When we try to give a rational account of the origins and spread of Christianity, part of what we need to do is reconstruct the mindset of an audience who would have found Paul’s message attractive, moving, and inspiring. One way of understanding this is by tracing certain specific strands of Jewish religious culture stretching back many centuries, and seeing Paul as a kind of culmination of this history. We are unusually well-informed about this history because the Hebrew Bible (the Christian “Old Testament”) preserves documents from this tradition dating back at least 1,000 years.
From the beginning, this tradition is focused on battles, power struggles, on winning and losing. Winning in battle is not just winning but “vindication.” This is a common feeling still today. People who win out in a court trial feel this as a confirmation of the rightness of their cause. People who lose often feel humiliated, feel shaken in their self-confidence. People who lose in a trial, but remain convinced of their rightness, “cry out for justice,” which will only be satisfied if they “win” at court, because winning vindicates the claim that their cause is right. Thus still today, the word “just” and “justice” has really two meanings: (1) It describes a personal virtue, as when we describe someone as “a just man” known for his fair-mindedness. (2) “Justice” also describes a state of affairs in which people get what they deserve, whether in individual cases or as the state of a “just society.”
Significantly, tzedakah, a key Hebrew term for “rightness” was sometimes used in the oldest Jewish writings, to refer to actual winning in a battle or in a lawsuit, because winning is taken as a sign of superior rightness. To “cry out to God for tzedakah/justice” often means to cry out for victory over the enemies of Israel. During this oldest period, winning is taken to be a sign of God’s approval and confirmation that when Jewish people defeat their enemies it is because they deserve to defeat their enemies.
The authors of these earliest writings definitely feel that “God is on our side.” The earliest biblical writings are extremely ethnocentric. Hebrews deserve to win because they are Hebrews, God’s chosen people. The height of Jewish political power was reached during the reign of king David and his son Solomon. David was “God’s anointed,” God’s “Messiah” the Hebrew word for “anointed” (referring literally to a coronation ceremony anointing a king with oil).
In 586 B.C., however, the Hebrew people suffered a catastrophic defeat at the hands of the Babylonians, who completely destroyed the capital city of Jerusalem with its glorious temple, and carried off its leading families to exile in their own capital city Babylon. This caused severe self-questioning among Hebrew thinkers. In this period, Hebrew prophets, such as Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, brought about a new focus concerning the question of rightness (tzedakah), in effect beginning to separate the concept of rightness from the concept of belonging to God’s chosen people. It is possible to belong to the Hebrew people and not be truly right, therefore not deserving to win out over other peoples. To really be right and deserving of God’s favor and victory, one needs to actually be devoted to rightness and do what is right. The prophets saw the victory of the Babylonians as God’s punishment of the Hebrew people because they had become corrupt, lacking in true rightness.
The prophets extended this criticism to all those cases where a person feels self-confident because of their worldly success and worldly prestige. A person must deserve self-confidence and the respect of others, and true moral rightness is the only thing which makes a person so deserving. Pride and prestige due to actual worldly success without rightness, is false and ungrounded pride and prestige.
The following passage from the book of the prophet Isaiah (ch. 58), extends this point even to external religious observances such as fasting on designated days, which can also be a source of false self-confidence if not accompanied by rightness in the way one treats other people.
Cry out full-throated and unsparingly, lift up your voice like a trumpet blast;
Tell my people their wickedness, and the house of Jacob their sins.
They seek me day after day, and desire to know my ways, as though they were a nation that has done what is right and not abandoned the law of their God;
They ask me to declare what is due them, pleased to gain access to God.
[They say:] Why do we fast, and you do not see it? afflict ourselves, and you take no note of it?”
Lo, on your fast day you carry out your own pursuits, and drive all your laborers.
Yes, your fast ends in quarreling and fighting, striking with wicked claw.
Would that today you might [genuinely] “fast” so as to make your voice heard on high!
Is this the manner of fasting I wish, of keeping a day of penance: That a man bow his head like a reed, and lie in sackcloth and ashes? Do you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?
