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Paul’s Three Paths to Salvation
“We no longer need to separate Paul from Judaism in order to claim his Christianness,” writes Gabriele Boccaccini, “nor do we need to separate him from the early Jesus movement in order to state his Jewishness.” With this guiding principle Boccaccini unpacks the implications of Paul’s belonging simultaneously to Judaism and Christianity to arrive at the surprising and provocative conclusion that there are in fact three paths to Paul’s Three Paths to Salvation is an attempt to reconcile the many facets of Paul’s complex identity while reclaiming him from accusations of intolerance. Boccaccini’s work in reestablishing Paul as a messenger of God’s mercy to sinners is an important contribution to the ongoing conversation about Paul’s place in the contemporary pluralistic world.
182 pages, Hardcover
Published September 29, 2020
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December 22, 2024
NB: Since writing this review, I've come to the conclusion that Boccaccini is mistaken on two counts: firstly, in the Enochic Book of the Watchers, Shemihazah and his host rebel after, rather than before, the creation and fall of humanity. The story elaborates an obscure anecdote in Genesis 6, in which the "sons of God (or the gods)" lust after the "daughters of men," couple with them, and produce the brutish race of Nephilim, who perish in the flood but whose spirits, according to Second Temple folk belief, are permitted to test humanity. Secondly, Paul, perhaps unlike the Enochic writers, has no concept of "eternal condemnation," if by that one means the Dantean inferno of later Christian imagination. Paul's writings seem to suggest either a purgative universalism or a temporal annihilationism in which those who live in solidarity with the flesh (and thus out of sync with the age to come) will simply perish in what for Paul is a Hellenistic Jewish take on the Stoic conflagration. I nonetheless leave my review intact, because I think it accurately reflects Boccaccini's understanding of things.
Paul of Tarsus lived, wrote, and died as a Jew. Despite centuries of vigorous insistence to the contrary by Christian and Jewish commentators alike, Paul did not abrogate the Torah, did not preach a religion of “faith” over one of “works”, did not believe that traditional Jewish teachings had been “superseded” by the revelation of the Messiah, and never imagined himself to be effecting a clean break between an old religious tradition and a new one. Paul was a Jew of the Second Temple period who spent the whole of his life participating in a broad and diverse Jewish conversation. Initially a Pharisee and a persecutor of the Hellenizing elements of the Jesus movement, Paul’s “conversion” was not an abandonment of his ancestral faith but merely a realignment from one understanding of Jewish eschatology to another: from a proto-rabbinic school of thought to that of a messianic and apocalyptic sect.
It is impossible to make coherent sense of Paul’s soteriology without understanding how both the Pauline Epistles and the Synoptic Gospels were shaped by a tradition of apocalyptic writings, dating from the third to the first century BCE, that would later be consolidated in the apocryphal Book of Enoch. Enoch was an ancestor of Noah, and the writings attributed to him were understood by devotees of the Enochian tradition to carry at least as much authoritative weight as the Torah related by Moses himself. The new tradition told a bleak “counterstory” that enveloped the more stable cosmology of the Pentateuch, bookending the Mosaic Torah with both the concept of a final judgment at the “end of days” and a pessimistic protology regarding the origin of evil.
According to the Book of the Watchers—an early Enochic text—evil did not originate with the transgression of Adam and Eve, but with a primordial rebellion of superhuman angelic powers. These malevolent angels, led by Shemihazah and Azazel, were defeated by Michael and his host; but they were not destroyed. Instead, they were driven from the heavenly sphere and confined below the earth, and from here they exerted a corrupting influence of supernatural power on the human will, consolidating their rulership over the earth as a fiefdom insulated from the light of God and making spiritual captives of the human race. Whereas the Mosaic Torah emphasizes human agency and concerns itself primarily with the necessity of freely adhering to the laws of God, Enochic Jews insisted on the helplessness and futility of the human condition, imagining humanity as the victim and slave of sin rather than its principal perpetrator. The early Enoch tradition did not object to the Mosaic law, nor did it offer an alternative means of righteousness before God; it was merely a “theology of complaint” that emphasized the difficulty of conforming to the Torah under the dominion of wicked spirits that perverted the natural will to righteousness, even while it acknowledged that at the final judgment humans would be held accountable according to their deeds.
