We stand on the shoulders of giants. But which giants, and by what criteria do we choose them?

My questions determine my criteria. Why and how did those texts, communities and, movements that, by the early second century, we can begin to identify as “Christian,” originate in the closing decades of Late Second Temple Judaism? How does a message so idiosyncratically Jewish—about Israel’s god and his son, the final Davidic messiah; about the ends of the ages and the impending resurrection of the dead; about the reunion of all twelve tribes and the universal acknowledgement of their god by the seventy non-Jewish nations—even and ever become involved with pagans in the first place? And why did these pagans sign on, radically Judaizing their social practices, their worldview, and their ritual behaviors, showing honor solely to Israel’s god?

In light of these kinetically interrelated questions, coherence of explanation is my prime criterion. Whatever these Jews were saying—in the Galilee and in Judea, in Aramaic and in Greek, in Caesarea and in Damascus and in Rome—it had to make sense to their various contemporaries, hearers both Jewish and pagan. What ways of thinking about the past, about this past, best accounts for the behaviors of all of these ancient people, and for the exiguous textual evidence (preserved in vastly changed circumstances) that they left behind?

Thus, my giants: Schweitzer and Stendahl. Schweitzer (and I interject here a shout-out to Johannes Weiss) in his work on both Jesus and Paul, unflinchingly emphasized eschatology. Immediate, temporally conceived, End-of-the-world-as-we-know-it eschatology.1 Stendahl (and I interject here a shout-out to Johannes Munck), in his work on Paul and especially on the Letter to the Romans, emphasized mission as the context and content of message.2 Jews, convinced that Israel verged on cosmic redemption, had an urgent message to get to the nations. The nations, too, they said, would be redeemed: but they had to commit to the right god. Through the pneuma of that god’s son, these people could do so; and in the brief meanwhile—as Eyl’s own lambent publication has recently explored3—their own pneumatic powers offset those of current cosmic rulers. But, said Paul, they better get with the program before Christ came back, which was soon. To quote Dale Allison’s quoting Harris Lenowitz, “The time scheme . . . for a messianic movement has but a single date: now.”4

I lack the evidence to conjecture why John the Baptizer and, following him, Jesus of Nazareth thought that God’s kingdom was at hand. I do know that an astonishingly strong, non-falsifiable trust (emunah; pistis) in this prophecy enabled some of Jesus’s followers not only to experience Jesus as raised, but also to interpret that experience: it validated their confidence in his prophecy. Paul, some quarter-century later, and to significantly different auditors, still broadcast the same message: The Kingdom is at hand.

“Jewish apocalyptic eschatology” is our heuristic, scholarly shorthand term for a baggy and uncoordinated assortment of expectations, predictions, resentments, compensatory visions, and hopes. As an interpretive framework, though, it represents the only first-century way of thinking that could have made sense of Jesus’s resurrection—and, indeed, that could even have sponsored having that experience to begin with. And it is the only interpretive framework that accounts for the immediate afterlives of Jesus’s message in his followers’ missions to Israel of the Diaspora, where synagogues already held sympathetic pagans. The missions’ demand that these ethnic others foreswear their own gods for Israel’s god, itself a form of radical Judaizing, indexes the missions’ apocalyptic sensibility: the returning messiah was about to put these lower deities in their place (e.g., Phil 2:10–11; 3:21; Rom 8:38; for the more detailed theomachy, 1 Cor 15:24–28). Worried synagogue authorities, Roman magistrates, and urban crowds outside the movement(s) thought otherwise (2 Cor 11:24–27). Not everyone was as certain as were Paul and his colleagues that they knew the time on God’s clock. But again, these apostles had inside information: pneuma and its prerogatives.

“One reason why it is easy to forget Paul’s apocalypticism,” Jennifer Eyl rightly notes, “is that there is so much else to look at in Paul’s letters.” True; and from those elements mighty institutions have grown. Institutions are invested in the long term. Apocalyptic movements are not. Inevitably, then, theologies based on these first-century Jewish texts will have a built-in torque. Paul (as Krister Stendahl luminously reminded us) was not a fourth-century Augustinian catholic. Nor was he a sixteenth-century Augustinian monk.5 Nor was he—I remind my New Testament colleagues—a member of the SNTS with a full set of Loebs. What a text meant to its first-century authors and hearers, as Krister again reminded us,6 will invariably be other than what it means to a twenty-first-century Christian community (of any denomination).

But, as Eyl continues, “perhaps the most important reason why we ignore [Paul’s] eschatological certainty is because he was utterly wrong.” Paul—as Jesus and the Baptizer before him, and as the Teacher of Righteousness before all of them; and as Joachim of Fiore and Sabbatai Zvi and William Miller, to name but a few, after them—was wrong about the world’s ending in his lifetime.

This unimpeachably correct observation touches a living nerve that connects the modern measure of truth to meaning: scientistic constructions of empirical confirmation. Logical positivism is a dusty reminder of what happened when philosophy internalized this standard to assess the meaningfulness of truth claims. Scientific and humanistic study both rest on hermeneutics, true. Like God, the Higgs Boson particle is elusive. But criteria of meaning, as we search for each, differ. Ideas about God in the West have a much longer echo chamber, a lot larger institutional investment, and (for better and often for worse) a lot more social purchase than does particle physics, for one thing. And the tests for Higgs Boson, while elaborate and expensive, are empirical, not moral or creedal or cultural.

It should be possible—indeed, it must be possible—to do theology even though the chief prophecy of Jesus and Paul, it turned out, was wrong. Schweitzer thought so. So did Stendahl. And they declined to distort history, or to deny it, in order to think theologically and to engage the world ethically. In their lives and in their work, these two great men embodied courage. Intellectual and theological courage. Strong shoulders to stand on.

One quick word, about theological taxonomies—“The Problem with ‘Pagans,’” as Eyl notes. The syngeneia that defined ancient Mediterranean “religions,” the kinship relations between heaven and earth, left Paul’s tongue tied. Ethnic others, whether Greeks or barbarians, were to commit to his Jewish god—while not, he heatedly insisted, “becoming” Jews. (No circumcision parties!) There was no term for non-circumcised (“unconverted”) ex-pagan pagans committed exclusively to Israel’s god, enabled through his son’s pneuma to follow (many of) that god’s specifically Jewish laws. This lexicological fact itself indexes the unstable social novum represented by these first-generation Christ-movements.

In time—the very thing that Jesus and Paul were convinced did not remain—these ex-pagans would be called “Christians.” That term would then be extended to the original and originary Jewish generation as well. But the very idea attested by this term means that the movements’ founding prophecy had to be retrieved through reinterpretation. In the late third-century anthology that we now call the “New Testament” an assortment of these second-, third-, and perhaps fourth-generation reinterpretations abides, the canonized survivors of Constantine’s later triage. The erasure of immediate eschatology began as soon as time failed to end on time. As historians, we have to work to recapture that moment of the movement. And we can.

