I’m buying myself a little more time to plan for the future of the “How to Think” series that’s been coming out on Mondays as the weekly free article. Today, I’d like to pick up a thread traced in the last free post, “There Is No Paul Without Plato,” by thinking out loud about a description of Christianity I employed there as a “Judaism for gentiles.” This is a way of thinking about Christianity that is not mine: it originates, actually, in Jewish scholarship attempting to reconceive Jesus, the apostles, and Christianity positively from the Jewish perspective, a thing that was happening as early as the 19th century in Europe and the United States and that resumed in the context of the new relationship between Judaism and Christianity which emerged in the aftermath of the tragedy of the Shoah. It is also a way of describing the religion of the nascent communities of non-Jews who became part of the Jesus Movement in the first century and of the Christianity that evolved from those communities in the second by contemporary biblical scholars that head up the so-called “New New” or “Radical New Perspective” on Jesus and Paul “within Judaism,” who especially seek to understand the new identity that Paul sought to craft for the gentiles to whom he felt commissioned as an ambassador of Jesus, Israel’s Messiah.1
“Judaism for gentiles” in this context means the adoption of certain fundamental features of Jewish ethnoreligious identity as they existed in the Second Temple period without full assimilation into the Jewish people. This means, in a nutshell: worship of Israel’s God, Yhwh, the God of the Jewish Temple and the Jewish Scriptures, as the world’s creator and king, a thing many gentiles in Diaspora synagogues were already doing before the advent of the Jesus Movement; cessation of cult to the ancestral gods and godlings of the Greco-Roman and Near Eastern worlds from which these gentiles came, which implied a rejection of the familial and public demands of eusebeia or pietas in which pistis/fides to one’s homeland and its gods meant cult to encourage the gods to continue maintaining the home, the city, and the state; the abandonment or at least mitigation of cultural practices connected to the worship of these previous gods, including the worship of eidola, participation in public festivals, functions, and domestic practices associated with them, which is to say, the vast, vast majority of Greco-Roman cultural mores; the cessation, also, of participation in cult to the genius of the Roman emperor as the paterfamilias of the oikoumene, the presiding divinity over the empire itself whose health and wellness meant, at least theoretically, the stability of the empire; adoption of Jewish ethical norms as they were expressed in the Greek Diaspora, effectively as summarized by the Ten Commandments, often subdivided into obligations of eusebeia or piety towards Yhwh and dikaiosyne or justice towards neighbors; and veneration of the crucified Jesus as the risen, vindicated Messiah and Lord of the world, the true emperor of the imminent Kingdom of God which would be established in the very near future, overturning the rule of the errant gods and of Caesar.
But “Judaism for gentiles” did not involve gentiles actually becoming Jews. In the Diaspora prior to the rise of the Jesus Movement, some Greeks and Romans appear to have become full proselytoi, “converts,” and some others to have been Godfearers, particularly ardent non-Jewish devotees of the Jewish God; but most gentiles that hung out in and around Diaspora synagogues appreciated Judaism as part of the religious diversity of the Greco-Roman world that they also freely enjoyed. Judaism was not a proselytizing religion in antiquity that sought converts from non-Jews on a regular basis, and not all Jews believed that conversion was even possible. Matthew Thiessen makes a fairly compelling argument that Paul, at least, did not believe that this was possible, given that the mitzvah to circumcise male children as the act by which they are included in the covenant specifies the eighth day as the time when this must happen if they are to be members of the people.2 If Yonatan Adler is right that the concept of Ioudaismos, “Judaism,” was a Hellenistic reconceptualization of Judahite/Judean identity—probably under the Hasmoneans, probably as part of a cultural project of unification, probably as part of their effort to promote the Mosaic Torah as a common legislation—then it is interesting to observe here that our first historical examples of adult men becoming Jews by circumcision happens under the Hasmonean regime, which forcibly converted Idumaea and Galilee in exactly this fashion; it is also interesting to note, then, that the Herodians, who were Idumaean converts to Judaism, were regarded by other Jews as of uncertain Jewish status ever after.3 The Book of Ruth, which is either Persian or Hellenistic in provenance, is also probably written to assert the possibility of conversion: though a Moabite, and theoretically barred by the Mosaic Torah from participation in the covenant community of Israel (Deut 23:3), Ruth the Moabitess not only joins the tribe of Judah by “conversion” (her famous profession to Naomi, at least, is still the means by which converts are received in Karaite Judaism), but she also becomes the great-grandmother of no less than King David. The Greek romance Joseph and Aseneth has a fairly memorable conversion scene for the heroine so that she can marry Joseph. But other Jews, like the author of the Book of Jubilees and the architects of the Essene movement, were not convinced that non-Jews could become Jews. Paul seems to have been a member of this camp, at least after his apocalyptic experience of Jesus.
