Saint Paul and Judaism.

        From this perspective we can appreciate the dramatic struggle of faith and culture reflected in Saint Paul's Epistles. In his magnum opus, the Epistle to the Romans, he takes up the theme of continuity and discontinuity between Jews, Gentiles, as well as Christians in a rather conscious way. Of course he is not concerned with this theme in the abstract but in terms of the direction of salvation history in his times. His concern was about what God was doing in Christ among Jews and Gentiles which the Apostle understands as the revelation of God's righteousness — the demonstration of God’s saving action in fulfillment of His promises in the Old Testament. It is in Romans (chaps 1-3) that the Apostle presents a christocentric survey of universal history which finds that ultimately neither Jews nor Gentiles have much to boast about morally or spiritually. All have gone astray and all need Christ through whom God offers universal salvation by means of faith in Christ and apart from the Law of Moses.  In what follows, our first focus will be on aspects of Saint Paul’s life and thought in continuity and discontinuity with his own tradition of Judaism of which he as a zealous and strict adherent.

        Chapters 9-11 of Romans are of special relevance to our discussion. The chief issue here is the fact of the corporate unbelief of the Jewish people. To the Apostle, this fact presents a painful personal and theological problem of the greatest magnitude, wrapped in the mystery of God's inscrutable ways. How can his fellow Jews not believe in their own Messiah? What is one to think about God's faithfulness to His promises? What is God's plan about Jews and Gentiles now that messianic times have arrived? Saint Paul's complex and laborious argumentation in part reaches a high point with his illustration of the good olive tree in Rom. 11:17-14. The illustration is not accurate horticulture — a wild shoot is not grafted on a good tree but the reverse — and St. Paul is aware of it (Rom. 11:24). However, his extended use of this forced image indicates that Saint Paul is grappling in an agonizing way with the problem of the relations between Jews, Gentiles and Christians, and can thus serve as a key by which to outline some main aspects our topic.

        First, we note that the illustration unequivocally assumes the essential continuity between the Jewish tradition and all Christian believers. The good olive tree (kallielaios) with its richness (or “fatness,” piotes) is the whole Jewish heritage glowing with divine revelation. Saint Paul earlier sums up this heritage when enumerating God's many gifts to the Jews: “the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the Law, the worship,... the promises,... the patriarchs, and... the Christ” (Rom. 9:4-5). Elsewhere in Romans he mentions the privilege of “the oracles of God” (ta logia Theou), the Scriptures, with which the Jews have been entrusted by God. According to Saint Paul's train of thought in Romans 9-11, there are two kinds of branches on the good olive tree, natural and honorary. The honorary branches are the Gentile Christians, formerly shoots of a wild olive (agrielaios), but now organically “grafted” to the good olive tree of whose richness they partake. The natural branches are the minority of Jewish Christians, mentioned not in the illustration itself but earlier in Romans 9-11, who constitute “the faithful remnant” of the Old Testament prophecies and who have attained to God's righteousness in Christ (Rom. 9:24; 11:5-7). These two kinds of branches representing the Jewish and Gentile Christians are united by their common call in Christ (Rom. 9:24) and their mutual participation in the blessings of the Jewish heritage. They are the ones who “confess with [their] lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in [their] hearts that God raised Him from the dead,” and who consequently make up the saved community in which “there is no distinction between Jew and Greek [because] the same Lord is the Lord of all” (Rom. 10:9-13).

        For Saint Paul, therefore, salvation history marks an essential and intrinsic continuity between Christianity and Judaism. Unlike Marcion of old and some theologians in modern times, Saint Paul has a completely positive view of the revelatory value of the Old Testament and the Jewish heritage. In agreement with the overall witness of the New Testament, the Apostle holds to the fundamental view that the Christian faith and life are to be interpreted in the category of renewal and fulfillment, rather than negation or abolition of the Jewish heritage. This line of theological thinking continues in the classic patristic tradition which affirms not only the workings of grace but also the sainthood of numerous figures in the Jewish tradition down to the Maccabean martyrs.

        Secondly, however, the illustration of the olive tree also emphasizes a sharp discontinuity between Judaism and Christianity centering on Christ. Here the qualification must be made that Saint Paul, in his own view, has a lover's quarrel not with the Jewish heritage as such but with contemporary unbelieving Jews. Without mincing his words, the Apostle holds that in the new stage of salvation history marked by the lordship of Christ, some natural branches were indeed “broken off” the good olive tree by reason of unbelief (apistia), just as “in their place” previously wild branches have been organically “grafted” by reason of faith (pistis, Rom. 11:17-20. In vain modern thinkers involved in the Jewish-Christian dialogue have tried to find support in Romans 11 for a theology of two equally valid covenants by God, one for Jews and the other for (Gentile) Christians. According to Saint Paul's illustration, the unbelieving Jews in messianic times are clearly cut off from the good olive tree. Earlier in Romans 9-11 the Apostle states that they are not the spiritual but the physical Israel (Rom. 9:6-8). He considers that they are “vessels of wrath,” who stand over against the “vessels of mercy,” the Christian Jews and Gentiles with whom the Apostle himself identifies using the plural “we” (Rom. 9:22-24). Thus a double discontinuity exists, not only between Christians and unbelieving Jews, but also between unbelieving Jews and their own heritage!

