194 A History of Judaism
who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.’
But, despite this divine origin, the believer in Christ is said to be ‘bap-
tized into Christ’, suggesting a unity of believers with Christ, and the
believers themselves as ‘one body in Christ’. Elsewhere he talks of ‘put-
ting on’ Christ like a garment. The relation between God and Christ as
his son is no more resolved for Paul than for other early Christians (its
working out would take many centuries and give rise to many disputes),
although he comes close to asserting their identity in his eagerness to
counter the polytheism of his gentile Christian congregations:
Indeed, even though there may be so- called gods in heaven or on earth – as
in fact there are many gods and many lords – yet for us there is one God,
the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one
Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we
exist.^53
Paul was evidently a highly unusual Jew even in a period in which
variety flourished, and we shall see that his teachings led in due course
to a parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity. But it seems
unlikely that it was his theology that led to the persecution by Jewish
communities in the 50s ce about which he boasted in II Corinthians.
Imposition of the ‘forty lashes minus one’ was dangerous for Jewish
community leaders and the threat posed by Paul must therefore have
been severe. Nothing either in his own letters or in the account in Acts
suggests a substantial movement of diaspora Jews to join his movement.
On the contrary, according to Acts he complained with some vehemence
that he had been rejected by them and had therefore turned to the gen-
tiles. It was a matter of importance for him that his new gentile Christian
communities were precisely not to think of themselves as Jews, since
faith in Christ was alone sufficient for salvation. Those most likely to be
upset by his mission to gentiles to come to faith in Christ and stop wor-
shipping their ancestral gods were not his fellow Jews but the gentile
city authorities and the representatives of pagan cults, such as the silver-
smiths in Ephesus who made statues of the local goddess Artemis and
who could see the customary worship of the civic community under
threat. The concern of the ‘rulers of the synagogue’ was more probably
that an attack on the religious customs of local gentile society by a vis-
iting Jew such as Paul might throw into doubt the delicate position of
the local Jews as a minority who were tolerated only so long as they did
not infringe the good order of the wider gentile community and the rel-
ationship of that community to its gods.^54