Pronouncing
a definitive answer to the question of the audience of Paul's letters is
difficult. At times, Paul seems to explicitly address Jewish Christians and, at
other times, Gentile Christians. Many--if not all-- of Paul's churches were
"mixed" congregations of both ethnic Jews and Gentiles (see
especially Romans 16). This reality is the obvious by-product of Paul's "Jew-first"
missionary principle in which the expansion of Christian followed the Jewish
diaspora from urban center to urban center throughout the Roman empire.
Pauline
Christians first met in diaspora "synagogues" - which were no more
than houses where worshipers gathered. (There is no archaeological evidence
for free-standing synagogue buildings or churches in Roman cities until long
after Paul's time.) There is no reason to believe that the Christian "house"
churches described in Paul's letters and the book of Acts patterned themselves
around any other model than the Jewish synagogue.
Despite the
fact that Paul's "churches" were populated by both ethnic Jews and
Gentiles, his letters are always--first
and foremost--informed by his mission as an "apostle to the Gentiles."
Paul understood himself--and his prophetic call--as the harbinger of the great
endtime ingathering of the Gentiles into the "people of God" that the
Hebrew prophets had predicted.
Given this
clear--and often stated--self-understanding, let me offer three simple rules
for discerning Paul's audience in his letters:
(1) Unless
otherwise noted, Paul writes to a Gentile audience.
(2) When Paul
writes about "Jews," these references are most likely to Christ-believing
Jews--including the Jerusalem church and other ethnic Jews--that were full
participants in the various missions churches rather than to all Jews in
general.
(3) Whenever
Paul addresses his Jewish kinsmen (sometimes all ethnic Jews, more often
Christ-believing Jews as determined by context), these statements are always the exception--and never the
rule--to Paul's normal Gentile audience and these statements are always clearly delineated by direct
statements or clear clues in the text itself.
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Look at this
example:
Mark my words! I, Paul, tell you that
if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all.
Again I declare to every man who lets himself be
circumcised that he is obligated to obey the whole law. You
who are trying to be justified by the law have been alienated from Christ; you
have fallen away from grace. (Galatians 5:2-4)
These words
make absolutely no sense if Paul's audience was a Jewish community in which the
males had already submitted to circumcision. These words are only meaningful if
directed to the Gentile males who were considering Jewish proselyte conversion.
In Galatians
5, Paul is not denying the Jewish
obligation of circumcision. Rather he is arguing against the imposition of
Jewish circumcision on Christ-believing Gentiles. He is making no statement about
the covenant obligations of Jews, rather he is affirming his mission to include
Gentiles "as Gentiles"--without Jewish proselyte conversion--in the
ingathering of the nations to God. Audience is everything when interpreting
this passage.
When
visiting Jerusalem on two separate occasions, Paul did not compel the Gentile Titus
to be circumcised, but he did compel (and seems to have performed the act
himself) the Jewish Timothy to be circumcised. Is Paul inconsistent? In no way.
Circumcision was a covenant obligation for Jews that Paul continue to recognize
as valid and God-directed, but was never an obligation for Gentiles. Given
this, it is clear that passages like Galatians 5 are addressed to Gentile
Christ-believers and should be interpreted accordingly.
Whatever
Paul says about the Jewish Torah and its obligations--especially the cultural
identity markers of circumcision, Sabbath observance, and food regulations
(kashrut)--it is significant to note that he (unless otherwise stated) is
speaking to a Gentile audience upon whom falls no Torah obligations.
The question
in Paul about Jews and Gentiles together in "one body" is the
question of whether the endtime ingathering of the Gentiles requires Jewish proselyte
conversion (washing, circumcision, Torah observance). Paul answers an emphatic
"NO!" to this question. For Paul, "Gentiles as Gentiles" are
included in God's "age to come" without Torah observance that never
applied to Gentiles in the first place.
Paul's
"apparent" repudiation of the Mosaic law--in Galatians 5 and similar
passages--means one thing if directed toward Torah-observant Jews like himself,
but it means an entirely different thing if addressed to Gentile converts who
as part of God's final, endtime action in Christ are now included into the
"people of God"--without taking on the specific obligations of Torah
observance.
Very good rules of thumb, Joe. I would only add that in his letters Paul uses both the terms "Jew/Jews" and "Israel/Israelites" near the same number of times, and while these terms very much overlap, I doubt that they are indistinguishable synonyms. The term "Jew" in Paul is more ethnically oriented, while the term "Israel" seems to carry a stronger theological nuance. Occasionally, Paul will use the term "Jew" to refer to Jews generally (e.g., Ro. 3:1; 1 Co. 1:22-23; 9:20; 2 Co. 11:24; 1 Th. 2:14), and there are a few places where scholars debate whether he means believing Jews or the whole Jewish constituency, but otherwise, I think the way you have delineated things is correct.
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