Joshua D. Garroway Pauls Gentile-Jews Neither Jew Nor Gentile, But Both

Paul’s Gentile-Jews
Paul’s Gentile-Jews
Neither Jew nor Gentile, but Both
Joshua D. Garroway
paul’s gentile-jews
Copyright © Joshua D. Garroway, 2012.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a

division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by
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company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
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Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United
Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978-1-137-28113-5
An earlier version of Chapter 5 originally appeared as “The Circumcision of Christ:

Romans 15:7–13” in the Journal for the Study of the New Testament 34:4 (2012): 303–22,
and is reprinted here by permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Garroway, Joshua D.
Paul’s Gentile-Jews : neither Jew nor Gentile, but both / Joshua D. Garroway.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-137-28113-5 (hardback)
1. Bible. N.T. Romans—Criticism, interpretation, etc. 2. Identification (Religion)—
Biblical teaching. 3. Gentiles in the New Testament. 4. Jews in the New Testament.
5. Christians. I. Title.
BS2665.6.I33G37 2012
227’.106—dc23 2012020645
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Scribe Inc.
First edition: November 2012
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Kristine
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
List of Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
Part I
1 The Gentile-Jew 15
2 Paul’s “Christians” as “Gentile-Jews” 45
Part II
3 Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: Purpose and Audience 73
4 Romans 4:1–12: Gentiles as Descendants of
Abraham “According to the Flesh” 81
5 Romans 15:7–13: The Circumcision of Christ 115
6 Romans 9–11: Israel, (Un)naturally 135
Conclusion 163
Notes 167
Bibliography 209
Index 225
Acknowledgments
This book stems from a conversation over beers following a graduate semi-
nar at Yale University in the fall of 2004. From there it became a term
paper, and from there a prospectus, a dissertation, a revised manuscript, a re-
revised manuscript, and now finally a book. That development would surely
have been thwarted were it not for the kindness and assistance of others.
Three figures stand out: Michael Peppard has been involved since the
glasses first tipped. He has been a loyal friend, colleague, sounding board,
critic, and supporter—everything one hopes to find in a graduate school
classmate. Dale Martin has been, and continues to be, everything one
hopes to find in an adviser. Rabbi Michael J. Cook, my teacher at the
Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, first inspired me to
enter this field of study and has remained a trusted a confidant in matters
mundane to sublime. In addition to these “pillars,” other scholars have
commented on drafts and/or provided unpublished work, most notably
Jeremy Hultin, Harold Attridge, Adela Yarbro Collins, Daniel Boyarin,
Mark Nanos, Caroline Johnson Hodge, Jeremy Bakker, Larry Behrendt,
and the anonymous readers at the Journal for the Study of the New Testa-
ment who read a version of this book’s fifth chapter. The editors of that
journal have kindly permitted me to republish that material. Annalisa
Zox-Weaver helped tremendously in polishing up the prose.
Libraries have been a second home for much of my adult life, and I
am grateful to the staffs and benefactors of Sterling Memorial Library
at Yale University, the Davis Family Library at Middlebury College, the
Frances-Henry Library at the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of
Religion in Los Angeles, and the David Allan Hubbard Library at Fuller
Theological Seminary. I owe them all exorbitant sums for air condition-
ing and Internet.
The final step in the process has taken place at the Hebrew Union
College–Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, where as a mem-
ber of the faculty I have been privileged to work alongside inspiring col-
leagues and students. One colleague in particular has inspired me more
than anyone else: my wife, Kristine Henriksen Garroway, to whom this
volume is dedicated. Words cannot express the depth of her contribution
to this book or of my appreciation for it.
Abbreviations
AB Anchor Bible
AnBib Analectica Biblica
BAR Biblical Archaeology Review
BNTC Black’s New Testament Commentary
CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly
DJD Discoveries in the Judaean Desert
EKKNT Evangelisch-Katholischer Kommentar zum
Neuen Testament
GLAJJ Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism
HThKNT Herders theologischer Kommentar zum
Neuen Testament
HTR Harvard Theological Review
ICC International Critical Commentary
JBL Journal of Biblical Literature
JJS Journal of Jewish Studies
JSNT Journal for the Study of the New Testament
JTS Journal of Theological Studies
KEK Kritisch-exegetisher Kommentar über das
Neue Testament
LCL Loeb Classical Library
MNTC Moffatt New Testament Commentary
NIGTC New International Greek Testament
Commentary
NovT Novum Testamentum
NTS New Testament Studies
RB Revue Biblique
TDNT Theological Dictionary of the New Testament
ThKNT Theologischer Handkommentar zum
Neuen Testament
WBC Word Biblical Commentary
WUNT Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum
Neuen Testament
ZNW Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentliche
Wissenschaft
Introduction
Jews, Gentiles, and Christians

The theme of the present work is the Jewish identity of the first
generation of Gentile-Christians. This topic might sound strange. After
all, how does one evaluate the Jewish identity of Gentiles? Such a conun-
drum would seem to be even trickier when related to the Jewish identity
of Gentiles who are deemed Christians as well? This book proposes that
Gentile-Christians of the first century should in fact be considered Jews,
at least to some extent.
By Gentile-Christians, of course, I am referring to the Gentiles of the
eastern Mediterranean rim who, during the middle of the first century
CE, found themselves swept up by the preaching of an itinerant Jewish
preacher named Paul and who, as a result, came to believe in the God
of the Jews and to view themselves as a part of God’s people Israel. That
Paul was the self-proclaimed “apostle to the Gentiles,” Paul of Tarsus,
the author of at least seven letters in the New Testament who altered
history dramatically by bringing the gospel, or “good news,” about the
God of Israel to those outside of the Jewish community.1 In Antioch,
Ephesus, Corinth, Galatia, Philippi, Thessaloniki, and elsewhere, Paul
and his associates called upon Gentiles to confide in the God of Israel
and to confess their faith in God’s son, Jesus Christ, whose recent death
and resurrection in Jerusalem had made possible their salvation from the
wrath of God about to be visited on the world. The end was drawing
near, Paul insisted, and only those reconciled to the God of Israel through
baptism into Christ would find acquittal when Christ returned to judge
the world. Importantly, however, Paul did not call upon these Gentiles to
be circumcised or to observe Jewish rituals, such as dietary restrictions or
Sabbath rest, because on his reckoning faith and baptism sufficed to draw
Gentiles near to the God of Israel. Because Paul did not compel these
Gentiles to convert to Judaism as such, historians have not considered
them Jews in any way, shape, or form. They skipped over Judaism, as it
were, transformed from “Gentiles” into “Christians,” and thus analysis of
Jewish identity in the ancient world has rarely taken them into account.2
2 Paul’s Gentile-Jews
Hence the strangeness of my opening remark: on the standard reckoning,

Gentile-Christians have no Jewish identity to be examined.
To be sure, not everyone baptized into Christ during the first century
stepped outside the bounds of Jewish identity. Historians of Christian
origins now widely accept that the first Jews who became Christians—
Peter and Paul, for instance—remained Jews through and through after
their baptism. They became “Jewish-Christians”—or “Christian Jews,”
as some prefer—a subset of the widely diverse first-century Jewish com-
munity, “Christian” Jews akin to “Pharisaic” Jews, “Sadducean” Jews, and
others. Only over the course of several generations did these Christian
Jews distinguish themselves from Judaism proper, at least as it came to
be defined by the Pharisees and their supposed successors, the rabbis.
Baptized Gentiles, on the other hand, at least those whose baptism was
supervised by Paul and was therefore unaccompanied by circumcision or
Law observance, for all intents and purposes bypassed Jewish identity.
They became Christians, not Jews.
Recently, some historians have expressed the concern that classifying
figures from the middle of the first century CE as Christians, including
Paul’s charges, is methodologically suspect.3 Although it has been standard
historical practice for centuries, these historians allege that employing the
term “Christian” is actually incompatible with Paul’s own descriptions
of his ministry and theology. One of the most startling revelations to
students approaching the New Testament for the first time or, for that
matter, to many seasoned readers who have never noticed it, is that Paul
never once uses the term “Christian” (or “Christianity”). Indeed, there is
reason to believe that the word did not yet exist in the 50s and early 60s
CE when Paul penned his letters, as the earliest occurrences of the term
come from texts originating at the end of the first century CE or later.4
Paul refers to his Gentile charges by any number of names—as “Gen-
tiles,” as “descendants of Abraham,” as “saints,” and frequently simply as
“you”—but not once does he call them “Christians.” Hard as it may be to
believe, Paul had never heard of “Christians.”
As such, one wonders why the majority of historians continue to
employ the term “Christian” so facilely when classifying Paul’s charges.
Why the ongoing willingness to apply a term from the late first century
CE and later to persons from the middle of the first century, an anachro-
nistic retrojection that runs the risk of misrepresenting Paul’s ideas? The
trend probably arises from the apparent lack of a superior alternative.
One supposes that something about the identity of these Gentiles changed
when they were baptized into Christ and thus there must be some name to
apply to individuals and communities who viewed that baptism as their
Introduction 3
distinctive rite of initiation. If one cannot call them “Jews” because the
baptism was not complemented by circumcision and Law observance,
then the term “Christian” must suffice, even if the word itself was not
coined until a few decades later. In other words, “Christian” is the best, if
not the perfect, option.
I have long been struck by the reluctance to identify Paul’s charges
as “Jews,” not because I myself believe these Gentiles became Jews on
account of their baptism, but because Paul evidently did. Many of the
terms he uses to describe his charges are undeniably Jewish in nature.
In his epistle to the Galatians, for example, Paul goes to great lengths
to prove to his readers that, despite their Gentile pedigrees, they are in
fact “children of Abraham,” a designation clearly descriptive of the Jewish
people.5 Likewise, when writing to the Philippians, Paul refers to himself
and his readers as “the circumcision,” a moniker that certainly reads like a
synecdoche for circumcised Jews.6 To the Gentiles of Corinth, Paul speaks
of the biblical patriarchs as “our” ancestors, whereas to the Romans he
suggests that any person baptized into Christ, whether a Jew or a Gentile
originally, becomes a member of “Israel.” If Paul so eagerly applies Jewish
terminology to his charges, why has there been such hesitation to con-
sider the possibility that Paul believed baptism into Christ, rather than
circumcision and Law observance, was the way by which Gentiles become
Jews in the wake of Christ’s death and resurrection? Why the insistence
that they bypass Judaism rather than become a part of it?
Perhaps this response stems from the fact that Paul also refers to the
same people in terms that clearly distinguish them from Jews! In his first
epistle to the Thessalonians, for example, probably the earliest of his
surviving letters, Paul warns the Thessalonians about the Jews allegedly
persecuting the churches in Judea, and the tenor of Paul’s statement sug-
gests that the Gentile recipients of the letter are not considered “Jews.”
Whatever they are, they are not Jews. A decade or so later, when Paul is
writing to the Romans, he says explicitly that he is writing to “you Gen-
tiles,” a characterization that again makes it near impossible to suggest
that Paul considers his Gentile audience to be Jews. And yet, earlier in
the same epistle Paul insists that “you Gentiles” are authentic descendants
of Abraham, and just a few verses later he describes them as branches in
the family tree of Israel! In virtually one breath, then, Paul describes his
charges in both Jewish and Gentile terms. Somehow or another, it seems,
they are Gentiles and Jews.
But that is impossible, is it not? One cannot be a Gentile and a Jew
at once.
Importing the term “Christian” has long served as the solution to

this crux interpretum. By the middle of the second century CE, Chris-
tian identity had come to be conceptualized by many self-proclaimed
Christians as a transethnic, religious category that depended on belief
rather than descent. They further believed that the community of faith-
ful Christians constituted the spiritual successor to God’s people Israel,
so that Christians might reasonably understand themselves to be Israel
in the spiritual sense even if they were, as nearly all of them were by the
second century, Gentiles by extraction. Hence a noted second-century
Christian thinker like Justin Martyr speaks of the Christian community
as “Spiritual Israel.”7 When this second-century conception of Christian
identity is brought to bear on the interpretation of Paul’s epistles, the jar-
ring juxtaposition of Jewish and Gentile terminology can be resolved. So
long as Paul, too, thinks of his charges as Christians, then at times he can
speak of them in explicitly Jewish terms because he believed them to be
so in spiritual terms—that is, “spiritual” descendants of Abraham, “spiri-
tual” Israel, the “spiritual” circumcision, and so on—whereas at other
times he refers to them in Gentile terms because he believed them to be
so in ethnic terms. The notion of a transethnic, spiritual Christian iden-
tity allows Paul to conflate a spiritualized Jewish identity and an ethnic
Gentile identity.
It bears repeating, however, that a uniquely “Christian” identity is
simply not a part of Paul’s lexicon. Paul never uses the term. It is sen-
sible to ask, therefore, whether we should continue to use either the term
“Christian” or the concept it implies—a religious identity stripped of
ethnic affiliation—when Paul himself never does. Taking this issue to
heart, a few recent commentators have striven to resolve the contradic-
tory terminology in Paul’s epistles without relying on the anachronistic
notion of a universalizing Christian identity. Among the best of these
efforts is Caroline Johnson Hodge’s If Sons, Then Heirs: A Study of Kin-
ship and Ethnicity in the Letters of Paul.8 According to Johnson Hodge,
Paul draws on ancient discourses of kinship, ethnicity, and adoption in
order to persuade his Gentile audiences that through Christ they have
become a companion people to God’s original people Israel. Baptized
Gentiles have not been incorporated into Israel, but rather have become
the adopted relatives of the Israelites who likewise trace their descent back
to Abraham. God possesses two distinct, but related, peoples in the wake
of Christ, Jews on the one hand and Gentiles in Christ on the other. This
approach to Paul enables Johnson Hodge to account for at least some of
Paul’s variable descriptions of his charges. He insists that they are sons
of Abraham, for example, because he believes that, even if they are not
Introduction 5
physical descendants of Abraham and constituents of the people Israel,

they have become adopted descendants of Abraham—and therefore puta-
tive descendants—and, accordingly, they are justified in claiming him as
an ancestor. They nonetheless remain Gentiles and, at times, Paul there-
fore refers to them as such. But Paul never calls them “Christians” because
he did not conceive of categories beyond “Jew” and “Gentile.”
Johnson Hodge has taken a step in the right direction, I believe, and I
single out her achievement because it influences my own thinking about
Paul’s letters considerably. Paul indeed utilizes the discourse of kinship
to construct an expressly ethnic, Abrahamic identity for his Gentile con-
verts to Christ. I would like to push that insight even further in these
pages, however, by proposing that Paul’s reimagining of the boundaries
of ancient Israel is more dramatic and scandalous than Johnson Hodge
supposes. Paul does not furnish an Abrahamic lineage for his Gentile
initiates with the intention of making them merely into a companion
people to Israel; the idea of two covenanted peoples of God—an original
and a belated one—would have been incomprehensible to Paul. Rather,
Paul insists upon the Abrahamic origins of baptized Gentiles because he
believes that they have become a part of the genuine people of Israel.
Faith, in Paul’s view, turns Gentiles into authentic descendants of the
patriarchs, authentic Israelites, authentically ethnic Jews, because the
death and resurrection of Christ fundamentally altered the way that the
identity of Israel was to be reckoned in the last stage of human history.9
Where descent from the patriarchs, genital circumcision, and observance
of the Law had designated the extent of Israel in previous generations,
now each of those ethnic markers could be achieved through Christ
and Christ alone. Faith in Christ made a person into a descendant from
Abraham; faith in Christ made one circumcised; faith in Christ made it
possible to observe the righteous dictates of the Law. Through Christ,
Paul believed, Gentiles could become ethnic Jews through and through;
as Jews, God’s elect people Israel, they could then stand justified before
Christ when he returned imminently to judge the world.
Yes, the premise of Paul’s mission was that Gentiles should be reck-
oned as authentic, circumcised, ethnic Jews because of the transformation
wrought in them as a result of their faith and baptism into Christ. That,
quite simply, is the point I will be arguing in this book. In Paul’s mind,
at least, his charges were Jews, not Christians, which is why he identifies
them not only as “descendants of Abraham” but also as “Israel,” as “the
circumcision,” and, as I will argue shortly, even as “Jews.” Not “spiritual”
descendants of Abraham or “spiritual” Israel, a qualification that Paul
never employs because, on his reckoning, they are the genuine article: the
descendants of Abraham, the Israel.
My challenge, then, is to explain why Paul at times alludes to these
apparent Jews as Gentiles and, correspondingly, why Paul sometimes
uses terms like “Israel,” “the circumcision,” and “Jews” with reference to
groups that do not exhibit faith in Christ. In other words, where most
other studies must explain why Paul refers to his charges in explicitly
Jewish terms if he in fact understands them to be Gentiles, my task is
just the opposite—to explain why Paul refers to his charges in explicitly
Gentile terms if he in fact understands them to be the most authentic sort
of Jew. As I demonstrate throughout this study, Paul’s rhetoric is “double
voiced” precisely because his effort to redefine the terms of Jewish iden-
tity requires him at the same time to invoke and validate the normative
conceptions of Jewish identity against which he inveighs. In other words,
Paul cannot redefine what he thinks Jewish identity is without simultane-
ously acknowledging what everyone else thinks it is; the result is an inher-
ently self-contradictory discourse in which Paul constantly intermingles
his own voice with the normative discourse he opposes.
Though I delve into the nature of this double voicedness as the book
unfolds, drawing in particular on the insights of the acclaimed linguist
and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, a brief example might be helpful
at this point to convey the direction in which I will be heading. Consider
Paul’s double-voiced discussion about Israel in Romans 9–11.10 At the
outset of this famous treatise on the fate of Israel, Paul proclaims that
“not all those descended from Israel are Israel” (Rom. 9:6b), a declaration
that hardly masks Paul’s intention to redefine what it means to be a part
of Israel. His meaning is clear: God’s people Israel is not constitutive of
the full array of Israel’s—that is, Jacob’s—descendants; which is to say,
simply because one has Israel for an ancestor does not guarantee that
he or she is a part of God’s covenant people Israel. As Paul reveals in the
discussion that follows, inclusion in God’s people Israel is, and always
has been, a matter of faith, mercy, and promise rather than descent. Yet,
just a few verses after Paul has declared what Israel really is, Paul speaks
of Israel again, but this time as a wayward entity that “pursued the Law
of righteousness but did not obtain the Law [of righteousness]” (Rom.
9:31). In this case, Israel clearly refers to Jews who have rejected faith in
Christ. “Israel,” in other words, comes to mean exactly the opposite of
what “Israel” just meant! First, Paul speaks of Israel as an entity that neces-
sarily excludes disbelieving Jews, but then he speaks of Israel as an entity
that necessarily includes them. The reason for the contradiction is that,
in the first case, Paul refers to “Israel” as he understands it, whereas in the
Introduction 7
latter he refers to “Israel” as it is normatively construed. This paradox is

precisely what I mean when I say that Paul’s discourse is “double voiced”:
it conflates his own authentic voice with the voice he opposes, the estab-
lished voice. The result of the double voicing is an internally contradic-
tory discourse in which a key term of Jewish identity, in this case “Israel,”
means one thing and its opposite at the same time.
Such contradiction, I surmise, had a significant impact on the Gentiles
who admired Paul and read his letters in order to understand the impact
of Christ’s death and resurrection on their newfound status vis-à-vis the
God of Israel. On the one hand, Paul’s impassioned reappraisal of Jewish
identity might well have persuaded them that they had in fact become
“Israel” in the most authentic sense. On the other hand, that Paul also
invokes the normative discourse about Jewish identity confirmed for these
converts that, without circumcision and the adoption of Jewish rites and
rituals, they remained uncircumcised Gentiles, non-Israelites, foreigners
from God’s people Israel. Certainly they would have gotten this impres-
sion from Paul’s opponents, who derided his ideas as outrageous. Paul’s
conflicted discourse, therefore, facilitated and reflected the formation of a
contested, conflicted, ambiguous identity for his uncircumcised converts
to Christ. They were really Jews, Paul insisted, but they were really not
Jews according to the standard reckoning, as even Paul would concede.
They were Gentiles. They were also Jews. They were, as I will suggest in
this book, Gentiles and Jews, “Gentile-Jews.”
Gentile-Jews
Of course, opting to describe Paul’s charges as “Gentile-Jews” rather than
“Gentile-Christians” presents difficulties in its own right. While avoiding
the unjustified introduction of the term “Christian” into an analysis of
Paul, it requires the deployment of a term that appears to be a nonsensical
contradiction. If a Gentile, by definition, is not a Jew, then to speak of a
person as both a Gentile and a Jew is impossible as a matter of course. It
would be tantamount to suggesting, for example, that parallel lines inter-
sect (in Euclidian space) or that an animal is also a plant. The term on
either side of the hyphen necessarily excludes the other. Why bother, then,
to replace one problematic expression of identity, “Gentile-Christian,”
with another one, “Gentile-Jew”?
In the first place, as I have already suggested, the latter term adheres
more rigorously to the categories of identity Paul himself uses to con-
struct reality. Paul speaks in the terms of Jews and Gentiles, not Chris-
tians. Even more important, I will argue, the apparent drawback of the
proposed expression is in fact its distinctive advantage. Paul’s letters are
rife with contradictory deployment of Jewish and Gentile terminology

precisely because the apostle was seeking to produce a category of identity
that did not yet have a name. Paul’s contention that faith in Christ trans-
forms Gentiles into ethnic Jews—circumcised, Law-abiding, descendants
of Abraham—was radically innovative and, as such, defied the bounds
of language. That is to say, Paul had no consistent and coherent way to
describe this new sort of Jew. Calling them “Jews,” “Israel,” or “descen-
dants of Abraham” defied the standard usage of those terms; yet to call
them Gentiles undermined his own dogged insistence that they had
ceased to be such. No alternative was available to him, however, because a
third category that was “neither Jew nor Gentile,” as Paul puts it in Gala-
tians 3:28, did not yet exist. When interpreters retrospectively provide
Paul that tertium quid by introducing “Christians,” they resolve what is
left unresolved in Paul’s own discourse. The catachrestical term “Gentile-
Jew,” on the other hand, reflects rather than resolves Paul’s incapacity to
describe the identity of his charges with a consistent, coherent term.
Not only does “Gentile-Jew” capture Paul’s own fraught discourse bet-
ter than “Gentile-Christian,” but I will further contend that the ambiva-
lence expressed in both the term and the conflicted identity it describes
may explain why the neologism “Christian” ultimately emerged and pro-
liferated in the years following Paul’s ministry. In pursuing this line of
argument, I draw upon the insights of Homi K. Bhabha, the postcolonial
critic who is perhaps best known for his theory of cultural “hybridity.”11
In his analysis of colonial discourse, Bhabha shows that the articulation
of identities—ethnic, religious, national, or otherwise—never succeeds
in achieving an unambiguous distinction between one category of iden-
tity and its alternative(s). Colonial representations of Englishness, for
example, invariably adopt and inscribe the voice of the indigenous “non-
English” other, thereby creating a “double-voiced,” or hybrid, discourse in
which Englishness can never be completely differentiated from non-Eng-
lishness. In this and other articulations of supposed cultural dichotomy
there is always what Bhabha calls a “Third Space,” a space “unrepresent-
able in itself ” that is “neither the one thing nor the other.”12 This hybrid
space is both “unrepresentable” and “unresolvable” because it can only be
described in the terms of the very dichotomy it resists.13 Colonial repre-
sentations of Englishness, in other words, invariably show traces of a non-
English Englishness, a hybrid, in-between identity for which no name as
yet exists. My argument, naturally, will be that the same phenomenon
is at work in Paul’s articulation of Jewish identity some twenty centu-
ries earlier: his representation of Jewishness produces a third category of
Introduction 9
identity—a non-Jewish Jew, a Gentile-Jew—which he can neither repre-

sent nor resolve given the constraints of his discursive world.
The reason Bhabha’s conceptualization of identity is especially valu-
able for this study is his emphasis on the generative and productive pos-
sibility of that anonymous third space. Those who are implicated in that
hybrid middle ground, who live in the interstices of culture as neither
one thing nor the other, face a fraught, decentered, dislocated, and con-
flicted existence. Such anxiousness, however, is culturally fecund accord-
ing to Bhabha because it elicits from cultural hybrids original and creative
efforts to negotiate their relationship to the paradigms with which they
fail to comply, to continually reimagine who and what they are, a pro-
cess of discovery that leads inevitably to new cultural expressions and
categories of identity. For this reason, Bhabha identifies hybrid liminal-
ity as a “third space of enunciation,” a place between the alternatives of
hegemonic discourse in which new forms of identification can be pro-
claimed, or “enunciated.” In my historical reconstruction, it is no coinci-
dence that a uniquely “Christian” identity—a third identity distinct from
“Jew” and “Gentile”—emerged in the generation immediately following
Paul’s ministry. Paul discursively constructed for his charges a fraught
Gentile-Jewish identity in which they were Jews but not Jews, Gentiles
but not Gentiles, and for those who assumed this self-understanding the
conflict ultimately proved too unstable to endure. It was too difficult, in
other words, to continue being “neither Jew nor Gentile.” Faced with the
impossibility of straddling the Gentile-Jewish boundary, then, spiritual
and intellectual successors of Paul such as Ignatius and Justin began to
imagine themselves as something altogether different. They were neither
Jews nor Gentiles, but Christians. Paul’s production of a hybrid, Gentile-
Jewish identity, therefore, was instrumental in the emergence of a unique
Christian identity, even if it was not Paul who first “enunciated” it.
Accordingly, this study recasts contemporary debates over the role
played by Paul in the emergence and development of Christianity. Many
historians have suggested that Paul, by introducing the gospel of Christ
to Gentiles without demanding circumcision or Law observance, trans-
formed the new Jewish movement so drastically—both demographi-
cally and theologically—that a schism with the larger Jewish community
proved inescapable. Some have even referred to Paul as the founder of
Christianity because he, more so than Jesus, Peter, or anyone else, devised
a religious identity that was qualitatively different from, and incompat-
ible with, Judaism. For other historians, however, it has been difficult
to conceive of Paul as the founder of Christianity, or even as a decisive
factor in the emergence of Christianity, if he predates the origin of the
term itself. Thus more recent theorizing about the rise of Christianity
has shifted its focus away from Paul and toward the discursive emergence
of Christianity in the second century and later—that is, when terms like
“Christian” and “Christianity” came into being. Indeed, some treatments
of Christian origins have opted not to consider Paul at all. Yet such dis-
regard for Paul’s role in the process hardly seems appropriate. Surely Paul
has something to do with the birth of Christianity, even if our understand-
ing of this role must be controlled by the fact that he precedes the advent
of the term itself. As I see it, the notions of hybridity and enunciation
may help to clarify the issue if we recognize that Paul’s production of a
hybrid, Gentile-Jewish identity generated the tension necessary for the
articulation of a unique Christian identity in subsequent generations.
Paul sowed, as it were, and his successors reaped.
Thus identifying Paul’s charges as “Gentile-Jews” is not just a vacuous
novelty, a clever innovation for saying the same old thing about Paul. As I
have just suggested, the term and the hybrid identity it both reflects and
evinces allow us to reconceptualize Paul’s role in the origins of Christian-
ity in a way that accommodates his failure to utilize the terms of Chris-
tian identity themselves. Just as importantly, however, reconfiguring the
way we approach Paul’s identification of his charges yields a tremendous
exegetical benefit, allowing for previously unimaginable interpretations
of important passages in the Pauline corpus. Once we acknowledge that
Paul’s objective in many sections of his epistles is to reevaluate the param-
eters of ethnic Jewish identity, however incomplete and hybridizing that
reevaluation proves to be, then several key passages take on a whole new
meaning. In the second part of this book, I offer close readings of three
such passages, each of which reading departs considerably from the stan-
dard array of interpretations.
So for example, in looking at Romans 2–4 I argue that Paul dramati-
cally reconfigures Jewish identity while engaging in an extended debate
with a Gentile interlocutor.14 Paul’s partner in conversation, introduced
in Romans 2:1, accepts Paul’s basic premise that a Gentile must become
a Jew in order to escape the imminent wrath of God, but he naturally
figures that circumcision and Law observance will secure his new sta-
tus as a Jew. On the contrary, Paul insists, that mode of conversion will
prove worthless for a Gentile in the present day and age. Neither his
circumcision nor his doomed effort to obey the Law will repair his incor-
rigibly sinful, Gentile character. Christ alone can do so. Indeed, as Paul
explains, faith in Christ will enable the Gentile to observe the Law prop-
erly; faith in Christ will also make him as though he were circumcised
(Rom. 2:26), as though he were a Jew (Rom. 2:28). As Paul goes on to
Introduction 11
explain in Romans 4:1–16, the transformation of the Gentile into a Jew is

so thoroughgoing that the Gentile may even lay claim to the most exclu-
sive ethnic Jewish identification: descent from Abraham “according to the
flesh.” In Romans 4:1, Paul’s Gentile interlocutor asks whether a Gentile
baptized into Christ might go so far as to say that he has Abraham as an
ancestor according to the flesh, a claim Paul affirms in 4:11–12 when he
contends that a Gentile who exhibits Abraham-like faith shares in the
fleshly circumcision received by Abraham as the fleshly seal for his faith.
As Paul puts it, Abraham becomes an “ancestor of ‘the circumcision,’”
a circumcised group that now includes “those who follow the example
of the faith that our ancestor Abraham had before he was circumcised”
(Rom. 4:12).
Turning then to Romans 15:7–13, I show that Abraham became an
“ancestor of the circumcision” to Gentiles at the same time that Christ
became an “agent of circumcision” for them. Despite the nearly unani-
mous view that this passage marks the culmination of Paul’s exhortation
for Jews and Gentiles in Rome to set aside their differences and come
together as one, I find a call for Gentiles of various stripes and inclina-
tions to treat one another kindly. Paul justifies his call for Gentile unity
by appealing to the generosity bestowed upon them all by Christ. Just as
Christ welcomed Gentiles into the glory of God by including them in
the patriarchal covenant, so the quarreling Gentiles in Rome should wel-
come one another. Christ brought them into the covenant by becoming
an “agent of circumcision,” as Paul calls him in Romans 15:8, because his
death and resurrection made available the faith by which Gentiles could
achieve circumcision, the entrance requirement for the covenant, in a
radically new way. As it turns out, Paul does require circumcision for his
Gentile converts, he simply does not believe in the sort of circumcision
wrought by a knife.
Lastly, I look at Romans 9–11, Paul’s famous deliberation over the
Jews’ widespread reluctance to embrace the gospel. Again, contrary to
the conventional view, I do not see Paul resolving the problem of Jewish
unbelief by predicting that, in one way or another, all or most Jews will
see the light. Rather, I propose that Paul redefines the boundaries of Israel
so as to include baptized Gentiles and to exclude all who have not com-
mitted to Christ, even Jews.15 What appears to be the unbelief of most
of Israel (i.e., most Jews) is, in fact, no such thing at all because what
most people think is really Israel is, in fact, not Israel. As I go on to show,
however, the logic and scheme Paul uses to redefine Israel betrays its own
fundamentally hybridizing effect. The metaphor Paul chooses to illustrate
the redefinition, the olive tree of Romans 11:17–24, reveals that, even
as God incorporates Gentiles into the family tree of Israel on account of

their faith, thus effectively making them authentic descendants of the
patriarchs, they nevertheless remain Gentiles to a certain degree. They are
“wild” branches that have been “unnaturally” grafted into a “cultivated”
tree, imagery suggesting that baptized Gentiles become Israelites in some
respects, but remain non-Israelites in others. They become, as I will insist
throughout the book, Gentile-Jews.
Before coming to these interpretations, however, I first examine the
historical and theoretical assumptions that undergird them. To that end,
the book begins by exploring in greater detail the notion of Gentile-Jewish
identity with which I have been engaged in this introduction. The open-
ing chapter contextualizes Paul’s ministry by considering the articulation
of Gentile-Jewish identities in the first century more broadly. Examining
an array of literature aimed specifically at describing transitions to Jewish
identity—that is, texts depicting how Gentiles become Jews or, alterna-
tively, what such Jews are like in the wake of that change—I demonstrate
the ways in which these texts expose ambiguity in first-century Jewish
identity. Then I turn my attention to Paul, showing how Paul’s effort to
redefine the key terms of Jewish identity is similarly hybridizing in its
effects. On the one hand, Paul insists that his charges have been trans-
formed into the most authentic sort of Jew on account of their faith in
Christ; at the same time, however, the way in which Paul presents that
reappraisal both confirms and reinforces the normative meanings of the
very terms Paul seeks to redefine. Thus while insisting that his charges are
Jews, Israelites, and circumcised descendants of Abraham, Paul simulta-
neously proves that they are manifestly not Jews, Israelites, or circumcised
descendants of Abraham, at least not as those terms of identity are norma-
tively construed. The result of these competing voices, I maintain, is the
construction of a hybridized Gentile-Jewish identity.
Part I
CHAPTER 1
The Gentile-Jew
Nero’s Nuptials: A Thought Experiment

Few Roman emperors are as well known today as the one who ruled
Rome from 54 CE until his suicide in 68 CE, Nero Claudius Caesar
Drusus Germanicus. Thanks in large part to the unflattering, albeit preju-
diced, descriptions of his reign from the Roman historians Suetonius,
Tacitus, and Cassius Dio, Nero has become a symbol of extravagance
and despotism in Western culture, an icon of power run amok. Witness
the 1951 epic Quo Vadis? (based on Henry Sienkiewicz’s Nobel prize–
winning novel), in which Peter Ustinov gives the timeless cinematic por-
trayal of Nero as an arrogant, insatiable, and diabolical tyrant who thrills
in the suffering of others and in his own orgiastic frenzies.1
Less notorious in popular culture is Nero’s second wife, Poppaea
Augusta Sabina, who married the emperor in 62 CE already pregnant
with their first child. According to the same Roman historians, Poppaea
was no less indulgent, cold-blooded, or ambitious than her husband. She
capitalized on her exquisite beauty and feminine wiles to secure her posi-
tion as empress, urging Nero first to murder his mother, Agrippina, and
then to banish (and ultimately execute) his first wife, Octavia.2 Admit-
tedly, not every ancient source paints so uncomplimentary a portrait of
Poppaea. Graffiti from Poppaea’s hometown of Pompeii, which not coin-
cidentally gained the advantageous status of colonia during Nero’s reign,
salutes her impact on imperial decrees.3 The Jewish historian Josephus,
who claims to have known Poppaea personally, extols her as a “pious
woman” and praises what he believes to be her advocacy on behalf of Jew-
ish subjects in the empire.4
Ultimately, whether Josephus, his Roman counterparts, or the graf-
fiti at Pompeii most accurately represents Poppaea is of little concern
here. Each source has an axe to grind and the accounts have been shaped
accordingly. I introduce the relatively obscure Poppaea in order to provide
historical context for the thought experiment from which I will launch
this chapter’s exploration of the category “Gentile-Jew.” The experiment

requires the suspension of disbelief, so I beg the reader’s indulgence:
Imagine, as best you can, the imperial wedding of Nero and Poppaea
in 62 CE. No doubt it was a spectacular gala, as both figures reportedly
relished extravagance. Now imagine that every subject of the empire has
accepted an invitation to the event. Marshaling forty million or so bodies
into one place would be impossible, of course, but fortunately the mind’s
eye is unconstrained by such physical limitations. Now picture the (very
long) reception line that forms to receive the happy couple. Again, the
amount of time required to shake forty million pairs of hands need not
detain us. Lastly, and this part is the most important part of the experi-
ment, imagine that Poppaea, who according to Josephus had a soft spot
in her heart for Jews and their causes, has requested that the Jews of the
empire be placed first in line. “Jews to the front,” she commands the cen-
turions, as the miles-long column takes its form. Jews stream toward the
front of the line while non-Jews weave their way to the rear.
Can you picture such a line? What does it look like? The part of the line
in which I am especially interested is the dividing line between the Jews
and the non-Jews. Based on a speculative estimation of the Jewish popula-
tion of the empire at the time, the point of transition would fall close to
the front of the line, probably after a million or so souls.5 But what does
that transition look like? Is there a single point in the line, two identifiable
persons, where the changeover from Jew to non-Jew takes place?
The assumption guiding this chapter is that the answer is quite simply
“no.” We could rather easily arrange this reception line in such a way that
the first hands shaken by Nero and Poppaea would be indisputably Jewish
and the last hands indisputably Gentile, but precisely when the subjects
switched from Jewish to Gentile would be impossible to determine. At
no point in their procession through the line would Nero and Poppaea
be able say, “Here is the last Jew in the line, and here the first non-Jew.”
On the contrary, between the obvious Jews in the front and the obvious
Gentiles at the rear, we could situate a host of figures whose identifica-
tion as Jews would be contested and ambiguous—figures who are not
entirely Jews but not entirely Gentiles, subjects whom I will characterize
as “Gentile-Jews.”
Some readers may recognize this thought experiment. It is a variation
of the “wave theory” of identity put forward recently by Daniel Boya-
rin, a prominent voice in the study of ancient Jewish identity.6 Notably,
however, Boyarin is less interested in the identification of Jews vis-à-vis
non-Jews in the first century CE than of Jews versus Christians in the
second through fifth centuries CE. According to Boyarin, Judaism and
The Gentile-Jew 17
Christianity were not discretely bounded cultural entities by the late first
century CE, as is widely believed. In fact, the two religions were but poles
on a vast spectrum of cultural identification that Boyarin calls “Judaeo-
Christianity.” And between the obvious Jews and the obvious Christians
were a vast array of hybridized Jewish-Christian identities. To illustrate
this spectrum of identities, Boyarin imagines a traveler’s journey from
Paris to Florence. Were he to stop in each village along the way, Boyarin
proposes, the traveler would realize at the outset of the trek that the cities
were in France because French would be the language spoken. Toward
the end of the march, likewise, he would know he had crossed over into
Italy because the language in the cities would be unmistakably Italian.
In the middle of the journey, however, the traveler would not be able to
determine when he had crossed from France into Italy without the help
of signs, nor would he be able to identify the point at which he stopped
hearing French and began to hear Italian. As Boyarin explains, “There
is no linguistic border ‘on the ground.’ The reason we speak French and
Italian as separate languages is precisely because the dialect of Paris and
the dialect of Florence have been canonized as the national languages.”7
The languages are not bounded entities, but poles on a spectrum with
many gradations of “Franco-Italian” between. The analogy to Boyarin’s
ancient subject is obvious. As he puts it, “Social contact and the grada-
tions of religious life were such that, barring the official pronouncements
of the leaders of what were to become the ‘orthodox’ versions of both
religions, one could travel, metaphorically, from rabbinic Jew to Christian
along a continuum where one hardly would know where one stopped and
the other began.”8
I am proposing a similar continuum in order to account for Jewish
identity in the first century CE. My hypothetical experiment is nearly
identical, if a bit more festive: an emperor and his wife could travel along
a continuum from Jew to Gentile in the middle of the first century, shak-
ing unmistakably Jewish hands at the outset and unmistakably Gen-
tile ones later on, never knowing precisely when the celebrants ceased
being Jews and began being Gentiles. Along the way, they would pass
through a “Gentile-Jewish” section of the line, the segment occupied by
“Gentile-Jews.”
Dispensing with Essences:

Constructing a Gentile-Jew
Some readers may object to the thought experiment on the grounds that
Jews and Gentiles could in fact be distinguished easily from one another
in 62 CE. Taking contemporary Jewish law as the standard, for example,
they might determine that birth from a Jewish mother served as the defin-
itive standard; those with a Jewish mother would have been in the front
of the line, those without in the rear, and the point when the transition
occurred could be determined. Others might put forward circumcision as
the essential marker of Jewish identity, at least for the male subjects. Cir-
cumcised males would be in the front, uncircumcised in the rear, and the
point where things changed would be clear, clothes notwithstanding. Still
others might suggest residence in Judea as the deciding factor, or belief in
the God of Israel, or obedience to the Torah. Indeed, if we were able to
reduce Jewish identity to any of these single factors, then objections to the
thought experiment would be insurmountable.
The fact is, however, that such essentialist approaches to cultural or
religious identity invariably fail to account for Jewish identity as it is reck-
oned in reality. The evidence belies any effort to establish the “neces-
sary and sufficient” characteristic that marks off Jewish identity from its
alternative. Just take circumcision, the trait so often hailed as the deci-
sive marker of male Jewish identity. It is beyond dispute that there were
uncircumcised males in antiquity who nevertheless identified themselves
as Jews and were recognized as Jews by others. Hellenizing Jews in the
days of the Hasmonean revolt, for example, were known to reverse their
own circumcisions; others refrained, voluntarily or not, from circumcis-
ing their Jewish sons. Two centuries later, Philo of Alexandria tells of Jews
who understood the Torah’s command to circumcise in purely allegori-
cal terms and accordingly renounced its practice. Still later, the rabbis
of the Talmud agreed that boys not subjected to circumcision because
they suffered from hemophilia were nonetheless Jews. Male circumcision,
therefore, cannot be taken as an indispensable indicator of ancient Jew-
ish identity. Nor was it “sufficient,” because if circumcision alone made
a man a Jew then Egyptian priests, among other circumcised males in
antiquity, would be deemed Jews, an obviously absurd classification. Fea-
tures beyond the absence of a foreskin are required to identify an ancient
man as a Jew. Circumcision, therefore, cannot qualify as the essential
marker of Jewish identity.9
Indeed, no single factor will do. Matrilineal descent, monotheistic
faith, birth or residence in Judea—none of these can serve as the sine
qua non, the essential feature without which one cannot be considered
a Jew.10 Identification of ancient Jews would be easier if there were such
a feature, but there is not. Accordingly, historians must employ a more
sophisticated method when considering ancient Jewish identity, one that
evaluates identity as a configuration of related traits rather than a sin-
gle characteristic. Jonathan Z. Smith has dubbed such an approach the
The Gentile-Jew 19
“polythetic” method of classifying groups.11 In contrast to the “mono-

thetic” method, which (unsuccessfully) seeks out the sine qua non, poly-
thetic approaches to identity enumerate an inventory of characteristics
typical to a group in a particular time and place and then examine the
configuration of those characteristics in the surviving evidence. Each
member of the group would exhibit at least some of the characteristics,
and each characteristic would be exhibited by at least some of the mem-
bers, but no single characteristic would mark off every member of the
group. A helpful illustration of this method of classification is the human
family. No single trait—for example, a particular height, weight, or hair
color—is possessed by every member of a family, yet the members of any
family share a sufficient number of traits to differentiate them from other
families. Tall stature, red hair, or intelligence might run in a family, but
one need not be tall, redheaded, or intelligent to be a part of that family
and, correspondingly, not every tall, redheaded, or intelligent person in
the world is a member of the same family. The helpfulness of the family
as an analogy to this mode of classifying things probably explains why the
Austrian philosopher who made it famous, Ludwig Wittgenstein, called it
Familienähnlichkeit, or the “family-resemblance” method of classification.
This book demurs from proposing a full-scale polythetic description
of Jewish identity in the first century, which would require first enumer-
ating a large number of traits characteristic of Jews in antiquity, then
tracing the configuration of those traits in the surviving evidence. Such a
project would be worthwhile, but massive, and would lead us far astray of
the ultimate objective. Nevertheless, a more limited engagement with the
family-resemblance method enables us to defend, theoretically at least,
the claim that no clear-cut distinction between Jew and Gentile would
exist in the hypothetical reception line at the imperial wedding. As we
will see, the method does not accommodate neatly bounded identities.
Let us start by drafting a list of typical Jewish attributes in the first
century CE.12 Here are 12: (1) circumcision; (2) observance of dietary
laws, (3) Sabbath, or (4) festivals; (5) a Jewish mother; (6) a Jewish father;
(7) birth, or (8) residence in Judea; (9) expressed relationship with the
Jewish God; (10) knowledge of the Hebrew Bible; (11) familiarity with
Hebrew language; and (12) membership and/or participation in a syna-
gogue. Though by no means exhaustive, this list captures a wide range of
typical Jewish characteristics. It could be larger, but greater length would
not alter the nature of the argument. My claim is that a person exhibit-
ing all the characteristics would be obviously Jewish. A person exhibiting
most of them would probably be as well. But if we were to arrange our
reception line so that those bearing all 12 features were first, those with
11 coming next, and so forth, would there be a single point at which a

subject’s Jewishness would no longer be obvious? Is it five features? Three
features? When we have reached those exhibiting only one feature, would
they be distinguishable from the obviously Gentile persons bearing none
of the attributes? The polythetic mode does not, and cannot, specify the
number of attributes determining inclusion in the group. My surmise is
that some persons exhibiting five attributes would seem Jewish, whereas
others with a different five, or perhaps even the same five but expressed
in a different way, might seem Gentile. The same could be said of persons
with four, three, or two, even one attribute. In many cases we would
probably go back and forth in our minds, asking, “Which is this person,
a Jew or a Gentile?”
The point is that the polythetic mode of classification does not abide
neat borders around a group; it always situates some subjects within the
border. I emphasize within the border, and not on it, because the poly-
thetic method, without the sine qua non, does not produce a line separat-
ing one identity from another, but a gradation across which numerous
ambiguous identities exist. In short, the polythetic method prevents one
from separating the world into the categories “Jew” and “Gentile” with-
out creating at the same time a theoretical space for those who fit into
both groups, into neither, mostly into one but a little into the other, and
so on. “Jew” and “Gentile” do not reflect a binary division into two dis-
tinguishable essences, but a continuum along which, theoretically, every
shade of Gentile-Jew can exist.
This assertion is not to say that particular people or communities in
the first century did not draw hard-and-fast lines separating Jew from
Gentile. Although we do not possess anything resembling their bylaws,
synagogues in antiquity no doubt employed specific criteria for deter-
mining who could benefit from membership in the capacity of a Jew as
opposed to a non-Jew. Other Jewish institutions must have established
Jewish identity by one criterion or another for the sake of the Temple tax.
For their own part, non-Jewish authors, bureaucrats, or common folk
evaluated claims to Jewish status by standards they believed were valid.
But the standards employed in different places, at different times, and by
different people varied widely. We have already seen such variety mani-
fested in Palestine during the Hasmonean period and in Egypt at the time
of Philo. In both cases Jews disagreed over the necessity of circumcision
for Jewish identification. Just so readers do not think circumcision would
be the only subject of debate, however, consider another “dispute” among
contemporaries: the works of Josephus reveal that he believed birth to
a Jewish father or residence in Judea to be the most important factors
The Gentile-Jew 21
in determining Jewish identity; whereas according to the Roman histo-

rian Cassius Dio, birth was less important than behavior. He claims that
though the residents of Judea were called Jews, the name “also applies to
all other people who adhere to their customs even if they are from a differ-
ent nation.”13 In other words, where one was born or even to whom does
not matter; the mere devotion to Jewish observances makes one a Jew.
Historians must resist the temptation to evaluate these various claims,
as though one ancient person or group knows best what a Jew really is.
Once we dismiss the notion that Jews exist prior to their being described
as such, we are no longer in a position to say that one person knows what
a Jew is better than any other. We cannot say, for example, that Josephus
is right and Cassius Dio is mistaken.14 After all, the notion of mistaken-
ness is only possible when privilege is given to one particular understand-
ing of Jewish identity. Our focus instead should be on the way competing
uses of the name “Jew,” as well as other related terms, such as “Israel” or
“Israelite,” interact to create contested and negotiated identities.
One way to conceptualize such “negotiated” identities is to imagine an
alternative method of arranging our hypothetical reception line. Rather
than placing people in descending order according to a series of typical
attributes, we might entrust the placement of subjects to a committee
composed of various individuals from the empire. One such motley crew
might include a Roman bureaucrat or poet, a Pharisee, a so-called God-
fearer from Ephesus, a Qumranite, and a Corinthian innkeeper.15 Imag-
ine if every subject of the empire came before this committee, one by one,
to have his or her claim regarding Jewish identity evaluated. My surmise
is that many persons would be confirmed quickly as Jews, many more
would pass through without dispute as Gentiles. Some, at least, would
force the committee to linger in debate. Perhaps an individual claims to
be a Jew, but one or more committee members find him wanting cer-
tain necessary attributes? Perhaps he or she claims to be a Gentile, but
the committee is of two minds? Perhaps certain individuals are not quite
sure whether they should be at the front or the rear of the line? Perhaps
members of the committee are themselves uncertain? Again, the point is
that between the obvious Jews and the obvious Gentiles will be a group of
Gentile-Jews about whom this committee will have to ask, about whom
they will deliberate and dispute.
In the next chapter, I will explore in greater depth and with more
theoretical precision the ways in which the negotiation of these compet-
ing claims generates hybridized identities. For the moment, however, I
would like to move beyond the theoretical and begin to explore whether
this notion of a Gentile-Jewish middle ground is anything more than
just that—a purely theoretical, hypothetical construction. What evidence

from the ancient world actually substantiates the claim? Although no
evidence will avail itself for the viability of maneuvering forty million
Roman subjects into a single reception hall, we will not have to look far
to find sterling examples of contested Gentile-Jewish identity.
The Production of Gentile-Jewish

Identities in the First Century
Other historians have described the boundary separating Jew from Gen-
tile in the Hellenistic and Roman periods as fuzzy.16 Particularly with
regard to God-fearers, historians have acknowledged that not every per-
son in antiquity can be assigned easily to one category or the other. No
one has contributed more to our understanding of this “gray area” than
Shaye J. D. Cohen, whose work has provided the principal source of
energy for countless discussions of ancient Jewish identity over the past
decade. In 1999, Cohen published The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundar-
ies, Varieties, Uncertainites, an analysis of Jewish identity in antiquity that
synthesizes a vast amount of data. Cohen’s findings confirm the presence
of a gray area in which Jewish identity was contested and negotiated. The
subtitle of the work tells the whole story: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertain-
ties. The names of the chapters and appendices are likewise suggestive:
“Was Trophimus Jewish?,” “Was Timothy Jewish?,” “Was Herod Jewish?”
The coherency of these questions presupposes the ambiguity at hand:
when identities are clear-cut, then one does not have to ask.
Cohen traced the historical roots of such ambiguity to the Hasmonean
period when, he alleges, the Greek word Ioudaios (pl. Ioudaioi) became
imbued for the first time with new meanings. Whereas it once described
only those in the ethnic group, “Judean,” the term came eventually to mark
off the political-ethnic-religious complex, “Jew/Judean.” The principal
reason for this development was the emergence of two processes by which
non-Ioudaioi could become Ioudaioi. First, some non-Ioudaioi became
Ioudaioi when their lands were conquered by the Judeans and they were
incorporated politically into the Judean state. The chief examples of this
development are the Idumeans, the inhabitants of the land immediately
to the south of Judea, whom I consider at length in a moment. Second,
by no later than the first century BCE there emerged non-Ioudaioi who
became Ioudaioi through a process that could best be described as volun-
tary religious conversion. These proselytes, wherever they lived, adopted
the beliefs and practices of the Ioudaioi without becoming enlisted in
the Judean state. As such, those who “converted” to Judaism maintained
their ethnic and political affiliations and became Ioudaioi, or “Jews,” in
The Gentile-Jew 23
the religious sense only.17 Those who were incorporated politically into
Judea, such as the Idumeans, may have maintained their original ethnic
affiliation but, insofar as they adopted the beliefs and practices of the
Ioudaioi and acquiesced to the authority of the Judean state, they became
both “Jews” and “Judeans.” In other words, historical developments in
the Hasmonean period expanded the possible meanings of the term Iou-
daios. It could mean “Judean,” “Jew,” or both.18
Cohen was not the first to suggest alternative translations for Ioudaios,
but the debate over how best to translate Ioudaios came to the fore in
the wake of Cohen, so much so that no treatment of first-century Juda-
ism is considered complete any longer without an apology for how one
translates it.19 Those favoring “Judean” usually contend that “Jew” is an
anachronistic term because it imposes rabbinic and postrabbinic concepts
of Jewish religious identity onto the prerabbinic world. Furthermore,
they claim, the term was associated so closely with the land of Judea, its
Temple, and its resident ethnos, or people, that “Judean” alone captures
the true flavor of the term. Advocates for “Jew” over “Judean” have the
history of English interpretation on their side, as well as the claim that
many ancient Ioudaioi were in fact not linked either politically or ethni-
cally to Judea. Some follow Cohen in maintaining that one’s translation
should depend on context—“Judean” when the political or ethnic sense
is desired, “Jew” for the religious sense. Still others suggest that historians
should avoid the shortcomings of either English equivalent by simply
reproducing the Greek original, Ioudaios.20
On the surface, the last solution is the most appealing, as it resolves the
problem of translating Ioudaios into English by effectively eliminating it.
But leaving the term untranslated generates as many problems as it avoids.
In the first place, the word is aesthetically unpleasing (in the eyes of this
beholder, at least), as English writing should utilize English terminology
whenever possible. Second, and probably more important, to leave Iou-
daios untranslated is to privilege the term over and against all the other
Greek terms routinely translated by historians of Christian origins. Why
should Ioudaios not be translated, but charis (“grace”), pistis (“faith”), or
skandalon (“stumbling-block”) should? The English equivalents chosen
for those terms are no less loaded with imported meaning. Yet leaving
these and the scores more terms like them untranslated is a cumbersome
course that few English readers would find desirable. Accordingly, I have
chosen to translate Ioudaios in this book. I prefer the terms “Jew” and
“Jewish” to “Judean” because I believe that “Judean,” both as a noun and
as an adjective, inappropriately delimits Ioudaios as a geographical term,
which does not account adequately for the evidence as I understand it.
For the remainder of this chapter, however, I will leave the terms
untranslated and speak simply of Ioudaioi and non-Ioudaioi. This proce-
dure is necessary, as we will see in a moment, in order to advance further
my argument about “Gentile-Jews.” That argument also requires me to
linger for a moment longer on Cohen’s proposal that Ioudaios should be
translated alternatively as “Jew” or “Judean” depending on the context,
as the strengths and weaknesses of his solution are crucial for recognizing
the potential for ambiguity inherent in the Greek original. Cohen is to
be lauded for having recognized the rich variation of associations desig-
nated by the Greek Ioudaios—the “political,” the “ethnic,” the “religious,”
and so on. Yet his decision to distinguish between two types of Ioudaioi,
“Judeans” and “Jews,” resolves in too facile a manner the complexity abid-
ing in the original term. True, some in the ancient world were Ioudaioi
more so in the religious sense (i.e., proselytes), and others more so in the
ethnic or political sense (i.e., Idumeans), but here is the crucial point:
though such a distinction can be expressed meaningfully by two different
English equivalents, “Judean” and “Jew,” only one Greek term served for
both of these. In other words, whether one was a “Judean,” a “Jew,” or
both on our modern reckoning, he or she was simply a Ioudaios in the
first century. Rendering the Greek with two English terms makes a neat
division that the Greek original does not permit.
To see why this seemingly obvious point is so critical, consider what
happens when we translate in reverse, and take the distinction between
“Jew” and “Judean” back into Greek. According to those who believe that
Ioudaios should be translated alternatively as “Jew” and “Judean,” one
could be a “Jew” without being a “Judean.”21 For example, a Ioudaios
whose family had lived for generations in Ephesus might be a “Jew” in
the religious sense, but not a “Judean” in the ethno-geographic sense. And
though far less common, one might also imagine a “Judean” who was not
a “Jew”—an Alexandrian trader, perhaps, who had settled permanently
in Jerusalem to facilitate his business. To the extent that he maintained
his devotion to the gods of Egypt, he would be a non-Jewish Judean.
Were we to put these alternative translations of Ioudaios back into Greek,
however, we would be stuck with a precarious statement such as this: “It
was possible to be a Ioudaios without being a Ioudaios, and though far
less common, one could also be a Ioudaios without being a Ioudaios.”
One can surely see where I am headed. It is precisely the multivalence of
the term Ioudaios in the ancient world—the countless ways in which one
could identify or be identified as a Ioudaios—that makes it so practical
to render the term with two English equivalents; yet, by the same token,
the multivalence also betrays the possibility for contradiction within the
The Gentile-Jew 25
generating Greek term itself. It demonstrates just how murky the border
between the Ioudaios and the non-Ioudaios really was. After all, when we
divide the first-century world into Ioudaioi and non-Ioudaioi, where are
we to place those who were Ioudaioi (i.e., “Jews”) without being Ioudaioi
(i.e., “Judeans”)? What about the Ioudaioi (i.e., “Judeans”) who were also
not Ioudaioi (i.e., “Jews”)?
Admittedly, one might allege that this entire discussion constitutes
little more than theoretical amusement, a provocative exercise of the
mind that has no real historical implications. If we were to look closely
at populations in the first century, one might ask, would we really find
Ioudaioi who were also not Ioudaioi? Did cases of such ambiguous Jewish
identity really exist? The answer to these questions is an unambiguous
“yes”; such identity did exist in the first century CE, and to a consider-
able extent. What follows, then, is an investigation of two of the most
outstanding varieties of “Gentile-Jewish” identity in the first century, two
populations who indeed appear to have resided, to varying extents, in the
murky realm separating Ioudaios from non-Ioudaios. The first are the Idu-
means who, according to some reports, became Ioudaioi when they were
incorporated politically into the Judean state after they were conquered
by the Hasmonean king John Hyrcanus (134–104 BCE). As we will see,
the texts describing the Idumeans and their past vary in their estimation
of the extent to which Idumeans actually became Ioudaioi. The second
contingent includes the Gentiles in antiquity who came to be associated
with the Ioudaioi by means of an intentional, personal choice to adopt
Jewish customs and beliefs. In Greek contexts, such persons were often
known as prosēlytoi; in Semitic contexts they were known as gerim (sing.
ger). Despite their conversion, however, many texts describing these new-
comers to the Jewish ranks conceptualize them as something different,
even if only slightly different, from native Ioudaioi or “children of Israel.”
As with the Idumeans, something about them remains ceaselessly and
unavoidably Gentile in nature even as they are transformed.
Before embarking on this investigation, though, let me be clear about
what the analysis aims to demonstrate. I am in no way suggesting that
any of the groups to be examined—Idumeans, prosēlytoi, or gerim—
constituted a distinguishable third category of identity, part-Gentile and
part-Jew, which an observer in the first century could have recognized or
named. On the contrary, the authors whose texts will be considered prob-
ably viewed Jewish identity as an either/or proposition: a person is either
a Ioudaios or not, Israel or not. I am merely suggesting that the discourse
surrounding transition between these groups, particularly in the direction
from Gentile to Ioudaios, highlights the fluidity of the boundary and the
possibility for categories of people who are more or less Jewish. Naturally,
I have chosen to focus on transitional groups because it anticipates my
ultimate objective in this book. It sets the stage for my impending exami-
nation of yet another company of first-century individuals who began
life as Gentiles but became, on account of their baptism into death and
resurrection of Jesus Christ, Ioudaioi more or less.
Idumeans
Just what happened to the Idumeans in the late second century BCE is
a matter of historical debate. None of the three ancient historiographers
who take up the incorporation of the Idumeans into Judea describes the
events in the same way. The earliest of these reports comes from the Greek
geographer Strabo (d. 24 CE): “As for Judea, the Idumeans and the lake
occupy the western edge by Casios. But the Idumeans are in fact Nabate-
ans who, having been driven from there because of an insurrection, came
over to the Ioudaioi and shared in their customs with them.”22
According to Strabo, the Idumeans joined the Ioudaioi and adopted
their customs voluntarily, and apparently peacefully, in the wake of their
expulsion from Nabatea. Which insurrection Strabo has in mind, and
why it led to the Idumeans fleeing westward, remains unclear. In any case,
his description contrasts sharply with the one offered by an enigmatic
figure called Ptolemy, cited by Ammonius Grammaticus as the author of
a history of Herod the Great: “Ioudaioi and Idumeans are different, just as
Ptolemy says in the first book of On Herod the King. For Ioudaioi are those
who were naturally and originally so, while Idumeans, on the other hand,
were not Ioudaioi originally, but were Phoenicians and Syrians. After they
were conquered by [the Ioudaioi] and were compelled to be circumcised,
to contribute to the nation, and to practice the same customs, they were
called Ioudaioi.”23
As Ptolemy understands it, the incorporation of the Idumeans was
hardly an act of voluntary adherence, nor was it initiated by the Idumeans
themselves. They were forced to undergo circumcision and assimilation
to the customs of the Ioudaioi at the behest of their conquerors. A similar
scenario is presented by Josephus: “Hyrcanus also took Adora and Marisa,
cities in Idumea. When he had subdued all the Idumeans, he allowed to
them to stay on their land so long as they would have their genitals cir-
cumcised and utilize willingly the laws of the Ioudaioi. Because of their
fondness for their homeland, they submitted both to circumcision and to
making their lives in all other respects the same as the Ioudaioi. They were
Ioudaioi from that point onward.”24
The Gentile-Jew 27
For Josephus, then, the Idumean conversion was the result of a dra-
conian ultimatum: get on board or get out. This version may not mirror
the unadulterated compulsion described by Ptolemy, but it is also a far
cry from the voluntary incorporation in Strabo’s account. Thus we have
before us three related but divergent accounts.
In the face of this evidence, one might be tempted to reconstruct
what “really happened” to the Idumeans under John Hyrcanus.25 Such
an effort certainly has merit, but would prove to be of little importance
for the present investigation. My interest is not what really happened to
the Idumeans and how they came to be associated with the Ioudaioi, but
rather how historians in later periods characterized that association and
the implications of such descriptions for our understanding of Idumean
identity in the first century CE. Strabo, Ptolemy, or Josephus may have
the most accurate account, but my concern is the unique way each one
configures the relationship between Idumeans and Ioudaioi.
Were one to rely on Strabo’s account, for instance, one would never get
the impression that the Idumeans became Ioudaioi at all. Indeed, Strabo
makes just the opposite point. Having observed that the westernmost
regions of Judea are occupied by Idumeans, Strabo takes care to forestall
the implication that the Idumeans are therefore Ioudaioi. On the con-
trary, he asserts, the Idumeans are Nabateans, not Ioudaioi.26 He then goes
on to explain how this group of Nabateans ended up in Judea. They came
as refugees from an insurrection, at which time they cast their lot with
the Ioudaioi and agreed to live according to their customs. Neither of the
Greek terms used by Strabo to describe this attachment to the Ioudaioi
(proschōreō or tōn nomimōn koineō), suggests that the Idumeans became
Ioudaioi in any sense. They simply explain how this group of Nabateans
ended up living peacefully in a place that otherwise should be inhabited
by Ioudaioi.
Ptolemy, on the other hand, is under the impression that a change
in identity occurred when the Idumeans came under the authority of
the Ioudaioi. After this lot of Syrians and Phoenicians (not Nabateans)
was subjugated, circumcised, enrolled, and assimilated, they were “called”
Ioudaioi. They were called Ioudaioi, he concedes, but they were not really
Ioudaioi, which Ptolemy emphasizes at the outset of his account when he
baldly declares that “Ioudaioi and Idumeans are different.” They are dif-
ferent because Ioudaioi are Ioudaioi “naturally and originally.” Idumeans,
on the other hand, were originally Syrians and Phoenicians, and came to
be called Ioudaioi only following their subjugation. Thus even though
they are called Ioudaioi, they are not Ioudaioi, or at least not Ioudaioi to
the extent that Ioudaioi are Ioudaioi. Presumably Ptolemy’s claim comes
in response to those who allege that Idumeans are in fact Ioudaioi, which
is especially likely seeing as his discussion of the matter appears in a his-
tory of Herod the Great, a man for whom the relationship between Idu-
means and Ioudaioi was of paramount importance, as we will see shortly.
Indeed, we need not look far to find someone who claims that Idu-
means have become full-fledged Ioudaioi. Josephus says so in no uncer-
tain terms. Those Idumeans who opted to remain in the land and to
undergo circumcision became Ioudaioi and “were Ioudaioi from that
point onward.” For Josephus, the incorporation of the Idumeans into
Hyrcanus’s kingdom enabled them not merely to be called Ioudaioi, but
to become Ioudaioi, and they have remained so up to Josephus’s own
day. Thus where Strabo never entertains the notion that that Idumeans
became Ioudaioi at all, and Ptolemy believes that they became Ioudaioi in
name only, Josephus appears to think that Idumeans became Ioudaioi in
the fullest sense: in both name and deed, Idumeans were Ioudaioi.
This description is but one side of the story, however, as a thorough
inspection of Josephus’s writings reveals that, however much Josephus
thought the Idumeans had become Ioudaioi in the wake of Hyrcanus’s
conquest, they nevertheless remained different from Ioudaioi. Without
the preceding cited passage, one would hardly get the impression that
Josephus reckoned the Idumeans to be Ioudaioi at all. In keeping with the
standard practice of his day, Josephus understands the Ioudaioi to consti-
tute a “nation” (Gk. ethnos), or a “people” (Gk. genos), defined in opposi-
tion to all other nations and peoples of the world (i.e., Gentiles). Among
those other nations, however, are the Idumeans, whom Josephus routinely
identifies as a “nation” and a “people” of their own! A case in point: when
Josephus introduces the father of Herod the Great, Antipater, who was
born at least one generation after the Idumeans had supposedly become
Ioudaioi, he describes Antipater as an Idumean according to both ethnos
and genos.27 Josephus preserves this distinction between Ioudaioi and Idu-
means in recalling later events as well. When he describes the events of the
Jewish war with Rome between 66 and 73 CE, Josephus mentions how
the so-called zealots were besieged in the Temple and needed assistance to
overcome their less zealous brethren led by the deposed High Priest Ana-
nus, who wished to capitulate to the Romans. The zealots appealed to the
Idumeans, whom Josephus again describes as a discrete ethnos—indeed,
an ethnos with a rather unsavory and bellicose constitution:
Nevertheless it seemed best to call in the Idumeans. They wrote a brief

