Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Aus dem Klappentext

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity

University of California Press

You will surely not find it strange that this subject, so profound and difficult, should bear various interpretations, for it will not impair the face of the argument with which we are here concerned. Either explanation may be adopted.

This book is the record of an encounter with some of the most remarkable texts in the canon of western literature, the letters of Paul. If one measure of the greatness of a work of literature is its ability to support many interpretations, then certainly these texts must rank among the very greatest of literature, for they have spawned and continue to spawn—anew every morning—not only new interpretations of particular passages but entirely new constructions of their complete thought-world. Here, then, you have a talmudist and postmodern Jewish cultural critic reading Paul. I think that my particular perspective as a practicing Jewish, non-Christian, critical but sympathetic reader of Paul conduces me to ways of understanding his work that are necessarily different from the ways of readers of other cultural stances. This text fits into the tradition, then, of what has come to be called cultural readings of the Bible, readings that are openly informed by the cultural knowledge and subject-positions of their producers.

I am going to begin this introduction by asking a question that I fantasize will be asked by many of my readers: What motivated a scholar of Talmud, virtually untrained in New Testament scholarship, to produce an essay about Paul? What is my purpose in writing this book? What, indeed, beyond the sensual pleasure of learning, impelled me to learn Greek (of which I had only one year before this project) in order to read Paul and write about him? There are several answers to these closely related questions.

First of all, I would like to reclaim Pauline studies as an important, even an integral part of the study of Judaism in the Roman period and late antiquity. Paul has left us an extremely precious document for Jewish studies, the spiritual autobiography of a first-century Jew. There is hardly another document, save parts of Josephus and Philo, which even comes close to fitting such a description. Moreover, if we take Paul at his word—and I see no a priori reason not to—he was a member of the Pharisaic wing of first-century Judaism, with which Josephus may have also been connected but with which Philo certainly was not.1 In addition, Paul's activity and its consequences have had an enormous effect on the history of the Jews and Judaism in late antiquity (not to mention afterward). Much of that distinctive religious formation that we call rabbinic Judaism, which is the ancestor of virtually all Judaisms since late antiquity, was formed in the environment of a Pauline Christianity growing steadily in influence through the crucial formative centuries of this Judaism and culminating in the triumph of Christianity in the fourth century. I would like to make this absolutely clear. It is proper to speak of “rabbinic” Judaism only with regard to the second century and onward, because we have no direct evidence for such a movement prior to the Mishna formed in the late second century. The Rabbis see the first-century Pharisees as their spiritual ancestors, and there is no reason to doubt that sensibility, but, on the other hand, neither is there reason to assume that the later rabbinic reports about those Pharisees have not been substantially re-formed in the light of rabbinic Judaism itself. Accordingly, when we speak of rabbinic Judaism, we are speaking of a post-Pauline religious development. This means that Judaism formed itself for good and for ill in the context of Pauline (and other Christian) thought, sometimes undoubtedly reacting simply for the purpose of self-definition but also, more positively, answering in its own distinctive fashion theological and other challenges placed before it by Pauline Christianity.2

Second, I would like to reclaim Paul as an important Jewish thinker. On my reading of the Pauline corpus, Paul lived and died convinced that he was a Jew living out Judaism. He represents, then, one option which Judaism could take in the first century. Paul represents a challenge to Jews in the first century, and I will argue that he presents a challenge to Jews now as well. Assuming, as I do, that Paul was motivated not by an abnormal psychological state but by a set of problems and ideas generated by his cultural, religious situation, I read him as a Jewish cultural critic, and I ask what it was in Jewish culture that led him to produce a discourse of radical reform of that culture. I ask also in what ways his critique is important and valid for Jews today, and indeed in what ways the questions that Paul raises about culture are important and valid for everyone today. Further, I want to inquire into the limitations, inadequacies, contradictions, and disastrous effects of some of the Pauline solutions to those problems. Finally, I wish to interrogate our situation and ask whether we have better solutions to the cultural, social problems raised by the Pauline corpus.

In his very extremity and marginality, Paul is in a sense paradigmatic of “the Jew.” He represents the interface between Jew as a self-identical essence and Jew as a construction constantly being remade. The very tension in his discourse, indeed in his life, between powerful self-identification as a Jew—in Romans 9, he expresses willingness to sacrifice his own salvation for that of “his brothers according to the flesh”—and an equally powerful, or even more powerful, identification of self as everyman is emblematic of Jewish selfhood. Paul represents in his person and thematizes in his discourse, paradoxes not only of Jewish identity, but, as we have come to learn, of all identity as such. When the Galatians wish to take on Jewish cultural practice, Paul cries out to them with real pathos: Remain as I am, for I have become as you are. The paradoxes and oxymorons of that sentence are, I submit, those of identity itself, and exploring the Pauline corpus with this kind of quest in mind will lead us to a deeper and richer appreciation of our own cultural quandaries as male or female, Jew or Greek, and human.

I am indeed wrestling here with Paul—a metaphor that I think he would have appreciated—in two senses: I am wrestling alongside of him with the cultural issues with which he was wrestling, and I am also wrestling against him in protest against some of the answers he came up with. Paul's discourse is supremely pertinent even today, and not only because there are millions for whom his word is Scripture. When Paul says, There is no Jew or Greek, no male and female in Christ, he is raising an issue with which we still struggle. Are the specificities of human identity, the differences, of value, or are they only an obstacle in the striving for justice and liberation? What I want to know is what Paul is saying to me, a male Jew, and how I must respond to it. How must I accept what he says as an ethical challenge and in what ways do I wish to reject that challenge and its implications? Finally, how might Paul's challenge and my response be of interest and importance to other people of difference?

Rather than seeing Paul as a text and my task that of a philologist, I see us engaged across the...