Paul the Apostle and Jewish Christianity
Since the 1970s, scholars have sought to place Paul the Apostle within his historical context in Second Temple Judaism.[1] Paul's relationship to Judaism involves topics including the status of Israel's covenant with God and the role of works as a means to either gain or keep the covenant.[2]
The inclusion of Gentiles into the early Christian movement provoked a controversy between Paul and other Apostles over whether the gentiles' faith in Christ exempted them from circumcision.[2][3] Paul did not deem circumcision necessary for gentiles, because he thought that God included them into the New Covenant through faith in Christ.[2][3][4][5] This brought him into conflict with the Judaizers, a faction of the Jewish Christians who believed Mosaic Law did require circumcision for Gentile converts.[2][3][4][5][6] Eventually Paul's view prevailed, and this among other related developments led to the separation of early Christianity from Judaism.[2][3]
Jewish views[edit]
Jewish historical reconstructions[edit]
Jewish interest in Paul is a recent phenomenon. Before the so-called Jewish reclamation of Jesus (as a Jew) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he had hardly featured in the popular Jewish imagination and little had been written about him by the religious leaders and scholars. Arguably, he is absent from the Talmud and rabbinical literature, although he makes an appearance in some variants of the medieval polemic Toledot Yeshu (as a spy for the rabbis).[99] But with Jesus no longer regarded as the paradigm of gentile Christianity, Paul's position became more important in Jewish historical reconstructions of their religion's relationship with Christianity. He has featured as the key to building barriers (e.g. Heinrich Graetz and Martin Buber) or bridges (e.g. Isaac Mayer Wise and Claude G. Montefiore) in interfaith relations,[100] as part of an intra-Jewish debate about what constitutes Jewish authenticity (e.g. Joseph Klausner and Hans Joachim Schoeps),[101] and, on occasion, as a dialogical partner (e.g. Richard L. Rubenstein and Daniel Boyarin).[102] He features in an oratorio (by Felix Mendelssohn), a painting (by Ludwig Meidner) and a play (by Franz Werfel),[103] and there have been several novels about Paul (by Shalom Asch and Samuel Sandmel).[104] Jewish philosophers (including Baruch Spinoza, Leo Shestov, and Jacob Taubes)[105] and Jewish psychoanalysts (including Sigmund Freud and Hanns Sachs)[106] have engaged with the apostle as one of the most influential figures in Western thought. Scholarly surveys of Jewish interest in Paul include those by Hagner (1980),[107] Meissner (1996),[108] and Langton (2010, 2011).[109][110][111]