letter explaining how Ananus, having deceived the people, was betraying
the metropolis to the Romans, while they withdrew in the name of liberty
and were holed up in the Temple. They further explained that their fate
The Gentile-Jew 29
would be decided shortly, and that, unless the Idumeans would send help
immediately, they would succumb to Ananus and the enemies, and the city
would fall to the Romans. They told the messengers to relay much more
about the present circumstances to the leaders of the Idumeans. The two
active men put forward to deliver the message were capable of speaking
persuasively about such matters and, even more importantly, were fleet-
footed. They knew that the Idumeans would be persuaded at once because
they were a clamorous and unruly ethnos, always looking for action and
rejoicing in revolution, and easily spurred by flattery to gather arms and
rush into battle as if to a feast.28
Thus insofar as the Ioudaioi constitute a unique ethnos, then Idumeans,

who make up an ethnos of their own, cannot be Ioudaioi.
Yet in the confrontation that ensues when the Idumean army arrives at
Jerusalem in response to the zealots’ plea, it becomes apparent that even
though Josephus understands the Idumeans to be something different
from Ioudaioi, they are nevertheless kinsmen of the Ioudaioi. As Josephus
reports it, the Idumeans expected to be admitted into the city in keep-
ing with Jerusalem’s age-old custom of granting unfettered access to all
“kinsmen” (homophuloi), a term used elsewhere by Josephus to describe
the relationship of Ioudaioi to one another.29 Those within the city walls
evidently agreed. Their spokesman, the chief priest Jesus, would permit
them to exercise the right afforded them as “relatives” (sungeneis) of the
Ioudaioi, provided they lay down their arms.30 The Idumeans refused to
comply and ultimately gained entry with the help of the besieged zealots.
According to Josephus, then, although the Idumeans became Ioudaioi
in the days of John Hyrcanus, they remained distinct from the Ioudaioi for
the next two centuries, during which time they nevertheless merited the
privileges afforded to the Ioudaioi and their kinsmen. If this last sentence
is confusing, it should be. The point is that Josephus’s own descriptions of
the Idumeans are ambiguous, just as there is ambiguity when Josephus’s
accounts are read alongside those of his contemporary historians. The
Idumeans are alternatively Ioudaioi, Ioudaioi in name only, distinct from,
but related, to the Ioudaioi, or not Ioudaioi at all!
In light of such disparate descriptions, perhaps we should simply say
that the Idumeans were “sort of ” Ioudaioi, partial Ioudaioi. Remarkably,
Josephus reports that this very solution to the problem of Idumean iden-
tity was employed in his own time, emerging in response to the controver-
sial ancestry of Herod the Great to which we already have alluded. Herod
was the son of Antipater, the man whom Josephus calls an Idumean
according to ethnos and genos. This lineage proved a source of concern
for Herod once he became king over the Ioudaioi. According to Josephus,
Herod’s court historian, Nicholas of Damascus, doctored Antipater’s fam-

ily tree so as to make him a direct descendant of the Ioudaioi who had
returned to Judea in the wake of the Babylonian exile. This trickery made
Herod a member of the same ethnos and genos as the Ioudaioi, a desirable
trait for one claiming to be king over that people.31 The ruse appears to
have had an effect, too. Two generations later, when the Ioudaioi and the
Syrians residing in Caesarea were squabbling over civic rights, the for-
mer maintained their superiority on the grounds that the founder of the
city, Herod, had been a Ioudaios by genos, a claim the Syrians accepted.32
Of course, whether these adversaries agreed upon Herod’s status because
they had fallen prey to Herod’s propaganda or because they believed that
descendants of Idumeans were in fact Ioudaioi, even according to genos,
is impossible to determine. Possibly the Ioudaioi of Caesarea themselves
fudged Herod’s credentials in order to press their case, and the Syrians
acquiesced out of ignorance. In any case, we also know that not everyone
accepted Herod as such. Both in later generations and in Herod’s own
day, his status as a Ioudaios was open to question.33
The most intriguing example in this regard is the accusation of Antigo-
nus, the last Hasmonean king over Judea and Herod’s rival for the throne.
Besieged by Herod and his Roman allies in Jerusalem, Antigonus was
unwilling to capitulate peacefully, which would allow Herod to seize the
kingship afforded him by Mark Antony. Josephus describes Antigonus’s
refusal as follows: “Antigonus, in response to Herod’s offer, told Silo and
the Roman army that it would contradict their own sense of fairness if
they were to give the kingship to Herod, who was both a commoner and
an Idumean—that is, a hemiioudaios—when it would be fitting to give
it to those descended from the genos, as was customary for them.”34 The
extraordinary aside, in which Josephus calls Herod a “hemiioudaios,” liter-
ally a “half-Ioudaios,” could be taken in two ways. Josephus might be sug-
gesting that Antigonus himself slung the term hemiioudaios at Herod in
an attempt to undermine his legitimacy. Alternatively, Josephus may have
wished his readers to know that Antigonus opposed Herod because he
was a commoner and an Idumean, and then Josephus himself explained
for them the significance of the latter accusation. After all, for those who
previously had read that Idumeans became Ioudaioi in the time of John
Hyrcanus, it might seem curious that a century later someone would call
into question the legitimacy of an Idumean as a native ruler of Ioudaioi.
Whether it was Antigonus or Josephus who brought the term to bear,
“hemiioudaios” speaks volumes about the nature of Idumean identity in
the first century CE. The term cannot be understood as a reference to the
different ethnic backgrounds of Herod’s parents in the same way we might
The Gentile-Jew 31
call someone “half-Italian” today if one parent is Italian and the other
not.35 Some have argued for this interpretation, insisting that Antigonus
viewed Herod as a half-Ioudaios because his father was an Idumean—that
is, a Ioudaios, whereas his mother was an Arab.36 Herod was therefore half-
Ioudaios and half-Arab. Miscegenation is surely not the issue, however.
Herod’s parents are not even mentioned. Herod is not a half-Ioudaios
because one parent is a Ioudaios and the other is Arab. Rather, Herod is
identified as a full-blown Idumean presumably because his father was
and identity was passed through the father’s line and, as a full-blown Idu-
mean, Herod is a half-Ioudaios! In other words, an Idumean is “sort of ” a
Ioudaios, a “half-Ioudaios,” at once a Ioudaios and not a Ioudaios.
Returning, then, to our ancient reception line, one is hard-pressed to
determine where we ought to situate Idumeans in the year 62 CE. Would
they be at the front with the Ioudaioi or in the rear with the Gentiles?
Where would the ancients themselves have placed them? As we have seen,
Josephus might have called for their inclusion among the Ioudaioi, seeing
as they had become Ioudaioi two centuries earlier. Readers of Ptolemy the
historian, on the other hand, might have objected, as “Ioudaioi and Idu-
means are different.” Idumeans themselves might well have been divided
over where they ought to appear. The Idumean soldiers who demanded
admission to Jerusalem in order to aid their zealous kinsmen might have
insisted on their standing as full-fledged Ioudaioi.37 Other Idumeans, such
as Herod’s friend Costobar, whom the king appointed governor over Idu-
mea, might well have objected to his being included among the Ioudaioi.
According to Josephus, Costobar wished to rid his people of their ties to
the laws and worship of the Ioudaioi and have them resume their ancestral
devotion to the goddess Koze.38
The imagined discussion between Strabo, Ptolemy, Josephus, Herod,
Antigonus, Costobar, and others over the placement of Idumean descen-
dants in the reception line illustrates just how unstable the boundary
between Ioudaios and Gentile could be at the turn of the millennium.
These transitional figures defy that dichotomy and indicate contested,
negotiated Gentile-Jewish identities.
Converts
The same could be said about many of the converts who came to be
associated with the Ioudaioi by adhering to their beliefs and performing
their ancestral customs. Precisely when and where conversion originated
remains a mystery. Few would contend that a thoroughgoing assimilation
of Gentiles into the Israelite community as the result of a change in belief
and practice was possible in preexilic Israel.39 Ancient Israelites permitted
gerim to dwell in their midst, but gerim in this sense refers to “resident
aliens,” tolerated foreigners rather than incorporated members of the
body politic. And although certain restrictions were placed on them by
the host community, there was no expectation that these gerim would
think or act like Israelites and no prospect that, if they did adopt Israelite
ways, they would become Israelites. No one could become an Israelite. The
Hebrew Bible does acknowledge that non-Israelites on occasion adopted
the Israelite worldview; most famously, perhaps, the leprous Naaman of
Aram, who proclaims the oneness of the God of Israel following his heal-
ing by the prophet Elisha. Even in that remarkable case, however, there
is no indication that Naaman was thereby incorporated into the people
of Israel.40
Indeed, the earliest unambiguous reference to the incorporation of a
non-Israelite comes from the book of Judith, a novella probably penned
in the second century BCE.41 At the end of this work, the Ammonite gen-
eral Achior is so astounded by the victory of the Israelites over the Assyr-
ians that he believes in the God of Israel and undergoes circumcision. As a
result, we are told, “he was added to the house of Israel until today” (Jud.
14:10). Whether this statement indicates that Gentiles were in fact being
incorporated into Jewish communities in the second century, it suggests
that a Jewish author could now conceptualize such a notion. Theoreti-
cally, at least, a man could join the house of Israel by accepting monothe-
ism and removing his foreskin.42
Over the next few centuries, such voluntary conversions did occur.
By some accounts, they occurred in considerable numbers.43 What was
demanded of converts, and what rituals or protocols, if any, marked their
formal incorporation into the community are nevertheless obscure. In
Greek-speaking contexts, these converts were known as proselytes (Gk.
prosēlytos, meaning “one who has come over”), a term that may have dis-
tinguished them from Gentiles who supported the Ioudaioi or adopted
their beliefs and customs to a limited degree, and what historians have
come to identify as “God-fearers.” In rabbinic contexts, where protocols
for admission were eventually spelled out, they were known as gerim—
that is, the same term used in the Hebrew Bible to identify resident aliens
who could not be assimilated into the body politic.
Whether they are speaking about proselytes or gerim, historians often
refer to such converts as though they became Ioudaioi or “children of
Israel” (Heb. bĕne yisrael) through and through as a result of their conver-
sion, as though they crossed an ontological point of transition where they
ceased being Gentiles and became its opposite.44 They are described with
phrases like “full-fledged Jews,” “complete Jews,” or “100% Jewish,”45
The Gentile-Jew 33
totalizing expressions that presume that Jewish identity is a strictly

bounded, either/or proposition. Gentiles remain entirely Gentiles until
the moment they become proselytes or gerim, at which time they become
Jewish, pure and simple.
In the following discussion, I propose that the discourse surrounding
converts in several ancient contexts exposes a distinction between Gentile
and Ioudaios/Israel that is less clear and precise than these historians have
presumed. Many discussions of converts and conversion describe Jewish/
Israelite identity as a fluid situation in which degrees of Jewishness, so
to speak, could be conceptualized. I shall not address every ancient text
about conversion, as my aim is not to provide a thorough account of
conversion in antiquity. Such a task is far too tall for this study. I sim-
ply wish to demonstrate how a sampling of descriptions of converts and
conversion indicate that Jewish identity in antiquity could be construed
as spectral in nature rather than neatly bounded, and that Gentile-Jewish
identities were possible.
Of course, to suggest as much is hardly controversial when it comes to
the ger in rabbinic literature, as several scholars have already proposed that
rabbinic descriptions of the ger belie a hard and fast boundary between
Israelites and Gentiles. Gary Porton, for example, summarizes the rab-
binic conception of the ger with unmistakably ambiguous terminology
like “middle ground,” “marginal,” and “liminal”:
Thus, the convert occupied the middle ground between Israelites and gen-
tiles. On the one hand, the converts severed all ties with their previous
gentile life and were responsible for observing most of the same rituals
incumbent upon native-born Israelites. On the other hand, they were
treated differently from native-born Israelites, often being listed as a dis-
tinct class of persons along with priests, Levites, Israelites, and so forth.46
The rabbinic texts present the converts as marginal beings, occupying
the liminal space between the Israelite and the gentile communities. From
the point of view of the totality of the rabbinic tradition, converts were
marginal . . . They had severed all ties with their gentile community, but
in some sense they remained on the outer edges of their new community.
They were not gentiles, although their gentile past seems to have been
important in certain contexts. And they were not fully equated with native-
born Israelites, although they had many traits in common. They were alien
and familiar at the same time. The converts never totally lost their “other-
ness.” They never seem to have discarded their strangeness completely.47
In other words, Porton explains, numerous rabbinic texts portray the ger
as partially fledged, incomplete, less than 100 percent Israelites. They are
no longer viewed as Gentiles, which means they are Israelites; yet they are
not quite the same thing as Israelites. They began life as Gentiles and to
some extent that foreignness is considered irremovable, thus rendering
gerim incapable of becoming Israelites on par with the native born.
Cohen makes basically the same point, epitomized in his summary
statement that, on the rabbinic view of conversion, “a convert is not an
Israelite, but he is a Jew.”48 This distinction, of course, is based on Cohen’s
thesis that ancient Jewish identity was bifurcated into national (in this
case, “Israelite”) and religious (“Jew”) components. Thus insofar as a Gen-
tile could adopt the religious scruples of the Jewish community, he could
become a Jew; but insofar as he could not undo his pedigree, so to speak,
the Gentile could never become an Israelite. According to this reading of
rabbinic literature, then, converts in some sense reside on the boundary
between Israel and the Gentiles rather than on one side or the other.
Wanting room to examine each of the numerous rabbinic passages
that Porton, Cohen, and others have adduced to support these claims,
two brief and apposite examples must suffice. The first is the well-known
proclamation in Mishnah Bikkurim 1:4 (ca. 200 CE), which mandates
that converts should not recite the phrase from Deuteronomy 26:5–10
when bringing first fruits to the Temple: “The following people bring
[first fruits] but do not recite [the formula]: the convert, who brings [first
fruits] but does not recite [the formula] because he cannot say: ‘[the land]
that the Lord swore to our fathers to give to us.’. . . When he prays by
himself, he should say, ‘the God of the fathers of Israel,’ and when he prays
in a synagogue he should say, ‘the God of their fathers.’”49 Proselytes are
not Israelites, are not the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and
thus, however much they have been incorporated into the people of Israel
by means of their conversion, they must distinguish themselves from the
native born by refraining from invoking the eponymous ancestors when
they deliver first fruits to the Temple. Moreover, as the Mishnah goes on
to say, the Gentile origins of proselytes also affect the manner in which
they call on the ancestors of Israel during the daily prayers. Both in pri-
vate and in public, they are forbidden from invoking the forebears as their
own. Although they are inside the Israelite community in one sense, the
Mishnah positions proselytes outside the community in this case rhetori-
cally, as they are expected to speak of the community as if it were not their
own. They were born as Gentiles and, to some extent, remain Gentiles
forever, even if, in many respects, they are Gentiles no longer.
A similarly ambiguous status surfaces in a dispute from the Babylonian
Talmud (ca. 600 CE), in which Rabbi Yohanan (d. 279 CE) considers the
difference between Israelites and idolaters:
The Gentile-Jew 35
Why are idolaters polluted? It is because they did not stand at Mount Sinai.
When the serpent came upon Eve, he put pollution into her. Because they
stood at Mount Sinai, the pollution of Israel was eliminated. The pollution
of the idolaters was not eliminated because they did not stand at Mount
Sinai.
R. Aha, the son of Raba, asked R. Ashi: “What about converts?” He
said to him: “Even though they were not there, their guiding stars were
there, as it is written, ‘[I am not making this covenant and this oath with
you alone, but] with he who is standing here today before the Lord our
God and he who is not here, etc.’” (Deut. 29:13–14).
Now this is at odds with R. Abba bar Kahana, for R. Abba bar Kahana
said: “It took three generations for the pollution to be eliminated from our
forefathers. Abraham sired Ishmael, Isaac sired Esau, Jacob sired the twelve
tribes that had in them no taint.”50
The passage assumes a divided world. There are Israelites and there are
idolaters; the former lack pollution and the latter have it. The outstand-
ing problem is how this state of affairs came about if the progenitor of all
humankind was herself polluted. According to R. Yohanan, the Israelites
were distinguished from the rest of humanity as a result of their experi-
ence at Sinai. As R. Aha understands it, however, this explanation fails to
account for converts, who are ostensibly unpolluted Israelites, but whose
forebears were not present at Sinai. Again we have a case where one “has
to ask,” where marginal identity is clearly being contested and negotiated.
Not surprisingly, R. Ashi’s solution employs the sort of paradox required
to make sense of ambiguous identity. Even though they were not there,
R. Ashi explains, converts were there because their guiding stars were pres-
ent. The alternative provided by R. Abba bar Kahana is no less hybrid-
izing in its effect. He claims that Israel’s “detergent process,” as Joshua
Levinson has so aptly called it, began not at Sinai, as R. Yohanan had pro-
claimed, but with Abraham, and concluded with his great-grandchildren,
the immaculate 12 sons of Israel.51 Neither R. Abba bar Kahana nor the
later sages draw out the implications of this teaching for the status of
converts, but if one were to view the convert as analogous to Abraham,
then the convert, like Abraham, would be partially polluted, partially a
Gentile. His children would be less polluted, and so on and so forth until
the third generation, when the conversion from Gentile to Israelite would
be complete.
Both of these rabbinic passages underscore the liminal position of the
ger in the rabbinic worldview. They reveal how the convert was “alien
and familiar at the same time,” as Porton puts it.52 Crucial to the rabbis’
perception of their own identity was the perceived visceral connection to
the biblical Israelites, the descendants of Jacob who stood at Sinai and
inherited the Land of Israel. Indeed, as the preceding texts illustrate, the
rabbis preferred the self-designation “Israel” or “children of Israel,” a title
highlighting their uniqueness as a descent group. Gentiles could be incor-
porated into that descent group, but they could never entirely cease to be
Gentiles. Their past and their lineage remained with them, making them
irreversibly Gentile to some degree, even as they became “like an Israelite
in all respects,” as several other rabbinic texts proclaim.53
Of course, the rabbis were not the only postbiblical Jewish commu-
nity to consider the social and legal status of gerim. Among the Dead
Sea Scrolls, a number of texts indicate that the Qumran community,
too, viewed gerim as possessing a differential quality that distinguished
them from the native born. The Damascus Document (CD), for instance,
divides Israel into four constituencies—priests, Levites, Israelites, and
gerim—and may even refer to gerim as “foreigners” (bĕne nekhar) after
their conversion.54 Another text known as 4QFlorilegium describes gerim
as distinct from Israelites and subordinate to them. It lists them among
those forbidden to enter the messianic Temple, alongside Ammonites,
Moabites, bastards, and foreigners.55 The Temple Scroll (11QTa) corrobo-
rates this ruling, forbidding gerim from proceeding past the Temple’s outer
court for three generations, and thus exhibiting a conception of gradual
refinement similar to the one formulated by R. Abba bar Kahana.56
The restrictions on gerim envisioned at Qumran may be emblematic
of a more widespread attitude among Ioudaioi of priestly extraction. A
placard posted outside the Temple in Jerusalem warned those of “foreign
birth” from advancing into the precincts reserved for native worshippers,
a prohibition that, if taken literally, might have applied to gerim. Also
notable is the episode Josephus reports in which a certain Simon, a man
known for religious scruples, slanders King Agrippa as unholy and lobbies
for his exclusion from the Temple.57 The right of entry, Simon insists, is
reserved for those born of the right stock, and Agrippa lacks a qualifying
pedigree because he descended from Idumean converts. Daniel Schwartz
has proposed that the strictly genealogical view of identity suggested in
such texts derives from the priests’ conception of their own identity vis-
à-vis other Ioudaioi:
Priests—those with a monopoly on access to the sacred precincts and cult—

are, in Judaism, determined by their descent. He who is not (believed to
be) a descendant of Aaron cannot be a priest, no matter how dedicated
to piety and sanctity he may be. But if the question “who is a priest?” is
answered necessarily and sufficiently by descent, it follows that this crite-
rion is important. Therefore, it is natural to apply it to the question “who
is a Jew?” as well, with the result that a Gentile cannot become a Jew, no
The Gentile-Jew 37
matter how dedicated to piety and sanctity he may be. That is, consistent
priests might well hold that one cannot convert to Judaism, however wel-
come it might be that they choose to worship the true God.58
The second-century BCE book of Jubilees may well hold the same view.
While never mentioning converts or conversion specifically, the author of
Jubilees declares that any male not circumcised on the eighth day of life,
even if he is descended from Israelites, is not an Israelite.59 The genuine
Israelite community is inaccessible to belatedly (or prematurely) circum-
cised Israelites, not to mention Gentiles.60 The Dead Sea community may
have held a similar view, such that the gerim mentioned in the preceding
passages should not be understood as converts at all, but as resident aliens
in the biblical sense. Even if these passages do consider gerim to be con-
verts, however, they are not members of the community on equal footing
with the native born, barred as they evidently are from the Temple. There
is a sense in which they are Israelites, and a sense in which they are not.
Many Greek texts that consider the prosēlytos likewise reveal a view of
Jewish identity in which the convert can be like the Ioudaios, and indeed
may even be a Ioudaios, but is nevertheless distinguishable from a Ioudaios.
The book of Acts, for example, includes “Ioudaioi and proselytes” among
those present at Pentecost (Acts 2:10), an expression suggesting that these
terms mark off two discrete constituencies. If proselytes are full-fledged
Ioudaioi, there would be no reason for the author of Acts to list them
separately. A similar pairing appears at the conclusion of Paul’s sermon at
Antioch of Pisidia, when “many of the Ioudaioi and the righteous pros-
elytes followed Paul and Barnabas” (Acts 13:43). Again, the proselytes are
apparently different enough from Ioudaioi to be listed separately from
them. Acts also specifies that Nicholas, one of seven men appointed to
oversee the ministration of the widows (Acts 6:5), was a “proselyte from
Antioch.” Of course, we cannot know if the author of Acts felt it neces-
sary to distinguish Nicholas from his peers by highlighting his status as a
proselyte, but the description serves to do just that—to distinguish him
from what are presumably six native-born Ioudaioi.61
A similar phenomenon occurs in the dozen or so inscriptions from
antiquity that mention proselytes. Found mostly on epitaphs spanning a
wide temporal and geographic range, many of these inscriptions refer to
the deceased simply as “proselyte,” whereas a few say “proselyte” alongside
“Ioudaia/os.” The well-known inscription from Aphrodisias, which cel-
ebrates the donors to a local building project, specifically identifies three
persons as proselytes. Whether the proselytes themselves chose to be des-
ignated as such or the community of Ioudaioi insisted on it is impossible
to determine. In any case, this manner of labeling converts highlighted
their ambiguous status, acknowledging their entrance and participation

in the community of the Ioudaioi while at the same time underscor-
ing that their inclusion was on terms different from the native born.62
Though some proselytes may well have been memorialized with the term
“Ioudaia/os” alone, proving as much is impossible until an epitaph of this
sort can be linked to a known proselyte.63
Both Philo of Alexandria and Josephus likewise attest to an ambiguous
status for proselytes. Philo expresses deep affection for proselytes.64 He
praises them for having abandoned their erroneous ways and adopted a
life dedicated to the one true God. He compares them to Abraham, the
paradigm for all who turn from darkness to light. Yet Philo never says that
converts become either Ioudaioi or Israelites, nor does he claim that they
join the ethnos or genos consisting thereof. He suggests only that converts
cross over into a new politeia, or “citizenship.” Presumably this politeia
is the politeia of the Ioudaioi, but nothing Philo ever says indicates that
converts join this politeia as Ioudaioi. They join it as proselytes.
Joining as proselytes does not necessarily mean they join on lesser
terms, however. On several occasions, Philo insists that they be accepted
as equal members of the politeia. Yet the manner in which he articulates
this call for equality betrays his underlying assumption that proselytes are,
in fact, different from the native born, even when the two are conjoined
into one unit. Consider the following appeal from Philo’s treatise On the
Virtues:
Having given laws pertaining to the treatment of people from the same
nation, [Moses] also thought proselytes were worthy of all the same consid-
eration. After all, they left behind their blood-relatives, country, customs,
and temples, as well as their gods and the worship and tribute devoted to
them, and came to a beautiful home. They abandoned spurious myths
in favor of a vision of the truth and the worship of the one true God. So
he bids those of the nation to love converts, not only as friends and kins-
men, but even as themselves, seeking the best for them in both bodily and
spiritual terms and sharing in their joys and pains, so that even though the
parts are different, it looks like one living being, bound together and uni-
fied by fellowship.65
Philo calls for unity, but his language divides as much as it unifies. Mem-
bers of the nation are to think of converts as kinsmen and to treat them in
such a way that it looks as if they are all one uniform entity. But clearly all
are not the same. The provision for the proselytes is an addendum to the
legislation governing those who belong to the “same nation.” Proselytes
are not members of this nation, but a prosthetic whom the real members
The Gentile-Jew 39
of the nation are called upon to respect. Doing so makes the two distinct
parts seem as though they are one, but this result will be an appearance,
not reality. Converts can become almost identical to the native born, but
“almost” is the operative term.
Elsewhere Philo articulates a similarly divisive unity in demanding
equality for the convert. Having noted Moses’s devotion to wisdom, he
observes,
God accepts all those who are of the same disposition, whether they were
born as such from the beginning or became better people by converting
to a superior order of men. The former did not forsake their noble birth;
the latter saw fit to make the voyage toward piety. These he calls converts
because they have “crossed over” to a new and God-loving politeia. They
disregarded bogus myths and embraced the untainted truth. Therefore,
he gives equal treatment under the law to all converts and provides them
all that is given to the native born, and he advises those of noble birth to
reward them not only with honors, but also with special friendship and
abundant kindness.66
Here, again, the politeia is divided between those who naturally belong
in it and those who have entered belatedly. Beginning by observing that
“God accepts all those who are of the same disposition,” the passage then
makes clear that all those of the same disposition are not the same. Some
were born with it, while others had to acquire it. As the passage con-
tinues, it becomes clear that this division between the innate and the
acquired disposition is in fact hierarchal. Something inferior, even con-
trived and unnatural, taints the monotheistic conviction of the proselyte:
“Inasmuch as God has provided full legal equality to those who have
denounced the delusions of their fathers and forebears, he commands the
native born not to revile with idle talk and unbridled tongues the gods
recognized by others, lest proselytes be incited by this to speak impiously
against the truly existent one. They will go astray because they do not
know the difference, since from an early age they were taught falsehood
as though it were truth.”67 Philo’s exhortation to welcome the proselyte
with especial warmth comes with an admonition: proselytes are weak.
Despite their apparent conversion from the delusions of their ancestors to
a perception of the one true God, years of instruction and immersion in
the idolatrous world have left them incapable of discriminating reliably
between God and the gods. The native born must therefore tread gently
around proselytes to avoid splintering the fragile monotheistic veneer. In
this sense, Philo’s description of the proselyte calls to mind colonial texts
that speak of “civilized” natives, indigenous persons who learn to act,
dress, and speak like the white man, but whose barbaric essence never
fully disappears.68 As with Philo, there can be likeness, even equality, but
never sameness.
Finally, we turn to Josephus. Evaluating Josephus’s opinion of conver-
sion is difficult because he never once uses the word prosēlytos. He does
describe what look like conversions, however. The clearest example is the
royal house of Adiabene, who according to Josephus adopted the ancestral
customs of the Ioudaioi.69 Josephus reports how Izates, the crown prince
of Adiabene, learned of the foreign customs under the tutelage of the
merchant Ananias, who had already made inroads among the women at
the royal court. Having learned that his mother Helena, too, had gone
over to these customs, Izates wished to be circumcised. He postponed the
deed at the behest of Helena and Ananias, who feared that the subjects of
Adiabene would not tolerate a king devoted to foreign customs. Later on,
however, at the bidding of Eleazar, Izates underwent circumcision and the
concerns of Helena and Ananias turned out to be unsubstantiated.
Debate around this episode generally focuses on when Izates officially
becomes a proselyte, and hence a Ioudaios.70 The prevailing view is that
Izates became a proselyte at the time of his circumcision, prior to which
he was a God-fearer, one who sympathized with Ioudaioi without being
counted formally among them. Others have challenged this view, claim-
ing that Izates became a proselyte following his instruction under Ana-
nias. He underwent circumcision at a later date because he was a Ioudaios,
not because he wished to become one.71 The pertinent question, however,
is not when the conversion was official, but to what extent the conver-
sion made Izates into a Ioudaios. Some evidence suggests that Josephus
believed proselytes become Ioudaioi in the fullest sense. According Jose-
phus’s account, “When [Izates] had learned that his own mother was very
happy with the customs of the Ioudaioi, he was himself eager to convert
to those ways, and thinking that he would not genuinely be a Ioudaios
unless he were circumcised, he was ready to do so.”72 Izates thinks he
will become a “genuine Ioudaios” through circumcision, a sentiment rein-
forced by his mother, who explicitly says that circumcision will indicate
to his subjects that he has become a Ioudaios. Notably, however, Josephus
attributes these thoughts to his Gentile characters rather than to his own
narrative voice. Izates, and not necessarily Josephus, thinks circumcision
will make him into a Ioudaios. Other evidence from antiquity suggests
that non-Ioudaioi generally believed that proselytes became Ioudaioi upon
conversion, which Epictetus, Cassius Dio, and many other sources make
clear.73 According to Cohen, Ioudaioi knew this about Gentiles and often
assigned the view to Gentiles in their own literature.74 That Josephus says
The Gentile-Jew 41
Izates thought circumcision would make him a Ioudaios, and that his sub-
jects would infer the same, reveals only that Josephus knew how Gentiles
understood the effects of conversion, not necessarily his own opinion on
the matter.
Nowhere does Josephus refer in his own voice to a proselyte as a Iou-
daios. Like his contemporaries, he speaks of them in highly ambiguous
terms. In a passage from The Jewish War, for example, he reports that the
Ioudaioi in Antioch “brought over to their forms of worship a great num-
ber of Greeks, and had made them in some way a part of themselves.”75
What Josephus means by “in some way” is anybody’s guess, but these
Greeks appear to have had one foot in the community and one foot out.
By coming over to the religious observances of the Ioudaioi, they were
incorporated into the community, but incompletely. Earlier in The Jewish
War, Josephus describes the situation in Syria at the outbreak of the war
with equally enigmatic language:
The Syrians killed just as many Ioudaioi. They slaughtered those whom
they took from the cities, doing so not only out of hatred, as they had done
before, but in order to protect against the dangers they now faced. The
whole of Syria was in a terrible commotion. Every city was divided into
two camps, with the security of each depending on its ability to anticipate
the moves of the other. Days were spent in blood and the nights were even
more trying. For even though they thought all the Ioudaioi had been elimi-
nated, each city held the Judaizers under suspicion. No one dared rashly
to kill the ambiguous entity and they feared the mixed group as though it
were genuinely foreign.76
The Greek in this passage is knotty, so much so that scholars cannot agree
whether the “Judaizers,” the “ambiguous entity,” and the “mixed group”
refer to one, two, or three distinct parties. Clearly, however, Josephus first
divides the region into two camps, the Syrians and the Ioudaioi, but soon
after acknowledges that a good many people were caught in the middle
of this dichotomy. The Syrians thought they had killed all the Ioudaioi,
but they were not sure whether the Judaizers, whatever they were, were
Ioudaioi or not. They also thought twice about killing the “ambiguous
entity,” presumably because they were not certain whether they were Iou-
daioi or not. This situation offers a case of negotiated and contested iden-
tity with the severest of consequences.
Perhaps none of these three groups refer to proselytes, as those brought
over “in some way” to the community in Antioch, as well as the Juda-
izers, the ambiguous entity, and the mixed group may, after all, refer to
God-fearers or to persons of mixed ancestry.77 In the end, it does not
matter much. Even if Josephus does not have proselytes in view here, but
God-fearers or some other group, the broader argument in this chapter
would hardly be diminished. There would simply be yet another set of
persons about whom the organizer of our ancient reception line would
“have to ask.” Whoever they are, these partially incorporated, ambiguous,
mixed, Judaizing people are, like proselytes in many of the sources we
have examined, not quite Ioudaioi or Israelites but not quite not Ioudaioi
or not Israelites all the same.
Conclusion
Indeed, we need not stop at Idumeans, gerim, proselytes, and God-fear-
ers in considering the spectral nature of Jewish identity in antiquity. A
broader sweep of figures might reveal even more possibilities for ambigu-
ity. We have discussed the ambiguous status of proselytes, but what about
apostates? What about those who wished to terminate their association
with the Ioudaioi? An inscription from Smyrna refers to a donation of
ten thousand drachmas provided by “those formerly Ioudaioi.”78 Schol-
ars have debated whether this expression designates the contributors as
immigrants from Palestine or apostates in the religious sense. In either
case, they are described as once having been Ioudaioi but remaining so
no longer. The book of 3 Maccabees mentions a certain Dositheos, “a
Ioudaios according to genos who later changed his view of the customs and
became a stranger to the ancestral laws.” Josephus tells of the children of
a man called Alexander, the great-great-grandson of Herod, who “at birth
abandoned concern for the local customs of the Ioudaioi and converted to
the Greek traditions.”79 Elsewhere he reports on the marriage of Herod’s
daughter, Berenice, to the Cilician king Polemo, noting that the latter was
circumcised; but when Berenice abandoned him, he was “released both
from the marriage and from abiding by the customs of the Ioudaioi.”80
To what extent did these persons cease being Ioudaioi? In the case of
Dositheos or the children of Alexander, did abandoning their ancestral
customs mean they were no longer Ioudaioi, even according to genos? In
the case of Polemo, to what extent did he become a Ioudaios by convert-
ing and to what extent did he cease being so when his marriage ended?
According to Josephus, other converts were known to relapse.81 Did these
people return to being Gentiles in the fullest sense? Unfortunately, the
slimness of the evidence for such circumstances prevents any detailed
analysis of these questions. All we can say is that Idumeans, proselytes,
and God-fearers attest to movement along a Gentile-Jewish spectrum
in one direction, but others were traversing the opposite way, many of
The Gentile-Jew 43
whom were no doubt caught in the middle—no longer Ioudaioi, but not
quite Gentiles either.
Samaritans, too, would make an interesting case study in this regard.
Numerous texts distinguish between Samaritans and Ioudaioi. Jose-
phus often reports conflicts between the two and insists in no uncertain
terms that Samaritans are not Ioudaioi. But he also concedes that the
Samaritans at times identify themselves as Ioudaioi. In his view, they
call themselves Ioudaioi when it benefits them, staking their claim to
kinship on descent from Ephraim and Manasseh. When advantage calls
for the opposite, they disavow such fraternal ties.82 Of course, there is
good reason to take Josephus’s charge of unscrupulousness with a grain
of salt. Some Samaritans might genuinely have understood themselves to
be Ioudaioi. Evidence from outside of Palestine links Samaritans to the
term “Israelite,” if not Ioudaios. Two inscriptions found on Delos feature
dedications by “Israelites” who made offerings to “Holy Argarizein,” a
certain reference to Mount Gerizim, the Samaritan holy place.83 At that
time on Delos, at least, Samaritans identified as Israelites, just as here
and there they identified as Ioudaioi according to Josephus. But they
were also not Ioudaioi.
Even more cases might be exemplary. Slaves acquired by Ioudaioi
became Ioudaioi in a sense, as there is good reason to believe that male
slaves were circumcised at acquisition and granted the status of proselyte
upon manumission.84 What, then, shall we say about their status dur-
ing their period of servitude? Were they preproselytes? Partial, partial
Ioudaioi?
By now the point should be obvious. All these examples, from Idu-
means, proselytes, and God-fearers, to apostates, Samaritans, and slaves,
corroborate the claim made on theoretical grounds that the border
between Jew and Gentile in antiquity was indeed stocked with various
figures whose identity was contested, negotiated, and ambiguous. This
chapter has demonstrated that the articulation of the ancient dichotomy
between Ioudaios and non-Ioudaios did not, in reality, correspond to a
neat divide. There was, as there inevitably will be, an assemblage of what
Homi K. Bhabha refers to as “stubborn chunks,” groups or individuals
who defied representation in the paradigmatic scheme, those who were
not quite Jews but not quite Gentiles either.85
I have focused on transition as a key factor in generating such hybrid-
ized identities, showing that those who began life as Gentiles, only to
“become” Jews later in life, often got stuck in an “in-between” space
where neither name was apt. Our attention now turns to another group
caught in the same divide.
CHAPTER 2
Paul’s “Christians”
as “Gentile-Jews”
Introduction: A Corinthian “Christian” Meets Nero

In the previous chapter, I used a thought experiment to introduce the
claim that certain individuals in the first century CE cannot be catego-
rized straightforwardly as either Jews or Gentiles. It was 62 CE, Nero and
Poppaea had just celebrated their nuptials, and the reception line greeting
them was arrayed so that the Jews of the empire would be first in line.
Proselytes, gerim, and Idumeans, among others, would have complicated
the arrangement of the column.
In this chapter I wish to consider the placement of still another sort
of person.
I have in mind a leading member of the church in Corinth. He is a
man, about fifty years old, an elite gentleman from an established Corin-
thian family. For forty years he lived piously by Greco-Roman standards,
worshipping in an appropriate manner the gods of his household, his city,
and his Roman conquerors. He was, by all assessments, a “recognizable”
Gentile, not a Jew by any stretch of the imagination. Things changed,
however. Around the year 50 CE, he learned that some of his servants
had been meeting regularly with an itinerant Jewish teacher from Tarsus.
In the course of investigating the matter, he too became persuaded by
the gospel, or “good news,” proclaimed by Paul, and he accepted bap-
tism into Jesus Christ. His life was transformed dramatically as a result.
In the first place, he understood the cosmos differently: there were not
many gods and many lords, as he had long thought, but one God—
the God worshipped by the Jews—and one Lord—Jesus, the son of the
Jewish God, on account of whose death and resurrection he would soon
stand justified before God. This change in conviction brought changes in
behavior. He scrapped his household gods and rituals, avoided civic cults,
and frequently begged out of meals at which meat from the local temples
might be served. Instead he shared meals with his fellow believers, where
together they performed a ritual of communion with the risen Jesus and
read from the sacred books of the Jews, which they believed furnished
predictions of events in their own time. The man began to associate with
a good number of Jews, too, especially those who shared his messianic
conviction. Like these Jews, he sent money to Jerusalem, donating gener-
ously to a collection of funds Paul was taking to the apostles in the Jewish
capital. He even learned a few words of Hebrew and Aramaic.
Twelve years after this extraordinary transformation, the man comes
to Rome to hail the emperor and his bride. He hears the centurions’ cry:
“Jews to the front of the line, Poppaea’s orders!” Where will he go? Does
he know? Do we?
Most readers will identify this man as a Gentile, specifically a “Gen-
tile-Christian.” Not that all Christians were Gentiles, of course. Had I
described someone more like Peter, James, or Paul, or Paul’s missionary
coworkers Priscilla and Aquila, equal agreement would be reached that
such “Jewish-Christians” should be classified as Jews. This supposition
may not have been the case a century ago, but increasingly historians
have come to believe that Jews baptized into Christ, at least in the first
or second generation after the crucifixion, did not cease being Jews. Most
historians consider Christianity in its earliest stages to have been one of
the manifold expressions of Judaism during the Second Temple period.
As one historian has explained it, “Christianity” was but one species of
the genus “Judaism,” akin to other species such as the Pharisees, Saddu-
cees, or Samaritans.1 Accordingly, Jews baptized into Christ might have
become Jews of a different stripe, but they remained Jews nonetheless.
So Peter, James, and Paul would have been among the first to greet the
emperor. They were Jews. If this interpretation is so, however, if “Chris-
tianity” truly did begin within Judaism so that Jews who became “Chris-
tians” remained Jews, why is it outrageous to suppose that Gentiles who
became “Christians”—such as our Corinthian example—also became
Jews? If “Christianity” composed a species within the genus of Judaism,
then why should we not understand baptism into Christ as a means by
which Gentiles converted to Judaism?
As I see it, baptized Gentiles did become Jews—at least sort of. They
become Gentile-Jews, as I will explain in the present chapter.
Let us begin by revisiting the polythetic, family-resemblance mode of
classification described in the previous chapter. How might our Corin-
thian gentleman fare if he were subjected to a classification procedure
that enumerates a large number of typical Jewish characteristics and then
evaluates the quantity and configuration of those traits? Our man from
Paul’s “Christians” as “Gentile-Jews” 47
Corinth displays no shortage of Jewish attributes: a fierce devotion to the

God of the Jews; a belief in that God as the God of the world; frequent
engagement with the Jewish scriptures; association with Jews and possibly
with local Jewish institutions (e.g., synagogue); Jewish scruples vis-à-vis
cultic worship; a financial commitment to Jerusalem, the mother-city of
the Jews; and recitation of prayers at least partially in Hebrew or Aramaic.
Keep in mind, too, that if we were considering a Gentile convert to Christ
from Galatia rather than Corinth, we might even suppose that our subject
is circumcised and observes Jewish festivals, in which case we might go so
far as to suggest that we are dealing with a “recognizable” Jew, or at least
a Jewish proselyte. Even in the case of our uncircumcised Corinthian,
however, the sheer number of typically Jewish attributes is too great to
classify him unmistakably as a Gentile. In some respects, he seems like a
Jew; in other respects, admittedly, he seems like a Gentile. In other words,
we “have to ask.”
Did he himself have to ask? Did others around him? Assessing such
questions is difficult because the evidence is so scant. What little we do
have—namely, Paul’s surviving correspondence with the churches in
Corinth—yields a predictably fuzzy picture. Paul makes it seem as though
his Corinthian charges are not Gentiles, and thus Jews, but also not Jews,
and thus Gentiles. In 1 Corinthians 12:2, for example, Paul admonishes
his readers regarding their idolatrous past: “You know that when you were
Gentiles,” Paul says, “you were led astray toward mute idols.”2 By compar-
ing the present to the time when his readers were Gentiles, Paul appears
to suggest that they had since broken free from that status and become its
opposite—namely, Jews. Earlier in the same epistle, Paul chides the Cor-
inthians for countenancing “the sort of fornication [practiced] not even
among the Gentiles” (1 Cor. 5:1), an accusation that makes little sense if
Paul considers the intended recipients of the letter to be Gentiles. Paul’s
harangue against idolatry in 1 Corinthians 10 also describes the recipi-
ents in Jewish terms. He includes them when recalling “our” fathers in
biblical times, whose shortcomings serve as an example for “us,” a pair of
pronouns that serve to incorporate the Corinthians into the narrative his-
tory of Israel. It certainly sounds as if the Corinthians had become Jews.
That said, Paul also indicates that the Corinthians are not Jews, at least
insofar as Jews are the descendants of the Israelites. During his tirade
against idolatry, for example, Paul bids his readers to consider the sacri-
ficial practices of “Israel according to the flesh” (1 Cor. 10:18), thereby
implying that the readers themselves are not included in that entity. Thus
although the Corinthians may claim the biblical Israelites as their own
ancestors, they are clearly not descended from those ancestors, at least
“according to the flesh.” This incongruity is compounded in Paul’s second

letter to the Corinthians, when he distinguishes his Corinthian audience
from the biblical “children of Israel” whose minds were blinded at Mount
Sinai and “even until today a veil is upon their heart when Moses is read”
(2 Cor. 3:14). In other words, a Corinthian might view the biblical Isra-
elites as his forebears, and reckon himself a child of Israel in that respect,
but insofar as he looks to scripture for examples without a blinded mind,
he is not one of “them,” not one of the children of Israel, not a Jew in
that respect.
According to Paul, then, our Corinthian case study is no longer a Gen-
tile, but not quite a Jew either. Of course, insofar as these categories are
complementary, he has become a Jew while remaining, in some respects,
a Gentile. If Paul’s correspondence set the standard for arranging the
reception line greeting Nero and Poppaea, the centurions would be hard-
pressed to figure out where to station him. Our Corinthian resides in the
murky, unnamable, contradictory, in-between realm. He is a Gentile-Jew.
Acknowledging such murkiness is not the standard solution to the
dilemma.3 Ordinarily, this Corinthian convert is thought to have bypassed
Jewish identity entirely. Following his baptism into Christ and his adop-
tion of the consequent behaviors, he became a “Christian,” an umbrella
grouping into which both Jews and Gentiles can be incorporated. As
Christians, he and his fellows are no longer Gentiles in the spiritual or
religious sense, even if they remain so in an ethnic or physical sense; con-
sequently, Paul can speak of their Gentile past. Even so, they have inher-
ited the spiritual endowment of the Jews and, as a result, Paul can speak
of their descent from the Israelites nevertheless differentiating them from
Jews, the descendants of Israel according to the flesh. In the prevailing
taxonomy, then, our subject is a Gentile by ethnicity and a Christian by
religion—a Gentile-Christian—and insofar as Christianity represents the
spiritual successor to Judaism, here and there Paul can describe him in
spiritualized Jewish terms. But he is not a Jew. He is a Gentile, a Gentile-
Christian, and his place would be in the rear of the line.
As entrenched and pervasive as it is, however, the term “Gentile-Chris-
tian” issues from a view of Christian origins that struggles to account for
identity as it is described in the surviving texts of the apostolic period,
which is to say, the genuine epistles of Paul. The concept of the hybrid
“Gentile-Jew,” on the other hand, stems from an alternative account of
Christian origins that, when applied to the texts of Paul, yields innova-
tive and satisfying interpretations. Before this new account can be fully
appreciated, however, we must review the strengths and weaknesses of the
conventional paradigm, typically dubbed “the parting of the ways.” As we
will see, recent appraisals of this paradigm have raised serious questions
about the role played by Paul in the emergence of Christians and Christi-
anity and their differentiation from Jews and Judaism.
The Parting of the Ways