The Essenes shared the Enochian conception of the superhuman origin of evil, but rejected the notion that the Jews were as much in thrall to the demonic powers as other peoples. They maintained that the election of Israel was established by God at the creation of the cosmos, and was in no way attenuated by the angelic rebellion. The Jews could preserve their liberty from the powers by maintaining and reinforcing the boundaries between themselves and other people; and this entailed adopting a new communal halakhah, or life-way, that was understood as a supplement to the incomplete Torah of Moses. The Book of Daniel hints at a possible reconciliation between the apocalyptic lamentations of the Enochians and the covenantal militancy of the Essenes, recognizing the influence of superhuman forces and the subjection of Israel to the wrath of God, but also seeming to view the perpetuation of evil as the product of a combination of angelic and human malfeasance while maintaining the salvific quality of the Mosaic law. Paul’s understanding of this apocalyptic conversation on the superhuman power of sin, the relation between Jews and gentiles, and the role of the Mosaic Torah was foundational to his entire system of thought.
Alongside this eschatological conversation was a messianic one. There were two broad messianic models in Second Temple Judaism: the Son of David and the Son of Man. The former was an earthly figure, a human being anointed by God, who was to overthrow the human powers—“the nations” that oppressed Israel because of its sins—restore the Davidic kingdom, and govern the liberated Jews as a wise ruler. The Son of David would redeem Israel collectively, but was not an agent of individual salvation, which could only be ensured by obedience to the law.
The apocalyptic Son of Man described by the Parables of Enoch in the first century BCE, by contrast, had to be a heavenly figure in order to have power over the rebel angels who held humanity in subjection; no mere mortal was capable of subduing these superhuman forces. The Son of Man was understood in the Enochian tradition to be a preexistent celestial being, created at the beginning of time, even before the angels, and kept hidden until his glorious apocalyptic manifestation, when he would destroy the evil angelic powers and sit as the eschatological judge of humanity.
In addition to the Son of Man, the Parables of Enoch made a critical amendment to the soteriological bleakness of the earlier Enochic tradition by introducing the figure of Phanuel, an angel of mercy, and opening up the possibility that the unrighteous who were incapable of conforming to the law because of angelic sin could be saved from condemnation through repentance. The manifestation of the Son of Man would inaugurate a brief period in which sinners could repent of the works of their hands, ensuring that Phanuel would shield them from the fires of judgment and allow God’s mercy to prevail over His justice. There were now three “categories” of people: the Righteous, who would be saved according to their works at the last judgment; Unrepentant Sinners, including “the kings and the mighty”, who were doomed to perdition on account of their unworthiness; and, finally, “Others”: sinners who fell short of God’s law but were justified and made capable of salvation through their repentance.
In the Synoptic Gospels, the Enochic-Danielic vision of the messianic Son of Man who would crush the power of Satan and judge the human race at the end of days was combined with the figure of Phanuel, the imparter of divine mercy to the repentant before the final judgment, in the person of Christ. The entire mission of Jesus was directed at the “Others”: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners [Mark 2:17].” While John the Forerunner could only express an Enochian hope that God would not abandon repentant sinners, Jesus concretized this hope because He Himself was understood as both the eschatological judge and the agent of mercy for the penitent. Phanuel was a good enough defense attorney, but any criminal defendant would be put more at ease if the judge himself promised to waive his sentence if he demonstrated contrition.
