Matthew Thiessen on the Jewish Paul: should we choose against readings that are harmful to others?

In the introduction to his book A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles (2023), Matthew Thiessen says that his broad aim is to present a reading of Paul that does not perpetuate an old “Christian” or “Lutheran” view of Judaism as “inferior or even pernicious, something left behind or something that has died” (4). He will argue against the conclusion, reached even by many more recent interpreters who have rejected the old perspective, that “Paul must have thought something was inherently flawed with, wrong about, or absent from Judaism” (9). Thus, he aligns himself with the radical new perspective associated with William Campbell, Kathy Ehrensperger, Paula Fredriksen, Mark Nanos, and Magnus Zetterholm.

Some simple ways to make Paul weird again

In chapter one, “Making Paul Weird Again,” Thiessen reflects on some of the ways in which standard assumptions are being adjusted. The category of “Christian” is probably anachronistic; for Paul the division between Jew and non-Jew remains fundamental. The word “church” is too closely identified with “Christianity” as a religion in opposition to Judaism; ekklēsia is a generic term for “assembly” or “gathering.” The word “Christ” has lost its properly Jewish connotations. To call Paul an “apostle” fails to capture the political significance of the Greek term: he was a herald or envoy or ambassador or spokesperson “on behalf of a king: Jesus the Messiah” (16).

Thiessen further holds that the collection of Paul’s letters is too small, too disjointed, too full of holes to be self-interpretive. So it is “imperative that we work to situate Paul… within the genus of Second Temple Jewish thought, which was much more diverse than people often recognize” (18). This has implications, for example, for how we understand Paul’s argument about gentiles and circumcision. Contrary to popular Christian interpretation, it is not the case that first century Jews generally expected gentiles to convert to Judaism in order to experience divine deliverance.

Finally, we must ask whether our understanding of Paul’s argumentation at any particular point makes rhetorical sense. “How likely is it that Paul believed that he could convince others of X?” (20). The point of that is not made entirely clear.

But what it comes down to is that there are proper historical-critical constraints on readers, but we must also recognise that the reader is creatively and imaginatively engaged in the work of interpretation and must make responsible choices. It is, in the words of Margaret Mitchell, an “artistic exercise in conjuring up and depicting a dead man from his ghostly images in the ancient text, as projected on a background composed from a selection of existing sources.”

This brings us to the question of the moral responsibility of the modern interpreter.

Thiessen has been “trained in the methods of historical criticism” but he struggles with his own subjectivity. Scholars easily fall into the trap of thinking that their training endows them with technical mastery over the text, forgetting that interpretation is always conditioned by their “social context and the unique history of biblical studies as a modern discipline.” So true!

There is, therefore, unavoidably, a “moral component to how one chooses to depict Paul.” We have to consider not only the many ways in which our subjectivity distorts interpretation but also whether that distortion is harmful to others, and in the case of Pauline studies, the principal harm likely to be done is towards Jews.

I would argue that where uncertainty persists, we have a moral obligation to choose against readings that harm others. What I set out to do in the following pages is to provide a reading of Paul that is not dependent on the denigration of ancient Jews and Judaism. I do this because I think readings that do otherwise are historically implausible and, even more importantly, denigrate modern Jews and Judaism. Historically, Paul would have been surprised by the later Christian claim that he was rejecting Judaism and founding a new religion. (21)

A Paul without a future

Most of Thiessen’s preface to the interpretation of Paul makes sense to me. The man needs to be stripped of the layers of Christian theology and allowed to dress himself as a first century Jew. And how would a first century Jew dress himself? Well, we need to familiarise ourselves with the intellectual fashions displayed in the windows, stacked on the shelves, hanging on the racks of Hellenistic Judaism.

It made me wonder, though—before we get to the moral responsibility problem—whether in our eagerness to recover the Jewish Paul we underestimate the extent to which his thought was already being reconfigured around the prospect of a future rule of the Lord and Messiah Jesus over the nations, in a way that exceeded or transcended all current arrangements—not only the failed synagogues of diaspora Judaism but also the communities of eschatological witness in which Paul was investing so much hope.

Thiessen has nothing to say in this chapter on the weirdness of Paul about the spectacular future political-religious transformations that were the object of his “apostolic” proclamation. He did not merely speak “on behalf of a king.” He spoke on behalf of a king who would judge the nations on a day of wrath, abolish the follies and attendant depravities of Greek religion, and govern the oikoumenē justly, to the glory of the one true God.

