open-ended, methodical investigation of problems of the human past.10 Responsible inquiry is its only requirement—not accuracy in relation to pre-conceived images. If we knew the past in advance, after all, we would not need to investigate it. Whatever prestige history has comes from its relentlessly truth-seeking, ever-questioning nature. If we give that up and descend into camps, we forsake history’s aegis. One can only investigate responsibly if one is not invested in conclusions, which must change with new information and insight. As the ancient physician Galen stressed (De sectis), a medical research group committed to its propositions in advance is only a dogmatic hairesis. Likewise with the human past, a programme that exists to elaborate what it already believes about the past cannot do history. Since no one today knows much about the Paul who lived in the first century, the criterion for a ‘historical Paul’ cannot be correspondence with a known image. The historical Paul is the assemblage of low-resolution, tentative images that reside in the minds of historians willing to study him in his ancient contexts, constantly moving between testing interpretations and imagining explanations.11 The long 7 Magnus Zetterholm, ‘Paul within Judaism: The State of the Questions’, in Mark D. Nanos and Magnus Zetterholm, eds., Paul within Judaism: Restoring the First-Century Context to the Apostle (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 34: ‘proponents of … Paul within Judaism perspectives … share the assumption that the traditional perspectives … need to be replaced by a historically more accurate view. … I am quite confident that Christianity will survive a completely Jewish Paul.’ 8 Jacob Neusner, Review of Paul and Palestinian Judaism, History of Religions 18 (1978), 177–91. 9 Mark D. Nanos, ‘Introduction’, 8–9: ‘the prevailing constructions of the apostle have not begun from the most probable historical hypotheses; they have not been approached from the most historiographically grounded sensibilities; they have not been developed around the most historically likely choices….’ The scholars in this volume share a ‘commitment to the quest to understand the historical Paul …, letting the theological chips fall where they may.’ But see the works in nn. 3–4 among dozens of others. 10 E.g., R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, ed. Jan van der Dussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 7–10, 19–20; Bloch, Historian’s Craft, 20, 71, 87; Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1–25. 11 Terence L. Donaldson, Jews and Anti-Judaism in the New Testament (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010), is a model of careful method. 2 and painful conflict between historical and theological research was obvious before our times. The two sides had a rough time getting along in the long nineteenth century because of the then-clear difference between open-ended questioning and belief.12 These issues were real and divisive. They tend to be blurred today, when perspectives, arising from presuppositions deemed equally legitimate, minimise conflict in the public academic square. A Lutheran, Catholic, or Jewish Paul must be sound. That is the price of being an icon. But the evidence of Paul’s letters (Phil 3; 2 Cor 10–13; Galatians) and early legacy (James 2.14; Acts 21.20–28; 2 Pet 3.15–16; Marcion, Ebionites, pseudo-Clementines) show that many of his contemporaries did not find him simpatico.13 Paul reciprocated their disdain (below). Where did such conflicts come from, if he was clearly devoted to Judaean ancestral customs? Why were similar accusations not made of Peter or James? Did the author of Acts invent the hostile impressions of Paul that he attributes to Judaeans, Christian believers or not, in chapter 21? Did Irenaeus fabricate the Ebionites, who: reject the apostle Paul, maintaining that he was an apostate from the law ..., [and who] practise circumcision, persevere in the observance of those customs that are enjoined by the law, and are so Judaean in their style of life that they even adore Jerusalem as though it were the house of God’ (C. Haer. 1.26.2; cf. Origen, C. Cels. 2.1; 5.61, 65)? Paul’s fans and detractors alike, from Marcion via the Popes, Luther, and NT scholar B. F. Westcott through most of the twentieth century, understood him to have declared the end of Moses’ law.14 Before the last generation, Jewish academics with serious knowledge of early Christian texts tended, reciprocally, to follow Voltaire and Thomas Paine in distinguishing Jesus, a recognisably Jewish teacher, from Paul, a figure rather alien to Judaism. Kaufmann Kohler’s entry in the Jewish Encyclopedia (1906), for example, spoke of Paul’s pathology and ‘unparalleled animosity and hostility to Judaism’.15 Although the Third Reich did not emerge organically from Christian anti-Judaism, this long tradition of divorcing Pauline Christianity from Judaism was crucial to the ‘German Christian’ movement and undoubtedly played a role in the European churches’ co-optation, causing deep soul-searching after the war—as we see in the final version of nostra aetate (1965) or Rosemary Radford Ruether’s Faith and Fratricide (1974). One need not doubt that the swing to a profoundly Jewish Paul, with the implicit claim that a colossal misreading underlies traditional interpretation, comes with all sincerity and moral justification. History upsets holisms, however, with its interest in particulars, contexts, and change. That is why history and tradition are at odds. Asking historical questions does not mean claiming a chimerical objectivity. Objectivity does not enter into it, even as an aspiration unmet. Hypothetical reconstruction can never acquire the status of fact (a factum, done and dusted); it lives on a different 12 Of countless examples, the relatively tame British standoff between Benjamin Jowett’s circle and their opponents around 1860 gets at the central issues. Cf. Benjamin Jowett et al., Essays and Reviews (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1861) with William E. Jelf et al., Faith and Peace (London: Saunders, Oatley & Co., 1862). 13 See Gerd Lüdemann, Opposition to Paul in Early Christianity, trans. M. E. Boring (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989); Patrick Gray, Paul as a Problem in History and in Culture: The Apostle and his Critics through the Centuries (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2016). Wayne Meeks, ed., The Writings of Paul (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 176–84, 288–301, excerpts ancient and modern detractors. 14 E.g., Kenneth Stow, Popes, Church, and Jews in the Middle Ages: Confrontation and Response (London: Routledge, 2007); B. F. Westcott (as Dunelm) in William Knight, The Arch of Titus and the Spoils of the Temple (London: Religious Tract Society, 1896), 9–11. 15 Kohler at http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/13232-saul-of-tarsus. Cf. Joseph Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth: His Life, Times, and Teaching (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 64; Hyam Maccoby, The Myth-Maker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity (New York, HarperSanFrancisco, 1987); Geza Vermes, Jesus in his Jewish Context (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 40–52. 3 cognitive plane. Especially when we feel confident in in speculating about the lost realities behind the scant survivals from antiquity, we must doubt because there is so much we cannot know. There are, however, evidential facts in the data of our meagre survivals. These—such as the presence or absence of terms—are the same for everyone who cares to look. In what follows, I shall focus on these facts. Delighted to share in honouring Terry Donaldson, whom I have considered a model of scholarly probity since our graduate-student days, I offer this essay in a constructive historical vein. In a recent volume representing the PWJ approach, Donaldson wrote a typically circumspect review, which highlighted several problems with this perspective. I shall take one of his positive reflections on the volume, however, as my departure point: I also appreciate the attention that is given to terminological matters. Many of the terms and categories used in critical reconstructions of the past are laden with meanings and connotations that have accumulated through centuries of subsequent use, which readily leads to anachronisms, distortions, and false assumptions.16 This is a basic principle of ancient history. Alas, when it comes to terms and categories we all find it easier to strain out the gnats in others’ work while we swallow whole the camels we find more congenial.17 I shall push farther in this direction, hoping to be radical enough to get at some ignored ancient roots. I would formulate the historical problem of this essay this way: How did Paul present himself in relation to Judaean law and custom in his letters to his converts (not: What did Paul think or why)? My reasons for not formulating the problem in terms of ‘Judaism’ will become clear presently. I do not seek to defend a particular Paul, but rather invite readers to reflect with me on the parameters for pursuing this important figure historically.18 How would Paul look if we put aside ingrained modern categories to think in terms that were available to him and his contemporaries in the eastern Mediterranean under Rome (Parts I and II)? In Part III, I offer a sketch of what seem to me the beginnings of a plausible 16 Donaldson, ‘Paul within Judaism: A Critical Evaluation from a “New Perspective” Perspective’, in Nanos and Zetterholm, Paul within Judaism, 283 (emphasis added). 17 As much of my research has been devoted to ‘the rectification of names’, I am sympathetic; cf. Mason and Tom Robinson, Early Christian Reader (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2004), 7–10. PWJ scholars place weight on framing categories, however—Diaspora, gospel, Judaism—that had no currency, while their concern for shades of meaning in pistis is difficult to follow. Cf. Anders Runesson, ‘The Questions of Terminology: The Architecture of Contemporary Discussions in Paul’, in Nanos and Zetterholm, Paul within Judaism, 59–68: ‘Christians’ is not emic language in Paul; etic definitions would be hazardous; and even if Acts 11.26 were trusted concerning early use, Christianoi might be better rendered ‘messianics’. But we normally transliterate (rather than translate) place and group names. Although Christ-followers preferred in-house terms—brothers and sisters, slaves of Christ, in Christ—all known outside observers thought that Christiani had been around for decades before 100 CE (Josephus, Ant. 18.64 in the most likely authentic part, 93 CE referring to the 30s; Pliny, Ep. 10.96, on former Christians who left 25 years earlier; Tacitus, Ann. 15.44.2 and Suetonius, Ner. 16.2 on Christians in Nero’s Rome). Cf. John Barclay, ‘“Jews” and “Christians” in the Eyes of Roman Authors c. 100 CE’ in Peter J. Tomson and Joshua Schwartz, eds., Jews and Christians in the First and Second Centuries: How to Write their Histories (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 313–26; Birgit van der Lans and Jan N. Bremmer, ‘Tacitus and the Persecution of the Christians: An Invention of Tacitus?’ Eirene: Studia Graeca et Latina 53 (2017), 301–33. Although the apparently Latin -ianus might suggest an origin with the authorities (but ‘Herodians’), 1 Pet 4.16 and Acts 11.26; 26.18 assume that the name did not trouble Christ-followers. Ignatius’ delight in christianismos (below) assumes long familiarity with ‘Christian’. We do not know whether Paul knew the term, as we have only some of his letters to fellow-believers. 18 Cf. Dunn, ‘New Perspective’: ‘to see Paul properly within his own context, to hear Paul in terms of his own time’ (100); Nanos, Paul within Judaism, 9: ‘committed to proposing … pre-Christian … questions about Paul’s concerns and those of his audiences and contemporaries … a historical portrait of Paul.’ 4 direction. In honour of our subject, I postpone elaborating the ‘problem’ until Part IV, after this embryonic ‘solution’. 