While the Enochic tradition layered justification and salvation together, imagining that justification through repentance would occur just prior to the final eschatological judgment, the Jesus movement introduced more of a temporal separation between the two. Repentance and faith in Christ led to justification—a forgiveness of past sins and a resetting of the condition of sinners on an equal footing with the righteous—but those who received the forgiveness of baptism would still be judged at the end of days according to their deeds. The baptized were thus placed in a precarious position: their old sins were forgiven and their enthrallment to the malevolent angels was broken, but they were still required to live righteously going forward. Failure to do so would constitute blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, a rejection of the clemency freely offered to them, and would mean eternal condemnation for the offender. Paul did not break from this understanding; he believed that sinners (Jews and gentiles alike) were afforded a chance at justification by the sacrifice of Christ, but salvation at the end of time would still depend upon one’s works.
Did Paul believe that Jesus was God? He certainly believed that Jesus was a divine and heavenly being; and Jesus has the distinction of being the only person in Judaism who is known to have been worshipped by his followers. But there was plenty of room within the framework of Second Temple Judaism for divine beings—angels, exalted humans, and the Messiah—who were not themselves God. Even the worship of Jesus was not entirely unique within the worldview of Jewish apocalypticism: the Parables of Enoch suggested that the Son of Man would be worshipped, and in another apocryphal text called the Life of Adam and Eve, the angels are invited to worship Adam as the image of God, and it is Satan’s refusal to do so which leads to his fall.*
There were also certain manifestations of God—namely, Wisdom, the Spirit, and the Word—that mediated the relationship between God and creation, but which were also understood to be God Himself on account of their uncreated nature. Jewish monotheism was sustained not so much by insisting on the unicity of God as by articulating the distinction between the created and the uncreated. There was indeed only one God—YHWH sat at the top of a perfect “pyramid of divinity”, whereas the pyramid was more truncated in pagan belief systems—but whatever was understood to be uncreated could be identified with God, fostering an atmosphere of free speculation on the divine nature and attributes.
For Paul, Christ was a divine being who preexisted the creation of the universe, but He was still created. Paul essentially viewed Jesus as an extraordinarily powerful angel who became a human being. It would not be until the Gospel of John that the Jesus movement would take the critical step of identifying Christ with the uncreated Logos.
Paul distinguished himself from the “conservative” faction of the Jerusalem Church, headed by James the Just, by arguing for the equality of Jews and gentiles within the Jesus movement; and he based this belief on his Enochic understanding of the abjectness and universality of the human enslavement to angelic sin. Since Jews and gentiles alike were taken captive by the demonic powers wholly without their own consent, and since all are likewise afforded justification by the unmerited sacrifice of Christ which counterbalanced the power of the evil spirits and restored agency and responsibility to every person, there was little reason to distinguish between repentant sinners of Jewish or gentile origin. If the better part of humanity, comprised of both Jews and gentiles, has been enslaved by sin, there is no room for works that could merit justification. The sinner could only say “yes” to his cosmic liberation.
James, for his part, though he believed with Paul in the superhuman origin of sin, did not believe that humanity was enslaved by it. Rather, the demonic powers tempt people into sin, which, once committed, leads to death. Human beings retain a measure of freedom, and so the justification of the sinner is to be demonstrated by the practice of the teachings of Jesus—the “law of liberty”, as James called it—whereas for Paul it was a completely gratuitous movement of God that the slave of sin could only affirm. If works were required for the gift of justification, as James believed, then Jews still had an advantage over gentiles in the form of the Torah, which provided them with a guide for right conduct and knowledge of the temptations employed by the demonic powers. It is this difference between Paul and James on the nature of the human condition in light of angelic sin that explains why Paul has almost nothing to say about the teachings of Jesus, focusing entirely on his sacrificial death, while James has nothing to say about the death of Jesus and refers exclusively to His teachings.