Finally, to “Paul within Judaism.” That the argument qua framing device even needs to be made—as it now is, variously, by a merry band of scholars who dispute raucously as well between themselves—measures how theologically overladen the field of Pauline Studies is. “Judaism,” like “Christianity” and like “paganism,” is just another heuristically convenient label. Roman-period Jews (which is what and who I actually study, not “Judaism”) were an ethnic archipelago unevenly distributed across the empire and beyond, varying locally according to class, clan, and culture, varying trans-locally even more. (Jesus and Paul, remember, did not even share the same scriptural traditions.) Ancestral customs, many concentrated on and around their one particular god (and, occasionally, on his assistants), were variously communicated and enacted by people who thought of themselves and were thought of by others as Ioudaioi. That (hi, Steve Mason!) is what I mean by “Judaism,” whether modern or ancient. Jews were no more on the same page then than Jews are now.

Eyl gently complains that “as the book unfolds . . . ‘Paul within Judaism’ comes to look like ‘Paul only within Judaism.’” Heu, miserrima! (I, not she.) I labored, using his undisputed letters, to locate Paul within the god-congested, multiethnic pagan religious institution where he worked: the ancient city. I am morally certain that he, like Gamaliel after him, availed himself of Roman baths. (That is, Paul—as other wandering apostles, doubtless—was naked, in public, immersed together with uncircumcised idol-honoring Gentiles both before and after God revealed his son in him. That thought should put the quarrel in Antioch, whatever that was about, in some sort of perspective.) And Paul used the public loos. And the public fountains. But he never says so, and those behaviors do not really touch significantly upon what we have of his messaging.

But we do know that Paul called down the pneuma of Christ using exactly the same language of adjuration that a magical adept would employ to summon any obliging superhuman power: epikaloumai.7 Surely his first-century auditors (the Jew first and also the Greek) would recognize an adjuration when they heard it. Paul watched (though I doubt ever participated in) Greek sporting events, and he uses this experience to articulate teaching moments. Paul’s main conceptualization for integrating ex-pagans into Abraham’s family draws on Roman (i.e., pagan) legal protocols of huiothesia / “son-making.”8 He combats the social agency of insulted godlings (lower gods, lords, and daimonia), and he looks forward to their losing the final cosmic battle to the son of his god.

Paul, in short, worked a different neighborhood than did James. In consequence, he had to deal with a lot of non-Jewish others, both human and divine. As a first-century diaspora missionary, Paul-within-Judaism worked within and was shaped by majority Mediterranean culture, a.k.a. paganism. “Paganism” no less than “Judaism” contoured his Christology: those gods are Christ’s “last enemies.” Modern monotheist readers do not see these other gods, but there they are in the New Testament, as in the Old, looking right back at us. Of course, these deities also stand in Plutarch and in Seneca and in Tacitus and in Juvenal, and I appealed to those sources too, though lightly. The gods are not invisible, there. The Pagans’ Apostle seeks to help the reader to see that these gods also operate, importantly, within impeccably Jewish texts: 1 Thessalonians and Philippians and the Corinthian correspondence and Romans. I wanted to make them visible there.9

To close on the question that Eyl closes on: Where are we now in Pauline Studies? Alas, as far as I can tell, we stand in two discrete silos. The SBL bears witness to this. One silo is Pauline Theology. The other is Pauline Epistles, joined recently by the Historical Paul. These silos usually host scholars trained and teaching in different institutions: divinity schools and faculties of theology, to the one side; humanities departments—comparative religion, or Classics, or history, or philosophy, or some combination of these—on the other. We all share space in some journals, but that situation, too, is becoming polarized.10 There is little traffic across the (evident) aisle. I want to change this. I want this to change.

To that end (telos, as in Rom 10:4), to contemplate the state of our state, both sections, Pauline Epistles and Pauline Theology, are co-sponsoring a session on Paul, History, and Theology. Paul-people will speak (John Barclay, Troels Engberg-Pedersen). A Roman-period Christianist will speak (Candida Moss). And the man who wrote the book (actually, many books) on Renaissance historiography, Professor Tony Grafton of Princeton University’s Department of History, will also speak. (That way of framing history, in the sixteenth century, is why Luther validated his reading of Paul by saying that he was simply recovering what Paul himself had said.)11 Insha’allah, Covid-19 will get in no one’s way. I cannot divine from here what wisdom will spring forth or which spirits will descend. One thing I do know: this panel will be terrific. SBL, Boston 2020. Be there or be square.

Nostra Sententia and Historical Imagination: A Response to Brent Nongbri

Paula Fredriksen

Sometimes, when I read his sermons, full of hate speech; or his obsequious letters wheedling political concessions out of imperial power-brokers; or when I think of the sheer amount of damage he did, framing his massive apology for “pastoral” deployments of coercive force (. . . yes, I know: nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition . . .), I think that Augustine is someone who I would cross a room to avoid.

But when I contemplate his radical secularization of politics (contra, for instance, the supine Eusebius); or his insistence that all efforts at self-knowledge are intrinsically retrospective, unstable, and always potentially self-serving; when I consider the sheer creativity of his assertion that the Bible, whatever its many meanings, must always have one specific to originary times and places, secundum historicam proprietatem; when I think of him standing his ground as that great celebrity scholar-diva, Jerome, staged his thunderous tantrum over how to read Galatians (epp. 28, 40, 71, 75 [Jerome’s response], and 82)—well, then, Augustine the beacon of intellectual courage shines like a star in the firmament.

Of all the many, many things from and about him that I have learned in the course of our many decades together, it is Augustine’s ideas about the past that have entranced me the most. The past, as he urges in Confessions 11, is a species of non-being. It does not exist—except in our thinking about it. His bon mot to the Faustus he conjured in his virtual disputatio, the c. Faustum (at 26.5), beautifully catches something that is true too for modern practitioners of critical history, as Brent Nongbri so provocatively points out. If historical work is an act of imagination, how can we be sure that we are not making this stuff up? How do we discern good history from bad? And, even more to the point—thanks again, Brent—how do we discern a good historical account of Paul from those historically inflected theologies produced by scholars who think that they are doing history?

I start where Nongbri starts, with the evidence. What is it? The guild is divided. Colossians and even Ephesians are treated by some as primary sources, “Pauline” in a first-order way. Second Thessalonians has been similarly repurposed. Is 1 Thess 2:13–16 an interpolation (a nod here to Birger Pearson),1 or is it truly Paul, just being his rhetorically over-heated self?2 No manuscript tradition lacks these toxic verses. But then, no piece of Pauline manuscript predates the late second century, by which time the theme of Jews-as-slayers-of-the-prophets has long launched (Gospel of Matthew; Dialogue with Trypho). And how does Acts help or hinder? How do we decide?

My book explains what I think and why. On these issues of evidence and method, here, I turn now to Nongbri’s productive juxtaposition of Augustine and Paul. Five million words via a reasonably stable textual transmission, from the politically agile late Roman bishop. Twenty-four thousand words via widely varying vicissitudes stabilized only by the fourth century, from the early Roman, messiah-minded, pneumatically empowered Jew. “So, in terms of evidence,” Nongbri asks, “does the exercise of ‘seeing Augustine as Augustine saw himself’ differ in kind, or merely in scale, from the exercise of ‘seeing Paul as Paul saw himself’?”

