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Contraversions: Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture, and Society #1
A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Contraversions: Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture, and Society)
Daniel Boyarin turns to the Epistles of Paul as the spiritual autobiography of a first-century Jewish cultural critic. What led Paul―in his dramatic conversion to Christianity―to such a radical critique of Jewish culture?
Paul's famous formulation, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, no male and female in Christ," demonstrates the genius of Christianity: its concern for all people. The genius of Judaism is its validation of genealogy and cultural, ethnic difference. But the evils of these two thought systems are the obverse of their geniuses: Christianity has threatened to coerce universality, while ethnic difference is one of the most troubled issues in modern history.
Boyarin posits a "diaspora identity" as a way to negotiate the pitfalls inherent in either position. Jewishness disrupts categories of identity because it is not national, genealogical, or even religious, but all of these, in dialectical tension with one another. It is analogous with gender: gender identity makes us different in some ways but not in others.
An exploration of these tensions in the Pauline corpus, argues Boyarin, will lead us to a richer appreciation of our own cultural quandaries as male and female, gay and straight, Jew and Palestinian―and as human beings.
Paul's famous formulation, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, no male and female in Christ," demonstrates the genius of Christianity: its concern for all people. The genius of Judaism is its validation of genealogy and cultural, ethnic difference. But the evils of these two thought systems are the obverse of their geniuses: Christianity has threatened to coerce universality, while ethnic difference is one of the most troubled issues in modern history.
Boyarin posits a "diaspora identity" as a way to negotiate the pitfalls inherent in either position. Jewishness disrupts categories of identity because it is not national, genealogical, or even religious, but all of these, in dialectical tension with one another. It is analogous with gender: gender identity makes us different in some ways but not in others.
An exploration of these tensions in the Pauline corpus, argues Boyarin, will lead us to a richer appreciation of our own cultural quandaries as male and female, gay and straight, Jew and Palestinian―and as human beings.
382 pages, Paperback
First published September 14, 1994
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About the author
Daniel Boyarin
44 books84 followersDaniel Boyarin, Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture and rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships. His books include A Radical Jew, Border Lines, and Socrates and the Fat Rabbis. He lives in Berkeley, California.
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April 13, 2024
In this illuminating study, Daniel Boyarin interprets the life and thought of the Apostle Paul as a kind of synecdoche for the identitarian conundrums of Hellenistic Judaism. Like many of his Jewish (near) contemporaries—among them Philo of Alexandria and the anonymous author of the Wisdom of Solomon—Paul was preoccupied with a perceived disjuncture between the universality of the Torah’s content and the particularity—even the insularity—of its form. The Torah proclaims the One True God, the creator of all things and all people; yet in its record of His dealings with humanity, this God figures primarily as the patron of one particular nation, one lineage—the children of Israel—whom He has set apart from all the others and with whom He has entered into an exclusive covenant. What’s more, the divinely-imparted terms of this covenant enjoin the members of this tribe—Paul’s tribe—to undertake certain practices—most notably male circumcision and kashruth—which mark them off from the rest of humanity. Such partiality might be appropriate for a tutelary god; but would the universal God of all creation really play favorites? Could the story of one nation and its patron deity somehow claim validity for all people? Paul found a solution to this predicament in a most astonishing way. He had been involved in the suppression of an obscure sect, which claimed as its figurehead a crucified and resurrected Messiah; but one day, on the road to Damascus, he had a mysterious, profound, and life-changing encounter of his own with this risen Christ—an apocalypse that opened the way to a radical reinterpretation of the Torah, the purposes of God, and the identity of the true Israel.
