Judaizing the Nations: The Ritual Demands of Paul's Gospel

Abstract

Much current NT scholarship holds that Paul conducted a ‘Law-free’ mission to Gentiles. In this view, Paul fundamentally repudiated the ethnic boundaries created and maintained by Jewish practices. The present essay argues the contrary: Paul's principled resistance to circumcising Gentiles precisely preserves these distinctions ‘according to the flesh’, which were native to Jewish restoration eschatology even in its Pauline iterations. Paul required his pagans not to worship their native gods—a ritual and a Judaizing demand. Jerusalem's temple, traditionally conceived, gave Paul his chief terms for conceptualizing the Gentiles' inclusion in Israel's redemption. Paul's was not a ‘Law-free’ mission.

At some point between the years 410 and 415, Paulinus of Nola wrote a long letter to his friend and fellow bishop, Augustine of Hippo. Addressing Augustine as ‘the blessed teacher of Israel’, Paulinus asked about the interpretation of a variety of verses from both testaments (ep. 121.1, 2). Especially confounding, Paulinus wrote, were Paul's statements about the Jews in Romans 11. ‘As regards the Gospel’, Paul had said about his kinsmen, ‘they are enemies, because of you [Gentiles]; but as regards election, they are beloved, because of the forefathers’ (Rom 11.28).

What good does being ‘beloved of God’ do for the Jews, Paulinus now asked, if they are damned outright for being the enemies of Christ? Behind this, he continued, stood a more fundamental question: Why had God configured salvation as a zero-sum competition between Gentiles and Jews in the first place? Does not Paul's statement imply that the Gentiles could not have believed unless the Jews, first, had not believed? ‘How was God…incapable of acquiring both peoples, rather than having only one or the other?’ Paulinus asks. ‘If the Jews are beloved of God, how will they perish? And if they do not believe in Christ, how will they not perish?’ (ep. 121.2, 11).¹

Augustine, of course, is one of the West's most influential interpreters of Paul. He is also the author of several strong misreadings of the Apostle, and especially of the letter to the Romans. The doctrine of predestination as the plumb line for understanding Romans 9–11; the ‘all Israel’ of Rom 11.26 as an exclusively Christian eschatological society composed of both Gentiles and Jews; the doctrine of Original Sin as framed by Rom 5.12; the redemption of Jew and of Gentile as equally relying on ‘justification by faith’—these teachings all appear in Augustine's reading of Romans. They had evolved in response to the challenge of Manichaean Christianity, and to the formative influence of late Roman Platonism. For this reason, Augustine's Paul more readily fits the fourth–fifth-century Latin West than he does the mid-first-century Hellenistic Diaspora.² These teachings contoured Augustine's answer to Paulinus's questions; to varying degrees, they contour still—I think to our detriment—the interpretive work of modern NT scholars in search of the Paul of history.

But some of the less familiar elements of Augustine's Paul derived from a presupposition about gods and humans that spanned their two distinct historical moments. This is the idea, and the social reality, that ethnic distinctiveness and religious distinctiveness are simple synonyms, and native to all ancient peoples. In other words—and in common with many NT scholars—both Paul and Augustine held that mos maiorum or religiones patriae or παράδοσις πατρικῶν functioned both to prescribe appropriate cult and to serve as ethnic boundary markers.³ Unlike most modern NT scholars, however, Augustine held that this function of marking ethnic boundaries continued to define Israel secundum carnem in the first generation of the church, and rightly so. I think that Paul would agree. This principle also sustained Augustine's contention that the Temple in Jerusalem always stood at the heart of Paul's religious universe. I think that Paul would agree. And it supported Augustine's conviction that, in the first generation of what would eventually become the church, Jewish Christians, Paul emphatically included, continued to live according to their ancestral practices, while the apostles encouraged gentile Christians, without converting to Judaism, to Judaize. I think that Paul would agree.⁴

From this historical fact—that in Mediterranean antiquity, cult defined ethnicity and ethnicity defined cult—Augustine distilled theology: a Jewish Jesus, a Jewish Paul, and a Judaized first generation of Gentiles served his defense of the doctrines of Creation and of Incarnation. I want to deploy this fact historically, to use it as a cardinal point in my reconstruction of Paul and of his mid-first-century context. For historical reasons, I will end up asserting many of the same positions that Augustine, for theological reasons, also asserted. Unlike Augustine, I will conclude my reconstruction of Paul's mission and message by urging that a whole host of theologically imbued concepts and vocabulary—and especially the phrase ‘Law-free mission’⁵—be dropped by scholars who quest for the historical Paul.