Scale. In 1986, pondering the historiographical mess made when scholars considered both men’s rhetorically powerful presentations of former selves—the throbbing book 8 of the bishop’s Confessions; the apostle’s weaponized narration of his past in Galatians 1—I suggested that our problems arose less from our evidence (so much from Augustine! so little from Paul!) than from our question-framing. In this particular instance, the problem was the Quest for the Historical Moment of Conversion.3

A single, dramatic “moment of conversion” is itself a rhetorical construct, one deployed to great effect in Acts, by which time, of course—early second century—Luke’s Paul does have something to convert to: “Christianity” (cf. Acts 11:26). Augustine also had something to convert to. He went from one form of Christianity (Manichaeism) to another (the imperially patronized Nicene variety). But the descriptions he gives of this transition in its immediate aftermath, the writings from the summer of 386, differ unmistakably from the Confessions’ re-description of it in 397. Through reading Plotinus and Porphyry, and through assessing the lay of the land (unlike Rome, Milan offered no Manichaean network of patrons), Augustine by 386 had long let his dualist allegiances lapse. In that summer of his discontent, he staggered to three fatigued decisions. He would stop sleeping with women. (Monnica had sent the mother of Augustine’s son packing. Augustine immediately acquired another concubine in her stead; Conf. 7.15, 25.) He would be baptized, some nine months thence, by Ambrose. And he would resign his professorship.

The real work of “conversion” occurred slowly, back in Africa, over the course of the 390s.4 Only thereafter did the dispirited decisions of 386 transmute, through the alchemy of retrospect and rhetoric, into a single and singular dramatic Event: the conversion of book 8. The Confessions is Augustine’s public performance of his (new) catholic self.5 He declaims this self before a skeptical audience of resentful colleagues, chaffing at his shrewd self-promotion up the ecclesiastical ladder to a plum church office.6 If you see all this as achingly introspective “candor,” you’re going along for the ride. It’s a great ride, and you’re in excellent company. William James. A. D. Nock. In the mid-1960s, an astonishingly young Peter Brown. Still: caveat lector.

Paul also lived in a world where he had two religious options: Judaism and everything else. “Everything else” was the ancestral practices of other ethnic groups. Paul stuck with his own. Stendahl, following Munck, sounded the summons to rethink Paul’s shift of enthusiasms not as “conversion” (what was there to convert to, other than paganism?) but as “call.” Augustine quit the Manichees. Paul never quit the synagogue (2 Cor 11:24–26). And he was, by his own estimate, one of the Best. Jews. Ever. (Phil 3:6; Gal 1:14.) Also one of the best apostles. Ever. (1 Cor 15:10; 2 Cor 11:23; 12:11.) And the best wonder-worker. And best speaker of angelic tongues. And the best diviner of Jewish textual arcana. “Who has known the mind of the Lord?” he asks, quoting Isaiah. His answer is all over his letters: Paul.

A historical analysis of particular evidence can only occur once we critically reconstruct historical context. For Augustine, this means attending especially to the situation that defined him: the evenly matched civil war within North Africa’s catholic church. (On this, again, see especially Shaw’s brilliant Sacred Violence.) By 411, imperial intervention secured, Augustine (& co.) un-leveled the playing field. Dissident catholics would now be prosecuted as heretics.

The real work came then: subduing angry dissidents, suborning or intimidating their clergy, absorbing Donatist real estate with its income-producing lands and labor. St. Stephen’s relics usefully arrived. Victorious, his political muscle buffed, Augustine sponsored a new, pan-Mediterranean agōn for his talents: he invented Pelagianism. Oh, and Rome fell (to Arian Christians), so he wrote The City of God. (Against the pagans? The second half of the book rails against catholic millenarians.) We have so much from him, and about him. If we overlook his context, his circumstances, and his temperament—not as strategically, seductively retailed in the Confessions, but as registered by his political and rhetorical agility, his sheer will to power, his unflinching embrace of state coercion as a medium of Christian love—we will get him wrong.

How, then, did Augustine see himself? As a late Roman bishop: magistrate, pastor, politician, combat theologian. He could never be as High Table as Ambrose, and he knew it. But like his distant mentor, he consolidated power and authority in his own person: Voce ecclesiae loquor! That’s what late Roman bishops did. Luckily for us, he was also a restless intellectual and a brilliant exegete. He painted himself into some hideous theological corners—predestination; unbaptized babies justly damned for Adam’s sin; coercion-for-your-own-good—but when he was not trying to crush an opponent, his mind, scripture-borne, could soar. It’s still a beautiful thing to watch.

Who was Augustine, “really”? His nonpareil rhetorical skills inhibit my ability to peer much more closely than the sketch, above, suggests. Despite the relative disproportion of evidence, then—208 words of Augustine’s for every one of Paul’s—I feel that I know Paul better. Thickly complicated power politics obscure neither his motives nor his actions. Rhetorically, Paul is also very good, but he’s no Augustine; and no hard assets are at stake in terms of real estate, wealth, and raw, state-enforced power. Nothing crucial, for Paul, hangs upon successful dissembling. And the apostle’s circumstances and his goals were wildly different from the bishop’s. Paul’s energies pool around one chief priority: How to pneumatically Judaize ex-pagan pagans so that they can “fulfill the [Jewish] Law.” Augustine is deliberate. Paul is urgent.

Alas, he was also controlling. He viciously trash-talked fellow adelphoi who, by mid-century, urged proselyte circumcision as the means for Christ-following ethnē to prepare for the approaching End. Read by later Gentile Christians, Paul’s letters served, and serve still, as a sustaining source of Christian anti-Judaism and—as seen in Christian Europe’s systematic mass murder, not a century ago, of European Jews; as seen in synagogue shootings by Americans both white and black in the past three years—a sustaining source of racist anti-Semitism. “Justification by faith, and not by the works of the Law,” Luther’s (sixteenth-century) anti-papal sound bite, still provides many scholars with their key to Paul’s (first-century) intra-movement message. Modern monotheism wraps a theological invisibility cloak around all the pagan gods against whom Paul fights—and against whom, Paul is convinced, the returning Davidic warrior messiah would shortly fight as well. “The Law” (to borrow the incisive language of 1066 and All That)7 is A Bad Thing, defunct currency, one of the stoicheia of this age. (Then how, one wonders, could its telos be Christ?) You would think that Paul’s chief message to his assemblies was “Don’t circumcise!” It was, instead, “No more latreia to daimonia! Trust in Israel’s god alone! And meanwhile, do not listen to the hypocrites, the dogs, the mutilators of the flesh, the false brethren, the so-called super-apostles. . . .” It’s hard, always being right. But it was a burden that Paul shouldered cheerfully. After all, his public (yea, cosmic) vindication loomed, as close to hand as the returning Christ.

Theology wrapped in the rhetoric of historical investigation. There’s a lot of it going around. I am so tired of investing research time reading big books and endless articles ostensibly on Paul, and coming away knowing more, instead, about the personal religious commitments of their modern authors. This is a roaring industry, and it is not going away. Within universities, theological faculties are usually the oldest, thus the most substantially endowed; in the UK and in Europe, often state-supported as well. And, as I mentioned in my response to Jennifer Eyl, modern allegiances to scientific criteria of meaning, the need for some sort of historically imagined empirical confirmation, hamper doing critical history when looking at ancient figures of continuous religious significance. But if any text from the past—Isaiah’s, Paul’s, Augustine’s, even Luther’s—is immediately meaningful to us, then we are certainly misreading it vis-à-vis how it was conceived by its original author(s) and received by its original audiences. If we cannot rebuild that contemporary context, we cannot retrieve these texts’ original meanings.