There has never been a definitive model for depicting the emergence
of Christianity, no perfect description to capture what happened.4 We
know it happened, of course, since prior to 30 CE there were ostensibly
no Christians in the world, then four centuries later there were not only
Christians but a Christian empire, Christian institutions, and attested
beliefs and practices that can be classified unequivocally as Christianity.
Christianity came about, but where it came from, and when, how, and
why it emerged remain obscure and controversial. Everyone concedes
that the process had something to do with Jews and Judaism, yet just
how Christianity and Judaism began as one thing and ended up as two
remains maddeningly elusive. Judith Lieu, a respected voice on the mat-
ter, has summed up that frustration as follows:
Both “Judaism” and “Christianity” have come to elude our conceptual

grasp; we feel sure they are there, and can quote those “others,” outsid-
ers, who were no less sure . . . Yet when we try to describe, when we
seek to draw the boundaries which will define our subject for us, we lack
the tools, both conceptual and material. It seems to me equally justifiable
to “construct” “Christianity” in opposition to “Judaism” at the moment
when Jesus “cleansed the Temple,” at least in the literary representation
of that event, and to think of that separation only in the fourth century,
stimulated by dramatic changes in access to power—and I could call to my
defence advocates of both positions, no doubt determined by their own
starting-points and definitional frameworks.5
As Lieu so aptly explains, accounting for how, when, and why Juda-
ism and Christianity became distinct entities depends ultimately on the
“starting-points,” or assumptions, informing a given paradigm and the
“definitional frameworks” employed. Starting from one point of analysis,
and employing one set of definitions, the emergence of Christianity looks
different than it would from a different perspective and with alternative
parameters. Most important to recognize is that few approaches are dead
wrong and none are just right. One approach might clarify a particular
aspect of the process, but obscure another. One interpretive angle may
account splendidly for one group of texts or phenomena, yet stymie mak-
ing sense of others.
The paradigm currently preferred in scholarship, called the “parting

of the ways,” gained popularity in the middle of the twentieth century as
an allegedly objective and ecumenical alternative to confessional Jewish
and Christian perspectives on the schism.6 The advocates of this approach
often differ on dates and details, and the precise contours of one descrip-
tion of the “parting” rarely cohere exactly to another, but by and large
they share an organizing narrative. Annette Yoshiko Reed and Adam H.
Becker have described these basic parameters as follows:
In the first century CE, Judaism was characterized by great diversity, and
the Jesus Movement was still negotiating its relationship to Jews and
Judaism, both inside and outside the (still fluid) boundaries of its own
communities. As a result, Christ-believers of both Jewish and non-Jewish
ethnicities engaged in a range of exchanges with non-Christian Jews, such
that even the conflicts between them were typically predicated on close
contact and competition. In the wake of the destruction of the Second
Temple and the Bar Kokhba Revolt, however, the two religions decisively
institutionalized their differences. With the Jerusalem Church’s alleged flight
to Pella, apostolic “Jewish Christianity” lost its last bastion of authority, and
the church would thenceforth be dominated by the antinomian “Gentile Chris-
tianity” espoused by the apostle Paul and embraced by non-Jews throughout
the Roman Empire. Concurrent with the church’s geographical shift from the
Land of Israel to the urban centers of the eastern Mediterranean, Christianity
emerged as a fully independent system of belief and practice, self-defined as
non-Jewish in its theology, its ritual practice, and the ethnicity of its adherents.7
I have italicized a portion of this citation in order to accentuate the criti-

cal role ascribed to Paul in nearly every version of the “parting” paradigm.
Paul’s Gentile-based, Law-free, brand of Christianity could not be rec-
onciled with contemporary Judaism, the reasoning goes, and although
it took until 70 CE or perhaps even later for it to gain demographic,
geographic, and institutional dominance, once it did the ultimate schism
between Judaism and Christianity was just a matter of course. Paul is
the portal through which Christianity leaves Judaism and becomes some-
thing else. Martha Himmelfarb puts it in no uncertain terms in her own
synopsis of the “parting” paradigm:
Had Paul never appeared on the scene, the Jerusalem church, so Jewish in its
piety, might have remained a variety of Judaism. But Paul’s mission to the
Gentiles radically altered the demographic balance of early Christianity
against the Jerusalem community. By the late first century Christianity was
primarily Gentile in its membership. What is more, Paul’s mission to the
Gentiles involved a rejection of the Torah. For the Jerusalem community,
Jesus was the Messiah, but that in no way affected the continuing validity
of the Torah. For Paul, the Torah had once been valid, but the Torah itself
looked forward to the coming of Christ, who opened a new path to God.
In the new age, the age in which Paul and his contemporaries lived, the
Torah had become obsolete.
Unlike the Christianity of the Jerusalem community, Paul’s brand of
Christianity, whether it was practiced by Jews or by Gentiles, could not be seen
simply as a variety of Judaism. It was something new. As Paul’s form of Gen-
tile Christianity without Torah became the dominant form of Christianity,
the separation of the daughter religion from its mother became inevitable.8
Again, I italicized the crucial part of the quotation for emphasis. In the
standard paradigm, the jolt required to propel Christianity entirely outside
the limits of Judaism, so that it no longer could be viewed as yet another
“brand” or “variety” of Judaism, may have been provided by the rebellions
against Rome and other events in the late first or early second centuries
CE, but the wheels for this transition were put in place by Paul, who first
conceptualized a Christianity distinct from Judaism in the 40s and 50s
CE. This Pauline brand of Christianity stood waiting in the wings when
the Christianity still subsumed within Judaism ultimately gave way. Yet
another distinguished voice on the matter, James D. G. Dunn, has put it
this way: “It was Paul who, by questioning the function of the law in its
role of defining his people, and by declaring that in Christ neither Jew nor
Greek counted for anything (Gal. 3.28), made it virtually impossible for
‘Christianity’ to remain part of a ‘Judaism’ defined in ethnic terms . . . Paul,
in other words, stands at a point of still clear overlap between ‘Christianity’
and ‘Judaism’ where a crack between the two was just becoming visible and,
in most reckoning, was responsible more than anyone else for expanding
that crack into a rift.”9
Paul’s pivotal role in propelling Christianity beyond the bounds of
Judaism is rooted in the standard understanding of his missionary objec-
tive, as confirmed by the Apostolic meeting he himself describes in his
epistle to the Galatians. As the story goes, Paul may not have been the
first to advertise Christ to the nations, but he was the first to bring them
a gospel that required neither circumcision nor submission to the Law—
namely, conversion to Judaism. This gospel was presumably the content
of his revelation from Christ as reported in Galatians 1:11–16, it was the
premise of his mission to the Gentiles thereafter, and it was the claim he
ascended to Jerusalem to defend at the end of his career. According to Paul,
at least, in Jerusalem he learned that he had not run in vain. He received
authorization for his “gospel of uncircumcision” from James, Cephas, and
John, thereby confirming—as the outcome of that conference is so often
summarized—that Gentiles could become Christians without becoming Jews

first. According to the “parting of the ways” scheme, this momentous
decision paved the way for the separation of Christianity from Judaism
over the course of the next century. Once Paul’s Gentile Christianity was
given sanction, it was simply a matter of time before demographic realities
and theological convictions made the rupture with Judaism irreparable.
Recent Criticism
Despite its continued influence, the “parting of the ways” model has
come under attack in recent years.10 One of the principal charges is over-
simplification. Though it laudably acknowledges the diversity of Jewish
expression in the first century CE, the model tends to ignore the diver-
sity in both Jewish and Christian expression in the second century CE
and beyond. Jewish diversity after 70 CE is pigeonholed by the supposed
hegemony of the rabbis, whereas “proto-Orthodox” voices such as Igna-
tius, Justin, and Irenaeus come to stand for Christianity.11 The paradigm
also neglects the variation in relations between Jews and Christians with
respect to time and place, failing to acknowledge that the “parting” in
Palestine, for example, did not happen at the same time or in the same
way in Asia Minor, Italy, or Babylonia.
Another criticism of the “parting” model—and the one of primary
interest here—centers on the problem of anachronism. As I just noted,
the model grants Paul a crucial role in initiating the rift between Judaism
and Christianity. By making it possible for Gentiles to join his move-
ment without circumcision and Law observance, Paul enabled Gentiles
to bypass Judaism and become a third thing, Christians. The trouble with
this view is that terms like “Christian” and “Christianity” never appear
in Paul’s letters. These terms first surface at the end of the first century.12
How, then, could Paul be the inaugurator of a new religion distinct from
Judaism, a gentile “Christianity,” as well as a new religious identity, gentile
“Christian,” when no such terms issue from his own pen? Not only does
Paul’s discourse lack these specific words but also his worldview does not
permit the concept of a third “Christian” entity that the words imply. As
E. P. Sanders has observed, Paul generally speaks in binary us-versus-them
terms: “He frequently used bipolar distinctions—descendant of Abraham
or not, my people or not my people (Rom. 9:25, quoting Hosea), those
who are being changed and those who are perishing (2 Cor. 3:18–4:3;
cf. Phil. 3:18–20), and the like.”13 To these distinctions one could add
Jew and not-Jew (e.g., Rom. 2:28–29), circumcised and uncircumcised
(e.g., Rom. 2:25–29), Israel and not Israel (e.g., Rom. 9:6). In other
words, Paul conceives of the world dichotomously in accordance with the
standard Jewish division of the world into Jews and Gentiles, Israel and
not, God’s people and not, the stock of Abraham and the nations, circum-
cised and uncircumcised, and so on. Paul’s vocabulary and his conceptual
demography are not merely binary, but they are also unmistakably Jewish
rather than “Christian.”14
Awareness of the anachronism infecting the “parting of the ways” para-
digm has triggered two trends still gaining momentum in early Christian
studies. On the one hand, the absence of explicitly Christian terminology
until the end of the first century CE has compelled a certain reluctance
to employ terms like “Christian” or “Christianity” when discussing Paul,
Peter, James, and their contemporaries, because the use of such terms
would mark an unwarranted introduction into the first century CE of a
religion and a religious identity not forged until the late first century CE
and later.15 One scholar goes so far as to say that such terms “make us lie”
when discussing the apostolic period.16 A plethora of alternatives has there-
fore been proposed, among them “Christ-follower,” “Christ-believer,”
“Yeshua-follower,” “Nazarene,” and “Jew or Gentile ‘in Christ.’”17 On
the other hand, revisionist theorists of Christian origins have increasingly
abandoned Paul as a crucial—indeed, even relevant—agent in the process
of historical change. As attention has shifted to figures of the later first
through the fifth centuries, the period witnessing the discursive produc-
tion of “Christianity” and “Christian” identity, Paul has become largely
neglected. Daniel Boyarin, whose name is perhaps most closely associated
with the revisionist postdating of Christian origins, provides no treatment
of Paul in either of his two monographs on the Jewish-Christian schism.18
Yoshiko Reed and Becker likewise have steered clear of Paul in their recent
indictment of the “parting” paradigm.19
The growing conflict between the entrenched “parting” paradigm and
its revisionist assailants has therefore yielded a somewhat schizophrenic
perspective on Paul. One view of Christian origins regards Paul as the
primary instrument by which Christianity comes into being and distin-
guishes itself from Judaism; in another, Paul precedes the period in which
scholarly inquiries after the origins of Christianity should occur, and the
very terms “Christian” and “Christianity” are deemed unfit for analysis of
his epistles. This Gordian knot is especially troubling for those who are
sympathetic to both sides, those convinced that Paul should play a criti-
cal role in any conceptualization of Christian origins, but who also take
seriously the fact that Paul never speaks of “Christians” or “Christianity,”
and hardly has a place for this tertium quid in his binary division of the
world in Jewish terms. Yet how can one possibly appreciate Paul’s role in
the origins of Christianity without inappropriately ascribing to him terms

and concepts foreign to his epistles?
It is possible to bridge the gap between tradition and revision, to
emphasize the importance of Paul in the origins of Christianity at the
same time respecting the limits imposed by the discursive emergence
of “Christians” and “Christianity” in the years following Paul’s activity.
And central to this alternative historical construction is the theoretical
concept of hybrid identity, specifically the “Gentile-Jew.” Contemporary
perspectives on hybridity provide an invaluable analytical tool for con-
ceptualizing the relationship among Paul, his writings, and the discursive
emergence of Christianity in the generations after him.
Hybridity and Christian Origins

To some degree, hybrid identity in cultural studies has become inextri-
cably associated with the theorist and literary critic Homi K. Bhabha.20
As I discussed briefly in the introduction, Bhabha has drawn attention
to the ambivalent character of colonial discourse. Even as this discourse
disavows the colonized other, he claims, it nevertheless incorporates traces
of the other’s language and knowledge, a blending that ultimately under-
mines the very dichotomy that is presupposed. A colonial text such as
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, for example, undertakes to distin-
guish what is properly English from what is native, but its articulation
of Englishness is invariably implicated, influenced, or affected by its con-
ception of what is native. Englishness thus never emerges as a “pure” or
“authentic” identity distinguishable from native identity, which itself is
never pure because both alternatives are constantly being reconstructed
and reimagined through their encounter with the other. The ultimate
result of such colonial discourse, accordingly, is not a sharp distinction
between the one and the other—the English and the native—but hybrid-
ity, which Bhabha describes as “a problematic of colonial representation
and individuation that reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so
that other ‘denied’ knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and
estrange the basis of its authority.”21 For Bhabha, in other words, hybrid-
ity refers to the fundamental instability of the entrenched dichotomies
of colonial discourse. This reading of colonialism, in turn, leads to his
broader understanding of all culture as fundamentally hybrid in nature.
No cultural, ethnic, or national identities are ever fixed or pure, but are
constantly being reproduced and redetermined; accordingly, it is on the
borderlines between supposedly pure cultures, what Bhabha calls “the in-
between space,” where “the burden of the meaning of culture” resides.22
Especially important for this study is Bhabha’s insistence that such “in-
between” spaces give cultures their capacity to change. Bhabha describes
this effect of hybridity convincingly in an essay titled, “How Newness
Enters the World,” a phrase with obvious pertinence for the subject at
hand as our concern is how something new—namely, Christianity—
entered the world.23 According to Bhabha, identity in the “in-between”
space of culture, what he elsewhere calls the “Third Space,”24 cannot be
identified with understandable terminology because it defies the very
capabilities of hegemonic discourse. In a world supposedly divided into
“English” and “native,” for example, in which one is either English or
native, no name exists for the inevitably constructed hybrid identity that
is, as Bhabha puts it, “neither the One nor the Other but something else
besides.”25 The dichotomy admits of no third term. Likewise, I will sug-
gest, no name existed for Paul to describe the hybrid space that is neither
Jew nor Gentile (or both Jew and Gentile) in a world supposed to be
divided neatly between the two. Such unnameability becomes especially
palpable when one considers what Bhabha calls “the subjects of cultural
difference,” the border dwellers who occupy the hybrid third space by
identifying themselves, or being identified, as resisting neat cultural divi-
sions. Naming such subjects, Bhabha insists, requires the use of “hybrid
hyphenations,” contradictions in language that “emphasize the incom-
mensurable elements . . . as the basis of cultural identifications”26—that
is to say, a term like “Gentile-Jew,” which signifies those persons who are
Jews but not quite Jews, Gentiles but not quite Gentiles, whose status
eludes the descriptive capacity of language’s binary demands.
Bhabha’s claim about the anonymity of hybrid identities is epitomized
in the title of a work whose author may be more familiar than Bhabha to
the reading public. The British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie gained
notoriety in 1988 when the publication of his book The Satanic Verses
provoked enormous controversy in the Islamic world. Seven years later,
Rushdie put out an anthology of short stories titled East, West: Stories. The
characters in East, West typify the experience of those who operate betwixt
and between the apparently exclusive realms of the East and the West. In
discussing the curious title he gave to the collection, Rushdie said that
“the most important part of the title was the comma. Because it seems
to me that I am that comma—or at least I live in the comma.”27 Like so
many of his characters, Rushdie views himself as the consummate hybrid
border dweller. He lives in the anonymous space that is both East and
West, and neither East nor West, but that can only be named in relation to
those terms: East, West. The comma carries profound significance, in other
words, even if there is no name for what the comma actually represents.
As Rushdie’s own contributions reveal, however, the anonymity of

the hybrid middle ground—identifying as a hyphen or a comma—does
not stifle creative expression. Far from lending itself to cultural idleness
or stagnation, hybrid identification teems with possibilities for newness
and innovation. Indeed, new forms of identity and cultural expression
emerge precisely as a consequence of hybridity, as the very indescribability
of liminal identity elicits the use of language in unsanctioned and previ-
ously unimagined ways. In other words, according to Bhabha, efforts to
describe the untranslatable third space, to express what is ultimately inex-
pressible, produce hybridized terms that flout standard assumptions about
the world. Accordingly, the in-between space does not produce an inter-
minable status quo in which newness is forever stifled by the hegemony
of established language; on the contrary, hybridity proves to be a source
of ingenuity, originality, and creativity. The instability of the hybrid third
space makes it culturally generative because life on the unnamable border
elicits blasphemous expressions of newness from its unmoored subjects,
articulations of new modes of identity and new ways of conceptualizing
one’s relationship to the world. Thus Bhabha also refers to the hybrid
third space as a “Third Space of enunciation,”28 a place between the alter-
natives allowed by contemporary discourse in which new forms of iden-
tity are enunciated and brought into being.
How, then, does newness enter the world? It emerges through hybrid-
ity, through the inability of reigning paradigms to describe and contain it.
And so, how might “Christianity” and “Christian” identity have entered
the world? The premise of this investigation is as follows: if novel subjec-
tivities are indeed enunciated out of a hybrid third space, then analyses of
“how Christianity entered the world” might succeed by focusing on a pre-
ceding condition of incommensurable differences—in this case, a hybrid
Jewish-Gentile space, inhabited by hybrid Gentile-Jews, which ultimately
proves untenable and elicits the enunciation of a third thing, Christian-
ity, that is neither the one thing (Jewish) nor the other (Gentile), but
something entirely new. The notion of hybridity would thus resolve the
conundrum introduced by revisionists who have drawn attention away
from Paul toward the discursive production of Christianity in the second
and third centuries CE by allowing us to link Paul to those who gave
voice to Christianity in subsequent generations. Hybridity would offer
a conceptual paradigm with which to understand Paul without utilizing
an anachronistic third category of identity, at the same time acknowledg-
ing that Paul’s discourse was instrumental in bringing about that third
category, because it is precisely the hybridized Jewish-Gentile subjectivi-
ties forged through Paul’s Gentile mission that ultimately precipitated
the enunciation of identities that were neither Jewish nor Gentile but,
as Bhabha puts it, “something else besides, which contests the terms and
territories of both.”29 In other words, “Christianity.”30
Our challenge, accordingly, will be to demonstrate how the genuine
epistles of Paul reveal just the sort of hybridized Gentile-Jewish space
that anticipated the enunciation of “Christianity” in the decades to fol-
low by those uncomfortably caught in the dilemma of being both Jews
and Gentiles, and neither Jews nor Gentiles, at the same time. We have
already encountered some initial indications of such contradiction, as the
Corinthian correspondence showed Paul referring to his audiences with
explicitly Jewish and non-Jewish terms—they were “no longer” Gentiles
and descendants of the Israelites, but decidedly not Israelites according
to the flesh. The remainder of this book reveals that Paul’s other letters,
particularly Romans, reveal a similarly messy predicament facing the ini-
tiates to whom Paul writes. He describes his audiences alternatively as
Gentiles, by nature even, and yet also as Jews; as genitally circumcised yet
manifestly uncircumcised; as outside Israelite history and yet inextricably
a part of it; as a part of Israel and yet foreign to it; as recent entrants
into the covenant of the biblical patriarchs and yet members foreknown
from the very beginning. In short, Paul constructs an identity for his
charges that is “both/and” and “neither/nor.” In my view this untranslat-
able, incommensurable, and paradoxical identity forged by Paul in the
middle of the first century elicited the enunciation of a third conceptual
identity, Christianity, at the close of that century and later by figures like
Ignatius, Justin, and others. No longer willing to be caught in the middle
as Gentile-Jews, “Christians” began to define themselves as neither one
thing nor the other, but something altogether different.
Paul’s Production of Hybrid Identity

At the heart of Paul’s production of hybridized identity, I suggest, is a
program of thoroughgoing ethnic redefinition. Paul’s aim in Romans,
Galatians, and Philippians, or at least certain portions of these epistles,
is to demonstrate how the death and resurrection of Christ inaugurated
a radically new and culminating period in human history, one with pro-
found consequences for the nature of Jewish identity and the criteria
governing inclusion in the covenant of Israel. Whereas Jewish identity
prior to Christ had been determined primarily by two factors—physical
descent from the patriarchs and genital circumcision, with “works of
the Law,” such as dietary regulations and festival observance, consti-
tuting signs of commitment to, and maintenance of, the covenant—
Christ changed these criteria dramatically.31 In Paul’s conception of the
eschatological present, the faith made available through Christ became

the single criterion by which inclusion in the covenant would be deter-
mined.32 In short, Christ makes one a Jew; Christ makes one a member
of Israel; and without Christ, one cannot be a Jew or a member of Israel,
regardless of birth, lifestyle, or genital appearance. Paul reinterprets every
trait that once determined Jewish status, be it circumcision, patriarchal
descent, or observance of the Law, in terms of baptism into Christ alone.
His momentous theological program amounts to a radical reevaluation
of what it means to be a Jew, thereby making it possible for Gentiles to
become Jews through Christ alone.
The notion that Paul envisions a path by which Gentiles can become
Jews through baptism is not in itself entirely novel. Indeed, Krister Sten-
dahl dramatically altered the course of Pauline interpretation nearly fifty
years ago when he proposed that Paul’s primary concern was not the nature
of a new religion, Christianity, as the superior solution to the problem of
sinfulness as compared to the inadequate Judaism it came to replace, but
rather the implications of Christ’s death and resurrection for understand-
ing the relationship between Jews and Gentiles vis-à-vis Judaism. In the
wake of Stendahl, several interpreters from the so-called new perspective
on Paul have proposed that Paul’s objective was indeed to reconceptualize
the Jewish covenant in terms of Christ so that Gentiles could be included
through baptism alone. Dunn and Boyarin, for example, have read Paul
as a consummately Jewish cultural critic who objects to the peculiar ethnic
markers of Jewish identity—observances of the flesh, such as circumci-
sion, dietary regulations, and festivals—advocating instead for a univer-
salized Jewish identity in which a law of faith replaces works of the law as
the mode by which the covenant is entered and sustained.33 By means of
their faith in Christ, Dunn and Boyarin would argue, Gentiles can enter
the Jewish covenant, observe the Law as it was meant to be observed, and,
in a sense, become Jews. Though neither invokes the figure of hybridity
explicitly, both Dunn and Boyarin understand Paul to have devised a
scheme in which Gentiles become Jews while at the same time remaining
Gentiles. By shedding the ethnic markers of Judaism, Paul conceives a
universalized spiritual or eschatological Jewish identity attainable by all
persons regardless of their ethnic origin. As they read Paul, to be truly a
Jew is not a matter of descent, circumcision, or any other peculiar and
external ethnic marker, but rather an internal transformation of the spirit
to which all may aspire and which only God can see. According to Dunn,
Paul makes this reevaluation of Jewish identity patent in his assessment of
circumcision in Romans 2:28–29:
Paul is attacking a concept of law-keeping which was tightly tied to mem-

bership of the Jewish nation . . . Paul will not allow this false understand-
ing of God’s covenant righteousness to retain even the title “Jew.” Not
only is the requirement of circumcision to be redefined (properly defined)
in a way which renders the outward rite unnecessary, but the very name
“Jew” is to be redefined (properly defined) also, as one whose Jewish-
ness (=praiseworthiness) is dependent not on what spectators can see and
approve, but on what God alone can see and approve (the hidden secrets
of the heart—[Rom.] 2:16).34
The “properly defined” Jew, also dubbed by Dunn the “eschatological

Jew,” can therefore be ethnically a Jew or a Gentile, for as Paul would have
it, once the ethnic markers of Jewish identity have been discarded, then
the term “Jew,” rightly understood, becomes devoid of ethnic content.35
In other words, one can be a Gentile as far as ethnicity is concerned, but a
Jew in the spiritual or eschatological sense—a Gentile-Jew, so understood.
The shortcoming of this approach, in my view, is its assumption that
Paul’s revised estimation of Jewish identity rises above ethnic designa-
tions, its insistence that for Paul there is an eschatological Jew in addi-
tion to an ethnic one, a distinction that perpetuates the tenacious notion
in Pauline studies of a universalizing “Christianity” that transcends the
parochial and ethnically determined Judaism. The eschatological Jew is
in fact nothing other than the “Christian” of previous scholarship, who
had already been recognized as the “true” or “spiritual” Jew.36 Though
Dunn might claim that “the eschatological Jew is a Gentile as well as a
Jew!” what he means is that a Gentile baptized into Paul’s ministry is a
Gentile (by way of ethnicity) as well as a Jew (by way of religious identity
or eschatological status).37
On my view, Paul retains a thoroughgoing commitment to the ethnic
aspect of Jewish identity. Baptism into Christ makes Gentiles into ethnic
Jews.38 His reevaluation of Jewish identity through a baptismal lens does
not transcend the physical, ethnic markers of Judaism by replacing them
with spiritualized alternatives, but rather maintains and reinforces the
essentiality of those physical characteristics by reinterpreting them so that
they can now be achieved exclusively through Christ. For example, Paul
does not discard the importance of genital circumcision in favor of the
spiritual circumcision of the heart. On the contrary, Paul believes that the
mark of circumcision—even genital circumcision—remains the defini-
tive indicator of inclusion in the Abrahamic covenant; he simply main-
tains that baptism into Christ, and not a knife, becomes the mode by
which one becomes genitally circumcised. Likewise, Paul does not replace
physical descent from the patriarchs as a marker of Jewish identity with
a notion of spiritual descent. Physical descent from Abraham, Isaac, and

Jacob remains for Paul a crucial attribute of authentic Jewish identity, but
such lineage is now to be determined on the basis of one’s relationship to
Christ. For Paul, the Jewish identity Christ has made available to Gentiles
is entirely ethnic in character.
Of course, Paul does not think that baptism into Christ alters the phys-
iological constitution of believers manifestly. Baptism did not remove the
foreskins from his male charges or reconfigure their bloodlines. What has
changed for Paul is the way in which those definitive markers of Jewish
identity are reckoned; that is to say, what counts as genital circumcision
and physical descent. No longer does the excision of the genital foreskin
make one circumcised, according to Paul, but an imperceptible removal
of that foreskin wrought by Christ, so that one baptized into Christ can
be reckoned as genitally circumcised even if his penis remains untouched.
Paul says as much in Romans 2:25, when he proclaims that one baptized
into Christ is considered genitally circumcised despite his foreskin, and
alternatively that one who is not baptized is considered uncircumcised
despite his apparently exposed glans. Likewise, as Paul alleges in Romans
9–11, a Gentile baptized into Christ is reckoned to be a physical descen-
dant of the patriarchs despite his or her non-Israelite ancestry, whereas a
Jew who is not baptized is expunged from the family tree of Israel and
no longer reckoned a physical descendant. In Paul’s estimation, a Gen-
tile baptized into Christ does not become a spiritually circumcised, spiri-
tual Jew, at least inasmuch as “spiritual” suggests something qualitatively
different from “physical” or “ethnic.” Such a Gentile becomes an ethnic
Jew—a genitally circumcised, fleshly descendant of the patriarchs!
The distinction between “spiritual” circumcision and descent as they
are normally construed and the “reckoned” genital circumcision and
physical descent for which I am presently advocating is by no means
trivial. Both acknowledge a change in identity that is wholly intangible,
or nonempirical, in nature, and both are mediated by faith, but the dif-
ference is significant. When Paul is said to advocate for spiritualized
markers of Jewish identity, such traits are understood to be alternatives
to the physical traits normally determining Jewish identity. Paul is taken
to say that spiritual circumcision of the heart matters, whereas its coun-
terpart, genital circumcision of the penis, does not. Likewise, spiritual
descent from Abraham matters, whereas physiological kinship does not.
The physical markers of Jewish identity are thereby obviated and tran-
scended. In my understanding, Paul’s conceptions of reckoned circumci-
sion and descent are not alternatives to the physical counterparts, but
replications of them. The circumcision attainable through Christ allows
one to become reckoned as possessing the fleshly, genital circumcision

required by the Abrahamic covenant; likewise, the descent from Abraham
attainable through Christ allows one to become reckoned an actual physi-
ological descendant of Abraham—that is, an Israelite. In this sense, the
physical markers of Jewish identity are neither obviated nor transcended.
They remain the essential determinants of Jewish identity; all that has
changed is the manner in which they are achieved—through baptism into
Christ exclusively.
Such a reading of Paul, naturally, requires a revised understanding of
what transpired between Paul and the original apostles at the Jerusalem
conference. Paul did not ascend to Jerusalem in order to defend the idea
that Gentiles could become Christians without becoming Jews first. Nor
is it, as some revisionists have claimed, that Paul defended the idea that
Gentiles could become Jews—a special sort of spiritual or eschatologi-
cal Jew—without undergoing genital circumcision. Rather, Paul’s dispute
with the apostles in Jerusalem was about what counts as genital circumci-
sion, which by extension is a disagreement over how one gains admission
into the patriarchal covenant. Paul actually agreed with the authorities in
Jerusalem that genital circumcision remained the defining indicator of
Jewish identity, but in the wake of Christ he believed that circumcisions
would now be performed by Christ, not by men. Against the reigning
view still maintained by the circumcision party and its supporters that
what enables Gentiles to enter the covenant is a manifest circumcision
of the foreskin wrought by a blade, Paul considered the very purpose of
Christ’s death and resurrection to have been the opportunity it provided
for Gentiles to enter the covenant by means of a circumcision achieved
through faith alone. Gentile converts need not be circumcised, therefore,
because they had already been circumcised on account of their baptism
and, accordingly, were prepared to withstand God’s impending wrath.
Indeed, as Paul suggests in Philippians 3:3, to circumcise such converts a
second time would constitute nothing short of mutilation.
No doubt this novel thesis will prove controversial. Readers have prob-
ably already adduced Pauline passages that seem to controvert it. Many,
if not all, of these passages will be addressed in the remaining chapters
as I defend my approach by examining selected passages from Romans
alongside relevant selections from Paul’s other letters. Before turning to
the passages, however, I will address two questions sure to have arisen in
opposition to my claims.
First, readers might be asking, if Paul believes that genital circumci-
sion remains a crucial criterion for determining inclusion in the covenant,
why does he so strenuously lambaste those in his communities seeking to
impose or undergo circumcision? Why does Paul berate the Galatians for
their foolishness and wish castration upon those who would circumcise
them? Why does he traduce his opponents at Philippi as mutilators of the
flesh? Paul’s own words to the Galatians answer these questions, when he
addresses speculation that he himself is an advocate of genital circumci-
sion. This accusation is curious, of course, and will be taken up shortly
in greater length. For the moment, let us consider only Paul’s response to
the charge. He objects to it, saying, “If I still preach circumcision, then
why am I being persecuted? In that case, the scandal of the cross would
be eliminated” (Gal. 5:11). Paul assumes that the scandal of the cross has
something to do with the discontinuation of genital circumcision, at least
as it was once understood. In some way, Paul suggests, the cross has elimi-
nated the requirement of circumcision, and to preach circumcision would
be tantamount to dismissing the effect of the cross. But what exactly is this
relationship between the cross and circumcision? As I understand it, the
cross puts an end to the need for circumcisions wrought by men precisely
because it realizes circumcisions wrought by Christ. The cross scandalously
demands that Jewish identity be configured in a way that obviates long-
standing practices and assumptions. Circumcisions with a knife are no
longer necessary because the death and resurrection of Christ, and par-
ticipation in those events by means of baptism into Christ, now actualize
the genital circumcision required for inclusion in the Jewish covenant.
Indeed, circumcision in the flesh becomes impudently superfluous, and
the pursuit of it in addition to baptism becomes tantamount to rejecting
the achievement of the cross; it suggests that Christ had not transformed
the nature of the Jewish covenant and that the terms and conditions of
the covenant remain as they were prior to Christ; it suggests that Christ
died in vain, as Paul puts it in Galatians 2:21. Circumcision with a knife
understandably is reprehensible to Paul, calling into question the neces-
sity of Christ’s death and resurrection and, inasmuch as it is comparable
to cutting an already (divinely) circumcised penis, serving as an act of
unnecessary mutilation.
The second question deals with the apparent slate of evidence con-
tradicting my contention that Paul believes baptism makes Gentiles into
Jews, even ethnic Jews who are genitally circumcised descendants of the
patriarchs. If this evidence proves as much, one might reasonably ask,
why does Paul at times refer to his charges as Gentiles, as outside the fold
of Israel, and why does he at times speak of Jews and Israel in ways that
clearly exclude Gentile converts to Christ? (Of course, one could simply
invert these questions so as to stymie traditional approaches to Paul: if
Paul does not think Gentiles become Jews by means of Christ, why does
he at times use explicitly Jewish terminology to describe them? My open-

ing example from the Corinthian correspondence strove to lay bare this
conundrum in Pauline interpretation.)
The answer to these questions stems from the assumptions about lan-
guage presumed in this investigation, specifically its tendency to engender
contradiction when mobilized for the purpose of producing change. The
very process of redefining identity, I suggest, leads invariably to a fair
degree of double-talk. Why so? Because the effort to redefine terms and
concepts requires one at the same time to invoke and utilize the norma-
tive understandings of those terms and concepts and thereby to confirm
their stability and authenticity. So for example, Paul cannot redefine the
basic terms of Jewish identity in light of Christ without situating his reap-
praisals alongside the normative meanings of those terms. Paul knows full
well that in resignifying words like “Jew,” “Israel,” and “circumcision,” he
is flatly contradicting the standard sense of those words in his day. When
Paul describes what “Israel” really is as a result of Christ’s death and resur-
rection in Romans 9–11, for example, he understands that this meaning
is not at all what “Israel” means or has ever meant to anyone else. How
could he not realize this difference? In Galatia, Philippi, Antioch, and
undoubtedly elsewhere, critics rebuffed his avant-garde redefinitions as
newfangled and absurd. And yet, for his reinscription of Jewish identity
to be meaningful, Paul cannot escape the normative discourse with which
his revision contrasts. His refashioning of terms has to develop in con-
versation with “accepted” notions of Jewish identity if it is to make any
sense at all. To explain how Christ fundamentally has changed what a Jew
“really” is, what circumcision “really” is, or what Law observance “really”
is, Paul has to acknowledge that the terms Jew, circumcision, and the
Law, and the relationship of such terms to Jewish identity, already have
established meanings in the world. They already “really” mean something.
Thus Paul’s claim that faith in Christ is what “really” makes one genitally
circumcised is, at the same time, a tacit recognition that this faith is not
what “really” makes one circumcised, at least as most people understand
that term. For this precise reason Paul can speak of his baptized charges
as though they are uncircumcised—because on the normative reckoning
they are—and also describe them as circumcised—because on his reck-
oning they are. The result is a hybridized discourse on circumcision that
articulates a new (and unnameable) subject position, one that simultane-
ously is “really” circumcised and “really” not circumcised. A similar hybrid
discourse emerges around the issue of patriarchal descent, in which Paul’s
effort to claim for baptized Gentiles “real” descent from the patriarchs,
even physical descent, at the same time acknowledges that they can never
be “real” descendants in the normative sense. They are “really” descen-

dants and “really” not, a conflicted and contradictory status created by the
clash of two competing claims on reality.
To better understand how competing voices collaborate to produce
hybridity within Paul’s discourse, consider the insights of Mikhail Bakhtin,
whose reflections on hybridity in language have had enormous impact
on contemporary postmodern theorists.39 Particularly helpful is Bakhtin’s
concept of dialogism, or double voicedness, in language, for through this
concept he develops his understanding of linguistic hybridity. Curiously
enough, Bakhtin adduces a biblical image to illustrate the dialogic nature
of language, as if he wished to draw the attention of biblical scholars! He
highlights the utterly peculiar way in which the mythical Adam was able
to relate to the world, a mode of linguistic interaction inaccessible to
all who have come after him. As Bakhtin explains, Adam “approached a
virginal and as yet verbally unqualified world with the first word.”40 That
is to say, as the very first human, Adam had free reign over his descriptive
acts. Each time a new animal passed before him to be named, the term
emanating from his lips traveled directly toward its object and encoun-
tered no rival terms in its path. When he pointed to a spotted, long-
necked animal and said “giraffe,” it became a giraffe, pure and simple.
When he pointed to the pink, snout-nosed squealer and said “pig,” it
became a pig, pure and simple. There were no rival claims. Only Adam
enjoyed such hegemonic control over language, however. Everyone since
Adam has entered a world that is already named, an environment already
filled with names, words, and opinions expressed by previous speakers. As
a result, when anyone since Adam has uttered words, these words have
not traveled undeterred, like a beam of light, toward their object; rather,
the words become “entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points
of view, alien value judgments and accents.”41 Anything uttered necessar-
ily interacts with “the ‘already uttered,’ the ‘already known,’ the ‘common
opinion,’ and so forth.”42 Thus Bakhtin declares that all human discourse
is “dialogic,” or double voiced, in nature. Any spoken word carries within
it not only the intentions of the speaker, but also the intentions already
associated with that word in the world in which it is spoken—and here is
the key: meaning results from the interaction of the two.
So for example, were Cain later to accost the spotted, long-necked,
quadruped and rename it “zebra,” his redefinition of the beast would not
escape interaction with Adam’s previous descriptions. The term “zebra”
already had associations, and the animal to which Cain was pointing was
already known as “giraffe.” Of course, this example is rather mundane.
But consider Paul pointing at one of his baptized Gentile charges and
exclaiming, “circumcised” or “Jew.” These terms were already loaded,

so to speak, shot through with meanings in an already-named discur-
sive world; by summoning such terms Paul was necessarily alluding to
what others already had said about Jews and circumcision. These “already
uttered” positions were embedded in Paul’s own speech act, for as Bakhtin
tersely puts it, “the word in language is half someone else’s.”43 One can
ascribe new meanings to a term, but such ascription can never efface the
meanings already associated with that term.
For this reason, Bakhtin goes on to explain, language has the funda-
mental capacity to produce hybridity. Sometimes the hybridity is gener-
ated unintentionally; for example, when a speaker directs an utterance
toward an object without meaning for other voices to complicate its
sense. Yet, as Bakhtin observes,
However monological the utterance may be . . . , it cannot but be, in some

measure, a response to what has already been said about the given topic, on
the given issue, even though this responsiveness may not have assumed a
clear-cut external expression . . . After all, our thought itself . . . is born and
shaped in the process of interaction and struggle with others’ thought, and
this cannot but be reflected in the forms that verbally express our thoughts
as well . . . Any utterance, when it is studied in greater depth under the
concrete conditions of speech communications, reveals to us many half-
concealed or completely concealed words of others.44
No matter how much one tries to speak as though in a vacuum, to rep-

licate the conditions enjoyed by Adam, already-uttered voices in the
world invariably penetrate and complicate the speech. Alternatively,
forms of intentional hybridity occur when the speaker purposefully takes
up another voice or belief system in order to make an utterance double
voiced by design. The speaker reaches into the world, appropriates the
voice of another, and then creates an utterance in which that alien voice is
commingled with his own. The result is a single discourse featuring two
voices, two intentions. The speaker’s own voice might relate to the voice
he has appropriated in any number of ways; for example, it might be sup-
portive, defiant, and so on.
One particular class of intentionally hybrid discourse is especially valu-
able in analyzing Paul’s epistles, the one Bakhtin calls “internally polemi-
cal discourse,” which he believes to be ubiquitous in both literary and
everyday speech. Such discourse comprises “the word with a sideward
glance at someone else’s hostile word,” an expression on which Bakhtin
elaborates in the following passage:
In a hidden polemic the author’s discourse is directed toward its own ref-
erential object, as is any other discourse, but at the same time every state-
ment about the object is constructed in such a way that, apart from its
referential meaning, a polemical blow is struck at the other’s discourse on
the same theme, at the other’s statement about the same object. A word,
directed toward its referential object, clashes with another’s word within
the very object itself. The other’s discourse is not itself reproduced, it is
merely implied, but the entire structure of speech would be completely
different if there were not this reaction to another person’s implied words.45
In other words, the speaker intends not merely to describe an object, but
also simultaneously to confront, disarm, and expose rival claims about
that object already in the world, claims that the speaker admits and antici-
pates in advance. This aim is the sideward glance to which Bakhtin refers.
The speaker’s claim does not eliminate or drown out the rival voice(s),
however, but clashes with it, resulting in a double-voiced hybrid discourse
in which, as Robert Young has observed, “each voice can unmask the
other.”46 The speaker’s voice unmasks the rival voice with its sideward
glance, but the implied presence of the rival voice brings with it the
potential to unmask the speaker’s own voice, so that there is, again bor-
rowing from Young’s description, “an undecidable oscillation in which it
becomes impossible to tell which is the primary meaning” of the words in
use.47 Such oscillation confers to the words a hybrid quality that tolerates
simultaneously different, even contradictory, meanings.
What has all this theorization to do with Paul? In short, multiple and
clashing voices regarding Jewish identity are unmistakably discernible in
Paul’s epistles. On the one hand, there is Paul’s authentic perspective:
Christ has ushered in a new epoch in history in which Gentiles, by means
of faith alone, can acquire Jewish status and become circumcised mem-
bers of Israel. Yet time and again this perspective runs up against the
normative view, the common opinion, which considered circumcision
and Abrahamic descent—and not the Christ-oriented versions proposed
by Paul—to be the essential markers of Jewish identity. On this stan-
dard view, of course, Paul’s converts to Christ are not Jews, and they can
only become Jews through the accepted modes of conversion (which were
themselves capable of producing hybrid identities, as we have already
seen). Paul’s appropriation and reinscription of Jewish identity can only
succeed, then, if he always has his eyes on this already-uttered position,
at times invoking it, at times confronting it, at times casting a sideward
glance at it. In Romans 11:13, for example, as in many other places, Paul
adopts the prevailing voice as his own, referring to his audience simply as
“Gentiles.” At other times he invokes the dominant discourse in order to
oppose it explicitly, as in Romans 2:17, where he initiates a conversation

about the nature of Jewish identity with an interlocutor who putatively
endorses the status quo. The two voices, Paul’s and his opponent’s, collide
as Paul underscores the contrast between them. Still other times, however,
Paul merges his authentic voice with the dominant voice, and he does
so with polemical intentions. In Philippians 3:3, for example, Paul no
doubt casts a sideward glance at his Philippian opponents when he pro-
claims that “we are the circumcision.” No interlocutor is portrayed, but
Paul’s scandalous claim gains its meaning when contrasted with the rival
voice of those in Philippi who identify themselves as “the circumcision.”
Likewise, Paul’s insistence in Galatians that Christ makes one a “child
of Abraham” anticipates the rejoinder from Paul’s opponents there, who
teach that circumcision and/or physical descent are required to claim such
status. Paul’s assertion that baptism into Christ is what “really” makes one
a child of Abraham finds meaning only when heard against the prevailing
discourse, which claims, on the contrary, that other characteristics “really”
make one a child of Abraham.
In other words, in numerous places and in numerous ways, Paul
invokes the “realness” of the prevailing discourse on Jewish identity even
as he formulates his own view as the newer and “more real” alternative
to it; the result of this pervasive double voicedness are epistles riddled
with contradictions, in which the same persons can be described alter-
natively with Jewish or Gentile terminology, in which terms like “Jew,”
“Israel,” “circumcision,” “child of Abraham,” and concepts such as Law
observance and genealogical descent, routinely have different meanings.
Just consider the word “circumcision”: in 1 Corinthians 7:19 Paul claims
that circumcision is irrelevant to one’s standing before God, a claim also
made in Galatians 5:6 and 6:15; yet, as we have just seen, in Philippi-
ans 3:3 Paul suggests that circumcision is especially relevant, as the title
of “the circumcision” is a designation worth contesting fiercely. Just two
lines further, however, circumcision refers to something different once
again! When Paul claims he was “circumcised on the eighth day” (Phil.
3:5), surely he is describing the irrelevant sort of circumcision he smears
in the letter to the Galatians, not the sort worth bragging about only
two lines before. The point is that Paul simultaneously weaves competing
discourses on “circumcision,” shifting nimbly in and out of these voices
throughout his epistles—indeed, in Philippians 3:3–5 he switches from
one to another within two lines, and as we will see later on in Romans
2:25–29, he imputes three discrete meanings to “circumcision” in the
space of just four verses! The result of such variation is a hybrid state of
affairs in which the same people can be considered “really” circumcised
and “really” not circumcised, with each claim on reality simultaneously

reinforcing and unmasking the other.
In the chapters to follow, I reveal how Paul reevaluates other terms and
concepts of ancient Jewish identity by mobilizing and manipulating com-
peting discourses. Taking up terms like “Jew,” “Israel,” and “descendant
of Abraham ‘according to the flesh,’” Paul invokes both their normative
and innovated senses, ultimately generating that “undecidable oscillation
in which it becomes impossible to tell which is the primary meaning.”48
Determining unambiguously whether Paul’s charges are “really” Jews or
“really” not becomes impossible because neither discourse, Paul’s nor the
prevailing one, has the unanimous grip on reality. A hybrid discursive
space is thereby created, one that is both Jewish and not Jewish at the
same time, the space of the Gentile-Jew.
Conclusion
An important point: no one used the term “Gentile-Jew” in Pauline com-
munities, at least as far as we know. On the basis of Paul’s extant epistles,
I imagine that many of Paul’s charges wondered whether they were Jews,
and that outside observers experienced similar uncertainty, but there
survives no witness to the term “Gentile-Jew,” or “half-Jew,” as Antigo-
nus famously dubbed Herod the Great. As I previously noted, however,
terms like “Christian,” “Christ-believer,” and “Jesus-follower” are absent
just the same. Indeed, the very controversy over how best to describe
Paul’s followers emerges from the fact that Paul himself gives no definitive
terminology. We are at a loss to find the choice term to describe Paul’s
charges precisely because Paul, too, was at a loss to do so. As he strove to
articulate a new, genuinely ethnic, Jewish identity for baptized Gentiles,
Paul named it with the terms at his disposal, and the result is a messy
blend of contradictions in which the same people are called Jews and
Gentiles, circumcised and uncircumcised. My argument has been that
the catachrestical neologism, “Gentile-Jew,” rather than the anachronistic
“Christian,” renders that unnamed identity more effectively because it
reflects the tension in Paul’s discourse rather than resolving it.49
The concept of the “Gentile-Jew” circumvents the shortcomings of the
traditional taxonomy, allowing us to adhere rigorously to the idea that
Christianity began within Judaism, acknowledging that just as Jews bap-
tized into Christ remained Jews, so too, on Paul’s reckoning at least, Gen-
tiles baptized into Christ became Jews.50 At the same time, the concept of
the “Gentile-Jew” concedes that Paul’s view was not universally accepted
and became an issue of vigorous debate between him and his adversaries,
capturing in its hyphen the competing discourses in play within Paul’s
letters and the hybridized “in-between” identity emerging as a result. Fur-

ther, the concept of the “Gentile-Jew” explains how and why Paul can
describe his charges alternatively in Jewish and Gentile terms—as Jews,
as Gentiles, as both, and as neither. By encapsulating this conflicted state
of affairs, the term “Gentile-Jew,” a paradoxical and intrinsically unstable
term, reflects the provisional nature of borderline existence and forges out
a third space in which new strategies for selfhood—in this case, “Chris-
tian” selfhood—can be articulated. Accordingly, Paul need not be over-
looked as a crucial agent in the discursive emergence of Christianity, as
the traditional paradigm requires, even if that discursive emergence does
not begin, as the revisionists rightly claim, until the end of the first cen-
tury CE and later. Paul facilitated the hybridized, untranslatable, incom-
mensurable Gentile-Jewish identity that ultimately proved untenable and
elicited the articulation of the radically new concept, “Christianity,” in
subsequent generations.
Part II
CHAPTER 3
Paul’s Epistle to
the Romans
Purpose and Audience
The Purpose of Romans

Nearly a half-century ago, Günther Bornkamm published his now
well-known essay, “The Letter to the Romans as Paul’s Last Will and Tes-
tament.”1 In response to the increasing tendency to steer interpretation
of Romans away from the longstanding estimation of it as a “summary
of the Christian religion,” as Martin Luther’s friend Philipp Melanch-
thon described it, in favor of reading Romans within a more narrowly
defined historical context, Bornkamm warned against carrying historical
zeal too far. He reminded readers just how difficult it is to reconstruct
the circumstances of the earliest churches in Rome—their origin, issues,
and demography—as well as Paul’s relationship to them, insisting that we
remain largely “in the dark” on these matters and that Paul’s letter to the
Romans does little to illuminate us.2 Paul may disclose the putative reason
for sending the letter when he solicits Roman prayers for the successful
delivery of the collection he is bringing to Jerusalem, and no doubt he
also hopes to ingratiate himself to the Roman churches in order to secure
a warm welcome on his impending visit, which in turn will allow him
to make Rome the staging area for his pending missions into Spain.3 Yet
Paul gives little indication that he knows anything in particular about
the circumstances facing the churches in Rome. As Bornkamm puts it,
“Paul never mentions a thing about any sort of information which he has
received from Rome, and nowhere does he name any informants, as is
the case in other letters.”4 Such silence is not to say Paul knew absolutely
nothing about the churches in Rome. He probably possessed a general
familiarity with their history, their leaders, and their concerns, but the
allusions to specific people and to local circumstances that we find in

Paul’s other letters are simply absent in the epistle he sent to Rome.
Accordingly, Bornkamm concluded, we ought to resist the urge to
interpret Romans against the backdrop of hypothetical circumstances in
Rome, for nothing suggests that Paul would have been aware of such
issues when he wrote. He would not have known, for example, that the
Roman churches were split between legalistic and libertine factions, as one
popular reconstruction of the situation in Rome supposes.5 Nor would he
have known, as others have suggested, that Jewish and Gentile converts to
Christ were competing for positions of leadership in the churches in the
wake of the Jews’ return to Rome following the lapse of Claudius’s edict
of expulsion in 54 CE.6 Accordingly, we ought rather to understand the
epistle as a generalized missive, a “last will and testament,” in which Paul,
apprehensive about his impending trip to Jerusalem, reflects on his apos-
tolic career and gives his gospel a thorough, sophisticated, and considered
expression. To this end, Paul takes up the various arguments and positions
he has articulated in his previous epistles and carefully arranges them into
a virtual manifesto. The notion of justification by faith that appears in
the epistles to the Galatians and Philippians, for example, finds mature
and refined expression in Romans. So too, the relationship among faith,
freedom, and love, addressed first in reference to the concrete Corinthian
concern over dietary scruples, is revisited in Romans 14 in more general-
ized terms. In this respect, then, Romans indeed appears to constitute a
“summary of the Christian religion,” or at least a “summary of Pauline
religion.”7
This summative feature of Romans makes it especially conducive to
an analysis of Pauline thought more broadly. When it comes to the sub-
ject at hand, Jewish identity, Paul’s most thorough, detailed, and mature
discussions of Jewish identity occur in Romans, first in Romans 1:18–
4:16 and then again in Romans 9–11. Romans 15:7–13, though con-
siderably shorter, reveals an understanding of circumcision and covenant
inclusion that reinforces the perspective in the longer passages. Analysis
of these three passages, then, amounts to a description of Paul’s view of
Jewish identity in Romans, which in turn will serve as a launching pad
for interpreting corresponding passages in Galatians, Philippians, 1 and
2 Corinthians, and Colossians, and allow us to arrive at a more complete
understanding of Paul’s view of Jewish identity broadly speaking.
Contrary to Bornkamm, however, I would suggest that reading
Romans as a summary of Pauline religion also furnishes some insight,
however limited, into the original purpose and occasion of the letter.
Granted, our knowledge of the Roman churches in the middle of the first
Paul’s Epistle to the Romans 75
century remains negligible, but the very fact that Paul felt compelled to
send the Romans a summary description of his gospel prior to his visit
is suggestive. When else did Paul send a letter to a community before he
visited it, and so long and so carefully crafted a letter at that? He wrote
the rest of his extant epistles to communities after he had sojourned with
them, and never merely to spell out what he had just taught them face-
to-face. There must be a reason Paul decided to pave the way for his visit
to Rome with a carefully considered letter. He must have known at least
something about the churches in Rome, such that an anticipatory cor-
respondence was in order.
So what did he know?
His intentions become clearer when one considers another of the epis-
tle’s distinguishing features: its obviously polemical character. Romans
frequently gives the sense that Paul is fine-tuning his gospel vis-à-vis
palpable opposition, charges actually leveled against him, his followers,
and his teaching. One might explain this polemical aspect of the letter as
Paul’s engagement with tacit adversaries, hypothetical opponents whose
contrasting voices are required to give relief to Paul’s innovative perspec-
tive. But there is ample reason to believe that in Romans Paul is not
dealing solely with theoretical objections to his gospel. The opponents in
Paul’s other epistles are unquestionably real, and Paul gives clear indica-
tion in Romans that he is responding to actual accusations made against
him. Romans 3:8, for example, responds to the charge that Paul and his
associates promote malfeasance, an accusation reappearing in Romans
6:1 and 6:15. In Romans 3:31 and 7:7, Paul refutes what appears to be
the very real charge of antinomianism. Analysis of Romans, then, should
proceed on the assumption that the opposition in the epistle reflects real
historical circumstances, just like the opposition in Paul’s other epistles.8
Who, then, are the arguments in the epistle intended to controvert,
and why did Paul draw them up into a sophisticated elaboration of his
previous positions to be dispatched to Rome in anticipation of his trek to
Jerusalem and then to Rome itself? In short, I believe, Paul’s reputation
had preceded him to Rome. He never escaped the antagonizing forces
that dogged him in Antioch, Philippi, Galatia, Corinth, and elsewhere,
and eventually the assailants of his gospel in the other cities made their
way to Rome, or at least their critical assessment of Paul reached that far.
The success of his impending western mission therefore depended upon
his ability to salvage his reputation in the city from which he planned
to stage the expedition. If he could not count on a cordial reception in
Rome, then his westward expansion would never materialize. Yet such a
reception would not be possible with the misunderstandings about his
gospel circulating in Rome. To lay the groundwork for his future work,
then, Paul dispatched a rigorous defense of his gospel to the churches in
Rome, opening his apology by confidently proclaiming, in response to
the allegations against his gospel, that he is not ashamed of it.9
The underlying assumptions of this hypothesis do not extend beyond
the evidence, assuming as it does simply that criticism of Paul’s gospel had
spread to Rome and, in addition, that Paul knew about it. Both can be
established confidently on the basis of the epistle itself. Paul refers to his
opponents and their arguments several times in Romans; he also assumes
his audience is familiar with them and cautions his audience against their
perniciousness. In Romans 16:17, for example, Paul urges his readers
to “watch out for those who create disagreements and obstacles against
the teaching that you learned.”10 We can only speculate about how such
opposition had reached Rome or how Paul learned of it. As the capital of
the empire, however, Rome received and dispatched information swiftly.
Tourists, merchants, government officials, and countless others came and
went from Rome regularly, and one need not stretch the imagination to
envision reports about gospels and missionaries among the many goods
exchanged. Perhaps rumors about Paul came to Rome following the death
of Claudius, when Jews returned to the capital having heard about Paul
during their temporary residence in the Mediterranean cities to the East.
Perhaps Paul learned of the spread of these rumors through his contacts
in Rome, such as Prisca and Aquila.11 Or, maybe some of Paul’s mis-
sionary rivals from Galatia or Philippi had already arrived in Rome and
disparaged his gospel in anticipation of his visit. However it transpired,
Paul knew his opposition had made inroads in the Roman churches and,
if he had any hope of securing the success of his visit to Rome, he had
to control the damage. He therefore sent the churches a carefully con-
structed and elaborate defense of his gospel, a manifesto that refined and
enhanced the arguments he had already used to gainsay his adversaries in
other settings.
Those arguments, of course, have to do with the method by which
Gentiles enter the covenant of Abraham and thereby secure salvation
from the imminent wrath of God. Paul’s rivals proposed that Gentiles are
required to undergo genital circumcision and to pursue Law observance
as those criteria were normatively understood—circumcision by knife,
observance of dietary restrictions, holidays, and the like. Paul insisted that
those aspects of Jewish identity were to be determined entirely by faith in
the wake of Christ, such that baptism became tantamount to undergoing
genital circumcision and to fulfilling the dictates of the Law. Gentiles
accordingly should not pursue requirements beyond their baptism, as
doing so would constitute a rejection of the gift graciously granted them

by Christ.
In drawing this distinction between Paul and his rivals, however, I do
not want to give the impression that Paul’s opposition was “Jewish” in
nature. Others who read Romans in a polemical light frequently char-
acterize Paul’s opposition as “Jewish,” or “Jewish-Christian,” in contrast
to the “Gentile-Christian” position promoted by Paul. Labeling Paul’s
adversaries “Jewish” is doubly flawed. On the one hand, such identifica-
tion suggests that Paul’s message is categorically not Jewish, or at least it is
significantly less Jewish than the position against which he inveighs. Such
a distinction obscures the fact that the views of both Paul and his oppo-
nents are “Jewish” inasmuch as both seek to define the terms by which a
Gentile becomes a Jew, a member of Israel, a child of Abraham, and so
on. On the other hand, the classification insinuates that Paul’s rivals are
themselves specifically Jews, rather than Gentiles, who have converted
to Christ, Jews who are apparently less willing than Gentile converts to
accommodate Paul’s radical reinterpretation of circumcision and the Law.
So in Romans 14:1–15:13, when Paul seems to be addressing a dispute in
Rome regarding dietary scruples, most historians conclude that the ten-
sion is the result of Christian Jews (who cling to the demands of the Law)
and Christian Gentiles (who do not) struggling to live together peace-
ably. The assumption is that Jewish converts would be more dedicated to
the Law than Gentiles; yet this oft-repeated supposition simply does not
accord with what little we know about the earliest Diaspora churches.
Though there were indeed Jewish converts who sought a life in Christ
without relinquishing their adherence to the Law, such as James and the
“circumcision faction” or Paul’s adversaries in Corinth and Galatia, just
the same there were Jews who believed that baptism into Christ obviated
the continued authority of the Law, such as Paul, Prisca, and Aquila. Like-
wise, whereas some Gentile converts were persuaded by the first camp,
such as the “foolish” Galatians (Gal. 3:1) or their deceived analogs at
Corinth or Philippi, others clearly embraced Paul’s message and snubbed
their nose at Law observance. There are therefore no grounds for assum-
ing prima facie that Jewish converts to Christ were less willing or able
than Gentiles to pursue a life in Christ devoid of Law observance or that
Gentile converts were less willing or able than Jews to accept the yoke of
the Law when persuaded to do so. Using the term “Jewish” to describe
Paul’s opposition, then, is inaccurate and deceptive; their gospel was no
more “Jewish” than was Paul’s, and they themselves may well have been
Gentile converts to Christ.
The Audience in Romans

A related and equally popular view held by those who read Romans
polemically is that Paul’s aim in the epistle is to ease the tensions in Rome
by appealing to both sides of the divide. He encourages the Law-free
Gentile converts to bear with the scruples of their Jewish fellows and to
appreciate the Jewish origins of the gospel, all the while revealing to his
Jewish readers how Gentiles, no less than Jews, can become members of
God’s people through Christ. Paul aims his savvy call for reconciliation
at Jewish and Gentile readers alike. Such an understanding of the audi-
ence in Romans might be compelling were it not for the unmistakable
evidence in the epistle suggesting that Gentiles alone are Paul’s intended
target.12 On the two occasions that he explicitly addresses his readers,
Paul identifies them as Gentile converts. In Romans 11:13 Paul indicates
precisely whom he is addressing when he says, “I am speaking to you
Gentiles.” He could not be any clearer about the fact that his message is
for “you Gentiles.” Paul addresses the same audience at the outset of the
epistle when, in Romans 1:13, he anticipates reaping fruit “also among
you, just as among the other Gentiles.” Again, the “you” in this statement
necessarily refers to the Gentile converts in Rome. Nor does Paul ever say
anything in Romans from which we might infer that Paul anticipated
Jewish readers. True, Paul at one point assumes his readers know the Law
(Rom. 7:1ff.), and elsewhere he discusses supposedly “Jewish” concerns
such as the priority of the Jews in the gospel (1:16, 2:10), the equality of
Jews and Gentiles in their standing before God (2:9, 3:20, 3:29, 10:12),
or the lack of belief among the majority of Jews (9–11), but none of these
passages requires an audience different from the Gentile one Paul twice
addresses explicitly. After all, Gentile converts could know the Law and
be interested in it as much as their Jewish counterparts.13 So too, could
Gentiles be genuinely interested in discussions about Jews and their rela-
tionship to Paul’s gospel. Making sense of widespread Jewish unbelief,
for example, is a conundrum that Paul must address in order to convince
Gentiles of the trustworthiness of the Jewish God. In other words, as
Stanley K. Stowers has put it, “Simply because Paul speaks about Jews
does not require that he is speaking to Jews.”14
That said, I do not wish to give the impression that I adhere to the
so-called Gaston-Gager hypothesis (named for Lloyd Gaston and John
Gager), which proposes that Paul’s message in Romans and his other epis-
tles is not merely addressed to Gentile converts, but is also relevant for
the situation of Gentiles only.15 On that view of Paul’s theology, Christ
became the mode by which Gentiles were reconciled to the God of Israel,
but for Jews the Law remained the terms of the covenant; accordingly,
what looks like Paul’s critique of the Law and of Jewish unbelief is in fact
a critique only of Law observance by Gentiles and of Jews who do not
understand Christ’s role in saving Gentiles. Though appealing ecumeni-
cally, this proposal struggles in the face of evidence from Paul’s epistles
and is methodologically flawed in its own right; just as one should avoid
supposing that Paul must be talking to Jews because he talks about Jews,
one should also refrain from supposing that because Paul addresses only
Gentile converts, his message is only relevant for them. Paul’s descriptions
of his gospel make clear that Jews, like Gentiles, require the justifica-
tion achieved through Christ if they want to withstand God’s impending
judgment. In Romans 1:16, for example, often identified as the thesis
statement of Romans, Paul characterizes the gospel as “the power of God
for salvation to all who believe, to the Jew first and also to the Gentile.”
Not only is the gospel of Christ relevant for Jews, but also Jews have had
priority over Gentiles in receiving it. A similar description of the gospel’s
significance for Jews appears in Romans 2:10–11. In Romans 9–11, Paul
concludes that God has excised from Israel those Jews who have rejected
Christ, whereas in Romans 3:19–22 he proclaims that “the whole world”
is subject to God’s judgment, that “no flesh” will be judged positively
through works of the Law, and that the righteousness of God now comes
“through Jesus Christ for all who believe.” Such grand and universal state-
ments belie the idea that Paul figures Christ to be a vehicle to salvation
for Gentiles alone.16
Again, the relevance of Paul’s gospel for Jews does not necessarily mean
that Paul addresses his message in Romans to Jewish converts. Paul takes
seriously his ambassadorial responsibility as “apostle to the Gentiles”
(Rom. 11:13), bearing fruit among the Gentiles, just as Peter, accord-
ing to Paul’s report of the Jerusalem Council at least, was doing among
Jews. Paul speaks to Gentiles because he believes his commission is to do
exactly that, even if his understanding of the gospel requires that all per-
sons ultimately submit to Christ. God sanctioned him to articulate and
defend only “the gospel of the uncircumcision” (Gal. 2:7), which as he
understands it is the legitimate admission of Gentiles into Israel through
submission to Christ alone, without circumcision and Law observance.
Paul does not presume to address the gospel to Jews because doing so
would transgress the bounds of his authority, and he is likewise irked
when rival apostles encroach on his domain by presenting a bogus gos-
pel of Law observance to Gentiles. Such intruders elicit his grumbling
to the Galatians, Corinthians, and Philippians, and as I suggested previ-
ously, they impel him to dispatch a scrupulous defense of his gospel to
Rome. Paul suspects that Gentiles in Rome have been misled and, as the
sanctioned apostle of the Gentiles, he needs to fend off the growing mis-
conceptions about his gospel by pleading his case. Thus it is not that Paul
has nothing to say to Jewish converts in Rome; it simply is not within his
commission to do so.
In Romans, Paul defends his gospel to Gentile converts, so that these
Gentiles, who through baptism have become for all intents and purposes
Jews, will withstand the temptation to pursue circumcision and Law
observance as their mode of entry into God’s covenant with Israel, which
would exhibit a gross misunderstanding of the purpose and efficacy of
Christ’s sacrifice on their behalf. Paul strives to convince Gentile converts
in Rome that faith alone has secured their status as Jews, circumcised
members of the Abrahamic covenant, initiates into God’s people Israel.
To succumb to the demands of his rival missionaries, to submit to cir-
cumcision and the yoke of the Law, would be to overlook the achieve-
ment wrought for them by Christ. This is Paul’s gospel, the power of God
for salvation, and he is not ashamed of it.
CHAPTER 4
Romans 4:1–12
Gentiles as Descendants of Abraham
“According to the Flesh”
Introduction: An Impossible Conclusion