It is also worth noting that Paul’s conception of equality between Jews and gentiles was tied up with the equality he envisioned between slaves and freemen as well as men and women. It was an eschatological equality, only made manifest at communal meals, and did not apply to ordinary worldly life. These distinctions would be abolished in the age to come, but until then they were to remain intact. Thus men and women were still to embody different social roles, slaves and freemen were to remain in their respective positions even while recognizing one another as brothers in Christ, and Jews and gentiles were still to maintain their separate communities and practices while living righteously in light of the justification offered by Christ: the Jews by keeping the Torah, and the gentiles by accordance with what other Jewish writers would refer to as the “natural law”, “the law of conscience”, or the “Noahide law”.
Thus were there three paths to salvation in the worldview of the Apostle Paul: for righteous Jews, obedience to the Mosaic law; for righteous gentiles, a life in keeping with natural law; and for sinners of all stripes, the gratuity of justification in Jesus Christ, followed by a righteous life in accordance with one of the other two categories.
*A version of this story is also presented in the Qur’an.
Paul of Tarsus lived, wrote, and died as a Jew. Despite centuries of vigorous insistence to the contrary by Christian and Jewish commentators alike, Paul did not abrogate the Torah, did not preach a religion of “faith” over one of “works”, did not believe that traditional Jewish teachings had been “superseded” by the revelation of the Messiah, and never imagined himself to be effecting a clean break between an old religious tradition and a new one. Paul was a Jew of the Second Temple period who spent the whole of his life participating in a broad and diverse Jewish conversation. Initially a Pharisee and a persecutor of the Hellenizing elements of the Jesus movement, Paul’s “conversion” was not an abandonment of his ancestral faith but merely a realignment from one understanding of Jewish eschatology to another: from a proto-rabbinic school of thought to that of a messianic and apocalyptic sect.
It is impossible to make coherent sense of Paul’s soteriology without understanding how both the Pauline Epistles and the Synoptic Gospels were shaped by a tradition of apocalyptic writings, dating from the third to the first century BCE, that would later be consolidated in the apocryphal Book of Enoch. Enoch was an ancestor of Noah, and the writings attributed to him were understood by devotees of the Enochian tradition to carry at least as much authoritative weight as the Torah related by Moses himself. The new tradition told a bleak “counterstory” that enveloped the more stable cosmology of the Pentateuch, bookending the Mosaic Torah with both the concept of a final judgment at the “end of days” and a pessimistic protology regarding the origin of evil.
According to the Book of the Watchers—an early Enochic text—evil did not originate with the transgression of Adam and Eve, but with a primordial rebellion of superhuman angelic powers. These malevolent angels, led by Shemihazah and Azazel, were defeated by Michael and his host; but they were not destroyed. Instead, they were driven from the heavenly sphere and confined below the earth, and from here they exerted a corrupting influence of supernatural power on the human will, consolidating their rulership over the earth as a fiefdom insulated from the light of God and making spiritual captives of the human race. Whereas the Mosaic Torah emphasizes human agency and concerns itself primarily with the necessity of freely adhering to the laws of God, Enochic Jews insisted on the helplessness and futility of the human condition, imagining humanity as the victim and slave of sin rather than its principal perpetrator. The early Enoch tradition did not object to the Mosaic law, nor did it offer an alternative means of righteousness before God; it was merely a “theology of complaint” that emphasized the difficulty of conforming to the Torah under the dominion of wicked spirits that perverted the natural will to righteousness, even while it acknowledged that at the final judgment humans would be held accountable according to their deeds.
The Essenes shared the Enochian conception of the superhuman origin of evil, but rejected the notion that the Jews were as much in thrall to the demonic powers as other peoples. They maintained that the election of Israel was established by God at the creation of the cosmos, and was in no way attenuated by the angelic rebellion. The Jews could preserve their liberty from the powers by maintaining and reinforcing the boundaries between themselves and other people; and this entailed adopting a new communal halakhah, or life-way, that was understood as a supplement to the incomplete Torah of Moses. The Book of Daniel hints at a possible reconciliation between the apocalyptic lamentations of the Enochians and the covenantal militancy of the Essenes, recognizing the influence of superhuman forces and the subjection of Israel to the wrath of God, but also seeming to view the perpetuation of evil as the product of a combination of angelic and human malfeasance while maintaining the salvific quality of the Mosaic law. Paul’s understanding of this apocalyptic conversation on the superhuman power of sin, the relation between Jews and gentiles, and the role of the Mosaic Torah was foundational to his entire system of thought.