Finding a match between a sentence in Paul and a sentence in Deuteronomy is not “doing history.” Validating a twenty-first-century Christian theology by presenting it as what an apocalyptically-minded first-century Jewish author himself thought is not simply bad history. It is also, I think, not very good theology. The ethical use of history requires theologians and New Testament scholars to acknowledge that Paul did not think about the things that we think about in the ways that we think about things. Indeed, he very often thought about quite different things. (Spirit-possession, divination, demonic impurity, eschatological bodies of pneuma, and male-gendered angels, to name a few.)

Doing history requires a lot of peripheral vision in order to see the ancient social context. The ruins of Graeco-Roman urban sites.8 The social traction afforded by inscriptions, amulets, divinatory media, papyri. The buried libraries of lost communities whose writings have not been continuously updated through institutional reinterpretation (and yes, Brent, by copying). The universal assumption that superhuman powers have social agency. Paul had to make sense to people thinking in these ways, back then, or we would not have his letters at all, now.

Theology is textual: clear, elegant, regulated by canon, creed, and community. History is contextual. Contingent, methodologically messy, tempest-tossed. Appreciating ancient context requires, on our part, a sort of letting go. We begin our historical work on Paul by acknowledging that both he and his auditors are different from us. They lived in a geocentric universe. They dealt with daimonia on a regular basis. They thought that special humans were divine. They thought that the divine manifested as special humans. They buried curse tablets. (Believe me, if I thought that these worked, I would too.) They thought that ancient texts revealed concrete and detailed information about current and future circumstances. They thought that moral, cultural, and intellectual differences between various ethnē and genē, between men and women, between slave and free, were intrinsic, timeless, enduring: physei, “by nature.” (My heart sinks, actually, when I reflect on how many people indeed do still think in these ways.)

Where and how do we start to pursue these ancient people, so radically independent of and utterly indifferent to our own precious sensibilities? We embrace disorientation. We renounce the anesthesia of anachronism. We allow the dead to be radically Other, at home in their own world, and thus not in ours.

Respect for human difference is the beginning of historical wisdom. Sic est sententia mea, quae vestra fiat!

My old friend Troels Engberg-Pedersen (whom I here call Troels) did his undergraduate training in Classics, his Oxford doctoral work in Classical Philosophy and in Theology. He probably knows the Stoicorum veterum fragmenta by heart and (no less probably) can declaim them in crystalline Oxbridgian Greek. When I need to know about pneuma—which is often, as things turned out—I turn to Troels. My command of classical grammar will never be what his is. (For that matter, the same holds true for my command of English grammar. Many Scandinavian colleagues make me feel this way.)

My training was different. I did a double BA in Religion and in History at an American college. (Wellesley. More than 60 percent of the faculty was female, including the higher admin. I did not appreciate then how important this was. But more on gender below.) As an act of will, I shoveled Latin into an overly congested curriculum that also required my taking four semesters of math and science and four semesters of gym. (Not gymnasium. Gym.) And while for my Religion degree I read what now seems like an awful lot of Tillich, Barth, Bultmann, and Bonhoeffer, I had only one year of formal post-graduate theological study (Oxford, 1973/74). That was enough for me. Back in the States, I worked with John Gager at Princeton. Melanesian cargo cults, Nuer rituals, Wittgensteinian gnomoi, Nag Hammadi mystica, and Mary Douglas’s grids and groups marked my pathway to my work on Augustine on Paul.

This Syndicate exchange, then, embodies a small miracle. The enormous differences in our respective academic training notwithstanding, Troels and I when we read Paul’s letters see almost the same apostle. That is amazing. And, for me, enormously encouraging. The current, unhappily polarized situation of Pauline Studies notwithstanding, it is possible—as Troels and I demonstrate—for scholars trained within theological faculties and scholars trained within departments of comparative religion to learn from each other, and to appreciate each other’s work. More to the point, sometimes they can even agree on important questions of historical interpretation. Again deferring to the incisive language of 1066 and All That: This is A Good Thing.

But informed disagreement is also A Good Thing. It frames argument. And collegial argument offers the opportunity for scholarly progress. So let’s jump in.

Peri archōn: Language games. Christian theological vocabulary is geared to enunciating Christian theology, which is just as it should be. Utilized in historical endeavor, however, it can becloud the enterprise. So, first, to address (alas, only some of) Troels’s excellent challenges, I need to talk about the ways that words work.

“The Christ-event.” Let me qua historical religionist meditate briefly on this. As used by Troels here—“the Christ event (Christ’s resurrection)”—as by others elsewhere, this phrase speaks in the tongues of historical puncta. But “the” Resurrection is a rhetorical construct, a literary device akin to “a moment of dramatic reversal.” Such devices structure narrative, because they deliver emotional punch. Gospel writers (though Mark less so) used it for their stories about the post-crucifixion Jesus. (Visually reformatted, it gave us Grünewald.) Luke-Acts used it for Paul’s “conversion.” (Think Caravaggio.) Augustine, similarly, used it—the bolt-from-the-blue Event—to retail “Augustine.” Then modern scholars interpret this device as description, deciding that there actually was some such historical punctum. And off they go, chasing after the wild goose of “what happened.”

But as Paul’s letters themselves describe, and as the physics and psychology of ancient pneuma themselves suggest, Jesus’s post-mortem, pre-Parousia manifestations did not describe a moment: they defined a zone. I connect dots from 1 Corinthians 15 here: I assume that the witnesses whom Paul lists “saw” Christ (whatever that meant) in and as a sōma pneumatikon. (Ancient pneuma is stuff. It is not not-stuff, as Troels taught us all so well.) And as the work of Jennifer Eyl and Giovanni Bazzana now helps us to see, pneuma manifested in individuals within community by empowering charismatic behaviors.1 The flashier phenomena must have been great fun (to the point that Paul worries what wandering outsiders might think, or how male angels might be tempted to behave, 1 Cor 14:23; 11:10).

The key indices of pneuma for Paul the Pharisee, however, were ritual and ethical. Paul’s kainē ktisis, the empirical measure of pneuma’s effects, were his communities of ex-pagans, ethnē who, though sinners-by-nature (Gal 2:15), were able to start acting more-or-less like Jews without “becoming” Jews. Only Israel’s god; no other gods; no idols; contribute funds for the group back in Jerusalem; and a lot of other idealized Jewish community behaviors (“fulfilling the law,” e.g., Rom 13:8–10). How long could they hold on in this way? Until Christ was declared to the cosmos to be God’s Davidic son, the final christos, empowered by the pneuma of holiness from, out of, on account, by virtue of (ek) the resurrection of the dead (Rom 1:4). A happy elect few knew about this already. Soon everybody would. It was all happening en taxei, nun (Rom 16:20, 26).