One of the more popular modes of biblical interpretation performed
by rabbis in late antiquity was the petichtah, or homiletical proem.
Though its structure varied widely, the basic strategy in the petichtah was
to link an opening “petichtah verse,” usually excerpted from the Writings
(i.e., the books of the Hebrew Bible between Psalms and Chronicles),
to a concluding “seder verse,” drawn from the opening of the prescribed
passage from the Pentateuch. The rabbi demonstrated his mastery of
scripture and oral tradition through a series of deft interpretive moves,
gradually revealing how a seemingly unrelated verse from the Writings,
when expounded, leads ineluctably to the beginning of the day’s read-
ing. The audience thrilled at the spectacular acumen, marveling as the
rabbi forged a cogent argument en route to a predetermined destination.
Where the rabbi would go was known already, yet tension was sustained
by curiosity about how he would overcome the challenges of getting there.
Knowing the end did not spoil the story, but rather made its recitation all
the more exhilarating.1
This chapter unfolds in a similar manner, as I provide the conclu-
sion at the outset and then beg the reader’s patience while I trace out the
steps that lead to it. The reasons for doing so are many, not the least of
which is my hope that the analysis will prove absorbing. The chief aim
in beginning with the end, however, is to afford readers time to digest
the conclusion, which deviates dramatically from conventional interpre-
tation and may appear fantastic at first. Incredulity is expected. As in a
petichtah, where the dubious audience cedes the rabbi time to weave his
way through verses of scripture, I trust readers will endure as I reveal how
the astonishing conclusion in fact proceeds logically from what comes

before it.
The conclusion is a novel reading of Romans 4:1–12, in which Paul
takes up the issue of Abraham’s encounter with God in Genesis 15. The
New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) translates the passage as follows:
1
What then are we to say was gained by Abraham, our ancestor according
to the flesh?
2
For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about,
but not before God.
3
For what does the scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was reck-
oned to him as righteousness.”
4
Now to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift but as something
due.
5
But to one who without works trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such
faith is reckoned as righteousness.
6
So also David speaks of the blessedness of those to whom God reckons
righteousness apart from works:
7
“Blessed are those whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are
covered;
8
blessed is the one against whom the Lord will not reckon sin.”
9
Is this blessedness, then, pronounced only on the circumcised, or also
on the uncircumcised? We say, “Faith was reckoned to Abraham as
righteousness.”
10
How then was it reckoned to him? Was it before or after he had been
circumcised? It was not after, but before he was circumcised.
11
He received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that
he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised. The purpose was to make
him the ancestor of all who believe without being circumcised and who
thus have righteousness reckoned to them,
12
and likewise the ancestor of the circumcised who are not only circum-
cised but who also follow the example of the faith that our ancestor Abra-
ham had before he was circumcised.
Paul uses the example of Abraham to prove that justification from God
comes from faith rather than works. He begins with a question: “What
then shall we say was gained by Abraham, our ancestor according to the
flesh?” and he reveals the answer in the ensuing verses: what Abraham
gained was justification by faith rather than works (i.e., circumcision).
Accordingly, Abraham became the prototype for the justifying faith
presently made available through Christ, and Abraham’s paternity thus
extends beyond his Jewish offspring to include Gentiles who exhibit
the faith Abraham demonstrated before his circumcision. Abraham has
Romans 4:1–12 83
become a father to all who believe in Christ, whether circumcised Jew or

uncircumcised Gentile.
So goes the usual manner of interpreting Romans 4:1–12.
Though nearly universal, this reading is simply not what Paul says,
at least in the original Greek, where Paul says something much different
from what most English Bibles have him say. The question Paul allegedly
asks at the outset, “What then are we to say was gained by Abraham?” (a
question so conveniently answered with “justification by faith”) cannot be
what Paul asks if the rules of Greek grammar are taken into consideration.
In the first place, Paul does not ask what “was gained” by Abraham—a
past tense, passive English verb that inaccurately represents the active,
perfect tense Greek verb heurēkenai, a verb that, in any case, means “to
find,” not “to gain.” A more faithful rendering would have Paul ask either
“What then are we to say Abraham . . . has found?” or “What then are we
to say? Have we found Abraham?” Of course, these more accurate transla-
tions confound traditional interpretation because they generate questions
for which “justification by faith” no longer provides a sensible answer.
Even more problematic is the Greek that lies beneath Romans 4:12,
which translators frequently misrepresent. According to the NRSV in the
preceding quotation, Paul says that Abraham is the ancestor of those who
are circumcised, a constituency that Paul then clarifies to mean those who
are both circumcised and faithful: “[Abraham] likewise [is] the ancestor
of the circumcised who are not only circumcised but who also follow the
example of the faith that our ancestor Abraham had before he was cir-
cumcised.” In other words, Paul wishes to say that, in the wake of Christ,
Abraham remains an ancestor for Jews (whom he calls “the circumcised”),
but only those Jews who have accepted Christ as Israel’s messiah. Yet one
only arrives at this translation by blatantly disregarding a crucial Greek
word in the latter portion of the sentence. The word is tois, which is noth-
ing more than the Greek definite article (i.e., “the”), but its inclusion in
the sentence has a significant impact on the meaning. When the word
is taken into account, Paul does not say that Abraham is the ancestor of
those who are circumcised and also believe in Christ—that is, baptized
Jews—but rather that Abraham is the ancestor of all those who are cir-
cumcised, a constituency that he then clarifies to mean both Jews and
Gentiles: “Abraham likewise is the ancestor of the circumcision: not only
those who are of the circumcision (i.e., Jews), but also those who follow
the example of the faith that our ancestor Abraham had before he was
circumcised (i.e., baptized Gentiles).”
Stunning as it may seem, Paul declares that “the circumcision” of
Abraham actually includes those Gentiles who have emulated the faith
Abraham exhibited prior to his circumcision. In other words, Paul is sug-

gesting that uncircumcised Gentiles are in fact circumcised! In order to
cope with Paul’s seemingly inconceivable remark, interpreters of Romans
have devised no shortage of strategies to get rid of the pesky tois. Paul’s
pen must have slipped, some have alleged, or a subsequent scribe mistak-
enly added the Greek article, because Paul could not possibly have meant
what the letter says.
I believe Paul did write what Romans says he wrote. And I believe he
meant it. Paul made the astonishing claim that uncircumcised Gentiles
are, in fact, circumcised descendants of Abraham, just as the Greek text
would suggest. That is the impossible conclusion of the present chapter.
Understanding the question Paul poses in Romans 4:1 is the key to
arriving at this conclusion. Paul asks neither “what then are we to say was
gained by Abraham?” nor the grammatically superior “what then are we
to say Abraham . . . has found?” Indeed, Paul does not ask about anything
Abraham did in the past. Paul is not even the one asking the question!
Since Romans 2:1, I suggest, Paul has been engaged in a conversation with
an imagined interlocutor—a Gentile contrived by Paul—who is strug-
gling to determine whether he needs to be circumcised and follow the
Law in order to become a Jew and thereby to survive the imminent wrath
of God. In this manufactured debate, Paul aims to correct this Gentile’s
false impression of what it means to be Jewish. Neither circumcision nor
Law observance makes one a Jew, Paul insists, but the transformative faith
available in Christ. Such faith makes a Gentile, for all intents and pur-
poses, into a Jew: it enables the Gentile to become circumcised in a truly
efficacious way; to observe the Law as it was really meant to be observed;
and to restore his or her relationship with the God of Israel. Faith alone,
Paul asserts in Romans 2–3, makes Gentiles into Jews.
In response to Paul’s argument, the Gentile interlocutor opens Romans
4 with a question designed to push Paul’s extraordinary claim to the limit.
If faith makes a Gentile into a Jew, he inquires, if faith makes a Gentile
truly circumcised and truly Law observant, can a faithful Gentile go so
far as to claim even the most peculiar, ethnic Jewish characteristic: descent
from Abraham according to the flesh? “What shall we say,” he asks in
Romans 4:1, “[shall we say] that we [Gentiles] have found Abraham to be
our forefather according to the flesh?” Surely, he supposes, descent from
Abraham “according to the flesh” remains the exclusive privilege of the
Jews. Paul’s answer is astonishing: Gentiles can indeed claim Abraham
as a forefather, even according to the flesh! Paul goes on to explain how
this is so, culminating in Romans 4:11–12, where he declares unmistak-
ably that faith permits a Gentile to claim Abraham as an ancestor in the
Romans 4:1–12 85
same manner as a Jew. Because Abraham was justified through his faith,
and because he received a circumcision in the flesh as a symbol of that
faith, then all who imitate Abraham’s faith become sharers in that fleshly
circumcision, and in this sense they become his descendants “according
to the flesh.” Herein lies the whole point of Romans 4:1–12—that faith
transforms Gentiles into Jews, even to the point that they may claim to be
descendants of Abraham, and even descendants “according to the flesh”!
Yes, Gentiles are descendants of Abraham according to the flesh. As I
suggested previously, this will sound far-fetched to many, so let me waste
no time in formulating the defense for it. The case rests on four premises
about the argument Paul has mounted in Romans prior to Romans 4:1–
12, as well as on the assumptions about Romans laid out in the preceding
chapter—namely, that Paul composed Romans for a Gentile audience
in order to deflect the arguments of his opposition, who claimed that
circumcision and Law observance were necessary for Gentile converts to
Christ. Each of the four premises will be treated in the pages that follow:
1. In Romans 1:18–32, Paul describes the plight of Gentiles before the

God of Israel, not the sinfulness of all humanity, as many suppose.
2. In Romans 2:1–16, Paul introduces a Gentile interlocutor, whom
he warns about the penalty Gentiles will soon incur for their
wickedness.
3. In Romans 2:17–29, Paul continues his conversation with the Gen-
tile interlocutor, persuading him that faith, as opposed to circumci-
sion and Law observance, establishes a Gentile in God’s covenant.
4. In Romans 3:1–30, Paul persuades the Gentile interlocutor that
the historical advantage provided to the Jews by the Law has lapsed
with the advent of Christ. Jews and Gentiles now find themselves
in the same boat. Faith has become the single avenue to justifica-
tion and, as the only means of achieving reconciliation with the
Jewish God, faith also has become the distinctive marker of Jewish
identity.
In Romans 4:1–12, then, Paul culminates the argument by revealing

just how completely faith transforms a Gentile into a Jew. A Gentile can
claim every last Jewish privilege and characteristic, even descent from
Abraham according to the flesh.
As we will see, however, Paul’s effort to claim a Jewish identity for
Gentiles works only insofar as he concedes at the same time that Gentiles
are manifestly not Jews, at least by standard reckoning. They may claim
in one sense to be descendants of Abraham according to the flesh, even
though it is patently obvious that in another sense—and the normative

sense at that—they are not descendants as such. As is typical in the articu-
lation of hybrid identities, Paul’s reinscription of the basic terms of Jewish
identity, such as “Jew,” “circumcision,” and Abrahamic descent “accord-
ing to the flesh,” challenges and reevaluates those terms in a way that
simultaneously reinforces their already-uttered sense. By Romans 4:12,
Paul will have made clear that baptized Gentiles are Jews but also not
Jews, circumcised but not circumcised, descendants of Abraham accord-
ing to the flesh but also not.
The Four Premises

ROMANS 1:18–32: THE PLIGHT OF THE GENTILES
Something is rotten in Romans 1:18–32. As Paul reports, God’s wrath is
being revealed from heaven against the ungodliness and unrighteousness
presently infecting the world:
18
For the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the impi-
ety and injustice of people who, through injustice, suppress the truth;
19
since that which can be known about God is apparent to them because
God showed it to them.
20
For God’s eternal power and divinity, though invisible, have been seen
and comprehended through his works since the creation of the world;
accordingly, they have no excuse;
21
since, even though they knew God, they did not glorify or give thanks to
him as God, but they were enfeebled in their thinking and their senseless
minds were made dark;
22
though they said they were wise, they were fools;
23
and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for the likeness of
mortal men and birds and four-footed creatures and reptiles.
24
Therefore, God gave them over to impurity through the passions of their
hearts, through which their bodies would be dishonored.
25
They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and they worshipped and
served the creature instead of the creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.
26
On account of this, God gave them over to ignoble passions, such that
their women exchanged natural sexual relations for the unnatural;
27
and, likewise, the men abandoned natural sexual relations with women
and burned with desire for one another; men committed shameful acts
with men, receiving in themselves the recompense due for their error.
28
And, just as they did not see fit to recognize God, God gave them over
to unfit minds, to do improper things;
29
they have become filled with all sorts of injustice, baseness, greediness, ill
will; full of envy, murder, strife, treachery, malice; gossips,
Romans 4:1–12 87
30
slanderers, despisers of God, insolent ones, boasters, contrivers of evil,
disobeyers of parents;
31
senseless, faithless, hateful, merciless;
32
although they recognize the requirement of God, that those who do such
things are worthy of death, they not only do these things but also approve
of those who do them.
Hate, greed, lust, wickedness, idolatry, insolence, slander—it is hard to

imagine the downward spiral of those who “exchanged the truth about
God for a lie” reaching any lower. But just whose rottenness does Paul
have in mind? Has humanity in general given over to “ignoble passions”
and “senseless minds,” as many have suggested, or is Paul diagnosing the
condition of Gentiles alone?2 Overwhelming evidence favors the latter
view.
In the first place, the opening verse of the passage is linked by the rep-
etition of the word “for” (Gk. gar) to Romans 1:13–17, the latter part of
the epistle’s introduction, in which Paul reveals his intention to minister
specifically among the Gentiles in Rome:
13
I do not wish you to be unaware, brethren, that I have often intended to
come to you (but I have been prevented up to now), in order that I might
reap fruit among you, just as I have done among the rest of the Gentiles.
14
I am a debtor both to Greeks and barbarians, both to the wise and the
foolish,
15
which accounts for my eagerness to proclaim the gospel also to you who
are in Rome.
16
For (Gk. gar) I am not ashamed of the gospel, as it is the power of God
for salvation to all who believe, to the Jew first and also to the Greek;
17
for (Gk. gar) the righteousness of God is revealed in it, by faith to faith;
just as it is written, “The righteous one will live by faith.”
Though his efforts thus far have been thwarted, Paul wishes to visit Rome
so that he might reap fruit among its Gentile population just as he has
done in other cities of the Mediterranean. He feels indebted to preach
among the Gentiles and has no shame in his message, which promises sal-
vation through faith not only for Jews but also for Gentiles. In v. 18, then,
opening with the explanatory term “for,” Paul explains why Gentiles so
desperately need to hear his message. In short, their failure to acknowl-
edge God has rendered them incorrigibly sinful and alienated them from
God, a condition for which Paul’s gospel is the only viable remedy. Paul
then goes on to spell out why he is dogged by so nagging a compulsion
to “reap fruit” among the Gentiles in Rome: they are a rotten, lowly, and
godforsaken lot.
It therefore comes as no surprise that Paul’s description of the Gen-

tile plight in Romans 1:18–32 resembles other ancient Jewish accounts
of Gentile origins and sinfulness. A clear correspondence exists, for
example, between Paul’s description of Gentiles in Romans 1:18–32 and
chapters 11–15 of the Wisdom of Solomon (ca. first century CE), accord-
ing to which Gentiles had failed to discern God’s presence in the world,
worshipped animals instead, and indulged in wicked behaviors such as
murder, theft, corruption, defilement, and sexual error. Other parallels
in ancient Jewish literature reveal the same chauvinism, suggesting that
Paul’s indictment in Romans 1:18–32 draws upon typical Jewish atti-
tudes about Gentiles.3
Indeed, so obvious is Paul’s allusion to the specifically Gentile plight in
1:18–32 that even those who insist that Paul is referring to the fall of all
humanity sometimes admit that this is not their first impression.4 C. E.
B. Cranfield and Ernst Käsemann, for example, both acclaimed interpret-
ers of Romans, concede that this passage appears to be an indictment of
Gentile inadequacy. The ways that they and others subsequently transfer
Paul’s target from Gentiles to all of humanity prove unconvincing, if not
altogether mysterious. Some say Paul uses the expression “all people” in
Romans 1:18 so as to include Jews as well as Gentiles in his indictment.5
Yet, as the preceding translation indicates, Paul never says that “all peo-
ple” are implicated. He does not condemn the impiety and injustice of
“all people,” but “all the impiety and injustice of people who, thorough
injustice, suppress the truth.” “All” describes the impiety, not the people.
Paul speaks of God’s wrath being revealed against the wickedness of those
who suppress the truth, giving no indication that such persons include
the entire human race. His concern is the wretched plight specifically of
the Gentiles.
Others transform the indictment of Gentiles into an allegation against
all humankind by comparing the phrase “exchanged the glory” in 1:23 to
the identical expression used in descriptions of idolatry in Psalm 105 and
Jeremiah 2–3, where the shortcoming of Israel, not of the Gentiles, is the
issue.6 Yet Paul gives no indication that he is alluding to scripture, and
his broad reference to “birds and four-footed creatures and reptiles” as
the images for which the immortal God was exchanged differs markedly
from the very specific allusion to the golden calf in Psalm 105. Jeremiah
2–3 does not mention any animal replicas at all. Such subtlety and gen-
erality would be inexplicable if Paul were indeed adducing these biblical
precedents as a way to incorporate Israelites into his indictment. More
likely, Paul spoke of “exchanging” God’s glory for vain images because
Romans 4:1–12 89
this usage was well-known scriptural terminology for describing idolatry,

which Paul shapes here according to his specific aim.
In Romans 1:18–32, Paul describes the dire condition of Gentiles:
their impious rejection of God and the resulting depravity have rendered
them vulnerable to the divine wrath being revealed from heaven. As the
raison d’être for Paul’s mission to the Gentiles, the passage follows seam-
lessly on the heels of Paul’s statement of purpose in the preceding passage.
Paul hastens to broadcast his good news to the Gentiles (1:13–15), a gos-
pel of faith promising salvation even to those who for so long have been
alienated from the one true God (1:16–17). Romans 1:18–32 reveals just
how long and how alienated Gentiles have become.
ROMANS 2:1–16: CONFRONTING A GENTILE

Readers sensitive to rhetorical tropes in ancient letter writing recognize
that in Romans 2:1–16 Paul employs prosōpopoieia (lit. “face-making”),
a rhetorical device in which a speaker or writer pretends to be someone
else.7 Paul fabricates an interlocutor, a hypocritical Gentile judge, with
whom he will converse in the ensuing verses—in my view, until the end
of the fourth chapter.
1
Therefore, you are without excuse, whoever you are, when you pass judg-
ment; for by passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, since
you, the judge, do the same things.
2
[You say], “We know that the judgment of God upon those who do such
things is true.”
3
But do you, who judges those who do such things while doing them
yourself, suppose that you will escape the judgment of God?
4
Or, do you despise the wealth of his kindness, clemency, and patience,
being unaware that the kindness of God can lead you to repentance?
5
Because of your tremendously hard and impenitent heart you are storing
up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath, revelation, and judgment from
God,
6
who will give back to each according to one’s deeds:
7
eternal life for those who seek glory, honor, and immortality by patiently
doing good work;
8
but wrath and anger for those who strive against the truth out of self-
ambition, obeying injustice instead.
9
Affliction and anguish await every person who does evil, the Jew first and
also the Greek;
10
but glory, honor, and peace await all those who do what is good, the Jew
first and also the Greek.
11
For there is no partiality with God.
12
All who have sinned without the Law will perish without the Law, and
all who have sinned with the Law will be judged by the Law.
13
For it is not those who hear the Law that are righteous before God;
rather, those who do the Law will be justified.
14
For whenever Gentiles, who do not possess the Law, do naturally what is
expected in the Law, they are a law unto themselves even though they do
not possess the Law.
15
They show that the work of the Law is written in their hearts—to which
their conscience bears witness, while in their relations with one another
their thoughts either accuse or defend them—
16
on the day when God will judge the hidden thoughts of humanity
according to my gospel through Jesus Christ.
The very first word in the passage unlocks the identity of the interlocu-
tor. By opening the next phase in his argument with the transitional term
“therefore” (Gk. dio), Paul implies that the hypocritical judge is among
those maligned in his preceding description of the Gentile plight. The
judge is one of those Gentiles who, according to the indictment, failed to
acknowledge God and by consequence became foolish, senseless, idola-
trous, debased, and wicked.8 “Therefore,” Paul goes on to say, this Gentile
cannot cast judgment upon the impiety of others because he himself is
guilty of the same charge.9
Paul then takes aim at this incorrigibly sinful Gentile who nevertheless
has the gumption to judge his fellow. Paul scolds him for his hypocrisy and
wonders at his obtuse incomprehension of God’s impending judgment of
his own wayward deeds. Of course, such incomprehension may not be
as misguided as Paul makes it seem. The Gentile might well claim that
the God of the Jews cannot hold him accountable for his deeds because
Gentiles never received God’s Law and could therefore not be expected to
know any better. To some extent, Paul already anticipated this response
in 1:21 when he suggested that Gentiles knew (and indeed continue to
know) the truth about God and his expectations, but nevertheless opted
to misrepresent God, a crime for which God has punished them by hard-
wiring them for immorality. In 2:6–16, Paul again explores the grim and
seemingly diabolical consequence of that error: even though Gentiles are
programmed to sin, and even though they never forged a covenant with
God or plainly received God’s directives, they are nevertheless subject to
God’s expectations for human conduct because, as Paul puts it, God “will
give back to each according to one’s deeds” (2:6). Good individuals receive
eternal life whereas the wicked incur wrath, and this decree is true not
only for the Jew, for whom it could reasonably be expected, but also for
the Greek (2:7–10). God shows no partiality in meting out rewards and
Romans 4:1–12 91
punishments according to deeds (2:11). God’s Law is the absolute stan-

dard for judgment; those living up to it will be justified, whether or not
they have heard it (2:12–13).
Even still, Paul reveals in 2:14–16, all is not lost for Gentiles. Their
alienation from the Law and their inveterate sinfulness do not spell cer-
tain doom. There is a way for Gentiles to live up to the Law and thereby
to become a law unto themselves, to show that “the work of the Law is
written in their hearts” (2:15).10 That way is provided by the faith made
available in Jesus Christ. Paul does not explicitly disclose that avenue
to salvation, but he adumbrates what follows by alluding to the day on
which “God will judge the hidden thoughts of humanity according to my
Gospel through Jesus Christ” (2:16).
ROMANS 2:17–29: ESCAPING THE GENTILE PLIGHT; OR, BECOMING A JEW

Before elaborating on his own solution, Paul considers an alternative way
out of the Gentile predicament, presumably the one suggested by Paul’s
opposition. A Gentile might become a Jew in the traditional manner,
through circumcision and Law observance, and thereafter rest confidently
in his standing before God:
17
But if you call yourself a Jew and rely on the Law and boast about God,
18
and you know [God’s] will and discriminate on the basis of your instruc-
tion in the Law,
19
and you have become convinced that you are a guide for the blind, a
light for those in the dark,
20
a tutor for the foolish, and a teacher of babes, because you have the
appearance of knowledge and truth through the Law.
21
Well, then, you who teach others, do you teach yourself? You who preach
against stealing, do you steal?
22
You who says not to commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who
hates idols, do you rob temples?
23
You, who boasts about the Law, dishonor God by transgressing the Law.
24
Since “on account of you the name of God is blasphemed among the
Gentiles,” just as it has been written.
25
For, on the one hand, circumcision is of benefit if you do the Law;
however, if you are a transgressor of the Law, then your circumcision has
become a foreskin;
26
so, if a foreskinned person observes the righteous decrees of the Law,
shall his foreskin not be reckoned as a circumcision?
27
And one who is physically uncircumcised will judge you, who fulfilled
the Law through the letter and circumcision, to be a transgressor of the
Law.
28
For it is not the externally marked person who is a Jew, nor is circumci-
sion performed externally in the flesh;
29
rather, it is the internally marked person who is a Jew, and circumcision
is of the heart, by means of the spirit and not the letter, whose praise is not
from people but from God.
Despite the nearly unanimous view that Paul tangles here with a boast-
ful Jew, nothing in the conversation indicates that Paul’s dialogue partner
is anyone other than the Gentile whom he just chastised for hypocritically
judging his fellow Gentiles.11 In the first place, Paul gives no rhetorical
indication that he has introduced a new interlocutor, such as a change in
verb forms or an indefinite pronoun, which ancient readers would have
expected. At one point in the Moralia, for example, Plutarch converses
with a fabricated interlocutor named Paccius, but later introduces another
partner in dialogue with the expression, “someone else might say.”12 Sen-
eca, on the other hand, following a lengthy exchange in an epistle with
an interlocutor whom he addresses with second-person verbs, introduces
a new counterpart by shifting noticeably to third-person verbs. Elsewhere
in the same epistle Seneca indicates yet another transition by announc-
ing in no uncertain terms his intention to engage a new subject.13 For his
part, Paul provides no such indication that his target has changed in 2:17.
The verbs and pronouns are in the second person singular, just as they
are in 2:1.
Some have said that Paul explicitly identifies the interlocutor as a Jew
when he says, “if you call yourself a Jew.” Consider Paul’s wording closely,
however. He does not identify the man as a Jew. He accuses the interlocu-
tor of calling himself a Jew, which could mean that Paul regards him either
as a Jew who calls himself a Jew or, just as reasonably, as a Gentile who
has come to do the same.14 Paul is employing the ancient rhetorical com-
monplace of distinguishing name from deed.15 Were Paul’s target a Jew
who calls himself a Jew, then Paul’s point would be that the interlocutor,
though rightfully possessing the name Jew and boasting in the benefits it
bestows, besmirches that name through hypocritical behavior and proves
himself unworthy of the title. Were it a Gentile who calls himself a Jew,
then Paul means to say that the sinful Gentile interlocutor, though puta-
tively adopting Jewish status and boasting in its attending advantages,
nevertheless remains a hopeless sinner—now a hopelessly hypocritical
sinner as well.
The second option makes better sense. Paul’s argument up to this point
has emphasized the degeneration of non-Jewish peoples (1:18–32) and
the resulting hypocrisy of any Gentile who has the audacity to judge his
fellow (2:1–16). Paul has had Gentiles in view from the start and nothing
Romans 4:1–12 93
in the text suggests that he has cast his gaze elsewhere. Moreover, Paul
introduces the Jewish appellation in 2:17 in conditional terms: “If you call
yourself a Jew,” an expression that recommends viewing the interlocutor
as a Gentile. Admittedly, where Paul completes this conditional sentence
is not clear, but the fact that he phrases the interlocutor’s claim using the
conditional “if ” imbues the claim with a sense of contingency. In other
words, Paul makes it seem as though the claim is but one option—the
interlocutor could choose to call himself a Jew or he could not (though
the first option is fraught with problems, as Paul will demonstrate). Were
Paul confronting what he thought was a Jew, why would he depict the
claim to Jewish identity as though it were contingent? Of course a Jew
would claim to be a Jew! For this reason, translators wishing to portray
the interlocutor as a Jew have downplayed or even whitewashed Paul’s
conditional language. The King James Version, for example, gives no hint
of the “if ” conveyed in the Greek, saying “Behold, thou art called a Jew.”
Ignoring the “if ” creates the false impression that there are no ifs, ands, or
buts about the interlocutor’s Jewish identity.16
If the interlocutor were indeed a Jew, however, the argument Paul
cultivates subsequently would make little sense. Paul emphasizes the
unavoidable hypocrisy of his counterpart, who might preach against
theft, adultery, and temple robbing, but who invariably perpetrates those
very crimes. For Paul’s remonstration to succeed there must be the tacit
assumption that the interlocutor is likely to commit such transgressions,
either in reality or according to the stereotypes informing Paul’s view of
the world. The last offense in particular makes it unlikely that a Jew is
the intended target.17 What Paul means by the Greek term hierosuleis,
tentatively translated as “do you rob temples?” is not certain because the
verb can refer to the actual stealing of idols from temple precincts or,
more generally, to some expression of commitment to the value of idols.
In either case, little to no evidence suggests that Jews did such things in
antiquity to any appreciable degree, either in actuality or according to
stereotype.18 There were Jewish thieves, to be sure, and Jewish adulter-
ers as well, but Jews were hardly known as temple-robbing or idolatrous
people. Were Paul’s interlocutor meant to be a Jew, then the likely answer
to Paul’s query, “Do you rob temples?” would likely be “No!” Indeed, for
this very reason one commentator, assuming that the interlocutor is a Jew,
has called Paul’s question “perhaps one of the most curious, if not perplex-
ing, passages from the pen of Paul.”19
Paul’s question is only perplexing when one insists that Paul under-
stands the interlocutor to be a Jew. There would be no confusion at all
if he were a Gentile. Granted, the typical Gentile in the ancient world
was not a serial temple robber, but in Jewish eyes—Paul’s, for example—
idolatrous sacrilege was indeed a characteristic Gentile vice. Paul reveals
as much in 1 Corinthians 12:2 when, reminding his listeners of their
Gentile past, he recalls their previous propensity to be “led astray to mute
idols.” Were Paul conversing with a Gentile interlocutor in Romans 2:17,
then his argument would simply be tapping into the assumptions neces-
sary to make his point, a point that itself fits neatly into the case Paul
has been building against his Gentile foe. Paul has maintained that Gen-
tiles are incorrigibly flawed and that, as a result, no Gentile may reckon
himself superior to another in the eyes of God. Now he dismisses the
obvious solution to that dilemma: ceasing to be a Gentile by becoming
a Jew! A Gentile might well believe that conversion to Judaism through
circumcision and Law observance can mend the brokenness at root in his
character. According to Paul, such a conversion would hardly provide the
fix because, as he has already demonstrated, Gentiles are beyond repair by
any traditional means. Just as unruly Gentiles caused God’s name to be
blasphemed in the days of Isaiah, Paul explains, any Gentile who supposes
that studying the Law and adopting Jewish ways can make him a Jew will
invariably prove that he is not a Jew by succumbing to his inveterately
crooked nature.20 Despite his circumcision and his concomitant instruc-
tion in the Law, such a Gentile would continue to indulge his sinful appe-
tite and ineluctably violate the Law.
The only way for the interlocutor to escape his Gentile wretchedness,
Paul goes on to say in 2:25–29, is through a new sort of transformation,
one that miraculously mends his flawed nature and allows him to obey
the Law genuinely. This transformation would enable him to escape his
Gentile status and become a Jew, so that even though he remained uncir-
cumcised, it would be as though he were circumcised; and, likewise, even
though he would not observe the statutes of the Law literally, it would
be as though he were living up to its righteous decrees. Such a quasi-
circumcised Gentile, ironically enough, would then be in a position to
judge another Gentile, such as the interlocutor, whose chosen markers of
Jewish identity—literal circumcision and “the letter” of the Law—wind
up indicting him as a sinner before the Law! The “judging” language
from 2:1 does not reappear in 2:27 by accident, but rather it reflects
the summation of the point Paul introduced when he first rebuked his
Gentile counterpart. This judgmental Gentile, who would draw upon
his newfound Jewish status as a source of arrogance and pride, has been
exposed as the object of judgment by the very same Gentiles whom he
has had the nerve to impeach. He might think he has escaped his Gentile
nature by calling himself a Jew because of his circumcision or his training
Romans 4:1–12 95
in the Law, but in fact his apparent conversion has merely highlighted his
Gentile inadequacy. Meanwhile, those Gentiles who have repaired their
sinful hearts by means of the spirit, though they remain uncircumcised
and supposedly not Jewish, have turned out to be nothing other than cir-
cumcised, Law-abiding Jews! As Paul concludes, “It is not the externally
marked person who is a Jew, nor is circumcision performed externally
in the flesh. Rather, it is the internally marked person who is a Jew, and
circumcision is of the heart, by means of the spirit and not the letter”
(2:28–29).
For Paul, then, the way for Gentiles to evade the impending wrath
is indeed to become a Jew. In that respect, the interlocutor is correct in
2:17; this Gentile simply does not understand what becoming a Jew actu-
ally entails in the wake of Christ. In 2:17–29, Paul reconfigures Jewish
identity so that its sine qua non is no longer the literal circumcision of
the penis, or performance of the literal decrees of the Law, but a spirit-
mediated circumcision and the consequent performance of the righteous
decrees the Law, which are presumably its moral, rather than ceremo-
nial, requirements.21 The tacit assumption, of course, as Paul proclaimed
in 1:16–17 and will make explicit again in 3:21, is that Christ alone
makes such a transformation possible. Christ facilitates the circumcision
required to enter the covenant; Christ enables one to fulfill the decrees
of the Law; in short, Christ makes one a Jew. As such, Christ is the only
solution to the Gentile plight.
ROMANS 3:1–31: THE LAPSING OF THE HISTORIC JEWISH ADVANTAGE

As in any act of reinscription, however, Paul must reckon with that fact
that the terms of Jewish identity, such as the word “Jew” itself, will not
simply jettison their customary associations in the face of his reassign-
ment. Paul himself has been using the standard meaning of the term
“Jew” in his refrain, “to the Jew first, and also to the Gentile,” where “Jew”
surely refers to the externally marked sort, not the authentic, internally
marked, variety. Moreover, integral to Paul’s argument thus far has been
the patent advantage of Jews as they are traditionally reckoned, their pri-
ority in both judgment and salvation, and the tenacity of Gentile inferior-
ity. Jews—that is, the literally circumcised, Law-possessing type—seemed
much better off up until 2:17; yet now Paul seemingly maintains the
contrary: Jews have no advantage at all. Without the internal transforma-
tion wrought by Christ, they are no longer even Jews!
Paul addresses this seeming contradiction in 3:1–31, as the interlocu-
tor points out Paul’s apparent leveling of the traditional Jewish advantage:
1
So, then, [you ask], what is the advantage of the Jew, and what is the
benefit of [physical] circumcision?
2
Much, in every way! In the first place, they were entrusted with the ora-
cles of God.
3
So, then, [you ask] if some of them were unfaithful, does their unfaithful-
ness nullify the faithfulness of God?
4
By no means! Let God be truthful even if every person is a liar; as it is
written: “So that you may be justified in your words and you will triumph
when you judge.”
5
But, [you ask], if our injustice confirms the righteousness of God, what
shall we say? Shall we say that God is unjust to carry out the wrath? (I am
speaking in a human way.)
6
By no means! Since then how could God judge the world?
7
But if the truth of God abounds for his glory because of my falsehood,
then why am I still judged to be a sinner?
8
And would we not [be compelled to say], just as we are blasphemed and
just as they say that we say, that we should do evil things so that good
things come about? Their condemnation is just.
9
So, then, [you ask], does that mean we [Gentiles] are at a disadvantage?
Not at all. For we have already charged that all people, both Jews and
Greeks, are under sin;
10
as it is written that: “No one is righteous, not even one;
11
no one understands, there is not one who seeks out God.
12
Everyone has turned away and become worthless; no one acts kindly,
not even one.”
13
“Their throat is an open grave; they lie with their tongues.” “The venom
of asps is beneath their lips.”
14
“Their mouth is full of curse and bitterness.”
15
“Their feet are quick to shed blood;
16
destruction and misery are in their roads;
17
And they do not know the path of peace.”
18
“Fear of God is not before their eyes.”
19
We know that whatever the Law says is addressed to those under the
Law, so that every mouth should be silenced and the whole world should
be answerable to God.
20
Since no person will be justified before him through works of the Law,
for through the Law is the awareness of sin.
21
But now, the righteousness of God has been revealed apart from the Law,
although it is witnessed by the Law and the Prophets—that is,
22
The righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all those who
believe; for there is no distinction,
23
For everyone has sinned and lacks the glory of God,
24
But is justified gratuitously by the his grace through the redemption
which is in Christ Jesus,
Romans 4:1–12 97
25
whom God put forth as a means of expiation, through faith, by means
of his blood, as a demonstration of his righteousness, on account of his
passing over previous sins,
26
by the forbearance of God, as a demonstration of his righteousness at
the present time, so that he would be proved just and the one who justifies
him who believes in Jesus.
27
So, then, [you ask], where is the boast? It is excluded. By what sort of
Law, [you ask], the Law of works? No, by the Law of faith.
28
For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works of the
Law.
29
Or, [you might ask], is God of the Jews only? Is God not also of the
Gentiles? Yes, even of the Gentiles,
30
since there is one God, who will justify the circumcised person out of
faith and the uncircumcised person through faith.
31
So, do we abolish the Law through faith? By no means! Rather, we con-
firm the Law.
Romans 3:1–31 is a long and difficult passage featuring any number of

controversial verses. We cannot dwell at length on every aspect of it. We
shall focus only on the progression of Paul’s argument from the preceding
chapter, that Jewish identity in the wake of Christ has become determined
in all respects by faith in Christ, so much so that Gentiles exhibiting such
faith are thus reckoned as though they are circumcised, Law-observant
Jews. As the interlocutor observes at the outset, this reevaluation of Jew-
ish identity would obliterate the historical distinction between Jews and
Gentiles, because every advantage previously enjoyed exclusively by Jews
would now be accessible by Gentiles. “What is the advantage of the Jew,”
the Gentile interlocutor asks, “and what is the benefit of [physical] cir-
cumcision?” Paul resolves the issue of the historic Jewish advantage by
pointing to Christ’s function as a pivot point in human history. Yes, he
concedes, Jews had the advantage over Gentiles before Christ, “but now,”
as Paul emphatically declares, Christ has leveled the playing field.22 The
Jewish advantage secured by circumcision and possession of the Law has
been replaced by a new sort of Jewish advantage, one secured by a new
sort of circumcision and fulfillment of the Law as capacitated by Christ.
The old and the new Jewish identities are linked, as Paul goes on to say,
inasmuch as the purpose of the old was to anticipate the new.
Paul establishes this point through continued dialogue with the imagi-
nary Gentile interlocutor. Once his counterpart asks after the value of
the historic Jewish identity, which would seem to have been obviated in
Christ, Paul insists that there is still a Jewish advantage. But he promptly
narrows his first response, “much in every way!” to the paramount Jewish
asset: “They were entrusted with the oracles of God” (3:2).23 By referring
to the Jewish scriptures as the “oracles” of God, a term familiar to ancient

readers, Paul suggests that the scriptures were divinely inspired messages
delivered in the past, whose enigmatic meanings will be revealed at some
point in the future once the key for deciphering them has emerged. In
Paul’s view, God had granted the Jews the privilege of receiving those ora-
cles and transmitting them through the ages. With the mission of Christ
accomplished, however, the genuine meaning of the scriptures has at last
been revealed and the historic advantage enjoyed by the Jews has accord-
ingly lapsed.24 Paul repeats this claim unmistakably in 3:9.
Before doing so, however, Paul fends off some false and devastating
implications one might infer from so dramatic a historical shift. Paul par-
ries the efforts of the interlocutor to deflate his contention that the Jews’
advantage over Gentiles was a historic one, culminating in the arrival
of Christ. First, the interlocutor—who, as a Gentile, understandably
speaks about Jews in the third person—wonders whether the disbelief
in the oracles exhibited by some Jews, as evidenced by their rejection of
Christ, nullifies the faithfulness of God (3:3).25 On the contrary, Paul
insists, the faithlessness of such Jews actually confirms the faithfulness of
God, a point he supports through an appeal to Psalm 51:4. Next, Paul
addresses the Gentile side of the equation. The interlocutor—now speak-
ing in the first person, naturally—wonders whether the “injustice” of the
Gentiles, described by Paul in Romans 1:18–32, impeaches the justice of
God by causing God to punish Gentiles unfairly.26 Not at all, Paul insists,
because the injustice of the Gentiles confirms God’s justice no less than
the faithlessness of some Jews confirms God faithfulness. Of course, if
this is so, then one might reasonably conclude that Gentiles ought to con-
tinue behaving unjustly so as to continually affirm the glory of God! Paul
admits to having been accused of suggesting as much, but insists, without
argument, that doing so would be worthy of condemnation.27
Having dealt with the implications of his claim in 3:2, Paul returns
to the issue of Jewish advantage in 3:9. If Jews have an advantage over
Gentiles because they received and transmitted the oracles of God, the
interlocutor naturally wonders whether Gentiles are in fact still at a dis-
advantage vis-à-vis Jews, despite what Paul suggested in 2:25–29: that real
Jews are those internally marked as such. “So, then,” he asks Paul, “does
that mean we are at a disadvantage?”28 Paul’s response provides the final
turn in his argument and allows him to reach the conclusion at which
he has been driving all along. “Not at all,” Paul says, Gentiles are not at
a disadvantage because “we have already charged that all people, both
Jews and Greeks, are under sin” (3:9). Paul’s view is clear—Gentiles are
by no means at a disadvantage—but his rationale is curious, as nowhere
Romans 4:1–12 99
up to this point has he claimed that “both Jews and Greeks are under
sin.” He has hardly spoken of sin at all, and certainly has said nothing
about anyone being “under sin,” either Jews or Gentiles or both. The
missing antecedent has naturally led to endless conjecture about what
Paul is referring to.29 The best solution, as I see it, is to assume that when
Paul says he has “already charged that all people . . . are under sin,” he
does not necessarily mean that he has done so in the present epistle. In
other words, the Greek word proaitiaomai, “to charge previously,” implies
only that Paul has made the accusation prior to the moment he is writing.
The expression could refer to something he has written previously in the
same letter, but just the same could allude to a claim a he has made dur-
ing the course of his ministry. This approach is appealing because Paul’s
contention that “all are under sin,” though not stated in Romans prior
to 3:9, does in fact appear in Galatians 3:22, where Paul declares that
“scripture has imprisoned everything under sin.”30 Thus in response to
the interlocutor’s concern that Gentiles are at a disadvantage, Paul draws
on an argument he has not yet used in the present epistle, but has in fact
made on previous occasions.
Indeed, Paul betrays his own recognition that by 3:9 he has not yet
established universal sinfulness when he defends the assertion with a
lengthy scriptural catena. This chain of verses is no doubt a previously
assembled piece; Paul is not selecting quotations extemporaneously. He
has rehearsed this arrangement before, presumably in defense of claims
similar to the one made to the Galatians, that “scripture has imprisoned
everything under sin” (Gal. 3:22). Here are the scriptures. But to what
end does Paul employ them? What is the point of showing that the
Hebrew scriptures allege over and over again that “no one is righteous,”
and “everyone has turned away”? Paul reveals the aim in Romans 3:19:
“We know that whatever the Law says is addressed to those under the
Law, so that every mouth should be silenced and the whole world should
be answerable to God.” The catena is directed at Jews and, more impor-
tant given the identity of the present interlocutor, at Gentiles who would
seek to become Jews by enmeshing themselves in the Law. Moreover, the
point of the catena is clear: there is no escaping sin, even within the Law.
The final clause in 3:19 then expresses the totality reached once the Jew-
ish sinfulness established in the catena is added to the incorrigibly corrupt
Gentile character revealed in 1:18–2:29: now that Jews, too, have been
shown to be indicted by their own Law, then “every mouth [i.e., both
Gentiles and Jews] should be silenced and the whole world [i.e., both
Gentiles and Jews] should be answerable to God.”
Summarizing Paul’s argument in 3:1–20, then, we see that Paul begins

by confirming the value of normative Jewish identity because of its his-
torical purpose (3:1–2), but insists nevertheless that Gentiles stand at no
disadvantage because Jews, too, are under sin (3:9). After all, scripture
itself proclaims that no one is righteous (3:10–18) and surely scripture
has Jews in its crosshairs (3:19–20). Thus by 3:20 Paul has established the
incorrigible sinfulness of Gentiles (1:18–32), the culpability of Gentiles
before the Jewish God (2:1–16), and the worthlessness of the traditional
understanding of Jewish identity based on literal circumcision and Law
observance, both for Gentiles (2:17–29) and for Jews (3:9–20), despite
the historic advantage of that identity (3:1–2).
Paul’s argument makes a significant transition at Romans 3:21, as he
brings into full view what was adumbrated in his thesis statement at 1:16–
17, repeated at 2:14–16, and raised again at 2:25–29—namely, the full
impact of Christ on human history. Paul indicates this shift in focus with
the emphatic “but now” (Gk. nuni de), an expression that makes clear just
how different the present epoch is from the historical period that preceded
it.31 Prior to “now,” the eschatological present initiated by Christ’s death
and resurrection, Paul has conceded that Jews held the honor of harbor-
ing God’s revelation, a revelation that, as we have just learned, exposes
its recipients as sinful and provides no justification. “Now,” however, the
salvific moment envisioned by that revelation has been made manifest in
Christ, a salvation that shows no deference to past advantages. “There is
no distinction,” Paul boldly proclaims, “for everyone has sinned and lacks
the glory of God” (3:22–23).
Paul negotiates the consequences of this leveled playing field in 3:27–
31 as he resumes the discussion with his interlocutor.32 Asked about the
enduring validity of the boast previously available to Jews, Paul explains
that it has been eliminated, not by the Law as it is fulfilled through works,
which was the source of the boast, but by the Law as it is fulfilled by the
faith made possible in Christ and now accessible to all. This faith has
become the avenue to divine justification for both Jews and Gentiles, for
those circumcised literally and those not. Simply put, there is one God;
God is the God of the historically advantaged Jews and the historically
disadvantaged Gentiles, and the historic disparity has lapsed because ful-
fillment of the Law through faith now functions as the mode by which all
find justification before God.
Such a claim, of course, has shocking implications for Jewish identity.
If faith alone determines one’s fulfillment of the Law and, indeed, as Paul
proposed in 2:25–29, one’s status as a Jew, does there remain any distinc-
tion at all between Jews and Gentile? Can a Gentile in Christ go so far
Romans 4:1–12 101
as to claim even the most ethnically peculiar characteristic of the Jews—

descent from Abraham “according to the flesh”?
The “Impossible Conclusion”: Gentiles as

“Descendants of Abraham ‘According to the Flesh’”
Romans 4:1–12 is an especially thorny passage. Paul’s precise line of
thought proves difficult to penetrate, as does the role of the passage
within the wider context of Romans. So too, are there ticklish grammati-
cal issues, particularly in the first and last verses. Let us look first at the
NRSV translation, as it represents the foil against which my revised read-
ing will be presented:
1
What then are we to say was gained by Abraham, our ancestor according
to the flesh?
2
For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about,
but not before God.
3
For what does the scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was reck-
oned to him as righteousness.”
4
Now to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift but as something
due.
5
But to one who without works trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such
faith is reckoned as righteousness.
6
So also David speaks of the blessedness of those to whom God reckons
righteousness apart from works:
7
“Blessed are those whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are
covered;
8
blessed is the one against whom the Lord will not reckon sin.”
9
Is this blessedness, then, pronounced only on the circumcised, or also
on the uncircumcised? We say, “Faith was reckoned to Abraham as
righteousness.”
10
How then was it reckoned to him? Was it before or after he had been
circumcised? It was not after, but before he was circumcised.
11
He received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that
he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised. The purpose was to make
him the ancestor of all who believe without being circumcised and who
thus have righteousness reckoned to them,
12
and likewise the ancestor of the circumcised who are not only circum-
cised but who also follow the example of the faith that our ancestor Abra-
ham had before he was circumcised.
As I suggested previously, the passage is widely viewed as a case study

designed by Paul to defend his claim that Jewish boasting is excluded
and that justification comes through faith, not works. Paul shows how
Abraham, the originator of the Jewish covenant, was justified by the

faith he displayed in Genesis 15:6, not by works, which provided him no
boast before God. The problem with such an approach to 4:1–12 is that
although it accords nicely with Paul’s denunciation of Jewish boasting in
3:27–28, it overlooks 3:29–31, the more immediate context, in which
Paul culminates the argument he began making about Jewish identity
in 2:25–29. Having shown that Jewish identity has become a matter of
faith, and that the historic advantage of the Jews lapsed with the advent
of Christ because faith provides access to salvation for all, Paul proceeds
to explain how the firmly established “Law of faith” has broken down the
historic wall separating Jew from Gentile. Both Jews and Gentiles now
rest in the same boat, so to speak, because both must claim Jewish identity
anew as it is presently constituted through the transformation afforded
by Christ. God is the God of both Jews and Gentiles, Paul declares, and
both are justified by God through faith. Thus the context for 4:1–12 is
less Paul’s notion of justification by faith alone than it is the consequences
of justification by faith alone—namely, the obliteration of the historic
Jewish advantage and the reorientation of Jewish identity in accordance
with the Law of faith. The passage is not a proof that justification comes
by faith, but rather a defense of Paul’s view of Jewish identity vis-à-vis the
Abrahamic heritage in light of the established fact that justification comes
only by faith, which is precisely why Paul’s conclusions at the end of the
passage have to do specifically with the nature of Abraham’s paternity,
not his mode of salvation. Such conclusions also indicate that the ques-
tion posed at the outset of the passage is about the nature of Abraham’s
paternity, not how he became justified. Paul must be asking a question in
4:1 to which a meaningful answer is “Abraham was made an ancestor to
all who believe.”
The usual rendering of the opening question, as indicated in the
preceding NRSV translation, fails to meet that criterion. When Paul is
thought to ask, “What then are we to say was gained by Abraham, our
ancestor according to the flesh?” there is simply no way to connect this
question to what follows, which, as we just noted, deals with the nature of
Abraham’s paternity, not with anything he “gained.” Just as importantly,
the very term “gained” is pulled from thin air, because the original Greek
verb means “to find,” not “to gain.” The verb is also in the active, not the
passive, voice and in the perfect, not the past tense. In other words, the
normal rendering of Paul’s question is difficult to defend grammatically.
A superior translation would have Paul ask, “What then are we to say
Abraham, our ancestor according to the flesh, has found?”; yet even this
more accurate translation yields a question that fails to account for the
Romans 4:1–12 103
response that follows. Why, after all, would Paul use the perfect tense to
describe a discovery by Abraham in the distant past? Why say, “Abraham
has found,” rather than “Abraham found.” And in any case, why does
Paul speak of Abraham finding anything at all? When does the Bible ever
speak of Abraham finding something? Hunting down a hidden object for
this verb has led scholars on a never-ending chase to identify the object
Abraham allegedly discovered.33
In the face of this ambiguity, Richard Hays has proposed a rendering
of the question that is viable contextually and unassailable on grammati-
cal grounds.34 Hays considers Abraham to be the object, rather than the
subject, of the sentence so that Paul and his fellow Jews become the find-
ers. In other words, Paul asks, “‘What shall we say? [Shall we say] that
we have found Abraham to be our forefather according to the flesh?’”
The case for translating the question in this manner is persuasive most
importantly for taking seriously Paul’s customary usage of the rhetori-
cal construction “What shall we say?” (Gk. ti oun eroumen). Paul uses
this expression six times in Romans, and in every case but one (8:31) it
stands alone as a complete sentence. Moreover, in every case the ques-
tion posed is rhetorical and in nearly every case the follow-up question
presents a false inference to which Paul explicitly objects. The pattern
also holds when Paul uses the similar but abbreviated expressions, “What
then?” (Gk. ti oun) and “What then shall I say?” (Gk. ti oun phēmi). As an
example, consider Romans 6:14–15, in which Paul reprises the concern
he raised in Romans 3:8 that he and his audience ought to act sinfully in
order to magnify God’s grace:
14
For sin will not rule over you, for you are not under Law but under grace.
15
What then? Shall we act sinfully because we are not under Law but under
grace? By no means!
Paul clearly employs “What then?” as a way to tackle the potentially dev-
astating inference one might draw from his claim that baptized Gentiles
live under grace rather than Law. Does that mean Gentiles should sin
in order that grace might abound? Of course not. Were Romans 4:1 to
follow the same form, then Paul would be asking a complete question,
“What shall we say?” followed by a false inference, “[Shall we say] that we
have found Abraham to be our forefather according to the flesh?” Though
Paul provides no answer to the question, it would have to be, as Hays
himself insists, “Of course not!”
Hays has come closer to the best possible reading of Romans 4:1, but
he remains one step away.35 It is true that the inference Paul introduces
in the second part of the “What shall we say?” construction is usually
false. On at least two occasions, however, the inference is correct. Paul

makes it absolutely clear, too, when the inference is correct. Whenever
Paul introduces a false inference with the “What shall we say?” construc-
tion, he always indicates its falseness with an expression of unequivocal
dissent. As we just saw, in Romans 6:15, Paul rebuffs the bogus notion
that his readers should intentionally sin with the categorical denial, “By
no means!” (Gk. mē genoito). Likewise, in Romans 9:14, Paul follows
“What then shall we say?” with the false inference, “[Shall we say] that
God is unjust?” Again, Paul stridently discards the inference by declaring
“By no means!” Elsewhere Paul uses the similar expressions “not at all”
(Gk. ou pantōs) or “but rather” (Gk. alla) when designating an inference
as false.36 Twice in Romans, however, Paul follows the “What then shall
we say?” construction with a correct inference, the correctness of which is
indicated precisely by the absence of any expression of dissent. In Romans
9:30, when Paul follows the “What then shall we say?” construction with
the inference, “[Shall we say] that the Gentiles who did not pursue righ-
teousness have found a righteousness rooted in faith, while Israel, which
pursued righteousness through the Law, failed to attain it?” Paul indicates
that the inference is correct by offering no dissent. Yes, Paul suggests, as a
matter of fact the Gentiles did attain righteousness whereas Israel did not!
Paul confirms a correct inference in Romans 11:7 in the same way. By
failing to contradict the notion that Israel as a whole did not attain what it
sought because a great many hearts were hardened, Paul affirms that, as a
matter of fact, the contention is true. In other words, Paul leaves nothing
to chance when he thinks his inferences are false: his “no” is a clear “no!”
Correspondingly, his silence following an inference is a deafening “yes!”
Thus by opting not to gainsay the rhetorical question, “Have we found
Abraham to be our forefather according to the flesh?” Paul indicates that
the answer is, as a matter of fact, yes! Of course, for Paul himself to ask
this question would make no sense at all, because in that case Paul would
be asking whether he and his fellow Jews have found Abraham to be a
forefather according to the flesh. The positive answer would be obvious
and the verse would amount to little more than a non sequitur.37 Were we
to imagine the question on the lips of Paul’s Gentile interlocutor, how-
ever, the question makes perfect sense.38 Resuming his examination of
Paul’s claim that “there is no distinction,” that historic Jewish identity is
obsolete and that faith makes one a Jew in the wake of Christ, the inter-
locutor tests the limits of Paul’s contention by pursuing its most extreme
implication: “What then shall we say?” the interlocutor asks, “[Shall we
say] that we [Gentiles] have found Abraham to be our forefather accord-
ing to the flesh?” Note the felicity of the perfect tense, as the interlocutor
Romans 4:1–12 105
inquires after the significance of a past event, Christ’s death and resurrec-
tion, on the present status of believers. Specifically, he wonders whether
the historic distinction between Jew and Gentile has been eradicated even
to the point that Gentiles who become Jews through faith can claim the
most particularistic, ostensibly unattainable, and inherently un-Gentile
title, “descendant of Abraham according to the flesh.” Surely, the inter-
locutor’s question presupposes limits to the Gentile’s claim on Jewish
identity. Baptism into Christ cannot make one a descendant of Abraham
according to the flesh, or can it?
By failing to indicate his dissent, Paul reveals the astonishing answer:
as a matter of fact, yes, even that Jewish attribute is available to Gentiles!
Now this claim is astonishing, to say the least. It sounds preposterous. I
would suggest, however, that Paul wants it to sound preposterous. His
goal in 4:1–12 is to obliterate completely the distinctions between Jews
and Gentiles in Christ, and he does so by eliminating the most obvious
and irresolvable distinction of them all. He makes the interlocutor ask
whether a baptized Gentile can go so far as to call Abraham an ancestor
even “according to the flesh,” a claim surely reserved for Jews regardless
of faith commitments. Paul astonishes his opponent by embracing what
was supposed to be a reduction of his argument to absurdity. Indeed,
Paul’s rhetoric indicates his intention to be shocking. As we saw previ-
ously, in the two other cases where Paul completes the “What then shall
we say?” construction with a positive inference, the inference is outra-
geous. In 9:30–31, Paul scandalously proposes that Gentiles who never
sought righteousness attained it, whereas Jews who pursued the Law of
righteousness came up short.39 Romans 11:7 expresses a similarly outra-
geous estimation: though many Jews pursued righteousness, only a few
elect ones achieved it because God blinded the rest of them! Again, a
shocking and counterintuitive affirmation comes in place of the expected
articulation of dissent. Note, too, that when Paul signals scandal by fail-
ing to repudiate the positive inference, he proceeds immediately to jus-
tify his view, either with an explanation (9:31–32) or with a scriptural
verse (11:8). So, too, in 4:1 Paul furnishes an immediate explanation for
his staggering assertion, as he opens 4:2 with “for,” a postpositive gar in
Greek, which suggests that he is offering an explanation for the wild claim
he has just made.40
The argument Paul initiates in 4:2, which continues all the way through
4:12, is indeed a defense of justification by faith apart from works.41 In
this respect I agree with the unanimous scholarly consensus. Paul shows
how God reckoned righteousness to Abraham because of his faith, not his
works. Abraham may well have performed good works, Paul concedes,
but these did not set him right with God. He then marshals Psalm 31 to
reinforce this position. There exists little controversy or confusion about
Paul’s point in 4:2–8.
Serious issues reemerge in 4:9–12, however. Paul reveals that his apol-
ogy has not been simply a defense of justification by faith per se, but the
preliminary step in his clarification of the precise nature of Abraham’s
paternity—that is, his justification for proposing that Gentiles in Christ
can indeed claim Abraham as a forefather even according to the flesh, just
as the interlocutor ridiculously suggested. Paul first takes up the blessing
pronounced by Psalm 31 on the man whose sins are not reckoned to him,
asking whether the blessing God gave to Abraham was pronounced on
a circumcised or an uncircumcised man. Because the blessing of Abra-
ham in Genesis 15 precedes Abraham’s circumcision in Genesis 17, Paul
concludes that Abraham was reckoned to be righteous while as yet uncir-
cumcised. He then turns to the purpose of the belated circumcision. As
Paul explains it, Abraham received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the
righteousness he had while uncircumcised in order that he might become
a father to all those uncircumcised who likewise exhibit faith. Moreover,
Paul concludes that this status also makes Abraham a “father of circum-
cision,” not only to those whose genitals are circumcised like Abraham
(i.e., Jews) but also to those who imitate the faith for which Abraham
received circumcision as a sign (i.e., Gentile converts to Christ). In other
words—and this is where 4:12 provides the answer to the question posed
in 4:1—Gentiles can indeed claim Abraham as a forefather “according
to the flesh” insofar as they share in his fleshly circumcision when they
mimic the faith for which Abraham received that mark as a sign. Abra-
ham does not become their forefather “according to the flesh” because
Christ whites out their family tree and rewrites it with Abraham on top.42
Rather, Abraham becomes their forefather “according to the flesh” inas-
much as they acquire Abraham as a “father of circumcision” when they
demonstrate the same faith for which Abraham received circumcision.
Paul secures the most exclusive Jewish privilege for his Gentile charges,
Abrahamic paternity “according to the flesh,” by craftily reevaluating
what determines such paternity. It is not a matter of physical descent, but
of faith. Faith enables believers to share in Abraham’s circumcision in the
flesh, which in turn makes him a “father of circumcision” to them and, in
this way, a “forefather ‘according to the flesh.’”
Those who doubt that Paul could possibly argue that faith enables
one to share in the fleshly circumcision of Abraham, that in some way
faith imputes to believers the status of one circumcised in the flesh, need
only recall Paul’s claim in Romans 2:26: “If a foreskinned person observes
Romans 4:1–12 107
the righteous decrees of the Law, shall his foreskin not be reckoned as a
circumcision?” His “foreskin” refers to his genitally uncircumcised state,
and by some remarkable transformation, Paul contends, observance of
the Law makes his uncircumcised penis circumcised or, more sensibly, it
makes it as though he were circumcised. According to Paul, faith makes
observing the righteous decrees of the Law possible for Gentiles and
enables Gentiles to be reckoned as though they are circumcised, whether
or not they really are! Faith truly does allow one to claim Abraham as an
ancestor “according to the flesh,” at least inasmuch as “flesh” refers to
being circumcised in the flesh.
This interpretation of Romans 4:1–12 understands Paul to be heading
in a seemingly absurd direction. Shall we say that Paul affirms a Gentile’s
right to claim Abraham as an ancestor according to the flesh? As a mat-
ter of fact, yes, that is precisely what Paul says! The apparent absurdity of
the reading no doubt stems from the completely different direction most
explanations of the passage take. Most think Paul’s aim is to distinguish
between two modes of Abrahamic paternity. As Paul would have it, Abra-
ham received circumcision as a seal of the righteousness he had while
uncircumcised so that he would become, on the one hand, a father to all
who are uncircumcised but share his faith (i.e., baptized Gentiles) and,
on the other, a father to all who are both circumcised and share his faith
(i.e., baptized Jews). The passage then becomes a call for reconciliation
between Jews and Gentiles under the umbrella of Abrahamic faith.
And yet Paul simply does not make this claim unless one dismisses
the grammar altogether. The problem is Paul’s duplication of the definite
article tois—which means nothing more than “those”—a small, seemingly
insignificant word, but one with enormous implications for the meaning
of the sentence. By using this word once at the beginning of the sen-
tence and then again in the second part, Paul indicates that Abraham is a
“father of the circumcision” to those who are circumcised (i.e., Jews), and
also a “father of the circumcision” to those who mimic the faith he had
while uncircumcised (i.e., Gentiles in Christ). In other words, Abraham
becomes a “father of the circumcision” even including ostensibly uncir-
cumcised Gentile believers. The grammar is unmistakable; yet because
most translators cannot fathom that Paul would say such a thing, they
simply render the verse as though Paul never wrote the second tois.43 They
act as though it is not even there. Some even go so far as to justify the
oversight by claiming that the duplication of tois was nothing more than
a slip of the pen, an accident that can justifiably be ignored. As Cranfield
puts it, “We are justified in regarding [tois] as a simple mistake, whether
of Paul himself or of [Paul’s scribe] Tertius or of a very early copyist, and

ignoring it in interpretation.”44
A few brave commentators have tried to account for the text as Paul
wrote it, usually by assuming that when Paul says, “father of circumci-
sion,” he means “father of (the spiritual) circumcision (of the heart).”45
For Paul, Abraham’s faith prior to his circumcision is tantamount to the
spiritual circumcision he describes in 2:26–29, and this spiritual circum-
cision enables Abraham to become a “father of (spiritual) circumcision”
to those who are “physically (and spiritually) circumcised” (i.e., believing
Jews) and to those who are circumcised only spiritually (i.e., believing
Gentiles). Though laudable for its reluctance to discount the latter tois,
this explanation makes little sense as a purpose or result clause introduced
by the preceding verse. In other words, how would Abraham’s receiving a
physical circumcision make him a “father of spiritual circumcision” to all
believers? This reading might succeed splendidly if 4:12 followed 4:10,
because then Paul would say that Abraham’s prior spiritual circumcision
makes him a “father of spiritual circumcision” to all those who believe,
regardless of their physical state. But the apparent cause of Abraham’s sta-
tus as a “father of circumcision” is provided in 4:11, and it is his physical,
genital circumcision, not his spiritual, ethical circumcision. Not surpris-
ingly, then, proponents of this view generally leap over 4:11 as though
it was an insignificant addendum, mentioned merely to emphasize the
priority of Abraham’s belief.
Indeed, this leap is the second major flaw in the standard approach
discussed previously, in which Paul shows in 4:11–12 that Abraham is
the father of all those who believe, of Gentiles exhibiting the faith of
Abraham and of Jews who do the same. Faith, in this reading, is the uni-
versal standard by which to reckon Abrahamic paternity. Again, though,
even if grammatically defensible (and it is not), this reading would only
make sense as a completion of the sentiment expressed in 4:10. It cannot
explain what Abraham’s physical, genital circumcision has to do with a
paternity now based exclusively on a spiritual or ethical criterion. Because
4:11 obtrudes so jarringly into this line of thought, commentators tend
either to read 4:10–12 as though 4:11 were not there or to interpret 4:11
in a way that facilitates the elision from 4:10 to 4:12. One interpreter, for
example, suggests that 4:11 is nothing but a parenthesis.46 Others sneak
the word “only” or “merely” into the sentence, so as to reduce Abraham’s
physical circumcision to an afterthought: Abraham received the circumci-
sion “only” secondarily and “merely” as a sign of his demonstrated faith.47
Of course, nothing in the text suggests either parentheses or the implied
inconsequence of Abraham’s circumcision.
Romans 4:1–12 109
The reading I propose encounters none of the problems just described.