        This precisely is the agonizing problem of Romans 9-11 over which Saint Paul struggles to provide various answers. The two important qualifications he makes are (1) that the unbelief of the Jewish people serves the positive cause of a large-scale conversion of Gentiles and (2) that it is provisional rather than final (Rom. 11:11,25-26). The Jews have indeed stumbled but they have not ultimately been rejected by God as His people — “by no means!” (me genoito!), says the Apostle, for otherwise the faithfulness of God to His own promises would be in question (Rom.11:1,11,29). They may now be “enemies of God” pertaining to the Gospel and for the sake of Gentiles, but they are the irrevocably beloved and elect people of God, although now paradoxically in a state of disobedience, just like Gentiles Christians were previously in a state of disobedience (Rom. 11:28-32). God's plan is to consign all to disobedience that He may show mercy upon all (Rom. 9:32). Saint Paul's profound conviction which he reveals as a divine mystery is that by God's power all Israel will finally believe and be saved (Rom. 11:23-26). He concludes with a doxological affirmation of God's inscrutable wisdom (Rom. 11:33).

        It is of great importance to note that Saint Paul, despite his harsh language — there was no ecumenical politeness in antiquity — refrains from pronouncing judgment on the Jews as being accursed by God. Rather, he expresses astonishing solidarity with them, solemnly stating that he would be willing “to be cut off from Christ for the sake of my brethren and kinsmen by race” (Rom. 9:3). These words of the Apostle, as well as similar words by Moses in Ex. 32:32, have been lifted up by various Church Fathers as the highest examples of selfless love. In the illustration of the olive tree Saint Paul on the contrary warns Gentile Christians three times not to be haughty or conceited toward unbelieving Jews but to stand in awe before the mystery of God (Rom. 11:18-25). However, later Christian generations were often to forget the Apostle's admonitions. Without any sense of solidarity with the Jewish people, they turned the lover's quarrel and the “in-house” biblical critique of Jews into a hateful source of prejudice, polemics, and persecution, despising and mistreating the Jewish people. It is one of the darkest ironies of history that the “honorary Israelites,” the Gentile Christians engrafted on the good olive tree, chose many times to stomp on the broken branches rather than to long and pray with Saint Paul for their salvation.

        The final major discontinuity between Judaism and Christianity pertains to Saint Paul’s hermeneutical perspectives. Saint Paul's quarrel of love with contemporary Jews was not only over Christ but also over the interpretation of the Jewish tradition. The experience of Christ gave the Apostle and the early Church a new hermeneutical key by which to appropriate the Jewish heritage. It is a fact that the developing Christian tradition consciously or unconsciously embraced numerous individual elements as well as patterns of Jewish thought, worship and practice from a new theological perspective, yet with a great deal of variety and diversity. At certain points, however, the christological criterion yielded interpretive results quite conflicting with those of the Jewish scribal tradition. Of course Saint Paul would claim that the coming of Christ and the gift of the Spirit led quite naturally to the Christian interpretation of the Jewish heritage as the fulfillment of prophecies. But the scribal teachers would vehemently disagree, viewing the christological interpretations as radical departures, even an apostasy, from Judaism. What we observe in history is two communities of faith with differing hermeneutical perspectives.

        The most crucial discontinuity in interpretation, and one which hastened the historical separation between Judaism and Christianity, centered on the role of the Mosaic Law. Already the Hellenists of Acts, that is to say, the Greek-speaking Jews who had become Christians, seemed to have questioned the authority of the Temple, the Law and Jewish customs in messianic times, which generated a fierce persecution against them (Acts 6:13,-14; 8:1). The Apostle Paul, erstwhile zealous persecutor of these same kind of Christians, took up their cause and was himself, after Damascus, persecuted not only by unbelieving Jews but also by right-wing Jewish Christians, those whom he names “false brethren” (Gal. 1:4) and “the circumcision party” (hoi ek peritomes, Gal. 1:12) who wanted, along with Christ, to maintain Jewish customs in strictness. When Saint Paul speaks about “his Gospel,” he surely means not a different Gospel from that preached by all (1 Cor. 15:11), but rather preaching Christ to the Gentiles apart from the requirements of the Mosaic Law, a Gospel with which “the pillars” of the Jerusalem Church agreed (Gal. 2:1-9).