This, rather, is the “fasting” that I wish: releasing those bound unjustly, untying the thongs of the yoke; Setting free the oppressed, breaking every yoke;
Sharing your bread with the hungry, sheltering the oppressed and the homeless; Clothing the naked when you see them, and not turning your back on your own.
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your wound shall quickly be healed; Your vindication shall go before you, and the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.
Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer, you shall cry for help, and he will say: Here I am! If you remove from your midst oppression, false accusation and malicious speech;
If you bestow your bread on the hungry and satisfy the afflicted; Then light shall rise for you in the darkness, and the gloom shall become for you like midday;
Then the Lord will guide you always and give you plenty even on the parched land. He will renew your strength, and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring whose water never fails.
The ancient ruins [of Jerusalem] shall be rebuilt for your sake, and the foundations from ages past you shall raise up; “Repairer of the breach,” they shall call you, “Restorer of ruined homesteads.”
If you hold back your foot on the Sabbath from following your own pursuits on my holy day; If you call the Sabbath a delight, and the Lord’s holy day honorable; If you honor it by not following your ways, seeking your own interests, or speaking with malice–
Then you shall delight in the Lord, and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth; I will nourish you with the heritage of Jacob, your father, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
This passage illustrates several important aspects of the “prophetic” tradition in Judaism.
First, note that the examples the author gives of “wickedness,” “sins,” “abandoning the law of God” do not consist in failing to conform to minimal rules of moral decency, rules against lying, stealing, and killing given in “the Ten Commandments.” What “the law of God” requires is not passive conformity to rules, but active concern to right the injustices of society, especially injustices consisting of the oppression of the weak by the powerful in society. A person who merely obeys the Ten Commandments but still participates in social oppression can still be said to have “abandoned the law of God.”
Secondly, here we see the contrast between traditional “religious” practices (fasting and doing penance on certain days), and more strictly moral norms related to social justice and injustice.
Thirdly, we can see here the main function of “prophecy” in the Hebrew tradition. What most characterizes the classical Hebrew prophets is passionate moral preaching, using powerful emotional imagery. Prophets have been called “the conscience of Israel.” Promises about the future do play a role, but their function is not really just to display a miraculous ability to foretell the future. They are part of a call to rightness. The present subjection of the Jewish people to oppressive foreign rulers is God’s punishment of His people, which they deserved because of their lack of true rightness. If they have a fundamental change of heart and become devoted to true rightness, the just God will in the future give them what they deserve, and restore the kingdom of David.
Finally, note the emotional intensity in the passage, achieved by the use of very concrete imagery. “Prophecy” in Israel always has a highly emotional character that is absent in Plato’s more abstract discussions, and the dry outlining of principles and practical instructions of the Pali Canon. It could not achieve this emotional intensity without the use of concrete imagery.
The importance of concrete imagery extends also to promises about the future. Note that there is nothing here about spiritual souls of individuals being rewarded in a spiritual heaven. This idea, described at length in Plato’s Phaedo, does not appear until very late in Jewish scriptures. For earlier Jewish tradition, as here, “God’s salvation” is conceived of in very this-worldly terms as a concrete freeing of the Jewish people as a whole from foreign domination and oppression.
The importance of concrete imagery extends also to promises about the future. Note that there is nothing here about spiritual souls of individuals being rewarded in a spiritual heaven. This idea, described at length in Plato’s Phaedo, does not appear until very late in Jewish scriptures. For earlier Jewish tradition, as here, “God’s salvation” is conceived of in very this-worldly terms as a concrete freeing of the Jewish people as a whole from foreign domination and oppression.