Not only does it acknowledge that Paul wrote tois twice, but it also explains
why Paul attributed such moment to Abraham’s circumcision in the flesh.
Because Paul’s goal in this passage is to defend the idea that Gentiles, by
means of Christ, have found Abraham to be a forefather according to
the flesh, he does not conclude by undermining Abraham’s circumcision
as trivial, but by exalting it as the very cause of Abraham’s fleshly pater-
nity over all who believe! Abraham received the physical confirmation of
the faith he had while uncircumcised in order that he might be a father
to those imitating his faith (as would be expected on the basis of 4:2–
10), even a “father of circumcision” to them.48 Paul reveals how one may
claim Abraham as a forefather “according to the flesh,” not by becoming
a branch in Abraham’s family tree (a strategy he will pursue in Romans
9–11) or by undergoing circumcision as Abraham did, but by sharing in
the faith for which Abraham received the fleshly seal. Faith makes one a
descendant of Abraham, even according to the flesh.
Paul drives this point home in 4:13–16. Abraham, Paul reminds us,
received a promise that he would become an ancestor to the world, but
that “righteousness of faith” and not “the Law” would determine that
relationship (4:13). Having explained why in 4:14–15, Paul restates
the claim in 4:16, drawing full attention to the identity of the “seed” to
whom the Abrahamic promise has been confirmed. Because the promise
depends on faith, Abraham’s promised “seed” includes faithful Gentiles
no less than faithful Jews. In accord with what Paul has been arguing since
3:21, faith has rendered prior distinctions between Jews and Gentiles
obsolete, now standing as the single factor determining Jewish identity,
an identity that includes descent from Abraham “according to the flesh.”
Accordingly, insofar as faith has become available to all people in the wake
of Christ, Gentiles no less than Jews “have found” Abraham to be their
father “according to the flesh.” Abrahamic paternity is the same for Jews
and Gentiles, a point made clear by Paul at the close of both 4:12 and
4:16, where he stresses Abraham’s identity as “our father” and the “father
of us all,” that is to say, both you the Gentile and me the Jew.
Constructing a Gentile-Jew
So there it is: a rereading of Romans 4:1–12 that accounts for its gram-
matical quirks and fits smoothly into the argument Paul has constructed
up to that point. Paul set out to demonstrate the salvation made available
to Gentiles through faith. Gentiles need to be saved, too, for they are
an incorrigibly sinful bunch. To escape inexorable wrath, Gentiles must
throw off their Gentile status and restore their long lost relationship with
the Jewish God, the only God of the world. Unfortunately, becoming a
Jew through traditional measures will not do the trick, because circum-
cision and Law observance will not mend the crooked Gentile heart.
Indeed, Jews themselves, who until Christ were able to boast in their
Jewishness as it was traditionally reckoned, have been exposed as sinners
and stand no greater chance than Gentiles at achieving salvation without
Christ. In the eschatological “now,” only faith makes one right with the
Jewish God. Only faith makes one a Jew and, accordingly, faith deter-
mines all the particularities of Jewish identity: faith makes one genitally
circumcised; faith makes one capable of observing the righteous decrees
of the Law; faith makes one a descendant of Abraham—indeed, even a
descendant “according to the flesh.” No aspect of Jewish identity can be
understood apart from faith any longer.
Many will no doubt object to this reading, as it departs dramatically
from standard approaches to the passage. I suspect that objections will
stem from Paul’s use elsewhere in Romans of the expression “according
to the flesh” in an unmistakably negative sense, often contrasting it with
“spirit” or “promise,” making it hard to accept that Paul would have at
another point viewed it so positively.49 In Romans 9:7–8, for example,
Paul says that “it is not the ‘children according to the flesh’ who are reck-
oned as Abraham’s ‘seed,’ but the children according to the promise.” So
too, does Paul frequently derogate genital circumcision, most famously
in his epistle to the Galatians. Such evidence, some will argue, makes it
impossible to believe that Paul actually underscores the value of Abra-
ham’s genital circumcision in Romans 4 and uses it as the means for link-
ing faithful Gentiles to Abraham “according to the flesh.”
Were these complaints to be lodged, however, they would be dimin-
ished by the theoretical conception of language and identity formation
discussed in the first part of this book. To say that the phrase “according
to the flesh” is invariably negative in Paul’s epistles will not do when, in
fact, Paul uses it in different, at times contradictory, ways. In Romans 1:3,
for example, “according to the flesh” refers to Jesus’s descent from the line
of David, which corresponds to Paul’s use of the term in Romans 9:3–5
and 1 Corinthians 10:18. Yet when he constructs his allegory in Galatians
4:21–31, Paul imputes exactly the opposite sense to the phrase. He con-
siders baptized Gentiles to be descendants of Abraham through Sarah and
Isaac “according to the spirit,” whereas Jews and/or Judaizing Gentiles
trace their lineage through Hagar and Ishmael “according to the flesh.”
Surely Paul knows that Jews descend physically from Abraham through
Isaac, a point he makes numerous times elsewhere, in which case “accord-
ing to the flesh” must refer to something that is precisely not physical
Romans 4:1–12 111
descent! At other times Paul uses the expression in altogether different

ways, often describing an undesirable mode of conduct: for example, “liv-
ing according to the flesh.” Even still, one cannot say that the phrase
invariably has a negative sense for Paul, because Paul clearly delights in
Jesus’s pedigree as a scion of David “according to the flesh.” Thus to say
that Paul would never proclaim Gentile believers to be descendants of
Abraham “according to the flesh” because elsewhere he maligns descen-
dants of Abraham “according to the flesh” fails to consider that Paul in
fact employs the expression in multiple, even contradictory, ways.
More important, however, my reading assumes, indeed requires, that
Paul and his listeners understand that descent from Abraham “accord-
ing to the flesh” does not mean normatively what Paul wants it to mean
in Romans 4:1–16. The very issue in Romans 1–4, the reconfiguration
of standard conceptions about Jewish identity, requires that Paul recog-
nize and acknowledge the validity of standard conceptions as such, as
they constitute what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the “common opinion,” the
“already-uttered” perspective. So for example, Paul’s very argument in
Romans 2:25–29 demands that the term “Jew” normatively refer to a
person of (hereditary) Jewish origin who is physically circumcised and
observes the Law (of works). Only then can his reevaluation of the term
make sense. The same is true of “circumcision” in those verses. The revised
understanding presumes general acceptance of the meaning supplanted.
Accordingly, when Paul proceeds in other places to speak of “Jews” and
“circumcision,” readers rarely confuse the matter and suppose Paul is
referring to those terms as they were redefined in Romans 2:25–29. No
one would ever claim that Paul’s frequent railing against circumcision pre-
cludes the possibility that in 2:26 Paul suggests that baptized (and mani-
festly uncircumcised) Gentiles are in fact circumcised. No one struggles
to accept that for Paul such believers are circumcised in one sense and
uncircumcised in another. They are also Jews in one sense and not Jews in
another. In my reading, “according to the flesh” is simply another reevalu-
ated term. Thus when Paul proclaims in Romans 9:7–8 that the “children
according to the flesh” are not the children of God, one need not con-
fuse his view of fleshly descent with the one he constructs in Romans 4.
Baptized Gentiles can be Jews without being Jews, circumcised without
being circumcised, and descendants of Abraham “according to the flesh”
without being descendants of Abraham “according to the flesh.”
Crucial to this understanding of Paul’s rhetorical strategy is recognizing
the role language plays in constructing identity and the inevitable double
voicedness that issues from discursive processes of cultural change. For
Paul, Jewish identity has changed fundamentally in the wake of Christ;
yet he cannot articulate that change without invoking the very notions
of Jewish identity he wishes to upend. He cannot sound the end of the
historic division between Jew and Gentile without himself tapping into it,
indeed reinforcing it, by dwelling on such things as the extreme wretched-
ness of Gentiles, as he does in Romans 1:18–32. He cannot redefine Gen-
tile believers as “Jews,” as “circumcised,” or as “descendants of Abraham
‘according to the flesh,’” without simultaneously acknowledging that they
are manifestly not such, and without drawing upon and thereby reinforc-
ing the very discourse he seeks to transform. Paul’s reevaluation of Jewish
identity is, as Bakhtin puts it, “entangled, shot through” with the echoes
of normative Jewish discourse and the result, of course, is the articulation
of a double-voiced and contradictory identity in which Gentile believers
in Christ become “Gentile-Jews,” at one and the same time Jews and not
Jews.50 Indeed, this conflict may well explain Paul’s curious description of
God’s saving power in Romans 3:30, where Paul claims God will justify
“the circumcised person,” namely, Jews, “out of ” faith and “the uncir-
cumcised person,” namely, Gentiles, “through” faith. Even Paul’s clearest
articulation of the role faith plays in leveling the distinction between Jew
and Gentile, reinforces the distinction.
An important implication of this production of “Gentile-Jewish”
identity is that Paul’s insistence on a Gentile’s ability to become a Jew
through faith at the same time intimates that Jews who reject that faith
might become, to some extent at least, Gentiles. In other words, Paul’s
new standard for Jewish identity—faith in Christ—fashions a “Jewish-
Gentile” identity as well as a “Gentile-Jewish” one. Indeed, Paul says as
much in Romans 2:25–29: just as an uncircumcised man becomes circum-
cised when he observes the righteous statutes of the Law, so a circumcised
man becomes uncircumcised in the opposite scenario. A Jew who lacks
faith, and who therefore cannot observe the righteous statutes of the Law,
according to Paul at least, becomes an uncircumcised Gentile! At the same
time, though, he presumably remains a Jew in another sense, a possessor
of the great historic advantage described by Paul in Romans 3:1–2. I will
explore this issue in further depth shortly, when I examine Paul’s engage-
ment with the implications of widespread Jewish unbelief in Romans
9–11. In no uncertain terms, Paul uses the metaphor of an olive tree to
explain how unbelieving Jews are, in a sense, Gentiles, detached from the
community of Israel in which they historically participated, while at the
same time they are still Jews, in possession of the natural Jewish constitu-
tion of the tree from which they have been cut off.
Before pressing on, however, I would like to address an experience
some readers may have had in proceeding through this chapter, a sense of
Romans 4:1–12 113
“bewilderment,” for lack of a better word, at the apparent contradiction

in my employment of certain terminology. In other words, if Gentiles
baptized into Christ become, on Paul’s reckoning, circumcised Jews, why
do I more often than not refer to such persons as Gentiles? Likewise, if
Jews who remain unbaptized are deemed by Paul to be uncircumcised and
not truly Jewish, why do I nevertheless call them Jews?
As I see it, anyone who has felt such bewilderment has not merely
understood the main argument of the chapter, they have also experienced it.
I have claimed that Paul’s attempt to redefine the nature of Jewish iden-
tity in the wake of Christ is necessarily embedded within the normative
discourse against which it is contrasted. Were Paul to refer to his baptized
charges exclusively as Jews or Israelites, which I think he believes they are,
and were Paul to refer to unbelieving Jews routinely as uncircumcised
Gentiles, Paul’s discourse would be incomprehensible to his readers. His
reassessment of terms and concepts must exist alongside usage of the same
terms in their normative sense if he is to convey any sensible meaning.
As a result, however, neither the normative sense nor Paul’s reevaluated
sense ever gains a unanimous grip on reality. The result is contradiction,
confusion, and hybridity.
This study is an heir to the same struggle. Were I to adopt Paul’s own
perspective and refer consistently to baptized persons, regardless of origin,
as Jews while referring to the unbaptized as Gentiles, no reader familiar
with New Testament studies would have a clue as to what I was discuss-
ing. It would be incomprehensible. Who would understand if I alluded,
for example, to the “problem of Gentile unbelief in Romans 9–11”? Like
Paul, I have to ground my description of Paul’s reevaluation of Jewish ter-
minology within established discourse. Readers must continue to be on
their toes, therefore, for terms like “Jew,” “circumcision,” or “Israelite,”
will not always mean the same thing.
CHAPTER 5
Romans 15:7–13
The Circumcision of Christ
Introduction
Is a circumcision performed by a Jewish woman valid under Jewish
law? This matter is disputed in the Babylonian Talmud.1
Rav, a Babylonian sage from the early third century CE, believes it is
not. Though he never rules on the issue specifically, the Talmud deduces
Rav’s position from the rationale he gives for disqualifying a circumcision
performed by a Gentile. According to Rav, the Jewish obligation to be
circumcised stems from God’s proclamation in Genesis 17:9: “As for you,
you shall keep my covenant [of circumcision].” Because the command
is directed at the singular “you,” who is Abraham, Rav concludes that
only Abraham and his male descendants require circumcision. Therefore
male Gentiles have no obligation to become circumcised and, accord-
ingly, Gentiles may not provide circumcisions for those required to keep
the commandment. On the basis of this reasoning, the Talmud explains,
a woman is likewise prohibited from performing a valid circumcision, for
she, too, falls outside the bounds of the commandment. Because they are
not obligated to be circumcised, Jewish women cannot perform a legiti-
mate Jewish circumcision on a man.
The Talmud infers the opposite view from the rationale for disqualify-
ing circumcisions performed by Gentiles, which is proposed by Rabbi
Yohanan, a third-century CE Galilean sage. Rabbi Yohanan says that
Gentiles may not circumcise Jews on the basis of Genesis 17:13, which,
as he construes it, reads, “The circumcised person will circumcise.” Thus
it is not those commanded to be circumcised who may circumcise others,
but rather those actually circumcised, as scripture says, “the circumcised
person will circumcise.” Theoretically, at least, this criterion excludes
Gentiles.2 Despite what one might expect, however, it does not exclude
women. Why not? Because, according to Rabbi Yohanan, Jewish women

are considered “as though they are circumcised.” Despite bearing no cir-
cumcision in the flesh—indeed, Jewish women do not even have penises
to be circumcised—when it comes to their legal status and their inclu-
sion in the Abrahamic covenant, they are reckoned as though they do.
Correspondingly, the Talmud maintains, Jewish men who never undergo
circumcision because two of their older brothers died from the surgery
are included in the covenant despite their foreskins. Like Jewish women,
they are reckoned “as though circumcised,” despite their appearance in
the flesh.
I did not begin this chapter with a foray into Jewish legal analysis in
order to postulate a relationship between Paul and the Talmud. To sup-
pose that Paul’s understanding of circumcision draws directly on the simi-
lar rabbinic conception, or vice versa, would be unfounded. I merely seek
to convey that the view of circumcision described in the previous chapter
is by no means peculiar within the broader scope of Jewish reflection on
the subject, as Jews besides Paul have claimed that a group of manifestly
uncircumcised persons is in fact circumcised, at least from a particular
point of view. To some degree, of course, both Paul and the Talmud are
wrestling with the same thorny issue—namely, if penile circumcision
defines membership in God’s covenant with Abraham, how might that
covenant include people who cannot, or ought not, be circumcised?3 The
snag for the Talmud is women, for whom penile circumcision is impossi-
ble, and hemophiliac or otherwise sickly boys, for whom cutting the flesh
would prove fatal. The solution is to reevaluate circumcision in terms of
pedigree: women lack penises and hemophiliacs have foreskins; yet, as
far as inclusion in the Abrahamic covenant goes, both are circumcised
because they were born into a Jewish family.
For Paul, the issue is more complicated. On the one hand, as he argues
in Romans 2, circumcision will not reconcile Gentiles with the God of
Israel because even if Gentiles join the ranks of the circumcised, they
will nonetheless continue in their wicked ways and incur the wrath of
God. On the other hand, as Paul goes on to insist in Romans 3–4, the
true nature of the covenant defined by circumcision has nonetheless
been revealed through the advent of Christ who, as God had promised
all along, made available the faith for which Abraham merited his cove-
nantal relationship with God in the first place, a faith subsequently sealed
into his flesh through circumcision. According to Paul, therefore, faith is
tantamount to genital circumcision because one necessarily shares in the
circumcision of Abraham when one shares Abraham’s faith. In this way,
Romans 15:7–13 117
Abraham becomes a “father of the circumcision” to anyone who walks in

the footsteps of his precircumcision faith.
Thus where the Talmud makes Jewish birth equivalent to penile cir-
cumcision in the case of women and legitimately uncircumcised men,
Paul makes faith its equivalent for Gentiles. Faith enables Gentiles to share
in Abraham’s circumcision and thereby to claim Abraham as an ancestor
“according to the flesh.” I proposed this thesis in the previous chapter.
The present chapter reinforces that reading by examining a related pas-
sage, Romans 15:7–13:
7
Therefore, welcome one another, just as Christ welcomed you4 into the
glory of God.
8
For I say that Christ has become a “servant of the circumcision” on behalf
of the truth of God in order to confirm the promises to the patriarchs,
9
and [I say] that Gentiles are glorifying God on behalf of mercy; just as it
has been written, “Therefore I will confess you among the Gentiles and I
will sing to your name”;
10
and elsewhere, “Rejoice, Gentiles, with his people”;
11
and elsewhere, “Praise the Lord, all Gentiles, and let all nations extol
him”;
12
and elsewhere Isaiah says, “The root of Jesse will arise, and the one who
rises up to rule the Gentiles, in him the Gentiles will hope”;
13
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that
you may flourish in the hope and power of the holy spirit.
Because many of the terms and ideas of Romans 4 reappear in Romans

15, interpreters have long believed a relationship exists between the two
passages. Most frequently, the exhortation in 15:7–13 is viewed as an
ethical consequence of the theological plan spelled out in 4:1–16. First
Paul clarifies how faith makes it possible for Gentiles to join Jews as mem-
bers of the Abrahamic covenant, then in 15:7–13 he explains why this
spirit of reconciliation should govern the interactions between Jews and
Gentiles in Rome. Jews and Gentiles ought to “welcome one another”
because Christ has welcomed both of them into the glory of God. Christ
welcomed “the circumcision,” namely, the Jews, inasmuch as he became
their servant in order to confirm or fulfill the patriarchal promises, and
he welcomed the Gentiles because his acts of service to the Jews, followed
by his death and resurrection, led to the incorporation of Gentiles into
the glory of God.5 Accordingly, as Moses long ago predicted, Gentiles had
begun rejoicing and celebrating alongside God’s people.6
Reading Romans 15:7–13 as a call for reconciliation among Jews and
Gentiles in Rome is unconvincing. As I suggested in the previous chapter,
the primary thrust of Romans 4 was not an effort to transcend ethnic
peculiarities by unifying Jew and Gentile under the banner of faith, there-
fore there is no reason to suspect that Paul is drawing on the same theme
at the close of the epistle. On the contrary, we will see, just as Paul’s
objective in Romans 4:1–12 was to show how Gentiles become ethnic
Jews by means of their faith in Christ—circumcised Jews descended from
Abraham “according to the flesh”—so in Romans 15:7–13, Paul culmi-
nates the epistle by revealing an ethical consequence of faith specifically
for Gentiles. Because Christ has welcomed Gentiles into the Abrahamic
covenant by enabling them to become circumcised, Gentiles ought to
respond by treating one another hospitably despite their differences.
“Servant” or “Agent”
The traditional approach to Romans 15:7–13 is rooted in the nearly uni-
versal assumption that the Greek term diakonos peritomēs refers to Christ
as a “servant of the circumcision”—that is, a servant of the Jewish people
whom, as we saw previously in Romans 3:30, Paul elsewhere calls by the
moniker, “the circumcision.”7 Though grammatically defensible, this ren-
dering of diakonos peritomēs is not the only possible understanding and,
as many already have observed, is riddled with difficulties.8 For example,
how Christ’s ministry among the Jews, if that is what Paul means when he
calls Christ a “servant of the circumcision,” would have fulfilled or con-
firmed any of the promises to the patriarchs remains unclear. Paul would
be suggesting that Christ ministered among the Jews “in order to confirm
the promises to the patriarchs,” but a glance at the patriarchal promises
in Genesis reveals that they have to do with land, divine protection, and/
or progeny, not with the bestowal of future messianic “servants.” Admit-
tedly, one could read certain passages in the Prophets as pledges by God
to provide such a servant, but in that case such promises would be made
to prophets, not to “the patriarchs”—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. More-
over, in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible used
by Paul, these prophecies invariably use the word doulos (“servant/slave”)
rather than diakonos to denote the servant.9
Yet another problem with reading Romans 15:7–13 as a call for rec-
onciliation between Jews and Gentiles resides in figuring out why Paul
thinks Christ’s ministry among the Jews had anything at all to do with the
glorification of God by Gentiles, which Paul mentions in v. 9. Granted,
Paul thinks Christ has a lot to do with Gentiles coming to glorify the
God of Israel, but for Paul it is always Christ’s death and resurrection that
make possible Gentile reconciliation with God. If Paul were here linking
that reconciliation to Christ’s service to the Jews during his lifetime, then
Paul would be leaving what one commentator has called “a very large gap”
Romans 15:7–13 119
in logic.10 Indeed, for Paul to allude to Christ’s earthly ministry at all is

curious because he rarely concerns himself with Jesus’s life or teaching,
focusing instead on the ramifications of Christ’s death and resurrection.
Why Paul would invoke Jesus’s ministry so idiosyncratically is difficult to
explain.
A better rendering of diakonos peritomēs, and one that is equally defen-
sible on grammatical grounds, is “agent of circumcision”—that is, an
agent who makes circumcision available to others.11 Paul does not call
Christ a “servant of the circumcision,” where “the circumcision” is a mon-
iker for the Jewish people, but rather calls Christ an “agent of circumci-
sion,” where circumcision refers to the act of removing the foreskin from
the penis.12 Christ has become an agent of circumcision, Paul declares,
not because Christ performs physical circumcisions as though he were
a mohel, but because he facilitates the admission of Gentiles into the
patriarchal covenant that has genital circumcision as its entrance require-
ment.13 This point reiterates Paul’s message in Romans 4, as I argued in
the previous chapter. In Romans 15, Paul reprises the idea, invoking it
as the principle upon which his readers’ mutual conviviality ought to be
predicated. “Welcome one another,” he tells them, “just as Christ wel-
comed you into the glory of God” (15:7). He then clarifies how Christ did
so, observing that “Christ has become an agent of circumcision on behalf
of the truth of God in order to confirm the promises to the patriarchs”
(15:8). In other words, Christ has made reception into the Abrahamic
covenant available to Paul’s Gentile audience by effectively circumcising
them—by faith rather than by a knife—an act that fulfilled what God
had promised to the patriarchs long ago.
Not only is rendering diakonos peritomēs as “agent of circumcision”
grammatically possible in Greek, but it also accords with the only other
case in which Paul calls Christ a diakonos. In Paul’s epistle to the Gala-
tians, written sometime prior to Romans, Paul wrestles with the apparent
paradox created when a Jew seeks justification through Christ rather than
the Law. If the pursuit encourages the Jew to engage in behaviors that
make him a sinner before the Law, Paul wonders (rhetorically) whether
Christ functions as a diakonos hamartias, a “servant/agent of sin” (Gal.
2:17). Paul’s feigned concern is not that Christ becomes a “servant of
sin,” one who ministers to sin, but that Christ, as the exclusive source
of justification, in some ironic twist actually promotes sinful behavior.14
Thus Paul’s fear is not that Christ ministers to sin, but that he administers
it to others. Paul uses diakonos similarly in his correspondence with the
Corinthians. In 2 Corinthians 3:6, Paul identifies himself (and Timothy)
as a diakonos vis-à-vis the new covenant, by which he does not mean that
he “serves” the new covenant but rather “serves it up,” so to speak, rep-
resenting it, promoting it, and making it available to others.15 So too, in
Romans 15:8, I would suggest, Paul calls Christ a diakonos peritomēs, an
“agent of circumcision,” because in Paul’s opinion Christ administers or
“serves up” circumcision to Gentiles.
Reading the verse in this way makes much better sense of the patri-
archal promises that, according to Paul, have been fulfilled by Christ. As
I suggested previously, the prevailing view cannot explain how Christ’s
becoming a “servant to the Jews” amounts to a fulfillment of God’s prom-
ises to the patriarchs. As an “agent of circumcision,” Christ would by all
means fulfill those promises, at least as Paul construes them elsewhere in
Romans. For example, Paul addresses the patriarchal promises in Romans
4:13–16, where he describes God’s vow to Abraham that he should be an
“inheritor of the world” (4:13). God deliberately made faith the foun-
dation of that promise, according to Paul, so that its present recipients
would include Gentiles who share in Abraham’s faith by means of Christ.
The same understanding of the patriarchal promises arises in Romans
9–11 when Paul confronts the lack of faith exhibited by some Jews, and
the possible implications of this disbelief on the faithfulness of God to
his covenanted people. Paul refutes the idea that such Jewish unbelief
means God’s word is unreliable, and his apology is revealing. Paul does
not defend God’s honor by insisting, as he is thought to do in Romans
15:8, that God held up his end of the bargain by sending Christ as a ser-
vant to the Jews; rather, Paul vindicates God by proposing that Israelites,
as they are construed on the standard reckoning by physical descent, Law
observance, and other such factors, are in fact not the intended recipients
of the patriarchal promises. The promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
are determined by faith, by grace, and, as Paul says explicitly in Romans
9:15–18, by God’s merciful election. In the wake of Christ, God merci-
fully has chosen some from among both Jews and Gentiles to become the
promised heirs of the patriarchs; consequently, continued unbelief among
Jews does not impeach God’s reliability, for it is not Jews who necessarily
inherit the patriarchal promises, but rather the faithful, which currently
includes some Jews and some Gentiles. Simply put, God’s merciful inclu-
sion of Gentiles through faith rests at the core of Paul’s conception of the
patriarchal promises in Romans.
Galatians 3:1–29 corroborates this view. Whereas some of the details
of Paul’s argument in Galatians 3 differ from the analogous material in
Romans 4, especially insofar as Christ is identified as the single seed of
Abraham, Paul’s view of the patriarchal promises remains basically the
same. Because Christ is the promised seed of Abraham, Paul explains,
Romans 15:7–13 121
incorporation into Christ through baptism makes such status available

to anyone, even Gentiles (Gal. 3:27–29). Paul also insists, as he does in
Romans, that the patriarchal promises are determined not by Law (Gal.
3:18–19), but by faith, and specifically by “the faith of Jesus Christ” (Gal.
3:22). One might say that in Galatians, as opposed to Romans, Paul
explains how Christ initiated the Gentile inclusion promised by God:
not through his earthly ministry to the Jews, as if this service somehow
enabled Gentiles to come aboard, but through his death on the cross
(Gal. 3:10–13).
For Paul, then, “the promises to the patriarchs” do not refer to mes-
sianic pledges to the Jewish people, which can be confirmed or fulfilled
by the manifestation of a “servant.” They denote rather the covenant
between God and Abraham, rooted in faith, which is confirmed when
access to that covenant is made available to all nations, on account of
mercy, by means of the faith effectuated by the death of Christ.16 This
understanding of the patriarchal promises coheres felicitously with the
understanding of Christ as an “agent of circumcision” in Romans 15.
According to Paul, Christ welcomed “you” Gentiles into God’s covenant
by becoming an agent of the circumcision required for admission, doing
so in order to confirm God’s promises to the patriarchs that Gentiles,
through God’s mercy, would eventually enter the covenant through faith.
As a result of their merciful inclusion in the covenant, moreover, Gentiles
have begun to glorify God in a way that was not possible before Christ
made circumcision available to them.17
The sequence of scriptural quotations with which Paul supports his
call for conviviality makes clear that Gentile inclusion in the covenant of
God lies at the heart of the message. Following his announcement that
Gentiles are glorifying God for the sake of mercy, Paul endorses the claim
as a fulfillment of scriptural prophecy. It is happening “just as it has been
written.” The catchword uniting the ensuing four citations is “Gentile.”18
Paul marshals evidence from each sector of the Hebrew Bible—Torah,
Prophets, and Writings—to demonstrate that the ultimate glorification
of God by Gentiles has been part of God’s plan all along. First Paul cites
Psalm 18:49: “Therefore I will confess you among the Gentiles”; then
Deuteronomy 32:43: “Rejoice, Gentiles, with his people”; then Psalm
117:1: “Praise the Lord, all Gentiles, and let all nations extol him”; and
lastly Isaiah 11:10: “The root of Jesse will arise, and the one who rises up
to rule the Gentiles, in him the Gentiles will hope.” As the italics indicate,
the catena of scriptures describes Gentiles rejoicing, praising, and put-
ting hope in Christ, because Gentile reconciliation with God is exactly
Paul’s point in the preceding verses. God mercifully chose to fulfill those
scriptures in the present time by sending forth Christ, an “agent of cir-

cumcision,” who granted Gentiles access to God’s covenant with Israel.19
In sum, then, construing diakonos peritomēs as “agent of circumcision”
rather than “servant to the circumcised” allows for a more coherent read-
ing of Romans 15:7–13. Gone are the nagging difficulties faced when
one tries to explain what Christ’s ministry among the Jews had to do
with the patriarchal promises or the subsequent glorification of God by
Gentiles. Christ, as an “agent of circumcision,” fulfills the promises to
the patriarchs, particularly to Abraham, that he would become a father
of many nations (Gen. 17:6) and that all the nations of the world would
become blessed through him (Gen. 12:3, 22:18.) Christ provides the cir-
cumcision that enables Gentiles to claim the covenantal status that had
been deferred for centuries. Now as recent initiates to the covenant, Gen-
tiles are singing God’s praises. They should also be eager to extend the
same kindness to one another that Christ showed them when he granted
them entry into the covenant. Why, though, does Paul feel it necessary to
spell out the ethical ramifications of his theological innovation? In other
words, why the exhortation for his Roman readers to conduct themselves
more nobly?
What Is the Problem in Rome?

Paul’s call for conviviality, as I have called it, is in fact the coup de grâce
in an exhortation begun by Paul in Romans 14:1, in which he calls on
“weak” and “strong” elements in the Roman community to set aside their
differences and to come together as one. What exactly Paul means by the
“weak” and the “strong” is a contentious issue. Most commonly, the weak
are identified as mainly Jewish believers in Christ because the behaviors
Paul associates with the weak reflect typical Jewish scruples in the ancient
world: the avoidance of meat and the observance of “special days.”20 Paul
deems such believers “weak,” the reasoning goes, because their faith is
not resolute enough to make them feel confident about abandoning Jew-
ish legal observances in light of their newfound faith in Christ.21 The
“strong,” by contrast, are mainly Gentile believers who understand that
such scruples are unnecessary. Paul beseeches the “strong” Gentile con-
tingent to bear with the infirmity of the “weak” Jews and to treat them
amicably; the “weak,” in turn, are asked not to judge the “strong.” Paul
then perorates in Romans 15:7–13 by pointing to the example of Christ,
who welcomed both Jews and Gentiles into the glory of God. The prob-
lem in the Roman churches, then, is tension between Jewish and Gentile
constituencies.22
Romans 15:7–13 123
However common, this interpretation is “weak” in its own right. In the

first place, as we saw previously, Romans 15:7–13 says nothing about the
reconciliation of Jews and Gentiles or of Christ welcoming them both in to
the glory of God. The “circumcision” in that passage does not refer to Jews,
but rather to the circumcision undergone by Gentiles who enter God’s
covenant through the agency of Christ. Moreover, in Romans 15:1 Paul,
a Jew, identifies himself among the “strong.” Paul was not alone either, as
Jews like Priscilla and Aquila occupied the same camp. Conversely, to the
extent that Gentile believers in Rome were attracted to aspects of Jewish
Law, whether because they came from the ranks of Jewish sympathizers or
because they had been persuaded of the importance of the Law by rival
apostles, then surely some of them would have constituted the “weak.”
For this reason, interpreters widely acknowledge that a strict identifica-
tion of the “weak” with Jews and the “strong” with Gentiles is too facile,
a difficulty overcome by referring to the Jewish orientation of the “weak,”
or something to that effect. Yet this concession alone makes it hard to see
why Paul would try to clinch the case in Romans 15:7–13 by invoking
God’s discrete treatment of Jews and Gentiles. Most importantly, perhaps,
viewing the dispute between the weak and the strong along Jewish and
Gentile lines fails to consider the audience to whom Paul explicitly refers
in Romans. When Paul culminates his call for the reconciliation of the
weak and strong, he urges them to “welcome one another, just as Christ
welcomed you.” This second-person plural pronoun in 15:7 corresponds
to the same pronoun used in 15:14, which surely refers only to Gentile
readers. Indeed, the plural “you” in Romans always refers to Gentiles, so
that there is simply no reason to suspect that either of the groups addressed
by the “you” in 15:7 is made up of Jews, or a bloc of mostly Jews.23
Rather, the dispute to which Paul refers in Rome is among Gentiles
only. Most likely, I suspect, a dispute between Gentiles over the degree
to which Gentiles should observe Jewish rites as a result of their baptism
into Christ. Gentiles who are “strong” in faith would know that Christ
has ended the era of literal Law observance. Those “weak” in faith, on the
other hand, such as the interlocutor with whom Paul speaks in Romans
2–4, might believe that reconciliation with the God of Israel requires
both faith in Christ and observance of the Law. Such a position would
be understandable if these Gentiles had practiced Jewish rituals prior to
their conversion to Christ in the capacity of a Jewish sympathizer, or if
they had been persuaded by the rival missionaries whose activity in Rome
likely prompted Paul’s letter in the first place.24 Such “weak” Gentiles
would reckon Jewish holidays superior to other days and avoid meat in
order to comply with Jewish dietary laws.
In Romans 14:1–15:13, Paul advises the “weak” and the “strong” con-
tingents to allow their faith and concern for the Lord to motivate their
interactions with one another. The strong ought to bear with the nomistic
inclinations of the weak in the spirit of self-sacrifice, whereas the weak
ought to stop passing judgment on the strong. Paul clinches the call for
conviviality in 15:7–13 by drawing on the example of Christ, encourag-
ing both weak and strong Gentiles to welcome one another just as Christ
welcomed them into covenant of God by making faith-based circumci-
sion possible. In so doing, Paul not only inspires goodwill but also does so
in a way that reinforces the position of the “strong” with whom he identi-
fies. After all, if the disparity in faith described in 14:1–15:6 has to do
with the conviction that faith alone determines reconciliation with God
and membership in the patriarchal covenant, Paul reinforces the view of
the strong in 15:8 when he proclaims Christ as an agent of circumcision.
Faith in Christ effects circumcision in its adherents; thus faith, by itself,
brings Gentiles into the glory of God.
In this way, Romans 15:7–13 presents the communal and ethical
implications of the theological plan Paul lays out in Romans 4:1–12. Ear-
lier in the epistle, Paul explained how the circumcision gained through
faith in Christ enables Gentiles to claim Abraham as a forefather, even a
forefather according to the flesh. Now Paul reveals the agency of Christ in
facilitating that circumcision and the implications of that act: Gentiles of
different minds ought to welcome one another just as Christ welcomed
them all into the glorious covenant from which they had been alienated
for so long. Indeed, even Paul’s peculiar use of perfect tense verbs in
Romans 4:1 and Romans 15: 8 recommends the linkage of these passages:
Gentiles have found Abraham to be “a father of the circumcision” because
Christ has become “an agent of circumcision” for them.
Faith-Based Circumcision in Paul’s Epistles

Despite the preceding arguments, many readers may still find it difficult
to accept that, for Paul, a man so frequently identified as the most vocal of
opponents of circumcision, faith in Christ is actually tantamount to geni-
tal circumcision. In order to bolster the case, then, let us examine three
more passages from the Pauline corpus that exhibit exactly the same view:
Colossians 2:11–13, Philippians 3:2–3, and Romans 2:25–29. Added to
Romans 15:7–13, these passages make clear Paul’s belief that Christ pro-
duces in his Gentile adherents a genital circumcision that facilitates their
admission into the covenant of Israel.
Romans 15:7–13 125
COLOSSIANS 2:11–13
I begin with a passage from Paul’s epistle to the Colossians, which prob-
ably offers the weakest supporting evidence because a slim majority of
scholars believes that Paul did not actually write the epistle.25 Even those
who question Pauline authorship, however, usually acknowledge that
the author of Colossians stemmed from a school of disciples devoted to
Paul and his thought, sometime around the middle to end of the first
century. Moreover, this disciple deliberately wrote in Paul’s name, was
familiar with the general contours of Paul’s thought, and was interested in
conveying that thought to his readers.26 Thus even if Paul did not write
Colossians, evidence suggests that it reflects Paul’s fundamental theologi-
cal assumptions. Should it turn out that Paul in fact wrote the epistle,
then, of course, the following case would prove all the more compelling.
Colossians 2:11–13 falls within the broader context of Colossians
2:8–23, an exhortation in which the author cautions his audience against
adversaries who “teach by philosophy and empty deceit, according to
the traditions of human beings, according to the rudiments of the world
and not according to Christ” (Col. 2:8). Christ, he reminds them, is the
source of all authority and the source of their fulfillment (Col. 2:9–10).
In 2:11–13, the author elaborates further on the effect of Christ:
11
In whom you were even circumcised with a circumcision not wrought
by hands, by stripping off the body of the flesh, by means of the circumci-
sion of Christ,
12
having been buried with him in the baptism in which you were also
raised up with him, through the faith of the working of God, who raised
him from the dead.
13
Even you, although you were dead in trespasses and in the uncircumci-
sion of your flesh, he made you alive with him by forgiving us of all the
trespasses.
The author of Colossians tells his readers that their faith in Christ has
wrought in them a circumcision, which enabled them to overcome the
death they experienced previously on account of the “uncircumcision” in
their flesh. The circumcision undergone by the Colossians is described in
three ways. First, it is “not wrought by hands.” Presumably this refers to
human hands, suggesting that the circumcision was the product of divine
effort, as the term acheiropoiētos indicates in Mark 14:58 and 2 Corinthi-
ans 5:1. Second, it involves the “stripping off of the body of the flesh.”27
What this description means, exactly, will be clarified momentarily.
Lastly, we learn that the circumcision occurs either “in the circumcision
of Christ,” or more likely, “by means of the circumcision of Christ.” But
what exactly is the “circumcision of Christ”? It could refer to the cir-

cumcision undergone by Christ in his infancy, but it is far more likely a
reference to the death of Jesus—the shedding of his flesh—understood
through the metaphor of circumcision.28
What, then, is the author saying about the circumcision undergone
by the Colossians? As the preceding translation indicates, the circumci-
sion occurred when the Colossians were buried with Christ at their bap-
tism, after which they were also raised up with Christ.29 In other words,
the burial and subsequent resurrection with Christ experienced by the
Colossians at their baptism created in them nonhandwrought circumci-
sions achieved through the stripping off of the flesh and through the “cir-
cumcision of Christ.” When they were buried with Christ, the believers
shed their flesh just as Christ shed his when he died. Their flesh was cir-
cumcised through baptismal participation in the death of Christ, and in
this way they have received a circumcision not wrought by human hands
but through the agency of Christ. The “circumcision of Christ,” then,
refers to Christ’s death, and believers, through communion with Christ
at baptism, experience that death, that stripping off of the flesh, and in
that sense become circumcised. The passage is by no means easy, but the
author of Colossians appears at least to be suggesting that the Colossians
have become circumcised on account of their baptism.
But what flesh has been shed by them? What, exactly, has been circum-
cised? Perhaps the author refers to a circumcision of the heart, so that the
flesh excised is either the figurative foreskin of the heart or the sinful “life
in the flesh” that a spiritual circumcision overcomes.30 That the author
describes the circumcision as “not wrought by (human) hands” may sug-
gest the sort of ethical transformation characterized in Deuteronomy, Jere-
miah, and elsewhere as a figurative circumcision of the heart. However, the
term “not wrought by human hands” does not preclude a circumcision of
the genital foreskin because the author’s point is simply that the circumci-
sion has been achieved through divine, rather than human, agency.31 Such
insistence may even suggest a kind of circumcision that can be handmade,
which would rule out a circumcision of the heart, as it cannot be circum-
cised manually (at least not without drastic consequences!). Human hands
can and do circumcise penises, however, and thus the remarkable aspect
of the genital circumcision undergone by the Colossians stems from its
performance by the hand of Christ rather than by the hands of men. By
participating in the death of Christ in baptism, the Colossians shed the
body of their flesh—namely, their genital foreskins.
This reading finds contextual support in the ensuing v. 13, where the
author elaborates on the transformation experienced by the Colossians as
Romans 15:7–13 127
a result of their baptismal circumcision. Previously they were dead because

of their “trespasses” and because of the “the uncircumcision of [their]
flesh.” Baptism, the author goes on to say, has made them alive alongside
Christ, their trespasses forgiven. In this reversal, then, the uncircumcision
of their flesh has likewise been removed. Admittedly, this “uncircumci-
sion of the flesh” may merely be a “symbol of spiritual alienation,” as one
interpreter has put it, akin to the uncircumcision of the heart mentioned
in Deuteronomy 10:16, Jeremiah 4:4, Ezekiel 44:7, Jubilees 1:23, Philo
(Spec. 1.305), and the Dead Sea Scrolls (1QpHab 11:13).32 Indeed, these
several verses reveal how well known this concept was in Jewish circles in
the first century CE, as in other times throughout ancient history. But in
nearly every case in which authors intend the figurative understanding of
uncircumcision, they specify so by referring to the “uncircumcision of the
heart,” or the “hardness of the heart.” Alternatively, when “uncircumci-
sion” alone is mentioned, both in the Hebrew Bible and in the Second
Temple literature, the uncircumcision invariably refers to the foreskin
of the penis.33 Thus if the author of Colossians 2:13 wished to portray
the Colossians as ethically uncircumcised, or uncircumcised in the heart,
prior to their baptismal transformation, then he, too, would likely have
employed the customary terminology for doing so. As it is, he refers to the
“uncircumcision of the flesh” because he is calling attention to the Colos-
sians’ prior state of genital uncircumcision.
Confirmation of this reading comes from an analogous passage in the
epistle to the Ephesians, an indisputably pseudepigraphic epistle that uses
Colossians as a principal source. Ephesians 2:11–13 calls on its readers to
remember their own recent transformation:
11
Therefore, remember that in the past you were Gentiles in the flesh,
those called the uncircumcision by those calling themselves the circumci-
sion, which is wrought by hands in the flesh.
12
[Remember] that at that time you were without Christ, alienated from
the polity of Israel and strangers to the covenants of the promise, without
hope and godless in the world.
13
But now, in Christ Jesus, you who were once afar have become near by
means of the blood of Christ.
This conversion experience mirrors the one described in Colossians 2:11–

13. The Ephesians had been “Gentiles in the flesh,” which in light of the
explanatory clause in v. 11b must refer to their lack of genital circum-
cisions. When they were uncircumcised, they were alienated from the
covenant of Israel, godless in the world and without hope. Now they
have been brought near, so that they are no longer without God, no
longer strangers to the polity of Israel and the covenants of the promise.
Presumably they are no longer “Gentiles in the flesh,” too, if we are to
take seriously the contrast between “in the past” (Gk. pote) in v. 11 and
“but now” (Gk. nuni de) in v. 13. If we suppose that the Ephesians have
not removed their foreskins with a knife, we are left with the conclusion
that they are no longer “Gentiles in the flesh” because the flesh of their
foreskins has been removed “by means of the blood of Christ.” Now of
course, I am not suggesting that baptism has caused the Ephesians to be
separated from their foreskins in any tangible sense. Were one to peek at
the Ephesians after baptism, the men would still have foreskins and the
women would still lack penises. As we saw in the introductory example
from the Talmud, however, appearance is not necessarily reality. Despite
their appearance, Jewish women and hemophiliac men are thought to
have undergone the ontologically transformative circumcision required
for admission into the covenant with Abraham. Likewise, I am propos-
ing, Ephesian men and women have undergone the same transformation.
They have become genitally circumcised members of the covenant, what-
ever the appearance of their genitals.
The author of Colossians makes just this point, suggesting that the
recipients of his epistle had been circumcised by means of Christ, a cir-
cumcision involving the shedding of genital foreskins made possible by
the death experienced by believers in their communion with Christ at
baptism. Such a link between the baptismal rite of initiation and circum-
cision seems natural because circumcision was the initiatory rite in God’s
covenant with Israel.34 Because the Colossians had not been circumcised
by a knife and had not entered the covenant by that means, then surely
the baptism by which they did enter the covenant furnished the required
circumcision.
The question remaining, then, is whether the author of Colossians
originated this notion of faith-based circumcision or derived it from
another source, the best candidate being the apostle in whose name the
author composed. The first part of this chapter demonstrated a prec-
edent in Paul’s genuine epistles—namely, Paul’s contention that Christ
became an “agent of circumcision” in order to facilitate Gentile inclusion
in the covenant and thereby to confirm the promises to the patriarchs,
which in turn corresponds to Paul’s claim in Romans 4:1–12 that faith in
Christ connects Gentiles to Abraham’s circumcision and allows them to
claim him as an ancestor according to the flesh. If a connection indeed
exists between these passages, however, one is justified in wondering why
the author of Colossians has couched his understanding of circumci-
sion within the context of baptism, when Paul’s genuine epistles never
Romans 15:7–13 129
mention circumcision and baptism in the same place. One may account
for the disparity in a couple of ways. First, it must be remembered that
Paul never provides a detailed baptismal theology. His references to bap-
tism are few and far between, and never elaborate. In Romans 6:3–4, he
mentions baptism briefly as part of an exhortation against sinful behav-
ior; in 1 Corinthians 1:13–17, baptism surfaces in his condemnation of
Corinthian factionalism; in 1 Corinthians 12:13 and Galatians 3:27, he
speaks of baptism as a mode of intimate communion with Christ. These
last instances are especially tantalizing and beg more detailed description.
Nevertheless, what little we do learn about baptism from Paul is reflected
in Colossians 2:11–13: the believer participates in the death of Christ,
just as Romans 6:3–4 describes it, and the believer experiences a funda-
mental change in identity due to this communion, just like in 1 Corin-
thians 12:13 and Galatians 3:27. Thus one possible explanation for the
disparity is that the author of Colossians drew on Paul’s teaching for the
link between baptism and circumcision, even if this link never surfaced
in the sliver of Paul’s teaching that survives. Alternatively, the link may
be the interpretive contribution of the latter author. That is, whereas Paul
taught that the death of Christ granted access to the covenant and cir-
cumcision to Gentiles who believe, the author of Colossians elaborated
on the “mechanics” of this experience, so to speak, by correlating it to
baptism.
In either case, Colossians 2:11–13 bolsters the case for reading “cir-
cumcision” in Romans 15:8 as a reference to genital circumcision, not the
Jewish people. The first generation of Paul’s interpreters, who knew Paul’s
teachings intimately and wrote in his name, speak of a “circumcision not
wrought by hands” by which Gentiles shed the uncircumcision in their
flesh, a circumcision made possible by participation in the “circumcision
of Christ.” This circumcision certainly resembles Paul’s proclamation that
Christ has become an “agent of circumcision” who fulfills the patriarchal
promises and welcomes Gentiles into the glory of God.
PHILIPPIANS 3:2–3 AND ROMANS 2:25–29

Near the conclusion of Paul’s epistle to the Philippians, the apostle’s
tone changes abruptly as he confronts a pernicious element infecting
his beloved community of Philippi. Someone has been encouraging the
Philippians to undergo circumcisions wrought by human hands. Paul’s
admonition is a fierce, threefold call to take heed before these rogue
preachers: “Beware of the dogs! Beware of the evil workers! Beware of the
genital mutilation!” (Phil. 3:2). Paul then explains why the circumcisers
are to be avoided, turning his attention to the status of his followers:

