Paul
Next to Jesus, Paul was the most significant figure in the movement during
the first century. In some respects, he was even more controversial than Je-
sus. We know a lot more about him thanks to the second half of Acts and
to some letters of his that survive. (His authoring seven of them is un-
doubted, but the other six were probably written in his name by his associ-
ates in the decades after his death.) The two sources are not completely at
odds, but they do present rather different portraits of Paul’s relation to Ju-
daism. Acts depicts him as an observant Jew even after he joined the Jesus
movement. He continues to follow Jewish laws and observe Jewish cus-
toms. He has Timothy circumcised, frequents Diaspora synagogues, gets
his hair cut to fulfill a vow, travels to Jerusalem to give alms to his nation
and offer sacrifices, undergoes ritual purification in the Temple, pays the
expenses of a Nazirite ceremony for four men, and announces before the
Sanhedrin that he is a Pharisee. For Luke, then, Paul was basically a Jew
who added faith in Messiah Jesus to his Judaism.
Paul’s letters (which Acts nowhere mentions) confirm several ele-
ments of this profile. In them he claims to be a Hebrew born of Hebrews
who was circumcised on the eighth day (Phil. 3:5). He proudly calls himself
an Israelite and a descendant of Abraham (Rom. 11:1). He concedes that
circumcision is of value if one practices the Torah (Rom. 2:25). He speaks
of the Jewish people as his “kinsmen according to the flesh” and avers that
“to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the
Law, the worship, and the promises”; they are beloved for the sake of the
patriarchs, and to them belongs the messiah (Rom. 9:3-5; 11:28). And he
staunchly insists that even though Christ came to save Gentiles, God has
not abandoned the Jewish people; in fact, their election is “irrevocable”
and all “Israel will be saved” (Rom. 11:26, 29). He pronounces the Torah
“holy, just, and good” (Rom. 7:12) and protests that faith does not abrogate
the Law but establishes it (Rom. 3:31). “It is not the hearers of the Law who
are righteous before God but the doers of the Law who will be counted
righteous,” he writes to Christians in Rome (2:13). Indeed, the “just re-
quirements of the Law” (the moral demands of the Torah) are to be ful-
filled in the lives of believers as they cooperate with the Spirit of God at
work within them (Rom. 8:4).
These strong affirmations of Jewish identity, however, reveal only part
of the picture. Most of Paul’s positive statements about the Torah appear in
a single letter, Romans, his last; and they look like strategic backpedaling,401Early Judaism and Early ChristianityEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
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