Actually, this promised salvation never happened. Israel never regained its former independence and status as a political power in the region. Foreign domination of Israel increased rather than diminished. After Babylonians came Persians, Greeks, and then Romans, who ruled Israel during the time of Jesus. By this time Israel had endured foreign domination for over 500 years. Jewish people living in Israel found Roman rule particularly outrageous, and there were continual revolts during the first half of the first century, some led by “Messiahs” who struggled to overthrow Roman rule. Roman/Jewish conflicts ended disastrously when, in crushing a revolt, Roman armies completely destroyed the city of Jerusalem including its sacred temple.
This situation gave rise to two developments leading directly to the views of Paul.
Actually, this promised salvation never happened. Israel never regained its former independence and status as a political power in the region. Foreign domination of Israel increased rather than diminished. After Babylonians came Persians, Greeks, and then Romans, who ruled Israel during the time of Jesus. By this time Israel had endured foreign domination for over 500 years. Jewish people living in Israel found Roman rule particularly outrageous, and there were continual revolts during the first half of the first century, some led by “Messiahs” who struggled to overthrow Roman rule. Roman/Jewish conflicts ended disastrously when, in crushing a revolt, Roman armies completely destroyed the city of Jerusalem including its sacred temple.
This situation gave rise to two developments leading directly to the views of Paul.
First, in some Jewish circles, resentment of foreign rule and disillusionment with several Jewish-born puppet rulers, deepened into a more fundamental pessimism about the possibility that any human government could ever represent true rightness. Rightness came to be thought of in more and more transcendent, otherworldly terms. The future “Messiah” — whom Isaiah still thinks of as a human king like David restoring political power to Israel — came to be thought of as a strictly otherworldly figure who would descend from God’s world to this world. The Hebrew prophets’ expectations of the restoration of Israel’s power was transformed into expectations of a cosmic catastrophe — an “apocalypse” ending the world as we know it — in which God and God’s Messiah would come to cleanse the whole world of injustice and institute a perfectly just Kingdom of God ruling the world. A Jewish sect responsible for writing the Dead Sea scrolls were among the Jewish groups who shared these apocalyptic expectations.
It is worth noting here how historical and cultural developments affected Jewish ideas about God. In modern times, questions and controversies tend to focus around the issue of God’s existence. But few people in the ancient world disagreed about the existence of God or gods. What they strongly disagreed about was how to picture God, and especially how to picture God’s relation to the world. And the movement toward apocalyptic in Judaism in one important respect marks a radical departure from the thought of the classical Hebrew prophets about God.
Classical prophets like Isaiah assumed that God is in control of all major events in warfare and politics. If Jews lose battles and come under subjection to foreign powers, this could only be because the all-powerful God wanted this to happen, as punishment for lack of rightness in Israel. The apocalyptic movement completely rejected this assumption. If God is truly in control, deciding who has power or lacks power in the present world, there would be no need for a cosmic catastrophe wiping out the world as we know it. The God who is expected to bring about this catastrophe soon is a very different God than the God of Isaiah, bearing a completely different relation to the world. (This also marks a difference between the apocalyptic worldview and the view of many modern Christians, that God is responsible for all events in the world.)
Another development in the Jewish prophetic tradition leads to Paul. What is relevant here is prophetic soul-searching. The Hebrew prophets saw the defeat of Israel by foreign powers as a punishment for its un-rightness, and preached that victory for Israel would only come when it showed itself deserving of victory by its commitment to rightness.
Especially as time went on, it must have been far from clear to many Jews exactly what the “sins” were that caused this 500-year extended punishment from God. But somewhere, some such unrightness must exist. Perhaps at some deep and only half-conscious level even the most sincere and apparently law abiding Jews were only reluctantly pushing themselves to do the right thing, while some other part of them was resisting and rebelling. This focus on the issue of motivation is already evident here and there in the classical prophets, as when Isaiah has God say: “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”
In Paul we see the extreme culmination of this, a quest for rightness that had become completely focused on internal motivation rather than external actions, and a quest that had become focused on a kind of transcendent, perfect rightness in these motivations. To understand Paul’s views on this, we have to realize he had a very polarized view of things. On the one side was an ideal of absolutely perfect rightness, consisting of being completely, wholeheartedly, and enthusiastically seized from within by a passion for rightness. Anything less than this — being internally conflicted, having to battle internal resistance and attempting by pure will power to force oneself reluctantly to do the right thing — this could only count for Paul as “sin.”