1. Paul did not know about Judaism In case my title should suggest that, whereas other scholars place ‘Paul within Judaism’, I would place him outside it, I hasten to explain that my argument is more basic. Paul, Peter, Philo, Josephus, and their contemporaries were all without Judaism, because the category was not available to them. This is not a matter of mere semantics. Coming to terms with ancient discourse and its categories, leaving our comfort zones for that foreign territory, just as we would if we were studying ancient India or China, and as we routinely do in studying other aspects of the Roman empire, seems to me the beginning of historical understanding. On the threshold of Christianity’s transformation from persecuted nuisance to mostfavoured status, in the early 300s, the man who would soon write a panegyric of the transformative emperor Constantine was still preoccupied with justifying the Christian faith. In his Preparation of the Gospel, Eusebius boldly addresses the central criticism of this faith over the past three centuries. Whereas Pindar’s motto ‘Nomos is king’ had echoed through centuries as the axiomatic foundation of social order (Herodotus 3.38.4; Origen, C. Cels. 5.40), many Christians were following Paul’s lead in declaring themselves not to be under law (ὑπὸ νόµον) at all.19 For Paul, the most salient nomos had been that of Moses, which defined life for Judaean communities throughout the Mediterranean, including his own before he followed Christ.20 The nomoi of his non-Judaean converts were the customs and traditions of their respective poleis. The Christians’ opponents cared little about what these people believed, but insisted that they show loyalty to their nomoi. They must return to the cosmos and embrace the calendar, festivals, sacrifices, and civic institutions of one polis or another, not pretend to float above it all with their claims to esoteric truth or the bizarre hope of evacuation into the sky.21 By the early fourth century, from a position of rapidly growing confidence, Eusebius turns the tables and debuts the game-changing Christian lexical palette: ‘Christianismos breaks with both Hellēnismos and Ioudaismos, yes. Deal with it!’ (1.5.5). Back at the beginning, Paul had parried the same accusation of defection from civic loyalty without benefit of Eusebius’ capsule lexicon. Rejecting demands from others for thisworldly affiliation, he declared: ‘our political community (ἡµῶν … τὸ πολίτευµα) exists in heaven, from where we also await a saviour-lord, Jesus Christ’ (Phil 3.21). By about 200 CE, increasingly learned Christian writers felt strong enough to confront the ‘champions and avengers of laws and ancestral institutions’ (Tertullian, Apol. 5–6). Thus Tertullian, for example (Ad nat. 2.1.7): This is what our project is against: it is against the arrangements made by the ancestors, authoritative opinions [or models] passively received, the laws of those in power, and the reasonings of the wise; it is against antiquity, custom, coercion; it is against precedents, marvels, and wonders—all of which conspired to create your corrupt view of the Deity. 19 E.g., 1 Cor 9.20; Gal 3.23; 4.4, 32; 5.18; Rom 6.14–15. Cf. Philo passim; Josephus, Antiquities 1–11 and Against Apion; Diodorus Siculus 34/35.1.1–4; Strabo 16.2.34–37; Tacitus, Hist. 5.3–5. 21 Celsus in Origen, C. Cels. 5.25–26, 33; Porphyry (or similar) in Macarius Magnes, Apocr. 3.30, in R. Joseph Hoffmann, Porphyry’s Against the Christians: The Literary Remains (Amherst: Prometheus, 1994), 59; Julian, C. Gal. [Loeb] 39a–43a, 141c–141b, 238d, 314c, 343c–356e. 20 5 Claiming a pristine revealed truth in Christ, Christ-followers often viewed variegated local traditions as mouldy and corrupting, not as the beautifully varied gardens of the oikoumenē, which gave security and substance to human life. Although Tertullian, like Paul, has the customs of all gentes and nationes in view, as for Paul the Judaeans are his most germane example because they were the precursors of Christians. God had once chosen that gens, but abandoned them and transferred his favour to more faithful followers from all nations (ex omni iam gente et populo et loco cultores sibi adlegeret deus multo fideliores in quos gratiam transferret, Apol. 21.4–6), in a community no longer defined by local tradition. Ethnos- or gens-identity, identified with ancestral customs and laws, has lost its relevance. Clement’s Exhortation to the Greeks weaponises the same points, contrasting customs ‘handed down from fathers’ with revealed truth: ‘Let us then steer clear of custom! Let us steer clear of it like a dangerous headland. …. Custom is a snare, a trap, a pit, an evil treat’ (Protr. 10, 12.1). At least fictively from the Roman side, the character Caecilius in Minucius Felix’s Octavius mocks Christ-followers’ claim to stand above nations and tribes (gentes nationesque), in their arrogant expectation that the universe will burn while these naïfs alone are saved (11.1). The philosopher Celsus assails the same view (Origen, C. Cels. 5.14–16). Inured to such criticism, however, Tertullian is still confidently awaiting the coming conflagration, in which the world with its ancient ways and origin-claims (cum tanta saeculi vetustas et tot eius nativitates uno igni haurientur), magistrates, philosophers, poets, and other scoffers, will be consumed (Spect. 30). Although each of these authors writes with distinctive turns of phrase in a particular context, and their larger views differ, they all see themselves as cleaving to central Christian positions established most clearly by Paul. It was this conflict between conformity to nomos and cold rejection of it that Eusebius reframed in his table-turning lexicon: ‘One might fittingly use the label ἰουδαϊσµός for the constitution arranged according to the law of Moses, connected with the one God over all, and ἑλληνισµός to express in nuce the superstitious belief in many gods, as in the ancestral customs of all the ethnē.’22 His optative-mood creativity would make no sense if everyone had always known that ἰουδαϊσµός or ἑλληνισµός had such meanings. Outside of Christian usage, no one knew this vocabulary. Outsiders had indeed seen Christians as half-way between Hellas and Judaea—taking the worst elements from each while committing themselves to neither. Eusebius agreed about the in-between position but rejected the inference that ‘Christianism’ was derivative. It may only have ‘recently been made the nomos for all humanity of the inhabited earth’ (νεωστὶ πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποις τοῖς καθ’ ὅλης τῆς οἰκουµένης νενοµοθετηµένη), with Christ’s arrival, but Christian faith was in fact, for him, ‘the oldest community of piety and most ancient philosophy’ (τὸ µεταξὺ τούτων παλαιότατον εὐσεβείας πολίτευµα, καὶ ἀρχαιοτάτη µέν τις φιλοσοφία), antedating both Moses and polytheism—which is to say, ‘Judaism’ and ‘Hellenism’ (Dem. ev. 1.2.9). Recalling Paul in Gal 3.6–29, Eusebius used the new words to claim that Moses’ system, encapsulated in his curse of Israelites who failed to fulfil every bit of the law (sharing Paul’s odd reading of Deut 27.26), was a late change to the simple faith of the patriarchs, which had effectively been Christianism before Christ. The main incubators of this Christian lexicon before Eusebius, as far as we can see, were Tertullian in Latin and Origen in Greek. Tertullian pairs every use of Christianismus with Iudaismus, as a way of contrasting Gospel with Law or ‘legal servitude’ (Marc. 4.6, 33; 5.4, 6). He also frequently uses Iudaismus on its own—some 20 times. Origen anticipates Dem. ev. 1.2.2: Τὸν µὲν ἰουδαϊσµὸν εὐλόγως ἄν τις ὀνοµάσειε τὴν κατὰ τὸν Μωσέως νόµον διατεταγµένην πολιτείαν, ἑνὸς ἐξηµµένην τοῦ ἐπὶ πάντων θεοῦ, τὸν δὲ ἑλληνισµόν, ὡς ἐν κεφαλαίῳ φάναι, τὴν κατὰ τὰ πάτρια τῶν ἐθνῶν ἁπάντων εἰς πλείονας θεοὺς δεισιδαιµονίαν; 22 6 Eusebius most directly, using ἰουδαϊσµός some 33 times to mean the belief system based in Moses’ law. Most telling his eight-volume refutation of Celsus, which has ἰουδαϊσµός nine times and reinterprets Celsus to speak of ‘Judaism’ (1.2.2), though Celsus does not use the word in his own voice. This matches the evidence that Porphyry and Julian, who knew a great deal about Christians and Judaeans, never thought to use ἰουδαϊσµός.23 The Christian lexicon of reductive -isms reached its full flowering with Epiphanius, decades after Eusebius. He created a flow-chart of falsehood by calling out five ‘mothers’, or wombs, of deviance, which he called Barbarism, Scythism, Hellenism, Judaism, and Samaritism (Anc. 12.8; Pan. 1.2 [Holl] 1.157–197). Using -ism language for belief-systems was thus a Christian innovation. No nonChristian would have thought, upon seeing such words, that they intended systems of thought or belief. A barbarism (βαρβαρισµός) was a turn of speech (cf. Strabo 14.2.28), akin to a solecism (σολοικισµός) at sentence level and contrastable with Hellenism (ἑλληνισµός), which meant adopting or affecting pure Greek (Aristotle, Poet. 1458a). Compare our use of ‘Americanism’ (‘Can I get fries with that, going forward?’) and Britishism (‘I’m peckish’). As we can still see in their English descendants—baptism, ostracism, Laconism, Medism, Atticism— Greek -ισµός nouns referred to actions: baptising, ostracising, Medising, and so on. Χριστιανισµός began its life the same way. It meant Christianising over against ἰουδαϊσµός, or Judaising (below). As both terms lost their dynamic sense, apparently through being freeze-dried in Latin, they gradually came to form of a Christian luggage-set for contending belief systems, or ‘religions’. That is why Ἰουδαϊσµός and the others are found almost exclusively in Christian authors. Any reader can confirm the following facts. First, of the 393 occurrences of ἰουδαϊσµός in the database of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, 388 are Christian. The other five come from a single Judaean text (2 Maccabees) and one that borrows from it (4 Maccabees). Second, all known occurrences of Latin Iudaismus are Christian. Third, in spite of its title, Menachem Stern’s indispensable three-volume compendium, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, contains no instance of ‘Judaism’, either ἰουδαϊσµός or Iudaismus, from the pen of an outside observer. Fourth, in the extensive corpora of the Hebrew Bible/LXX, Philo, Josephus, 1 Maccabees, the pseudepigrapha, Qumran Scrolls, and the New Testament (outside Gal 1.13–14), no ἰουδαϊσµός or Hebrew equivalent such as yahadut appears. Given that scholars do rely on ‘Judaism’ when discussing these texts—try to imagine an academic discussion of Galatians, Romans, or Matthew without ‘Judaism’—is it not worth asking why ancient authors felt no such need? Are we missing something that was obvious to them? For readers wondering why I seem to ignore ἰουδαϊσµός in 2 Maccabees and perhaps Galatians 1.13–14 (if considered Judaean), I should explain.24 The author of 2 Maccabees—if not Jason of Cyrene, whose work he abridges—was partial to -ισµός action-nouns. His apparent innovations include ‘arming with a breastplate’ (θωρακισµός) and ‘eating entrails’ (σπλαγχνισµός; 6.7, 21; 7.42), which more or less vanish from later literature.25 He also introduces three cultural -ισµός words: ἀλλοφυλισµός, ‘foreignising’ (4.13; 6.24), ἑλληνισµός, ‘hellenising’ (4.13), and ἰουδαϊσµός, ‘judaising’ (2.21; 8.1; 14.38 [twice]). Since his programmatic statement at 4.13 speaks of a ‘peak of ἑλληνισµός’ and an ‘advance in ἀλλοφυλισµός’, these two terms must refer to the actions of hellenising and foreignizing, as 23 Cyril has it at Proph. min. 1.659; Comm. Joann. 2.108; Comm. Luc. 72.864, not when citing Julian. Mason, ‘Jews, Judaeans’; Orientation, 175–220. 25 Other words of this class have extremely slender attestation prior to his eager use of them: ἐµφανισµός (3.9), ὑποµνηµατισµός (2.13; 4.23), and καθαρισµός (1.18, 36; 2.16, 19; 10.5). 24 7 one would expect from the form. No extant later author finds a use for ‘foreignising’ in a lifeand-death cultural struggle. Given this context, it is easiest also to understand the neologism ἰουδαϊσµός in the same way, as the proper counter-movement of Judaeans to the rampant foreignising or hellenising of their ancestral customs. These need, ironically, to be judaised in order to be restored. Thus we read that ἰουδαϊσµός was what armed Judaean groups were doing, at the risk of their lives (8.1; 14.38), for which they could well be punished—not for being Judaeans, which they could not change, but for persisting in certain actions. Another way the author describes that persistence is with the noun ἀναστροφή: a constant striving, turning and returning, or commitment to Judaean ways, instead of ‘capitulating to foreignising’. The author praises old Eleazar for precisely this determination (6.23–24). Any Greek speaker could have deduced from morphology and context what ἀλλοφυλισµός, ἑλληνισµός, and ἰουδαϊσµός mean in this extraordinary work, even though the words themselves were not otherwise used this way. The conflict described by this author, which summoned his literary creativity with this form of word, left hardly any occasions for their later use, once that famous but unique crisis had passed. Ἰουδαϊσµός might have disappeared with the others if the Judaean Paul had not found the occasion to recall 2 Maccabees with a new ironic twist. When some of his gentile recruits for Christ in Asia Minor, influenced by other teachers, decided they should judaise, after coming to suspect that Paul had corrupted the apostles’ teaching by ignoring its Judaean content (Gal 1.6; 2.14; 3.1– 3; 4.21; 5.2–12), he revived this language to convey the energy he had formerly devoted to Judaean customs, to convince them that he was by no means overlooking Judaean law. For this purpose, he seized both barrels from 2 Maccabees to speak of τὴν ἐµὴν ἀναστροφήν ποτε ἐν τῷ ἰουδαϊσµῷ, ‘my own former doggedness in the judaising’ that others had put on the table. His non-Judaean audience presumably had no basis for catching the allusion to 2 Maccabees, unless Paul’s opponents had used the text of crisis as ammunition against him (accusing him of being a new Antiochus). But his meaning is clear enough because he explains it: ‘that is, I was going after the assembly of God with a vengeance, trying to wipe it out’ (Gal 1.13). Having invoked ἰουδαϊσµός, he repeats it immediately for effect: ‘This is what you want? Look, I was far ahead of my peer group in the judaising’, which he glosses this time as: ‘so completely was I a devotee of the traditions of my ancestors’. His point seems clear: no one is now keener on Judaean ancestral law than he was—before Christ called him (Gal 1.15). 