Alongside this eschatological conversation was a messianic one. There were two broad messianic models in Second Temple Judaism: the Son of David and the Son of Man. The former was an earthly figure, a human being anointed by God, who was to overthrow the human powers—“the nations” that oppressed Israel because of its sins—restore the Davidic kingdom, and govern the liberated Jews as a wise ruler. The Son of David would redeem Israel collectively, but was not an agent of individual salvation, which could only be ensured by obedience to the law.
The apocalyptic Son of Man described by the Parables of Enoch in the first century BCE, by contrast, had to be a heavenly figure in order to have power over the rebel angels who held humanity in subjection; no mere mortal was capable of subduing these superhuman forces. The Son of Man was understood in the Enochian tradition to be a preexistent celestial being, created at the beginning of time, even before the angels, and kept hidden until his glorious apocalyptic manifestation, when he would destroy the evil angelic powers and sit as the eschatological judge of humanity.
In addition to the Son of Man, the Parables of Enoch made a critical amendment to the soteriological bleakness of the earlier Enochic tradition by introducing the figure of Phanuel, an angel of mercy, and opening up the possibility that the unrighteous who were incapable of conforming to the law because of angelic sin could be saved from condemnation through repentance. The manifestation of the Son of Man would inaugurate a brief period in which sinners could repent of the works of their hands, ensuring that Phanuel would shield them from the fires of judgment and allow God’s mercy to prevail over His justice. There were now three “categories” of people: the Righteous, who would be saved according to their works at the last judgment; Unrepentant Sinners, including “the kings and the mighty”, who were doomed to perdition on account of their unworthiness; and, finally, “Others”: sinners who fell short of God’s law but were justified and made capable of salvation through their repentance.
In the Synoptic Gospels, the Enochic-Danielic vision of the messianic Son of Man who would crush the power of Satan and judge the human race at the end of days was combined with the figure of Phanuel, the imparter of divine mercy to the repentant before the final judgment, in the person of Christ. The entire mission of Jesus was directed at the “Others”: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners [Mark 2:17].” While John the Forerunner could only express an Enochian hope that God would not abandon repentant sinners, Jesus concretized this hope because He Himself was understood as both the eschatological judge and the agent of mercy for the penitent. Phanuel was a good enough defense attorney, but any criminal defendant would be put more at ease if the judge himself promised to waive his sentence if he demonstrated contrition.
While the Enochic tradition layered justification and salvation together, imagining that justification through repentance would occur just prior to the final eschatological judgment, the Jesus movement introduced more of a temporal separation between the two. Repentance and faith in Christ led to justification—a forgiveness of past sins and a resetting of the condition of sinners on an equal footing with the righteous—but those who received the forgiveness of baptism would still be judged at the end of days according to their deeds. The baptized were thus placed in a precarious position: their old sins were forgiven and their enthrallment to the malevolent angels was broken, but they were still required to live righteously going forward. Failure to do so would constitute blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, a rejection of the clemency freely offered to them, and would mean eternal condemnation for the offender. Paul did not break from this understanding; he believed that sinners (Jews and gentiles alike) were afforded a chance at justification by the sacrifice of Christ, but salvation at the end of time would still depend upon one’s works.