Paul became completely focused on this issue of a wholehearted internal passion for rightness. A person who becomes completely and perfectly right and just in the eyes of God by being entirely consumed by such a passion, not only shows herself deserving of some future “salvation.” A person who becomes completely “right” down to the marrow of her bones, completely and perfectly “justified in the eyes of God” is already “saved.” To become perfectly “just” in God’s eyes is not only to merit future vindication and salvation. To become perfectly right in God’s eyes is itself already “salvation.”
This new idea of salvation is really also a completely new idea about what one needs to be saved from. What one is saved from is not the domination by the unjust over the just, but from one’s own “un-justified” and therefore “sinful” state. Tzedekah, rightness, no longer refers at all to being vindicated by some future worldly victory or success, but refers primarily to the present state of a person living in this present world in a state of perfect rightness, “saved” from her previously “un-justified” state. Paul still looks to God for salvation, but the salvation brought about by God does not consist in giving them a future victory/success that they deserve. It consists in an internal transformation, changing them into individuals who are already in the present fully “just” in God’s eyes. It has come to seem obvious to modern Christians that Jesus as Savior and Messiah came to save people from their sinful state. To really understand the first generation of Christians we have to realize what a novel notion this must have been at the time.
Paul thinks that he and the members of his communities have experienced such a justification/salvation, consisting most basically in an experience of being carried away and transformed by an internal force they conceptualized after the manner of their time as a divine “holy spirit.” Spirit is a motivating force within a person, but experienced by that person as something that comes upon her “from beyond” — i.e. beyond the control of her rational decision-making. Paul thinks that the rational-decision-making-self (which he calls the “Fleshly” self) is incapable of the total rightness God demands. He refers to what this self is capable of as “the weakness of Flesh.” Fleshly attempts to keep God’s law are inevitably reluctant and incomplete, accompanied by internal conflict and rebellious feelings, therefore in Paul’s mind still “sinful.” To be spirit-possessed is to be internally carried away by something coming from beyond this Fleshly self, something “in me” but still “not me.” In Paul’s mind, this internally driving spirit is not “God’s Holy Spirit” unless it is the Spirit of the Jewish God who demands perfect rightness. This is why, for him, being Spirit-possessed (described in ch. 8 of Paul’s Letter to the Romans) is the same thing as making one’s whole being “an instrument of Rightness” in the world (described in ch. 6 of this same letter.)
For reasons that need further explanation below, highly emotional and enthusiastic spirit-possession in Pauline communities was a response brought about in people by a certain kind of charismatic preaching, of which Paul seems to have been a master. The main theme of this preaching was the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. These two events are all that mattered to Paul, who scarcely mentions anything else Jesus said or did. For Paul, the crucifixion is symbolic of the condemnation and death of one’s “Fleshly” and inevitably “sinful” self, and the resurrection is symbolic of being justified in God’s eyes and “brought to life” by the Holy Spirit, a gift coming from beyond one’s normal “Fleshly” self, i.e. from God. Becoming right/just is thus itself a gift from God, not a “human” (i.e. Fleshly) achievement. It no longer just makes a person deserving of future “salvation” by God– it is itself already God’s salvation.
People are saved by Jesus as Messiah/Savior in the sense that the preaching about His crucifixion and resurrection brings about Spirit-possession, the all-consuming, God-given, internal passion for rightness that alone renders a person “just-ified” rather than “sinful” in God’s eyes.
Although Paul very consciously thinks of himself as the true inheritor of the Jewish tradition, continuing especially the tradition of the Hebrew prophets, for him “salvation” has become de-politicized, internalized, and individualized, completely separated from the fate of the land of Israel and of the Jewish people as a whole.
