The End of Paul within Judaism?

Paul within Judaism (PwJ) is a broad collection of scholars committed to the interpretation of Paul within Judaism and to present him as a Jewish figure rather than as a heavily Christianized Jew of antiquity.

Now I’ve written a pro and con introductory article on PwJ. To be clear, I think there is some good stuff here, some genuinely needed corrections, not the least the possibility that Paul was generally Torah-observant and Paul did in a sense compel his Gentile converts to judaize by becoming monotheistic, abstaining from aspects of idolatry, and sexual immorality. But there are some points on which I think that the PwJ collective has gone a bridge too far, or don’t make sense of Paul’s actual arguments in his letters.

(1) The concern to make sure Paul’s churches are never identified with/as Israel makes me think PwJ should be called “the Dispensational Paul” since a distinction between the church and Israel is the sine qua non of Dispensationalism.

(2) Paul did hold to a sectarian supersessionism, not with the church replacing Israel, but maintaining that the Pauline assemblies saw themselves connected to the story of Israel, a sacred history into which they had been grafted. See the book I did with Scot McKnight on this topic called God’s Israel and the Israel of God.

(3) Plus, for all claims about de-Christianizing Paul and de-theologizing the debates around him in favor of comparative religious history, at the end of the day, the PwJ crowd is still very much interested in theological questions of soteriology and in-group boundaries. In other words, they have still not penetrated into the domain of Pauline “religion.”

As it goes, there was a great session on PwJ at the Society of Biblical Literature meeting last November in San Diego (alas, I was away on a study tour in Greece and Turkey). My friend Dr. Christoph Heilig live-tweeted the session with several good observations. In his substack, Heilig comments:

What I hope to see now is not merely a pendulum swing back to older paradigms, but an adjustment within PwJ itself—a development into a more constructive and, thus, more convincing discourse. For this to happen, I believe certain parameters will be critical.

He then proceeds to list the ways in which PwJ might self-correct. It is well worth the read!

There’s a lot of energy, momentum, and controversy around PwJ. So it will be interesting to see which direction it moves into in the future.