Having said that, it is by no means clear that all of Paul’s apostolic colleagues agreed with him about the means of admission for gentiles.4 When Paul himself tells us about an argument with Peter on this topic in Antioch, we are habituated to read Paul as saying that when he “opposed Peter to his face” on separation between Jewish and gentile Jesus-followers that Paul was successful in getting Peter to courageously resume table fellowship with gentile Christians despite the presence of ambassadors from James, Jesus’s brother, heading up the community in Jerusalem and presumably pressuring Peter into maintaining the boundary (Gal 2:11-14). But it is important to observe that Paul does not say he won the argument, and we do not have Peter’s side of things: given that Paul is writing to a Galatian community that is tempted to try and fully integrate into Judaism by circumcision and adoption of the Mosaic Torah, and his rhetorical goal is to dissuade them, we would think that he would have said that he had won the debate to prove the point, that even Peter conceded the dispute to him, but Paul does not say that. This calls into question what exactly was accomplished at the Jerusalem Council as Paul recounts it in Galatians 2:1-10, which seems only really to establish that the pillars of the Jerusalem community acknowledged Paul’s ambassadorship to the gentiles, and says little about a settlement concerning circumcision. Scholars generally agree on three things with respect to the portrayal of this meeting in Acts 15: (1), Paul and Acts disagree on the details; (2), Paul was actually there; (3), Acts is written a minimum of twenty to a maximum of sixty years after Paul’s death, and so is obviously trying to reconcile disparate information into a synthetic narrative. Acts is also, generally, trying to insist on Paul as Torah-observant (Acts 21:17-26), presumably over against then contemporary readers of Paul that were trying to read Paul as a supersessionist or as a “Christian.”
Given these data, we can appreciate that the New Testament also includes other visions for gentile inclusion that do seem to advocate full assimilation to Judaism. In Matthew, for example, Jesus declares that he has not come to abolish but to fulfill the Torah and the Prophets and that every command of the Torah is binding (Matt 5:17-20); Matthew is careful to edit the language of Mark that might seem to depict Jesus as abolishing purity laws with respect to food (compare Mk 7:1-23; Matt 15:1-20); the Matthean Jesus tells his followers to listen to Pharisaic halakha (Matt 21:1-3); and then he commands his disciples to make disciples of the nations, teaching them to observe all that he had commanded them (28:19). If all one had was Mark and Matthew, and not Paul or Luke-Acts or John to compare to them or to produce a synthetic portrait with, one would probably conclude that Jesus wanted the nations to become Torah-observant, which would include circumcision: this is a Jewish universalism by the integration through conversion of the nations to a Jewish life. This matches the contemporary scholarly image of the sociohistorical origin of Matthew’s Gospel in a community of Jewish and Judaized Jesus-followers in northern Galilee or southern Syria, competing with Pharisaic authorities and their communities for the right to define Judaism.5
So the Pauline “Judaism for gentiles” that would become Christianity is not the only sort. In Paul’s own day, James or people connected to James seemed to expect that Paul’s own apostolate to the gentiles would eventually result in the gentiles becoming Jews or fully integrating; Paul’s reading of Jewish Scripture and apocalyptic literature resisted this proposition as not consonant with what he read in his authoritative texts, as he read them, and he would certainly have been correct that this was an irregular position in mainstream Judaism, at least as a matter of ordinary policy. In his available models for thinking through “the gentile problem,” he could find Jewish models of sympathization, salvific ethical monotheism, eschatological participation in Israel’s restoration, and exclusion alongside the possibility of conversion, and Paul seemed to gravitate more towards unique combinations of the other models than towards conversion.6 James and “Matthew,” and perhaps the historical Peter, by contrast, seem to have drifted more towards the notion that gentiles should, ultimately, undergo full conversion to Judaism as an expression of allegiance to Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, and should embrace the full yoke of the Torah.