“For it is we who are the circumcision, we who serve God by means of
the spirit and boast in Christ Jesus and have no confidence because of
the flesh” (Phil. 3:3). Paul goes on to show why he has every reason for
confidence in the flesh, but nevertheless reckons that advantage to be for
naught on account of Christ.
A fair amount of interpretive unanimity surrounds Paul’s bold declara-
tion that “it is we who are the circumcision.” Everyone acknowledges, for
example, that “we” refers not to Paul and his fellow Jews, but rather to
Paul and his Gentile converts at Philippi.35 Paul has lumped himself in
with these apparently uncircumcised Gentiles, with the result that most
of the “we” who constitute “the circumcision” do not appear to be circum-
cised. As such, there is also consensus about the type of circumcision Paul
has in mind: a figurative circumcision of the heart. Paul thus turns the
alleged argument of the would-be mohels in Philippi on its head, as those
claiming to be “the circumcision” and demanding circumcision for Gen-
tiles in Christ are robbed by Paul of the very name, “the circumcision.”
They are but mutilators of the flesh, Paul declares, for whom the epithet
“dog,” customarily thrown by Jews at Gentiles, is more appropriate.36 In
fact, Gentiles in Christ do not require genital circumcision because they
already have been circumcised in the way that truly matters, figuratively
in the heart by means of the spirit. They really are “the circumcision.”
For the most part, this approach to Philippians 3:2–3 is correct. One
aspect requires tinkering, of course. Paul is not referring to a figurative cir-
cumcision of the heart, but to the circumcision of the penis required by
the Abrahamic covenant. A review of Paul’s description of circumcision in
Romans 2:25–29 reveals why. As I suggested in the previous chapter, to see
in Romans 2:25–29 only a figurative circumcision of the heart is to miss the
key point. True, Paul says in v. 29 that “it is the internally marked person
who is a Jew, and circumcision of the heart, by means of the spirit and not
the letter, is what matters.” There is more to the story, however. In the pre-
ceding verses, Paul lays out the determinants of this figurative circumcision:
25
For, on the one hand, circumcision is of benefit if you do the Law;
however, if you are a transgressor of the Law, then your circumcision has
become a foreskin;
26
so, if a foreskinned person observes the righteous decrees of the Law,
shall his foreskin not be reckoned as a circumcision?
27
And one who is physically uncircumcised will judge you, who fulfilled the
Law through the letter and circumcision, to be a transgressor of the Law.
28
For it is not the externally marked person who is a Jew, nor is circumci-
sion performed externally in the flesh;
Romans 15:7–13 131
29
rather, it is the internally marked person who is a Jew, and circumcision
is of the heart, by means of the spirit and not the letter, whose praise is not
from people but from God.
If there is any logic to the progression of vv. 25–29, then the circumci-
sion of the heart described in v. 29 must be a metaphor for the ethical
achievement mentioned in vv. 25–27. That is, one shows that the foreskin
of his heart is circumcised when he “observes the righteous decrees of the
Law” (Rom. 2:26). According to Paul—and this part of the passage is
often misunderstood by interpreters—such upright conduct reveals just
as much about the state of one’s genitalia as it does about one’s heart,
which Paul makes clear in vv. 25–26 by describing the remarkable trans-
formation experienced by a genitally circumcised man who fails to live up
to the Law’s standard. The exposed glans of such a man becomes a fore-
skin! Paul cannot mean that his foreskin regenerates tangibly, such that
the change would be empirically observable. For Paul to suggest as much
would be absurd. Rather, Paul alleges, the foreskin grows back insofar
as the man’s standing in the Abrahamic covenant is concerned. In other
words, it becomes as though he were uncircumcised; his circumcision
is reckoned to be a foreskin. This intangible epispasm, as it were, alters
the man’s circumcision in the flesh, annulling it and rendering him as
though he were uncircumcised.37 An equally astonishing phenomenon
occurs when a genitally uncircumcised man fulfills the righteous decrees
of the Law, as Paul reveals in v. 26: the foreskin of such a man will be
reckoned as a circumcision! Again, the transformation described cannot
be an observable change in the flesh. Though ostensibly uncircumcised,
through his observance of the righteous decrees of the Law, made possible
by his faith in Christ, this man acquires a reckoned genital circumcision;
and, just as in the opposite case, that reckoned circumcision makes it as
though he were circumcised in the flesh. Paul’s point in Romans 2:25–
29, then, is not that figurative circumcision of the heart matters whereas
circumcision of the penis does not. In fact, circumcision of the penis is
of paramount importance. What has changed is what counts for genital
circumcision. As Paul explains it, figurative circumcision of the heart,
determined by compliance with the righteous decrees of the Law, effects
a simultaneous, ontologically transformative circumcision of the penis,
which in turn renders Gentile believers as though they were circumcised.
Thus when Paul exhorts his Philippian charges by assuring them that
“we are the circumcision,” he says so not merely because they are cir-
cumcised figuratively in the heart. He considers them circumcised in
the genitalia just the same because their foreskins are now reckoned as
exposed glandes. Through their service to God by means of the spirit and
their boasting in Christ Jesus (who circumcised them), their fleshly fore-
skins already have been circumcised and their inclusion in the covenant
secured. To submit to adversaries who do not acknowledge this circum-
cision and who require the sort wrought by the knife would constitute
willing submission to physical mutilation, the unnecessary cutting of an
already exposed glans! No less would such capitulation undermine the
effect wrought by Christ on the believers’ standing before God. Christ has
produced in them the genital circumcision required for admission into
God’s covenanted people. Paul makes no clear-cut distinction between a
necessary circumcision of the heart, enabled by Christ, and an unneces-
sary circumcision of the penis. Both are essential, and the one produces
the other.
So in Romans 15:8, Paul calls Christ an “agent of circumcision” pre-
cisely because Christ offers a genital circumcision not wrought by hands,
the circumcision that enables Gentiles to enter into the glory of God
and to sing his praises, thereby confirming the age-old promise that the
nations of the world would come to receive the inheritance of Abraham.
EXCURSUS: GALATIANS
Now that we have addressed the description of reckoned genital circum-
cision in Romans 2:25–29, Romans 15:7–13, Philippians 3:2–3, Colos-
sians 2:11–13, and Ephesians 2:11–13, one might naturally wonder how
this understanding of circumcision squares with Paul’s view in his epistle
to the Galatians. Specifically, one might be curious to know why, if Paul
or Paul’s disciple emphasizes the importance of genital circumcision in
other epistles, the idea is not developed at all in Galatians, the letter in
which Paul confronts the issue of circumcision most directly. I hesitate to
address this question, as it requires me to make sense of what Paul does
not say when understanding what he does say is challenging enough! Nev-
ertheless, the silence in Galatians seems significant enough to warrant a
response, even if conjectures alone must suffice.
On the one hand, Paul’s failure to discuss reckoned genital circumci-
sion in Galatians may simply be because he had not yet developed the
idea when he penned Galatians. Indeed, it might well be that Paul devel-
oped it precisely as a response to the conflict in Galatia. Paul’s theological
and historical argument in Galatians is that Gentiles need not take on
the responsibility of the Law, which presumably includes circumcision,
because the Abrahamic covenant preceded the bestowal of the Law by
more than four hundred years. Because Christ made available the faith
on which the original covenant was based, submission to the Law, which
Romans 15:7–13 133
had been a temporary measure, was no longer necessary or prudent. The

glaring problem with this line of reasoning, of course, is that circumci-
sion is an inseparable part of the covenant with Abraham as it is described
in Genesis. Though Abraham may not have possessed the Law, which
God gave to his descendants four hundred years later, he did receive cir-
cumcision as the very symbol of the covenant he forged with God. Paul’s
objection to the Law may be on solid ground, then, but his opposition to
circumcision is not, for unlike the Law, circumcision cannot be dismissed
as a secondary or superfluous addition to the covenant (even if many
commentators see Paul saying as much in Rom. 4:11). Circumcision is
part and parcel of the covenant. Whether Paul recognized this wrinkle
in his argument himself or if his adversaries or their protégés in Galatia
pointed it out to him, Paul may well have responded by conceptualizing
a way that Gentiles could acquire the circumcision necessary to join the
Abrahamic covenant without being circumcised manifestly in the flesh,
a practice Paul opposed and that invariably was accompanied by submis-
sion to the Law. In his epistle to the Romans, then, Paul first explains his
solution: through faith, Gentiles can be genitally circumcised without
being genitally circumcised.
Alternatively—and this is the explanation I prefer—Paul may have
deliberately withheld his understanding of reckoned circumcision from
the Galatians so as not to create confusion among his charges about what
it really means to be circumcised. Paul’s view of circumcision is rooted in
the essentiality of genital circumcision as a requirement for inclusion in
the covenant. Were he to make this case to the Galatians, he feared that
the “foolish” among them would mistake his advocacy of reckoned cir-
cumcision for a recommendation to pursue circumcisions wrought by the
knife. This concern would explain why Paul concedes in Galatians 5:11
that people in Galatia have come under the impression that he preaches
the value of circumcision, a curious admission by Paul considering the
vociferous opposition to circumcision expressed in Galatians. How could
Paul ever have been understood to be an advocate of circumcision? Had
he once preached conversion to Christ along with circumcision? The con-
cession would make sense if the Galatians had learned of Paul’s positive
estimation of genital circumcision but mistook it for an endorsement of
literal circumcision or, at least, heard the Galatian opponents twist Paul’s
view in that direction, intentionally or not.38 Wishing to avoid confusing
his readers or playing into the hands of his opponents, Paul chose not to
distinguish between reckoned and literal circumcision, opting instead to
repudiate the later and to focus his argumentation on the obsolescence
of the Law.
Conclusion
In Paul’s view, Christ’s death and resurrection made him an “agent of cir-
cumcision” for Gentiles. Early in his epistle to the Romans, Paul considers
the alienation of Gentiles from God’s covenant and concludes that the
only means by which they can join that covenant, and thereby withstand
imminent judgment, is to become a Jew, a circumcised, Law-abiding,
physical descendant of Abraham. For Paul, however, the only way to effect
that transformation is through faith and baptism into Christ, plain and
simple. At the close of the epistle, when Paul exhorts his Gentile audi-
ence to set aside their differences and to welcome one another with open
arms, he draws on the example of Christ as a source of inspiration. Just
as Christ fulfilled God’s promises to the patriarchs by making available
the circumcision required for participation in God’s covenant, Gentiles
should extend such kindness toward one another, welcoming one another
and together singing the praises of God.
CHAPTER 6
Romans 9–11
Israel, (Un)naturally
Introduction
Take a piece of cotton and hold it over a lit match. The cotton catches
fire, burns, and yields a blackened version of its former self. (If you did
not use tongs, then perhaps your finger suffered a similar fate!) When
asked to describe what happened in this brief experiment, most would
call it a simple case of cause and effect. Fire, by its nature, burns cotton,
and cotton, by its nature, turns black when burned.
Not everyone would see it that way, however.
According to adherents of the Ash‘arite school of Muslim theology in
the eleventh century, what looks like cause and effect to most observers is
in fact an illusion. Objects in the world, they would say, whether fire, cot-
ton, or human beings, cannot cause anything to happen. God and God
alone is the cause of everything, everywhere and always. Each moment of
existence, on their reckoning, is the result of a divine act of creation ex
nihilo (lit. “out of nothing”). What looks like fire producing its natural
effect on cotton is nothing more than a series of discrete moments, each
created by God ex nihilo and then promptly annihilated, in which God
makes the cotton look increasingly blacker. The supposed causal relation-
ship between the burnt cotton and the burning flame is merely the result
of our perception. It is an illusion. There really is no link at all.1
A helpful analogy to this view of reality, dubbed “occasionalism” by
philosophers, is visual animation (as it was practiced prior to comput-
ers). The animator draws a series of discrete images, which he or she then
reveals one after the other. Presentation of the images in sufficiently rapid
succession produces the illusion of continuous action, when in fact the
events of the cartoon are nothing more than discrete and completely
independent artistic moments, or “occasions.” The animated drama of
Mickey Mouse putting on a hat, picking up a wand, and causing a broom-

stick to fetch water is in fact the sequential creation and elimination of
discrete still images. The animator constantly creates and destroys cin-
ematic reality just as God creates and destroys metaphysical reality in the
Ash‘arite scheme.2
Now Paul was neither an eleventh-century Muslim metaphysician nor a
twentieth-century Disney animator. He was a first-century Cilician Jew. As
in the previous chapter, I do not mean to suggest that a relationship exists
between the introductory examples and Paul, which in this case would be
absurd. I have drawn attention to Ash‘arite philosophy and to traditional
modes of animation because they provide an instructive analogy for under-
standing Paul’s portrayal of Israel in perhaps the most controversial of all
Pauline passages, Romans 9–11. Paul’s central message in that passage, as
I will demonstrate, is that God’s people Israel experiences continual recre-
ation at the behest of God. Israel takes on a new form in every generation,
the shape of which is determined by God’s deliberate manipulation. This
continual refashioning usually comes by way of pruning, as God cuts off
superfluous or disobedient branches in Israel’s family tree, leaving only a
faithful and obedient remnant to constitute the next version of Israel. In
his own day, however, Paul reveals that, for the first time ever, God is trans-
forming Israel through a simultaneous process of paring down and building
up. In the wake of Christ, Paul explains, God has not only jettisoned many
previous constituents of Israel, but he has also brought Gentiles on board.
The latest version of Israel and, in Paul’s apocalyptic view of the world, the
last one, is composed of a Jewish remnant and Gentile adoptees.
Paul’s view of God’s relationship to Israel, then, is not unlike the rela-
tionship of an animator to his own creative project. Just as the animator
draws his or her characters anew in each frame, altering them slightly or sig-
nificantly, so God creates Israel anew in each generation; and importantly,
just as the animator strives to generate the illusion of continuous action by
exposing the discrete images in rapid succession, so God’s frequent redraw-
ing of Israel’s constituency has produced an illusion—the illusion of heredi-
tary continuity. Though Israel has come to be viewed as the full array of
Israel’s descendants, Paul insists that there has in fact never been a time in
history, including Paul’s own, in which God’s people Israel included the
entire stock of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Israel). Israel is determined by
faith through God’s deliberate manipulation, not by descent.
Paul says as much in his declaration at the outset of the passage: “Not
all those descended from Israel are Israel” (Rom. 9:6b). Plain and simple:
to be descended from Israel does not necessarily mean that one is a part of
Israel. The verses leading up to that claim reveal why Paul cares so much
Romans 9–11 137
about the demographic constitution of Israel. In Romans 9:1–5, Paul

anguishes over the condition of his “kinsmen according to the flesh,” the
Israelites, the progeny of the patriarchs to whom God’s promises had been
given and from whose stock Christ descended.3 Paul despairs because his
brethren have largely rejected Christ, which puts them at peril before
the impending wrath of God; perhaps more important given the Gentile
audience in Romans, their repudiation calls into question the very fidelity
of the God of Israel. After all, if Christ represents the fulfillment of God’s
promises to Israel, yet the overwhelming majority of what seems to be
Israel has not accepted Christ, then what good are God’s promises? Why
should Gentiles in Rome entrust themselves to the God of Israel if that
God is but an unreliable foreign deity who has failed to keep faith with
his own people?
Paul responds to these implicit questions in Romans 9–11. His thesis, as
we just observed, is the audacious claim set forth at the beginning: “Not all
those descended from Israel are Israel.”4 The widespread Jewish rejection
of Christ does not mean God’s promises to Israel have failed, Paul explains,
because Israel is not what most people think it is. Israel is not constitu-
tive of all Jews, the descendants of Israel, as most suppose. In reality, Paul
insists, Israel has been defined since its very inception by faithfulness to
God, not descent. This was the criterion in the days of Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob; it held true in the time of Elijah; and, it remains so in the pres-
ent day, when faithfulness to God is demonstrated by baptism into Christ.
Thus the rejection of Christ by most Jews—the putative Israelites—does
not mean God has reneged on his promises to Israel, because such disbe-
lieving Jews are ipso facto not a part of Israel.
That Paul resolves the dilemma of Jewish unbelief by redefining Israel
is widely acknowledged when it comes to Romans 9–10. In Romans 11,
however, most interpreters suppose that Paul changes gears dramatically.
Having spent two chapters mustering a multitude of arguments to defend
his claim that “not all those descended from Israel are Israel,” Paul is
thought to predict the eventual salvation of Israel as it is normatively
construed—as Jews, the physical descendants of the patriarchs. Paul looks
forward to the time when jealousy over God’s acceptance of Gentiles will
incite disbelieving Jews to acknowledge Christ. As a result, “All Israel will
be saved,” as Paul triumphantly declares in Romans 11:26, thus confirm-
ing God’s steadfastness to Israel. In other words, whereas Paul at first
defends God against the harrowing implications of Jewish unbelief by
insisting that not every Jew is really a part Israel (Rom. 9–10), he proceeds
to exonerate God by proclaiming just the opposite—that all Jews really
are a part of Israel and somehow they will be saved in the end (Rom. 11).5
Interpreters have proposed no shortage of strategies to account for the

apparent about-face. Most say, for example, that Paul’s Jewish pride “kicks
in,” leading him to abandon his original line of reasoning and, when push
comes to shove, to devise a means for rescuing his fellow Jews. Others
suspect Paul of lapsing into a bout of apocalyptic speculation, envision-
ing a day in which Jews somehow see the error of their ways and turn en
masse to Christ, despite their present refusal to do so.6 The most cogent
explanation of the supposed contradiction between Romans 9–10 and
Romans 11, however, is also the oldest. It simply denies that there is any
contradiction at all. According to Augustine, the early fifth-century bishop
of Hippo, Paul’s understanding of Israel in Romans 11 is exactly the same
as it is in the two previous chapters: God’s true Israel, composed of Jews
and Gentiles in Christ, is determined by faith rather than descent.7 When
Paul announces the salvation of all Israel in Romans 11:26a, he is referring
to the same entity he began to describe in Romans 9:6b, the Israel con-
stituted by Jews faithful to Christ in addition to a “full number” of Gen-
tiles mercifully granted entry into the covenant. In Romans 11, just as in
Romans 9–10, Israel is determined by faith, not descent. Paul’s argument
throughout Romans 9–11 effects a thoroughgoing redefinition of Israel in
accordance with faith, with the result that Jews who deny Christ are simply
not a part of Israel, whereas Gentiles who accept Christ are.
Though pervasive in antiquity and embraced by some today, this read-
ing of Romans 9–11 as a redefinition of Israel has lost favor in the last
half-century.8 Contemporary ecumenical concerns have no doubt played
a role in its waning popularity.9 Especially since the Holocaust, those
interested in fostering cordial relations between Jews and Christians have
identified this and similar interpretations of Pauline passages as perni-
cious, as conducive to the “triumphalist” or “supersessionist” Christian
theologies of Judaism that historically have shaped negative estimations
of Jews, allowing for their mistreatment and, in the case of the Holocaust,
dissuading too many Christians from protesting the Nazi atrocities.10 As
a Jew with these interests and concerns, similarly fearful of propagating
a view of Paul that might compromise productive Jewish-Christian dia-
logue, or worse, contribute to the imperilment of the Jewish people, I
have asked myself whether it is worth advocating this interpretation of
Paul among my students and peers. Perhaps the more ethical choice is
to remain silent on the matter and allow less controversial approaches to
Paul prevail, even if I find them less convincing.
As this chapter demonstrates, I have opted to endorse the allegedly
supersessionist reading. I do so because I believe it is exegetically superior
and, more important, because I think that my particular interpretation
Romans 9–11 139
can actually serve to discourage rather than support the idea of Christian
supersession. My approach to Romans 9–11 differs in important ways
from previous efforts to read the passage in a similar vein. Whether ancient
theologians like Irenaeus, Augustine, or Clement of Alexandria, or mod-
ern scholars like Hervé Ponsot, Francois Refoulé, or N. T. Wright, these
interpreters invariably have concluded that Paul redefines Israel in Romans
9–11 by “spiritualizing” it, by making faith in Christ its essential criterion
for inclusion and discarding the significance of physical descent from the
patriarchs.11 As Wright has put it, pithily if problematically, membership
in Paul’s Israel becomes determined by “grace, not race.”12
As I demonstrate in this chapter, Paul’s reevaluation of Israel actually
does just the opposite. Far from discarding physical descent, Paul’s “spiri-
tualizing” of Israel endorses descent from the patriarchs—even physical
descent—as the singular factor determining inclusion in Israel. Physical
descent from the patriarchs remains for Paul the signature characteristic of
Israel; what has changed in the wake of Christ is simply the way in which
such descent is reckoned. Physical descent as such no longer counts as
physical descent, but faith, which confers upon its adherents the status of
actual progeny. By means of faith, Paul insists, Gentiles become putative
physical descendants of the patriarchs—that is, Israelites—whereas Jews
who reject such faith, despite being physical descendants of the patriarchs,
are reckoned as though they are not. The metaphor with which Paul cul-
minates his redefinition exemplifies this principle unmistakably. Through
his description of the olive tree, an image so closely associated with physi-
cal lineage and descent, both in the ancient world and in our own, Paul
illustrates how faith determines physical descent, how “grace determines
race,” to revise Wright’s dictum. Just as faith turns Gentiles into physi-
cally circumcised Jews (Rom. 2:25–29; Rom. 15:7–13; Phil. 3:2–3), and
into descendants of Abraham “according to the flesh” (Rom. 4:1–12), so
faith makes them into branches on Israel’s family tree, genuine physical
descendants of Israel. Paul’s allegedly “spiritual” Israel, whose salvation he
proclaims in Romans 11:26a, remains a fleshly Israel, an Israel connected
to its progenitors as limbs are to branches and branches are to a trunk,
with faith as the sap holding it all together.
As we will see, however, this reevaluation of descent has a flipside because
insofar as Paul insists on the continued physicality of God’s covenant with
Israel, redefined as it is, he simultaneously undermines the possibility that a
Gentile can ever enroll in Israel in the fullest sense, or that a Jew, whatever
choice he makes, can ever cease to be Israel entirely. This contradiction
also finds expression in the olive tree metaphor, in which baptized Gen-
tiles, even as they gain ligature into Israel’s family tree, nevertheless remain
Gentiles in Paul’s estimation, “unnatural” and “wild” branches, physio-

logically distinct in their basic constitution from what is naturally Israel.
Through faith in Christ, it seems, Gentiles become Israelites while at the
same time remaining non-Israelites—namely, Gentile-Jews—whereas a
correspondingly ambiguous status comes to characterize unbelieving Jews:
though displaced from their patriarchal roots, they nonetheless remain
Israelites in their “natural” physical constitution.
In other words, Paul’s effort to transform physical descent from an
actual to a putative status, and thereby to transform the identity of God’s
people Israel, proves to be a deficient and incomplete endeavor. By his own
admission, a sense remains—a physical, fleshly sense—in which Gentiles
remain forever Gentiles, even as they are affixed physically to the constitu-
ency of Israel and acquire the status of actual descendants. As much as
Paul claims the title “Israel” for Gentile believers, then, he also subverts
that claim, depicting Israel in such a way that it can never accommodate
Gentiles as unadulterated members. As such, even when read as a polemi-
cal redefinition of Israel, Romans 9–11 is hardly conducive to (gentile-)
Christian supersessionism.13 This reading presents challenging implica-
tions in its own right, but these, I believe, can enhance mutual apprecia-
tion and understanding among contemporary Jews and Christians, not
impede them.
Romans 9–11 as a Polemical Redefinition of Israel

Two assumptions rest at the foundation of this reading of Romans 9–11.
The first, which is relatively uncontroversial, is that the olive tree in
Romans 11:16–24 describes God’s people Israel:
16
If a part of the dough offered as first fruits is holy, then the whole batch
is holy; and if the root is holy, then so are the branches.
17
But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, though a wild
olive shoot, were grafted in place of them and became sharers in the rich
root of the olive tree,
18
do not boast over the branches. If you boast, remember that you do not
support the root, but rather the root supports you.
19
And so you say, “Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in.”
20
True enough. They were broken off for lack of faith, as you stand by
means of faith. Do not be arrogant, therefore, but be afraid.
21
For if God did not spare the natural branches, then he will not spare you.
22
And so behold the kindness and the severity of God: severity toward
those who fell, but the kindness of God toward you, so long as you remain
in the kindness, since otherwise you, too, will be cut off.
Romans 9–11 141
23
And even they, if they do not persist in unbelief, will be grafted in, for
God has the power to graft them in again.
24
For if you were cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree and were
grafted unnaturally into a cultivated olive tree, then all the more so the
natural ones will be grafted back into the olive tree that is their own.
Israel is compared to a planting of God, in some cases specifically to an

olive tree, in both the Hebrew Bible and Jewish literature of the Second
Temple period.14 The context in which Romans 11:16–24 appears makes
clear that Paul’s metaphor also corresponds to Israel. Paul has focused
unwaveringly on Israel ever since the beginning of Romans 9 and Israel
will remain Paul’s subject in the verses to follow (Rom. 11:25–32). It
would be inexplicable if the olive tree referred to anything other than
Israel, whose holy roots are the patriarchs and whose branches (at first)
are the present-day Israelites, those Paul mentioned in Romans 9:1–5 as
his “kinsmen according to the flesh.”
The second, more contestable premise is that Paul’s proclamation
about Israel in Romans 11:25–32 recapitulates the transformation of
Israel he just described in the olive tree metaphor:
25
For I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, my brothers, lest
you become wise in your own estimation: a hardening has come upon a
part of Israel until the full number of Gentiles enters,
26
And in this manner all Israel will be saved; as it is written, “From Zion
the Redeemer will come; he will wipe away impiety from Jacob.”
27
“And this will be my covenant with them, when I take away their sins.”
28
With respect to the gospel they are enemies for your sake; but with
respect to election they are beloved for the sake of their fathers
29
for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.
30
For just as you once disobeyed God but now have been shown mercy
because of their disobedience,
31
so they have now been disobedient because of your mercy, so that they
too may be shown mercy.
32
For God has relegated everyone to disobedience so that he may show
mercy to everyone.
“A hardening has come upon a part of ‘Israel,’” Paul declares, “until the full
number of Gentiles enters, and in this manner ‘all Israel’ will be saved.”
As I read it, “Israel” in the first clause and “all Israel” in the second are
not the same entities, and Paul distinguishes between them in his effort to
redefine the constituency of God’s people. Just as he demonstrated in his
description of the olive tree, many constituents of Israel have fallen away
for lack of faith (i.e., hardened Jews), whereas others previously excluded
from Israel have been incorporated into Israel (i.e., baptized Gentiles),
and in this manner all Israel—the olive tree as it now stands comprised of
a Jewish remnant and Gentile immigrants—will be saved.15 Paul thereby
confirms what he first proposed in Romans 9:6: all those descended from
Israel—that is, what most people think is Israel—are not really Israel.
According to the prevailing view, of course, Paul says nothing of the
sort. His announcement in Romans 11:25–26a is not a recapitulation
of the olive tree metaphor, but an addendum to it, a forecast about the
conclusion to the historical process of salvation currently unfolding. Paul
acknowledges that many Jews have become hardened and have fallen
away from God, but this misstep has enabled Gentiles to draw near to
God through Christ and, in the end, the hardened Jews will return to
God’s favor. In this sense, “all Israel will be saved,” which is to say, all Jews
ultimately will be saved. Paul may not specify how or when this reclama-
tion will occur, and such details remain a matter of contention among
scholars, but the identity of “all Israel” is not: “All Israel” is the hardened
descendants of Israel, the Jews.16 They will be saved despite their current
situation.
As I mentioned previously, such a reading is thought to have an ecu-
menical advantage inasmuch as it forestalls efforts to disassociate Jews
from God’s people Israel. For three reasons, however, it is not tenable.
THE CONTEXT OF THE ARGUMENT

In the first place, if he indeed foretells the ultimate salvation of his Jewish
kinsmen in Romans 11:26a, Paul would sabotage the argument he has
developed so forcefully and meticulously up to that point. Paul began his
treatise on Israel by expressing despair over the unbelief of his kinsmen, a
grief stemming not only from fraternal devotion but also from the erro-
neous theological conclusions that might be drawn from the widespread
lack of faith. If so many of the Israelites, who were entrusted for so long
with divine gifts, were now failing to acknowledge the last and greatest
of these gifts, then perhaps God had reneged on his promises to Israel,
forsaking that people and turning his affections elsewhere. Perhaps Israel’s
lack of faith impugns God’s faithfulness to Israel. Paul does not counter
this mistaken inference by predicting the eventual return of his faithless
kinsmen. Indeed, if he had done so, then the depth of the despair he
just expressed, which resurfaces in his “heartfelt” prayer of Romans 10:1,
would be difficult to fathom. Why such grief and anxiety, after all, if
Paul knows things are bound to work out in the end? Paul rather defends
God’s faithfulness by indicating that what seems to be Israel is not really
Romans 9–11 143
Israel, that Jewish unbelief does not impeach God’s faithfulness to Israel
because disbelieving Jews, though ostensibly Israelites, are in fact not Isra-
elites, for faith itself now determines membership in Israel.
This thesis, introduced by Paul in Romans 9:6, guides the ensuing
arguments in Romans 9–11. Paul bolsters the thesis in Romans 9:6b–23
by demonstrating the biblical roots of the principle that God’s people
has never been coterminous with the totality of the patriarchs’ descen-
dants. Abraham had two sons, for example, but only Isaac received the
promises. Isaac likewise had two sons, but God bestowed his favor on
Jacob alone. God trims down God’s people generationally, according to
God’s own will and design.17 In Romans 9:24–10:18, Paul expands on
the thesis by revealing the remarkable developments in his own day, a day
envisioned by the prophets, in which God has chosen to include within
Israel not merely a remnant of physical descendants but also individuals
from outside the family, with faith alone being the criterion by which
all are included. In Romans 11:1–16, Paul defends this redefinition of
Israel against faulty inferences, first spurning the allegation that God has
displaced all Jews and replaced them with Gentiles, a prospect that Paul’s
own faith belies, and then rejecting the possibility that forsaken Jews
have forgone all opportunity to reenter Israel. Forsaken Jews may reenter
Israel by means of faith, just as the Gentiles had done. Finally, in Romans
11:17–24, Paul culminates his argument with the metaphor of the olive
tree to illustrate how faith determines the constituency of Israel.
Were he to devote so much time and energy to redefining Israel
according to faith only to turn around and contrarily insist that Israel in
fact comprises the totality of the patriarch’s physical descendants and that
Israel as such will somehow be saved in the end, Paul would be gainsay-
ing the reasoning and the emotional tenor of everything that has come
before. When the audience is expecting the coup de grâce, Paul would be
relenting inexplicably.
Romans 11:25–26a should therefore be read as Paul’s finishing stroke,
the inclusio of ancient rhetorical practice, in which he recapitulates the
proposal first put forth in Romans 9:6b. Paul opened the argument by
distinguishing between Israel as it seems to be and Israel as it really is;
Romans 11:25–26a concludes with the exact same message. Indeed, the
correspondence between Romans 9:6b and Romans 11:25–26a belies the
prevailing justifications given for rejecting the view that 11:26a amounts
to the climax of Paul’s redefinition of Israel. On the one hand, it is often
claimed, Paul would not suppose different referents for Israel in the same
verse. When Paul says that “a hardening has come upon a part of Israel,
until the full number of Gentiles enters, and in this manner all Israel will
be saved,” it is assumed that “Israel” in the first clause and “all Israel” in
the second must refer to the same entity—namely, the Jewish people. On
the other hand, many say, throughout Romans Paul consistently refers to
Israel as it is traditionally conceived—again, as the Jews.18 Romans 9:6b
demonstrates that both assertions are false.19 When he says that “not all
those descended from Israel are Israel,” Paul not only intends different ref-
erents for Israel, but the latter Israel clearly refers to Israel in its reconfig-
ured sense, as determined by faith rather than descent. The opening salvo
in Paul’s argument is a verse that juxtaposes two obviously distinct mean-
ings for “Israel.” Not surprisingly, then, when Paul lobs his final volley in
Romans 11:25–26a, that verse also juxtaposes two different meanings for
Israel: “A hardening has come upon a part of Israel (i.e., Jews) . . . and in
this manner all Israel (i.e., Jews and Gentiles in Christ) will be saved.”
THE GRAMMAR OF ROMANS 11:25–26A

The grammar of Romans 11:25–26a, as much as the wider context, rec-
ommends reading the passage as the culmination of Paul’s redefinition
of Israel according to faith. Especially revealing is Paul’s use of the Greek
verb eiserchomai (“to enter”) in Romans 11:25: “A hardening has come
upon a part of Israel, until the full number of Gentiles enters.” What
exactly are Gentiles “entering” as a result of the hardened Jewish hearts?
This question has long vexed interpreters who think the destination is
anything but God’s people Israel. Some have said Paul is describing the
Gentiles’ entry into the “kingdom of God,” whereas others believe Paul
is alluding to an eschatological pilgrimage in which Gentiles will enter
Jerusalem.20 Such explanations lack any support from the surrounding
context, however. Paul has had the identity of Israel in mind throughout
the entire passage, and therefore the most sensible object for the verb
“entering” is the metaphor to which Paul has just alluded: the olive tree
denoting Israel in its currently evolving form. According to Paul, a hard-
ening has come on a portion of what seems to be Israel, such that they
have been dispossessed, and this process has enabled Gentiles to “enter”
Israel in their stead. In this way, “all Israel,” authentically composed of
Gentiles and the Jewish remnant, will be saved.
In other words, an efflux of Jews and an influx of Gentiles is the pro-
cess by which “all Israel,” properly understood according to faith, will
be saved. The Greek word houtōs at the beginning of Romans 11:26a
confirms as much. As the relative adverb of manner, houtōs describes the
manner, or way, in which something occurs. In other words, “A hardening
has come upon a part of Israel until the full number of Gentiles enters,
and in this manner all Israel will be saved.”21 Translators wishing to see
Romans 9–11 145
the prediction of a mass Jewish conversion in this verse, however, rou-

tinely translate houtōs as an adverb of time, preferring terms like “then”
or “afterwards.” Paul is then taken to say that “a hardening has come
upon a part of Israel until the full number of Gentiles enters, and then (or
afterwards) all Israel will be saved.”22 In other words, Paul is describing
a sequence of events that culminates in the salvation of “all Israel”: first
Israel is hardened, then the Gentiles enter, and after that the hardened
Israel will return and be saved.23
Such an interpretation would make sense if Paul had used one of the
many Greek terms that indicate a sequence of events. If Paul had written
tote (“then”), for example, or epeita (“afterward”), then it would be reason-
able to conclude that he is in fact predicting the ultimate salvation of all
Jews as the last stage in salvation history.24 As Paul has written the sentence,
however, the salvation of “all Israel” is not an event that follows the hard-
ening of Israel and the entrance of a certain number of Gentiles; rather,
the salvation of “all Israel” is the result of those processes: a hardening has
come upon a part of Israel (i.e., the Jews), which has led to the introduc-
tion of a certain number of Gentiles into Israel; this two-pronged process
is the means by which “all Israel,” properly understood, will be saved.25
A number of interpreters who concede this grammatical point have
nevertheless persisted with the view that Paul foresees the eventual con-
version of all Jews to Christ.26 They usually achieve this conflated inter-
pretation by linking the salvation of “all Israel” to Paul’s discussion of
“jealousy” in Romans 11:11–13, in which Paul expresses hope that his
ministry to the Gentiles will provoke jealousy among Jews and induce
some of them to convert. In Romans 11:25–26a, then, Paul is taken to
predict the end result of that provocation: the hardening of the Jews has
led to the inclusion of the Gentiles, which, in turn, has led to jealousy
among the hardened Jews, and such jealousy will lead all Jews eventu-
ally to gain salvation. This explanation cannot be what Paul envisions,
however, as his very own description of his effort to provoke Jews evinces
little confidence that it will have widespread, much less complete, suc-
cess. Throughout Romans 11, and specifically in Romans 11:11–14, Paul
ascribes an unmistakable sense of contingency and uncertainty to the res-
toration of faithless Jews. Yes, Paul admits that he magnifies his ministry
among the Gentiles in order to make his kinsmen jealous, yet he candidly
confesses his hope to save only “some of them” in the process. Indeed,
he wonders whether he will urge any to repent and at best he aspires to
“some.”27
In Romans 11:23, moreover, Paul describes the reinstatement of Jews
into the olive tree as a possibility, rather than a certainty, insisting that Jews
may be regrafted only if their unbelief lapses. That Paul describes the ease
with which such Jews would be repatriated does not make that return any
less speculative; it merely reinforces his call for humility among Gentiles
by accentuating the tenuousness of their newfound advantage. So too,
when he declares, in Romans 11:15, that repatriation of forsaken Jews
would be like resurrection from the dead, Paul is by no means predicting
that all Jews will return, but merely affirming how glorious it would be
if they did so. Again, if they did so. These are expressions of hope from
a man distraught over the fate of his kinsmen, not certifiable predictions
from a man convinced his kinsmen will be saved. Likewise, in Romans
11:28–32, Paul does not declare that Jews will reclaim their birthright in
the end, but merely that their eternal call guarantees them the chance to
do so. They have not “stumbled so as to fall,” as Paul declares in Romans
11:11, as if they were now precluded from calling on God’s mercy in
the same way Gentiles have done in the wake of the Jews’ misstep; and,
surely, Paul hopes they will capitalize on the opportunity.28 But nowhere
in Romans 11 does Paul predict that a Jewish return will occur. He hopes
for the possibility of a Jewish return, and he endeavors to incite it, but this
attitude should not be misconstrued as a prediction of it.
THE PROOF TEXTS IN ROMANS 11:26B–27

Paul’s proof texts make it even less likely that he viewed jealousy as the
goad by which Jews would return to God en masse. Paul buttresses his
claim that “all Israel will be saved” with Isaiah 59:20–21, which he has
manipulated slightly, but meaningfully:
26
And in this manner all Israel will be saved; as it is written, “From Zion
the redeemer will come; he will wipe away impiety from Jacob.”
27
“And this will be my covenant with them, when I take away their sins.”
The “redeemer” who comes forth from Zion is nearly always identified
as Christ, whom Paul believes will return at the second coming to banish
the lack of faith among the Jews (i.e., Jacob). Yet, if Christ will save the
hardened Jews through some remarkable eschatological feat, how does
the verse provide proof of a historical plan that envisages Jews returning
to Christ on account of jealousy? What has Christ’s return to do with the
jealousy provoked by Paul’s ministry?29
In fact, the proof text has nothing to do with either jealousy or Christ’s
second coming, as Paul’s manipulation of the verse from Isaiah makes
abundantly clear. Whereas the prophet proclaims that “the redeemer will
come for the sake of Zion, and he will turn away impiety from Jacob” (Isa.
Romans 9–11 147
59:20), Paul makes Zion the origin of the redeemer’s visit rather than
its aim or destination: the redeemer will come “from Zion.” This crucial
change in terminology makes it impossible to think that Paul alludes to
the second coming and its benefit for obstinate Jews. In that case, Paul
would have left the verse as it is in Isaiah, as if to say that a redeemer
would come for the sake of Zion, which by synecdoche could be construed
as the Jewish people. Paul says rather “from Zion,” which makes no sense
as a reference to the second coming because by Paul’s own reckoning, in
1 Thessalonians 4:16, Christ’s descent at the end of days will come from
heaven, not Zion:30 “For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with
the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend
from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first.” When Paul says that
the redeemer will come from “Zion,” he means Zion, Jerusalem. Paul is
not describing the return of Christ as a redeemer, but the redemption
wrought by Christ through his death and resurrection—which occurred
in Zion—about which the good news is spreading forth from Zion into
the world. Through that gospel, Paul goes on to say, Christ is removing
impiety from Gentiles who have abandoned their sinful ways and entered
Israel, or “Jacob,” through faith. By manipulating the proof text, Paul
confirms his contention that God has fulfilled his promises to Israel by
extending a gospel of faith to those Gentiles who were always meant to be
part of Israel in its final form.31
The second clause in the proof text likewise refers to the gospel of
Christ’s death and resurrection. Paul elaborates on the significance of the
redeemer’s arrival, saying “this will be my covenant with them, when I take
away their sins.” If Paul is referring to a removal of sins in the future, then
he has forgotten one of the fundamental theological claims he empha-
sizes throughout his epistles, particularly in Romans. In Romans 3:25,
Paul says emphatically that the removal of sins for all persons has been
accomplished through the death and resurrection of Christ. In Romans
5, he goes on to describe the efficacy of Christ’s death and resurrection
as atonement for sin. When Paul speaks of the time when the proph-
ets foresaw that God would remove the sins of Jacob, he must therefore
be referring to the death and resurrection of Christ. The two prophetic
texts justify Paul’s claim that Christ represented the fulfillment of God’s
promise to Israel by allowing the remission of sins. The promise has been
fulfilled through the gospel of Christ, which began in Zion and is now
spreading as far as Rome, to all who will make known their identity as
Israel, or Jacob, by receiving the gospel through faith.
In sum, then, Romans 11:25–26a should be read as the culmination
of Paul’s effort to redefine Israel according to faith. This interpretation is
consistent with Paul’s overall reasoning in Romans 9–11, as well as with

his initial outburst of emotion and the prayer on behalf of his kinsmen in
Romans 10:1; it honors the grammar of the verses, identifying “Israel” as
the only sensible object for the verb “to enter” and allowing the relative
adverb of manner to be just that, an adverb of manner; and this interpre-
tation explains why Paul manipulated the proof text from Isaiah as he did.
Confronted with the challenge of defending God’s faithfulness to Israel in
the face of widespread Jewish rejection of Christ, Paul exonerates God by
demonstrating that all Israel will be saved despite Jewish unbelief, because
anyone who rejects Christ, whether Jew or Gentile, is by definition not a
part of Israel. Since the days of the patriarchs themselves, God has formed
his people by paring down their physical descendants, by recreating Israel
anew in each generation. In the present day, Paul insists, God is also
accomplishing what the prophets had foreseen—a simultaneous pruning
and grafting, by which Gentiles have gained access to the God of Israel
by means of faith. Excised Jews have not forgone all hope of repatriating,
Paul insists, and indeed such a restoration would be simple and “natural,”
if facilitated by faith in Christ. But whether one Jew returns or they all do,
Israel in its present form is determined by faith, not descent, and Israel as
such will be saved. There are thus no grounds for suspecting God’s fidelity
to his people Israel. One simply needs to get straight what Israel truly is.
Just as we have seen in the previous two chapters, however, Paul’s
attempt to redefine the fundamental characteristics of Jewish identity at
one and the same time subverts and reinforces the normative understand-
ing of those characteristics. We noted that Paul’s reevaluation of circum-
cision both undermines and supports the relationship between genital
circumcision and one’s inclusion in God’s covenant. Paul does not dis-
count genital circumcision as a covenantal requirement, as he is generally
thought to do; rather, he sees the genital circumcision demanded by the
covenant to be derivative of baptism. The faith expressed through bap-
tism effects in believers a genital circumcision wrought by Christ. Accord-
ingly, baptized Gentiles may consider themselves not merely “Jews,” but
“the circumcision” and even descendants of Abraham “according to the
flesh,” even though they are clearly not circumcised or descended from
Abraham on the standard reckoning.
The same sort of reevaluation occurs in Romans 9–11, as Paul rede-
fines the parameters of God’s authentic people Israel. As before, Paul’s
discourse undermines the normative understanding of Israel by making
admission into Israel a matter of faith rather than descent, with the result
that many Jews are cast out and many Gentiles included. At the same
time, Paul’s recasting of Israel reinforces the idea that descent from the
Romans 9–11 149
patriarchs is a necessary attribute for inclusion. The metaphor of the olive

tree indicates this fiat explicitly, as it depicts the constituency of Israel as
the offspring of the patriarchs. The result, of course, is that faithful Gen-
tiles become descendants of Israel in one sense, remaining unalterably
Gentile on the other. In other words, they are depicted as Gentile-Jews.
Correspondingly, we will see, faithless Jews are in one sense cut off from
Israel, but in another sense part of Israel’s natural constituency. Jewish-
Gentiles, perhaps.
The Olive Tree: A Redefinition of Descent

According to Caroline Johnson Hodge, Paul’s olive tree metaphor bears
affinity to the well-known figure of the “family tree,” which is designed
to capture the physical relationship between generations.32 Just as the root
of a tree grows contiguously into the trunk, limbs, branches, and leaves,
and provides nutrients out of its own richness, so ancestors are physically
proximate to their descendants and pass on to them a material part of
themselves. As Johnson Hodge puts it, “This image of a tree as a lineage
works so well because kinship, like plant growth, is considered organic
and contiguous. Each descendant (or new plant) is literally an elaboration
of the ‘stuff ’ of its ancestor.”33
This analogy was not lost on the ancients. A wide range of texts and
traditions, from classical authors like Homer, Aristotle, or Demosthenes
to specifically Jewish writers like Philo or the author of 4 Maccabees,
conceptualized in one way or another the transmission of physiologi-
cal “stuff ” from progenitor to descendant, usually a male patriarch to
his male issue.34 The author of 4 Maccabees, for example, underscores
the consanguinity of the tortured seven brothers when admiring their
courage before Antiochus Epiphanes: “You are not ignorant of the love
of humanity which divine and all-knowing Providence imparted to off-
spring through fathers and implanted through the womb of the mother,
in which [womb] these brothers dwelled for equal time, during which
[time] they were formed, having grown from the same blood and having
been perfected through the same soul” (4 Maccabees 13:18–19).
As Johnson Hodge astutely notes, “In this passage, character traits are
passed from father to sons through the physiological processes of con-
ception and gestation in the womb . . . Because the brothers come from
the same fundamental material, all are able to face their martyrdom in
like manner, with courage and honor.”35 The passage therefore epitomizes
the physical interconnectedness inherent in many ancient ideologies of
patrilineal descent, a concept captured in the physiological and organic
proximity of the family tree.36
Paul’s olive tree in Romans 11:17–24 is the family tree of Israel repre-
senting the patriarchs, their descendants, and the “stuff ” passed between
them. His description of the tree’s transformation, then, is striking. By
alleging that “some of the branches have been broken off,” Paul proposes
that certain Israelites, by which he must mean the Jews who spurn Christ,
have relinquished their physiological connection to the patriarchs. They
have been separated from their roots so that, in effect, they are no lon-
ger the physical descendants of the biblical patriarchs, no longer able to
benefit from the character and sustenance provided by the circumstances
of their birth. Paul has “unfleshed” them, in a sense, expunging them
from the family by rhetorically dissolving their connection to the previous
generations.
Of course, Paul anticipated this “unfleshing” when he proclaimed, at
the outset of Romans 9–11, that God’s people Israel is not coterminous
with the physical descendants of the patriarchs. A closer examination of
Paul’s thesis statement in Romans 9:6–8 will prove worthwhile.
6
It is not as though the word of God has faltered, because not all those
descended from Israel are Israel.
7
Nor is it that all the seed of Abraham are children, for “your seed will be
called through Isaac”;
8
which is to say, it is not the children according to the flesh who are chil-
dren of God, but the children of the promise are reckoned to be the seed.
Paul commences his redefinition of Israel by asserting that not every per-
son descended from the patriarchs is reckoned as a physical descendant.
Three parallel terms mark off the ostensible descendants of the forefa-
thers: first, Paul refers to them as “all those descended from Israel”; then
he calls them “all the seed of Abraham”; and lastly, “the children of the
flesh.” In each case, however, Paul contends that inclusion in the cat-
egory does not guarantee inclusion in the more rarified group to which
it is compared.37 “All those descended from Israel,” for example, are not
necessarily “Israel”; so, too, “all the seed of Abraham” are not necessarily
the “children”; and finally, the “children of the flesh” are not necessarily
the “children of the promise.” Having contrasted the inclusive categories
with the more exclusive ones, Paul adds the scandalous twist: he dubs the
children of the promise the “seed,” applying to them the very same term
he used to describe the totality of Abraham’s physical descendants in the
previous verse. In other words, in the span of just two verses Paul turns
Abraham’s “seed” from a category determined by physical descent into a
category determined by the promise. “All the seed of Abraham,” as Paul
put it in the first verse, are not really “seed,” for only “the children of the
Romans 9–11 151
promise are reckoned to be seed.” The category of “seed” is now deter-

mined by promise rather than descent and thus, by analogy, the other
ostensibly physical categories Paul mentions are not what they seem—
that is to say, “all those descended from Israel” are not really descended
from Israel and the “children of the flesh” are not really children of the
flesh!
Quite simply, Paul has reconfigured what counts as physical descent
from the patriarchs, which is not to say he believes that Ishmael, Abra-
ham’s son through the maidservant Hagar, or any of the six sons of
Keturah, Abraham’s second wife, were not sired by Abraham; nor would
Paul endorse the ridiculous notion that Isaac did not sire Esau, the twin
brother of Jacob. All of them were born just as Genesis says they were.
Paul’s point is simply that God’s allocation of the promise determined
which physical descent counted as physical descent, which children would
really be children, which seed would be reckoned as seed. As it happened,
the promise went through Isaac and Jacob. They were reckoned “seed,”
whereas the others—Ishmael, the sons of Keturah, and Esau—though
ostensibly Abraham’s seed, were not. They were seed, but not really seed.
According to Paul, the principle that governed the first generations of
God’s people has continued to subsequent generations, so that not every
Israelite in Paul’s own day is necessarily a part of Israel; or, at least, not
every descendant of Israel is reckoned to be descended from Israel.
The metaphor marshaled by Paul at the conclusion of Romans 9–11
illustrates the same idea. The olive tree reveals the effects of God’s ongo-
ing pruning of Israel in the wake of Christ. As the fulfillment of God’s
promise to Israel, Christ and the faith he made available have become
the standard by which inclusion in Israel and physical descent from the
patriarchs are to be determined. Any ostensible descendants of Israel who
have rejected that faith have therefore been removed from the family tree,
cut off from God’s covenant in the same way Ishmael, Esau, or the fol-
lowers of Baal were before them. Although they are descended from Israel
according to the flesh—branches in the family tree—these faithless Israel-
ites are no longer reckoned as such, as God has severed their physiological
connection to the ancestors and restricted their access to the benefits and
endowments attending such status.
Even more remarkable than Paul’s description of God’s pruning is the
expression he gives to the phenomenon he first explored in Romans 9:24
when he suggested that God is shaping the present generation of Israelites
not only from a faithful remnant of ostensible descendants but also from
those outside of the family. Although such Gentiles have no physiologi-
cal relationship whatsoever to the patriarchs, God is nonetheless grafting
them into the family tree of Israel, attaching them physiologically to the
patriarchs in the same way forsaken Jews were previously. Indeed, Paul’s
description makes clear that the grafted Gentiles occupy the spaces on the
tree once occupied by the detached Jews. The Gentiles have been grafted
“in place of ” the separated branches, enabling them to become “sharers”
in the olive tree’s rich root and to benefit from the endowments transmit-
ted through the patriarchs’ line of descent.38 Accordingly, these grafted
Gentiles must not assume, as too many Jews mistakenly had, that their
status in Israel depends on anything other than faith.39
As new offspring in the family tree of Israel, these Gentile initiates
have acquired a new physiological status, a new birthright, as Paul indi-
cates through the terminology describing how they were incorporated
into the tree. Over and again, Paul uses the Greek term physis, the source
of the English word “physiology,” which underscores the change in Gen-
tile lineage and birth status. Paul calls the Jewish branches in the tree
“natural” (Gk. kata physin), which on the horticultural level refers to their
contiguous physiological relationship to the remainder of the cultivated
tree. The Jewish branches are made from the same “stuff ” as the root and
branches from which they grew. In human terms, a person’s “nature,” or
physis, has a similar meaning, what one ancient Greek lexicon calls “a con-
dition or circumstance as determined by birth especially as inherited from
one’s ancestors, in contrast to status or characteristics that are acquired
after birth.”40 In other words, people’s “nature” marks off their heredi-
tary and physiological link to their ancestors, as well as the various traits
and endowments afforded them as a result of their birth.41 Faithless Jews,
therefore, although “natural” branches in Israel’s family tree, are no lon-
ger in their natural place, having been replaced by Gentiles who belong
naturally to another, uncultivated tree. “Against nature,” Paul maintains,
God has grafted wild Gentile branches into Israel’s cultivated family tree,
thereby granting them the status of those born into Israel naturally, those
who benefit from the characteristics and endowments secured by physical
descent.
It is not clear whether Paul knew much about grafting procedures in
ancient agriculture. Some say he was quite familiar with them, others
insist that Paul the urbanite knew little of country ways. The standard
procedure was apparently to graft cultivated shoots into robustly rooted
wild trees in order to produce the best fruit. Less common was a proce-
dure in which wild shoots were grafted into withering cultivated trees as
a means of rejuvenating them.42 In any case, Paul’s description of Isra-
el’s horticultural alteration cannot be alluding to either practice, as Paul
describes an altogether different procedure: shoots from the wild olive are
Romans 9–11 153
grafted into the cultivated tree in order to benefit from the richness of the
roots in the cultivated tree, a switch that is “against nature” because the
arborist intervenes in the natural way of things by producing a physiolog-
ical connection between trees of different origin, allowing one to benefit
from the “stuff ” in the other.
By analogy Paul suggests that God has performed a “physiological
impossibility” on the human level by connecting wild Gentiles to the
cultivated stock of Israel.43 God has changed the natural station of these
Gentiles, removing them from their original lineage and granting them
a different and superior birthright. God has altered the circumstances
determined by their birth, changing what they are by “nature.” Needless
to say, Paul does not mean God has changed the circumstances of their
birth, as if God went back in time and gave them different parents. The
issue is what counts for descent. Faith has made it as though Gentiles
are descended from Israel, as though they constitute the ancestors’ seed,
and this new birthright allows them to draw on the endowments of their
new forbears.
Such a notion of constructed paternity was hardly peculiar in ancient
perceptions of kinship. Adoption, for example, was an especially impor-
tant institution in the Roman world, and evidence indicates that “graft-
ing” was a familiar metaphor for describing it.44 Through adoption a man
could undo his birth status, switching his lineage by taking on a new
father in a process that, according to the Institutes of Justinian, “imitates
nature.”45 This reordering of status is exemplified unmistakably in the
phraseology of an adoption ceremony put forth by Aulus Gellius: “May
it be your will and command that L. Valerius may be to L. Titius in right
and in law his son, just as if he were born from his as father and from his
mother, and that he (Titius) may have in relation to him (Valerius) the
power of life and death, as there is to a father in the case of a son.”46
A clear distinction exists between descent and reckoned descent. As a
result of the adoption, L. Valerius is reckoned as though he were a son
to L. Titius. Although he is not his son in a physical sense, the adoption
makes it as though he is his son in every respect, as though he were a
physical descendant. The adopted son possesses exactly the same status
as a born son, just as real and true. The adoption document becomes
a stand-in for birth, reconfiguring how birth status is determined.
Importantly—and to this point we have returned over and over—the
rhetoric of adoption also reinforces the authenticity and the realness of
kinship determined by birth even as it undermines and reevaluates it. The
adoption formula assumes that biological kinship is in fact what makes
the father-son relationship “real.” It simply makes the adoption ritual
determinative of biological kinship, as opposed to biological kinship as

such. In other words, the adoption makes L. Valerius equivalent to a son
by birth, which makes him “really” a son. Birth to the father remains the
crucial factor, but such birth is now determined by the adoption.
Paul performs the same operation in Romans 9–11. Though he does
not refer specifically to the “adoption” of Gentiles, as he does when he
calls them “sons” and “heirs” in Romans 8:15, his reconfiguration of
descent in the metaphor of the olive tree produces the same ambiguous
effect. Physical descent from the patriarchs, which means inclusion in
the family tree of Israel, becomes a matter of faith alone. Faith keeps
Jews on the tree and enables Gentiles to be attached. Faith determines
the genuine descendants of the patriarchs, the genuine Israel, which is
precisely what Paul told his readers earlier in Romans, when he summed
up his reinterpretation of patriarchal descent in Romans 4:1–16 as fol-
lows: “Therefore, [descent] comes from faith, (so that it is according
to grace), so that the promise is confirmed to all the seed, not only to
those [whose descent comes] out of the Law, but also to those [whose
descent is reckoned] by means of the faith of Abraham, who is the father
of us all.” Faith is the standard by which physical descent is determined,
whether one is in fact the seed of Abraham or not, which is exactly the
point of the olive tree metaphor.
Accordingly, the metaphor affords a fitting conclusion to the argument
Paul introduced with his thesis statement in Romans 9:6b: “Not all those
descended from Israel are Israel.” Recall that this thesis was presented ini-
tially as a response to the tacit impeachment of God’s righteousness posed
by the unbelief of Paul’s “kinsmen according to the flesh, who are the
Israelites, who have the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of
the Law, the service, and the promises, who have the patriarchs and from
whom came Christ according to the flesh” (Rom. 9:3–5). Over the course
of Romans 9–11, Paul explains that despite their physical descent from
Israel, these faithless Israelites are not really Israelites, not really his kins-
men according to the flesh, and not really the inheritors of the endow-
ments listed. This status now pertains only to those demonstrating faith,
regardless of origin, for by faith Israel is determined, even according to
the flesh. As the olive tree demonstrates, faith is the criterion by which
Israelites remain physiologically connected to the ancestors as well as the
criterion by which Gentiles gain such a connection. Those of faith are
the real Israelites, Paul’s real kinsmen, and their reception of the promise
demonstrates God’s righteousness.
Some might object to the notion that Paul wishes to forge for Gentiles
a physiological relationship to Israel on the grounds that Paul refers to
Romans 9–11 155
an “Israel according to the flesh” in 1 Corinthians 10:18, which surely

refers to Jews, the ostensible descendants of Israel. This “Israel according
to the flesh” is often opposed to the “Israel of God” mentioned by Paul
in Galatians 6:16, so that Paul envisions two discrete Israels—the fleshly,
ethnic, or historical Israel, namely, Jews, and the spiritual, eschatological,
or true Israel, namely, Christians. The notion of two Israels would be
theologically incomprehensible to Paul, however, for whom there was but
one Israel, which was fleshly, ethnic, and historical, as well as spiritual,
eschatological, and true. This Israel is characterized by the olive tree, the
totality of Israel’s promised descendants, determined—as it was always
meant to be—by faith.
How, then, can Paul refer to Jews, including those who rejected such
faith, as “Israel according to the flesh”? Surely it is because Paul recognizes
that his recasting of Israel hardly reflects the normative understanding of
that entity in the ancient world, and his polemical redefinition requires
his audience to appreciate the more stable meaning. Like all others in the
wake of the biblical Adam, Paul operates in what Mikhail Bakhtin calls
an “already-uttered” discursive world, a world in which the term “Israel”
does not apply to Gentiles in Christ.47 Paul may believe that his charges
are in fact Israelites by dint of their baptism, but he also understands that
“the word in language is half someone else’s,” as Bakhtin puts it, and he
nimbly shifts between the dueling perspectives.48 In Romans 9–11, for
example, he first invokes the established discourse about Israel, referring
to Jews as Israelites and as his kinsmen according to the flesh, only to
controvert this assertion in the subsequent verses by claiming that these
alleged Israelites are not really Israelites or kinsmen at all. In 1 Corinthi-
ans 10:18, then, when Paul calls attention to the manner in which Jews
participate in the Temple at Jerusalem, he refers to them according to the
normative understanding of them as the descendants of Israel accord-
ing to the flesh. Yet calling them “Israel according to the flesh” by no
means requires that Paul really believes that such Jews constitute Israel,
even according to the flesh, any more than his references to Jews as Jews
mean that he thinks Jews are really Jews (as in Rom. 2:29), or his refer-
ences to Jews as “the circumcision” mean that he really thinks Jews are
“the circumcision” (as in Phil. 3:3). Simply put, Paul often invokes the
normative discourses that he elsewhere aims to undermine. Paul’s letters
feature competing yet intertwined discourses. They are “double voiced.”
Recognizing the competing discourses in Paul’s epistles not only
allows us to see how Paul situates his novel view of Jewish identity vis-
à-vis the already-spoken assumptions in his day, but it also allows us
to appreciate the places where Paul blends the competing discourses in
utterly fascinating ways. Paul’s portrait of the olive tree is the most spec-
tacular example. The metaphor depicts faithless Jews, on the one hand,
as detached branches that have lost their physiological connection to
Israel. They have been broken off from their people. As Paul explains it,
however, they have not become non-Israelites, at least not entirely. There
remains a significant difference between faithless Jews, whose basic con-
stitution nevertheless remains “cultivated,” and faithless Gentiles of the
world who are composed by nature from the “stuff ” of wild olives. The
distinction turns out to be crucial in Paul’s argument, too, as he uses it to
temper Gentile arrogance by pointing out how easy it would be for God
to reattach the cultivated branches should they choose the way of faith.
If and when they are reattached, Paul insists, not only will they share
again in the richness of their ancestors’ endowment, but they will also do
so in a tree that is “their own,” the one to which they belong naturally.49
The flipside of this line of reasoning has unsettling implications for the
Gentile immigrants grafted into Israel by faith. Their new birthright and
lineage has turned them into Israelites even in a fleshly and physiological
sense, but evidently they are not quite Israelites to the same degree as
native Israelites once they have come to faith. Gentiles can become Isra-
elites through Christ, but this process, Paul suggests, is fundamentally
unnatural and results in their becoming Israelites of a different sort—
Israelites even in terms of physiology and lineage, but not the same thing
as Israelites in terms of physiology and lineage.50
The state of being the same, but different, should sound familiar. Above,
for example, we saw how Jewish authors in antiquity often arrived at this
result when describing conversion to Judaism. Recall the rabbinic sources,
for example, which declared the proselyte to be “like an Israelite in all
respects,” at the same time articulating clear distinctions between proselytes
and native-born Israelites in matters of law, liturgy, and lineage. Philo, Jose-
phus, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and other Jews and Jewish texts proved similarly
capable of describing the status of a convert in ambiguous terms. Inasmuch
as Jewish identity was determined to some extent by physical descent, Gen-
tiles could never become identical to the native born.
This capacity for Gentiles to become like Jews, but not quite Jews,
resembles the ambivalence toward civilized natives often expressed in
colonial discourse. Homi K. Bhabha, among others, has shown how colo-
nial texts often aspire, on the one hand, to enlightening, refining, and
cultivating natives while at the same time insisting on the impossibility of
perfect imitation. Colonial subjects can become “almost white, but not
quite.”51 Such “mimic men” may be permitted, even encouraged, to look,
speak, and act like the colonizer, but some differential quality invariably
Romans 9–11 157
prevents the replication from being exact. The mimic man thus never
becomes more than a blurred reflection who, according to Bhabha, pres-
ents a menace to the colonizer because he distorts, even if only slightly,
the imagined ideal.52
In Romans 9–11, I am suggesting, Paul discursively constructs mimic
men who are “almost the same, but not quite.”53 He challenges the essen-
tiality of physical descent from the patriarchs as an indicator of Jewish
identity by reinterpreting physical descent in terms of Christ, yet this
radical reevaluation does not eradicate the normative assumption about
Jewish identity entirely. While faith, rather than physical descent, has
become the essential criterion for inclusion in Israel, among the faithful
an appreciable difference persists between those whose presence in Israel
is “natural” on account of their origin and those who are “unnatural”
initiates. The former possess genuinely Israelite constitutions, whereas the
latter have become Israelites, but Israelites of a different sort. In other
words, faith has made physical descent from the patriarchs no longer mat-
ter, except to the extent that it still does. The result of Paul’s redefinition
of Israel, then, is a hybridized discourse in which baptized Gentiles (and
for that matter, unbaptized Jews) straddle the divide between Israelite and
non-Israelite, between Jew and Gentile.
Thus Paul appears to level the distinction between Jew and Gentile,
as each, on his reckoning, secures the status of an Israelite by means of
faith in Christ; yet the way Paul has crafted the metaphor of the olive tree
makes clear that Gentiles who are imputed the status of an Israelite, as
real as that status is, never cease to be non-Israelites entirely. Even as they
acquire a new lineage, becoming Israelites in a fleshly and physiological
sense, these initiates into Israel nevertheless remain different from Jews
who might confirm their birthright in Israel by means of faith. Gentiles
can become Israelites, but only through an “unnatural” process that results
in their becoming Israelites of a peculiar sort—Israelites, even in terms of
physiology and lineage, but “not quite” the same as Israelites in terms
of physiology and lineage. Paul’s metaphor depicts this differential qual-
ity unmistakably, as Gentiles remain wild, uncultivated branches even as
they are grafted into the cultivated tree. They gain access to Israel, but
there remains a degree to which Israel can never accommodate Gentiles
as thoroughly, as easily, or as naturally as it can a faithful Jew.
Conclusion: Faith Determines (Physical) Descent