4 Maccabees, possibly contemporary with Paul, is the only other extant Judaean text that borrows ἰουδαϊσµός from 2 Maccabees (4 Macc 4.23). It valorises the word in the straightforward way that 2 Maccabees does, however, whereas Paul finds it the potent mot juste for describing his former exertions on behalf of Judaean tradition against the threat of Christ-followers—before he abruptly joined them in response to God’s intervention. This is presumably why Paul never uses ἰουδαϊσµός in the way that scholars do, for ‘Judaism’. That is, he does not use it in the body of Galatians or Romans, to characterise the laws of Moses or Judaean tradition, just where scholars speak of Judaism. In Paul’s account, his encounter with Christ and commission with The Announcement (τὸ εὐαγγέλιον), which had nothing to do with human input, let alone ancestral tradition, put his zeal for Judaean tradition behind him (Gal 1.15–17). Writing decades after Galatians, but well aware of Paul’s linguistic moves, Ignatius of Antioch took the decisive step in making ἰουδαϊσµός a durable Christian category, though he did not know that he that he was doing so. Hearing of judaising among the Philadelphians of Asia Minor (cf. Rev 3.9), he took a leaf from Paul to object: ‘If someone explains judaising 8 to you (Εὰν δέ τις ἰουδαϊσµὸν ἑρµηνεύῃ ὑµῖν), don’t listen! It is better to hear christianising from a man having circumcision (παρὰ ἀνδρὸς περιτοµὴν ἔχοντος χριστιανισµὸν ἀκούειν) than judaising from a foreskin-type (ἢ παρὰ ἀκροβύστου ἰουδαϊσµόν)’ (Phila. 6.1). Circumcised or not, everyone should now ‘talk of Jesus Christ’. Anticipating the later writers we noted above, Ignatius insists that to bring up laws and customs now is to live among ‘the tombs of the dead’, ensnared by ‘the ruler of this age’—a Pauline phrase (1 Cor 2.6–8; cf. 2 Cor 4.4). Writing to the Magnesians, he compares judaising (ἰουδαϊσµός), after Christ’s coming, to ‘ancient and worthless fables’ (8.1). Here he replaces the tomb metaphor with that of stinking food past its useful time (Mag. 10.1–3), before driving home his point: ‘It is absurd to talk Jesus Christ and to judaise (ἄτοπόν ἐστιν Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν λαλεῖν καὶ ἰουδαϊζειν)! For christianising did not put its trust in judaising, but judaising in christianising (ὁ γὰρ χριστιανισµὸς οὐκ εἰς ἰουδαϊσµὸν ἐπίστευσεν, ἀλλ᾿ ἰουδαϊσµός εἰς χριστιανισµόν)’. That ἰουδαϊσµός retains a verbal sense in Ignatius is clear because he uses ἰουδαϊζειν and ἰουδαϊσµός as synonyms. He is continuing Paul’s creative re-use of 2 Maccabees. His exaltation of χριστιανισµός as the end of history, however, paved the way for its new use as an abstract noun in Latin (above). To summarise: Paul and his contemporaries did not know about Judaism. They communicated, instead, using the long-established lexical bank of the Graeco-Roman world. This had a clear place for the ancient Judaean ethnos, its mother-polis Jerusalem, lawgiver Moses, distinctive calendar, festivals, laws, and customs, including circumcision and dietary restrictions. I am not making an argument from silence here, from the mere happenstance that hardly any contemporary texts use ἰουδαϊσµός. Perhaps other texts did use it to mean Judaism, but they have been lost, one might counter. The silence is made both deafening and dispositive, first, by the contrast between the ubiquity of ‘Judaism’ among Christian authors, often in a single text, and its complete absence from such massive corpora as the LXX, the pseudepigrapha, Philo, Josephus, and outsider observers—where the subject matter is precisely what scholars call Judaism. Second, granted that most ancient texts did not survive, the surviving evidence is sufficient for us to trace the development of ἰουδαϊσµός with some confidence, from a rarely needed action-noun to the standard Christian suitcase-label for a system of belief. The new Christian meaning explains the absence of the word from Judaean texts, where it did could not have indicated a faith system. Shaye Cohen’s ‘Jewishness’ would not face the same objections if we could understand it not as a mere stand-in for the same reified ‘Judaism’ but as something more open and culturally diffuse, by analogy with ‘Romanness’ (cf. Romanitas)26 or perhaps modern ‘Britishness’. These words do not describe a system of belief but rather a vague suite of ascribed traits, values, and behaviours, which differ with each observer.27 Depending on their experience with the British, some might think of Britishness as aristocratic ways, high tea, or excessive diffidence, while others think of vestigial imperialism, others the welfare state embodied by the NHS, still others football hooliganism and knife crime. PWJ scholars appear to move in this direction even with Judaism at times, when they write of ‘Judaism— that is, the Jewish way(s) of life’, or say that ‘Judaism, as a multifaceted, dynamic cultural development, took place within other multifaceted dynamic cultures in the Hellenistic world’. But their insistence on placing Paul and even his foreign converts within Judaism, and as constituting ‘subgroups of Judaism’,28 explodes that sound historical instinct. The Christians 26 Shaye J.D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 27 Cf. Louise Revell, Roman Imperialism and Local Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1–39. 28 Nanos, ‘Introduction’, in Nanos and Zetterholm, Paul within Judaism, 9 and 10, respectively (my emphasis). 9 needed and created capsule-words for in-or-out faith systems corresponding to Christianism. This matching luggage set was not yet available in the first century. Paul and his contemporaries were therefore ‘without Judaism’. II. What Difference Does a Category Make? When I have discussed such issues with colleagues or published in this vein, the most consistent response has been: ‘You’re being pedantic. Obviously, we need some covering term for everything Jewish. Judaism is the familiar term, and you don’t have a better one.’29 This response misses the point, however, that historians do not otherwise feel the need to miniaturise complex cultures with capsule-words. At least, I have never heard any historian speak of Romism, Athenism, Egyptism, or Syrism—or lament the lack of such terms. Those who feel this need for Judaeans alone might ask themselves why. Is it because the academic study of Judaea, its people, and literature skews toward the theological and trans-temporal? Are we unconsciously absorbing and preserving old Christian perspectives? To be sure, we all make compromises for convenience, such as when we use ‘emperor’ for the Roman princeps, who, in the first century and a half, could never have used a term corresponding to the normal senses of emperor in English. In many communicative contexts, I have no problem calling my research area ‘ancient Judaism’. It is not a question of pedantry. Communication depends on one’s interlocutors and purposes. Using ‘Judaism’ as a real category in historical research on the first century is another matter, with obvious consequences. For once we stipulate that the ancients knew Judaism, we inevitably ask, first, what class of things Judaism belonged to (usual answer: it was a species of religion) and then set about characterising this particular expression of the genus. Scholars in this field have spent huge amounts of time asking ‘What kind of religion was ancient Judaism: legal, legalistic, progressive, missionary?’ Paradoxically, the scholar who did the most to establish the critical-historical study of Judaism in American universities, Jacob Neusner, stressed more than anyone the notion of Judaism as a system. His mathematical, philosophical, and comparative-religionist inclinations—this last influenced by Jonathan Z. Smith—led Neusner to read each ancient Jewish corpus as the constructions of a discrete ‘intellectual system’.30 His vision of many ‘Judaisms’ in antiquity provoked Sanders’ contrary case for a ‘common Judaism’: not many systems but one system, one Judaism.31 These scholars had no interest in preserving the ancient Christian suitcases, certainly not for ancient Christian reasons, but strangely they ended up enshrining them in research nonetheless. Well before his conflict with Neusner, Sanders challenged age-old Christian readings of Judaism, but he did so by exploring how its ‘members’ understood their place in this ‘religion’.32 Against long-standing Protestant imaginings, he compellingly argued, Jews were not worried about earning their God’s favour, or membership in Judaism. As he famously put it: ‘A pattern of religion … is the description of how a religion is perceived by its adherents to function… of how getting in and staying in are understood: the way in which a religion is understood to admit and retain members is considered to be the way it ‘functions”’. Jews were in by free divine election or choice, not by their efforts to gain entry. They kept the laws (covenant obligations) as a function of membership in this religious system, failure being remedied by repentance and atonement. Whereas Sanders was concerned to clarify how one 29 E.g., Seth Schwartz, ‘How Many Judaisms were There? A Critique of Neusner and Smith on Definition and Mason and Boyarin on Categorization’, Journal of Ancient Judaism 2 (2011), 203–38, with much more sophistication than I can indicate here. 30 See Aaron W. Hughes, Jacob Neusner: An American Jewish Iconoclast (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 48, 106–108, 137, 145–47. 31 E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE–66 CE (London: SCM, 1992). 32 E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (London: SCM, 1977), 17. 10 got in and stayed in, it was only a matter of time before others would take up the corresponding phenomenon of leaving the religion of Judaism.33 Such questions would not arise, however, if one did not impose ‘Judaism’ on first-century texts and real-life conditions. We could then breathe fresher air and spare ourselves the stress of having to fit real people in a fictional category. Let us try a thought experiment. What would happen if we took a leaf from Martin Goodman’s magisterial Rome and Jerusalem, which methodically compares these two ‘ancient civilizations’,34 and applied our linguistic habit for speaking of Judaea to Rome? Could we ask: ‘How did one get in and stay in Romism?’ Or, ‘How did one leave Romism?’ Such questions would seem absurd, and no one asks them. Why, then, should we not study Judaeans, their mother-polis, lawgiver, laws, customs, and individual characters such as Paul in the way we study other contemporary cultures, using the categories familiar to ancient writers? The lexical categories known to Paul and his contemporaries, which had been around for centuries, permitted practically infinite individual variation. One belonged to a birth group (genos, ethnos), which had its peculiar laws and customs, but humanity was gloriously diverse, a point that many writers from Herodotus to Julian celebrated. How individual Persians, Romans, or Spartans behaved in relation to their ancestral traditions—how they viewed themselves and how others viewed them—was all to be played for. A Roman or Judaean male who felt perturbed by this variety, or the slovenly attitudes of the vulgus (hoi polloi, ‘ammei ha-aretz) toward ancestral norms, could always join a group with higher admission requirements: a philosophical school (Stoics, Pharisees, Essenes), priestly college, purity club, particular synagogue, or literary coterie. Formal or informal initiation into such groups was real, sometimes an ordeal. Certainly, one could speak of getting in and staying in such groups. Once admitted among fellow-purists, members could safely share their peeves concerning the larger society’s descent into the abyss. The larger society could have no such singlemindedness, however. Procreation has no standards. Before glancing over Paul’s letters in pursuit of our real-life historical question of how he presented himself to his groups in relation to Judaean ancestral tradition, it is worth trying to get a sense of the diversity that ancient categories permitted in relation to ancestral tradition, outside of in-out purity groups. Loyalty to one’s ethnos and polis were axiomatic values, as we have seen (cf. Herodotus 3.38). But every literate person knew that new affiliations and changing identities were always possible, whether individual or collective, voluntarily or under compulsion. This kind of thing was not framed as moving in or out of a religion, or in the case of Judaea as getting in or out of Judaism. How was it framed? I have mentioned Laconism, or Spartanising, a famous example of cultural admiration and borrowing. The term referred in the first instance to those who allied with Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. But Sparta’s fiercely disciplined way of life would remain highly attractive to modern societies from imperial Britain to Soviet Russia. Ancient admirers included philosophers, who liked its constitution from afar, and the young men who visited Laconia to see it in action—and faced periodic expulsion for the sake of maintaining cultural purity. In the opposite direction, Thucydides and the Spartans accused the Spartan king Pausanias of holding his ancestral laws in contempt, while favouring those of the Persians (1.132.1–2), a charge he did not accept but turned back on them.35 There were no objective measures of such things. Individuals acted as they saw fit, and sometimes incurred the wrath 33 Stephen G. Wilson, Leaving the Fold: Apostates and Defectors in Antiquity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004). Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (London: Penguin, 2007). 35 Mabel L. Lang, ‘Scapegoat Pausanias’, Classical Journal 63 (1967), 79–85. 34 11 of opponents for compromising the ancestral traditions. There are surely parallels in modern politics. Herodotus charged the Persian king Cambyses with forsaking his laws and everyone else’s (3.36–38). The Scythians were a fund of fascination on this score. The reported curiosity of some of their leaders about foreign wisdom led other Scythians to violence. Anacharsis, Toxaris, and Scyles did not cease to be Scythians, or even royals (much less leave a ‘Scythism’), when they returned home as Athenian citizens or devotees of the Great Mother Cybele. Rather, they were deemed sufficiently defective Scythians to be killed for abandoning their ancestral traditions, or foreignizing as 2 Maccabees might have put it.36 The general assumption was that the world’s ethnē had become distinct by evolving their customs as they gradually separated from a few root ethnē—Dorians and Ionians, Egyptians and Arabs. Judaeans, like Colchians and others, were assumed to have sprung from Egyptian stock, whereas the originally Arab Idumaeans had adopted Judaean laws under compulsion (Strabo 16.2.34), after which they could truly be called Judaeans in some sense (Josephus, Ant. 13.258)—while also remaining a distinct ethnos (War 4.233–82). Members of the Adiabenian royal family risked their lives when they embraced Judaean laws and customs in the 30s CE (Ant. 20.17–96) and later fought Romans alongside fellow-Judaeans, without losing their identity as Adiabenians.37 The countless others we hear about who associated with Judaean ways did so in different ways and degrees. Whatever passing Judaean contacts they had lacked the ‘curial’ authority to declare them ‘inside or outside Judaism’. Such language was not available. This is, incidentally, one reason why I prefer to render Ioudaios as ‘Judaean’ when I am interpreting ancient texts. I have never seen anyone render Ioudaia other than as Judaea, a simple transliteration, following the principle we normally use for foreign place and people names. Since that regional-ethnic name had the same relation to Ioudaios in ancient usage as Syria to Syrian, Egypt to Egyptian, Rome to Roman, Idumaea to Idumaean, and Samaria to Samarian, since Ioudaioi frequently appear in texts juxtaposed with these others, and since the prevailing assumption was that a group’s place of origin said much about its character and customs, it seems to me natural to render Ioudaios as ‘Judaean’—if my primary interest is in capturing what ancient audiences heard in the term, and not modern convenience. They knew of Judaea and therefore of Judaeans. This pairing also helps us to see that foreigners who emulated or embraced Judaean laws and customs did not join a ‘religion called Judaism’, but allied themselves in some degree with this ancient ethnos and its patrioi nomoi. Their native 36 Herodotus 4.76–80 with Josephus, Ap. 2.269; Plutarch, Banquet of the Seven Sages; Lucian, Anacharsis, Toxaris, and The Scythian; Diogenes Laertius 1.101–105. 37 With most scholars, Mark Nanos theologises the Adiabene story in ‘The Question of Conceptualization: Qualifying Paul’s Position on Circumcision in Dialogue with Josephus’s Advisors to King Izates’, in Nanos and Zetterholm, Paul within Judaism, 105–52. Nanos frames it for conversation with Paul (my emphasis): ‘The portrayal of King Izates sketched by Josephus is related in a story he purports to have taken place within Diaspora Judaism’ (110). And ‘Josephus characterizes the change that the non-Jew Izates makes to living like a Jew or practicing Judaism’; ‘Josephus makes no mention of Jewish communities … very individualistic’; ‘Josephus places the story within a Diaspora setting’ (111)’ ‘Eleazar is … likely a Pharisee’; ‘the reader is made aware of two conflicting Jewish interpretations of what is faithful’ (116). The highlighted language is all supplied by Nanos. Josephus instead draws from the common lexical bank: ‘About this time, Helena, queen of the Adiabenians, and her son Izates exchanged their way of life for the customs of the Judaeans (εἰς τὰ Ἰουδαίων ἔθη τὸν βίον µετέβαλον)’ (Ant. 20.17–96). Josephus has no ‘diaspora’, Judaism, Pharisee Eleazar, or ‘two interpretations of what is faithful’—distinctive PWJ language. In Ant. 20.48 (the only one of 10 πίστιςcognates in the story Nanos notices), Josephus is restating the lesson of Antiquities: that God watches human affairs and rewards those who follow him (Ant. 1.14, 20; 10.277–78). As for individualism: Helena soon visits Jerusalem, sends famine relief for city, constructs a palace, and plans her burial there (20.49–53, 95). Her sons send their boys for education there, where they fully participate in Judaean life and the coming war (20.71). Cf. Mason, ‘Jews, Judaeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History’ JSJ 38 (2007), 506–508 and Orientation to the History of Roman Judaea (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2016), 209–10. 12 ethnos identity could not disappear, in spite of such changes in affiliation. That is why Josephus could delight in saying (in effect), of a dead literary opponent who had reinvented himself more than once: ‘You can take Apion out of Egypt, but you can’t take the Egyptian out of Apion!’ (Ap. 2.138–44). Identity was complicated then, as it possibly is now. Such comings and goings are particularly well known in relation to Judaean culture because of the relative wealth of evidence. Tacitus, Celsus, and Cassius Dio all complain about ‘those who have abandoned their own ways, professing those of the Judaeans’ (Celsus in Origen, C. Cels. 5.41; cf. Tacitus, Hist. 5.5), with Dio adding that the term ‘Judaean’ is used for both native Judaeans and ‘all those who emulate their legal precepts, though being of another ethnos’ (Dio 37.17.1). From the Judaean side, Philo and Josephus talk of the welcome afforded to those who seriously wish to join their ethnos and live under their laws. They fully respect the hardships and ruptured family bonds that this can involve (Philo, Virt. 102–103; Josephus, War 2.463, 560; 7.45; Apion 2.280–86). Since Moses’ laws reflect the very laws of nature, in Josephus’ view (Ant. 1.18–23), Abraham the Chaldaean could embrace them proleptically long before Moses lived (1.154–68); the Adiabenians complete that work’s literary inclusio by embracing these laws in the last volume (20.17–96). In the Roman world particularly, the adoption of layered identities was not strange. Rome had extended its citizenship and identity to privileged foreigners, who added it to their existing identities with varying degrees of devotion.38 Josephus also recognised the opposite direction of traffic, though he was not pleased about it—about Judaeans who abandoned the laws of Moses or simply failed to follow them. Since the moral lesson of his Antiquities is that those who follow Moses’ laws find success, whereas those who violate them meet disaster (Ant. 1.14, 20), the work furnishes examples of both kinds. Among the defectors and defaulters are various tyrants, rebels, kings including Saul and Herod, and high priests.39 In Josephus’ time, Tiberius Julius Alexander was from the most eminent Judaean family in Alexandria, nephew of Philo and son of a pillar of the Judaean community. Josephus praises this man’s actions as governor of Judaea and later of Egypt, but notes matter-of-factly that he ‘did not persevere in the ancestral customs’ (Ant. 20.100). No terrible consequence follows in Tiberius’ case. Josephus is much more severe toward Antiochus of Antioch, son of the most eminent Judaean in that polis, because his defection seriously harmed his compatriots. Unnerved by anti-Judaean sentiment as the war was beginning in 67 CE, Antiochus wanted to prove his Greekness by demonstrating his revulsion toward Judaean customs (τοῦ µεµισηκέναι τὰ τῶν Ἰουδαίων ἔθη). He not only offered Greek-style sacrifices, but advised the authorities to force other Judaeans to do the same, as a test of loyalty to their polis of residence, after falsely accusing them of plotting to burn it down (War 7.47–53). A different kind of loyalty question is pondered by Josephus in War 2.466–76. There, Judaeans from the south launch indiscriminate reprisals against Syrian poleis in retaliation for the massacre of their compatriots in Caesarea. The Judaean minority in Scythopolis join their townsfolk in defending the polis against these raids. But as soon as the threat has passed, they become suspect as potential spies and traitors, and face a most unjust massacre. Although Josephus presents the Judaean raids as the actions of an ethnos made ‘animal-like’ in its vengeful brutality (2.458–60), he curiously also blames the Judaeans of Scythopolis for having killed fellow-Judaeans and sided with foreigners (What else could they have done?), 38 Arthur M. Eckstein, Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of Rome (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 244–316; Revell, Roman Imperialism. 39 E.g., Nimrod (1.114); Korah (4.15–19); Abimelech (5.234); Hophni and Phineas (5.338–39); Saul (6.262–68); common people (11.40); Alexander Jannaeus (13.377–405); Herod (17.304–308); Drusilla 20.143–44; Ananus II (20.197–203); Ananias and other chief priests (20.204–207). 