Even among pagans, the prevailing philosophical currents of the Hellenistic world had been trending toward a more rarified monotheism for three centuries by the time of Paul’s epiphany. The cosmopolitan ethos and free-flowing cultural exchange of the era had brought Jewish ideas into contact with the intellectual milieu of the wider Mediterranean. The Jews found admirers in the Greek world for their “pure” monotheism, their aniconism, and their ethical conscientiousness; with one Theophrastus, Aristotle’s successor as head of the Peripatetic school in Athens, allegedly describing the Jews as a nation of philosophers. Hellenistic Jews and pagans alike regarded Moses as the expositor of a divinely-revealed philosophy. Jewish monotheism coupled nicely with the middle (and later, neo-) Platonist fascination with the concept of the One: a universal reality above and beyond the phenomenal world of multiplicity. Yet if the Jewish God was agreeable to the Greek world, the particularism of Jewish identity and practice were not. If the One was the highest and most universal reality, particularity and exclusion could only be seen as decline and deviation. The Western tradition’s fusion of the platonic quest for (spiritual) univocity with the Yahwist creation account of Genesis 2, in which the (spiritual) male figures as the universal human and the (material) woman as in some sense supplementary and derivative—originating with Philo but made culturally hegemonic by Christianity—is, in Boyarin’s view, the source of its tragic legacy of suspicion towards Jews and women alike, who came to represent baseness, physicality, and carnality as such.
Paul lived these contradictions: he was educated in a moderately dualist worldview with a broadly platonic and stoic metaphysics; he imbibed a Hellenistic cosmopolitanism; and he was a zealous believer in the God of Israel and the sacrality of the Torah. In Boyarin’s estimation, the brilliance with which he harmonized these disparate elements of thought and identity makes Paul both one of the greatest geniuses of antiquity and the progenitor of Western universalism—in both its positive and negative aspects. His muse was the risen Christ, whose dual nature provided the hermeneutical key to resolving the tension between the universal/incorporeal Oneness of God and the embodied particularity of Israel.
If the fleshly body of Jesus of Nazareth, a first-century Torah-observant Palestinian Jew, had been resurrected as a spiritual body, immortal and unencumbered by the fleshly markers of ethnic and sexual distinction—if, in fact, Jesus had been known by his followers in two ways: “according to the flesh” and “according to the spirit” (Rom. 1:3-4; 2 Cor. 5:16)—then every earthly/fleshly reality must have a corresponding heavenly/spiritual reality as well (2 Cor. 15:44). As for Plato, this lower world of matter and multiplicity must be but a pale reflection of a higher, intangible world: a world of ideas; a world of spirit. “[T]he things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Cor. 4:18). The material world must relate to the spiritual one as a signifier to its allegorical referent. But for Paul, unlike for Plato, the disclosure of this higher, universal reality was not a matter of static contemplation, but divine revelation.
The resurrection of Christ in a spiritual body signaled the dawn of a new cosmic aion in which the “literal,” flesh-and-blood realities the world had previously known were to be superseded by the “allegorical,” spiritual realities for which they had served as a signpost. Apocalypse and allegory were of a kind: the former unveiled the inner meaning of external forms, and in so doing revealed the preexistent allegorical relationship between flesh and spirit. History itself was moving from the literal to the allegorical, from the external to the internal, from the lower to the higher, from the carnal to the spiritual, from the transient to the immutable, from the many to the One, from death to life. All the physical and customary particularities of Jewish identity—those embodied practices which set the Jews apart and constituted their distinct existence—had been signifiers of the new world embedded within the old one. Now that the new world was arriving, the true meaning of these signifiers had been revealed, and their former “literal” instantiation was at best a matter of indifference.
As the fleshly Christ was superseded by the spiritual Christ; and the letter of the Law by the spiritual Law, which one fulfills by a faith demonstrated in works of love; so too was the fleshly Israel—constituted by physical kinship and those observances of the Law which distinguish it from other peoples—to be superseded by the spiritual Israel, comprising those who undergo the spiritual circumcision of baptism: dying to the flesh and putting on the spiritual Christ, who is no longer limited by the ethnic and sexual particularity of his fleshly life, and in whom all can therefore participate: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus (Gal. 3:28).” Paul’s truculent rejection of the necessity of circumcision for gentile Christians was not born, as some have suggested, of a desire to make it easier to proselytize, but rather of his conviction that circumcision symbolized the old aion in two ways: it was the symbol of Israel’s particularity according to the flesh, and its object was the organ of physical reproduction, signifying ethnic kinship, genealogy, and sexual differentiation; the importance of each of which was relativized (but, importantly, not entirely eliminated) by the apocalypse of Christ—as evidenced by Paul’s own indifference to marriage and reproduction, which Jewish tradition—then as now—celebrated and strongly encouraged.