The crisis in the earliest community over how to include gentiles was not defined by foresight of the dangers and possibilities inherent in every available option. Paul’s vision of differentiated belonging for Jews and gentiles ultimately won out, but the flip side of this victory is that in the end it became the basis for the conceptualization of Christianity as the antonym of Judaism, a tertium genus between Judaism and Hellenism, and as a cult exclusive of and successive to that of Judaism in particular. By the time of the fourth century council of Nicaea, where the question at Jerusalem had been how to include gentiles, a key part of the proceedings was condemning and forbidding observance of Jewish rituals in the Christian community. Conversely, and contrafactually, however, it is hard to see whether or how the Jesus Movement would have grown sufficiently or as strongly as it did had it adopted the conversion answer to the “gentile problem.” Perhaps large numbers of gentiles would have become Jews and this would have signaled to Jewish communities and leadership that the Jesus Movement was a significant prophetic revival or meaningful eschatological sign; perhaps also these conversions would have provoked imperial punishment (which is exactly why the Diaspora synagogues were punishing members of the Movement for their missionary activity among gentiles) and/or created problems for the Jewish community at large; perhaps, finally, no such large numbers of gentile members would have converted and the Movement may have eventually melted back into the mosaic of available Judaisms, with the memories of John the Baptist and Jesus still alive and significant for some Jews but not in any organized or fully integral way.
Christianity would eventually end up absorbing the Hellenistic Jewish Diaspora, sometimes by force, sometimes by threat, sometimes by conviction. Christianity is to no small degree what remains of Hellenistic Judaism: what literature survives from the Greek-speaking Jews that were once the most substantial cultural minority of the Mediterranean was preserved, read, and used by Christians for the bulk of antiquity, which is why we have the Septuagint, Hellenistic Jewish commentaries, expansions, rewritings, and apocryphal/pseudepigraphal biblical texts, and the writings of people like Philo and Josephus (and the fragments of people like Aristobulus) today. Greek-speaking Jewish habits of using Greek philosophy to interpret and construct Jewish theology and ritual practice were absorbed by the emergent Christian house-church federations and city-wide networks, and found their way into the articulate theologies of second, third, and fourth century Church Fathers. In the Aramaic/Syriac speaking world, Christians adopted a much more Semitic idiom for their theology, their liturgy, and their communities (Syriac priests are still called rabban, for example, and theological hymnography are madrashe, etc.), though Syriac Christians were also virulently anti-Jewish for most of their premodern history. The description of Christianity as a “Judaism for gentiles” is, in most respects that matter, simply a factual way to think about how Christianity became what it became.
The theological question that faces contemporary Christians in the late modern world is how to receive this historical development in a way that seems providential rather than accidental. What can it mean or should it mean not just for scholars to reconstruct it so, but for Christians to think of their religion as a “Judaism for gentiles?”
