Novenson Matthew - Paul and Judaism at the End of History

Matthew V. Novenson - Paul and Judaism at the End of History

One often hears it said that the apostle Paul’s discourse about the Jewish law – “Paul and the law” or “Paul and Judaism,” in industry-standard shorthand – is one of those classically intractable problems, like the problem of evil in philosophical theology or cold fusion in nuclear physics. In fact, however, it is very simple. Simple, but not easy, because the solution, although it is historically clear and compelling (as I shall argue in this book), has proved existentially intolerable to many of Paul’s readers. This is a shame, since it has effectively rendered unthinkable to us moderns what is, for its part, a very interesting, important idea, namely: that the world itself came to an end in the ﬁrst century of the Roman Empire.

According to one Jewish writer from this period, when God sends his son the messiah in the fullness of time, the messiah’s job is: to die, so that all his people can participate in his death, and then to effect the resurrection of the dead and the new creation. The Jewish writer I mean is the anonymous author of the apocalypse 4 Ezra (7:28–32), although every word of that summary is also true of his near-contemporary Paul. Both 4 Ezra and Paul think that the messiah must come and die to put an end to the present age and bring about the new creation. Unlike 4 Ezra, however, Paul thinks that the messiah has just now – within his, Paul’s, own lifetime – come and died. Hence, Paul reasons, the end of the age has come, and the new creation is here. This idea is not just implied but expressly stated all over Paul’s letters. The ends of the ages have come (1 Cor 10:11). The form of the cosmos is passing away (1 Cor 7:31). Christ himself was the last man (ὁ ἔσχατος Ἀδάμ, 1 Cor 15:45), the last mere mortal. His resurrection during the reign of Tiberius triggered the resurrection of all the righteous, so that from the 30s CE onward all God’s people will enjoy the life everlasting promised to the patriarchs. Everything Paul says about the Jewish law follows from this premise.

So I shall argue in this book. To get there, we shall have to look closely at Paul’s letters (and a number of other ancient Jewish texts) on the themes of Jewishness, gentileness, and time – or, in other words, ethnicity and eschatology. In relation to the long, fraught history of research, my goal is to explain why Paul’s thought, which in its main lines is so conventionally Jewish (one God, his temple in Jerusalem, the promise to father Abraham, the giving of the Torah to Moses, the coming messiah, etc.), has also struck so many readers as so radical, so Christian, even so anti-Jewish. The answer lies in Paul’s particular understanding of time, which is also quite conventionally Jewish (the present age, the end of the age, the day of the lord, etc.), except that Paul perceives the end of the age as present, not future. If understood in a sufﬁciently vague way, this claim is perhaps relatively uncontroversial. But in the precise way that I mean it, it is quite different from any interpretation of Paul currently on offer. Hence this book.