13 actions that placed them ‘under a curse’ and polluted them (2.472–73). He dramatically singles out the best Judaean fighter, Simon, to craft a mini-tragedy: Simon resolved to kill his family and himself, before the Scythopolitans could kill them. To cast Simon’s activity as ‘leaving Judaism’ would obscure the tragic tone of Josephus’ account, which underscores the real-life struggle of conflicting loyalties. Tiberius Alexander, Antiochus, and Simon were not following different ‘Judaic systems’. They were all Judaeans, who made the unique choices that seemed best in their particular situations. And of course, we see them only through the literary construction of Josephus, not from an omniscient or even balanced perspective. We cannot ask them how they interpreted Judaean ancestral tradition in relation to their various identities. Of the many ways in which one could (seem to) let observance of the ancestral laws slide, two others merit attention. The first appears in Philo’s famous insistence that knowing the spiritual truth of scripture does not permit one ‘to dissolve the customs that more exalted and greater men than any of our time devised’ (Migr. 90). We do not know the real-life situation behind this passage, but it raises the possibility that a purely philosophical approach was leading some Alexandrian Judaeans toward laxity in practically observing the laws. Second, the second chapter of Wisdom of Solomon, perhaps also from Alexandria, seems to describe a conflict among Judaeans, between those determined to enjoy life in the present and the ‘righteous’, who accept the constraints of ancestral law, partly in anticipation of the life to come (2.12).40 In any real human society, there must have been an enormous range of thought and practice, and perceived thought and practice, in relation to observance of ancestral custom, as there surely was of Rome’s mos maiorum. Even civic officials who had to represent the national customs at public events may not have sincerely believed in them,41 and a Greek’s or Roman’s enthusiasm for Egyptian or Judaean ways could effectively displace native allegiances. There is no reason to imagine that we would be able to categorise the kaleidoscope of individual possibilities, even if we wished to do so. In sum, just as there was no Judaism in Paul’s day, no authority could decide who was ‘in’ or ‘out’. Just as the choice to join the Judaeans did not obliterate one’s Idumaean or Adiabenian birth identity, so becoming lax in relation to Judaean customs or following Greek or Roman ways to some extent, could not stop one being Judaean—even if it caused rupture and scandal with family and friends. Paul was indisputably a Judaean, for that was his ethnos by birth, and he faced the criticism of compatriots if he seemed so disloyal as to badmouth Judaea’s ancestral traditions (Acts 21.21–36). The path he chose, including his posture toward the laws of Moses and ancestral custom, needs to be understood for itself, not as certifying his membership in a system constructed by modern scholarship or late-antique Christians. The next section suggests the beginnings of an approach to the historical Paul in his unique situation. III. Paul’s Euangelion in Relation to Judaeans and their Ancestral Traditions In asking how Paul presented himself to his groups, I follow four standard principles of historical research, which I lack the space to defend, namely: begin at the beginning, distinguish rhetoric from true beliefs, do not multiply entities unnecessarily, and work from the known to the unknown. These principles together recommend that we begin with 1 40 This standard reading is challenged by Jason Zurawski, ‘Paideia: A Multifarious and Unifying Concept in the Wisdom of Solomon’, in Karina M. Hogan, ed., Pedagogy in Ancient Judaism (Atlanta: SBL, 2017), 195–214. Even if he is right that this passage does not reflect an internal divide between more and less righteous Judaeans (I am not yet convinced), I stand by my general observations about human difference, ancient and modern. 41 Cicero (Div. 2.33 [70]) and Pliny (Ep. 4.8) were both members of Rome’s prestigious College of Augurs, with no belief at all in the divination behind it. Cf. Polybius 6.56.7–12; Diodorus 1.2.2; 34/35.2.47 on the importance of traditions connected with superstitious belief for public order. 14 Thessalonians, try to understand it (not Paul’s psychology or formative influences) as his first audiences might have done, and work from what is clearest to what becomes foggier in his later letters. The unmissable theme of 1 Thessalonians, the earliest known text by a follower of Christ, is what Paul calls The Announcement (τὸ εὐαγγέλιον). He uses this loaded expression six times in this brief letter, glossing it variously as God’s, ours, or Christ’s. What was The Announcement? Before proceeding, we should register the evidential fact, because it is often missed, that the term is strange in ancient discourse and, among early Christian texts, distinctively Pauline. The neuter singular with article, τὸ εὐαγγέλιον, does not appear in preChristian authors, including the Septuagint. Even without the article, the singular noun is extremely rare.42 The point is often missed because scholars have tended to blur cognates, as though plural εὐαγγέλια and the cognate verb, which are relatively common in the LXX and the NT, were a mere tomaeto and tomahto difference. But in English, when someone refers to ‘messages’ we think nothing of it. Messages are part of our daily reality. If, however, a colleague says ‘This weekend I’m attending a retreat about The Message’ (cue eerie music), the impact is completely different. The singular noun and definite article make us want to know: What is The Message? Among the sudden explosion of 76 occurrences of εὐαγγέλιον in the NT, 60 appear in Paul and doubtful Paul, 57 of these with the definite article, and often without elaboration as ‘The Announcement’. He obviously expected his letters’ audiences to know what he was talking about. By contrast, Luke, John and the Johannines, Hebrews, and reconstructed Q (also Coptic Thomas) lack the word altogether. Whatever we make of the outlier 1 Pet 4.17, therefore, εὐαγγέλιον language was evidently not shared vocabulary among early Christfollowers. This point becomes vividly clear from a tabular comparison of Mark with Matthew and Luke. Mark has a deep investment in εὐαγγέλιον language. It titles itself The Origin of The Announcement (1.1) and portrays Jesus himself proclaiming τὸ εὐαγγέλιον in his keynote (1.14, twice), then repeatedly identifying himself with τὸ εὐαγγέλιον (8.35; 10.29; 13.10; 14.9). While salvaging what they can from a largely uncongenial Mark, however, Matthew and Luke methodically remove such language from Jesus’ horizon. It belongs with the large body of material they do find wrong-headed in Mark—and what motivated them to craft new narratives. To be sure, Matthew retains four occurrences of εὐαγγέλιον, but it is no longer an absolute, self-evident category. Matthew reworks the instances it keeps as ‘the announcement of the Reign [of God]’ (4.23; 9.35; 24.14)—this text’s Leitmotif—or in one case uses it to mean only ‘this announcement’ for the report of a specific incident (26.13). Luke makes no attempt to save the terminology, presumably because the author knows it to belong to the next generation, and expurgates it from Jesus’ world. The simplest deduction from this evidence is that τὸ εὐαγγέλιον was known in the first century to be distinctively Pauline language. This would also explain why Paul referred to his first visit to Philippi and Thessalonica as ‘the beginning of The Announcement’ (Phil 4.15). In the second generation, only the first known narrative treatment of Jesus’ life, Mark, 42 The word was intelligible enough, but usually in the plural (‘news’). Even without the article, the singular is rare (Homer, Od. 14.152, 166; Josephus, War 4.240; Plutarch, Ages. 33.4; Demetr. 17.6; Mor. [Glor. Ath.] 347d twice). With the article, it is overwhelmingly Pauline and later Christian; Plutarch has it once with the article, but the article is demonstrative, referring to a report just given, not absolute as in Paul. 15 still had sufficient sympathy with Paul’s mission to present an interpretation of Jesus’ mission in these terms.43 Back in 1 Thessalonians, then, Paul’s opening thanksgiving declares his confidence that the new Christ-group in this port city has been selected for salvation, given their trusting response to The Announcement in spite of much harassment (1.5). Fortunately for us, he elaborates on the content of The Announcement. Others in Hellas have heard of how this group (a) ‘turned to God—from mere images to a living and true God’ (1.9), (b) ‘to await his son from the heavens, whom he raised from the dead—(c) Jesus, who is rescuing us from the impending wrath’ (1.10). We do not know everything that Paul said during his visit, of course. But given that the remainder of the letter elaborates only these same points, while reiterating that they constitute the heart of The Announcement that Paul brought during his visit (2.2, 4, 8, 9; 3.2), even insisting that Paul has little to add now, we have reason to infer that this was basically The Announcement that he proclaimed. That the need to be prepared for Jesus’ imminent return dominates The Announcement we see even in Paul’s incidental remarks (e.g., 2.12). He concludes the letter’s first part by saying that he writes in the hope of strengthening them so that they will be ‘blameless before our God and father at the arrival of our lord Jesus with all his holy ones’ (3.13). He then responds to three concerns that have come up after his departure, presumably conveyed via Timothy. For the first and third of these, Paul can only restate what he already told them when he was present. What should you do while waiting for Christ’s return? Do what I told you, only more (4.1–2): pursue holiness and abstain from sexual sin, especially, each preserving your ‘vessel’ and avoiding lust, while loving each other and minding your business (4.3–12). You ask me, ‘When will it happen?’ As I told you, we don’t know (5.1–2). Just watch, wait, and be prepared, because we aim to be rescued and not face wrath (5.9; cf. 1.10). The only substantial insight Paul explicitly adds deals with their concern about believers who die before the consummate event. Here he provides information that he claims to have received from the risen Christ (4.15): anyone who dies beforehand will follow Christ’s own path, of death followed by resurrection. In fact, the ‘dead in Christ’ will precede us, who remain alive, and we shall follow to meet them in the clouds. This news should console them (4.16–18). Paul closes the letter by reaffirming the main point (5.23–24): their spirit, mind, and body must be preserved ‘blamelessly intact at the arrival of our lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is trustworthy. He will do this!’ The entire letter, brief as it is, thus aims to consolidate Paul’s bond with those in Thessalonica who have trusted The Announcement. Having worried that their trust might have faltered, in the face of abuse from their townsfolk (2.17–3.5), he expresses joy at Timothy’s good report (3.1–12) and reassures them. 43 It cannot be mere coincidence that the later authors remove Mark’s other distinctively Pauline emphases (along with τὸ εὐαγγέλιον): the untrustworthiness of Jesus’ family, including his generally esteemed brother James, the head of the Jerusalem Christ-group (Mark 3.21–35; 6.1–6); the obtuseness of Jesus’ first students and especially Peter, though he was James’ leading associate in Jerusalem; Jesus’ alleged preference for a spiritual family, not connected by natural bonds (3.35; 9.38–41); his alleged rupture with Judaean law (Mark 7.19); the lethal hostility of Judaean leaders toward Jesus ab initio (2.1–3.6); and Mark’s pervasive sense of apocalyptic imminence, which the author uses Pauline language to create (9.1; 13.30–37). By supplying birth narratives, endorsing Jesus’ students (adding redeeming endings to Mark’s episodes), situating Jesus in a world of Judaean observance, and delaying or qualifying his Judaean opposition, Matthew and Luke independently reconfigure such unwelcome Pauline themes to yield completely different impressions of a Jesus deeply embedded in Judaean culture and continuous with it—until later ruptures, in Galilee (Matthew) or chiefly in Jerusalem (Luke). 16 What does this first letter say about Paul’s ethnos, its laws and customs? Nothing noticeable: no Torah, circumcision, covenant, scripture citations, Judaean tradition, calendar, or diet. It is not clear that anything in that vein would have been relevant to The Announcement. Scholars today know that Christos originates from Hebrew Mashiach– Messiah, but no such knowledge was necessary to understand this letter’s use of Christos.44 Indeed, nothing that Paul says about Christ in this letter requires biblical knowledge. He does not speak in Septuagintal tones about ‘idols’ as a self-evident evil, or mention the second commandment in 1.9–10. He frames his followers’ move from mere ‘representations’ (εἴδωλα) to the ‘living and true’ God, in language perfectly intelligible to Greeks. Philosophers had long since contemplated the true God over against mere representations. Greeks also knew about children of gods being restored after their death or removal to the underworld (Dionysus-Osiris, Attis, Persephone). Paul had only to convince such audiences that God had raised the crucified Jesus Christ from death and made him their lord who would soon return for them—a belief that Lucian would ridicule as compelling only to the gullible in his Passing of Peregrinus. This Paul succeeded in doing, with at least a few followers, and the claim formed the heart of The Announcement. Although 1 Thessalonians makes no call on biblical knowledge, its incidental reference to Judaeans is revealing. Expatiating on the abuse that Christ-followers in Hellas must endure before Christ calls them to heaven (1.6; 2.1; 3.3–4), Paul consoles them with the thought that they are suffering, from their townsfolk, what earlier Christ-followers including himself faced from their compatriots: ‘the Judaeans, who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all humanity, hindering us from speaking to the nations that they might be saved’ (2.14–16). This passage vividly depicts a rupture between Christ-followers and their contemporaries, whether Judaean or Greek, who reject the alleged revelation. Scholars of a previous generation, certain that the condign punishment of Jews for rejecting Christ (2.16) must reflect post-70 conditions, declared at least this part of the passage a post-Pauline interpolation. That option has now fallen out of favour, for good reason.45 Nowadays, the prevailing PWJ momentum in scholarship leads to the assumption that the passage reflects internal Jewish conflict.46 But that is not what it obviously says. If we read only what Paul writes, without resorting to Romans or other material unavailable to his audience in Thessalonica, the point seems clear: all heaven-bound 44 This is an evidential fact. Cf. Pliny, Ep. 10.96; Tacitus, Ann. 15.44; Suetonius, Claud. 