One important set of parameters for answering the question is to realize that Christianity is not the only such “Judaism for gentiles” on offer. Another, of course, is just Judaism: the Judaism of the rabbis and their intellectual descendants in particular, who eliminated the middle term possibilities of gentile participation in Judaism during an extensive period of Christian persecution of Jews in the Roman Empire and instead adopted the division of the world into Jew and gentile that first appears in Paul, and acknowledged only the full convert to Judaism, the completed proselyte, not the resident alien, the Godfearer, or the mere sympathizer. Christians in general have rarely considered how attractive becoming a Jew has seemed to so many, including to so many Christians, over the course of Jewish history. (In their defense, the attraction of Judaism often surprises Jews themselves.) Izates, the first-century CE king of Adiabene, was a convert (Josephus, Ant. 20.17-47); so was Aquila of Sinope (possibly also Onkelos, the author/translator of the Aramaic Targum Onkelos), a proselyte who studied under Rabbi Akiva and produced a rival translation of the Septuagint in Greek that was controversial among Christians and now only survives in fragments. In the Christianized Roman Empire conversion was illegal, and it is for this reason that rabbinic sources often express skepticism of converts; it is only in the modern period that this skepticism has been relaxed among liberal Judaisms, like the Reform and Conservative Movements, which require something like a catechetical period of study and preparation followed by approval by a beit din before undergoing the full ritual conversion.
Whatever one makes of Paul’s belief that gentiles simply cannot convert to Judaism, it has to be admitted that for two millennia (and even longer if one backpedals to the Hasmoneans and to Ruth) the vast majority of Jews have not agreed with him, and some other members of the Jesus Movement disagreed with him too. Judaism in the modern period has resumed something of its ancient transparency to the nations, inviting non-Jews to be in Jewish spaces, teach in Jewish schools, work in Jewish synagogues, and sometimes marry Jewish people, with or without conversion; Jews participate in joint international theological dialogues and local, on-the-ground ecumenical and other kinds of interreligious relations, forging partnerships with local (usually Christian and Muslim) clergy and communities, and sometimes engaging in common projects of social justice. It is actually more possible for non-Jews to learn about Judaism and to learn from Jews today, in 2023, than it has been for most of the last two thousand years since the period of the Hellenistic and Roman Diaspora. Jews have also made incalculable contributions to the cultural inheritance of the world: science, art, poetry, music, film, literature, scholarship, politics, and more. The Jewish God is, for most people in the Western world anyway, the deity they mean when they talk about “God,” whether they know it or not; this has been, as Maimonides himself recognized, the net impact of Christianity and Islam on the nations.
Islam is the other “Judaism for gentiles” with which Christianity shares space. And here, I think, Christianity is arguably at a disadvantage on a number of fronts. For one thing, Islam’s monotheism is in a sense much less complicated than Christianity’s became through the literary and theological deification of Jesus: while I have contended that the Trinity can and should be understood in a way that makes it inoffensive to the logical demands of monotheism, there is certainly something aesthetically aberrant about Christianity’s Trinitarian monotheism when compared to Jewish and Islamic monism of late antiquity and the medieval period. For another thing, Islam’s messianism remains a fundamentally prophetic and royal idiom in Islamic eschatology in a way that Christian messianism quickly ceased to function after the conversion of the empire: Islam believes Jesus is Israel’s Messiah, and so shares something with Christianity that neither share with Judaism, but Islam also takes Jesus to be a human being especially designated by God to rule in the end-time as King of Israel and emperor of the nations. Less heady, perhaps, Islam also successfully maintained (or rediscovered, depending on how one would like to parse the matter) fundamental ritual and moral practices that have historically been constitutive of Judaism, like circumcision and kashrut (in the form of halal). There is also a decent argument to be made, mainstream in the revisionist school of scholarship around Islamic origins, that the original aims of Muhammad and his umma were to reclaim Jerusalem and the Holy Land from Roman control and rebuild the Temple in anticipation of a returning, messianic Jesus. In these ways, Islam retained the Judaism part of “Judaism for gentiles” much better than Christianity did, and many elements of fundamental Jewish experience much longer than did Christianity.