Paul thus universalized Jewish identity—and human identity more broadly—by setting up a dichotomy between embodied particularity and spiritual unity while valorizing the latter. In this, Boyarin argues, he is responsible for Christendom’s universal scope of concern, as well as that of the secular Western culture that has succeeded it. This is an intellectual achievement and a legacy virtually unsurpassed by any individual thinker of the Western tradition; but it has also presented its own set of dangers, because the obverse of universal concern is universal coercion. While affirming the kinship of all human beings, Christianity also introduced the concept of the necessity of faith in Christ for salvation; opening the way, at its most extreme, to horrific regimes of coercion in which particular identities, beliefs, and practices have been branded as heathen, heretical, or uncivilized, and the people who embody them forcibly assimilated to a (Christian, Western) “universal” ideal. At their worst, Christian imperialisms have used Paul’s dualism of flesh and spirit to legitimize the torture, enslavement, and destruction of “heathen” bodies in the name of “saving souls.” And this coercive universalism has outlasted its explicitly theological idiom: the mission to Christianize the heathen was succeeded first (in part) by the “white man’s burden” to civilize the savage races, and then by the liberal imperialism of today, which maintains a hierarchy between those who assimilate to a deracinated Western liberal anthropology and those who resist it.
On the other hand, while the bulk of Jewish tradition has regarded non-Jews with a benevolent indifference—viewing themselves as performing a priestly role on behalf of the entire world and almost unanimously denying the necessity of conversion for a place in the World to Come—ethnic and genealogical particularism has an obvious dark side of its own; especially when racial chauvinism is combined with the coercive power of the state. Even in 1994, when this book was published, Boyarin had come to see the State of Israel as a tragic example of this coercive particularism. Living in Israel for a time, he became disillusioned with Zionism after witnessing the government’s lethal crackdown on the First Intifada. In lieu of a Jewish ethnostate, he has argued for a deterritorialized, diasporic Jewish nationalism, in which the ethnic/genealogical aspect of Jewish identity—perfectly benign in its own right—is not fused with political sovereignty. I can only imagine what Boyarin’s life as a Jewish American anti-Zionist has been like over the last six months, as the rhetoric surrounding Israel and its relationship with the United States has boiled over, and the overt fascism and genocidality of the current Israeli regime has become impossible to ignore.
What is needed, Boyarin concludes, is the embrasure of two positive dialectical tensions: first, that between the Jewish celebration of particularity and the Christian emphasis on human solidarity; and second, that between the multiple facets of Jewish identity itself—ethnic, religious, and national. Being in the Christian camp myself, I think the faith would benefit tremendously from recovering the Torahic and prophetic engagement with history, the concern with practical ethics and social justice—both of which Christian tradition has often lost sight of in its decidedly otherworldly orientation—and from studying the complex nature of Jewish identity, which is both strong enough to persist in the face of persecution and minority status and flexible enough to accommodate a wide variety of beliefs and lifestyles. In Pauline parlance, there must be a rapprochement between the Christ of the spirit and the Jesus of the flesh.
Even among pagans, the prevailing philosophical currents of the Hellenistic world had been trending toward a more rarified monotheism for three centuries by the time of Paul’s epiphany. The cosmopolitan ethos and free-flowing cultural exchange of the era had brought Jewish ideas into contact with the intellectual milieu of the wider Mediterranean. The Jews found admirers in the Greek world for their “pure” monotheism, their aniconism, and their ethical conscientiousness; with one Theophrastus, Aristotle’s successor as head of the Peripatetic school in Athens, allegedly describing the Jews as a nation of philosophers. Hellenistic Jews and pagans alike regarded Moses as the expositor of a divinely-revealed philosophy. Jewish monotheism coupled nicely with the middle (and later, neo-) Platonist fascination with the concept of the One: a universal reality above and beyond the phenomenal world of multiplicity. Yet if the Jewish God was agreeable to the Greek world, the particularism of Jewish identity and practice were not. If the One was the highest and most universal reality, particularity and exclusion could only be seen as decline and deviation. The Western tradition’s fusion of the platonic quest for (spiritual) univocity with the Yahwist creation account of Genesis 2, in which the (spiritual) male figures as the universal human and the (material) woman as in some sense supplementary and derivative—originating with Philo but made culturally hegemonic by Christianity—is, in Boyarin’s view, the source of its tragic legacy of suspicion towards Jews and women alike, who came to represent baseness, physicality, and carnality as such.
