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  • From: "Mark D. Nanos" <nanos AT gvi.net>
  • To: "Corpus-paul" <corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Paul a Pharisee
  • Date: Wed, 1 Dec 1999 09:12:29 -0600



The way you put it would mean that there is agreement between Paul
self-description and the way Luke depicts him.Judaism is a religion of
Torah; and passages like Gal. 2:14-21;3:10-14;Gal.4 and 2 Cor. 3:1-4:6,seem
to indicate that Paul sees the Torah as something that is past. I don't
understand why you seem to think that he was a Torah observant Jew.

Eduardo G. Llanes
Miami,Fl.


Dear Eduardo,
I do not see that any of these passages indicate that Torah is in the past, but rather that it is not for non-Jewish people who have "already" come to faith in/of Christ, and who are thus known by God "already" without becoming righteous ones of Israel. For Paul, they are representatives of the nations, evidence of the dawning of the age to come.

Paul is Jewish, and is not describing his own situation as though he was not. In other words, you will have to argue each of these passages to your conclusion, and not assume that they say what traditional interpretations have taken them to say, before you can test your portrait against Luke's.

Otherwise you judge Luke's Paul not necessarily against Paul's Paul, but the prior interpretive traditions' Paul, the Paul of so-called Paulinism, who looks very much like the product of the later Reformation take on Christianity against Judaism (against their contemporary view of Catholicism really), for example. That Luke did not know the Reformers' Paul should come as no surprise. But the point is that this does not tell us much about Luke. Rather, it tells us much about his interpreters: they have often pre-judged his voice according to only one of the possible ways to have first heard Paul's own voice; that is, on this largely held but perhaps anachronistic view, as against Jewish (read their understanding against Catholic) identity and piety. Now that the understanding among Christian interpreters of Judaism's own voice has begun to change, it will be necessary to reread Paul in his own context. Does it not make sense that he will read differently?

For example, how could Paul make the kind of claim that he does in Gal. 5:3 that calls those gentiles who receive Jewish identity (symbolized by receiving circumcision) to observe all of the Torah if he himself, who is circumcised, does not likewise understand himself to be so obliged? This would be a senseless argument, and hardly likely to convince those whom he seeks to dissuade. The would simply reply, because we want what you have, the privilege (implied in the context that Jewish identity is privileged, thus the interest among the gentiles addressed to aquire this status), without the obligations that obtain for those of this identity. Perhaps because interpreters of Paul have failed to realize that observance of Torah for a (religious) Jewish person (like Paul) was a privilege--although they can now, post-new perpsective--they had not considered the implications of how his argument might be taken in the opposite direction. So much of interpretations has to do with what one thinks they "know" when they begin the interpretive task!

As far as I can see in Paul's extant writings, all of his arguments rely on the premise that he has Jewish identity and behaves accordingly. But he is writing not to Jewish people like himself, but to gentiles, in order to clarify that they are equal partners without becoming Jewish; his argument is that Israel and the nations worship the One God together because the end of the ages when Israel and the nations will do so has dawned in Jesus Christ. At least that is how I see it. And if so, then Luke may just have Paul right on this matter anyway.

In other words, whether Luke has Paul right or not (to which I have not really attended in this response) can only be assessed according to one's reconstruction of Paul. And that is where the matter must first be argued: where do his arguments imply that Paul stands on Jewish identity and behavior for Jewish people (like himself), not gentiles, of whom and to whom he writes.

Regards,
Mark Nanos
Kansas City




  • Re: Paul a Pharisee, Mark D. Nanos, 12/01/1999

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