Did Paul believe that Jesus was God? He certainly believed that Jesus was a divine and heavenly being; and Jesus has the distinction of being the only person in Judaism who is known to have been worshipped by his followers. But there was plenty of room within the framework of Second Temple Judaism for divine beings—angels, exalted humans, and the Messiah—who were not themselves God. Even the worship of Jesus was not entirely unique within the worldview of Jewish apocalypticism: the Parables of Enoch suggested that the Son of Man would be worshipped, and in another apocryphal text called the Life of Adam and Eve, the angels are invited to worship Adam as the image of God, and it is Satan’s refusal to do so which leads to his fall.*
There were also certain manifestations of God—namely, Wisdom, the Spirit, and the Word—that mediated the relationship between God and creation, but which were also understood to be God Himself on account of their uncreated nature. Jewish monotheism was sustained not so much by insisting on the unicity of God as by articulating the distinction between the created and the uncreated. There was indeed only one God—YHWH sat at the top of a perfect “pyramid of divinity”, whereas the pyramid was more truncated in pagan belief systems—but whatever was understood to be uncreated could be identified with God, fostering an atmosphere of free speculation on the divine nature and attributes.
For Paul, Christ was a divine being who preexisted the creation of the universe, but He was still created. Paul essentially viewed Jesus as an extraordinarily powerful angel who became a human being. It would not be until the Gospel of John that the Jesus movement would take the critical step of identifying Christ with the uncreated Logos.
Paul distinguished himself from the “conservative” faction of the Jerusalem Church, headed by James the Just, by arguing for the equality of Jews and gentiles within the Jesus movement; and he based this belief on his Enochic understanding of the abjectness and universality of the human enslavement to angelic sin. Since Jews and gentiles alike were taken captive by the demonic powers wholly without their own consent, and since all are likewise afforded justification by the unmerited sacrifice of Christ which counterbalanced the power of the evil spirits and restored agency and responsibility to every person, there was little reason to distinguish between repentant sinners of Jewish or gentile origin. If the better part of humanity, comprised of both Jews and gentiles, has been enslaved by sin, there is no room for works that could merit justification. The sinner could only say “yes” to his cosmic liberation.
James, for his part, though he believed with Paul in the superhuman origin of sin, did not believe that humanity was enslaved by it. Rather, the demonic powers tempt people into sin, which, once committed, leads to death. Human beings retain a measure of freedom, and so the justification of the sinner is to be demonstrated by the practice of the teachings of Jesus—the “law of liberty”, as James called it—whereas for Paul it was a completely gratuitous movement of God that the slave of sin could only affirm. If works were required for the gift of justification, as James believed, then Jews still had an advantage over gentiles in the form of the Torah, which provided them with a guide for right conduct and knowledge of the temptations employed by the demonic powers. It is this difference between Paul and James on the nature of the human condition in light of angelic sin that explains why Paul has almost nothing to say about the teachings of Jesus, focusing entirely on his sacrificial death, while James has nothing to say about the death of Jesus and refers exclusively to His teachings.
It is also worth noting that Paul’s conception of equality between Jews and gentiles was tied up with the equality he envisioned between slaves and freemen as well as men and women. It was an eschatological equality, only made manifest at communal meals, and did not apply to ordinary worldly life. These distinctions would be abolished in the age to come, but until then they were to remain intact. Thus men and women were still to embody different social roles, slaves and freemen were to remain in their respective positions even while recognizing one another as brothers in Christ, and Jews and gentiles were still to maintain their separate communities and practices while living righteously in light of the justification offered by Christ: the Jews by keeping the Torah, and the gentiles by accordance with what other Jewish writers would refer to as the “natural law”, “the law of conscience”, or the “Noahide law”.
Thus were there three paths to salvation in the worldview of the Apostle Paul: for righteous Jews, obedience to the Mosaic law; for righteous gentiles, a life in keeping with natural law; and for sinners of all stripes, the gratuity of justification in Jesus Christ, followed by a righteous life in accordance with one of the other two categories.
*A version of this story is also presented in the Qur’an.
May 30, 2021
Boccaccini is the kind of guy who shows up uninvited to a church potluck and ruins the party by correcting the pastor’s speech to you every time they quote Paul. You don’t really want to listen to him because you don’t want to leave the potluck but you can’t deny that damn he could be right what are you even doing at this potluck?