Paul lived these contradictions: he was educated in a moderately dualist worldview with a broadly platonic and stoic metaphysics; he imbibed a Hellenistic cosmopolitanism; and he was a zealous believer in the God of Israel and the sacrality of the Torah. In Boyarin’s estimation, the brilliance with which he harmonized these disparate elements of thought and identity makes Paul both one of the greatest geniuses of antiquity and the progenitor of Western universalism—in both its positive and negative aspects. His muse was the risen Christ, whose dual nature provided the hermeneutical key to resolving the tension between the universal/incorporeal Oneness of God and the embodied particularity of Israel.
If the fleshly body of Jesus of Nazareth, a first-century Torah-observant Palestinian Jew, had been resurrected as a spiritual body, immortal and unencumbered by the fleshly markers of ethnic and sexual distinction—if, in fact, Jesus had been known by his followers in two ways: “according to the flesh” and “according to the spirit” (Rom. 1:3-4; 2 Cor. 5:16)—then every earthly/fleshly reality must have a corresponding heavenly/spiritual reality as well (2 Cor. 15:44). As for Plato, this lower world of matter and multiplicity must be but a pale reflection of a higher, intangible world: a world of ideas; a world of spirit. “[T]he things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Cor. 4:18). The material world must relate to the spiritual one as a signifier to its allegorical referent. But for Paul, unlike for Plato, the disclosure of this higher, universal reality was not a matter of static contemplation, but divine revelation.
The resurrection of Christ in a spiritual body signaled the dawn of a new cosmic aion in which the “literal,” flesh-and-blood realities the world had previously known were to be superseded by the “allegorical,” spiritual realities for which they had served as a signpost. Apocalypse and allegory were of a kind: the former unveiled the inner meaning of external forms, and in so doing revealed the preexistent allegorical relationship between flesh and spirit. History itself was moving from the literal to the allegorical, from the external to the internal, from the lower to the higher, from the carnal to the spiritual, from the transient to the immutable, from the many to the One, from death to life. All the physical and customary particularities of Jewish identity—those embodied practices which set the Jews apart and constituted their distinct existence—had been signifiers of the new world embedded within the old one. Now that the new world was arriving, the true meaning of these signifiers had been revealed, and their former “literal” instantiation was at best a matter of indifference.
As the fleshly Christ was superseded by the spiritual Christ; and the letter of the Law by the spiritual Law, which one fulfills by a faith demonstrated in works of love; so too was the fleshly Israel—constituted by physical kinship and those observances of the Law which distinguish it from other peoples—to be superseded by the spiritual Israel, comprising those who undergo the spiritual circumcision of baptism: dying to the flesh and putting on the spiritual Christ, who is no longer limited by the ethnic and sexual particularity of his fleshly life, and in whom all can therefore participate: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus (Gal. 3:28).” Paul’s truculent rejection of the necessity of circumcision for gentile Christians was not born, as some have suggested, of a desire to make it easier to proselytize, but rather of his conviction that circumcision symbolized the old aion in two ways: it was the symbol of Israel’s particularity according to the flesh, and its object was the organ of physical reproduction, signifying ethnic kinship, genealogy, and sexual differentiation; the importance of each of which was relativized (but, importantly, not entirely eliminated) by the apocalypse of Christ—as evidenced by Paul’s own indifference to marriage and reproduction, which Jewish tradition—then as now—celebrated and strongly encouraged.