1.

Gods and humans were the two key populations of ancient society, which could thrive only if gods were happy. Cult was the index of human loyalty, affection and respect. Cult made gods happy, and happy gods made for happy humans. The converse was also true: deprived of cult, gods grew angry. When gods were angry, people paid.⁶

Cult focused on actions, on showing and (no less important) on being seen to show respect for the gods. Peoples inherited their protocols for showing respect, and these protocols defined what we call ‘religion’. At the same time, these protocols also designated ethnicity. ‘Different nations have different customs’, remarked Athenagoras, ‘and no one is hindered by law or by fear of punishment from following his ancestral customs, no matter how ridiculous these may be’ (Legatio 1). True of pagans, true of Jews, as Celsus observed: Jews ‘observe a worship which may be very peculiar, but it is at least traditional. In this respect they behave like the rest of mankind, because each nation follows its particular customs’ (c. Celsum 5.25).

Note: ancient peoples, Jews included, did not ‘believe’ or ‘believe in’ their ancestral customs. They enacted them; they preserved them; they respected them; they trusted or trusted in them.⁷ This same practical stance describes, too, how ancient peoples—again, Jews included—coped with the gods of others. That the gods of others existed was another commonsense fact, demonstrated by the existence of that god's people. The Bible, prime textual residence of Israel's god, acknowledged the existence of these other gods, who were the deities of the nations. ‘All the peoples walk, each in the name of its god’, says the prophet Micah, ‘but we will walk in the name of the Lord our god forever and ever’ (Mic 4.5, and frequently elsewhere, especially in Psalms). ‘Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods?’ Moses asked (Exod 15.11). The lxx subordinated these other gods to Israel's god by conjuring the ranked divinities of the Hellenistic universe: ‘The gods of the nations are δαίμονες’ sang the Psalmist in Greek (95.5 lxx): a δαίμων was specifically a lower, cosmic god.⁸ More concretely, and more generally, diplomatic relations between peoples in the Hellenistic and Roman periods were negotiated by generating connections of kinship, discovering an ancient family bond that had been effected by their respective gods. Since the Jewish god did not leave behind offspring as the Greek gods did, his people built kinship lines and, thus, diplomatic relations by mobilizing the progeny of the patriarchs: In this way, for example, Jews and Spartans, through a distant union between a granddaughter of Abraham's with Heracles, became συγγενεῖς.⁹

Israel's god was famously demanding of his people, insisting that he be the sole recipient of their worship. And Jews generally do seem to have drawn the line at λατρεία, excusing themselves (to the irritation of sensitive pagans) from performing public cult acts to foreign gods. But Jews of course knew that these gods existed, and that a sensible show of courtesy went far toward placating both the deity and his or her people. Moses, in Greek, had seemed to counsel handling such relations gently when he advised ‘Do not revile τοὺς θεούς the gods’ (Exod 22.28 lxx). Commenting on this verse, Philo remarked that such sensitivity ensured peace between Israel and the nations, ‘for reviling each other's gods always causes war’ (Questions and Answers on Exodus 2.5; he goes on to note that Jews should also respect pagan rulers ‘who are of the same seed as the gods’, 2.6).¹⁰ Despite pagan complaints about Jewish separateness and ‘interfaith’ insensitivity, a wealth of epigraphical evidence supports what we also know from Hellenistic Jewish texts: many Jews acknowledged the existence of foreign gods, treated them with civility (if not with public cult), and in general fitted themselves alongside their pagan contemporaries in the god-congested universe of antiquity.¹¹