In Romans 9–11, Paul reconfigures the familial origins of baptized Gen-
tiles by interpreting physiological descent in terms of faith.54 We have
already seen Paul undertake this effort, of course. Recall his insistence,
in Romans 4:1–12, that Gentiles in Christ might even go so far as to

lay claim to the most peculiar of all Jewish characteristics, descent from
Abraham “according to the flesh.” Not only does Paul audaciously trans-
form the notion of patriarchal descent in his epistle to the Romans; he
also does so in the allegory about Sarah and Hagar in his epistle to the
Galatians (4:21–31). There Paul sketches a contrasting portrait of Abra-
ham’s first two bedmates, Hagar and Sarah. The former is a bondwoman
who gives Abraham a son “according to the flesh,” whereas the latter, a
free woman, provides him a son “through a promise.” The distinction
then breeds an allegorical interpretation: Hagar stands for the covenant
forged at Mount Sinai, for the earthly Jerusalem, and for Hagar’s children,
whom Paul identifies as the Jews. Sarah, on the other hand, represents a
better covenant, the heavenly Jerusalem, and her own children, whom
Paul suggests are baptized Gentiles like his Galatian readers. Following
the allegory, however, Paul returns to the biblical text, noting that the son
born “according to the flesh” in Genesis 21, namely, Ishmael, persecutes
the one born “according to the spirit,” Isaac. This conflict supposedly
corresponds to the circumstances in Galatia, where Jews are harassing
baptized Gentiles over the issue of circumcision. Cast them out, Paul
instructs, just as Abraham cast out Hagar and Ishmael, for you, like Isaac,
are the descendants of Abraham and his inheritors.
Paul knows full well that Jews trace their physical line of descent to
Abraham through Jacob and Isaac. They are the children of Isaac through
the free woman Sarah. What Paul does is nearly identical to what he
has done in Romans 9–11, particularly in Romans 9:7–8 when he
“unfleshed” his kinsmen. Paul confirms the importance of descent from
Abraham through Isaac, but he makes such descent dependent on the
promise rather than on descent itself, so that those who are born “accord-
ing to the spirit” are reckoned to be the direct descendants of Isaac regard-
less of their actual birthright. Inasmuch as Gentiles become children of
the promise through Christ, they are reckoned to be the seed of Abraham
through Isaac. Likewise, though Jews may claim to be the seed of Abra-
ham because of their descent from Abraham “according to the flesh,”
they are not reckoned to be his direct descendants. True, Paul concedes,
they are his children “according to the flesh,” but this term now is taken
to refer to a mode of conception, not a line of descent. Faithless Jews are
actually considered by Paul to be descendants of Ishmael “according to
the flesh” because, without faith and the promise, they are like Ishmael
who was conceived without the assistance of God. The authentic descen-
dants of Abraham “according to the flesh” are people of faith, whether
originally Jew or Gentile.
Romans 9–11 159
In Romans and Galatians, then, physical descent from the correct

patriarchal line—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—remains of great impor-
tance for Paul. One must be from the “seed” of Abraham to be included
in God’s people Israel, and descent through Isaac and Jacob determines
the seed. Paul thus reinforces standard conceptions of Jewish identity.
But Paul also reinterprets this idea in light of his own conviction that
God has revealed the faith on which the final version of Israel will be
established. The death and resurrection of Christ made possible the faith
that now determines who is a genuine descendant of the patriarchs. In
this sense, Paul’s reevaluation of descent mirrors the reevaluation of cir-
cumcision discussed in the previous chapter. Paul disputes that genital
circumcision remains necessary for inclusion in God’s covenant, but only
insofar as genital circumcision means circumcision with a knife. Geni-
tal circumcision continues to be a covenantal requirement for Paul, but
Christ now produces it. Faith removes the genital foreskin of believers,
at least to the degree necessary for admission into the Abrahamic cov-
enant. So too, Paul insists in Romans 9–11, faith changes Gentiles into
descendants of Abraham, likewise qualifying them to participate in the
covenant.
Just as with circumcision, however, Paul’s argument about descent,
his insistence that faithful Gentiles are really the physical descendants of
Abraham, simultaneously emphasizes that they are really not such, a para-
dox depicted in the metaphor of the olive tree. Gentiles have indeed been
reckoned the descendants of the patriarchs, attached physiologically to
them and allowed to gain succor from their endowment. Through faith
these Gentiles have changed their birthright and gained the status of Isra-
elites. But at the same time they are not the same as Israelites, for their
physical constitution remains different, despite their reckoned physical
transformation. The result is an irreconcilably hybrid status in which one
is truly a part of Israel and truly not.
Excursus: Supersessionism
Christian supersessionism is rooted in the notion of two distinct Israels:
a “new” or “spiritual” Israel determined by faith in Christ, namely, the
Church, and an “old” or “ethnic” Israel determined by physical descent
from the patriarchs. The former is the authentic Israel, the genuinely elect
people of God, whereas the latter is a fossil, the empty remnant of a people
once beloved by God, whose disobedience made possible its replacement.
The bifurcation appears unmistakably in Christian documents as early as
the second century CE, such as The Epistle of Barnabas, Justin Martyr’s
Dialogue with Trypho, and Melito of Sardis’s On the Passover.55 When it
comes to contemporary Christian-Jewish dialogue, these are “texts of ter-

ror,” to borrow the expression of biblical scholar Phyllis Trible.56
Paul’s treatise on Israel in Romans 9–11 is not so pernicious, however,
even when read as a polemical redefinition of Israel in terms of Christ,
because Paul’s “new” Israel never achieves a clean and decisive break from
the “old” Israel. The Israel Paul describes through the olive tree meta-
phor is a remarkably ambiguous entity, a mix of old and new. Far from
replacing a descent-centered Israel with a Christ-centered one, Paul has
conceptualized God’s single people Israel as both Christ centered and
descent centered, thus generating a host of blurry Israelite identities. Jews
who spurn Christ, as we have seen, lose their status as descendants of
Israel, but only partially. Inasmuch as they were born Israelites, branches
in a cultivated olive tree, they remain Israelites in constitution even after
they have been cut out of the family tree. Alternatively, Gentiles who
accept Christ gain the status of descendants of Israel, but only partially.
Inasmuch as they were born Gentiles, branches in a wild olive tree, they
remain Gentiles in constitution even after they have been grafted into a
new line. Gentile “Christian” supersession is out of the question, then, for
Gentiles can never entirely be a part of God’s people Israel and Jews can
never cease to be so.
Indeed, this ambiguous understanding of Israel may prove more har-
rowing for some contemporary Christian interpreters than for Jews. Paul’s
letters have no religious significance for Jews and they may simply dis-
regard what he has to say. They may hold fast to their belief that they
remain God’s people Israel in every sense, that they are the descendants
of the patriarchs and benefit from the merit and endowments passed
down from them. Dismissing Paul is not an option for most Christians,
however, and should they accept the reading of Romans 9–11 proposed
here, they would have to reckon with that fact that, according to Paul at
least, Gentile Christians will always be adulterated constituents of God’s
people. So long as Paul’s commitment to fleshly election is taken seriously,
the participation of non-Jews in Israel will be partial and unnatural, like
late-arriving guests who are welcomed but do not quite fit in. Their rela-
tionship to God’s covenant will always be different from the “natural” one
sealed in Jewish flesh. A few post-Holocaust Christian theologians have
begun to grapple with some of these ideas.57
I do not mean to suggest, however, that Jewish theologians must or even
ought to dismiss Paul entirely. Jews do not need to consider Paul when
reflecting on their relationship to God or their standing as God’s people,
for on these matters Paul has no authority. Nonetheless, Paul’s conception
of Israel in Romans 9–11 might help Jews to think more sympathetically,
Romans 9–11 161
and perhaps more productively, about their relationship to their Chris-

tian peers and the Christian claim to being God’s covenantal people. It
goes without saying that Jews will not accept the idea that faith in Christ
introduces one into the people of Israel; Jews have their own criteria for
conversion and Christian faith is not among them. Yet the Christian’s act
of faith need not be irrelevant for Jews, as though it were a religious convic-
tion like any other in the Gentile world. Inasmuch as Christians through
their faith have called upon the God whom Jews worship, embrace the
scriptures that Jews treasure, and engage in so many of the sacred objec-
tives for which Jews also strive, their conviction is qualitatively different
from that of other Gentiles. It may not bring them into Israel, on the
Jewish view, but certainly it brings them closer to Israel, makes them less
Gentile and, by globalizing familiarity with God and the Torah, their faith
has served to facilitate the day on which, according to the Jewish aspiration
expressed twice daily in the aleinu prayer, “Every inhabitant in the world
will know that to [God] every knee must bend.” Such a generous estima-
tion of Christians and their role in a grand messianic scheme of history are
hardly a novelty in Jewish thought; a Jew no less exalted than Maimonides
said much the same nearly a millennium ago.58
The ambiguity in Paul’s conception of Israel, then, might encourage
both Jews and Christians to negotiate their competing claims to being
God’s covenantal people in other than black-and-white terms. So long
as everyone is willing to think with fuzzier boundaries, then the claim of
one group need not be predicated on absolute disregard for the other’s.
Christians, for example, might assert with conviction that faith in Christ
is required for authentic participation in God’s people, also conceding
that Jews, by dint of the everlasting covenant sealed in their flesh, can
never be alienated from that people completely. Jews, on the other hand,
though denying that Christian faith constitutes a criterion for admission
into Israel, might nonetheless concede that such faith has brought Chris-
tians into a unique relationship with God and Israel, and made them
participants in God’s people in that respect. In other words, Jews and
Christians can learn to assert the authenticity of their own claims in ways
that respect, appreciate, and incorporate rival ones, rather than accepting
them as equally authentic or rejecting them outright. Not only would this
strategy hinder triumphalism, but it might also prove to be a helpful alter-
native to so-called one- and two-covenant solutions to the problem of
competing Jewish and Christian claims, which, as critics have observed,
tend to threaten the peculiarity of both Judaism and Christianity and/or
vitiate the distinction between them.59
Conclusion
Paul as a “Jewish Cultural Critic”

Daniel Boyarin has famously dubbed Paul a “Jewish cultural critic.”
Drawing largely on the interpretive trajectory established already by
James D. G. Dunn, Boyarin concluded that “Judaism, like any culture,
is obviously not above or beyond criticism from within or without,” and
Paul ought to be viewed as but one in a long line of Jews who have taken
issue, in this case serious issue, with one or another aspect of Jewish cul-
ture.1 In Paul’s estimation, something in the normative understanding
of Jewish culture was profoundly wrong and required, as Boyarin puts
it, “radical reform.”2 As I suggested previously, much of my work in the-
orizing Christian origins is indebted to Boyarin, particularly the “wave
theory” of identity he uses to understand the development of Judaism and
Christianity in the second century CE and beyond and their eventual, if
never complete, separation from one another.3 My perspective on Paul,
too, resembles the view of Boyarin, also finding Paul to be a Jew bent
on overcoming the fundamental failing in Jewish culture by rethinking
some of the most basic determinants of Jewish identity. In other words,
I agree wholeheartedly that Paul was a Jewish cultural critic. He did not
fashion a new religion, “Christianity,” in contradistinction to an old one,
“Judaism,” which he had come to find inadequate; rather, Paul refash-
ioned the religion he knew, Judaism, in contradistinction to competing
understandings of Judaism that, he believed, had not properly integrated
the advent, death, and resurrection of Christ as a crucial—indeed, the
crucial—component.
Where I part ways with Boyarin, Dunn, and others who have tried to
read Paul as a thoroughly Jewish critic of Jewish culture is in my reassess-
ment of the specific objectives and conclusions in Paul’s cultural critique.
Until now, interpreters have located Paul’s disrelish with Jewish self-
understanding in its basically ethnic or nationalistic character. According
to Dunn, for example, Paul believed that Jews had mistaken the Abra-
hamic covenant as an exclusively Jewish privilege determined by ethnic
Jewish practices such as circumcision, physical descent, and observance of
the Law. As he puts it, Paul believed that “covenant works had become too
closely identified as Jewish observances, covenant righteousness as national

righteousness.”4 Boyarin similarly describes Paul’s gripe with Judaism as
“the ‘ethnocentrism’ of biblical and post-biblical religion,” its “ethnic par-
ticularity,” and its “obsession with Jewish difference.”5 Such insistence on
ethnic peculiarity, Boyarin contends, conflicted with Paul’s fervent desire
to realize the universal Oneness of humankind, an aspiration he derived
from the universalistic strain within Jewish thought that stemmed from
the Hellenistic conception of the One.6 Both Dunn and Boyarin agree
that Paul solved the dilemma by transcending the ethnic peculiarities that
separated Jew from Gentile, spiritualizing the traditional ethnic markers
of Jewish identity, such as Abrahamic descent and circumcision. Physi-
cal descent according to the flesh was transformed into spiritual descent
according to faith; the physical circumcision of the genitals became the
spiritual circumcision of the heart. Paul thought it was possible, indeed
necessary, to become a spiritual Jew rather than an ethnic one, or as Dunn
calls it, an “eschatological” Jew.7
As I see it, Paul never transcends the ethnic parameters of Jewish
identity. He remains wholly committed to the ethnic conception of the
Jew, but reformulates the unique ethnic markers to render them entirely
dependent on the faith made available in Christ. So for example, we have
seen that Paul, in Romans 2–4, does not dissuade a hypothetical Gen-
tile from adopting the peculiar marks of a Jew—namely, circumcision
and Law observance—by disregarding the essentiality of such marks. On
the contrary, Paul insists that circumcision, Law observance, and physical
descent from the patriarchs remain the distinguishing features of Jew-
ish identity. He simply persuades his interlocutor (and, by extension, his
Gentile readers in Rome) that Gentiles baptized into Christ have already
obtained these attributes. On account of their faith, Gentiles have been
reckoned as genitally circumcised observers of the Law. Paul even goes so
far as to suggest that faith permits Gentiles to claim even the most distinc-
tive and ostensibly unacquirable characteristic of Jewish ethnicity, descent
from Abraham “according to the flesh.” As Paul explains in Romans 4:1–
16, Gentiles share Abraham’s genital circumcision when they exhibit the
faith for which Abraham received the inaugural circumcision. As a result,
Abraham becomes a “father of circumcision” to them and they become
Abraham’s descendants, even “according to the flesh.”
The notion that faith effects a genital circumcision in Gentiles was
corroborated by our investigation of Romans 15. Paul identifies Christ as
the “agent of circumcision” who made the patriarchal covenant, which has
circumcision as its entrance requirement, accessible to ostensibly uncir-
cumcised Gentiles. By sharing in the death and resurrection of Christ at
Conclusion 165
baptism, Gentiles shed their genital foreskin, albeit intangibly, and this
circumcision fulfills God’s ancient promise to Abraham that one day he
would become the father of many nations. Since Christ had welcomed
Gentiles into God’s glorious covenant by facilitating their circumcision,
Paul concludes, Gentiles should mimic Christ’s kindness by setting aside
their differences and glorifying God in unison.
The notion that Gentiles not only enter Abraham’s covenant through
circumcision but also gain Abraham as an ancestor even according to the
flesh, was confirmed by our analysis of Romans 9–11. Paul’s elaborate
redefinition of Israel makes clear that baptized Gentiles, just as much as
baptized Jews, are the authentic seed of Abraham. Particularly through
the culminating metaphor of the olive tree, Paul establishes a patriarchal
lineage for Gentile believers, “enfleshing” them as Israelites by furnishing
them the putative status of Israelite offspring, at the same time “unfleshing”
his unfaithful Israelite brethren by depicting their excision from the family
tree. “All Israel will be saved” through Christ, Paul emphatically declares,
because anyone outside of Christ is, by definition, not a part of Israel.
Paul thus never transcends the ethnic peculiarities of Jewish identity by
theorizing spiritual alternatives. Rather, he reconfigures the ethnic markers
so that they are determined by faith. The difference between these alter-
native perspectives is important. When Paul is thought to draw a distinc-
tion between physical and spiritual manifestations of Jewish traits, with
the spiritual versions being the preferred and genuine alternative, then the
physical, national dimension of Jewish ethnicity is downgraded—indeed,
on most readings of Paul, obviated and discarded. Spiritual circumcision
of the heart, not genital circumcision, reconciles one to God, and descent
from Abraham is a matter of faith, not kinship. Ethnicity is relegated and
transcended. On my view, the physical dimensions of Jewish ethnicity
remain crucial for Paul. Genital circumcision still matters, fleshly descent
still matters, but what’s at stake is how these physical, ethnic, character-
istics are reckoned. The debate surrounds the construal of reality, what
counts for Jewish ethnicity. As I read Paul, he views reality through the
inescapable prism of Christ and faith, with all the physiological aspects of
Jewish identity viewed in that light. Genital circumcision is not wrought
by men, but by Christ. Physical descent is not determined by birth, but
by faith. Ethnicity is not transcended, but made into a function of faith.
By means of faith, Gentiles become reckoned as ethnic Jews.
Such reckoned ethnicity is not unreal, however, which is a crucial
point, and precisely why I have chosen to frame the debate between Paul
and his adversaries, both real and imagined, as one about the way real-
ity is construed. According to Paul, the genital circumcision received by
faithful Gentiles is no less real or authentic than one they might receive
in the flesh by human hands. So too, their achieved physical descent from
the patriarchs is no less genuine than an empirically verifiable pedigree.
Indeed, from Paul’s Christ-oriented perspective, such reckoned status is
more real and more authentic than the empirical alternatives. As he makes
clear in Romans 2:25–29 and Philippians 3:3, the circumcision attained
through Christ is the real circumcision. The olive tree metaphor makes
the same point with regard to physical descent: displaced Israelites are
not really descendants of the patriarchs, while faithful Gentiles really are.
As I have emphasized in each of the exegetical chapters, however, Paul’s
reconfiguration of Jewish ethnicity also requires him also to invoke the
normative discourse against which his own conception of reality con-
trasts, to situate his approach to Jewish identity vis-à-vis the standard
empirical one, and thereby to reinforce the realness of the latter. His claim
in Romans 2:25–29, for example, that the circumcision of Christ is the
real circumcision, and that such a circumcision makes one a real Jew,
necessarily assumes the competing understanding of reality in which real
circumcision and a real Jew are something else. At times Paul invokes this
standard discourse, at other times he inveighs against it by comparing it,
implicitly (Phil. 3:3) or explicitly (Rom. 2–4), to his own Christ-oriented
view; still other times (Romans 11) he blends the two together almost
seamlessly.
The result of this multivocality, as I have suggested, is a hybrid dis-
course in which the same persons appear to be both one thing and the
other at the same time—really Jews and really not Jews, really circumcised
and really not circumcised, really Israelites and really not Israelites, and so
on. On my theoretical reconstruction of Christian origins, this hybrid
discourse was not without its effect on the recipients of Paul’s letters, the
participants in his ministry, and the heirs of his legacy. They naturally
wondered whether or not they were really Jews, really circumcised, really
Israelites. For a time they negotiated that murky middle ground between
Jew and Gentile until at last they began to enunciate their way out, deter-
mining that they were no longer the one thing nor the other, but some-
thing else entirely, Christians.
Notes
Introduction
1. While 13 epistles in the New Testament claim to have been written by Paul, and
a fourteenth, the anonymous book of Hebrews, has traditionally been attrib-
uted to Paul, most scholars today accept that Paul actually penned between
seven and nine. Nearly everyone agrees that Paul wrote at least seven: Romans,
1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon.
The authorship of Colossians and 2 Thessalonians is hotly debated, while most
believe that the remaining five are pseudepigraphic or, in the case of Hebrews,
falsely attributed to Paul. For a general discussion of pseudepigraphy in the
New Testament, see Raymond F. Collins, Letters That Paul Did Not Write
(Wilmington, DE: Glazier, 1988).
2. As examples, consider the fact that two of the staple primers for university
courses in Second Temple Judaism, John J. Collins, Between Athens and Jeru-
salem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 1999) and Shaye J. D. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah
(Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1987), hardly at all address Jesus, Peter, Paul, or
the origins of Christianity. Consider, too, the absence of Christians in Erich S.
Gruen, Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2002). A brief treatment of Paul and his charges is offered
by John Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora: From Alexander to Trajan
(323 BCE–117 CE) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 381–98.
3. The growing list of works in this regard now exceeds the number that can be
included in a note of reasonable length. Particularly important contributions
include the following: John G. Gager, Reinventing Paul (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2000), viii; Mark D. Nanos, The Irony of Galatians (Minneapolis,
MN: Fortress, 2002), 20; Magnus Zetterholm, The Formation of Christianity
at Antioch (London: Routledge, 2003), 6; Zetterholm, “Jews, Christians, and
Gentiles: Rethinking the Categorization within the Early Jesus Movement,” in
Reading Paul in Context: Explorations in Identity Formation. Essays in Honour
of William S. Campbell, ed. Kathy Ehrensperger and J. Brian Tucker (London:
T & T Clark, 2010), 242–54; Philip F. Esler, Conflict and Identity in Romans:
The Social Setting of Paul’s Letter (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2003), 12–13;
John H. Elliot, “Jesus the Israelite Was Neither a ‘Jew’ nor a ‘Christian,’” Journal
for the Study of the Historical Jesus 5, no. 2 (2007): 119–54; Caroline Johnson
168 Notes
Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in the Letters of
Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 4; and several contributions in
Matt Jackson-McCabe, ed., Jewish Christianity Reconsidered: Rethinking Ancient
Groups and Texts (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2007).
4. The earliest attestations to the terms “Christian” and “Christianity” constitute a
well-rehearsed list: Acts 11:26, 26:28; 1 Peter 4:16; Didache 12:4, in The Apos-
tolic Fathers, ed. Bart D. Ehrman, LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2003), 1:436; Ign. Rom., 3:3, Phil., 6:1, and Magn., 10:1–3 in Apostolic
Fathers (LCL), 1:250, 272, 288; Pliny, Letters, 10.96–97 in LCL (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 2:400–6; Tacitus, The Annals, 15.44 in
LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937), 3:282; Suetonius, The
Lives of the Caesars, Nero, 16.2, in LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1914), 2:110. For further discussion, see Chapter 2, note 12.
5. Identification as the children, or descendants, of Abraham was common for Jews
in antiquity. In the Hebrew Bible, Israelites are twice dubbed the “seed of Abra-
ham” (Isa. 41:8; Ps.105:6). In later literature, as Joachim Jeremias, 0“Abraa/m,”
TDNT 1:8, has so aptly put it, “Descent from Abraham is the pride of Israel.”
See further William Baird, “Abraham in the New Testament: Tradition and the
New Identity,” Interpretation 42 (1988): 367–79; Maria Neubrand, Abraham—
Vater von Juden und Nichtjuden. Eine exegetische Studie zu Röm 4 (Würzburg:
Echter Verlag, 1997); Dieter Georgi, “Aeneas und Abraham. Paulus unter dem
Aspeckt der Latinität?,” ZNT 5 (2002): 40–42. The identification of Jews as
the offspring of Abraham has endured into modern times, exemplified most
famously in George Washington’s letter of 1790 to the Hebrew Congregation
of Newport, Rhode Island, in which he proclaims, “May the children of the
stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good
will of the other inhabitants.”
6. For more on the possible derivation of this usage, see Joel Marcus, “The Cir-
cumcision and the Uncircumcision in Rome,” NTS 35 (1989): 67–81.
7. See, for example, Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, 11, in Patrologia Graeca,
ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris, 1857), 6.500, 11.
8. Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs.
9. In this respect, my approach to Paul is also indebted to the pioneering work
of Terence L. Donaldson, Paul and the Gentiles: Remapping the Apostle’s Con-
victional World (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1997), who proposes that Gen-
tile membership in a redefined Israel is the objective to which Paul is so
eagerly committed. “Gentiles had to become part of Israel to be saved,” as he
puts it (298). I also follow Donaldson in understanding that Paul’s redefined
Israel has Christ as its focal point; yet, whereas Donaldson thinks that Paul
sees Christ displacing Torah and ethnic descent as Israel’s boundary markers,
I will be arguing that for Paul Christ reinscribes rather than replaces those
markers.
10. Unless otherwise indicated, all references to the New Testament are my own
translations of Novum Testamentum Graece, ed. Kurt Aland, et al., 27th ed.
(Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1999).
Notes 169
11. The terms “hybrid” and “hybridity” appear ubiquitously in postcolonial studies,
though definitions and perspectives vary widely. For surveys and analysis of its
usage, see Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and
Race (London: Routledge, 1995); Joel Kuortti and Jopi Nyman, eds., Recon-
structing Hybridity: Post-Colonial Studies in Transition (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2007); Anjali Prabhu, Hybridity: Limits, Transformations, Prospects (Albany:
SUNY Press, 2007). For Homi K. Bhabha’s understanding of the term, see
Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990); Bhabha, The
Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
12. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 49, 55.
13. Ibid., 49.
14. As I will discuss at length in Chapter 4, the identity of the interlocutor in
Romans 2–4 is a matter of great debate, although this debate focuses almost
entirely on Romans 2:1. Whereas scholars have historically understood the
judge introduced in Romans 2:1 to be a Jew, a recent trend spearheaded by
Stanley K. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews and Gentiles (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 83–125, considers the interlocutor
to be a Gentile. This study adopts the latter view and goes even further in sug-
gesting that the same Gentile remains Paul’s interlocutor throughout Romans
2–4, a view so far endorsed only by Runar Thorsteinsson, Paul’s Interlocutor in
Romans 2 (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 2003).
15. This view has been advanced most notably in recent years by N. T. Wright, The
Climax of the Covenant (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1992), 231–57, although
it has a much older pedigree as I will discuss in Chapter 6 of this book.
Chapter 1
1. Henry Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis?, trans. Stanley F. Conrad (New York: Hippo-
crene, 1992).
2. For the Roman sources, see Tacitus, The Annals, 13.45–46; 14.1, 60–64 in
LCL (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1937), 3:80, 106, 310–20;
Cassius Dio, 62.27–28 in LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1925), 8:134; Suetonius, The Lives of the Caesars, Nero, 35; Otho, 3 in LCL
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), 2:146, 230.
3. On the relationship of Poppaea to Pompeii, in addition to the graffiti, see James
L. Franklin Jr., Pompeis Difficile Est: Studies in the Political Life of Imperial Pom-
peii (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 101–30.
4. Josephus, The Life of Flavius Josephus (hereafter Life), 16, in LCL (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), 1:8; Jewish Antiquities (hereafter A.J.),
20.189–96, 252, in LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965),
9:490–94, 522.
5. Salo W. Baron, ed., A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2nd ed. (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1952), 1:370–72, estimates the world’s Jew-
ish population in the mid–first century CE at eight million souls. Adolf von
Harnack, The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries,
170 Notes
trans. James Moffatt, 2nd ed. (London: Williams and Norgate, 1908), 1:1–
8, offers a more conservative four million. See further Louis Feldman, Jew
and Gentile in the Ancient World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1993), 293. For the purpose of this thought experiment, a precise figure is not
necessary.
6. Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and
Judaism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Boyarin, Border Lines:
The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2004).
7. Boyarin, Dying for God, 9.
8. Ibid.
9. For the view that many Jews in antiquity considered Jewish identity to be unat-
tainable by Gentiles, even through circumcision, see Matthew Thiessen, Con-
testing Conversion: Genealogy, Circumcision, and Identity in Ancient Judaism and
Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
10. On the issue of ancient monotheism and its possible distinction from what
moderns understand by that term, see Paula Fredriksen, “Mandatory Retire-
ment: Ideas in the Study of Christian Origins whose Time Has Come to Go,”
Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 35, no. 2 (2006): 241–43; Fredriksen
“Judaizing the Nations: The Ritual Demands of Paul’s Gospel,” NTS 56, no. 2
(2010): 240–44.
11. See the classic essay, titled “Fences and Neighbors,” in Jonathan Z. Smith,
Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1982), 1–18.
12. A similar, though not identical, approach to ancient Jewish identity has been
proposed by Maurice Casey, From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God (Louisville, KY:
Westminster/John Knox, 1991), 12–13. Smith, Imagining Religion, 8, likewise
demurs from proposing a full-scale polythetic classification of “Jew/Judaism” in
the ancient world, though he suggests what it would require; most importantly,
it would call upon one to “identify a set of characteristics and begin to trace
their configurations.”
13. Cassius Dio, 37.17.1, my translation.
14. Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncer-
tainties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 149, who on the basis
of statements like those found in Cassius Dio, concludes that at times “a gentile
might be mistaken for a Jew.”
15. “God-fearers” refers to Gentile men and women in Greco-Roman cities who
participated, to varying degrees, in Jewish synagogues and communities with-
out going “all the way,” so to speak, by becoming proselytes. The term originally
came from the Gospel of Luke, where the author uses it to characterize Corne-
lius and other anonymous Gentiles. Controversy over the status of God-fearers
in ancient Jewish communities was stirred three decades ago by the discovery
of an inscription at Aphrodisias that mentioned God-fearers as a category of
individuals alongside Ioudaioi and proselytes. See Robert S. MacLennan and
A. Thomas Kraabel, “The God-Fearers: A Literary and Theological Invention,”
Notes 171
BAR 12, no. 5 (1986): 46–53; Robert F. Tannenbaum, “Jews and God-Fearers
in the Holy City of Aphrodite,” BAR 12, no. 5 (1986): 54–57; Louis Feldman,
“The Omnipresence of the God-Fearers,” BAR 12, no. 5 (1986): 58–63.
16. According to Cohen, Beginnings, 4, “The boundary was fluid and not well
marked.” John J. Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the
Hellenistic Diaspora, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 275, speaks
of “a gray area that existed between Jew and Gentile in this period,” while
J. Andrew Overman, “The God-Fearers: Some Neglected Features,” in Diaspora
Jews and Judaism, ed. J. Andrew Overman and Robert S. MacLennan (Atlanta:
Scholars Press, 1992), 151, describes “a soft boundary line.”
17. I use the term “religious” with full awareness that the concept of religion as
we understand it was forged later than the period under discussion. Lacking
a more precise term, however, I use “religion” to refer generally to aspects of
life having to do with beliefs about gods and human interactions with them.
For more on the development of the concept of religion and its application to
cultures outside of the modern “West,” see the following: Jonathan Z. Smith,
“Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed.
Mark Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 269–84; Russell
T. McCutcheon, “The Category ‘Religion’ in Recent Publications,” Numen 42
(1995): 284–309. For treatments of the Latin term religio, see Michel Desp-
land, La Religion in Occident: Evolution des Idées et de Vécu (Montreal: Fides,
1979); Ernst Feil, Religio: die Geschichte eines neuzeitlichen Grundbegriffes von
Frühchristentum bis zur Reformation, 3 vols. (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1986–2001).
18. This is a summary of the thesis maintained in Cohen, Beginnings, 69–139. For
an extensive critique of Cohen’s thesis, see Steve Mason, Josephus, Judea, and
Christian Origins: Methods and Categories (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2009),
141–84.
19. See the earliest concerns over the translation of Ioudaios in Malcolm F. Lowe,
“Who were the IOUDAIOI?” NovT 18, no. 2 (1976): 101–30; A. T. Kraa-
bel, “The Roman Diaspora: Six Questionable Assumptions,” JJS 33, nos. 1–2
(1982): 445–64.
20. A concise summary of the debate over translating Ioudaios is provided by Caro-
line Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in
the Letters of Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 11–15. See, too,
Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jew-
ish Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), 159–66; John H. Elliott,
“Jesus the Israelite Was Neither a ‘Jew’ nor a ‘Christian,’” Journal for the Study
of the Historical Jesus 5, no. 2 (2007): 119–54; Philip F. Esler, Conflict and Iden-
tity in Romans: The Social Setting of Paul’s Letter (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress,
2003), 63–74; Mason, Josephus, 141–84; Joshua D. Garroway, “Ioudaios,” in
The Jewish Annotated New Testament, ed. Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Brettler
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 524–26; William S. Campbell,
Paul and the Creation of Christian Identity (London: T & T Clark, 2006), 2–6.
21. Cohen, Beginnings, 104–6, says as much.
172 Notes
22. Strabo, Geography, 16.2.34, my translation, in LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1930), 7:280.
23. Ammonius, De Adfinium Vocabulorum Differentia, no. 243, my translation, in
Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, ed. Menahem Stern (Jerusalem:
The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1974), 1:356.
24. Josephus, A.J., 13.257–58, my translation.
25. See for example, Cohen, Beginnings, 110–19; Richard Horsley, Galilee: History,
Politics, People (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1995), 42–45. As
Cohen observes, most historians either scrap Strabo and Ptolemy in favor of
Josephus’s testimony, or they fail to call attention to the discrepancy between
the three witnesses (116). See also Aryeh Kasher, Jews, Idumaeans, and Ancient
Arabs (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1988).
26. The Greek bears out this reading through its men . . . de construction and the
primary syntactical position given to Nabataioi in the second clause.
27. According to Josephus, The Jewish War (hereafter B.J.), 1.123, in LCL (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), 2:58, Antipater was “an Idumean
according to genos,” and had risen to an esteemed position within his ethnos.
See Josephus, A.J., 14.8, however, where Antipater is referred to simply as “an
Idumean.”
28. See Josephus, B.J., 4.228–31, my translation.
29. The rule is articulated in Josephus, B.J., 4.136. Simon, the Idumean chief, sug-
gests that he and his compatriots are “kinsmen” (homophuloi) in Josephus, B.J.,
4.276. On the connection in Josephus between “kinsman” and Ioudaios, see
Josephus, A.J., 14.131, 19.330; B.J., 2.466; Life, 26.
30. Josephus, B.J., 4.265.
31. Josephus, A.J., 14.8–10.
32. Ibid., 20.173.
33. See, above all, Cohen, Beginnings, 13–24. See also Peter Richardson, Herod:
King of the Jews and Friend of the Romans (Columbia: University of South Caro-
lina Press, 1996), 42; Albert Baumgarten, “On the Legitimacy of Herod and
His Sons as Kings of Israel” (Hebrew), in Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple,
Mishnah, and Talmud Period: Studies in Honor of Shmuel Safrai, ed. Isaiah Gafni
et al. (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1993), 31–37.
34. Josephus, A.J., 14.403, my translation.
35. As suggested by Cohen, Beginnings, 18–19.
36. Lawrence Schiffman, Who Was a Jew? Rabbinic and Halakhic Perspectives on the
Jewish-Christian Schism (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1985), 12–13.
37. Stern, Greek and Latin Authors, 1:356, is so impressed by their display of patrio-
tism that he declares, “At the end of the period of the Second Temple the Idu-
maeans felt themselves to be Jews in every respect.”
38. Josephus, A.J., 15.253–58.
39. Full assimilation may well have been possible, but the vehicle for doing so
would have been marriage to an Israelite rather than religious conversion as
we understand it. Foreign women who married Israelite men were presum-
ably incorporated into the new community. Foreign men who married Israelite
Notes 173
women could hope that their offspring might one day be considered Israelites.
As Shaye J. D. Cohen, “Conversion to Judaism in Historical Perspective: From
Biblical Israel to Postbiblical Judaism,” Conservative Judaism 36, no. 4 (1983):
34, puts it, “Conversion in the preexilic period is marriage with an Israelite
spouse.”
40. The same could be said of other “pious Gentiles” in the biblical narrative, such
as Ruth, Jethro, Rahab, and others.
41. While proposed dates for the book of Judith have ranged from the fifth century
BCE to the second century CE, most scholars opt for a date in the Hasmonean
era. See, for example, Morton S. Enslin and Solomon Zeitlin, eds., The Book of
Judith (Leiden: Brill, 1972), 26–31. Feldman, Jew and Gentile, 289, proposes
that the book of Esther provides the earliest description of conversion. Many
people “become Jews” (mithyahadim) in the wake of Haman’s destruction,
although the precise meaning of that Hebrew term has been debated. Accord-
ing to Solomon Zeitlin, “Proselytes and Proselytism during the Second Com-
monwealth and the Early Tannaitic Period,” in Harry Austryn Wolfson Jubilee
Volume on the Occasion of His Seventy-Fifth Birthday, ed. Saul Lieberman (Jeru-
salem: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1965), 2:873, the term refers to
people pretending to be Jews out of fear.
42. In contrast, other texts from this era appear unwilling to accept, even in theory,
that a man could join the house of Israel by becoming circumcised. Chapter 15
of Jubilees, another text probably dating to the second century BCE, suggests
that any male not circumcised on the eighth day of life, even if he is an Israelite,
does not belong to God’s covenant people.
43. Assessing the frequency of such conversions is an impossible task. The frequency
probably depended on the alacrity with which Jews proselytized in antiquity,
an issue of considerable controversy. Advocates for active missionary activity
include Bernard J. Bamberger. Proselytism in the Talmudic Period (Cincinnati,
OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 1939), 13–24; Feldman, Jew and Gentile,
288–382. Alternative perspectives have been put forth by Scot McKnight, A
Light among the Gentiles: Jewish Missionary Activity in the Second Temple Period
(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1991), 49–77; Martin Goodman, Mission and
Conversion: Proselytizing in the Religious History of the Roman Empire (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996), 60–90. For more on the openness of Jews to
interactions with Gentiles, see Pamela Eisenbaum, Paul Was Not a Christian:
The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle (New York: HarperOne, 2009),
99–115.
44. See, for example, Paula Fredriksen, “Judaism, the Circumcision of Gentiles,
and Apocalyptic Hope: Another Look at Galatians 1 and 2,” JTS 42 (1991):
537.
45. For the last of these, see P. W. van der Horst, Ancient Jewish Epitaphs (Kampen:
Kok Pharos, 1991), 72. The other expressions appear widely.
46. Gary Porton, The Stranger within Your Gates (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994), 17 (italics mine).
47. Ibid., 215 (italics mine).
174 Notes
48. Cohen, “Conversion,” 33.

49. H. Albeck, ed., M. Bikkurim (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1952),1:4.
50. B. Šabb. 145b–46a (Vilna: Romm, 1880–1886). Note that this text is hardly
treated by Porton. For his limited treatment, see Porton, The Stranger, 120,
179, 196. Unless otherwise indicated, translations of rabbinic texts are my own.
51. Joshua Levinson, “Bodies and Bo(a)rders: Emerging Fictions of Identity in Late
Antiquity,” HTR 93, no. 4 (2000): 348. Levinson’s treatment of this passage, as
well as m. Bik. 1:4 and others, is particularly incisive.
52. Porton, The Stranger, 215.
53. This famous formulation in b. Yebam. 47b is often used to defend the idea that
converts were reckoned equivalent to the native born. For similar sentiments
and formulations, see Mekilta to Exodus 12:49 (ed. Jacob Z. Lauterbach [Phila-
delphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1933], 1:128) and
Sifre to Numbers 9:14 and 15:16 (ed. Horovitz [Leipzig, 1917], 67 and 112;
translated in Jacob Neusner, ed., Sifre to Numbers: An American Translation and
Explanation. Brown Judaic Studies 118 [Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1986],
2:36 and 150) which proclaim that the proselyte is equal to the native born
with respect to all the commandments in the Torah.
54. CD, XIV.3–4, in Qumran Cave 4, XIII: The Damascus Document (4Q266–273),
ed. J. M. Baumgarten, DJD 18 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 109. See further
Chaim Rabin, The Zadokite Documents, 2nd rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958),
54; see also Philip R. Davies, “Who Can Join the ‘Damascus Covenant’?,” JJS
46 (1995): 138–39. Of course, it is possible that gerim in this passage does not
mean proselyte at all, but something akin to the resident alien in biblical texts.
55. 4QFlorilegium, I.3–4, in Qumran Cave 4.I (4Q158–4Q186), ed. John M. Alle-
gro, DJD 5 (Oxford: Clarendon: 1968), 53. Three alternative readings have
been proposed for this line according to George J. Brooke, Exegesis at Qumran:
4QFlorilegium in Its Jewish Context, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament
Supplement Series 29 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1985), 100–103. Citing
the work of J. M. Baumgarten, “The Exclusion of ‘Netinim’ and Proselytes in
4QFlorilegium,” Revue de Qumran 8 (1972): 87–96, Brooke concludes that
ger = proselyte is the preferred reading. This finds further support from Daniel
R. Schwartz, Agrippa I (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1990), 128.
56. Yigael Yadin, Temple Scroll, English ed. (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society,
1983), 39:5 and 40:6. See also Schwartz, Agrippa I, 128.
57. A.J. 19.332–34. See Schwartz, Agrippa I, 124–30, for an extended analysis of
this account. For the inscriptions on the Temple mount, see Emilio Gabba,
Iscrizioni Greche e Latine per lo Studio della Bibbia (Turin: Marietti, 1958), 24.
58. Schwartz, Agrippa I, 126–27.
59. On the impossibility of conversion according to Jubilees, see Thiessen, Contest-
ing Conversion, 67–86.
60. See note 42 in this chapter.
61. According to Thiessen, Contesting Conversion, 111–41, like Jubilees Luke may
have considered conversion to Judaism to be impossible.
62. Cohen, Beginnings, 161.
Notes 175
63. For more on proselytes in Greco-Roman Jewish inscriptions, see Ross S. Krae-
mer, “On the Meaning of the Term ‘Jew’ in Graeco-Roman Inscriptions,” HTR
82, no. 1 (1989): 35–53; van der Horst, Epitaphs, 68–72.
64. According to Ellen Birnbaum, The Place of Judaism in Philo’s Thought (Atlanta,
GA: Scholars Press, 1996), 197–99, Philo never uses the term prosēlytos, “pros-
elyte,” unless he is drawing on a biblical text that uses it. He employs epēlys, an
apparently synonymous term, more liberally. According to Birnbaum, “It may
be that Philo prefers epēlys and its variations to prosēlytos because these words
are more familiar to his readers. Prosēlytos appears almost exclusively in Jewish
and Christian writings, while epēlys and its variations can be found in classical
Greek writings, in which these terms denote a foreigner and indicate only a
civic standing. By using epēlys and its variations to signify one who abandons
polytheism to come over to belief in God, then, Philo adds a religious connota-
tion to these words” (198).
65. Philo, De Virtutibus, 102–3, my translation, in LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1939), 8:224–26.
66. Philo, De Specialibus Legibus 1.51–52, my translation, in LCL (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1937), 7:184–86.
67. Ibid., 1.53.
68. For a discussion of “civilized” natives, or what Homi K. Bhabha calls “mimic
men,” see Chapter 6 of this book.
69. A.J. 20.17–48.
70. According to Shaye J. D. Cohen, “Respect for Judaism by Gentiles According
to Josephus,” HTR 80, no. 4 (1987): 409–30, Josephus does not distinguish
clearly between cases of “adherence” and cases of conversion in B.J. He does
do so in A.J., however, and Cohen has singled out what he believes are seven
instances of conversion, even if the term prosēlutos does not appear.
71. Gary Gilbert, “The Making of a Jew: ‘God-Fearer’ or Convert in the Story of
Izates,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 44 (1991): 299–313. For the stan-
dard approach, see John J. Collins, “A Symbol of Otherness: Circumcision and
Salvation in the First Century,” in “To See Ourselves as Others See Us”: Chris-
tians, Jews, and “Others” in Late Antiquity, ed. Jacob Neusner and Ernest S.
Frerichs (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985), 163–86.
73. Epictetus, Discourses, 2.9.19–21, in LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1925), 1:272; Cassius Dio, 37.17.1. See further Cohen, Beginnings, 159.
74. Cohen, Beginnings, 160–62.
75. Josephus, B.J., 7.45, my translation.
76. B.J., 2.461–63, my translation.
77. Martin Goodman, Mission and Conversion, 87.
78. Jean Baptiste Frey, ed., Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaicarum (Rome: Pontificio Isti-
tuto di Archeologia Cristiana, 1952), 2:742.
80. Ibid., 20.146.
176 Notes
81. Josephus, Against Apion, 2.123, in LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1926), 1:340.
82. Josephus, A.J., 9.288–91.
83. Philippe Bruneau, “Les Israélites de Délos et la Juiverie Délienne,” Bulletin
de Correspondance Hellénique 106 (1982): 465–504. See also A. T. Kraabel,
“New Evidence of the Samaritan Diaspora Has Been Found on Delos,” Biblical
Archaeologist 47 (1984): 44–46.
84. According to Cohen, Beginnings, 155, that slaves owned by Jews became pros-
elytes upon manumission is established by the fact that Roman legislation, at
least in the wake of Antoninus Pius, consistently forbade the practice.
85. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 219.
Chapter 2
1. Gabrielle Boccaccini, Middle Judaism: Jewish Thought, 300 B.C.E–200 C.E.
(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1991), 18–21. This “scientific” classification
should not generate the impression, however, that distinctions between the var-
ious species of “Judaism” were neat and tidy. Richard Conniff, “Unclassified,”
Discover, June 2010, 52–57, has revealed that scientists are coming to realize
that, despite the apparent objectivity of biological classification, “fuzzy species
are common,” as one biologist puts it. In this book, of course, I will be arguing
not merely that the different “species” of Judaism had fuzzy boundaries but that
the genus “Jew/Judaism” did as well.
2. In order to forestall the implication that such persons have ceased being Gen-
tiles in the ethnic sense, however, and become its opposite, Jews, translators
routinely translate the Greek term ethnē as “pagans” or “heathens.” Since these
are religious rather than ethnic terms, their opposite can be “Christians” rather
than Jews. On this reading, when Paul says, “When you were ethnē,” he means,
“When you were pagans (as opposed to now, when you are Christians).”
3. William S. Campbell, Paul and the Creation of Christian Identity (London:
T & T Clark, 2006), 67, has emphasized that Paul’s communities occupied a
“liminal social location, on the borders of the Jewish world, but not quite part
of it, and yet retaining significant aspects of its self-understanding and identity.”
4. In recent years, the quest for the origins of a uniquely Christian religion and/or
identity has become something of an industry. The purpose of this study is not
to evaluate and respond to each and every theory, but simply to put forth a new
approach for consideration. Some of the most widely cited treatments of the
topic, beyond those discussed in the present work, include the several works of
Judith M. Lieu, Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in the
Second Century (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996); Lieu, Neither Jew nor Greek?:
Constructing Early Christianity (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2002); Lieu, Chris-
tian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004). See also Campbell, Creation of Christian Identity; Gerd Theissen,
The Religion of the Earliest Churches: Creating a Symbolic World (Minneapolis,
MN: Fortress, 1999); Ben F. Meyer, The Early Christians: Their World Mission
Notes 177
and Self-Discovery (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1986); Bengt Holm-

berg, ed., Exploring Early Christian Identity, WUNT 226 (Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2008).
5. Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 6. Boyarin claims to have drawn this
quotation from a “recent paper” delivered by Judith Lieu and he cites “‘I Am
a Christian’: Martyrdom and the Beginning of ‘Christian’ Identity,” in Nei-
ther Jew nor Greek?: Constructing Christian Identity (Edinburgh: T & T Clark,
2003); however, I have not found this citation in that source. I trust Boyarin
was working from a version of that essay prior to its publication.
6. Like the phenomenon it aims to describe, the origins of the “parting of the
ways” paradigm are obscure. I cannot determine definitively when and where
this expression was coined. My findings mirror those described in Annette
Yoshiko Reed and Adam H. Becker, eds., The Ways That Never Parted: Jews
and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2003), 1–16. In 1912, F. J. Foakes Jackson published a collection of
articles under the title The Parting of the Roads: Studies in the Development of
Judaism and Early Christianity (London: Arnold, 1912), but as Lieu, “‘The
Parting of the Ways’: Theological Construct or Historical Reality?,” JSNT 56
(1994): 101–19, observes, these essays do not reflect conceptually the “parting
of the ways” paradigm as it would come to be understood. The conceptual
origin is best traced to James Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and Synagogue:
A Study in the Origins of Anti-Semitism (London: Soncino, 1934). As far as
I can tell, the term and concept together appear first as a title in Abraham
Cohen, The Parting of the Ways: Judaism and the Rise of Christianity (London:
Lincolns-Prager, 1954). The paradigm no doubt arose as a critical response to
the confessional perspectives that predominated until the middle of the twen-
tieth century, challenging in particular the Christian supersessionist approach
in which Jesus is thought to have inaugurated a new religion, Christianity,
which obviated the worn out Judaism it replaced. It also contested the tradi-
tional Jewish view, however, which also sees Christianity as a distinct entity
from the time of Jesus, and takes it to be a heretical deviation away from
Judaism. These confessional perspectives were once explained to me with the
following humorous metaphor: For Christians, the religion introduced by
Christ was the natural continuation of Old Testament religion, and the Jews,
in rejecting it, missed the boat. For Jews, the religion of the rabbis was the
natural continuation of Old Testament religion, and for some odd reason,
a few Jews and bunch of Gentiles once got on a boat. The point, of course,
is that the separation looks different depending on the vantage point. The
“parting of the ways” paradigm recuses itself, putatively at least, from assessing
whether Christianity or Rabbinic Judaism is the authentic continuation of
biblical religion. Gaining purchase outside the confessional traditions, from
its bird’s-eye view it offers what Yoshiko Reed and Becker, Ways That Never
Parted, 1, call “a reassuringly ecumenical etiology of the religious differences
between present-day Christians and Jews.”
178 Notes
7. Yoshiko Reed and Becker, Ways That Never Parted, 4. The narrative requires a
parallel understanding of Judaism’s development in this period, in which the
destruction of the Temple and the Bar Kochba revolt result in the assumption
and consolidation of rabbinic power and spell an end to the vibrant Jewish
diversity of the first century. In short, Judaism becomes Rabbinism.
8. Martha Himmelfarb, “The Parting of the Ways Reconsidered: Diversity in
Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations in the Roman Empire: ‘A Jewish Per-
spective,’” in Interwoven Destinies: Jews and Christians through the Ages, ed.
Eugene Fisher (New York: Paulist, 1993), 48 (italics mine).
9. James D. G. Dunn, The Partings of the Ways, 2nd ed. (London: SCM, 2006),
357.
10. Criticism first surfaced a quarter-century ago with Steven Katz, “Issues in
the Separation of Judaism and Christianity after 70 CE: A Reconsideration,”
JBL 103, no. 1 (1984): 43–76. He undercut the evidence for explicit Jewish
polemics and discrimination against Christians in the early second century
CE. A decade later, the essentialist simplifications of Judaism and Christianity
required for the “parting” model were observed by Himmelfarb, “Parting of the
Ways,” and John Gager, “The Parting of the Ways: A View from the Perspective
of Early Christianity: ‘A Christian Perspective,’” in Interwoven Destinies, 62–73.
Since then, many more have thrown hats into the ring, most notably, Lieu,
Neither Jew nor Greek?; Boyarin, Border Lines, and Dying for God: Martyrdom
and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1999); and Yoshiko Reed and Becker, Ways That Never Parted.
11. The inadequacy of this view has been known since the work of Walter Bauer,
Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, trans. Philadelphia Seminar on
Christian Origins, ed. Robert A. Kraft and Gerhard Krodel (Philadelphia, PA:
Fortress, 1971).
12. The earliest attestations to the terms “Christian” and “Christianity” constitute a
well-rehearsed list: Acts 11:26, 26:28; 1 Peter 4:16; Didache 12:4, in The Apostlic
Fathers, ed. Bart D. Ehrman, LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2003), 1:436; Ign. Rom., 3:3, Phil., 6:1, and Magn., 10:1–3, in Apostolic Fathers
(LCL), 1:250, 272, 288; Pliny, Letters, 10.96–97, in LCL (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1958), 2:400–406; Tacitus, The Annals, 15.44, in
LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937), 3:282; Suetonius, The
Lives of the Caesars, Nero, 16.2, in LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1914), 2:110. For a helpful discussion of these texts, see John W. Marshall,
Parables of War: Reading John’s Jewish Apocalypse (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier
University Press, 2001), 69. All these documents can be dated comfortably to
the period after Paul, most to the second century, with the possible exception of
Acts, Didache, and 1 Peter. The difficulty, of course, is that Suetonius and Tacitus
use the term “Christians” when describing events during the reign of Nero, while
Acts posits the currency of the term some twenty years before that. There is no
way to confirm or deny the accuracy of these claims in light of existing evidence.
For the purposes of this study, the key fact is that Paul does not see fit to utilize
such terminology, whether or not it was available to him in the 40s and 50s CE.
Notes 179
For an interesting debate over the application of “Christian” terminology to first-

century CE phenomena, see the recent contributions of Magnus Zetterholm,
“A Covenant for Gentiles?: Covenantal Nomism and the Incident at Antioch,”
in The Ancient Synagogue from Its Origins until 200 C.E., ed. Birger Olsson and
Magnus Zetterholm (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 2003), 168–88; and
Bengt Holmberg, “The Life in the Diaspora Synagogues: An Evaluation,” in
Ancient Synagogue from Its Origins until 200 C.E., ed. Birger Olsson and Magnus
Zetterholm (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 2003), 219–34. See also Zetter-
holm, The Formation of Christianity in Antioch (London: Routledge, 2003), 16–
17n21; and Holmberg, “Jewish versus Christian Identity in the Early Church,”
RB 105, no. 3 (1998): 397–425.
13. E. P. Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People: A Comparison of Patterns of
Religion (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1983), 173.
14. The lone verses cited frequently to support the claim that Paul does conceptu-
alize a third grouping alongside Jews and Gentiles are 1 Corinthians 10:32, 1
Corinthians 12:13, and Galatians 3:28. My interpretation of these verses relies
on the argument developed in this chapter. Thus see note 49 in this chapter for
my treatment.
15. As one might expect, there have been numerous attempts to account for the
origin of the term “Christian” (Gk. Christianos; Lat. Christianus). Among the
most frequently cited are Elias Bickerman, “The Name of Christians,” HTR
42, no. 2 (1949): 109–24; Harold Mattingly, “The Origin of the Name Chris-
tiani,” JTS 9 (1958): 26–37; Baruch Lifshitz, “L’origine du nom des chretiens,”
Vigiliae Christianae 16, no. 2 (1982): 65–70; Justin Taylor, “Why Were the
Disciples First Called Christians at Antioch,” RB 101 (1994): 75–94; David
Horrell, “The Label Christianos: 1 Peter 4:16 and the Formation of Christian
Identity,” JBL 126, no. 2 (2007): 361–81; Philippa Townsend, “Who Were the
First Christians? Jews, Gentiles and the Christianoi,” in Heresy and Identity in
Late Antiquity, ed. Eduard Iricinschi and Holger M. Zellentin, Texts and Stud-
ies in Ancient Judaism 119 (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2008), 212–30.
16. Donald Akenson, Saint Saul: A Skeleton Key to the Historical Jesus (Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 55.
17. See, for example, Akenson, Saint Saul; Zetterholm, Formation; John H. Elliott,
“Jesus the Israelite Was Neither a ‘Jew’ nor a ‘Christian,’” Journal for the Study
of the Historical Jesus 5, no. 2 (2007): 119–54; Philip F. Esler, Conflict and
Identity in Romans: The Social Setting of Paul’s Letter (Minneapolis, MN: For-
tress, 2003); Campbell, Creation of Christian Identity, 12–13; Caroline Johnson
Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in the Letters of Paul
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Holmberg, “Understanding the First
Hundred Years of Christian Identity,” in Exploring Early Christian Identity, ed.
Bengt Holmberg, WUNT 226 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 3–5.
18. Boyarin, Dying for God and Border Lines.
19. Consider, too, the deliberate neglect of Paul in the otherwise fine study by Ste-
phen Wilson, Related Strangers: Jews and Christians 70–170 C.E. (Minneapolis,
MN: Fortress, 1995).
180 Notes
20. Homi Bhabha’s principal monograph is The Location of Culture (London: Rout-
ledge, 1994), which represents the locus classicus for his treatment of hybridity.
Because he is so central a figure in contemporary postcolonial studies, Bhabha’s
ideas have been widely discussed and analyzed. Among the many treatments,
see Robert J. C. Young, White Mythologies (London: Routledge, 1991), 141–56;
Peter Childs and Patrick Williams, An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory (Lon-
don: Prentice-Hall, 1996), 122–56; Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory:
Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997), 114–51; Anthony Easthope,
“Bhabha, Hybridity, and Identity,” Textual Practice 12, no. 2 (1998): 341–48;
David Huddart, Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 2006).
21. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 162.
22. Ibid., 56.
23. Ibid., 303–17. The phrase is borrowed from Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
(New York: Picador, 1988), 281.
25. Ibid., 313
26. Ibid.
27. Rushdie, East, West: Stories (London: J. Cape, 1994). For Rushdie’s reflections
on the title, see Nicholas Clee, ed., “Homeless Is Where the Art Is,” The Book-
seller, July 15, 1994, 49–50.
29. Ibid., 41.
30. Boyarin, Border Lines, 16–17, proposes a similar view of Christian origins: “In
my historical construction, a serious problem of identity arose for Christians
who were not prepared (for whatever reason) to think of themselves as Jews, as
early as the second century, if not at the end of the first. These Christians, whom
I will call by virtue of their own self-presentation, Gentile Christians . . . , were
confronted with a dilemma: Since we are no longer ‘Greeks’ and not ‘Jews,’ to
what kind of group do we belong? We are told that it was in Antioch that the
disciples were first named ‘Christians’ (Acts 11:26). I think it no accident that
this act of naming occurs in a context were the entry of ‘Greeks’ into the Chris-
tian community is thematized.” While Boyarin has not couched it in terms of
hybridity, he does locate the discursive emergence of Christianity in the cultural
interstices produced by the dilemma inherent in the Gentile mission, by the
entry of Greeks into an otherwise Jewish movement. Their inclusion meant they
were no longer Gentiles, but at the same time they were not quite Jews either,
and this anxious predicament ultimately gave voice to a subject position that was
neither Greek nor Jew, but “Christian.”
31. This description of Second Temple Judaism, of course, accords with the concept
of a “Covenantal Nomism” famously put forth by Sanders, Paul and Palestinian
Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1977),
419–28. See, too, Terence L. Donaldson, Paul and the Gentiles: Remapping the
Apostles Convictional World (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1997), 293–307, who
likewise proposes that Christ became for Paul the single criterion for admission
into a redefined Israel.
Notes 181
32. Paul’s belief that the events of the end times, now under way, would have impli-
cations for Gentiles corresponds to widespread Jewish expectations in antiq-
uity. Numerous Jewish texts from the Greco-Roman era reveal the belief that
at least some Gentiles will participate—in some way, shape, or form—in the
final redemption of Israel. The precise nature of that participation varies from
possibly full incorporation into the people of Israel to subordinated affiliation.
According to Donaldson, Judaism and the Gentiles: Jewish Patterns of Universal-
ism (to 135 CE) (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007), 503, these texts
tend to be ambiguous regarding “the precise status of these second-order par-
ticipants in eschatological redemption.” For more on ancient Jewish expecta-
tion about Gentiles at the end of times, see Donaldson, Paul and the Gentiles,
69–74; Wolfgang Kraus, Das Volk Gottes: Zur Grundlegung der Ekklesiologie bei
Paulus, WUNT 85 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1996), 12–110;
Scot McKnight, A Light among the Gentiles: Jewish Missionary Activity in the Sec-
ond Temple Period (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1991), 11–29; Paula Fredrik-
sen, “Judaism, the Circumcision of Gentiles, and Apocalyptic Hope: Another
Look at Galatians 1 and 2,” JTS 42 (1991): 532–64; Sanders, Jesus and Judaism
(Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1985), 93–95, 212–21.
33. Dunn, Jesus, Paul and the Law: Studies in Mark and Galatians (Louisville, KY:
Westminster/John Knox, 1990); Dunn, Romans, WBC 38A–B, 2 vols. (Dallas,
TX: Word, 1988); Dunn, The Theology of Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and
the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), especially
52–56.
34. Dunn, Romans, 1:128.
35. Ibid., 1:124–25.
36. See further the critique of Dunn’s position by Diana Swancutt, “Pax Christi:
Romans as Protrepsis to Live as Kings” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2001),
especially 38–46.
37. Dunn, Romans, 1:125.
38. Two recent studies have likewise emphasized the ethnic character of Paul’s
reevaluation of Jewish identity. The first, Diana Swancutt’s “Pax Christi,” con-
tends that Paul makes it possible for Gentiles to become ethnic Jews by crafting
what she calls a “noetic,” or mind-based ethnic Jewish identity. The second,
Johnson Hodge’s If Sons, Then Heirs, suggests that Paul solves the theologi-
cal conundrum of the Gentiles’ alienation from the God of Israel by drawing
on ancient discourses of kinship and ethnicity, specifically the language of
adoption and shared patrilineal descent. Paul manipulates these discourses to
show how baptism into Christ enables Gentiles to be adopted by the God of
Israel and by consequence to become a companion people to the people of
Israel, coinheritors of the endowment afforded by the patriarchs. God thus
possesses two covenantal peoples in the wake of Christ, Jews on the one hand
and Gentiles-in-Christ on the other. These peoples are related, insofar as they
share descent from the common ancestor, Abraham, but nevertheless distinct,
with Jews afforded the primary and superior position within the tandem. For a
182 Notes
related, though distinct, approach to Paul, see Campbell, Creation of Christian