Paul thus universalized Jewish identity—and human identity more broadly—by setting up a dichotomy between embodied particularity and spiritual unity while valorizing the latter. In this, Boyarin argues, he is responsible for Christendom’s universal scope of concern, as well as that of the secular Western culture that has succeeded it. This is an intellectual achievement and a legacy virtually unsurpassed by any individual thinker of the Western tradition; but it has also presented its own set of dangers, because the obverse of universal concern is universal coercion. While affirming the kinship of all human beings, Christianity also introduced the concept of the necessity of faith in Christ for salvation; opening the way, at its most extreme, to horrific regimes of coercion in which particular identities, beliefs, and practices have been branded as heathen, heretical, or uncivilized, and the people who embody them forcibly assimilated to a (Christian, Western) “universal” ideal. At their worst, Christian imperialisms have used Paul’s dualism of flesh and spirit to legitimize the torture, enslavement, and destruction of “heathen” bodies in the name of “saving souls.” And this coercive universalism has outlasted its explicitly theological idiom: the mission to Christianize the heathen was succeeded first (in part) by the “white man’s burden” to civilize the savage races, and then by the liberal imperialism of today, which maintains a hierarchy between those who assimilate to a deracinated Western liberal anthropology and those who resist it.
On the other hand, while the bulk of Jewish tradition has regarded non-Jews with a benevolent indifference—viewing themselves as performing a priestly role on behalf of the entire world and almost unanimously denying the necessity of conversion for a place in the World to Come—ethnic and genealogical particularism has an obvious dark side of its own; especially when racial chauvinism is combined with the coercive power of the state. Even in 1994, when this book was published, Boyarin had come to see the State of Israel as a tragic example of this coercive particularism. Living in Israel for a time, he became disillusioned with Zionism after witnessing the government’s lethal crackdown on the First Intifada. In lieu of a Jewish ethnostate, he has argued for a deterritorialized, diasporic Jewish nationalism, in which the ethnic/genealogical aspect of Jewish identity—perfectly benign in its own right—is not fused with political sovereignty. I can only imagine what Boyarin’s life as a Jewish American anti-Zionist has been like over the last six months, as the rhetoric surrounding Israel and its relationship with the United States has boiled over, and the overt fascism and genocidality of the current Israeli regime has become impossible to ignore.
What is needed, Boyarin concludes, is the embrasure of two positive dialectical tensions: first, that between the Jewish celebration of particularity and the Christian emphasis on human solidarity; and second, that between the multiple facets of Jewish identity itself—ethnic, religious, and national. Being in the Christian camp myself, I think the faith would benefit tremendously from recovering the Torahic and prophetic engagement with history, the concern with practical ethics and social justice—both of which Christian tradition has often lost sight of in its decidedly otherworldly orientation—and from studying the complex nature of Jewish identity, which is both strong enough to persist in the face of persecution and minority status and flexible enough to accommodate a wide variety of beliefs and lifestyles. In Pauline parlance, there must be a rapprochement between the Christ of the spirit and the Jesus of the flesh.
June 25, 2023
A fabulous book on Paul as a radical cultural critic. Boyarin's commentary on, and resistance to Paul's dualistic, allegorizing strategy is incredibly helpful, as is his post-structuralist sensitivity to matters of difference. Boyarin's Paul is neither inconsistent nor anti-Semitic, though he does originate what will later be called the "Jewish Question". The final chapter, where Boyarin constructs a deterritorialized, "Diasporic" universalism, is compelling even if it stands in need of qualification (in particular concerning his conceptualization of Judaism as a race). This text made me realize the extent to which Pauline hermeneutics had distorted my grasp of Judaism, and calls into question my habitual platonistic, body-hating tendencies.
*NB: his commentary on Gal. 3:24-6 is especially clarifying.
*NB: his commentary on Gal. 3:24-6 is especially clarifying.
June 28, 2010
This has been by farthest the most profound and challenging read on Paul.
July 7, 2018
The following quote can be used to summarise Boyarin's central argument:
"Judaism had been in increasing interaction with [Hellenistic] culture for several centuries by the time Paul was born, and this interaction had led to several striking cultural developments. The most important of these developments for my present purpose was the transformation in the significance of universalism"
While the exploration of relations between Paul's thinking and the wider discourse(s) of contemporary Hellenism is compelling enough, this brilliant book can certainly be read for other reasons as well. Certain readers would, perhaps, be more appreciative towards how it manages to summarise important trends in Pauline scholarship, as they appeared during the 1990's, while recurring comparisons between Paul and Philo may prove useful for others as well.
