As noted in a prior post, the faith once delivered was challenged and challenged again until in many respects it bore little resemblance to the continuity of faith that the Messiah taught in the 30s CE. As the apostles themselves warned, the magnification over millennia of revealed biblical truth slowly eroded.
From the end of the first century and on, small groups of disciples held to the biblical truths they understood, including observing a seventh day Sabbath and other biblical tenets that reflected the life, teachings and example of Jesus Christ. But as the faith once delivered plunged into the world of Hellenism and the spiritual politics of men—especially following the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE—things began to change.
The teachings of the Apostle Paul—a man who by his own accounts was born, lived, and died a Jew (read that again for emphasis)—were summarily mangled into a contrary position.
Why is this important? If one controls the language, one controls the narrative. Here’s a startling consideration: to truly understand what the Bible—and Paul—teaches, one must consider that the origins of the words “Christian,” “Christianity,” and the “church” from a historical perspective represent potential definitions that are—in the words of scholar Anders Runesson—“inadequate, anachronistic, and misleading.”
Is that true? What happened? And what do more contemporary scholars say today of this shift?
A new focus emerges
Since the 1500s, much of the Protestant world and contemporary syncretized Christianity has previously read the Apostle Paul through a single, powerful lens. It is the lens Martin Luther ground for himself in the monastery.
In his own life, Luther chafed under the heavy hand of a hot mix of politics and theology. His own studies led him to a new belief in sola scriptura—viewing the Bible as the sole infallible, authoritative source for faith. Under such a view, there was no room for organizational shackles of a confining hierarchical structure, one that put itself operationally biased in front of the scriptures.
As Luther advanced, the focus of the apostle Paul on grace, particularly salvation by grace, emerged as a turning point. Grace trumped the ponderous rigid focus of Luther’s prior fellowship.
But there was a serious overstep.
In that telling, Paul becomes Luther’s twin: a Jew who discovered that his ancestral faith was a treadmill of works-righteousness, abandoned it, and founded something new and better that would ultimately be called “Christianity.”
A made-up story
It is a moving story. The trouble is that a growing number of serious scholars—many of them no adherents of any particular church—now document that the Luther-infused account is largely a made-up story about Paul rather than the story and beliefs that Paul actually lived.
The crack in the wall opened in 1977, when E.P. Sanders published Paul and Palestinian Judaism. Sanders did something almost embarrassingly simple: he went back and actually read the Jewish sources—the Mishnah, the Talmud, the Dead Sea texts—to see whether first-century Judaism really was the legalistic, grace-starved system the commentaries assumed. He concluded it was not.
The promise of covenantal nomism
What he found instead he named covenantal nomism: the conviction that a Jew’s place before God rests first on God’s gracious choice of Israel, with obedience to Torah being the response to that election, never the purchase of it. As Sanders put it, “obedience maintains one’s position in the covenant, but does not earn God’s grace as such.”
This, incidentally, squares directly with Paul’s declaration in Ephesians 2:8-9 “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God” (English Standard Version)
Judaism mis-portrayed – no anxious bookkeeping of sin
Even the system of sacrifice assumed imperfection. The Torah has built in the means of atonement, expecting that no one would keep it flawlessly. Contrary to the theological myth that emerged from 100-1500 CE, this was not a religion of anxious bookkeeping. It openly featured, in Sanders’ words, forgiveness, love, and belief in a personal God active in the history of His people.
If that is true, then a sobering question follows, and the Paul within Judaism scholars — Magnus Zetterholm, Mark Nanos, Paula Fredriksen, and others—press it without flinching: What happens to five centuries of Pauline interpretation if the Judaism it assumed never existed?
Zetterholm traces the lineage of the older view with uncomfortable precision — an “incipient anti-Judaism” running from intra-Jewish polemic, through Ignatius and Justin and Melito of Sardis (who first charged “the Jews” collectively with deicide), through Augustine and Luther, and finally into the supposedly neutral German scholarship of the nineteenth century, where a man named Ferdinand Weber simply manufactured a portrait of legalistic Judaism that later scholars passed down like an heirloom.
The outcome? Made-up theology dressed itself as history, and the costume held for generations.