Pagans returned the favor, acknowledging and showing respect for the god of the Jews. In the Temple before the year 66 ce, they came as tourists to Jerusalem. How many? We have no way of knowing, but the lay-out of Herod's temple suggests that the numbers were high. Herod expanded the area around the old sanctuary to some thirty-five acres, enclosing it with a magnificent wall running nine-tenths of a mile along its perimeter.¹² Concentric courtyards of graduated size ringed the Temple's interior sacred space. The innermost court, closest to the sanctuary, was reserved for the priests; the next two, circumscribing the area, belonged respectively to Jewish men and to Jewish women. But the largest court of all, the one that surrounded these others, was the vast and beautiful Court of the Nations—an important architectural feature, I will argue shortly, for understanding a key element of Paul's gospel.

The Greek diaspora lacked Jewish temples, but it supported many Jewish assemblies. Whether designated as a συναγωγή, a προσευχή, a collegium, a πολίτευμα or a σύνοδος, such foundations have been recovered from Italy to Syria, from the Black Sea to North Africa. Wherever there were Jews, it seems, there were synagogues.¹³

No less often, interestingly, where there were synagogues, there also seem to have been pagans. Some of these pagans were patrons of synagogues and major donors to Jewish activities: spelled out in mosaics and inscribed on donor plaques, their generosity was publicly proclaimed by Jews honoring their benefactions. Interested pagans built synagogue structures or lavishly decorated their interiors; they sponsored Jewish philanthropic initiatives; they participated in Jewish prayer and study, and took part in Jewish fasts or feasts.¹⁴

Scholars, repeating the language of our ancient evidence, refer to such pagans as ‘god-fearers’ or as ‘Judaizers’. The terms are elastic, which fits the imprecision of our data. Occasional pagan involvement stands at one end of a behavioral spectrum; the explicit and voluntary assumption of some Jewish customs stands at the other. The point, for our present purposes, is that all of these pagan sympathizers, to whatever degree they chose to participate in Jewish communal life, did so as pagans. They also continued in their native cults. No formal constraints from the Jewish side seem to have abridged what was an ad hoc, improvised and voluntary arrangement. And such pagan involvement in synagogue life continued well on into the Christian period: indeed, the third-century (or, perhaps, fifth-century) Christian writer Commodian complained that Jews welcomed the pagan medius Iudaeus into the synagogue without making the least effort to proselytize him (Instructiones 1. 37.1–10).¹⁵

Refusal to worship the gods was the public behavior that pagan critics universally associated with Jews. It offended them. Nonetheless, majority culture by and large tolerated this singular aspect of Jewish behavior precisely because it was a demand of the Jewish god, and was therefore ancient and ancestral. This same ancient premium on ethnic loyalty which excused Jewish non-participation in public cult, however, also fed a special category of pagan anti-Jewish hostility. Eyeing god-fearers with mockery and distrust, fellow pagans objected to their assumption of some Jewish practices, wary of where it might lead. Again, Celsus: ‘If the Jews maintained their own law, we should not find fault with them, but rather with those who have abandoned their own traditions and professed those of the Jews’ (c. Celsum 5.41). The father starts keeping the Sabbath and avoiding pork, grumbled Juvenal, and the next thing to happen is that the sons become circumcised, keep Moses' laws and despise the laws of Rome (Satires 14.96–106).

Judaizing was a slippery slope. It could lead to Judaism. Pagans occasionally chose to affiliate themselves so extremely with Jewish ancestral practices that they became ex-pagans. In a culture where what we call ‘religion’ was seen as an innate, not a detachable, aspect of identity, this phenomenon scarcely made sense: it was tantamount to changing one's ethnicity. What we term ‘conversion’ was understood by ancient contemporaries as forging a political alliance, entering the Jewish πολιτεία and, as Celsus complains, assuming foreign laws and traditions.¹⁶ (For that reason, it struck some observers as a species of treason.¹⁷) Worse than turning their backs on their human kin, however, was the fact that such people also turned their backs to the gods who were theirs by birth and blood. They thereby disrupted the fundamental relationship between gods and their humans. Such behavior not only insulted the pagan community: It endangered the pagan community, because it insulted that community's gods, and angry gods made for sorry humans. Remarkably, however, pagan culture by and large accommodated contemporaries who underwent such a drastic change of status, and ‘converts’—προσήλυτοι—made up some of the diaspora synagogue's population as well.¹⁸ The greater number of non-natives in Jewish assemblies, however, would probably have been god-fearers. And as long as these god-fearers continued to honor their own ancestral customs and their own gods, the larger pagan urban community tolerated their honoring the Judean god, too.