However, the basic argument, which seeks to situate Paul in relation to above-mentioned concerns about 'the universal', is certainly the book's greatest achievement. In short, Paul's distinct views on Jewish 'Law', as expressed in 'the flesh', are related to wider attempts at easing tensions between God's supposed universality and the special significance ascribed to the Jewish people. This, in turn, relates to how Paul seeks to distance proper 'faith' from literal (i.e., 'fleshly') expressions of the Law, in what one could read as a particular (Jewish) expression of the wider internalisation of religiosity during the early centuries CE (cf. Stroumsa, "The End of Sacrifice").
In short, Boyarin presents a multi-faceted analysis of the context and ideas which inspired early Christians to define their religion as something radically new, universally inclusive, and therefore distinct from traditional Judaism.
"Judaism had been in increasing interaction with [Hellenistic] culture for several centuries by the time Paul was born, and this interaction had led to several striking cultural developments. The most important of these developments for my present purpose was the transformation in the significance of universalism"
While the exploration of relations between Paul's thinking and the wider discourse(s) of contemporary Hellenism is compelling enough, this brilliant book can certainly be read for other reasons as well. Certain readers would, perhaps, be more appreciative towards how it manages to summarise important trends in Pauline scholarship, as they appeared during the 1990's, while recurring comparisons between Paul and Philo may prove useful for others as well.
However, the basic argument, which seeks to situate Paul in relation to above-mentioned concerns about 'the universal', is certainly the book's greatest achievement. In short, Paul's distinct views on Jewish 'Law', as expressed in 'the flesh', are related to wider attempts at easing tensions between God's supposed universality and the special significance ascribed to the Jewish people. This, in turn, relates to how Paul seeks to distance proper 'faith' from literal (i.e., 'fleshly') expressions of the Law, in what one could read as a particular (Jewish) expression of the wider internalisation of religiosity during the early centuries CE (cf. Stroumsa, "The End of Sacrifice").
In short, Boyarin presents a multi-faceted analysis of the context and ideas which inspired early Christians to define their religion as something radically new, universally inclusive, and therefore distinct from traditional Judaism.
March 20, 2021
In this book, Boyarin repeatedly asserts the brilliance of Paul, and in turn, writes about him brilliantly. The author comes to the main letters of Paul from the standpoint of a post-modern Jewish Talmudic scholar. For him, the passage that provides the key to understanding the complex thought-world of the apostle to the nations is Galatians 3:28, where Paul asserts that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male and female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (this verse is printed on the cover of the book). Boyarin reads this as Paul’s attempt to resolve the tension he had experienced between the conflicting pulls of Jewish particularism and Hellenistic universalism. The solution involves a thoroughgoing allegorization, through which the emblems of particularity, especially circumcision, become signifiers of a higher, spiritual reality. In this way, “true Israel” becomes configured as those Jews and non-Jews who become followers of Jesus. The result is a moderate dualism, one “that makes room for the body, however much the spirit is more highly valued” (p. 185). At the same time, it leaves no room for Jews who choose neither to renounce their particularity nor become Christian. In subsequent centuries, this led in predominantly Christian lands to the so-called “Jewish problem” and the hideously barbaric attempts to “solve” it. Without making Paul personally responsible for this, Boyarin shows how these developments were one way Paul’s writings could be used.
Boyarin’s reading of Paul is sensible. In the course of his research, he found that at many points his understanding was a return to positions taken in the 19th century by F. C. Baur. While I found much to agree with, there are a couple of points I’m not so sure about. Toward the end of his Letter to the Galatians, Paul claims that the competing missionaries don’t themselves keep the law. Boyarin relates this charge to Paul’s lengthy account of his conflict with Peter in Gal. 2. While not maintaining that Peter is the opponent Paul has in mind throughout the letter, Boyarin asserts that the problem is the same. Rather than believing that adherence to the Torah is necessary to belong to the community of Christ-believers and thus attain salvation, theirs is a position of expediency. I will have to live with this suggestion for a while, since a more mainstream understanding makes adequate sense of chapters 3 and 4 of Galatians as well.