So, in trying to answer the question what it might mean for Christianity to be a “Judaism for gentiles,” the first thing that my attention is drawn towards is the indefinite article. Christianity is a Judaism for gentiles, but it is hardly the only one. The other thing that I observe is that Christianity is a Judaism for gentiles that, while it has boasted a global presence since antiquity, is seemingly tied by nature rather than by accident to the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, as the particular form that a kind of multiethnic popular Jewish movement was only capable of taking in that cultural matrix: even the vast world of Syriac Christianity, as different as it was from its Mediterranean origins in so many ways, is still shaped in its innermost self by the memory of Jesus, the apostles, and the earliest churches as having been reared on the Levantine Coast and in Asia Minor. Islam, similarly, is the sort of “Judaism for gentiles” that could only have arisen in the time and place where it did, partially shaped by and partially reacting to Christianity, and whose popularity and success in Central and South Asia in particular was conditioned as much by the cultural intelligibility of the form of life advocated by Islam to people already living in those places as by the beauty of Islamic prayer, liturgy, philosophy, and the like. And so the second thing that my attention is drawn towards, incidentally, is that Christianity is a Judaism that has found reception among some gentiles more than others, at different times and places, just like Islam. Though Christianity and Islam both imagine themselves as the ekklesia tōn ethnōn or the worldwide umma, encompassing all the nations of the world in their reach besides the covenant firstborn of Israel, the truth is that each constitutes a distinctive, bounded oikoumenē within which Jewish-style ethical monotheism has been disseminated and taken root as the ground of new cultural civilizations. At least on the face of it, the Maimonidean reading of Christianity and Islam as praeparatio messianica, paving the way for the future restoration of Israel of which both will prove to have been providentially prefatory, is a more straightforwardly logical response to Christianity and Islam’s mutual claims to succeed the covenantal priority of Israel (and in Islam’s case, of Christianity too), at least at this stage (if God tells the future, he hasn’t said anything to me).
It might seem initially off-putting to Christians to accept the assessment that Christianity is a kind of convenient way to make essential Jewish concepts and practices available to large swathes of humanity rather than beginning from the New Testament apologetic that Israel has simply been temporarily blinded to the truth of who Jesus is and therefore has yet to enter into the new covenant, whether understood on the mainstream Christian read as becoming Christian (Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, whatever) or on the Messianic read as accepting Jesus as Messiah and Lord on top of ordinary Jewish praxis. Several scholars have, of course, advocated that thinking back on Christian Origins and the development of Christian self-awareness should inspire this kind of humility in Christians, as thinking of ourselves as having been graciously included in the covenant family to which Israel is still the natural heir.7 But actually, I have a New Testament-based reason for thinking that this self-awareness, of the gentile Christian community as graciously included and therefore of Christianity as a kind of diluted Judaism for gentiles, and it has to do with the relatively careful way that Paul, at least, constructs the significance of Jesus’s messianic identity in relation to the eschaton.
In Romans 1:4, Paul says that Jesus was “appointed son of God in power according to the spirit of holiness from the resurrection of the dead,” that is, “the general resurrection of the dead,” not his own resurrection (anastasis nekrōn). This implies that for Paul, at least, Jesus’s function as Davidic messiah is still to come in the future, at the time of the eschaton and general resurrection, and this seems to match what he tells us elsewhere. Later in Romans, for example, he tells us that “the sonship and the glory and the covenants and the legislation and the worship and the promises,” the “patriarchs” and “the Messiah according to the flesh” all belong to the Jews (9:4-5), he is after all reasserting that none of these things have been lost simply on the grounds of Israel’s rejection of Jesus, whom he believes will make his eschatological appearance in Zion (11:25-27). This matches the eschatological scenario that Paul outlines elsewhere, where those “in Christ” or who “belong to Christ” are the first to rise in the eschatological krisis (1 Thess 4:13-5:11; 1 Cor 15:20-28). In Acts 1:6-7 and 3:17-21, read together, it would appear that Jesus’s role as Messiah is delayed until the “times and seasons” set by the Father for his appearance at the eschaton, when Israel as a whole will receive him as such.