With this as its context, how do we understand Paul's gospel?

2.

Modern scholars habitually describe Paul as a ‘monotheist’, and they are right to. But Paul is an ancient monotheist. This means that, while Paul's allegiance is firmly fastened on the god of Israel as the highest and most powerful god, Paul is perfectly aware of other gods as well. Unlike Philo, Paul is not courteous toward or about these gods: in fact he insults them, and he wants his pagans to have nothing to do with them. These gods represent Paul's cosmic opposition, and he looks forward to the day of their defeat.¹⁹

Meanwhile, he complains about their effects. The θεὸς τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου had blinded the minds of unbelievers (2 Cor 4.4; Pagans? Jews? cf. 2 Cor 3). The ἄρχοντες τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου, if by this phrase Paul intends astral powers, have crucified the son of Paul's god (1 Cor 2.8). The divinities formerly worshiped by his congregations in Galatia, he says, are not ‘gods by nature’ but mere cosmic lightweights, στοιχεῖα unworthy of fear or worship (Gal 4.8–9: note that Paul demeans their status, but does not deny their existence). Such gods, in fact, are mere δαίμονες, subordinate deities, ‘demons’ (1 Cor 10.20–21). ‘Indeed, there are many θεοί and many lords’, he tells his pagans in Corinth (1 Cor 8.5–6); but soon, these lower powers, currently worshiped through images, will themselves acknowledge the god of Israel when Christ defeats them and establishes the kingdom of his father (1 Cor 15.24–27). In the End, these beings, wherever they are—above the earth or upon the earth or below the earth—will also bend their knees to Jesus (Phil 2.10).²⁰

Paul's confidence that these gods will soon be defeated, and his efforts meanwhile to turn his pagans from them, are both aspects of his apocalyptic convictions. These were expressed in the accents peculiar to the early Jesus movement, which was itself apocalyptic. That is, the convictions and commitments of its disciples—the very way that they defined the mission and message of Jesus, made sense of his resurrection appearances and articulated beliefs about his second coming—all drew upon larger traditions of Jewish apocalyptic eschatology.²¹ Some of those traditions addressed directly the fate of non-Jews once Israel's redemption dawned. These traditions were mixed: some negative, some positive, both sometimes appearing in the same text. But the tradition that mattered to the new movement was the one that foretold the nations' inclusion, together with a reassembled Israel, once God's kingdom dawned.²²

This inclusive eschatological Jewish tradition about receiving pagans into the Kingdom might seem little different from the inclusive non-eschatological Jewish practice of receiving pagans into diaspora synagogues. But there was a crucial difference, one that throws the diaspora Jesus movement into sharper relief. The synagogue's προσήλυτοι were no longer pagans: they were Jews of a special kind. The synagogue's god-fearers or Judaizers, however, were ‘active’ pagans. Barring what we call conversion to Judaism, all sympathetic outsiders were pagans. They worshiped the gods native to them, however many other gods (including Israel's god) they might add on. But the Kingdom's pagans were a special and a purelytheoretical category: they were ex-pagan pagans or (to use the wiggle-room made available by our two English words for the single Greek ἔθνη), they were ex-pagan Gentiles.²³ When the lord of the universe reveals himself in glory, say these Jewish apocalyptic texts, the nations will destroy their idols, repudiate their gods and worship Israel's god together with Israel.

The anticipated destruction of their idols did not imply that, at the End, these pagans converted to Judaism. Conversion entailed the full assumption of Jewish ancestral practices and especially, for men, circumcision: apocalyptic texts fall short of claiming that. In the event, the nations do not convert; but they do ‘turn’—στρέφω with an assortment of prefixes in the Greek texts. When God redeems Israel, the nations will turn from the lesser gods whose images they worship and turn to the god of Israel. ‘Turn to me!’ cries God to the nations (Isa 45.22 lxx: ἐπιστράφητε). ‘All the nations will turn in fear to the Lord God…and bury their idols’ (Tob 14.6; ἐπιστρέψουσιν).