This is connected to a fact often overlooked: that the Christianity we know about through the writings of the New Testament is not the Christianity of Jesus’ Aramaic-speaking immediate disciples living in Israel, but of Greek-speaking missionaries and Jesus-followers living outside of Israel, most of whom (like Paul) had never met the person Jesus during his lifetime.
It appears that, even before the advent of Christianity, many non-Jews in the Roman empire were attracted to Judaism and frequented Jewish synagogues to study Jewish scriptures. Many non-Jews, also alienated from a mainstream Greco-Roman culture foisted on them by Roman emperors, must have found the Jewish experience of, and resentment of, Roman rule to be paradigmatic of their own life experience under Roman rule. So while their study of Jewish scripture in synagogues gave them a certain identification with the history of Israel, they were probably more susceptible of Paul’s de-politicized and individualized interpretation of the Jewish tradition. Jesus’ immediate disciples may have had a more specifically “Jewish” interpretation of Jesus and his message, but unfortunately we lack the sources for knowing much about them. It may be significant that Jesus’ immediate disciples come in for considerable criticism in the writings of Paul — showing that he recognized the difference that marked their interpretation (see especially Paul’s criticism in his Letter to the Galatians, of several of Jesus’ disciples who were authorities in the Christian community in Jerusalem at his time). At any rate, theirs was the version of the Christian message that became most popular in the Mediterranean world outside of Israel, especially among those people who identified with the Jewish tradition even though they were not of Jewish ancestry.
Pauline Christianity as a Dialectical Progression within the Jewish Tradition.
Not everyone hearing Paul’s particular message would be moved and transformed by this experience. A central problem for understanding early Christianity is reconstructing the mindset of an audience who would be moved and transformed in this way by this particular message. We must not only suppose an audience in whom Paul’s preaching induced highly emotional Spirit-possession. Why was the Spirit they felt possessed by a Spirit of moral rightness?
Here is a possible reconstruction:
The personal histories of Paul’s audiences were similar to Paul’s own. They had already been synagogue-goers immersed in pre-Christian Jewish scriptures, and attracted to a law-oriented version of Judaism similar to Paul’s Pharisaism.
Their transition from Law-oriented Pharisaic Judaism to Spirit-oriented Christianity was not a complete rejection of Judaism, but a dialectical progression within the Jewish tradition. “Dialectical progression,” is like a small chick breaking out of an egg. The egg allows the chick to grow, but at some point it has to break the egg to continue growing. The older Judaic tradition was like an egg fostering a certain kind of spiritual development. But at some point, for some people, the very structured, “Law” part of the Jewish tradition became an obstacle to further spiritual growth in this same direction, so adherence to this aspect of the tradition had to be symbolically and internally destroyed in order for further growth to take place. (As pointed out below, the Buddhist an-atta doctrine represents a dialectical development begun in earlier Hindu Atman-spirituality.)
This progress can be described in more detail as followed:
Paul was intensely immersed in Jewish scriptures. He felt a strong personal connection to these scriptures because the picture of God he encountered there awakened and caused to develop his own instinctive moral impulses. Scripture passages both awakened and became the externalized objective counterpart to his own subjective desires for perfect rightness.
The “demands of God” he became focused on in reading the scriptures were partly represented by particular rules for behavior, including those developed by the Pharisee party to which he belonged. They were not however limited to these rules, but took on a more generalized form, appealing to and shaped by his own more general intuitive feelings about moral rightness.
Psychological tensions gradually built up in Paul related to the external character of God’s demands evoked in him by the scriptures.
First, he felt a strong pull from the picture of perfect rightness he got from reading them, motivating him to put all his energy into trying to live up to this “transcendent” ideal. But at the same time this caused a certain polarization in his mentality. On the one side there was the immense and overwhelming perfect rightness to which he felt God was calling him. On the other side there were his own conscious efforts to live up to the overwhelming demands for perfect rightness. The more he felt the powerful and inspiring character of God’s demands, the more weak and inadequate his own responses felt to him by contrast. This is what he speaks of as “Flesh,” always “falling short of the Glory of God.” To his polarized mentality, “falling short” did not mean just “imperfect” as it might to us. He could only see it as “sin.” This is what he means by saying things like, “Law brings consciousness of sin,” “the Law killed me,” “Law is Spiritual, but I am Fleshly.”
