who are “in him” — who are united to him by being baptized into his
death and having his life formed in them by the Spirit — become fellow
heirs to those promises. This notion, that the Abrahamic covenant and
union with the messiah trump the Sinai covenant and living by Torah, has
no precedent in early Judaism. And there is nothing in early Jewish
thought to account for why the coming of the messiah should dethrone
the Torah. (Paul, of course, would protest that he and his Gentile converts
were indeed living by Torah, in accord with its true intention. He says as
much in Rom. 3:31, “Do we then nullify the Law through faith? Absolutely
not! Rather, we uphold the Law.”)
Since Paul was a Jew who regarded faith in Christ as the fulfillment of
Judaism, it is wrong to call him “anti-Jewish.” It is also unfair to call him an
“apostate” since he considered his Gentile mission to be a prophetic voca-
tion within his native religion, not the consequence of a conversion to a
new one. But in redefining the notion of covenant election so radically, he
struck at the heart of the Jewish identity of most Jews. Disagreement over
who is elect was certainly part of intra-Jewish debate in the Second Temple
period. This is clear enough from the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls. Paul,
however, went a step beyond the covenanters at Qumran: for them not all
Jews are elect, but all the elect are still Jews. Not so for Paul: only those in
Christ are in the covenant and among the elect. In his vision of a new hu-
manity destined for a new creation, ethnicity — so essential to Jewish
identity — disappears. If his theology implies no wholesale rejection or
supersession of Israel, it does imply a new definition of “Israel” and a dis-
placement of historic Israel’s covenantal self-understanding as a commu-
nity formed by physical descent and ritual observance.Other New Testament Perspectives on Jews and Judaism
Paul’s theology is the most complex — and on the subject of the Law, the
most convoluted — in the New Testament. The rest of the corpus presents
a range of attitudes toward Jews and Judaism. At one end of the spectrum
are writings that engage in a constructive and relatively positive appropria-
tion of Jewish scripture and tradition without vilifying or even referring
directly to Jews or non-Christian Judaism. At the other end are those that
were written to communities of believers who were in competition with
Jewish communities and that therefore reflect varying degrees of polemic,
separation, and supersession.405Early Judaism and Early ChristianityEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
Tuesday, October 09, 2012 12:04:18 PM