But this ‘turning’ to Israel's god is not the same as converting to Judaism, as Paul himself insists. His pagans are not to ‘become’ Jews. But they are to live as if they were eschatological pagans—which, by his lights, they are. During the brief wrinkle in time between the resurrection and the Parousia, Paul's pagans are to worship only Paul's god, the god of Israel, empowered to do so by that god's risen son. ‘You turned to God from idols, to worship the true and living god’, Paul tells his Gentiles in Thessalonika, ‘and to wait for his son from heaven’ (1 Thess 1.9 ἐπιστρέψατε).²⁴ By being ‘in Christ’, these pagans are spared two kinds of divine wrath: that of their own gods, infuriated by the lack of cult; and that of the god of Israel, which ‘is coming’ (v. 10; cf. Gal 4.8–9).

Note: both in the older Jewish apocalyptic traditions and in their newer Christian refraction, the nations join with Israel, but they do not join Israel. To phrase this point in Christian theological vocabulary, you do not need to be Jewish to be saved. At the End, the human population of God's kingdom reflects quotidian demography: Israel and the nations together worship Israel's god.²⁵

Paul also invokes the very Roman idea of adoption to express this distinct-but-together relationship of Israel and his Christian pagans. Roman adoption was both a legal and a religious act. Entering a new family entailed taking on obligations to new ancestors and new gods: adoption was superintended by a pontifex. ²⁶ In this regard, adoption in Roman culture is much like ‘conversion’ was in Judaism: both represent the legal creation of kinship bonds and an adjusted pantheon. Paul, however, does not think that Christian pagans should convert to Judaism, and so he deploys this image carefully. Israel, adopted already as God's son, descends from ‘the fathers’—Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—according to the flesh; to them God has made many promises (ἐπαγγελίαι, Rom 9.4; cf. 15.8 ἐπαγγελίαι τῶν πατέρων). Pagans-in-Christ are also from Abraham's lineage, since Abraham was the father of many nations (Gen 17.4; Rom 4.17); but they descend from Abraham alone, not also from Isaac and Jacob.²⁷ Because of the Spirit, however, these pagans too are now sons, heirs to the ‘promise’ to Abraham; like Israel, they too can now call God ‘Abba. Father’ (Gen 12.3; Rom 8.15; also Gal 4.6, where the spirit of Jesus effects the adoption).²⁸

But this new kinship is not tantamount to ‘conversion’, because these Gentiles are adopted not into Israel's family, but into God's. God, not Abraham, is their ‘Abba’, made such not κατὰ σάρκα but κατὰ πνεῦμα. Put differently: redeemed Israel and the pagans-in-Christ together share the same heavenly father κατὰ πνεῦμα, but κατὰ σάρκα they remain distinct.²⁹

3.

Paul's pagans received the divine spirit through baptism, specifically baptism into Jesus' death. The spirit also ‘sanctified’ these pagans. These ideas correlate to others: ideas about sacrifice, about purity and about holiness. To understand them, we have to look to their source: the rules of Leviticus, and the operation of the Temple.

All purity rules in antiquity, pagan and Jewish, describe ritual protocols which enabled the worshiper to approach and to interact with divinity.³⁰ The zone of this interaction was often around altars, and thus often had to do with sacrifices. Specifically biblical tradition governed the approach to divinity by two binary distinctions. One was the distinction between pure/impure or clean/unclean (טהר/טמא in Hebrew; καθαρός/ἀκάθαρτος in Greek). The other was the distinction between holy/profane or separated/common (קדשׁ/חל in Hebrew, ἅγιος/κοινός in Greek).³¹

The pure/impure distinction refers first of all to levitical or ritual impurity, a highly contagious condition arising from certain natural bodily processes, or from contact with or even proximity to certain polluting substances or objects. Such a state was virtually unavoidable, all but universal and, finally, temporary. It implied no moral condition: the impure person was not eo ipso a sinful person. The remedy for this sort of impurity is purification.³²