But secondly, we can think of “Flesh” as a kind of moral identity defined in relation to Law as the central element in the Pharisaic worldview. A moral identity defined in relation to Law is one whose sense of self-esteem is based on the conscious efforts one is able to put in to living up to Law. I can be proud of myself so long as I make the most strenuous efforts I can to live up to the demands of Law. In this worldview, who-God-is is Lawgiver, and who-I-am is a person obedient to this law external to myself. The demands are God’s, my efforts-to-obey are my own to be proud of — Paul retrospectively speaks of them disparagingly as “having something to boast about before God.”
In this context, one can also think of focus on Law as an attempt at self-protection, especially when God’s demands are identified with a particular set of behavioral rules, a marked tendency in Pharisaism. This makes God’s demands fixed, stable, and limited, allowing for the formation of a fixed and stable moral identity, defined in relation to limited and predictable rules governing one’s reaction to life-situations. In this light, Law is not so much a burden as self-protection, allowing a person to get comfortable and feel secure by sustaining a kind of moral identity that is well-known and unchanging, defined in relation to moral demands that are also well-known and unchanging. Paul instead came to identify the demands of God with the unpredictable demands of each unique situation, and also with internal drives beyond a person’s conscious control. From this perspective, Law is a protection against the unpredictable demands of God and against the internal intrusions of Spirit. Basing one’s self-esteem on one’s own “Fleshly” efforts to keep specific laws is a way of limiting the demands of rightness to manageable proportions, reducing them to the realistic but limited capacities of normal human conscious decision making and will power.
All this is an attempt to explain why Paul would be excited by the thought that the crucifixion of Jesus represents God’s angry condemnation and destruction of “Fleshly” being. He was excited by this picture of an angry and condemning God because some part of him recognized that psychologically destroying his own “Fleshly” moral identity (“putting to death Body-works”) was a necessary condition for release of an internal, non-rational and uncontrollable passion for rightness. There was new moral identity ready-to-emerge within him, and the main thing preventing its emergence was attachment to a more limited but safe, fixed and stable moral identity defined in relation to a fixed and stable set of moral requirements.
On this view, Pauline spirituality can partly be seen as a kind of dialectical development within the Jewish tradition, similar to the dialectical development within the Hindu tradition represented by Buddhism.
The early Hindu quest (represented in the Bhagavad Gita) for deeply satisfying internal peace beyond the threat of disturbing change led to meditation practices focused on getting in touch with and identifying with an unchanging otherworldly Atman. Despite the apparent direct rejection of this Atman-quest, in the Buddhist doctrine of an-atta, Buddhism does not represent a rejection of the Hindu quest itself, for a deeply satisfying internal peace beyond the threat of disturbing change. What really happened is that Buddhists realized that identifying one’s true self (Atman) with any particular experiential state would leave one vulnerable to deeply disturbing change, so that abolishing the Atman-ideal was a necessary condition for achieving the original goal of Hinduism. Buddhism represents itself as the completion of the Hindu quest, impossible without a previous, highly developed search for Atman. Abolishing the Atman ideal was just the final necessary step.
In the same way, we can see that the development of Jewish concepts of a very demanding Lawgiver God is a necessary background for the kind of transformation at the heart of Pauline spirituality. This is what is responsible for awakening, building up, and increasing the force of instinctive moral passion in Paul. It made him stretch to the utmost his conscious efforts to live up to the demands of the Jewish Lawgiver God, and to base his sense of self-esteem entirely on these efforts which he now looks back on as “Fleshly.”