His main argument in Paul’s Three Paths to Salvation is that what Paul means by justification must be situated within his Jewish context, and that it deals exclusively with past sins and not future glorification. Jesus’ forgiveness of sin frees all who trust him from the powers and principalities of evil which oppress them. These principalities make it difficult (but not impossible) to live righteously. Thus, being freed from the powers of sin, those who follow Jesus can now be good people© and await for the coming judgment, whereby they will be judged by their works. So it is possible to pass the judgment at the end and come out as a good person© without Jesus’ forgiveness, but it will be harder (narrow is the gate, etc etc).
He contends that Paul assumes (Rom. 2:6), James agrees (James 2:14), and the early Fathers reaffirm this doctrine of judgment by good works.
He’s not afraid to bash Wright et al. for not gong far enough to take Paul’s Jewishness to its logical conclusion. He also bashes Christian scholars who think STJ is unified in its beliefs, cosmology, eschatology, views of Messiahship, and that those who see Paul as “against Judaism” must understand that difference in belief doesn’t mean he’s out of the camp. It actually proves the opposite because Jews argued with each other all the time and were/are never unified in belief.
I think Boccacini is on to something but there are verses which flatly contradict him. Off the top of my head, verses like “No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn. 14:16), “There is no one righteous, not even one” (Rom. 3:10) seem problematic to his theory. I can’t blame him because Paul is hardly a systematic writer and seems to contradict himself (and James…. and Peter……) often. Overall a fun read because I enjoy speculative theology, but I’m not leaving the potluck just yet.
His main argument in Paul’s Three Paths to Salvation is that what Paul means by justification must be situated within his Jewish context, and that it deals exclusively with past sins and not future glorification. Jesus’ forgiveness of sin frees all who trust him from the powers and principalities of evil which oppress them. These principalities make it difficult (but not impossible) to live righteously. Thus, being freed from the powers of sin, those who follow Jesus can now be good people© and await for the coming judgment, whereby they will be judged by their works. So it is possible to pass the judgment at the end and come out as a good person© without Jesus’ forgiveness, but it will be harder (narrow is the gate, etc etc).
He contends that Paul assumes (Rom. 2:6), James agrees (James 2:14), and the early Fathers reaffirm this doctrine of judgment by good works.
He’s not afraid to bash Wright et al. for not gong far enough to take Paul’s Jewishness to its logical conclusion. He also bashes Christian scholars who think STJ is unified in its beliefs, cosmology, eschatology, views of Messiahship, and that those who see Paul as “against Judaism” must understand that difference in belief doesn’t mean he’s out of the camp. It actually proves the opposite because Jews argued with each other all the time and were/are never unified in belief.
I think Boccacini is on to something but there are verses which flatly contradict him. Off the top of my head, verses like “No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn. 14:16), “There is no one righteous, not even one” (Rom. 3:10) seem problematic to his theory. I can’t blame him because Paul is hardly a systematic writer and seems to contradict himself (and James…. and Peter……) often. Overall a fun read because I enjoy speculative theology, but I’m not leaving the potluck just yet.
January 21, 2025
And now for something slightly different!
The three paths to reconciliation with God are Torah, natural law, and for the rest of us, gracious justification through faith in Jesus Christ. The biggest plus of this work is its overall clarity and explanatory power. That being said, the second edition needs some editing; too much repetition and circuitous reasoning in the text, and it feels a little patched together. Recommended for those thinking about soteriology and looking for a way to make sense of the biblical witness.
The three paths to reconciliation with God are Torah, natural law, and for the rest of us, gracious justification through faith in Jesus Christ. The biggest plus of this work is its overall clarity and explanatory power. That being said, the second edition needs some editing; too much repetition and circuitous reasoning in the text, and it feels a little patched together. Recommended for those thinking about soteriology and looking for a way to make sense of the biblical witness.
Read
October 3, 2024Some really stellar stuff here. Don’t agree in all particulars, and the central thesis creates far more soteriological problems than solutions in my view. But there is some fine and useful stuff here.