Redirecting this observation to the question at hand, about how to think theologically about Christianity’s historical origins, I think we can fairly say the following. When, in the first century, Jesus’s followers claimed that they experienced him as risen from the dead and that he would appear soon from heaven to bring about Israel’s restoration in the Kingdom of God, they knew it was a tough sell to their fellow Jews and even more so to gentiles. I think they knew that when the apostles were dead and the second generation of the Movement was left in charge to keep it going that they had an even further uphill battle to fight, rhetorically speaking. I think contemporary Christians, living two thousand years later, are by contrast tone-deaf about how the continual delay of Jesus’s return now makes the hope for Jesus’s return at all seem to onlookers. And I think they have not yet begun to grasp that if Jesus is a or the Messiah, as Christians believe (and as I still believe), and if Jesus is going to be demonstrated Messiah at the eschaton, then these convictions exist in what is minimally a creative tension with the massive amount of historical evidence that stands contrary to the notion that the Messianic Age has in some sense arrived already, and is here present in, say, the Christian Church.
And so the end result is such: if it is still credible to believe that Jesus is Messiah, historical honesty forces us to reckon with the possibilities that either the exact character of Jesus’s identity has been misunderstood by Christians or that the Parousia has been delayed indefinitely to allow not only Christianity but also Islam to propagate ethical monotheism among the nations. On the first read, I think Christians can fairly maintain at a minimum that God raised Jesus and vindicated him against those who unjustly condemned him, and so I also think that it remains credible to hold that Jesus is Messiah-in-waiting; the flip side of this is that I think it is just intellectually honest to say that Israel’s skepticism of Jesus’s messianic identity is entirely justified given the state of the world the last two millennia, and all the more so given how Christians have historically treated Jews. On the second read, I think Christians have to take seriously the idea that even if Jesus is the Messiah, Christianity itself may be but a providential prolepsis, destined to be outmoded by a community that more faithfully reflects not only Jesus’s own teaching and ethics of the Kingdom but also, in some sense, the sort of community that he and his earliest followers envisioned.
In either of these possibilities, the flourishing of gentile Christianity as a distinctive set of communities comes out as a proleptic, providential phenomenon only possible in light of the delayed (or mistaken) eschaton. Even if one holds that Jesus is a or the Messiah, as I do, and that whatever the messianic fulfillment of the hopes of Israel ultimately is will be something Jesus will in some way bring about, one has to admit that the timetable implied by Jesus and his earliest followers did not turn out to be true. And how this affects Christianity’s self-understanding ought to be apparent at least insofar as we understand that the very basis for gentile Christian inclusion in the Jesus Movement worked out by Paul, whose ethnic essentialism deemed it impossible for the gentiles to join the covenant by becoming Jews, made contextual sense in part because of Paul’s belief in the imminent eschaton.
And here I would get creatively speculative and offer the following possibility, which I name without attachment and certainly without insistence that it be favored as true, but nevertheless: Pauline (and Johannine) Christianity, more or less the model of all subsequent Christianity, is perhaps destined to be historically outmoded at some point. To borrow Orthodox language for a moment, I have wondered occasionally if Paul’s “rule in all the churches” preserving the differences of Jews and gentile members and preventing gentiles from seeking full inclusion as Jews, is not in fact a kind of oikonomia, a concession of economy to the realistic magnitude that such an ask would have constituted for his gentile readers, especially given the nearness with which Paul sensed the Kingdom, and whether he would have had a different policy in mind in view of a continually delayed eschaton.