This built up pressures and tensions within him, which could only be resolved and released by assenting to the condemnation and “destruction” of the Fleshly self to which he had become very attached. There was in him a ready-to-emerge non-rational, enthusiastic passion for rightness, which could only be released however by “putting to death” his previous in-control, fixed and stable moral identity. What might at first appear to be a complete rejection of the Jewish tradition focused on a morally demanding Lawgiver God, is actually a further development of this same tradition. If Paul had not previously been a passionate Pharisee Law-keeper he would never have been carried away by the Spirit when he heard the message of God’s condemnation of all Fleshly effort in the crucifixion of Jesus.
This can be compared to a progression that often happens as children grow up. A child’s conscience is formed by obedience to rules externally imposed by parents. But some children internalize these rules in more abstract generalized form of a moral sensitivity — a personal “conscience” — which can then possibly find itself at odds with strict observance of the very rules their parents gave them that formed this conscience. Paul himself in his Letter to the Galatians speaks of the Jewish Law as a kind of childhood tutor (a paidagogos, from which our word “pedagogy”), until the message concerning Jesus came to liberate from Jewish Law the passion for rightness that was initially formed by the Jewish Law. Appendix I spells out this in more detail.
A fully rational account of Christian origins must suppose that this religious/psychological development was not only part of Paul’s personal biography. Paul’s Letter to the Romans would not have been widely copied and circulated in early Christian communities, becoming eventually the classic statement of Christian salvation, unless many others could feel Paul’s conversion experience reflected in this letter as a paradigmatic articulation of their own experience.
There is a plausible historical explanation for this, in the character of Jewish synagogue-communities throughout the Roman Empire.
– Scholars point out that Roman census figures suggest roughly 2 million Jews in the land of Israel, but three times that many (six million) existing outside Israel in various other parts of the Roman empire. This population of six million “Jews” cannot be totally accounted for by emigration from Israel, so not everyone listed as “Jewish” in these census could have been Jewish by ancestry. Even before the advent of “Christian” forms of Judaism, there must have been a great number of people from other ethnic groups who were attracted to the Jewish tradition, identified themselves as “Jews” in Roman census, and regularly attended Jewish synagogue gatherings. (“Synagogē” is a Greek word meaning “gathering.” At this time, not all synagogue-gatherings took place in special buildings called “synagogues.”) The New Testament Acts of the Apostles says that when Paul came to preach in a new town, he did so in local synagogue-gatherings — where according to the explanation just given, he found both ethnic Jews and non-Jews.
– The main activity in synagogue communities was study and interpretation of Jewish scriptures, with no central authority able to impose its interpretation on all synagogues. Paul is at great pains to present his version of the Jesus-tradition as the true inheritor of the Jewish tradition, the key to the interpretation of the true meaning of Jewish scriptures. They were presenting one among many kinds of scripture-interpretation people would have heard about in synagogue gatherings, from many other wandering preachers like Paul.
– Paul feels obliged to fiercely combat a kind of Law-oriented Judaism still evidently attractive to many members of the Christian communities he is addressing his letters to. In his Letter to the Galatians he attributes this same emphasis on Jewish Law, which he objects to, to some of Jesus’ immediate disciples such as Peter and James. Paul would not have felt so impelled to combat this emphasis on the Law aspects of Jewish scripture, unless there were many people among his audiences who felt very personally attracted to Law-oriented Judaism.
– Attendance at synagogue gatherings, especially outside of Israel, was voluntary. The idea that Paul’s message appealed to people because it freed them from burdensome Jewish Law is implausible. Anyone, ethnic Jew or non-Jew, who wanted to be free from Jewish Law could simply stop obeying these laws and stop associating with synagogue gatherings. Nothing serious would happen to them. People who attended these gatherings were by and large there because they wanted to be there. People were there because they liked Judaism, attracted by the inspiring ideals of moral rightness embodied in Jewish scriptures, and probably also because of the very fact that Jewish Law gave moral structure lacking in their lives.