November 1, 2020
When I was a kid, the local newspaper had a regular column called, “Through Rose-Colored Glasses.” Whether you loved the column or hated it, the title said it all. You knew that whatever was being written about was filtered through the optimistic worldview of the columnist.
For most of us, reading and understanding Paul is a similar experience. We aren’t engaging with what Paul actually wrote, not really. Instead, we’re filtering his letters (not to mention his theological worldview!) through Augustine and Martin Luther.
Gabriele Boccaccini seeks to strip away the filters to hear what Paul is really saying.
He starts with an exploration of 2nd Temple Judaism to put Paul back into his original context. This is really an exploration of the various Judaisms of Paul’s day. Just as there are many different denominations of Christianity today, there were different strands of Judaisms in the 1st-century.
What Boccaccini discovers is that Paul wasn’t a “convert to Christianity” so much as he moved within Judaism to a different world view, one much closer to the Enochian traditions.
For Paul, the rebellion of the angels (the Watchers) had enslaved and corrupted the world, which made it harder (but not impossible) for people to be righteous. Humanity was under the power of death, evil, and sin.
Salvation had always been possible for Jews through adherence to the Torah, and for gentiles by good works according to conscience and natural law. But, because humanity had been enslaved, it was nearly impossible. In other words, most of us (Jew or gentile) are found to be sinners.
However, through Christ’s death and resurrection, death was destroyed and we are freed from the power of sin and evil. (In the Orthodox Church, we say, "Christ has trampled down death by death.") Through baptism, all sinners (Jews and gentiles alike) are offered justification by faith. But, in its original context, this does not mean salvation. This means the forgiveness of sins.
Paul still envisions an end-time judgment based on one’s deeds. Though our past sins have been forgiven, going forward, we are expected to live blamelessly. The difference is that now we live with the help of the Holy Spirit.
In Pauline studies, the "New Perspective" broke Paul free from past theological trappings, but Boccaccini brings an even “fresher perspective” to Paul. For this reason, I think that Paul’s Three Paths to Salvation is the theological book of the year.
For most of us, reading and understanding Paul is a similar experience. We aren’t engaging with what Paul actually wrote, not really. Instead, we’re filtering his letters (not to mention his theological worldview!) through Augustine and Martin Luther.
Gabriele Boccaccini seeks to strip away the filters to hear what Paul is really saying.
He starts with an exploration of 2nd Temple Judaism to put Paul back into his original context. This is really an exploration of the various Judaisms of Paul’s day. Just as there are many different denominations of Christianity today, there were different strands of Judaisms in the 1st-century.
What Boccaccini discovers is that Paul wasn’t a “convert to Christianity” so much as he moved within Judaism to a different world view, one much closer to the Enochian traditions.
For Paul, the rebellion of the angels (the Watchers) had enslaved and corrupted the world, which made it harder (but not impossible) for people to be righteous. Humanity was under the power of death, evil, and sin.
Salvation had always been possible for Jews through adherence to the Torah, and for gentiles by good works according to conscience and natural law. But, because humanity had been enslaved, it was nearly impossible. In other words, most of us (Jew or gentile) are found to be sinners.
However, through Christ’s death and resurrection, death was destroyed and we are freed from the power of sin and evil. (In the Orthodox Church, we say, "Christ has trampled down death by death.") Through baptism, all sinners (Jews and gentiles alike) are offered justification by faith. But, in its original context, this does not mean salvation. This means the forgiveness of sins.
Paul still envisions an end-time judgment based on one’s deeds. Though our past sins have been forgiven, going forward, we are expected to live blamelessly. The difference is that now we live with the help of the Holy Spirit.
In Pauline studies, the "New Perspective" broke Paul free from past theological trappings, but Boccaccini brings an even “fresher perspective” to Paul. For this reason, I think that Paul’s Three Paths to Salvation is the theological book of the year.
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