        The essence of the complex problem of the Law in Saint Paul and early Christianity, as more and more scholars have come to perceive in recent years, has nothing to do with the alleged Jewish attitude of meritorious “work righteousness,” but with the concrete question of how Gentile converts were to be received into the Church. Some of the Jewish Christians insisted that Gentiles Christians had to be circumcised to be saved (Acts 15:1). Gentile Christians in the Galatian churches actually began to practice circumcision, kosher foods and Jewish festivals (Gal. 4:10; 5:2), what the Apostle describes as “Judaizing” or living like Jews (Gal. 2:14). His uncompromising answer is well known: justification is by faith in Christ not by works of the Law (Gal. 2:16).

        The Pauline phrase “works of the Law,” contrasted to faith, points essentially to the Jewish religious customs and not to ethical works which Saint Paul everywhere requires (Rom. 2:6-10; 1 Cor. 7:19; 2 Cor. 5:10; 5:20-21), especially in his frequent pastoral exhortations. Although the Apostle does not explicitly make a distinction between moral and ceremonial parts of the Law, he does implicitly draw such a differentiation (Rom. 2:21-29; 1 Cor. 7:19). The focus of his objections to the Law, after all, centers on circumcision and other religious signs which visibly identified Jews as Jews (Gal. 2:3; 4:10; 5:2,11; Rom. 2:25-29; Phil. 3:2-3,19), and not on moral elements assumed to be valid for all. His sharp critique of the Galatians is that they were “Judaizing” by observing circumcision and the like, not that they were either wrongly or excessively given to moral works! Where Saint Paul theologizes about the Law, the Apostle conceives of it in its totality as a God-given, holy, but temporary dispensation which Christ has ended and from which Christians are now free (Gal. 3:15:4:7; Rom. 7; 10:4). That the term telos (Rom. 10:4) should not be understood as “goal” or “fulfillment,” as many exegetes would have it, but rather as “termination” or “end” is indicated by the contrasts which follow as explanation of the point (Rom. 10:5-9). Obviously a dispensation that is temporary according to God's plan has a beginning (Moses) and an end (Christ). In Saint Paul’s theological thought hat is really fulfilled in Christ is God's promise to Abraham, not God's gift to Moses (Gal. 3).

        The Apostolic Council (Acts 15; Gal. 2) by supporting Saint Paul's position on the Mosaic Law regarding Christian Gentiles, succeeded in securing the unity of the Church but sealed Christianity's accelerated separation from Judaism. Saint Paul was not against observance of the Law by Jews, although the Law for him had become in the final analysis a matter of indifference as a saving criterion. But the Jewish people as a whole could not accept the new faith if it involved such a substantive revision of a core part of the tradition which defined their identity. In Romans 9-11 Saint Paul expressly links the corporate unbelief of the Jews to their zealous attachment to the Law (Rom. 9:30-32). At a time in history from the Maccabean Revolt to the Jewish Rebellion against the Romans (ca. 165BC-73AD), when the Jews were struggling to preserve their identity over against Gentile cultural, political and military onslaughts, they probably sensed only too well that the Christian relativization of the Law of Moses was life-threatening to the Jewish community. No wonder that they were aroused to persecution of Jewish Christians and their expulsion from the synagogues.

        However, the Apostle Paul and others like him were willing to risk that sacrifice toward a new universal identity in Christ. The Apostle was not of course opposed to a Jewish identity on a sociological level any more than he was opposed to a Roman, Greek or Scythian identity. Nor does he suggest anywhere that Hellenic culture was “higher” or “nobler” than the Jewish. He does not appeal to any humanistic reasons in moving beyond what, from the Christian point of view, came to be regarded as sacred Jewish religious culture. Rather, for him as well as for the developing Church, the very nature of faith in a universal Lord and the very nature of the Church as a universal community, required this historically fateful passage toward the universalization of essence of the Jewish faith discovered in Christ and the new humanity, the Church, which is His Body.

        Here we may note that Saint Paul's bold move for the cause of Christ and the Church in the Graeco-Roman world has much to say to us Orthodox Christians with the blessings and burdens of our own rich ethno-religious heritage today as we face the interaction of faiths and cultures in a global context. Our challenge is to consider how far our own Christian identity is shaped by the experience and convictions of Saint Paul regarding Christ as the universal Savior, the Gospel as the universal message, and the Church as the universal new humanity; and how far it is variously shaped by the immense and rich ethno-religious heritages of the various Orthodox Churches developed over many centuries. To be sure, as peoples with concrete histories we can rejoice in our particular ethnic cultures and share in the variagated culture of today's global village. But what of our universal identity in Christ which transcends all cultures and adapts to new ones?  What are the measures of appropriate unity and diversity? To what extent can we move beyond the sense of necessary uniformity and see that new cultural forms can express the essential experience and truth of the Orthodox faith? These and such questions will become more and more burning concerns in the future and tremendously important for our mission on a global scale. To understand more deeply our true identity as Christ's Church is also to grasp more clearly the great mission to which He calls us today.