25.4 (Chrestus); Josephus, Ant. 18.63 [whatever the original was]; 20.200. 45 Birger A. Pearson, ‘1 Thessalonians 2:13–16: A Deutero-Pauline Interpolation’, HTR 64 (1971), 79–94. 46 Sarah E. Rollens, ‘Inventing Tradition in Thessalonica: The Appropriation of the Past in 1 Thessalonians 2:14–16’, Biblical Theology Bulletin 46 (2016), 123–32, offers an insightful précis of research. Her own argument, however, illustrates both circular argumentation (pre-70 Christians could not have opposed Jews because they were both ‘varieties of Judaism’, 118) and the multiplication of entities: the passage is ‘an effort to form the identity of the nascent Thessalonian group, incorporating it into a wider mythic narrative—in this case, the narrative of Deuteronomistic theology … widespread among other Jewish texts’ (129). Rob van Houwelingen, ‘They Displease God and are Hostile to Everyone—Antisemitism in 1 Thess 2:14–16?’ Sárospataki Füzetek 22 (2018), 115–29, arguing that Paul’s ‘sharp criticism of the Jews … is moderated by the fact that he himself was Jewish’ (118) and that Paul does not speak against ‘Judaism as such’ (129), further illustrates the circularity. John C. Hurd, ‘Paul Ahead of His Time: 1 Thess. 2:13– 16’, in Peter Richardson and David Granskou, eds., Anti-Judaism in early Christianity. Volume 1: Paul and the Gospels (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press), 21–36, brought a rare historical sensitivity to the issue. 17 Christ-followers will face ‘persecution’ from the champions of ethnos-custom, Judaean and Greek or Thessalonian. The spectrum of ways in which Judaean Christ-followers had reacted to this pressure is another matter, irrelevant to Paul’s points to the Thessalonians and not explored here. But he will later charge that some of his Judaean Christ-following opponents, based in Jerusalem, caved in to persecution from other Judaeans, and that this explains their hostility to his mission among non-Judaeans (Gal 6.12). He, by contrast, uses ‘new creation’ language to stress the radical distinction between Christ-following and maintaining any such old commitments: the old has passed away (2 Cor 5.17; Gal 6.15). As far as his surviving letters permit us to judge, Paul remained devoted to The Announcement for the rest of his life. At the end of his undisputed corpus, at least, he still feels the acute need to defend The Announcement (Rom 1.15–16), for which God has uniquely chosen him (1.1). He has by now fully proclaimed The Announcement in the eastern Roman Empire, he says, and so wants to proceed to ‘the remainder’ of the nations, in the west (Rom 15.17–28; 1.13). The Parthian world and points farther east do not offer the same attraction. If Paul had been free to continue touring The Announcement throughout the Roman Empire, without interference or challenge, perhaps any subsequent letters would have resembled 1 Thessalonians: he gathers a following, leaves town, and sends an emissary for a follow-up visit. Those who remain faithful send questions back with the emissary, which Paul answers in an effort to consolidate the group. Things were not to be so simple, however. This was mainly because other influential Christ-teachers vehemently disagreed with Paul, and to some extent made their influence felt among his groups. If his other letters are notably more complex and problematic than 1 Thessalonians, that is largely because these people were influencing his groups—intentionally or not—with their very different interpretations of Jesus. He would finally write his longest letter, reciprocally, to a group that he did not establish, with a half-apology for interfering in a Christ-association founded on different principles (Rom 15.14–24). When faced with those challenges from eminent Christ-followers, Paul had to make adjustments and finesse the clear and simple claims of 1 Thessalonians. And as Sanders crucially observed, it was only when facing these later contingencies that he felt compelled to raise the issues of Judaean law and custom—because others had raised them in order to criticise him for alleged misrepresentations of Christ.47 To what extent his deeper views also changed as he penned his letters remains unclear to us, as it may have been to Paul himself. 1 Corinthians, apparently his next extant letter, already assumes that much has happened since his founding visit there, following a trip south from Thessalonica. He has come and gone, travelling back to Ephesus in Asia, and other teachers have passed through Corinth in the meantime. Or in Paul’s words: ‘I laid a foundation, and another is building over it; let each take care how he builds over it!’ (1 Cor 3.10). The over-builders he names are Apollos, elsewhere described as a Judaean thinker and orator from Alexandria (Acts 18.24–28), and the figure most prominent among Jesus’ direct students, Cephas (Peter), a Galilean fisherman according to the gospels, who has surprisingly travelled abroad in the Greek world with his wife, Jesus’ brothers, and their spouses too (9.5–6). Whatever their intentions may have been, serious rifts have now opened, because elements from Paul’s group are tending to prefer what these teachers are saying (1.11–12; 3.22). Paul has already written to the group at least once since his departure (5.9). We know precious little about that 47 Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 434–42. 18 lost letter, or much else that was happening, including what exactly Jesus’ family members and students taught, or how they viewed their relationships with Paul and each other. Nevertheless, it seems that Apollos is Paul’s most immediate concern, given that he singles him out as the one building on his foundation (3.4–11). Paul also vigorously disparages wisdom and rhetoric (4.6), while apparently punning on Apollos’ name (1.19: ἀπολῶ τὴν σοφίαν τῶν σοφῶν). Tellingly, the Corinthians ask Paul, their epistolary contact, when Apollos and perhaps the others will return (16.12). It is not clear that they wanted Paul back. It seems that they are not so eager for his return, given that he urgently dispatches Timothy, ‘my beloved child and trustworthy in the lord, who will remind you of my ways in Christ Jesus’—and in a clearly defensive posture threatens a follow-up visit, with a stick to enforce discipline (4.17–21). And when he does eventually visit, a ‘painful’ ensues, causing a very serious rift between Paul and the community he established (2 Cor 1.23–2.7). In the febrile atmosphere of 1 Corinthians, the clearest thread of contention turns on the circumstance that some in the community have come to think of Christ’s significance in ways rather different from those of Paul’s Announcement. They have come to prefer the notion that following Christ is about finding a kind of fulness, knowledge, and peace in this life, which makes better sense than the misery and suffering Paul predicts before Christ’s heavenly return (4.8–13). Other concerns of theirs, which Paul has heard by various means (7.1), would be easy to link up with the same picture, though we cannot join the dots with confidence: whether one should stop engaging with the world in light of Christ’s return, as Paul counsels, especially in relation to marriage (ch. 7: he prefers no marriage in light of the imminent end); why they might not eat good meat even if it came to market after temple sacrifices, since there are no real gods other than the true One (chs. 8–10; he prefers not); manifestations of spiritual gifts (chs. 12–14); and the central question of physical resurrection, for Christ and then for his followers—the heart of Paul’s Announcement, which some of now doubt (15.12). The main point for our purposes is that Judaean law and tradition are still not explicit issues, even in this long and varied letter. Paul cites a few carefully chosen scriptural prooftexts, 48 though these scattered passages, like his quotations of Jesus’ sayings and other texts (2.9; 15.32–33), serve his arguments about being ‘in Christ’ and do not resemble midrash, or an attempt to find deeper meaning in scripture as such. They have nothing to do with faithfully living by Torah. If we ask why he includes flashes of scripture at all, or what they might mean to his mainly non-Judaean assembly (12.2), a simple explanation might be that his Judaean rivals had made a great deal of Torah in their teaching, and he felt the need to show that he could use it also, in keeping with his Announcement. Paul also mentions Judaean holidays that he is observing (16.8). His reference to Passover (5.7) suggests that he shares this major Judaean holiday with his followers. But this might reflect larger Christian practice, in commemorating Christ’s death and resurrection at Passover-time. We do not know. We must remember that the ancient world knew no default or fall-back, secular calendar, as we have today. The Judaean calendar was the one in which Paul had been raised. He could not simply abandon it and still have a way of reckoning time. To reject it, he would have had to adopt the calendar of another polis, embracing the sacred festivals and sacrifices of Ephesus, Corinth, or Rome. Why would he do that, especially if he understood Christ’s significance from Judaean foundations now supplanted? Just as many exChristians still celebrate Christmas and Easter, in some sense, it is not difficult to imagine that the Judaean Paul continued to pattern his life by the calendar in which he was raised, 48 E.g., 1 Cor 1.19, 31 (omitting the reference to knowledge from Jer 9.23); 9.9; 10.1–8, 26; 14.2; 15.54–55. 19 even though he declared Moses’ law obsolete. Real life is not an academic seminar or exercise in pure logic. In Paul’s remaining principal letters to groups he has established, this question of Paul’s attitude toward Moses’ laws becomes ever more prominent, forced onto centre stage by those conflicts with others. From Phil 3.2–21 it appears that someone is telling his Christfollowers that they must observe Judaean nomoi. In response, Paul makes it clear as can be that he considers his Judaean past less than worthless now, ‘on account of the better possession of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my lord’. He excoriates the ‘dogs’ who want his groups to be circumcised. What he includes as ‘loss’, or even—a word unfit for church reading—excrement (σκύβαλα), though he formerly valued these greatly (3.8), include his Judaean ancestry, circumcision, membership of the Pharisees, and zeal for Torah. None of that matters now, he declares (3.9): not because he has begun following a different ‘Judaism’, but because Christ’s revelation and imminent return render any such ethnos-nomos heritage irrelevant. All humanity can be rescued now on the same basis, only by commitment to Christ. Confident that ‘our politeuma is in heaven’, he rails against the teachers who demand affiliation with an earthly community: their ‘end is destruction’ (3.17–21). 