The theology coded by “the Christ event” as “the Resurrection” not only fails to capture this phenomenon of Christ’s diffuse post-crucifixion presence. It rhetorically isolates the post-mortem Christ from what these people were convinced was one single kinetic arc of divine empowerment, terminating only at and as the kingdom. In theology-speak: Resurrection immediately entailed imminent Parousia. Lose sight of that, and “the Christ event” begins to become “the origins of Christianity.” That is indeed how things worked out: Jesus’s one-off resurrection hangs suspended in a history of continuing duration. (I put the eventual Assumption of the BVM aside for the nonce.) But Paul and his generation were certainly convinced that things were, and were about to be, quite otherwise.

“Righteousness for salvation” and, thus, the Christian theological status of “the law,” a.k.a. hai patrikai mou paradoseis (thus Paul, Gal 1:14). Following Jewish ancestral practices was not about being or getting “saved.” It was about how you lived if you were a Jew who chose to live Jewishly—as even Philo’s allegorizing neighbors thought they were doing (Mig. Abr. 89–93). Philo thought they were, too, though he also thought (on philosophical and practical grounds, since their souls still lived in their fleshly bodies) that they were going about things the wrong way. Meanwhile, he could admire the Essenes from a distance, overlooking a few small differences, like their following a solar calendar, their vilifying Jerusalem’s priesthood, and their living at close quarters with armed angels. Chapter 2 of The Pagans’ Apostle gives more detail on the catholic sensibilities of ancient Jews’ interpretations of lived Jewish law. Vigorous variety was the norm, not the exception.

When a woman immersed after menstrual niddah—the period of separation varying according to interpretation—she did so in order to resume normal sexual relations with her husband. Was she also immersing to gain salvation through the works of the law? I would be surprised. (It was probably hard enough just to get out of the house.) Why feed the hungry, clothe the naked, protect the powerless? Different ethnic cultures did all these things, and they had various reasons for thinking that these were the right things to do. Jewish culture(s) had a specific reason: their god had told them to do so, and they had agreed. (Speed-read Leviticus 19. It will give you a sense of what “love of neighbor and of the stranger” means. On one leg: Social policy, not emotional affect.) “Salvation” as “happy afterlife once God ends history” may have motivated some Qumran sectarians and various other apocalyptically-minded groups of Jews (like those represented by Peter, James, Barnabas, and Paul). If we could run the numbers, though—and alas, we cannot: ancient demography is statistically more gossamer than angels’ wings—we would probably find that most Jews in most places were cleaning for Passover, if they cleaned for Passover, because, come Nisan, that is what they did. Patria ethē for all ancient people-groups were primarily about how you lived, not primarily about what may or may not happen to you after you died.

I now face a fork in my road to responding to Troels’s response. Do I go with afterlife (the undead and their bodies), or with ethnicity (the living, and theirs)? Gender matters for both.

To Paul’s views on afterlife, first, with a shout-out to the scholar curating this symposium, Matthew Thiessen.2 I am going to have to bounce around between several letters. According to Rom 11:26 (Paul, again channeling Isaiah), Christ as returning messiah will manifest in Jerusalem at the mount then crowned by Herod’s magnificent temple. Then what? Eschatological arithmetic: The twelve tribes of the Davidic kingdom and all seventy nations descended from Noah are gathered in. (Paul must have mellowed since dictating 1 Thessalonians: there, ethnē who do not know his god are going to be the objects of wrath. Maybe he mellowed even since dictating Rom 1:18. Divine wrath was part of the hard sell: like execution, it concentrates the attention.) Then what? In 1 Thessalonians, the dead are raised and living lifted, all given glorious bodies. Christ’s politeuma is celestial (Phil 3:20).

1 Corinthians 15 provides more specific, scientific detail. Paul there speaks of pneumatic transformation: natural bodies both quick and dead change into bodies of pneuma. Pneumatic bodies rise, of course, and in terms of ancient physics that makes sense. Such bodies dwell in the realms above the moon, where flesh and blood cannot go (cf. 1 Cor 15:50). The form of the human body, its morphē, shifts to a god-form, morphē theou, like the one that Jesus had before his cosmic descent, and presumably had again post-mortem (Phil 2:6, 9). This transformation into spirit by spirit was already underway, says Paul, both for ex-pagan Gentile communities and for certain chosen Jews—the present remnant (Rom 11:5), God’s Israel (Gal 6:16, meaning those Jews within the movement who agreed with Paul), and of course Paul himself. These “called ones” know now what everyone will know soon: that the final messiah has already descended, taken on slave form, been crucified, been raised thus again transformed, and is about to come back.

What about everyone else? If most of Israel, ca. 57 CE, has not yet been immersed into Christ, how do they all get his pneuma? If most of the seventy nations have not been so immersed, how will they get Christ’s pneuma? And what about the dead (that’s a lot of people) who number among each group? I have no idea, since Paul does not say. What he does say is that all Israel will be secured (sōthēsetai) and that the fullness of the nations will “come in” (presumably, to the kingdom of Christ’s father).

Where then does everyone go? Ad astra.

Paul says this pretty plainly, as Thiessen has shown. If anyone out there is worried whether Paul’s vision is “Jewish” or “pagan,” from “Judaism” or from “Hellenism,” please, just relax. It is a good, ancient, Mediterranean idea. And the ancient Mediterranean is where Paul and his contemporaries happened to live.

Will there still be distinctions of ethnicity, gender, and social class once bodies shift to pneuma? Galatians 3:28 can be read as saying “no,” but I think that Paul speaks there about the empowering effects of Christ’s pneuma within community in the “present” (that is, sometime in the mid-first century). In Rom 15:9–12, to which I will shortly return, he speaks of a redeemed humanity broken down by ethnic groups: Israel, and everyone else. (The “everybody else” means both Greeks and barbarians, Rom 1:14: Paul thinks “Greek” as well as “Jewish” and, recalling the ways that he stretches ideas about huiothesia and legal inheritance, Paul thinks “Roman” as well.)

What about gender? Look, I do not even know what to make of circumcised angels, and they also have bodies of pneuma (cf. Jubilees 15.27). Greek and Roman gods are gendered, and theirs are star bodies too. (When Venus glowed in the firmament, she was a she.) Ancient Jewish angels are usually gendered and usually male, though some ancient Jewish angels are female. (Thank you, Mika Ahuvia.)3 My sense, from the few letters we have from him, is that Paul was not a detail guy. What he does know is that time is on the very edge of the End. To repurpose Troels’s phrasing, that was “the only thing that matters.”

And finally, Troels, by the discursive criteria of ancient ethnicity, I think that Paul thinks that his god is “Jewish.”4 Letting go of terrestrial real estate was remarkably “modernizing” of him, considering the magnetic pull of The Land in Biblical narrative; but by the early Roman period, YHWH had come a long way since Isaiah, even since Greek Isaiah. And I also think that Paul’s god, like Paul himself, and like most other ancients who thought about people-groups, was an ethnic essentialist. People groups were as they were physei. (Everyone: if you have not yet read Benjamin Isaac, please do so.)5 The new branches supported by the eschatological olive tree are there para physin (Rom 11:13–24, esp. v. 24). They are still wild, though the tree that God had cultivated, by God’s surprising act of generosity, now accommodates them up too. These Gentiles thus are and are not “part” of the tree; and the tree is still, in essentialist ways, “Jewish” (tēi idiai, v. 24 again).