In another departure from current mainstream thinking on Paul, Boyarin understands him to be a proto-encratite, proclaiming the superiority of celibacy over marriage not only because of the “present distress,” but generally. In this way, Boyarin returns to the understanding of earlier centuries. His argument, based on readings of Romans 5–8, I Corinthians 6–7 and Galatians 5, is persuasive, but again, I will have to live with this for a while.
In his final chapter, Boyarin shifts from engaging with Paul’s writings and the history of their interpretation to his personal response to Paul’s claim. Boyarin rejects Paul’s program of divesting himself of particularity to become assimilated into a universal (non-Jewish) man (Paul’s call for an end to the distinction male/female has a similar effect; initially liberating for women, treated as second-class, ends by assimilating them to a male ideal). Instead, he proposes a continued dialectic of Pauline common humanity and its opposite, Rabbinic particularism: “A dialectic that would utilize each of these as antithesis to the other, correcting in the ‘Christian’ system its tendencies toward a coercive universalism and in the ‘Jewish’ system its tendencies toward contemptuous neglect for human solidarity might lead beyond both toward a better social system” (p. 235) This would have the effect of what Boyarin calls “deterritorializing Jewishness.” As he sees it, it is not possible to uphold both particularity and territoriality. Boyarin thus rejects not only Paul but also Zionism, since the particularism of a minority cannot help but become oppressive when it is combined with political hegemony. In its place, Boyarin envisions what he calls a “diasporized (multicultural) Israel.” Sounds interesting, but it’s hard for me to see how to get there from the current situation.
I found this book stimulating and thought-provoking. Boyarin’s frequent references to points he had previously made or would subsequently suggest that the book could have been better organized. Also, there are 78 pages of endnotes, more than a quarter of the book. In many of these, Boyarin engages with a wide variety of scholarship, not just Biblical. I tried flipping back and forth for the first couple of chapters, but often had difficulty finding my way into the main text again. So I stayed with the main text, sometimes turning to the back at the end of each chapter to scan the notes. I’m sure I missed some interesting material this way. There seems to be no hard and fast rule for when footnotes would be better than endnotes. I envisioned an edition of this book in which the pages were laid out like pages of the Talmud, with the body of text in the middle, surrounded by discussion in all the margins.
Most books about Paul are written with the assumption that his writings are scripture, and therefore need to be defended or debunked. For Boyarin, they are valuable documents of first-century Jewish thought. The resulting book is a worthwhile read.
Boyarin’s reading of Paul is sensible. In the course of his research, he found that at many points his understanding was a return to positions taken in the 19th century by F. C. Baur. While I found much to agree with, there are a couple of points I’m not so sure about. Toward the end of his Letter to the Galatians, Paul claims that the competing missionaries don’t themselves keep the law. Boyarin relates this charge to Paul’s lengthy account of his conflict with Peter in Gal. 2. While not maintaining that Peter is the opponent Paul has in mind throughout the letter, Boyarin asserts that the problem is the same. Rather than believing that adherence to the Torah is necessary to belong to the community of Christ-believers and thus attain salvation, theirs is a position of expediency. I will have to live with this suggestion for a while, since a more mainstream understanding makes adequate sense of chapters 3 and 4 of Galatians as well.
In another departure from current mainstream thinking on Paul, Boyarin understands him to be a proto-encratite, proclaiming the superiority of celibacy over marriage not only because of the “present distress,” but generally. In this way, Boyarin returns to the understanding of earlier centuries. His argument, based on readings of Romans 5–8, I Corinthians 6–7 and Galatians 5, is persuasive, but again, I will have to live with this for a while.