The wedge between Paul and his own people
Here the discussion converges on the heart of the matter. The wedge that has been driven between Paul and Judaism—the very wedge that lets us imagine Paul somehow “left” one religion for another—was forged, these scholars argue, not by Paul but by his interpreters.
Consider the famous battleground phrase, “works of the law” (erga nomou). Luther insisted it meant the entire law, every commandment, the whole apparatus of human effort to merit salvation. But James Dunn, who coined the very term “New Perspective,” looked again at Galatians 2:16 and argued that Paul was not condemning good works in general.
Paul’s quarrel was with exclusion, with the claim that the covenant was for the circumcised only. Nanos sharpens this further still: “works of the law” may refer narrowly to the works of proselyte conversion. Paul was not telling Jews to stop being Jews. He was telling Gentiles they did not need to become Jews to belong to the Messiah.
This is the quiet earthquake. According to the independent analysis of Nanos, Zetterholm, and Fredriksen, Paul never opposed an understanding of Torah observance for Jews or non-Jews at all. His letters—including Romans and Galatians especially—are addressed in measure to non-Jews, and his fiery language about the law is aimed at the question of a potential requirement of Gentile circumcision, not at the Jewish way of life.
Given the fact that many early converts were “Godfearers” who were reading and studying the remarkably new view found in the Septuagint—the Torah then available in Greek translation—the original intent and purpose here could be easily grasped.
Paul, on this reading, remained exactly what he called himself: “circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews” (Philippians 3:5). Paul was, simply put, a Torah-keeping Jewish follower of the Jewish Messiah. Paul decidedly did not “found” an all-new religion.
What was Jewish was simply Christian
This reframing carries a startling implication for the modern believer, and it lands precisely where The Way has always pointed. The practices we have been taught to file under “Jewish”—and therefore, by unspoken assumption, abolished, obsolete, not for us—were in fact the center of the ordinary rhythm of the earliest assembly. The Sabbath was not a burdensome relic Paul labored to overthrow. It was the day.
The dietary distinctions, the festival calendar, the reverence for Torah as the gracious instruction of a covenant-keeping God—these were not the trappings of a “rival religion” called Judaism over against which “Christianity” defined itself. They were the life of the movement Acts calls “the Way” (Acts 9:2, 24:14), a movement that understood itself to be well within the teachings of the Old Testament
Boccaccini and Segovia’s Paul the Jew pushes the same door open from another angle, situating Paul squarely within what is been termed Second Temple apocalyptic Judaism—sharing its hope, its categories, its expectation of a coming Kingdom that would set the world right.
Here’s a critical point: Kathy Ehrensperger in Paul within Judaism makes the crucial point that Paul’s vision of unity “in Christ” never erased the distinction between Jew and Gentile. Both remained—together—within Israel’s continuing story.
The source of contagion, named
How, then, did we get the other Paul — the made-up Paul who somehow “slew” the Law?
Zetterholm’s answer is historical and unsettling. Early Gentile believers, facing Roman suspicion of new religions yet wishing to claim Judaism’s ancient pedigree, found a workable strategy: keep the antiquity, discard the Jews.
“Early Christianity emerged as a form of Judaism stripped from Jews,” he writes, “and anti-Judaism became an important ideological resource.” What began as political maneuvering hardened, over generations, into theology—and finally into a settled quasi-“fact” that Luther would receive, sharpen, and deliver down to the modern “Christians.”
This is the very contagion the New Testament writers saw coming. As noted in an earlier post, Jude pleaded with the saints “to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered,” warning that “certain people have crept in unnoticed.”
The drift was not imagined. The faith once delivered was Jewish to its roots—taught by a Messiah who declared, “I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17), and embodied by disciples who, by every account, prayed in the synagogue and kept the law of their fathers.
The scholars reviewed here come from many convictions, and in fairness, it needs to be noted that they do not all agree on where the trail finally leads.
But on the central point they speak with one voice: the wall between Paul and his own faith was built by later hands. Take it down, and a different apostle steps forward—not the founder of a religion against Judaism, but a faithful Jew calling the nations into the covenant promises of the God of Israel.
For those truly seeking the Way, that is not a minor correction. It is a powerful summons to look again at what was lost.
Coming up: what did Hegel and Baur do to Jesus Christ at the Tubingen School? (hint: many people believe it today)
Discover more from Seeking The Way
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.