Paul, New Perspectives and Pauline vs. Jewish Christianity
One of my readers recently shared with me some of their readings on the Apostle Paul, and it got me thinking about popular and scholarly visions of Paul. There is a genre of popular writing on the history of early Christianity which paints a picture of a stark division between the Christianity of Paul and the Christianity of the earliest followers of Jesus. One of these scholars is James Tabor, whose book The Jesus Dynasty (2006) argued that the original form of Christianity was a movement centered around the family of Jesus as a sort-of royal dynasty that was displaced by the teachings of Paul, which Tabor sees as fundamentally different from that of the earliest followers of Jesus. Another author who has written both scholarly and popular books on the early Christian movement, Robert Eisenman, similarly portrays the earliest Christianity as associated with James, the Brother of Jesus, and in stark opposition to the teachings of Paul.
These ideas have received a wide reception in popular media, but they don’t have much acceptance in the academic or theological world. Instead, a very different debate around Paul has been brewing in Protestant theological circles since the 1970s, the “New Perspective on Paul”. Unlike Tabor and Eisenman, who paint a picture of Paul as an opponent of “Jewish Christianity”, the authors associated with the New Perspective on Paul (E.P. Sanders and James Dunn, especially) argue we must understand Paul in the context of Second Temple Judaism to understand the points he was trying to make in his letters.
According to the New Perspectives school, the classical Reformers, such as Luther and Calvin, fundamentally misunderstood both Paul and Second Temple Judaism. The Reformers understood Paul’s concept of “Justification by Faith” as a matter of personal salvation - they set up a contrast between “Good Works” and “Faith”, with Paul on the side of “Faith” and his “Judaizer” opponents on the side of “Good Works”. A person is saved not by their good works, they argue, but by their faith in God and Jesus Christ. The New Perspectives school argues that the Reformers were conflating their criticisms of 16th century Catholicism with Second Temple Judaism, falsely setting up a dichotomy between “legalistic” Judaism and a Christianity freed from “works of the Law”. Instead, Sanders and Dunn argue that Paul’s point wasn’t about personal, individual salvation, but rather about membership in the covenant people of God. The “works of the Law” that Paul criticized weren’t good works (something that Paul seems to have written positively about throughout his letters), but rather the idea that Gentiles should adopt Jewish practices such as circumcision, dietary laws and Sabbath keeping.
The scholars in the New Perspective build off of better understandings among modern scholars of Second Temple Judaism. And they demonstrate that Paul is in line with much of Second Temple Judaism. Both, for instance, hold that at the Final Judgement, people will be judged based on the way they lived their lives - in other words with their “works” (a view that has caused much controversy among more conservative Christians in the Reformed tradition). [N.T. Wright has a great discussion of this in his lecture “New Perspectives on Paul” in section “3. Final Judgment According to Works”.] Where Paul differs from the rest of Second Temple Judaism is his idea that Gentiles can become part of God’s covenant without adopting the ritual markings of Judaism.
How are we supposed to reconcile these very different views of Paul - Tabor’s vision of Paul as an almost Gnostic figure betraying the revolutionary and messianic family of Jesus or Eisenman’s view of Paul as a secret Herodian warping the Jewish Christianity of James with Sanders and Dunn’s very Jewish Paul who is attempting to incorporate Gentile Christians into God’s covenant with the Jewish people. I think a partial answer to untying this knot has to do with looking at the fundamental ways we interpret and understand the Bible.
For Tabor and Eisenman and many other popular writers like Bart Ehrman, the New Testament as we have it is incredibly distanced from the earliest Christianity. These authors imagine that the New Testament is engaged in a “cover up” - hiding the true nature of the original Christianity. As a result, they believe the Bible must be read “against the grain” - looking for points of conflict and contradiction that might reveal the “true” history of Christianity under the lies of tradition.
For the scholars associated with the New Perspectives (and for most theologians and orthodox thinkers throughout history), there is no “hidden” or “secret” Christianity that must be uncovered. Instead, Paul is seen as a reliable guide to the theology of 1st century Christians - that is, Paul is seen as representative of “mainstream” Christianity.
Some examples might help here. Paul presents the Jerusalem Church as an authoritative center of Christianity in his day. This church is associated with three “Pillars” - Cephas (Peter), James and John (Galatians 2:9). Around 48 CE, Paul and his companions present their missionary activity among the Gentiles to the leaders of the Jerusalem Church. Paul had been criticized by some Christians for not requiring Gentile converts to Christianity to be circumcised. According to the version of this “Jerusalem Council” in Acts, James declares that Paul’s approach is the right one, adding that Gentile converts should “abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from meat of strangled animals and from blood” (Acts 15:20).
In Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, he has a discussion of a similar dispute between himself and Peter. According to Paul, when Peter (Cephas) was in Antioch, he originally ate with Gentiles, something that would have been forbidden under normative understandings of Jewish law since Gentiles did not follow Jewish dietary restrictions. Then, “certain men came from James” and Peter suddenly stopped eating with Gentiles. Paul confronts him and condemns him to his face (Galatians 2).
These two accounts do seem to be in tension - in Acts, James embraces Paul’s mission to the Gentiles and his understanding of Gentile Christianity; in Galatians, men “from James” seem to inspire Peter to break table fellowship with Gentile Christians. Scholars like Tabor and Eisenman conclude that there really must have been considerable tension between James and Paul, and that the portrayal of their agreement in Acts must be historically inaccurate - an attempt by later generations of Pauline Christians to rewrite the history of Christianity. But I don’t know if this conclusion is really necessary. Earlier in Galatians 2, Paul writes “James, Cephas and John, those esteemed as pillars, gave me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship when they recognized the grace given to me. They agreed that we should go to the Gentiles, and they to the circumcised” (Galatians 2:9). Galatians seems to support the general picture of the “Council of Jerusalem” in Acts.
The matter is confused by the fact that there definitely existed later “Jewish Christian” groups that held James in special esteem and opposed the teachings of Paul. These groups are often labeled “Ebionites”, though they seem to have been made up of many smaller groups that may or may not have seen themselves as a single movement. The problem with reconstructing the beliefs and practices of the Ebionites is that we don’t have any of their writings - we only have second hand accounts by early Christian authors criticizing the Ebionites. Scholars like Tabor and Eisenman assert that the Ebionites represent a survival of the “original” Jewish Christianity, but they might just as easily represent a later movement that was distinct from both the earliest forms of Christianity and the newer, “Gentile Christianity” of Paul.
Either way, I hope you found this brief overview of recent writings on Paul to be interesting and informative. I’d love to hear your thoughts about this topic in the comments. And please let me know what other sorts of topics you’d like to see addressed in future newsletters!