Another type of impurity resulted from certain sexual and/or cultic sins.³³ To distinguish it from the first kind, scholars have designated this sort of defilement as ‘moral’ or ‘figurative’ or ‘metaphorical’ or ‘spiritual’ impurity.³⁴ It did not regulate access to the Temple. It did articulate moral status. Such defilement was not contagious, it was volitional, and it was avoidable.³⁵ The sinner defiled not only him or herself, but also the sanctuary and the land (Lev 18.25; 20.3). The remedy for the impurity of sin is cessation of the sinful activity, repentance and a special day of purgation with its own special sacrifices, Yom Kippur (Lev 16).

A second set of biblical categories, holy/profane or separated/common (קדשׁ/חל; Lev 10.10), also governed proximity to the sanctuary. Something ‘holy’ could be rendered ‘common’ or ‘profane’ (pro- before, outside; fanes altar). Iron tools cutting the stone of the altar, for example, would render the altar unfit (Exod 20.22). And the ordinary could be made holy, meaning ‘separated out’ from the common and dedicated to God. When choosing a perfect animal for sacrifice, for example, the worshiper would pronounce the offering קדשׁ, thus קרבן (cf. Mark 7.11). Similarly, a Jewish groom pronounces his wife קדשׁ לי, ‘sanctified to me’, set apart from all others for himself.³⁶

The purity legislation of Torah was binding only on Jews. How does it help us to understand Jewish views of Gentiles in the Roman period? Ritual impurity seems an irrelevant category. Israel, not the nations, is the focus of this purity legislation, both in the Bible and in later rabbinic opinion.³⁷ Moral impurity presents a more complex problem. Again, the biblical legislation is directed specifically to Israel, but the warnings refer to ‘the nations’ having committed similar sins. ‘Do not defile yourself with any of these things [incest, adultery, ritual infanticide, homosexual intercourse] for by all these things the nations that I cast out before you defiled themselves, and the land became defiled…and the land vomited them out’ (Lev 18.24). The natives of Canaan, God seems to be saying here, had defiled themselves and the Land with this behavior. The same behaviors, imputed to pagans, routinely show up in the vice lists of Hellenistic Jewish writings, among which, emphatically, are Paul's letters.³⁸ Pagans, in this view, would be not intrinsically impure, but functionally impure, made such by their enduring attachment to idols (not to mention their habitual indulgence in the various forms of πορνεία that invariably accompany idolatry in Jewish anti-pagan rhetoric, e.g., Rom 1.18–32).

But moral defilement, even that contracted through the worship of idols, is not contagious, and the lay-out of Herod's temple underscores this fact: Jews were able to walk through the Court of the Nations on their way to their own areas without fear of defilement. (The pagan presence in the synagogue would be even less problematic, since synagogues were not sites of sacrifice, thus not regulated by purity concerns.) However, ‘though not inherently impure, Gentiles are inherently profane’³⁹—that is, common, not separated out, when compared with Israel, the ‘holy’ nation set apart from the other nations by God for himself. Even a (theoretical) pagan who had not defiled himself with idols would still be κοινός, thus not suitable to be brought close to the altar of Israel's god.

Paul's letters are shot through with the language of sanctuary, sacrifice, purity and holiness. Alas, much of it is confusing. His efforts to describe Christ as a sort of sacrifice defy clarity. Paul's reference to Christ as a paschal lamb in 1 Cor 5.7 is less Christological than hortatory: in this passage, he urges his pagans to cleanse themselves of the leaven of pride in view of the fact that the (metaphorical) holiday of Passover is already underway. The paschal image, in other words, refers to Jewish time-keeping, not to a sacrificial death on the part of Christ. 2 Corinthians 5.21 and Rom 8.3, Christ as חטאת/ἁμαρτία or as περὶ ἁμαρτίας, also seem confusing, especially if scholars have rightly understood the Temple's own dynamics of purity: sin sacrifices cleanse the sancta, not the sinner.⁴⁰ The ἱλαστήριον of Rom 3.25, finally, is a sacrifice of expiation; but again, the image is extremely confusing (and, I think, confused). In Leviticus, the sacrifice is brought by penitent humans; in Romans, it is God who brings Jesus. The closest analogy to a sacrifice in Paul's time that would bear away the sinner's sin would be the scapegoat of Yom Kippur. But Paul nowhere uses this image and, besides—a nod to the eucharistic traditions—you do not eat scapegoats.⁴¹