Yes, there’s a chapter on “Paul, an End-Time Jew” to come, but I think I can guess what Thiessen is going to say there; and we have this statement in the Introduction:

…like the apocalyptic reading, I am convinced that Paul thought the Messiah’s coming had ushered in the end of the ages and that Israel’s God was indeed doing something new as the wake of the Messiah’s resurrection rippled through the cosmos. …the Messiah’s coming, death, and resurrection were, for Paul, its telos—its goal or culmination—not its destruction (Rom. 10:4). (9)

This, I think, is really a quite fundamental misunderstanding of Paul’s “apocalyptic” thought. The telos for Paul was not the “coming, death, and resurrection” of the Messiah. Everywhere in Paul, the telos was a future day—when the Greek would be judged, when the Jew would be judged, when the churches would be subjected to fire, when believers would need to be awake and put on armour, when the Lord Jesus would be revealed, when he would come from heaven to deliver his persecuted followers from the wrath to come, when the nations would confess Jesus as Lord. The telos iwas something to wait for, to be prepared for, to be hopeful for.

The “end” is by no means inconsistent with the more apocalyptic strands of Jewish belief, but I disagree with Thiessen that Paul thought that the resurrection of Jesus was in itself the climactic moment. It was a political appointment (Rom. 1:3-4) in anticipation of a moment in history when the Greeks would abandon their idols and serve the living and true God (1 Thess. 1:9-10). And it was the means by which that shared goal would be achieved that would drive at least the thin end of a wedge between Paul and his kinsmen according to the flesh.

Readings that harm others

I have to say that I’m puzzled by the assertion that “where uncertainty persists, we have a moral obligation to choose against readings that harm others.”

Why would we not say that the moral obligation is the same as the critical obligation, which in this case would be to keep an open mind about the meaning and implications of an obscure text?

In principle, surely, it is incumbent upon the scholar to persevere in the work of interpretation until the ambiguity or uncertainty has been satisfactorily resolved. If we have already chosen against readings that harm others, we not only forestall the longer critical task, we also create a bias against what may turn out in the end to be the better interpretation. That’s the whole point of critical enquiry.

It’s also possible that what appears harmful to others in today’s cultural and intellectual climate may be judged rather differently tomorrow.

And what do we do with interpretations that are unambiguously harmful to others? If we must allow them to stand, what is the justification for choosing against such readings when matters are less clear? If we do not allow them to stand, then we have resorted to censorship and the problem no longer arises. We have the problem of censorship instead.

When Thiessen says that he intends to “provide a reading of Paul that is not dependent on the denigration of ancient Jews and Judaism,” what does he mean exactly? Is he merely ruling against the later anti-Jewish prejudices of the church? Or is he rejecting the idea that Paul was himself anti-Jewish, on the grounds that it would be “historically implausible” for a first century Jew to express anti-Jewish sentiments?

Back to eschatology

Again, I think the real problem here is that Thiessen does not address the eschatological dimension. This is a persistent shortcoming of both the New Perspective on Paul and the Paul Within Judaism movement. The outlook is essentially sociological and synchronic: how is a community assessed at any particular moment in time?

Whether “denigration” is quite the right term, I’m not sure; but it seems to me that Paul had a very low opinion of the Judaism that he encountered in the synagogues in the course of his activities as a herald of the future kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ. They had fallen a long way short of the glory of God; they had become, for the most part, “vessels of wrath prepared for destruction” (Rom. 9:22).

This was a people which had been given so much but which had failed comprehensively to present to the ancient world a credible alternative to the narrative of Romans 1:18-32. So the living God was bound to hold his own people accountable first (Rom. 3:6, 19-20).Before there would be wrath against the Greek, there would be wrath against the Jew (Rom. 2:9).

The communities of the Lord Jesus Christ were in Paul’s mind to function as a benchmark of righteousness, superseding—at least in this limited eschatological context—the obsolescent synagogues: “Since you thrust [the word] away and do not judge yourselves worthy of the life of the age, behold, we are turning to the gentiles” (Acts 13:46*). Whether Israel as a whole would eventually change its mind on the matter, Paul was not in a position to say.

Does his forthright eschatological condemnation of his people amount to antisemitism? By highlighting it, do we “denigrate modern Jews and Judaism”? No, because it is not an essentialist appraisal. Judaism, Paul would say, is essentially good—for all the reasons listed in Romans 9:4-5—but is stumbling over God’s management of the impending crisis.

So the questions to be asked regarding modern Jews and Judaism—and, indeed, regarding modern churches—are these: Do they provide a credible alternative to the dominant narratives of our civilisation? Do they present a benchmark of righteousness by which our civilisation might in principle be judged?