In his final chapter, Boyarin shifts from engaging with Paul’s writings and the history of their interpretation to his personal response to Paul’s claim. Boyarin rejects Paul’s program of divesting himself of particularity to become assimilated into a universal (non-Jewish) man (Paul’s call for an end to the distinction male/female has a similar effect; initially liberating for women, treated as second-class, ends by assimilating them to a male ideal). Instead, he proposes a continued dialectic of Pauline common humanity and its opposite, Rabbinic particularism: “A dialectic that would utilize each of these as antithesis to the other, correcting in the ‘Christian’ system its tendencies toward a coercive universalism and in the ‘Jewish’ system its tendencies toward contemptuous neglect for human solidarity might lead beyond both toward a better social system” (p. 235) This would have the effect of what Boyarin calls “deterritorializing Jewishness.” As he sees it, it is not possible to uphold both particularity and territoriality. Boyarin thus rejects not only Paul but also Zionism, since the particularism of a minority cannot help but become oppressive when it is combined with political hegemony. In its place, Boyarin envisions what he calls a “diasporized (multicultural) Israel.” Sounds interesting, but it’s hard for me to see how to get there from the current situation.
I found this book stimulating and thought-provoking. Boyarin’s frequent references to points he had previously made or would subsequently suggest that the book could have been better organized. Also, there are 78 pages of endnotes, more than a quarter of the book. In many of these, Boyarin engages with a wide variety of scholarship, not just Biblical. I tried flipping back and forth for the first couple of chapters, but often had difficulty finding my way into the main text again. So I stayed with the main text, sometimes turning to the back at the end of each chapter to scan the notes. I’m sure I missed some interesting material this way. There seems to be no hard and fast rule for when footnotes would be better than endnotes. I envisioned an edition of this book in which the pages were laid out like pages of the Talmud, with the body of text in the middle, surrounded by discussion in all the margins.
Most books about Paul are written with the assumption that his writings are scripture, and therefore need to be defended or debunked. For Boyarin, they are valuable documents of first-century Jewish thought. The resulting book is a worthwhile read.
February 12, 2018
In a lot of ways, problematic (some of his exegesis of Paul is based on some very thin cultural connections), but the exploration of larger themes in Paul's writing concerning universalism and particularism, and the way these issues have played out in modern theology, is absolutely worth a read.
September 19, 2018
An interesting and honest reading of Paul from a Jewish perspective.
September 13, 2024
This is the best book on Paul I have read, bar none. One should not overlook the subtitle. Although the book reads like a scholarly exegesis of the Pauline corpus, a significant theme is the relevance of Paul's universalism for today. This relevance is informed by postmodernism, poststructuralism, and feminism, though not filtered through it. By this I mean that Boyarin does not uncritically adopt postmodern, poststructuralist, or feminist assumptions. It should be noted that there is a lot to be gained from this book even if your only interest is in biblical exegesis and you don’t care about modern day relevance. If this is the case, I suppose you can skip the last two chapters.
My only complaint about the book is the way the endnotes were handled. Much of the narrative material in the endnotes was of such interest that they really should have been incorporated into the main body of the text. But flipping back and forth between the text and endnotes was very tedious, especially to turn to a note, only to read, "I discuss this passage in detail in the next chapter," or, "See next chapter for details." However, most of the notes are not to be missed, especially the note on chapter 10 which contained insights on Zionism (really these should have been incorporated in the main text!) My solution, which really wasn’t much of a solution, was to read the notes en masse after finishing reading the main text. Next time I read this book I will read it the "right" way, flipping back between main text and endnotes, tedious though this shall be.
My only complaint about the book is the way the endnotes were handled. Much of the narrative material in the endnotes was of such interest that they really should have been incorporated into the main body of the text. But flipping back and forth between the text and endnotes was very tedious, especially to turn to a note, only to read, "I discuss this passage in detail in the next chapter," or, "See next chapter for details." However, most of the notes are not to be missed, especially the note on chapter 10 which contained insights on Zionism (really these should have been incorporated in the main text!) My solution, which really wasn’t much of a solution, was to read the notes en masse after finishing reading the main text. Next time I read this book I will read it the "right" way, flipping back between main text and endnotes, tedious though this shall be.
March 10, 2014
I'm not at all persuaded by his cultural politics, but he does have some interesting arguments about Pauline exegesis
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