But in a far-flung age where the end did not come, the Kingdom did not come, and Jesus, as its King, has still not yet come, I wonder if the wisdom of James and Matthew is not more apparent now than it once was, more appropriate and versatile now than the Pauline synthesis. Consider that Christianity, once it reached imperial form, has been a negative factor in history for many of the world’s peoples precisely because it has often sought to force them to abandon their traditional cultures and distinctives in favor of assimilation into a hierarchical and Eurocentric hegemony (Orthodoxy is just as guilty of this as Catholicism in different ways). Consider, too, that Christianity is experiencing epic losses in Western Europe and the United States, where it has been historically dominant, and its continuity in Eastern Europe is at least correlated to, if not caused by, a certain habituated refusal to engage with modernity and to critically examine the premodern traditions of Eastern Christianity in a balanced way (including, but not limited, to Eastern Christian anti-Judaism and antisemitism). And consider the motivations that often drive conversions to Judaism from Christianity: the sense of a holistic lifestyle, community, and more mature approach to matters of theology, philosophy, and moral praxis than the petty dogmatism that still dominates so many Christian circles. Is it at all possible that the success of Pauline ecclesiology and Johannine theology in bringing the nations to the obedience of Israel’s God and Israel’s Messiah, Jesus, might not have been the catalyst for a future—if not now, perhaps soon?—when it shall indeed be the case that the
the mountain of Yhwh’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of Yhwh, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.’ For out of Zion shall go forth torah and the word of Yhwh from Jerusalem. (Isa 2:3)
Again, I don’t pretend to know. I have written an awful lot on here about how Christianity might or certainly must change if it desires to survive; I have imagined and reimagined the possibilities of how Christian communities can adapt to their present circumstances and possible future ones and I expect there shall be more to come. Nor do I pretend to know how a change as seismic as backpedaling on the Pauline halakha of forbidding full Torah-observance to gentile Jesus-followers would work, nor do I presume that all traditional forms of Christianity are so empty of life as to require such a life-saving surgical maneuver (though I’m sometimes tempted to think that true, admittedly). My imagining here is instead conditioned by two closely related observations: the first is that Paul’s rule about how his multiethnic communities were to be organized was contextual, contingent both on his own limited awareness of his present and future and on the needs of people and communities that are now long since dead. It no longer seems responsible or right to treat his words as describing immutable rules of conduct that apply to all people, everywhere, at all times and places, if it ever did seem that way. And, second, my speculative exercise is conditioned by the reality that Christianity as a “Judaism for gentiles” is, at least in the late modern West, going to need to grapple once more with its Judaism in reinventing itself for purposes of survival and flourishing in a post-Christian age. When we peel back the notion of Christianity as Christendom, as a distinct imperial civilization, and return to it as a sense of pilgrimage, a people called out from the nations to be joined to Israel in the worship of Israel’s God—what other possibilities do we find not previously optioned?
Moreover, I’m under no illusion that this is necessarily something that, for example, Jews themselves want out of Christians. I think most Jews are happy to be in a situation where Christians minimally do not regularly engage in spectacular acts of violence against them and where society is basically open to them and their needs, and if Christians happen to be kind, interested people in interactions with Jews, then all the better. Jewish laypeople are usually no more inherently educated about Christians, Christianity, or Christian Origins than most Christians are about Jews and Judaism, and the quotidian religious interests of most people generally are usually pretty narrow. But I do wonder if Christian conversations with Jews might open up new possibilities if Christians were to once more think of their tradition as a preface to a future where the nations were fully incorporated into the mystery of Israel, in a way credible and appreciable to Jews, and of the Pauline division between Jew and gentile as a temporary or economic concession to create and sustain interest among non-Jews in the Jesus Movement in view of that future. What about a Christianity that brings non-Jews directly to the feet of Jewish teachers, looking to learn Torah, Jewish Studies, to adopt Jewish wisdom, and perhaps even ways of life, and looking to do so because this is what Christians feel Jesus has commanded them to? I think Pinchas Lapide was here a visionary with his suggestion that Jesus is, at a minimum, a prophet vindicated and glorified by God to bring Judaism to gentiles, as a more positive spin on the Maimonidean praeparatio messianica principle—and this from an Orthodox Jewish theologian.8 My question is, could Lapide’s position here be better served by Christians in reconceiving their own relationship to Judaism, by retrieving some sense of the prolepsis inherent in their status as a “Judaism for gnetiles”?