By comparison, Paul's language of ἁγιασμός with respect to his pagans-in-Christ, and his representations of his own work as priestly service, are surprisingly clear, as is his reference to the rituals of Jerusalem's temple that serve as his template. His Thessalonian pagans, for example, having turned from their idols to the living and true god, have attained ἁγιασμός: the rsv translates ‘sanctification’, but we should equally understand ‘separation’ or ‘dedication’. These Christian pagans, through their cleaned up ritual and sexual behavior, are separated from or distinguished from the other pagans, the ones who do not know God (1 Thess 4.4–5). Those who do know God have been called ‘not to impurity’—the moral consequence of idolatry and porneia—but ‘in holiness’ (v. 7). Elsewhere, Paul simply refers to these ex-pagan pagans as ‘holy ones’ (ἅγιοι, rsv ‘saints’ Rom 1.7; 1 Cor 1.2). They have been made holy—or separated, or dedicated to God—by God, through the spirit, in Christ (1 Cor 1.2).

We should hear Paul's language of purity, separation and sanctification in terms of the biblically based binary pairs טהר/טמא and קדשׁ/חל that govern access to the sanctuary in Jerusalem. Thanks to God's spirit (or to Jesus' spirit), these pagans have been separated out from their fellows, adopted into God's family, cleansed to participate in the eucharistic sacrifice of Christ—1 Corinthians 10 elaborates this whole set of ideas.⁴² When speaking of God's spirit, Paul likens his pagans to the Jerusalem temple: ‘Don't you know that you are God's temple, for God's spirit dwells in you?… For God's temple is ἅγιος, as you are’ (1 Cor 3.16). ‘Your body is a temple of the holy spirit’ (6.19). ‘We are the temple of the living god’ (2 Cor 6.16).

NT scholars will sometimes point to these verses by way of arguing that, for Paul, Jerusalem's temple has been superseded by this new, spiritual ‘temple’ of the Christian community. I argue the opposite: Paul praises the new community by likening it to something that he values supremely. If he valued the temple less, he would not use it as his touchstone.⁴³ This is not an either/or situation: for Paul, God's spirit dwells both in Jerusalem's temple and in the ‘new temple’ of the believer and of the community (Rom 9.4; cf. Matt 23.21).

The second half of Romans, I think, particularly works against an either/or view of God's in-dwelling spirit. The sanctity, dignity and probity of the Temple cult provides the inclusio that shapes the second half of the letter, from 9.4 to 15.16–27, where Paul likens his own mission to the Temple service. The rsv's famously bloodless translation of Paul's Greek terms masks Paul's Temple imagery in 9.4, where δόξα/כבד speaks precisely of God's glorious presence in Jerusalem's sanctuary, and λατρεία/עבדה refers to the cult of offerings enacted there. Chapters 9 through 15 move from Jerusalem to Jerusalem, where Paul anticipates performing his own priestly work, ‘sacrificing’ God's good news, presenting ‘the offering of [his] pagans’, now acceptable because they have been set apart/made holy by the holy spirit.⁴⁴ His pagans, through Christ, have moved from wrong ritual—the worship of idols—to right ritual, the worship of the true god. They are thus fit for intimate contact with the divine.⁴⁵

4.

What conclusions can we draw from this very quick survey of Paul's mission and message?