This yes-but aspect holds true too for metaphors of sonship. Adopted sons are “family,” but their syngeneia is constructed other than biologically, kata sarka. Legal syngeneia through huiothesia for Roman property law, and early imperial succession. Jewish covenantal syngeneia for ethnē, according to those Christ-apostles whom Paul despises—the targets of his tortuous allegorizing in Gal 4:21–31. Pneumatic syngeneia through eschatological huiothesia according to Paul & Co.

Note, too, the standing difference of status between Israel and the nations in Paul’s imaginaire. Genealogical Israel, Paul’s syngeneis kata sarka, had long ago been made God’s sons by God himself: no agency of Christ had been involved (though the messiah himself was, again kata sarka, part of the pack: Rom 9:4–5). Christ effects pneuma for all, but he effects son-adoption for Gentiles only: God had already taken care of the Jews. (I apologize on behalf of all of these ancient persons for their non-gender-inclusive sensibilities. Ancient gods, like ancients generally, tended to focus on the status, thus the liturgical behaviors, of [groups of] males.) This family distinction between sonship-groups shapes Paul’s closing cento in Rom 15:8–12. How this distinction will register in the stars, God only—and Paul, maybe—knows.

We come, finally, to 1517 and All That. Thus, too, to J. Z. Smith’s musings in Drudgery Divine.6 Troels suggests that Paul thought A+B X. I do not think so. For Paul, A+B X(AB). And that’s as much linear algebra as I can bluff. But I was struck by the phrasing of the last paragraph of Troels’s section, An Alternative Picture: “So, in the A+BX position Christ-believing Gentiles will positively allow Jews to follow their traditional ethnic practices, and Christ-believing Jews on their side will allow Christ-believing Gentiles to follow their traditional ethnic practices (apart, as Fredriksen rightly insists, from that of participating in traditional rituals to Gentile gods). Both things follow from their shared directedness to the only thing that matters: the Christ event.”

“Allow”? Who is doing the policing and the enforcing? These are urban voluntary associations on the equivalent of spiritual steroids. Paul gives orders, barks directives, makes demands, utters threats, pitches fits. A lot of his anger and frustration—as well as his verbal artillery—stems from his inability to control. Some of his ex-pagan Gentiles are heeding the “false brethren” and contemplating, or actually receiving, circumcision. (Thus Galatians, passim, and scattered places elsewhere.) He tells these male Gentiles that, for them, circumcision does not matter.7 (Did they listen? We do not know.) A baptized ex-pagan makes offerings to his native gods again. (Did he not get the memo? Had he not received pneuma? “Do not even eat with such a one!” 1 Cor 5:11) Too many people in Corinth’s assemblies are working too many pneumata too much of the time. Enough already, scolds Paul, while managing to mention that he’s better at that sort of thing than any of them. (God’s choice of him, after all, was not in vain, 1 Cor 15:10.)

Ex-pagan Gentiles are going to “positively allow” Jews in their assemblies to continue not to sacrifice to local gods? Not to eat abominations and crawling things? (Some Jews, not just the allegorizing Alexandrian ones, doubtless ate such stuff anyway.) These ex-pagans-in-Christ were thinking that maybe Jewish adelphoi should stop sealing God’s covenant in the flesh of their Jewish male children, because the ex-pagans had been told by Paul not to start? They were going to “allow” these Jewish adelphoi to continue to hear God’s logia on the Sabbath (as they were probably still doing themselves)? They were going to “allow” these pneuma-filled Jews to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem? To sacrifice once there? These ex-pagans were going to “allow” these pneumatic diaspora Jews, too, to offer their traditional logikē latreia to Israel’s god as they had been doing for centuries already, and would continue, post-70 CE, ever after (Rom 12:1; Tacitus, Ann. 5.5, 2)? How on earth were they going to stop them? Why would they even ever think they should?

The filaments of ancient divine/human syngeneia ran from the family hearth, through the generations of the dead, up to and through the spheres of heaven. This mutagenic movement within late Second Temple Judaism sheared those filaments with the pneumatic power of Israel’s final messiah—who was about to chasten these lower cosmic powers in any case. Then, through (dia) his son, the Jewish god would be universally acknowledged, from the astral intelligences on down (Rom 16:27; 1 Cor 15:57). Paul, meanwhile—reasonably and realistically—gave the ex-pagan woman “married to an unbeliever” a pass: she had to oblige marital mandate, which meant family cult.8

But pagan patria ethē were not, and never were, on the same level as Jewish patria ethē: on this point, Paul and the so-called super-apostles were agreed. (Augustine, reading Paul centuries later, concurred. Against Jerome, he argued that the entire first generation of Jewish apostles, Paul included, kept Jewish law. After all, the source of pagan custom was demons; the source of Jewish custom, God; ep. 82.2, 12.) To be part of this movement, whether of Paul’s branch or of any of the others, pagans had to radically Judaize. No Christ-follower, whether ex-pagan or Jew, ever thought that the Christ-Jews must paganize (allophylizein? cf. 2 Macc 4:13).9 Not all ethnic customs were created equal. Christ’s ex-pagans had to adopt many, if not most, of the Jewish ones.

Full disclosure at this finale: the filaments of intellectual syngeneia bind Troels’s and my computers together, our dialogue mounting ad astra through the electronic ether. Polychrome filaments of endless, intercalated emails. This conversation must continue there. Thank you, Troels my dear friend, for your sharp and salubrious criticisms.

Anybody who has ever stood in an Israeli bus queue understands what “purely notional” means: that is what an “Israeli queue” is. So, too, local traffic protocols. (And the drivers commanding those huge, hinged-at-the-middle Egged buses clearly have not left their Indy-500 pasts very far behind.) Queuing in Zurich, or driving there, affords a different experience. These varia have something to do, I imagine, with how different people in different places calculate perisomatic zones. My point: People stereotype because stereotyping “works.” The interpretative idea, the stereotype, is itself purely notional; but people use stereotypes—particularly when characterizing ethnic “others”—because they seem to have explanatory value for something Out There.

I grew up in an ethnically inflected America. All four of my grandparents immigrated to the States in the early 1900s. Two had come from Scandinavia (Oslo, and somewhere—I never knew where—in Sweden). Two arrived from Italy. Mom’s parents had a mixed marriage. Nonnu hailed from Sant’ Agatha, outside of Naples (he was a Northerner!), while Nana—Sicilian, not “Italian”—came from Messina. Some version of this European story stood behind most of the families of my native neighborhoods. I did not really encounter “White” America—Protestant, established, moneyed, powerful, unselfconsciously in control—until I went to college. There I made friends whose grandparents spoke unaccented English. And I finally encountered the calibrations of class.

The college’s international, multiethnic population blurred some of these social borderlines. So too did the fact that Wellesley’s student body was all female. So too did the late 1960s Zeitgeist. And yet. In the fall of 1969, I began to understand that, to be truly “unmarked” (however that idea was expressed back then), one was white, Protestant, and male, characteristics often coordinated with wealth and other indicia of social potestas. This thought had never really occurred to me before. Nor had I, until then, realized that—the accidents of my patronym and of my physical appearance notwithstanding—as a working-class, (post) Roman Catholic, Sicilian-family-formatted female, I was not quite “white.”1 And now, as an Israeli-American, voluntarily Jewish, female historian in historically male, Protestant, theologically tempered Pauline Studies, this sense of in-but-not-in still continues. All this backstory is by way of saying: Eric Barreto, I hear what you are saying.