But, alas, this really is just a speculative exercise. It is the sort of imaginative niche that answers well what I mostly feel as a personal theological and identitarian anxiety, over my profound, sometimes heart-tearing love for both Jews and Christians, Judaisms and Christianities, and Jesus as the human face who seems to stand between them. It is also the sort of imagined Christianity probably only credible to a biblical scholar, or at least to someone fully willing to look Paul square in the face and, without demonizing him or rejecting him, be willing to admit when he either had it wrong or when his answers to different questions don’t seem to be working anymore. One would think we’d be better at that, given that at least six letters that bear Paul’s name in the New Testament were written not by him but people doing exactly that with his surviving corpus of writings. For the time being, Christianity is likely to continue being a “Judaism for gentiles” of a more modest sort, the Church making available to the nations the non-negligible treasures, with all of their beauties and challenges, of ethical monotheism, messianic hope, and Jewish Scripture, in which the voice of the Lord’s instruction going out from Zion is perhaps more distant, maybe even echoed, but still, one hopes, no less audible.
For two accessible books introducing this scholarly vision, see Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), and more recently Matthew Thiessen, A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Nations (Grand Rapids: BakerAcademic, 2023).
See the argument in Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
See Yonatan Adler, The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal (AYBRL; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), on which I’ll have a forthcoming review in The Christian Century.
See John Kampen, Matthew Within Sectarian Judaism (AYBRL; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019) and Anders Runesson and Daniel M. Gurtner, eds., Matthew Within Judaism: Israel and the Nations in the First Gospel (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2020).
These are Thiessen’s labels. See Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem, 19-42.
E.g., Terence Donaldson, Gentile Christian Identity: From Cornelius to Constantine (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020), 718-728.
See Pinchas Lapide, The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective, trans. Wilhelm C. Linss (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1982).
Hm. St. Paul does admit the possibility of conversion—if one is circumcised after baptism, one is bound to keep the whole Law (Gal. 5:3).
On my reading of St. Paul, I don't really see Christianity as Judaism for Gentiles. St. Paul is not exactly supersessionist, as the Law is holy and still in effect—but, in his reasoning as I see it, the Law is inherently defective, being delivered through a chain of mediators and part of the fallen order of the world, and the Christian, being baptized into Christ's death and raised in His Resurrection, is no longer under it (this is just a special case of the general principle: all nations, being bound by specific cultic obligation and law to God or gods (Vedic, Greek, Jewish, etc.), are hereby freed from said obligations as they seek vindication and rectification through the faithfulness of Christ—there is no Jew or Greek). This is not Judaism for Gentiles—this is both the Jew and the Gentile changing to the state of Abraham, so to speak (Rm. 4:9-13), who predates and thus transcends these national 'dividing walls' that are torn down in Christ.
Of course, one's ethnicity, sex, personal characteristics, whatever are not eliminated in baptism—the specific characteristics of our particular modality are 'fulfilled,' so to speak, as we grow towards the likeness of God through our being fashioned according to the Image of God, the Human proper, Christ Himself (ἰδοὺ ὁ ἄνθρωπος!). Thus, as long as one's cultus is oriented towards *God* (as it certainly is with the Jewish people), there is no problem with participating in the ancestral rites—one is simply not bound by them as before.
My problem with your proposal, for whatever a layman's opinion is worth, is that this tacitly rejects the entire theological system of St. Paul. As you said, it is "to be willing to admit where he got it wrong" (which tacitly assumes that he does, in fact, get it wrong—which is not a trivial assumption!). Despite the problems that immediately follow from this (this, in effect, demotes St. Paul from apostlehood—he delivered a false Gospel), I also don't think Christendom necessarily follows from St. Paul. The primordial sin of Christendom, after all, is trying to make a kingdom that is not of the cosmos a kingdom of the cosmos, ironically reducing what is meant to be an eschatologically transcendent participation in the Human back down to a specific nation once more. Christendom is a tacit rejection of St. Paul, in my sight, not a consequence thereof.
Re: your creative speculation, what particular aspects of Johannine Christianity do you imagine passing away? I find that idea difficult to stomach, as much as I like much of what you say here.