1. First, we should not be tricked by the pagan complaints about Jewish ἀμιξία (separateness) or μισόξενος βίος (‘foreigner-hating lifestyle’). Learned Graeco-Roman ethnic stereotyping routinely leveled such accusations of anti-social behavior at foreigners.⁴⁶ The specifically anti-Jewish material looms large in the extant evidence because the later church incorporated and amplified those traditions so much; and often, NT scholars repeat these accusations of clannishness and separateness to explain tensions between Christian and non-Christian Jews (with Paul serving on both sides of the fence). But as the rich and variegated literary remains of Hellenistic Jewish culture and as the plenitude of inscriptions attest, Jews vigorously participated in majority culture socially, politically and intellectually: in many ways, except for their general refusal to participate in public pagan cult, Jews were not all that separate.⁴⁷ A high degree of social integration coexisted with religious—better, ethnic—distinctiveness.

2. We often read that, through the gospel, Paul came to see the wrong-headedness of Israel's ‘covenant distinctiveness’. Christian Gentiles and Christian Jews, in this view, together comprise a ‘new Israel’, where no such distinctions obtain. (Gal 3.28 is often pressed into service here.) This vetus Israel/verus Israel contrast is not native to Paul's thinking.⁴⁸ Paul, further, continuously draws distinctions between Israel and the nations (‘the Jew first and also the Greek’).⁴⁹ The divinely granted promises, privileges and prerogatives of Israel, ‘the gifts and the call of God’, abide forever (Rom 11.29). This distinction between Israel and the nations, and these convictions about God's constancy, shape the most programmatic discussion that we have from Paul, namely his letter to the Romans. Like other apocalyptically minded Jews of his era, Paul too held that the Kingdom's demography would reflect then what the world holds now: Jews and Gentiles, Israel and the nations.⁵⁰

The ‘saved Israel’ of Rom 11.26 came to refer exclusively to Christians only in the second century, once later theologians, re-reading the Septuagint and relinquishing Paul's vision of a fast-approaching eschatological resolution, referred the promises of Israel to their own churches.⁵¹ But for Paul, the hardening of Israel, which enables the mission to the Gentiles, is providential and temporary (Rom 11.25–26), while for Augustine, for example, it is punitive and permanent. The bishop accordingly must re-define ‘Israel’: ‘all Israel’ that is saved must become Christian Israel, the ‘Israel’ of the church (e.g. ep. 149.2, 19). But for Paul, ‘Israel’ always means his ‘kinsmen according to the flesh—they are Israel’ (Rom 9.4). The distinction of the covenant, and of the promises to the forefathers, remain. Romans ends with the Gentiles rejoicing ‘with God's people’ (Rom 15.10).

3. The Temple remains absolutely central, driving all of Paul's messy metaphors for Jesus' death as a sacrifice. No less importantly, it also supplies the chief terms by which Paul conceptualizes the incorporation of his pagans-in-Christ into Israel's redemption. The language of ‘sanctification’ means that these pagans have been separated out and, through the spirit, dedicated to God. (That also means that there is nothing intrinsically problematic for Paul about distinctiveness or separateness: that is how election works.) Paul's temple imagery; his way of speaking about offerings; his distinguishing between types of Gentiles as either קדשׁ or חל, ἅγιος or κοινός; his condemnation of pagan cult; his insistence on their worshiping Israel's god alone⁵²—in and through all these ways, Paul demands that his pagans Judaize.

4. Finally, we should see clearly what Paul is asking of his pagans, and what (so far as we know) absolutely all of the apostles in the early years of this messianic movement were demanding of their gentile followers: No λατρεία to native gods.⁵³ This was not an ethical demand so much as a ritual demand. More than this—as Paul surely knew—it was specifically a Judaizing demand.⁵⁴ The Jesus movement, out of apocalyptic conviction, required its Gentiles to enact precisely that behavior that majority culture (and Jews as well) associated universally and exclusively with Jews: to foreswear public sacrifice. Born Jews had been the occasional object of pagan resentment because of this behavior; proselytes that much more so. But when fellow pagans also began to disrespect the gods, this went too far, and the gods' people struck back. It is from this population—the deviant pagans of the Jesus movement—that the martyrs would come.⁵⁵

This insistence that none other than the god of Israel be worshiped ultimately came from the first table of the Law. It was defining; it was non-negotiable; it was uniquely Jewish. For all of the reasons reviewed above, then, but most especially for this one, the last way we should describe Paul's gospel to the Gentiles is to say that it was ‘Law-free’.