But I offer this personal prolegomenon, too, for the reader, in order to locate my responses to Barreto’s reflections on Paul, Pauline Studies, and contemporary Christian theology. I speak only as a historian: current constructivist theology stands well outside my ken and my academic competence. I will begin with some remarks about Paul’s world, especially its ways of relating divinity, humanity, and power. I will then briefly trace the pagan philosophical roots of modern Christian monotheisms. And I will close with some observations on the continuing salonfähig anti-Judaisms of contemporary academic Pauline Studies.

Then and Now: God(s)

We will look in on Israel’s god in a moment. For now, I turn to his Mediterranean colleagues.2 Back in the day, Greek gods and Roman gods, Etruscan gods and Lycian gods, Phoenician gods and Punic gods—from what I can tell, most ancient gods—had sexual relations with humans. People groups, especially their leaders, sprang from these unions. These peoples shared with their gods specific languages and locations, and received from them preferred protocols for showing respect. These were not casual connections. As classicist J. K. Davies reminds us, ancient gods were “powers first, persons second, and moral agents a long way third.”3

This standing situation of unequal power and moral opacity inscribed a certain anxiety into social relations between ancient peoples and their gods. Phobos, eusebeia, pietas—all of which we might translate as “fear”—encouraged prudent displays of deference. Traditions for showing respect, often received from the god him- or herself, managed the instability intrinsic to these relations of vastly unequal power. These traditions shaped time, structured social relations, and choreographed enactments. One’s emunah or pistis in or fides toward these protocols meant trusting that they pleased the god, who acknowledged these demonstrations of love and loyalty by sheltering his or her cities and peoples beneath a canopy of sōtēria/salus. (Not “salvation”: “security” or “wellbeing.”) In short, divine/human kinship, syngeneia, stabilized unequal power relations by “domesticating” them, quite literally: gods and their peoples lived together in (steeply hierarchical) family groups.

Peoples, places, deities, languages, sanctuaries, ancestral traditions: from these elements, ancients built the idea that we now call “ethnicity,” people-group-ness.4 Israelite ethnicity participated in this construction. Israel’s relationship with their god—unusually—was not biological, but they still formed a “family” unit, modulated by family metaphors, with power patterned accordingly. Male Israelites were as sons to their divine father (thus, in the first century, Paul’s language not of “begetting” but of “son-making,” huiothesia, when speaking of Jewish males and their god, Rom 9:4); or, Israel was to God as wife to husband, joined in a mutually covenanted marital relationship (with God, again, in the dominant male role).

Their god had decided to separate Israel out from other peoples “for himself.” His people in turn agreed to enact those behaviors that he insisted on. In the Five Books, very occasionally, God makes a “Because, that’s why” effort to explain both himself and, at the same time, the provisions of his torah (“teaching”). “Be you kidoshim, because I the lord your god am kadosh: I am the Lord” (Lev 19:2). Directives then follow (a.k.a. “the Law”).5

Kadosh (or, once God spoke Greek, hagios) means “holy,” “separated out.” The same language shapes Jewish marriage ritual to this day. “Consecrated” is an ecclesiastically overstuffed translation of kadosh. “Be you separate from, other”—other than all those other peoples—“for I the lord your god am separate from, other”—other, that is, from all those gods, the ones worshiped by the other nations. (These nations were also distinguished from each other by their particular lands, languages, kinship groups and gods: cf. Gen 10; Deut 32:8–9 NRSV). In brief, all ancients, Jews included, thought in terms of divinely established, discrete group identities. That is why so many of these other ancient peoples also proclaimed Heis theos! “One god!” when giving a shout-out to their own particular deity.6

Philosophy, by contrast, reformatted the idea of theos. “God” served as one of the categories shaping a discourse aimed at rationally organizing the elements of the “real”: theos, cosmos, anthrōpos, psychē, noûs (“rational mind”), and so on. A cultural form initially specific to the Greeks, philosophy as meta-discourse stood to the side of traditional piety. It was not inherited and communally enacted so much as voluntarily chosen, taught, and learned among elites. Some philosophies were non-theistic. Other forms (like that of the much-maligned Epicurus) featured divine powers that were less emotionally invested in human behaviors than were those ethnic gods who filled traditional narratives, who lived in local social space, and who engaged, along with their humans, in inter-city politics, diplomacy, and war. For theistic philosophies, especially those of Platonic genres, the single, highest god was really Out There: radically transcendent, non-gendered, non-city-specific—indeed, beyond cosmos itself—and, thus, non-ethnic as well.

In the course of the second century CE, philosophically educated Gentile Christians turned their attentions to the Greek texts of Jewish scriptures. How did the ethnic god of those ethnic stories relate to philosophy’s non-ethnic high god? Valentinus said one thing; Marcion, yet another; Justin, another still.7 Eventually, in 312 CE, a successful imperial usurper stabilized his rise to power by underwriting those Christian urban blocs whose traditions of reading the LXX (now this group’s Old Testament) aligned (more or less) with Justin’s. The Jewish identity of Israel’s god was gone. Imperially sponsored from this point on, he was Platonizing philosophy’s high god, tethered exiguously to these churches’ Old Testament through the later career of his Son. Reformatted even further through philosophy as Trinity, these divinities (with hypostasized “holy spirit,” added on or in) related only glancingly to Jewish scriptural traditions.

Paul’s own god, in short, has long been irrelevant to Christian theology. The biblical god lost his Jewish identity some twenty centuries ago. More intriguingly, this god’s son, the Davidic messiah, lost his Jewish identity as well. So too, no less remarkably, did that “Hebrew born of Hebrews,” the Israelite from the tribe of Benjamin, the Pharisee whose law-righteousness had been “flawless”: Paul.

Why? Because the “white” power brokers of the late imperial church identified all of these figures, divine and human, with themselves. (This was, to repeat, a normal ancient Mediterranean way for humans to relate to their gods.) Developing Christian art performed visual epispasm on the nude Jesus (as eventually on other formerly Jewish heroes gleaned from OT texts),8 or clothed him in the armor of a Roman military commander (a real chutzpah, in light of Pilate’s decision back in Jerusalem, ca. 30).9 Family is family. God—rather and in particular his divine-and-human Son, Christ—was Roman.

And Paul? He too was ethnically bleached, made un-Jewish by becoming anti-Jewish. Exegesis was (and is) the handmaiden of this theological de- and re-ethnicizing; later, Christian art took over. Eventually, classic Hollywood epics—The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965, starring Max von Sydow); The King of Kings (1961, featuring the young Brad Pitt of his day, Jeffrey Hunter)—would continue the tradition, remastering Jesus as vigorously, visually Northern European (thus, Protestant). And, retelling Kazinzakis’ retelling of the gospels, Scorsese (1988, Last Temptation of Christ) rendered the Gentiles’ apostle as a come-to-Jesus circuit preacher.10

Which brings us, once again, back to 1517 and All That.