2 Corinthians shows Paul even more distracted by teachers highlighting their authentic Hebrew descent and apostleship, who in his words offer a ‘different Jesus’ (2 Cor 10.12–11.23). They too will meet a horrible end (11.15). This letter or its sequel (2 Cor 1–9), depending on whether one treats 2 Corinthians as a unity, steps boldly on the Judaisers’ turf with a re-reading of the fundamental Sinai story. Paul claims Moses himself already realised that Torah’s glory was merely temporary and fading—a fact he had to conceal with a covering over his head. Five times in a short space (3.7, 11, 13, 14, 17) Paul repeats that Moses’ law has been ‘nullified’ by the greater glory of Christ (ὅτι ἐν Χριστῷ καταργεῖται). Galatians develops the same position, as it seeks to prove from the law, for those now enthralled by its observance, that the law is obsolete. Moses’ law lasted only until Christ’s arrival (Gal 3.1–4.7). ‘The present Jerusalem … is in slavery with her children’ (4.25). Paul’s letters to his own assemblies, where he asserted a measure of authority even in the face of competition, thus present a coherent picture of the relationship between The Announcement and his ancestral, Judaean traditions. Granted, these letters are by no means uniform in content or tone, and their contingent factors on many matters are evident. Paul must find ever new ways of explaining Christ’s return, in the face of high-powered and plausible challenges. For decades, scholars have been developing three main lines of explanation for the differences from one letter to the next: an evolution in his thinking;49 a ‘coherent’ matrix or core adapted to contingencies;50 or plain human inconsistency or carelessness.51 From a historical perspective, however, one might ask why Paul’s occasional letters should have to shoulder the burden of ‘consistency’,52 a standard we would not dream of applying to Cicero or Pliny. However that may be, Paul’s posture toward his Judaean past in these letters to his own groups, does not seem extraordinarily complex or vague. The Announcement is about a radically ‘new creation: the old has gone away’ (2 Cor 5.17; Gal 6.15). He is preparing himself and the chosen (= those who have trusted The Announcement) for evacuation from 49 E.g., Charles H. Buck and Greer Taylor, Saint Paul: The Development of his Thought (New York: Scribner, 1969). 50 E.g., J. Christiaan Beker, Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980). 51 E.g., Heikki Räisänen, Paul and the Law, second edn. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1987). 52 Räisänen, Paul, xi–xvi. 20 the impending wrath of God, to be with Christ in heaven—a scenario that would later attract Porphyry’s criticism that human bodies do not belong in heavenly spheres.53 Partly anticipating this objection, perhaps, Paul insists that preparation for heaven requires both a spiritual mode of life, free of carnal attachment, and a final transformation to spirit, following Christ’s example, before the upward journey (1 Cor 15.50–53). Since Paul attached The Announcement to a historical figure whom he had not personally known before his crucifixion, but others had known intimately, his Announcement was certain to put some noses out of joint. After a brief meeting with Peter and Jesus’ brother in Jerusalem, he steered clear of the Judaean mother-polis. When he returned there after fourteen years, he says, he did so only because of ‘a revelation’ and not from any obligation or summons—though still he worried that these influential Christ-followers would sink his project (Gal 2.2). It is unclear that they ever did accept The Announcement. Even when trying to put the best face on their encounter, Paul can speak only of his promise to Jesus’ family and students that he would speak to non-Judaeans only, and ‘remember the poor’ in Jerusalem. With this, they politely shook his hand and sent him off (Gal 2.2–10). The ‘pillars’ themselves also did some travelling, however, as we have seen, and became known to Paul’s groups. Whether or not they intended to interfere, their assumption that Christ-followers should follow Judaean laws got around, and they or people influenced by them became quite insistent. In dismissing these claims, Paul used his own formidable knowledge of scripture to make claims about the law’s temporary nature and displacement by Christ. Paul’s restriction of Moses’ law to a bygone period goes a long way toward explaining his repeated floggings by Judaean compatriots (2 Cor 11.24). Moses’ law was the foundation of Judaean life everywhere: the law that Judaean minority communities in many places had a hard-won permission to observe, exempting them from being subject to the prevailing laws in many poleis.54 Yet outside writers occasionally enjoyed ridiculing Moses as a supposed outcast from Egypt: a magician, leper, or deeply anti-social.55 Judaeans did not need one of their own now seeming to join in such deprecations, just as they did not need Antiochus of Antioch undermining their legitimacy there (Josephus, War 7, above), especially given that Paul was basing his claims on the post-mortem appearances of a Judaean crucified in Jerusalem. Even Acts, though generally a calming and homogenising narrative, claims that when Judaeans from Asia spotted Paul near Jerusalem’s temple, they were outraged because he was ‘teaching everyone everywhere against the people, the law, and this place’ (Acts 21.28). The same text claims that Christ-following Judaeans, who insisted on maintaining Judaean law, were under the impression that Paul was teaching ‘all Judaeans living among the nations defection from Moses: advising them not to circumcise their children or continue in the customs’ (21.21). These impressions are difficult to explain historically as the invention of this author. Left with only tiny fragments from Paul’s life, we do not have clear examples of what he said to other Judaeans, unless the letter to the Romans fits that bill. But already to the Corinthians he implies that he did talk with Judaeans when the opportunity arose, and when he did so he adapted his language for the sake of The Announcement (1 Cor 9.19–23): 53 Porphyry (vel sim.) in Macarius Magnes, Apocr. 4.2; in Hoffmann, Against the Christians, 68–69. Virtually every page of Josephus’ Antiquities and Against Apion, composed for Roman audiences in the first instance, is about the excellence of Moses’ laws as those governing Judaean life. Outside observers never doubted that Moses was the lawgiver under whose ordinances Judaeans everywhere lived, e.g.: Hecataeus of Abdera in Diodorus 40.3.38; Apollonius Molon in Josephus, Apion 1.145; Diodorus 34–35.1.1–5; Strabo, Geog. 16.2.34–46; Tacitus, Hist. 5.2–4. 55 See Molon and Tacitus in the previous note. 54 21 While being free from all, I have enslaved myself to all, so that I might win more. To the Judaeans I became as a Judaean, that I might win Judaeans; to those under law as one under law, though I am certainly not under law myself, that I might win those under law; to the law-less as law-less—though I certainly am not law-less with God, but in the ‘law of Christ’—that I might win the law-less. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I became all things to all people so that by all means I might save some. And I do all that because of The Announcement, so that I might be a partaker in it with others. It is hard to see how Paul could have put more starkly the primacy of The Announcement and the resulting irrelevance of all other norms. Feeling an imperative to ‘rescue’ as many as possible, he persuades Judaeans and foreigners in whatever language will work, though he claims no attachment except to The Announcement—and is certainly not ‘under law’. I can almost hear any colleagues who may still be reading saying, ‘Yes, but what about Romans?’ The question I proposed at the outset concerned Paul’s letters to the groups he founded. Even there, my interest is not in his internal thoughts or formative influences, which can only be conjectured, but in how his letters present his relationship to Judaean ancestral law. When Paul comes to write Romans, by contrast his proclamation of The Announcement in the east is over (Rom 15.18–28). Rome had apparently not been on his itinerary in declaring The Announcement, in part because the Christ group there was established by others. But now his plans have changed. Since he has decided to go as far as Spain to reach ‘the remainder’ of non-Judaeans, he can hope to visit Rome without causing offence and with due respect, purely as a passing-through point, since he must pass that way anyway. His groups in Philippi, Thessalonica, Corinth, or Galatia did not know his letter to the Romans, however, and that is why I have ignored it while trying to understand his correspondence with them. That said, the Romans reflex is so powerful in scholarship, even all-consuming, that some readers will think I am cheating if I ignore this unusual text. So I shall make a brief effort. Following our principle of stressing what is clearest, we see immediately that Romans continues to present Paul as uniquely linked with The Announcement (1.1, 9). He explains that ‘according to my Announcement’ Christ will return to judge the world (2.16), ties The Announcement to his work among the nations (10.16; 11.28; 15.16, 19), and ends with a greeting to the group in Rome based on ‘my Announcement’ (16.25). What his audience itself believes about Christ, tellingly, he cannot call The Announcement, but rather ‘your kind of teaching’ or ‘the teaching you learned’ (6.17; 16.17). Indeed, he will bring his Announcement when he visits, because he is not ashamed of it (1.15–16). He writes partly in preparation for that visit, but also for more urgent reasons. Heading first to Jerusalem, to convey the financial gift he has raised in Hellas, from his own assemblies, he appeals to the Roman for their support in ensuring that the gift will be accepted, and for their intercessions to ensure that he will be protected from ‘unbelievers’ or unpersuaded in Judaea (15.25–32). Why seek the support of Roman Christ-followers before heading to Jerusalem? Since Romans assumes Judaean perspectives, knowledge of texts, and even technical terms (3.25), uniquely calls Abraham ‘our physical ancestor’ (4.1), addresses the audience as Judaeans who know the law, and adopts ‘we’ language with them (2.17, 23, 27; 3.9; 7.1), while consistently speaking of gentiles in the third person (even at 11.13, telling his audience ‘Now I am speaking to the nations/gentiles’), and since the letter hardly makes a claim without a scriptural proof-texts, it seems to me that these Christ-followers are Judaeans. That is why, uncharacteristically falling over himself to be polite with a group he did not establish (1.11–12), Paul bobs and weaves to defend The Announcement from 22 specifically Judaean criticisms. Circumcision and Judaean identity have enormous value, he stresses (3.1–2)—although none with respect to salvation in Christ (3.30). Is the law finished with, or is it sin? Perish the thought! (3.31; 7.12)—although it points to Christ and otherwise is irrelevant (3.21; 4.14; 10.4). Has God abandoned Israel? Absolutely not! (9.2–6a)—but then again, not all ‘Israel’ are really Israel, are they? (9.6b). God’s choice of Israel is irrevocable, and so all Israel will be saved—at least when they cease to oppose The Announcement (11.25–32). The two-covenant (Sonderweg) reading of Rom 11.26—all Judaeans will be saved as such, without following Christ—might make sense if the line is taken by itself, at Paul’s moment of writing, deducing from the formulation in this verse alone. If exegetes of this persuasion are right about that, however, perhaps they would agree that an editor would have advised Paul to express himself much more clearly, without all the distracting build-up of chapters 1 through 8 or such remarks as at 11.14: ‘might save some of them’). Again, it is hard to imagine another historical figure (cf. Churchill, Roosevelt, Tony Blair) with whom we would pull out one remark, from one letter or speech, and when he was trying everything to woo a particular group, and insist that this was the foundation of his thinking in spite of all evidence to the contrary. For the overwhelming evidence of both Paul’s other letters and of Romans itself points, as we have seen, in a different direction. Paul considers it rather important to follow Christ, as he has done. Although this arguably last letter is clearly preoccupied with Judaean issues, most scholars understand it to have been written primarily for gentiles.56 I cannot follow this reasoning, finding it much easier to understand Romans as a case study of the principles Paul boasts of in 1 Cor 9.19–23 (above). For our question, however, it does not matter greatly whether Romans’ audience comprised Judaeans or devotees of Jupiter Optimus Maximus: first, because he did not write the letter to his own groups, and second, because ‘Judaism’ does not appear. As for Paul’s relationship with his ancestral traditions, while saying every reassuring thing he can about Israel and the law of Moses in this unusual letter, he still clings to The Announcement, which declares salvation through Christ alone, for Judaeans and Greeks on the same basis. IV. From Solution to Problem Although I depart substantially from Sanders’ approach to Paul in avoiding ‘Judaism’ or ‘patterns of religion’, and in not assuming that Paul had to be a coherent thinker,57 56 W. G. Kümmel, Introduction to the New Testament, trans. H. C. Kee (Nashville: Abingdon, 1975), 309: ‘essentially a debate between the Pauline gospel and Judaism, so that the conclusion seems obvious that the readers were Jewish Christians’, except that ‘the letter contains statements which indicate specifically that the community was Gentile Christian’, and ‘Any attempt to gain a picture of the readers of Rom[ans] must be made from this established point of view.’ Cf. Andrew D. Das, Solving the Romans Debate (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007) and Neil Elliott, The Rhetoric of Romans: Argumentative Constraint and Strategy and Paul’s Dialogue with Judaism (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), both of which highlight the Jewish content but insist on a gentile audience. Alleged proof of a gentile audience is found in Rom 1.5–6, 13; some translations embed this assumption (NRSV, NIV, ESV). But in the first passage, Paul mentions his own work among the nations (ἐν πᾶσιν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν; cf. Gal 1.16; 2.2; Acts 15.12; 21.19) and before ingratiatingly comparing his audience, ‘among whom you also are called of/for Christ’ (ἐν οἷς ἐστε καὶ ὑµεῖς κλητοὶ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ; cf. 1 Pet 2.12). He says only that he and they are likewise among (ἐν) the nations (cf. Acts 21.21 on Judaeans: τοὺς κατὰ τὰ ἔθνη πάντας Ἰουδαίους). In 1.13 Paul writes προεθέµην ἐλθεῖν πρὸς ὑµᾶς … ἵνα τινὰ καρπὸν σχῶ καὶ ἐν ὑµῖν καθὼς καὶ ἐν τοῖς λοιποῖς ἔθνεσιν. Although scholars usually read τοῖς λοιποῖς ἔθνεσιν as ‘[to] the other gentiles’ (in addition to you), the ordinary sense of τοῖς λοιποῖς is ‘[to] those remaining, the rest’. Given Paul’s plan to stop in Rome en route to the west, it is easier to see here as a distinction between the Romans and the remainder of the gentiles he plans to reach; cf. Steve Mason, Josephus, Judea, and Christian Origins: Methods and Categories (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2009), 303–28. 57 Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 433. 23 Sanders’ picture of Paul’s relationship to his ancestral tradition seems to me to explain what Paul says to his ‘assemblies’ better than the NP can. Namely, he claimed that his encounter(s) with the risen Christ had transformed his life; without that transformative experience, Paul would have remained happily devoted to his ancestral tradition, and persecuting Christfollowers. Following the divine encounter, however, all that mattered was union with Christ and preparing for his return, meanwhile fulfilling his unique mission to bring The Announcement to the nations. To be ‘in Christ’ was to be a ‘new creation’, which rendered existing structures and allegiances, laws and customs, without point or purpose. Whereas Sanders’ Paul followed a ‘pattern of religion’ very different from Judaism’s covenantal nomism, I consider ‘Judaism’ a historical distraction. But I share Sanders’ impression that Paul’s encounter with Christ, and not scriptural exegesis or the like, led him to jettison all earth-bound law and custom. Precisely that claim to be free from nomoi would become central in outsider criticism of Christ-followers, and among such figures as Tertullian, Minucius Felix, and Origen in the following decades (Part I above). Dunn’s 1982 lecture launched ‘The New Perspective on Paul’, we have seen, but in a roundabout way. He first allows that, among the many contributions to Pauline studies of past decades, only Sanders’ Paul and Palestinian Judaism deserves the accolade of a ‘new perspective on Paul’.58 This makes it sound as though Sanders’ view is the new perspective of the title. So the reader is surprised to discover that Dunn then applauds everything in Sanders’ book except its view of Paul. This view Dunn considers retrograde, inferior even to the old Lutheran Paul.59 An even bigger surprise is Dunn’s reason: ‘The Lutheran Paul has been replaced by an idiosyncratic Paul who in arbitrary and irrational manner turns his face against the glory and greatness of Judaism’s covenant theology and abandons Judaism simply because it is not Christianity.’60 Dunn imagines Paul as only one of a class of Jews who became Christ-followers, who must all have had similar reasons for doing so.61 This assumption leads him to reject Sanders’ ‘arbitrary and abrupt discontinuity between Paul’s gospel and Jewish past’. Dunn prefers to see Paul as reasoning himself into following Christ from scripture, as a Jew concerned only about the too-narrow ‘nationalist and racial’ character of contemporary Judaism. Being committed to ancestral tradition, Dunn proposes, Paul saw Christ as a means of dropping the ‘badges’ of Jewish exclusivity. ‘Logic’, ‘argument’, and ‘corollaries’ appear more than half a dozen times each in the famous lecture’s latter part. But the ancient recipients of Paul’s letters, who were perhaps more willing than modern professors to believe that God spoke to people, might not have found Paul’s move (according to Sanders) so strange. Is it arbitrary or irrational to do what God tells you? The author of Acts actually thematises necessary obedience to divine instruction, irrespective of human preference, to explain Christian origins—and uses Paul as Exhibit A (9.3–19; 26.19). Should Paul have remonstrated with the divine presence: ‘Well I’m flattered, but could you offer a seminar for me and my Jewish friends? If you can convince us that this is all grounded in scripture, and if we can all be apostles (I wouldn’t wish to be idiosyncratic), I’ll consider your offer’? Dunn’s assumption that Paul was one of a class, the members of which must have followed Christ from similar reasoning, seems to me controverted by nearly every line 58 James D. G. Dunn, ‘The New Perspective on Paul’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library 65 (1983), 95–122. 59 Dunn, ‘New Perspective’, 102–103. 60 Dunn, ‘New Perspective’, 109. 61 Dunn, ‘New Perspective’, 101 (my emphasis): ‘Paul was by no means the only Jew who became a Christian and it is difficult to see such an arbitrary jump from one “system” to another commending itself quite as much as it … did to so many of his fellow Jews.’ 24 from Phil 3.2 through Galatians 6, with Romans in the bargain. Paul’s claims of personal selection, revelation, and unique authority leap out everywhere: ‘When the one who had set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me … was pleased to reveal his son to me, that I might proclaim him among the nations, I did not consult with flesh and blood’ (Gal 1.15– 16). ‘Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus…? Are you not my work in the lord? … You are the seal of my apostleship!’ (1 Cor 9.1). ‘Last of all … he appeared to me. … I am what I am … I struggled far more than all of them [apostles] put together’ (15.8, 10). ‘I reckon myself in no way behind the oh-so-grand apostles’ (2 Cor 11.5). No less, Paul speaks pervasively of abrupt change, novelty, and disjunction: ‘If one is in Christ, it’s a new creation. The old things went away. Look: new things have come to be!’ (Gal 6.15). He formerly pursued the ancestral traditions with zeal, but now regards those who read scripture without Christ as veiled and blinded by ‘the god of this age’ (2 Cor 3.17–4.4). If Paul’s Announcement had been more in the vein of ‘I’m OK, you’re OK’, or ‘You know, I’ve discovered a new reading of Isaiah’, it would surely not have generated such urgency—or intense controversy. Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), founder of a modern philosophy of history, warned against five prejudices that ensnare historians. The third, ‘the conceit of the scholars’, meant ‘delight in fancying an inaccessible esoteric wisdom among the ancients, coinciding miraculously with the opinions professed by each one of themselves [the modern scholars], which they dress in the garb of antiquity in order to enforce their acceptance.’62 That is to say, we imagine that the ancients thought as we do, ignoring their unavoidable weirdness as figures from an alien past. Classicists and biblical exegetes—I say this as a fully complicit commentator—are especially prone to this fallacy because of the great distance between us and the world we study and yet the very hominess of ‘Judaeo-Christian’ tradition. We feel that we should understand it intuitively and feel at home in it. Dunn’s call for a reasonable, scholarly Paul seems to me to embody this pull, which we all feel in some way. Conclusion Many, perhaps most historical questions are worth pursuing even if we cannot definitively answer them. When we investigate why an actor in the past did something, or why an event occurred, we are immersing ourselves in their world to rethink their thoughts and situations. Since history is first of all the act of investigating, nothing is lost and much is gained by this effort to live imaginatively in the foreign world of the past, whether we ever figure things out completely or not. Whether Paul was inside or outside ‘Judaism’ is, by contrast, a pointless historical question in my view. This is not because it cannot be answered, but because even trying to answer it, merely framing such a question, takes us away from the ancient world, away from Paul’s world. Discussing the issue requires us to find out from each other what we mean by ‘Judaism’—a common-room discussion requiring several levels of abstraction. In this essay I have tried to think with readers about a different and simpler question, which is susceptible of at least partial (dis)confirmation, namely: ‘How did Paul present himself to the groups of Christ-followers he established, in relation to Judaean law, custom, and culture?’ Paul was a Judaean by ethnos, and that he could not change. He was indelibly circumcised, and he continued to follow at least some key moments in the Judaean calendar. The degree to which he ‘remained in the ancestral customs’ of the Judaeans, as Josephus 62 This is Benedetto Croce’s summary (in The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, trans. R. G. Collingwood [New York: Macmillan, 1913), 157) of passages from Vico’s Scienza Nuova (1744), accessible in English in Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch, eds., The New Science of Giambattista Vico (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1948), such as l.vii (59); II.iv (127–28), and III (330). 25 might have put it, is a different matter. Since most of what we all do comes from custom or habit, not rational analysis before each action, even if we could watch Paul acting in certain contexts we might not know what he was thinking or how he reconciled his thought with his actions. Where we can make some progress is with Paul’s self-representation to his ‘in Christ’ groups in letters. From this it emerges, first, that he was sure of having been singled out by God, and son Christ, to prepare the chosen among the nations for rescue to heaven. Second, ‘The Announcement’ he lays out to his groups lacked any Judaean requirements and required no biblical knowledge. Third, in response to those who thought that he should include Judaean content, he responded with a firm ‘No’. This was not because he had a different Judaism or because his groups were gentiles. It was because, for him, being in Christ rendered every nomos, of Greeks or of Judaeans, a dead letter. Moses’ law too had served only until Christ. Paul was emphatically not ‘under law’. Fourth, Paul declared as vividly as one could imagine his abandonment of the zeal he formerly had for his ancestral traditions. Fifth, he was happy to eat with non-Judaeans in a way that leading Judaean Christ-followers—Peter, Paul’s associate Barnabas, and a group from Jesus’ brother James—could not accept. Sixth, as word about these points got around, from Rome to Jerusalem, Paul’s Announcement caused deep offence to other Judaeans, whether Christ-followers or not. Seventh, Paul faced a rough reception from Judaeans everywhere, which included repeated whippings, because of The Announcement. These indications present a fairly unified picture, though still beginning and partial, of one Judaean who consciously abandoned his ancestral custom. He did this not for the more common reasons of laxity, intermarriage, or attraction to the ways of another ethnos, however, but because he claimed an encounter with the resurrected figure of Jesus Christ, which in his view displaced the ethnos-polis-nomos foundations of ancient identity. This radical departure from the long-established, essential-seeming categories of life would require successive generations of Christ-followers in Paul’s trajectory—by no means the only Christian trajectory—to explain themselves, when Christ did not return to evacuate them. Their predicament remained awkward until perhaps already Tertullian and Origen in anticipation, but certainly Eusebius and his successors, managed to turn the tables and reform the social-political lexicon in light of Christianity’s ascendancy, so as to value this faithbased identity over ethnos- and polis-affiliation. 26

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