My earlier reconstruction of Paul’s spiritual development and conversion depends on the fact that immersion in Jewish scriptures awakened in him a kind of perfectionist passion for rightness that ultimately his strenuous (but “Fleshly”) adherence to Jewish Law could not fulfill. Under these conditions, the final giving up, “putting to death” of his “Fleshly” identity, was a condition for release of a more non-rational passion for rightness that had been awakened by scripture-study. This brief picture of the character of Jewish synagogue communities gives a plausible explanation of how it is that Paul’s personal spiritual development could have been something shared by many other people in the audiences he preached to in synagogue-gatherings.
Appendix
The progress of Paul from Law-oriented to Spirit-oriented Judaism can be described by analogy with moral development in children.
First, consider the development of moral conscience in children in the normal process of socialization. Normally, children form a bond with their parents that makes them also dependent on their parents’ approval. Parents give their approval when the child conforms to certain rules for behavior the parents try to teach her. A child thus first encounters “morality” as a set of rules imposed on her from outside, a restriction and limitation on her freedom, preventing her from just doing whatever she wants to do.
When parents provide structure to their children by teaching them moral rules, they are also providing an external environment conducive to the development of an independent internal moral sense or “conscience” in their children. But imagine here two possibilities.
(1) In some cases the development of a moral conscience might be restricted to just mental imposition of rules on oneself — the developing child simply imposes on herself the same restrictions on her freedom that her parents imposed on her. She still feels rules as something she now has to impose on herself, the rules still being “external” to her personal wishes, restrictions on the free pursuit of whatever she desires. The main business of life consists in pursuing goals that seem most attractive, whatever the reason for their attractiveness. The person does this with a clear conscience so long as she doesn’t break the rules.
(2) But there is another possibility: As she grows up, a child can also (a) develop a more highly developed conscience, an intuitive moral sense of rightness that outstrips the rules she has been taught, and (b) make following this sense of moral rightness more central to her own identity, so that living in accord with this moral sense becomes more central to the main business of life. By “outstripping the rules,” I refer mainly to cases where a person doesn’t only refrain from breaking minimal rules of moral decency, but makes it her main concern to actively try to figure out and do the most right thing in every life-situation — for example not merely refraining from stealing money from other people, but actively trying to figure out and contribute to measures that will help remedy world poverty.
I offer this as a rough and partial analogy to the development Paul represents within the Jewish tradition. He is speaking at synagogue-gatherings mainly devoted to the study of pre-Christian Jewish scriptures. The “Law” they learned about in these scriptures are like the moral rules parents impose on their children, providing an external structure furthering the development of internal moral conscience.
Paul previously belonged to a very devout, law-oriented sect of Judaism called “Pharisees.” After his conversion to the Jesus-oriented interpretation of the Jewish tradition, he came to define the character of this new way by contrast to the Pharisaic way.
In Paul’s picture, Pharisaic Judaism resembles to some degree the kind of moral development represented in the first case above. Paul looks back on the Pharisee period in his own life as a time when he still felt Law as something external to him, a restriction he had to impose on some other part of himself which wanted to be free of such restriction. Paul sees this Pharisaic way both as a very attractive way of being, but also ultimately unsatisfying compared to his post-Pharisee stage.
Paul himself pictures the Jewish Law as a kind of childhood-tutor (paidagogos in Paul’s Greek, from which our word “pedagogy”), preparing people for life in the Spirit as adults. To put this in more general terms, Pauline spirituality assumes normal socialization — following one’s own inner drive does not mean completely undoing normal moral education by learning the moral norms of one’s society (as in Rousseau’s “noble savage”). Nor can following one’s own inner drive mean going against ordinary rules of moral decency. Following one’s own inner drive is only admirable if this inner drive is something that clearly surpasses rule-following in its goodness and moral rightness — if the guidance given by this drive amounts to higher standards of more perfect moral rightness. Paul is not really against rule-following itself. He is against trusting in rule-following, rather than trusting in an inner Spirit, for one’s basic sense of self-esteem (for “justification” in Paul’s language).