Then and Now: Theology and History

Christian anti-Judaism—and its murderous modern inflection, racist anti-Semitism—has a long and continuous history.11 Paul’s bad temper when maligning his Christ-following Jewish colleagues to his ex-pagan assemblies got things off to a bad start, once his letters—and the ones written later, in his name—were heard in circumstances that he never could have imagined. Then, right in this formative period, Jews fought three unsuccessful revolts against Rome, the first of which ended with the destruction of the temple. In the aftermath of 70, some Jewish Hellenistic writers (known to history as “the evangelists”) explained the temple’s destruction as God’s punishing the priests for failing to follow Jesus. And by the second century, in-fighting between Gentile Christians of various theological persuasions led to the mutual and heated exchange of anti-Jewish insults. (Tertullian to Marcion: #WorsethanJews! Athanasius to Arius: #JustlikeJews! Chalcedonians to Nestorians: #‘Jews’!)

Constantine’s patronage, combined with evangelical Passion narratives, rehabilitated Rome, despite the historical detail of Jesus’s death. Identifying Romanitas with ecclesia (configured variously by ethnic group and locale) led to the criminalization of Jewish practices for Gentile Christians and, eventually, for Jews as well.12 Then came fantasies of Jewish super-agency and malice, especially in times of social trauma. The fall of Christian Jerusalem to Islam, blood libels, the Black Death: Jews, said Christians, were at the bottom of it all. In the modern period, with the disruptions of industrial capitalism, international banking, and radical nineteenth- and twentieth-century politics, anti-Semitism bloomed and continues to bloom, both on the Right and on the Left, both in the West and, within Muslim regimes, in the (Mid-) East. RIGHT NOW, with Covid-19, paranoid anti-Semitism is awash on the Web. That’s a lot of cultural water under the historical bridge—and a lot of Jewish blood poured out on the sand.13

The Shoah (1941–1945) was a high-water mark of vicious anti-Semitism. Energized and enabled by Nazi policy, Christians of all denominations—Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox—with very few, very heroic exceptions, willingly joined in the murders. And simple human greed as much as theologically undergirded anti-Semitism fueled a pan-European feeding frenzy of theft, from high art to village huts. (Post-1945, Jews returning from the camps were slaughtered by neighbors unwilling to give their property back.) This is the huge homicidal convulsion that provides “post-Holocaust Western thinkers” with those “tearful misted-up spectacles” so derided by N. T. Wright, who impatiently urges Pauline scholars to discard them.14 Since such ethical blightedness speaks for itself, I prescind from further comment here.

How does 1517 and following fit in with all this? It identifies an inflection point on the arc of Renaissance Humanism, that cultural matrix for what we as New Testament scholars do now: restoring foundational texts through paleographical heavy lifting; reading in the primary languages; setting the texts within their historical contexts. The “new history” of this period was born along with its new science. Rome was less than exemplary in some of its responses to this moment. (Erasmus. Galileo. Copernicus. Papal Inquisition.) And as if all this weren’t enough, Rome had the Reformers to deal with as well. (Early modern European politics and the birth of the nation state had a little something to do with all this, too.)15

Tried-and-true traditions of intra-Christian insult—Gentile Christian opponents were “just like the Jews,” “leagued with the Jews,” “worse than the Jews,” or just plain “Jews”—were weaponized anew. Rome was more than the enemy of Reform: it was the enemy of Jesus, of Paul, of God himself. Sacramentalism, indulgences, Pharisaism, the “works of the Law” stood on Rome’s side. Grace, faith, the return to restored scriptures liberated from institutional monopoly, stood to the other. Reformers were not generating Protestantism. They were recovering what Jesus, and what Paul, had actually meant.

It was the Protestant insistence that Protestant constructions of Pauline theology were descriptive of the first-century apostle’s first-century thoughts that has had the most lasting effect on the work that we as scholars of religion now do. This too, I must note, is historically very interesting. Intervening centuries and cultures notwithstanding, the ancient Mediterranean correspondence between gods and humans has held. Syngeneia, now constituted theologically, continued (and continues) to coordinate heaven and earth. If the scholar were Protestant, then God, Christ, and Paul—each “unmarked” by Jewish (read: Catholic!) traditions—were Protestant as well.16

Late to the game (1943, Divino Afflante Spiritu), Rome formally joined in the project to quest for these historical figures. University faculties of theology—some denominational, some not—and departments of religion began their work. Today, in our newer context, scholars Catholic and Jewish also work within this Reformation-born intellectual tradition. In consequence, they, too, more variously, continue the production of Protestant Jesuses (anti-Pharisee, anti-purity, anti-priesthood, anti-temple), and of post-Torah-observant, Protestant Pauls. (#FoodfightinAntioch!) Academic “New Testament” studies remains a culturally Protestant discipline. It still mobilizes the past to configure modern confessional identities.17

There is no such thing, of course, as an “unmarked” humanity. People emerge from other people. They form groups, beginning with the family. They have histories. Ethnic constructs, modern no less than ancient, knit together ideas of biological kinship, place, foodways, language; constructs committed to concepts of ethnically specific, intrinsic patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior. Though notional, these ideas “explain” things Out There. (And that is one of the reasons why ethnic humor works. Mel Brooks’s Moses cursing in Yiddish still makes me laugh.)

Is modern theology qua ethical discipline capable of transitioning to becoming an ethnical discipline?18 To disavow the mirage of “unmarked” humanity? To imagine “ethnicities” as “a site for divine activity,” as Eric Barreto asks? Ecclesiastical institutions, no less than their members, have long histories, power structures, and deep investments in particular constructions of identity. A new post-Reformation theological task will require creativity and courage—and a certain salubrious stubbornness as well.

However notional ethnicity is, the passage of time is not. Non vacant tempora: “time takes not holiday.” (Augustine again, Conf. 4.8, 13.) In this way and for this reason, humans are truly “marked.” They are truly marked historically. The first century really was different from the twenty-first century. Jesus and Paul—themselves, though contemporary, two very different sorts of Jews—lived in a world configured very differently from our own. In my last two books, Paul, the Pagans’ Apostle and its smaller sequel, When Christians Were Jews (Yale University Press, 2018), I tried to put them both in their place. Historically.

But is a historically constituted Jesus or Paul—or Moses or David or Isaiah or Rabbi Akiva; or Mohammed, for that matter—theologically usable for current communities? I do not know. That is up to Christian, Jewish, and Muslim theologians. I speak here, again, only as a historian—and as only a historian. And it is as such that I state my wish, namely, that New Testament scholars stop wrapping their theological work in the rhetoric of historical investigation. I am interested in my colleagues as their colleague, but as a historian I am not interested in my colleagues’ twenty-first-century religious identities. Ancient people are my intellectual interest. That is why I do ancient history. Reading for the nth time that Jesus or Paul promoted “justification by faith” or believed in “grace, not the works of the law” just does not move that project along very far.

One last thought, on God. For Western monotheisms, God is, himself, historically conditioned.19 He speaks, muffled and imperfectly, through maddeningly interpretable, inherited texts. Like us—the only beings that he, for reasons that pass my understanding, made in his image—God too stands within a web of words. The religious (thus ethical) inferences that we draw from this condition of contingency are our responsibility, not his.

First, do no harm. All the rest is commentary.