Paul wrote before the "parting of the ways" of
Jews and Christians. He regularly expressed a utopian view of Jews and
Gentiles living together as an eschatological community – the "people of
God" at the end of the age joined together as one body, one house, one
loaf. Christianity did not have an independent existence during Paul's
lifetime. Rather the "Jesus assemblies" – whether meeting in the
homes of well-to-do patrons or in tenement work places and houses – grew out of
and paralleled the synagogues of the Jewish diaspora. It is hard to imagine the
first Gentile "Jesus worship" as anything other than a mirror, or
extension, of the liturgy borrowed from the first century synagogues.
This is not to say that Paul was oblivious to the
ever-present problems of his utopian vision. The great bulk of Paul's major
letters – Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians – deals specifically with the
challenges of Jewish and Gentile believers coexisting in a single community of
faith. These challenges were voiced with great volume and frequency by Paul's
diverse opponents. Nevertheless, Paul never abandoned his vision of end time
unity.
We – as modern interpreters of Paul – approach his letters
from the other side of the "parting of the ways." And this historical
perspective always colors our reading of Paul. Like Luther who "read
into" Paul the Protestant conflict with late medieval Catholicism, we
often see Paul only through our experience of Western individualism – as so
clearly expounded in Krister Stendahl's essay "The Apostle Paul and the
Introspective Conscience of the West."
The new perspective on Paul not only challenges Luther's
misrepresentation of the religion of second temple Judaism and Paul's place in
it, it also – and appropriately so – questions contemporary Western readings of
Paul's letters. Whether the new perspective offers a satisfactory
reconstruction of second temple Judaism and Jesus and Paul is a separate
matter. But the importance and necessity of this quest is beyond question.
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