The Maligned Apostle

Author: Dwight A. Pryor

IN OUR TIME a veritable revolution has occurred in Jesus studies.

Thanks in no small measure to Jewish scholarship in Israel, an impressive portrait has

emerged of Jesus of Nazareth as a Torah-affirming Jewish sage who operated confidently
within the vibrant matrix of Second Temple Jewish thought, drawing deeply upon the
traditions and concepts of Judaism and the Hebrew scriptures. Increasingly these insights
are being incorporated into the conceptual mainstream of the church, both Protestant and
Catholic.

Would that the same could be said regarding the Apostle Paul! With few exceptions
Jewish scholars and rabbis look upon him negatively—as a “convert” from Judaism to
Christianity, forsaking Israel and his Jewish heritage, and insistently espousing an anti-
Law polemic in his letters. Not coincidentally, this distorted image of “St. Paul” has been
proffered by the Church since the fourth century, only to become more entrenched in the
Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century.

Fortunately a serious reassessment of the “Protestant Paul” is presently underway by

several evangelical scholars. And it is needed. Consider for example the traditional
misrepresentations of Paul’s relationship with the Law and Judaism.

As a devout Pharisee, by his own testimony, Paul (Saul) had a zeal for the Torah, and was
completely confident of his righteous standing with respect to it (Phil 3:5-6). Even after
his encounter with the risen Lord, he continued to identify himself, in the present tense,
as a Pharisee (Acts 23:6). He went out of his way to celebrate the Feasts (20:16), and
insisted that the Torah was “spiritual” and the commandments, “holy, just and good” and
that in which he delighted (7:12, 14, 22).

WE SHOULD NOT BE SURPRISED that Paul has been misunderstood and maligned
through the centuries. It was so from the beginning! Even Peter commented that “there
are some things in [Paul’s writings] hard to understand” (2 Pet 3:16). A comment by
James also is telling.

In Acts 21:20, James reported to Paul that in Jerusalem many “thousands of Jews” had
come to faith in Messiah and all continued to be “zealous for the Torah” (suggesting that
Torah observance was normative for Jewish believers). They had heard (falsely) that Paul
taught Jews to “forsake Moses and the customs” of Judaism, including circumcising their
children (21:21).
James suggested a course of action to prove that this was a spurious charge, that Paul in
fact did “live in observance of the Torah” (21:24). Paul complied with James’
recommendation, not out of compromise or duplicity, but because it was true—as a
believer in Yeshua he continued in his calling as a Jew to keep the commandments of the
Law and the customs of his people. On three other occasions (Acts 24:14; 25:8; 28:17) he
testifies to this significant but oft neglected truth about himself.

Paul’s actions were consistent with his own “rule in all the churches” (1 Cor 7:17-20):
namely, that Jewish believers should not “put on the foreskin” (remove their
circumcision), nor must Gentile believers become circumcised. More than a physical act
is implied here. “Circumcision” in the Second Temple period was a shorthand way of
referring to the whole package of Jewish covenantal identity and obligations.

In other words, according to Paul’s rule, Gentile believers were not required to become
proselytes to Judaism (“be circumcised”), nor were Jewish believers—like Paul himself
—to abdicate their heritage of Torah obligations (“remove their circumcisions”). They
each should remain in their respective callings (7:20).

This Pauline dictum is consistent with the Jerusalem Council’s famous “Apostolic
Decree” of Acts 15—in which the Apostles and church leaders ruled that Gentile
believers should not be ordered to be circumcised and to keep all the laws of Moses, i.e.,
treated as if they were proselytes to Judaism (15:5, 28-29).

What was not said at that historic Council, however, is equally important to note (as have
scholars like Nanos and Wyschogrod). Never in the dispute was the issue raised about the
Jews present not keeping all the Torah’s commands or being released therefrom by virtue
of their faith in Yeshua. It was an unchallenged assumption that Torah obligations were
still in place for them, including Paul.

When Church councils in subsequent centuries formally forbade Jewish believers from
living as Jews, and required them at baptism to renounce “every rite and observance of
the Jewish religion,” they effectively banned Paul of Tarsus from membership! We all
have suffered the consequences ever since.

© 2011 The Center for Judaic-Christian Studies.

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