Identity, 121–58.
39. Introductory works on Bakhtin are now numerous. Some of these require
familiarity with the jargon of literary theory, linguistics, or philosophy, but
others are useful for readers who lack expertise in these fields. I have found the
most helpful introduction to be Sue Vice, Introducing Bakhtin (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1997). Also accessible are David K. Danow, The
Thought of Mikhail Bakhtin (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991); Katerina Clark
and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1984); Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (London:
Routledge, 1990); Graham Pechey, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Word in the World
(London: Routledge, 2007). For treatments of Bakhtin in relation to biblical
studies, see Carol A. Newsom, “Bakhtin,” in Handbook of Postmodern Biblical
Interpretation, ed. A. K. M. Adam (St. Louis, MO: Chalice, 2000), 20–27; Bar-
bara Green, Mikhail Bakhtin and Biblical Scholarship: An Introduction (Atlanta,
GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2000). Many scholarly articles demonstrate
the application of Bakhtinian concepts to contemporary literature and phe-
nomena; for example, Fred Evans, “Bakhtin, Communication, and the Politics
of Multiculturalism,” Constellations 5, no. 3 (1998): 403–23; Andrea L. Smith,
“Heteroglossia, ‘Common Sense,’ and Social Memory,” American Ethnologist
1, no. 2 (2004): 251–69; Carolyn McKinney, “Caught between the ‘Old’ and
the ‘New’? Talking about ‘Race’ in a Post-Apartheid University Classroom,”
Race, Ethnicity and Education 10, no. 2 (2007): 215–31; Kevin T. Jones and
Rebecca Mills, “The Rhetoric of Heteroglossia of Jewish Feminism: A Paradox
Confronted,” Women and Language 24, no. 2 (2001): 58–64.
40. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1981), 279.
41. Ibid. According to Bakhtin, “The word . . . weaves in and out of complex inter-
relationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third
group: and all this may crucially shape discourse, may leave a trace in all its
semantic layers, may complicate its expression and influence its entire stylistic
profile” (Dialogic Imagination, 276).
42. Ibid., 279.
43. Ibid., 293.
44. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern McGee,
ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1986), 92–93.
45. Ibid., 194–95.
46. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London: Rout-
ledge, 1995), 21.
47. Ibid., 20.
48. Ibid.
49. The verse usually adduced as evidence for the conceptualization of a third
group in Paul’s epistles is 1 Corinthians 10:32: “Be blameless to Jews, to Greeks,
Notes 183
and to the assembly of God.” If Paul here meant to distinguish the “assembly
of God” as a third thing, apart from Jews and Greeks, it would be an aberration
from his customary division of the world into bilateral terms. An interpretation
more in line with Paul’s expressed view of the world understands the apparent
tripartite division as bipartite. The division is not between Jews, Greeks, and
the assembly of God, but between those in the assembly of God, who really are
Jews, Israel, the circumcision, and so on, and those outside the church, who
are divided into Jews and Greeks according to the reigning Jewish perspective.
This conforms to the baptismal formulae Paul invokes in Galatians 3:28 and 1
Corinthians 12:13, which betray a similar dichotomy. The division is between
those in Christ and those not. For those in Christ, no one is a Jew or a Gentile,
at least as these identities were construed prior to Christ—that is, according to
the prevailing discursive categories. The world remains divided into Jew and
Gentile in the wake of Christ, but the terms of identity have changed. Those in
Christ are now the “real” Jews; those not in Christ are the “real” Gentiles. Thus
Paul’s program of ethnic redefinition not only makes available a Jewish identity
for Gentiles, but it also forges a Gentile identity for Jews. On this matter, see
especially Chapter 6 of this book.
50. Dunn, “Concluding Summary,” in Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways
A.D. 70 to 135, ed. James D. G. Dunn (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Sie-
beck], 1992), 367–68.
Chapter 3
1. Günther Bornkamm, “The Letter to the Romans as Paul’s Last Will and Testa-
ment,” Australian Biblical Review 11 (1963): 2–14, reprinted under the same
title in Karl P. Donfried, ed., The Romans Debate, 2nd ed. (Peabody, MA: Hen-
drickson, 1991), 16–28.
2. Bornkamm, “Letter to the Romans,” 18.
3. The importance of the journey to Spain in compelling Paul to write to the
Romans has been advocated most notably by Dieter Zeller, Juden und Heiden in
der Mission des Paulus: Studien zum Römerbrief (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibel-
werk, 1973), 70–72.
4. Bornkamm, “Letter to the Romans,” 20.
5. See the discussion in Chapter 5 of this book.
6. This reconstruction is most closely associated with Wolfgang Wiefel, “Die
jüdische Gemeinschaft im antiken Rom und die Anfänge des römischen Chris-
tentums. Bemerkungen zu Anlass und Zweck des Römerbriefs,” Judaica 26
(1970): 65–88, reprinted as “The Jewish Community in Ancient Rome and
the Origins of Roman Christianity,” in Donfried, Romans Debate, 85–101.
7. As Karl P. Donfried, “Introduction 1977,” in Romans Debate, xliii, observes,
Bornkamm was indebted to the work of T. W. Manson, who a generation ear-
lier had proposed that Romans represents a considered summary of the posi-
tions Paul arrived at in his previous missionary work. See Manson, “St. Paul’s
Letter to the Romans—and Others,” in Donfried, Romans Debate, 3–15. For
184 Notes
more on Bornkamm’s understanding of the purpose and occasion of Romans,

see, “Der Römerbrief als Testament des Paulus,” in Beiträge zur evangelischen
Theologie 53 (Munich: Kaiser Verlag, 1971), 120–39; Bornkamm, Paul, trans.
D. M. G. Stalker (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 88–96.
8. Bornkamm, Paul, 90–93, plays down the reality of the opposition in Romans
by pointing out the resemblance of Romans to the ancient diatribe, a genre
that supposedly utilizes hypothetical opposition as a matter of course; however,
according to Donfried, “False Presuppositions in the Study of Romans,” in The
Romans Debate, 112–21, this argument rests on faulty assumptions about the
diatribe and offers no justification for dismissing the implied opposition in
Romans as theoretical. Donfried insists that “any study of Romans should pro-
ceed on the initial assumption that this letter was written by Paul to deal with
a concrete situation in Rome. The support for such an assumption is the fact
that every other authentic Pauline writing, without exception, is addressed to
the specific situations of the churches or persons involved” (Donfried, Romans
Debate, 103–4).
9. This view of the purpose and occasion of Romans is identified most notably
by Peter Stuhlmacher, Paul’s Letter to the Romans: A Commentary, trans. Scott
J. Hafemann (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1994), especially 5–6.
See also Stuhlmacher, “Der Abfassungszweck des Römerbriefes,” ZNW 77
(1986): 180–93, reprinted as “The Purpose of Romans,” trans. Reginald and
Ilse Fuller, in Donfried, Romans Debate, 231–44. According to Stuhlmacher,
by introducing his gospel in Romans 1:16 with the declaration that he is not
ashamed of it, Paul “is signaling to friend and foe alike among his recipients
that he intends to stick to his embattled cause in Rome as elsewhere.” This view
follows the suggestion of Walter Schmithals, Der Römerbrief als historisches Prob-
lem, Studien zum Neuen Testament 9 (Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1975), 91–93.
See also Stuhlmacher, “Theme of Romans,” in Donfried, Romans Debate, 336.
For related views, see Kenneth Grayston, “‘I Am Not Ashamed of the Gospel.’
Romans 1,16a and the Structure of the Epistle,” Studia Evangelica 2 (1964):
569–73; Gerhart Herold, Zorn und Gerechtigkeit Gottes bei Paulus. Eine Untersu-
chung zu Röm 1, 16–18 (Frankfurt: Lang, 1973). Stuhlmacher and Schmithals
here oppose the more common view, usually associated with C. K. Barrett, “I
Am Not Ashamed of the Gospel,” in Foi et salut selon S. Paul, ed. Markus Barth,
AnBib 42 (Rome: Biblical Institute, 1970), 19–41, which thinks Paul employs
rhetorical litotes so that the denial serves as a confession.
10. Some have suggested that Paul anticipates the arrival of rival missionaries
in Rome. They are not there yet, but Paul thinks it is just a matter of time
before they reach the capital. For a discussion of this and related positions, see
A. Andrew Das, Solving the Romans Debate (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2007),
26–52; James C. Miller, The Obedience of Faith, the Eschatological People of God,
and the Purpose of Romans, SBL Dissertation Series 177 (Atlanta, GA: Society
of Biblical Literature, 2000), 17–19; Douglas A. Campbell, “Determining the
Gospel through Rhetorical Analysis in Paul’s Letter to the Roman Christians,”
in Gospel in Paul: Studies on Corinthians, Galatians and Romans for Richard
Notes 185
N. Longenecker, ed. L. Ann Jervis and Peter Richardson, supplement, JSNT 108
(Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1994), 320–31.
11. This is the view of Stuhlmacher, Paul’s Letter, 7–8.
12. The most compelling case in recent years for an entirely Gentile audience in
Romans has been put forward by Stanley K. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans:
Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 21–
33. A generation before Stowers, a similar case, though less detailed, was made
by Johannes Munck, Paul and the Salvation of Mankind, trans. Frank Clarke
(Atlanta, GA: John Knox, 1959), 200–209. See also Neil Elliot, The Rhetoric of
Romans: Argumentative Constraint and Strategy and Paul’s Dialogue with Judaism,
supplement, JSNT 45 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990), 290–92; and
Das, Solving the Romans Debate, 53–114.
13. Schmithals, Der Römerbrief, 74–91, long ago conceded that Romans is addressed
exclusively to Gentiles despite the discussion of “Jewish” topics. He proposed
that the Gentiles in question were former God-fearers who already had been
attracted to Judaism and, despite their conversion to Christ, were struggling to
abandon their adopted Jewish ways. I am sympathetic to Schmithals’ approach,
though a correction is certainly in order: While Gentile reluctance to Paul’s
gospel may well have come in part from God-fearers, it is no less reasonable
that some Gentiles became attracted to traditional Jewish beliefs or customs
as a result of their conversion to Christ. For a critique of Schmithals, see
A. J. M. Wedderburn, “The Purpose and Occasion of Romans Again,” in Don-
fried, Romans Debate, 195–202. Interestingly, the first criticism from Wed-
derburn, 196, features the standard effort to add Jews to the implied Gentile
readership in Romans: “But here it must be asked, against Schmithals, whether
it is likely that there would be no Christian Jews in Rome? There was there
a large Jewish population and, however diminished their community may
have been by Claudius’ expulsion of the Jews, there seems little reason to sup-
pose that Rome was for long cleared of all Jews, especially once Claudius was
dead.” The presence of Jews in Rome simply does not require that Romans is
addressed to them. See also A. J. M. Wedderburn, The Reasons for Romans, ed.
John Riches (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1988).
14. Stowers, A Rereading, 32–33. See also Caroline Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then
Heirs: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in the Letters of Paul (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007), 10, who writes, “Indeed, Paul writes about Ioudaioi;
this does not mean he writes to them.”
15. For the most successful treatments of Paul from this perspective, see Lloyd
Gaston, Paul and the Torah (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press,
1987); John G. Gager, Reinventing Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000); Neil Elliot, Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the
Apostle (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994); Stowers, A Rereading; Pamela Eisen-
baum, “A Remedy for Having Been Born of Woman: Jesus, Gentiles, and
Genealogy in Romans,” JBL 123, no. 3 (2004): 671–702; Eisenbaum, Paul
Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle (New
York: HarperOne, 2009).
186 Notes
16. Stuhlmacher, “Theme of Romans,” 337, makes the same case. Acknowledging
that Stendahl and other proponents of the Gaston-Gager hypothesis are correct
to assume that Paul’s particular rhetorical and apologetic concern is the justi-
fication of Gentiles and the implications of the gospel for them, he adds that
“even with the apologetic accentuation of the writing, the theme of the letter to
the Romans remains the gospel of the divine righteousness in Christ for those
who believe from among the Jews and the Gentiles. According to Paul, this
gospel is not simply a message which proclaims the acceptance by God of the
Gentiles as well, without having to be circumcised. Instead, the gospel is the
only saving revelation of the end-times salvation ‘for everyone who believes’. . .
From Paul’s perspective, therefore, there is only one way of salvation and only
one single gospel. The heart of this one gospel is the divine righteousness in and
through Christ available for everyone who believes.” For a recent critique of the
Gaston-Gager hypothesis, see Das, Paul and the Jews (Peabody, MA: Hendrick-
son, 2003), 96–106.
Chapter 4
1. For more on this rabbinic genre, see Joseph Heinemann, “Petichtot in Aggadic
Midrash: Their Source and Purpose” (Hebrew), Proceedings of the Fourth
World Congress of Jewish Studies 2 (1969): 43–47; Heinemann, “The Proem in
the Aggadic Midrashim: A Form Critical Study,” Scripta Hierosolymitana 22
(1971): 100–122; Richard Sarason, “Toward a New Agendum for the Study of
Rabbinic Midrashic Literature,” in Studies in Aggadah, Targum and Jewish Lit-
urgy in Memory of Joseph Heinemann, ed. Jakob Petuchowski and Ezra Fleischer
(Jerusalem: Magnes, 1981), 55–73.
2. The preeminent defense of the view that Gentiles alone are in view is provided
by Stanley K. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1994), 83–100. See, too, the more recent treatment by Runar
Thorsteinsson, Paul’s Interlocutor in Romans 2 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell
International, 2003), 165–77. The overwhelming scholarly view, however, is
that Paul indicts all of humanity. See, for example, staple commentaries such
as C. E. B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to
the Romans, ICC 45/1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), 1:103–35; James
D. G. Dunn, Romans, WBC 38A (Dallas, TX: Word, 1988), 1:70–76; Robert
Jewett, Romans, Hermeneia (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2007), 150.
3. It also mirrors Paul’s description of Gentile wretchedness prior to conversion
in his other epistles: For example, 1 Corinthians 12:2; 1 Thessalonians 1:9;
Galatians 4:8–11. According to Edward Adams, “Abraham’s Faith and Gen-
tile Disobedience: Textual Links between Romans 1 and 4,” JSNT 65 (1997):
47–66, Paul underscores the disobedience of Gentiles in Romans 1:18–32 by
contrasting it with the obedience of Abraham in Romans 4:1–16. According
to Kathy Gaca, “Paul’s Uncommon Declaration in Romans 1:18–32 and Its
Problematic Legacy for Pagan and Christian Relations,” HTR 92, no. 2 (1999):
165–98, there is a distinction between Paul’s polemic against Gentiles and that
Notes 187
furnished by other ancient Jews. Where texts like Wisdom attribute Gentile
waywardness to plain ignorance and see no hope for their betterment, Paul sees
rebellion as the cause of the Gentile plight and believes that they are capable of
returning to the awareness of God they possessed long ago.
4. Cranfield, Critical and Exegetical Commentary, 1:105, admits that “in this sub-
section Paul has in mind primarily the Gentiles.” Likewise, Ernst Käsemann,
Commentary on Romans, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
1980), 37–38, concedes, “Vv. 19–21 characterize the guilt of the Gentiles, and
vv. 22–32 portray God’s judgment.” Shortly thereafter Käsemann adds this puz-
zling addendum: “To the intensity of the judgment corresponds the totality of
the world which stands under it, so that the statement about the Gentiles applies
to the heathen nature of mankind as such, and hence implies the guilty Jew as
well.” Yet there are scores of equally “intense” condemnations of Gentiles by
Jewish authors in the ancient world that refer unambiguously to Gentiles alone.
5. For example, Jewett, Romans, 152; Dunn, Romans, 1:56.
6. For example, Cranfield, Critical and Exegetical Commentary, 1:105.
7. Studies of Pauline epistles in light of Greco-Roman rhetorical or epistolary tech-
niques have become too numerous to rehearse in a single note. The momentous
first step was provided by Rudolf Bultmann, Der Stil der Paulinischen Predigt
und die kynisch-stoische Diatribe (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1910).
More recent important treatments of Romans, in particular, have included
Thorsteinsson, Paul’s Interlocutor; Stowers, The Diatribe and Paul’s Letter to the
Romans (Chico, CA: Scholars, 1981); Changwon Song, Reading Romans as a
Diatribe (New York: Peter Lang, 2004).
8. Again, Stowers, A Rereading, 100–104, offers the best defense for seeing the
interlocutor as a Gentile. See also Thorsteinsson, Paul’s Interlocutor, 165–94;
Diana Swancutt, “Pax Christi: Romans as Protrepsis to Live as Kings” (PhD
diss., Duke University, 2001), 272–79; Lloyd Gaston, Paul and the Torah (Van-
couver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987), 119–20; F. J. Leenhardt,
L’Épitre de Saint Paul aux Romains, 3rd ed. (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1955), 44.
Among those who see a “universal man” are Alan Segal, Paul the Convert (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 258–59; Troels Engberg-Pedersen,
Paul and the Stoics (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000), 202. Most commentators
consider the interlocutor to be a Jew. According to George Carras, “Romans
2,1–29: A Dialogue on Jewish Ideals,” Biblica 73, no. 2 (1992): 206, all of
Romans 2 “may be conceived as an ‘inner Jewish debate.’”
9. Many have proposed that the interlocutor introduced here is a Jew. In order to
do so, however, they disregard the transitional term dio. Hans Lietzmann, Ein-
führung in die Textgeschichte der Paulusbriefe an die Römer, 3rd ed. (Tübingen:
J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1928), 37, calls it a “colorless transition particle.”
Others assume that Jews were included in the condemnation of Romans 1:18–
32, which we have already shown to be incorrect.
10. Usually interpreters claim that Paul refers in 2:14–15 to unbaptized Gentiles
who somehow do not fall into the Gentile condition described in 1:18–32.
For a persuasive rebuttal of this position, and an argument in favor of seeing
188 Notes
these Gentiles as those faithful to Christ, see S. J. Gathercole, “A Law unto

Themselves: The Gentiles in Romans 2.14–15 Revisited,” JSNT 85 (2002): 27–
49. Gathercole cites the numerous authorities with whom he agrees, including
among others N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant (Minneapolis, MN:
Fortress, 1992). John W. Martens, “Romans 2:14–16: A Stoic Reading,” NTS
40 (1994): 55–67, has proposed that Paul taps into the Stoic notion of natural
law in this passage.
11. As far as I am aware, this position has been suggested only by Thorsteinsson,
Paul’s Interlocutor, especially 134–44, 151–64, 196–204; although, William
S. Campbell, Paul and the Creation of Christian Identity (London: T & T Clark,
2006), 107–9, considers it.
12. Plutarch, Moralia, 469D, in LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1939), 6:194. See also Thorsteinsson, Paul’s Interlocutor, 139, who finds the
case of another new interlocutor introduced in 467D.
13. Seneca, Epistles, 88, in LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920),
2:348–76. See also Thorsteinsson, Paul’s Interlocutor, 143.
14. Note the contrast in Galatians 2:14, where Paul identifies Cephas as “being”
a Jew, not merely “calling himself ” one. In that case, there is not ambiguity
surrounding Paul’s actual opinion of the addressee. There is such ambiguity in
Romans 2:17.
15. As Thorsteinsson, Paul’s Inerlocutor, 198, observes, commentators as early as
Origen recognized that the verb “to call oneself ” (Gk. eponomazein) signals
a distinction between name and deed. See Origen, Commentary on Romans,
2.114, in Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Books 1–5, trans. Thomas
P. Scheck, The Fathers of the Church 103 (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic
University of America Press, 2001), 139. See also the obviously relevant and
well-known passage from Epictetus, Discourses, 2.9.19-21, in LCL (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), 1:272. As many have observed, Paul is
employing the distinction between name and deed, a commonplace occurrence
in ancient rhetoric.
16. There is a potentially illuminating variation in the textual tradition of Romans
2:17. The conditional “but if ” (Gk. ei de) unquestionably reflects the preferred
reading, but a few important manuscripts (D2, L, Maj syh, and some miniscules)
have “behold” (Gk. ide). While this may simply be the result of an inadvertent
scribal mistake, it may also reflect a conviction among early transcribers that the
interlocutor is indeed a Jew. In other words, just as many modern translators
assume it is a Jew and write “behold,” rather than “if, you call yourself a Jew,”
perhaps ancient scribes were similarly predisposed and did the very same thing!
Hearing ei de, they thought they had heard ide.
17. See the persuasive arguments in Thorsteinsson, Paul’s Interlocutor, 213–21.
18. Despite the frequent effort to prove that there is evidence. Consider, for exam-
ple, Edgar Krentz, “The Name of God in Disrepute: Romans 2:17–29 [22–
23],” Currents in Theology and Mission 17 (1990): 429–39.
19. Don B. Garlington, Faith, Obedience, and Perseverance: Aspects of Paul’s Letter to
the Romans (Tübingen: Mohr, 1994), 32.
Notes 189
20. Curiously, some have used Paul’s citation of Isaiah 52:5 as proof that the inter-
locutor is a Jew; however, as Thorsteinsson, Paul’s Interlocutor, 218–21, has
shown, the verse suggests just the opposite, as Isaiah speaks of oppressive Gen-
tiles who cause God’s name to be blasphemed. Thorsteinsson thus reasonably
asks: “Why would Paul have chosen an indirect accusation against gentiles to
proof [sic] his case against a Jewish interlocutor?” (219).
21. In Chapter 5 I will examine in greater detail the nature of the circumcision
undergone by Gentiles at baptism. It is not merely a circumcision of the heart,
but an intangible circumcision of the foreskin of the penis as well. Consider
closely Romans 2:26: “If a foreskinned person observes the righteous decrees
of the Law, shall his foreskin not be reckoned as a circumcision?” As I will
demonstrate, the circumcision being reckoned here is unquestionably a genital
circumcision.
22. As in Romans 3:21, “but now” (Gk. nuni de) possess what Dunn, Romans,
1:164 calls “clear temporal force.”
23. Note, importantly, that Paul refers to Jews in the third person rather than in the
first person plural, further indicating that the interlocutor is a Gentile. After
all, why would Paul speak about Jews in the third person if he were speaking to
another Jew? Efforts to reconcile this third person terminology with the sup-
posed Jewish identity of the interlocutor can be creative. For example, accord-
ing to Jewett, Romans, 241: “Cleverly taking over what he understands to be
Paul’s viewpoint, the interlocutor speaks of Jews in the third person, as if he
were not one.”
24. The importance of the past tense in 3:2 is also noted by John Barclay, “Paul and
Philo on Circumcision: Romans 2:25–9 in Social and Cultural Context,” NTS
44 (1998): 536–56.
25. Stowers, A Rereading, 168, suggests that the disbelief refers rather to Israel’s
failure to be a “light to the nations.”
26. Again, efforts to reconcile Paul’s curious use of pronouns with an allegedly Jew-
ish interlocutor have produced interesting comments: Jewett, Romans, 247, says
that “the possessive pronoun h9mw=n (‘our’) and the plural question that follows,
‘what shall we say,’ suggests that the interlocutor believes that Paul must share
this view.”; according to Dunn, Romans, 1:134: “Speaking of ‘our unrighteous-
ness’ he speaks as everyman, or more precisely as a Jew who now sees the uni-
versal implications of what had hitherto been an exclusively Jewish insight.”
27. This view of Romans 3:2–9 follows mutatis mutandis, the “basic rhetorical pat-
tern” proposed by Paul Achtemeier, “Romans 3:1–8: Structure and Argument,”
Anglican Theological Review 11 (1990): 84.
28. This verse receives a good deal of attention from interpreters, in large part
because the best rendering of it is incompatible with most approaches to
Romans 1–4. Though problems abound in the verse, all of which are addressed
in comprehensive commentaries, the most significant one surrounds the curi-
ous middle voice verb proechometha. Some give it active force, yielding trans-
lations such as, “Do we have an advantage?” See, for example, C. H. Dodd,
The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, rev. ed., MNTC 6 (London: Hodder and
190 Notes
Stoughton, 1932), 46–47; Heinrich Schlier, Der Römerbrief, HThKNT 6

(Freiburg: Herder, 1977), 97. But there are no other cases of such use for this
verb, and advocates invariably struggle to explain why Paul would not simply
have used the active voice to convey this message. Others render it as a true
middle; thus, “What shall we provide in our defense.” For a consideration of
this approach, see Nils A. Dahl, “Romans 3:9: Text and Meaning,” in Paul and
Paulinism: Essays in Honor of C. K. Barrett, ed. Morna Hooker and Stephen
Wilson (London: SPCK, 1982), 184–204. The response, “not at all” (Gk. ou
pantōs), makes it an untenable reading, however. An impressive minority take
the verb as a true passive; for example, Jewett, Romans, 257; Joseph A. Fitzmyer,
Romans, AB 33 (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 331.
29. Heikki Räisänen, Paul and the Law (Tübingen: Mohr, 1983), 97–99; and
E. P. Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People: A Comparison of Patterns of
Religion (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1983), 82, both wonder how Paul could
indict both Jews and Gentiles when his argumentation up to this point has
been directed primarily at Gentiles.
30. This should not be taken as an endorsement of the view that Paul was describ-
ing a universal sinfulness in Romans 1:18–32, a view that was just rebutted.
As I read him, Paul would agree that all humanity is under sin and in need of
Christ, but in the course of the argument in Romans 1–3, Paul arrives at that
conclusion in successive stages, first indicting Gentiles (1:18–2:29) and then
Jews (3:9–3:20).
31. See note 22 of this chapter.
32. Readers will notice that my study overlooks Romans 3:24–26. This is not to
suggest that these verses lack interpretive difficulties. However, seeing as they
deal with the mechanism by which Jesus offers salvation, I find little in them
that would either support or militate against the issue for which I am pressing
in this reading. If anything, the emphasis in v. 26 on “the present time” rein-
forces my opinion of the critical temporal transition for which Paul argues in
3:21ff.
33. Popular suggestions include “righteousness,” see Jewett, Romans, 308; “found
[sc. to be the case]?” see Philip F. Esler, Conflict and Identity in Romans: The
Social Setting of Paul’s Letter (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2003), 184; “grace,”
see Dunn, Romans, 2:198; and Otto Michel, Der Brief an die Römer, KEK 6
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1955), 99. Many also point to Sirach
44:19–21, in which it is said that Abraham was tested and “found faithful.”
34. Richard Hays, “‘Have We Found Abraham to Be Our Forefather according to
the Flesh?’ A Reconsideration of Rom. 4:1,” NovT 27 (1995): 76–98.
35. Among the studies that have embraced Hays’ interpretation, see Micheal
Palmer, “ti/ ou}n: The Inferential Question in Paul’s Letter to the Romans with
a Proposed Reading of Romans 4.1,” in Discourse Analysis and Other Topics
in Biblical Greek, ed. Stanley E. Porter and D. A. Carson, supplement, JSNT
113 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1995), 200–18; Joshua W. Jipp, “Reading
the Story of Abraham, Isaac, and ‘Us’ in Romans 4,” JSNT 32, no. 2 (2009):
217–42.
Notes 191
36. Although 1 Corinthians 10:19 lacks an explicit indicator of dissent, the forceful
“but rather” (Gk. alla) leaves no doubt as to Paul’s rejection of the inference as
false.
37. Hays, “Have We Found Abraham,” 87, accordingly tweaks Paul’s question by
supplying the term “only,” in which case the inference becomes false for Paul.
Paul wishes to say that Jews, like Gentiles, lay claim to Abraham as a father
according the spirit as well as the flesh. Yet this requires Hays, rather than Paul,
to supply the operative word—“only”—in the sentence.
38. Jipp, “Reading the Story,” 219–28, also argues that Romans 4:1 should be
placed on the lips of the interlocutor, though he envisions a Jewish interlocutor
rather than a Gentile one.
39. Hays, “Have We Found Abraham,” 79, describes Paul’s inference as “correct,
though scandalous.”
40. On the standard reading, in which Paul’s question in 4:1 is simply an inquiry
into what Abraham “has found” in the past, one expects an answer or an expla-
nation of what was found, not the beginnings of a defense for a claim that as
yet has not been made. This produces the awkward translations in nearly every
English version. Consider the King James Version as exemplary: “What shall
we say then that Abraham our father, as pertaining to the flesh, hath found? For
if Abraham were justified by works” What is the “for” explaining here? On my
reading, the “for” proceeds felicitously from the preceding verse: “[Interlocu-
tor]: What shall we say? [Shall we say] that we have found Abraham to be our
forefather according to the flesh? [Paul: As a matter of fact, yes!] For if Abraham
were justified by works . . . ,” and so on.
41. As I explain in the next paragraph, I am not suggesting that Romans 4:2 alone
constitutes the defense for Paul’s claim in 4:1, but rather the entirety of 4:2–
12 does so. In 4:2, Paul merely begins the defense, saying “For if Abraham
were justified by works, then he could boast, though not before God.” In
colloquial terms, Paul says, in effect, “If Abraham demonstrated good works,
then good for him!—but it has nothing to do with his status before God.”
This initiates the sequence of Paul’s argumentation in which he claims that
a) it was Abraham’s faith, not his works, that merited God’s blessing; b) this
faith was demonstrated while Abraham was yet uncircumcised; and c) Abra-
ham received circumcision as a physical indication, a sign, of that faith. This,
I suggest, enables Paul to conclude that others who demonstrate the same
faith gain Abraham as a “father of circumcision,” even if they are putatively
uncircumcised.
42. Paul will suggest as much in Romans 9–11, however, as I demonstrate in Chap-
ter 6.
43. Some say the grammar is flawed no matter how the verse is construed: For
example, Cranfield, Critical and Exegetical Commentary, 1:237; Dunn, Romans,
1:210–11; however, Maria Neubrand, Abraham—Vater von Juden und Nichtju-
den. Eine exegetische Studie zu Röm 4 (Würzburg: Echter Verlag, 1997), 234–
35, has shown that the reading provided here is more accurate.
44. See Cranfield, Critical and Exegetical Commentary, 1:237.
192 Notes
45. As far as I can tell, pride of place goes to Lucien Cerfaux, “Abraham ‘Père en
Circoncision’ des Gentils (Rom IV,12),” in Recueil Lucien Cerfaux (Gembloux:
J. Duculot, 1954), 2:333–38. More frequently referenced is the work of James
Swetnam, “The Curious Crux at Romans 4:12,” Biblica 61 (1980): 110–15.
46. C. K. Barrett, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, 2nd ed., BNTC 6
(London: A & C Black, 1991), 85–87.
47. For example, Swetnam, “The Curious Crux,” 111; Jewett, Romans, 318; Bar-
clay, “Paul and Philo on Circumcision,” 555.
48. As I have suggested all along, providing the Greek word kai (“also,” “too,” or
“even”) with adverbial force gives an even better sense of Paul’s point: The phys-
ical circumcision, which represented the precircumcision faith, makes Abraham
into a father to all who believe, even a “father of circumcision” to them.
49. Hays, “Have We Found Abraham,” 87, has provided this objection proleptically.
1981), 279.
Chapter 5
1. The following discussion appears in b. ‘Abod. Zar. 27a (Vilna: Romm, 1880–
1886). For further consideration of it, see Shaye J. D. Cohen, Why Aren’t Jewish
Women Circumcised: Gender and Covenant in Judaism (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005), 93–101.
2. Of course, some Gentiles are circumcised. According to b. ‘Abod. Zar. 27a, cir-
cumcised Gentiles such as Arabs or Gibeonites are considered to be uncircum-
cised despite the fleshly reality, a contradiction that should make better sense in
a moment.
3. Admittedly, this is not the explicit issue addressed in b. ‘Abod. Zar. 27a. As I
mentioned above, the ostensible aim in the passage is simply to distinguish
between two justifications for invalidating a circumcision performed by a
Gentile. The difference is that Rav’s proof text likewise invalidates a circum-
cision performed by a Jewish woman, while Rabbi Yohanan’s does not, and
the reason is the principle that a Jewish woman is “reckoned as though cir-
cumcised,” even if she is not commanded to be so. It is not possible to know
whether the editors of the Talmud originated the idea of “reckoned circumci-
sion” in this passage or whether it reflects a notion arrived at through previous
rabbinic reflection on the matter. In any case, there can be no doubt that Jews
had previously considered the status of circumcised Gentiles and uncircum-
cised Jews (e.g., hemophiliacs) vis-à-vis a covenant defined by circumcision (cf.
the reflection of Jeremiah on the matter centuries earlier [e.g., Jer. 9:25–26]),
even if the particular solution described above first appeared in late antiquity.
4. Many important manuscripts have “us,” rather than “you” in v. 7. The present
reading, however, enjoys what Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the
Greek New Testament (London: United Bible Societies, 1971), 536, has called
“superior and more diversified support.”
Notes 193
5. A good deal of attention has been given to whether the Greek verb bebaioō
should be rendered as “fulfill” or “confirm.” See Robert Jewett, Romans (Min-
neapolis, MN: Fortress, 2007), 892, for a brief consideration of both sides. I do
not believe my argument benefits or suffers from either of the two translations.
6. This general approach to Romans 15:7–13 is found in, among others, Ulrich
Wilckens, Der Brief an die Römer, EKKNT 6 (Zurich: Benzinger Verlag,
1982), 3:104–9; Klaus Haacker, Der Brief des Paulus an die Römer, HThKNT
6 (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1999), 295–300; Eduard Lohse, Der
Brief an die Römer, KEK 4 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 386–
90; Jewett, Romans, 886–99; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans, AB 33 (New York:
Doubleday, 1993), 704–8.
7. In addition to Romans 3:30, one might point to Romans 4:9; Galatians 2:9.
See further Joel Marcus, “The Circumcision and the Uncircumcision in Rome,”
NTS 35 (1989): 67–81.
8. See especially Sam K. Williams, “The ‘Righteousness of God’ in Romans,” JBL
99, no. 2 (1980): 241–90; Lloyd Gaston, Paul and the Torah (Vancouver: Uni-
versity of British Columbia, 1987), 133.
9. In order to determine a referent for the promises, many conflate these two inad-
equate alternatives, combining God’s promises to the patriarchs with the sup-
posedly messianic promises in the prophets; see, for example, Otto Michel, Der
Brief an die Römer, KEK 6 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1955), 322;
C. K. Barrett, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, 2nd ed., BNTC 6
(London: A & C Black, 1991), 249. Oddly, many fine commentators make no
effort at all to link Christ’s role as “servant of the circumcision” to “the promises
to the patriarchs,” as though there were no interpretive crux whatsoever; see,
for example, J. Ross Wagner, “The Christ, Servant of Jew and Gentile: A Fresh
Approach to Romans 15:8–9,” JBL 116, no. 3 (1997): 477.
10. Williams, “‘Righteousness of God,’” 285.
11. See Ekkehard W. Stegemann, “Coexistence and Transformation: Reading the
Politics of Identity in Romans in an Imperial Context,” in Reading Paul in Con-
text: Explorations in Identity Formation. Essays in Honour of William S. Campbell,
ed. Kathy Ehrensperger and J. Brian Tucker (London: T & T Clark, 2010), 16–
17. For Stegemann, however, circumcision is still understood metonymically as
“Jews, but not all of them.”
12. Meanings of peritomē, “circumcision,” vary in the New Testament. It can
indeed refer to the Jewish people identified according to one of their most
peculiar characteristics (e.g., Rom. 3:30, 4:9; Gal. 2:7–9; Eph. 2:11). For more
on the possible derivation of this usage, see Marcus, “The Circumcision,” 67–
81. Most would include the term “father of [the] circumcision” in Romans 4:12
in that category as well; however, as I suggested in the previous chapter, the
duplication of the definite article tois in 4:12b identifies Abraham as a “father
of circumcision” for manifestly uncircumcised Gentiles because they share in
the faith for which he received circumcision as a sign. In other words, peritomē
refers to a circumcised penis. Peritomē can also refer to the ritual of circumcision
(e.g., Gal. 5:7; Phil. 3:5) or to the state of being circumcised, in either the heart
194 Notes
or the genitalia (e.g., Rom. 2:25, 26, 27, 28, 3:1, 4:10, 11; 1 Cor. 7:19; Gal.
5:6, 6:15).
13. Mohel is the Hebrew term for the person who performs the rite of circumci-
sion in a Jewish context. For more on the rite of circumcision in ancient Jewish
contexts, see Lawrence A. Hoffman, Covenant of Blood: Circumcision and Gen-
der in Rabbinic Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Cohen,
Why Aren’t Jewish; Elizabeth W. Mark, ed., The Covenant of Circumcision: New
Perspectives on an Ancient Jewish Rite (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press,
2003); Andreas Blaschke, Beschneidung: Zeugnisse der Bibel und verwandter
Texte, Texte und Arbeiten zum neutestamentlichen Zeitalter 28 (Tübingen:
Francke Verlag, 1998); Nina E. Livesey, Circumcision as a Malleable Symbol,
WBC II 295 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010); Matthew Thiessen, Contesting
Conversion: Genealogy, Circumcision, and Identity in Ancient Judaism and Chris-
tianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
14. F. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Galatians, NIGTC (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerd-
mans, 1982), 141, offers a lucid rendering of Paul’s logic in this case. Hermann
W. Beyer, “dia/konoj,” TDNT, 2:88–89, has suggested that “‘Servant’ here
might be rendered ‘promoter.’” Similarly, Louis Martyn, Galatians, AB 33A
(New York: Doubleday, 1997), 255, suggests that the accusation to which Paul
is responding is that he has “in effect turned Christ into one who condones and
even facilitates sin, rather than combating it” (emphasis added).
15. Admittedly, this is not the predominant meaning of the word family in the NT,
but neither is it rare or idiosyncratic and, as we have just seen, it has this sense
in the only other case where Paul applies it to Christ. Many prefer to interpret
Romans 15:8 in light of the gospels’ use of the diakonos word family rather than
Paul’s own usage; for example, James D. G. Dunn, Romans, WBC 38B (Dallas,
TX: Word, 1988), 2:846, sees an allusion to Christ’s comments about service
and self-sacrifice in Mark 10:43–45. Yet Christ’s discussion of self-denial has to
do with his passion, not his ministry among the Jews while he was alive.
16. This understanding of the patriarchal promises is basically similar to Wil-
liams, “‘Righteousness of God,’” 286. See, too, Hans Wilhelm Schmidt, Der
Brief des Paulus an die Römer, ThHkNT 6 (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt,
1963), 239–40, who similarly emphasizes the universal scope of the patriarchal
promises.
17. The syntactical relationship between v. 9a and v. 8 has received much scholarly
attention, since it can be read in several different ways. For example, J. C. von
Hofmann, Die heilige Schrift Neuen Testaments (Nördlingen: C. H. Beck,
1868), 3:591–92, sees v. 9a as an independent sentence with the main verb as
an optative of wish: “Would that the Gentiles glorify God on behalf of mercy!”
Far more frequently, however, v. 9a is taken to be either a second purpose clause
or a resumption of Paul’s indirect speech. On the first score, Paul would be
saying that Christ’s service to the circumcised on behalf of the truth of God
has two consequences: (1) it fulfills the promises to the patriarchs, and (2)
it causes Gentiles to glorify God on behalf of mercy; if it is a resumption of
the indirect speech, then Paul would be saying two discrete things: (1) Christ
Notes 195
became a servant of the circumcision, on behalf of the truth of God, in order

to confirm the promises to the fathers, and (2) Gentiles are glorifying God on
behalf of mercy. Unimpressed with either alternative, Wagner, “Christ,” 481,
takes v. 9a to be an accusative of respect, so that Christ has become a servant in
two respects: (1) a servant of the circumcised, on behalf of the truth of God, in
order to confirm the promises of the patriarchs, and (2) a servant with respect
to the Gentiles, on behalf of mercy, in order to glorify God. Each of these pro-
posals has strengths and weaknesses, but for our purposes it is most important
to observe that all of them are based on the assumption that diakonos peritomēs
means “servant to the Jews.” When one reads it as “agent of circumcision,” then
any of the syntactical arrangements above makes sense, except for Wagner’s. My
translation understands v. 9a to be a resumption of Paul’s indirect speech. In
this case, Romans 15:8 fits cleanly between vv. 7 and 9, both contextually and
grammatically. Verse 8 constitutes a justification for v. 7, thus accounting for
the introductory gar; at the same time, v. 8 provides a fitting apposition for the
claim in v. 9, conjoined by a copulative de. That is to say, in order to defend his
claim that Christ has welcomed Gentiles into the glory of God, Paul says, on
the one hand, that Christ has become an “agent of circumcision,” on account of
the truth of God, in order to confirm the patriarchal promises, and on the other
hand, that Gentiles are now glorifying God on account of mercy (cf. the merci-
ful election of Gentiles described in Rom. 9). If v. 9a in fact forms a secondary
purpose clause, the interpretation works equally well. Paul would then say that
Christ became an “agent of circumcision” in order to confirm the patriarchal
promises, and this happened in order that Gentiles might glorify God. In either
case, the sentence becomes sensible only when one acknowledges that Christ
has become an “agent of circumcision” for Gentiles, not a servant or minister
to the Jewish people. For a recent consideration of the syntax, see A. Andrew
Das, “‘Praise the Lord, All You Gentiles’: The Encoded Audience of Romans
15.7–13,” JSNT 34, no. 1 (2011): 90–96.
18. See Das, “‘Praise the Lord,’” 98–101.
19. Because most commentators think Paul has both Jews and Gentiles in view,
they have devised strategies for broadening the focus of the catena so that it
refers to both Jews and Gentiles praising God in unison—as Dunn, Romans,
2:853, puts it, “an expression of the ideal of a humanity (Gentile and Jew)
united in worship of the same God and by hope in the same Christ.” Only
one of the four citations even remotely alludes to Jews, however. In v. 10, Paul
quotes Deuteronomy 32:43, which says, “Rejoice, Gentiles, with his people.”
Even here, however, the call is upon Gentiles to rejoice, just as it is exclusively
in the quotations adduced in vv. 9, 11, and 12. As Gaston, Paul, 134, puts it,
“This section deals solely with the theme of Gentile inclusion.”
20. As Das, Solving the Romans Debate (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2007), 106–7,
observes, this assumption is well grounded. The Greek terminology used with
regard to food (koinos and kathera), in particular, suggests a dispute over Jewish
scruples. As we will see momentarily, however, Das also correctly recognizes that
Jewish concerns and behaviors do not require audience members of Jewish origin.
196 Notes
21. According to Mark D. Nanos, The Mystery of Romans (Minneapolis, MN:

Fortress, 1996), 85–165, the “weak” are to be identified as “non-Christian
Jews.” For a detailed critique of this position, see Das, Solving, 115–48; Robert
A. J. Gagnon, “Why the ‘Weak’ at Rome Cannot Be Non-Christian Jews,”
CBQ 62, no. 1 (2000): 64–82.
22. This is by no means the exclusive scholarly opinion, of course. Many have
claimed that the “weak” and the “strong” have no objective referents in Rome,
but refer to “weak” and “strong” faith in general terms. See, for example,
Robert Karris, “Romans 14:1–15:13 and the Occasion of Romans,” in The
Romans Debate, ed. Karl P. Donfried, 2nd ed. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson,
1991), 65–84; J. Paul Sampley, “The Weak and the Strong: Paul’s Careful
and Crafty Rhetorical Strategy in Romans 14:1–15:13,” in The Social World
of the First Christians: Essays in Honor of Wayne Meeks, ed. L. Michael White
and O. Larry Yarbrough (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1995), 40–52; Wayne
A. Meeks, “Judgment and the Brother: Romans 14:1–15:13,” in Tradition and
Interpretation in the New Testament, ed. Gerald F. Hawthorne and Otto Betz
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987), 293–300. According to Max Rauer, Die
“Schwachen” in Korinth und Rom nach den Paulusbriefen (Frieburg im Briesgau:
Herder, 1923), 164–68, the “weak” are individuals (rather than a faction) in
Rome who, as former Gentile Gnostics or initiates into the mystery cults, have
incorporated ascetic practices into their new religious life.
23. See Das, “‘Praise the Lord,’” 101–6.
24. Das, Solving, especially 113–14, proposes that “weak” baptized God-fearers
would have struggled to live alongside baptized Gentiles with no commitment
to the Law. Das may be right, but there is just as much chance that Gentile
interest in the Law was the result of the success of Paul’s rival missionaries who
preached a gospel that included Law observance.
25. According to Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New
York: Doubleday, 1997), 610, “About 60 percent of critical scholarship holds
that Paul did not write the letter.” Provided there has not been significant fluc-
tuation in the last ten years, then roughly four out of ten think Paul did write it.
For an introduction to the basic arguments for and against Pauline authorship
of Colossians, see Raymond F. Collins, Letters That Paul Did Not Write (Wilm-
ington, DE: Glazier, 1988), 171–208.
26. This circle of disciples is often referred to as a Pauline “school.” Outi Leppä,
The Making of Colossians (Helsinki: Finnish Exegetical Society 2003) offers a
fine introduction to the issues surrounding the pseudepigraphy of Colossians.
While many attribute authorship of Colossians to a Pauline “school,” Leppä
notes that “there are still different opinions about the character of the school.
According to Lohse, Schenke, Müller, and Kiley, it was set up after the death
of Paul in order to protect his heritage, while Conzelmann, Ollrog, Ludwig,
Gnilka, and Hartman assume that the school already started to develop during
Paul’s lifetime” (12). Further dispute arises when it comes to the dependence
of Colossians on Paul’s genuine epistles, where opinions range from reliance on
none, to some, to all of them. For further discussion of the so-called School of
Notes 197
Paul, see Angela Standhartinger, “Colossians and the Pauline School,” NTS 50
(2004): 572–93.
27. Some have proposed that this refers to the flesh of Christ, but if this were so
then the author would have indicated as much, just as he does in Colossians
1:22 and 1:24.
28. This option appears to receive the most support among more recent commen-
taries: For example, Markus Barth and Helmut Blanke, Colossians, trans. Astrid
B. Beck, AB 34 (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 364–65; Dunn, The Epistles to
the Colossians and to Philemon, NIGTC (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996),
158; Peter O’Brien, Colossians, Philemon, WBC 44 (Waco, TX: Word, 1982),
117; Robert McL. Wilson, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Colossians
and Philemon, ICC 51/57 (London: T & T Clark, 2005), 204.
29. According to Dunn, Epistles to the Colossians, 159, the participial phrase, “Hav-
ing been buried with him in the baptism” should be linked to the next clause,
“You were also raised up with him,” rather than the preceding one, “You were
even circumcised with a circumcision.” Grammatically, however, this inter-
pretation is untenable because the participle suntaphentes is subordinate to
perietmēthēte in v. 11, not to sunēgerthēte in v. 12, which comes in a relative
clause that is itself subordinate within the participial construction.
30. For example, Dunn, Epistles to the Colossians, 147–58; Lohse, Colossians and
Philemon, trans. William R. Poehlmann and Robert J. Karris, Hermeneia (Phil-
adelphia: Fortress, 1971), 101–3, also hears echoes of the initiation rites from
the mystery cults.
31. While the Septuagint does not use acheiropoiētos, it employs cheiropoiētos
widely to describe graven images and false gods (e.g., Lev. 26:1, 30; Isa. 2:18;
21:9; Dan. 5:4; Jdt. 8:18; Wis. 14:8). As O’Brien, Colossians, Philemon, 115,
observes, cheiropoiētos (Mark 14:58; Acts 7:48; 17:24; Eph. 2:11; Heb. 9:11,
24) and acheiropoiētos (Mark 14:58; 2 Cor. 5:1; and here) in the NT “are used
to set forth the contrast between what is constructed by man and the work of
God . . . To speak of something ‘not made with hands’ (acheiropoiētos) is to
assert that God himself has created it.”
32. Cf. the stiff neck that requires circumcision in 1QS 5.5 (James H. Charles-
worth, et al., eds., The Dead Sea Scrolls: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek Texts with
English Translations, Volume 1, Rule of the Community and Related Documents
[Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1994], 20). For this understanding
of Colossians 2:11, see Eduard Schweizer, The Letter to the Colossians, trans.
Andrew Chester (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1982), 141; Lohse, Colossians
and Philemon, 101–3.
33. The one exception is Jeremiah 9:24, where akrobustia probably refers to a non-
physical circumcision, though the grammar of the verse is awkward. Otherwise,
akrobustia by itself always refers to the foreskin of the penis (e.g., Gen. 17:23,
34:14; Exod. 4:25; Josh. 5:3; 1 Sam. 18:25, 27; 2 Sam. 3:14; 1 Macc. 1:15).
The Greek hē sarx tēs akrobustias also refers to the genital foreskin (e.g., Gen.
17:11, 14, 24, 25; 34:24; Lev. 12:3; Jdt. 14:10).
34. See the similar point made by Barth and Blanke, Colossians, 367.
198 Notes
35. See, for example, Marvin Vincent, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the
Epistles to the Philippians and to Philemon, ICC 50 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark,
1961), 93–94; Gerald F. Hawthorne and Ralph P. Martin, Philippians, rev. ed.,
WBC 43 (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2004), 175; O’Brien, The Epistle
to the Philippians: A Commentary on the Greek Text, NIGTC (Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 1991), 358; Bonnie B. Thurston and Judith M. Ryan, Phi-
lippians and Philemon, Sacra Pagina 10 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 2005),
113–15; G. Walter Hansen, The Letter to the Philippians, Pillar New Testa-
ment Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), 220, though note
his disclaimer: “Paul’s bold claim that all believers in Christ are included in the
circumcision, in the people of God, does not imply that the Jewish people are
excluded from the people of God.”
36. Cf. Mark 7:28.
37. Epispasm, or the reversal of physical circumcision, was hardly unknown to Jews
in the ancient world (e.g., Jub. 15:34; 1 Macc. 1:15). For a helpful discussion
of the evidence, see Blaschke, Beschneidung, 139–44. In this context, however,
Paul cannot be alluding to such a practice. Paul insists that one’s transgression
against the Law produces a reckoned epispasm, not one visible in the flesh.
38. See the similar argument by Peder Borgen, “Paul Preaches Circumcision and
Pleases Men,” in Paul and Paulinism: Essays in Honor of C. K. Barrett, ed. Morna
Hooker and Stephen Wilson (London: SPCK, 1982), 37–46. Of course, Borgen’s
understanding of the figurative circumcision misconstrued by Paul’s opponents
is much different than the concept of reckoned genital circumcision proposed in
this study. For Borgen, it is the standard notion of the ethical circumcision (of
the heart) achieved through the renunciation of vices and illicit behaviors.
Chapter 6
1. For an introduction to the Ash‘arite school and its most prominent personali-
ties, see Neal Robinson, “Ash‘ariyya and Mu‘tazila,” in Routledge Encyclopedia
of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig (London: Routledge, 1998), 1:519–23; Kojiro
Nakamura, “Al-Ghazali, Abu Hamid,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
4:61–68; Michael E. Marmura, “Al-Ghazali,” in Dictionary of Literary Biogra-
phy: Medieval Philosophers, ed. Jeremiah Hackett (Detroit, MI: Gale Research,
1992), 205–13.
2. The analogy between Ash‘arite metaphysics and animation was brought to my
attention by Barry S. Kogan at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute
of Religion in Cincinnati, Ohio. Professor Kogan invokes a similar analogy,
the filmstrip, in Averroes and the Metaphysics of Causation (Albany, NY: SUNY
Press, 1985), 92.
3. Three protestations underscore the sincerity of Paul’s effusion. “I am speaking
the truth in Christ,” Paul exclaims, “I am not lying; my conscience bears me
witness through the holy spirit” (9:1). Also threefold is Paul’s description of
his grief: “I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could
wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my
Notes 199
own people” (9:2–4). Robert Jewett, Romans, Hermeneia (Minneapolis, MN:

Fortress, 2007), 556, calls it a “threefold asseveration of Paul’s sorrow, three
witnesses as it were, in hierarchical order.”
4. According to John Piper, The Justification of God: An Exegetical and Theological
Study of Romans 9:1–23, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1993), 65–67, the
clause negated in 9:6b is the second “Israel,” so that Paul in effect claims that
none of those presently descended from Israel are in fact a part of Israel as it
really is. This is impossible in light of Paul’s claim in Romans 11:1, however,
that he and other elect Jews have indeed remained a part of Israel.
5. Most commentators agree with James D. G. Dunn, Romans, WBC 38B (Dal-
las, TX: Word, 1988), 2:681, that “all Israel” in Romans 11:26a refers to “Israel
as a whole, as a people, whose corporate identity and wholeness could not be
lost even if in the end there were some (or indeed many) individual exceptions.”
See C. E. B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the
Romans, ICC 45/2 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1975), 2:577, who cites numer-
ous supporters. For even more bibliography, see Jewett, Romans, 701–2. The
evidence used to justify this interpretation is m. Sanh. 10:1, in which “all Israel”
is said to have a share in the world to come, but a litany of exceptions follows.
Biblical support is found in 1 Samuel 7:5, 25:1; 1 Kings 12:1; 2 Chronicles
12:1; and Daniel 9:11. Jewett, Romans, 701–2, is dubious of this view: “It
seems most likely that Paul’s ‘mystery’ was believed to include all members of
the house of Israel, who, without exception, would be saved.”
6. N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1992),
236, describes the problem and some proposed solutions as follows: “Put sim-
ply, the issue is this: if Paul rejects the possibility of a status of special privilege
for Jews in chs. 9 and 10, how does he manage, apparently, to reinstate such a
position in ch. 11? It is this apparent inconsistency that has led many to sug-
gest that the section contains a fundamental self-contradiction, which is then
explained either as a resurgence of patriotic sentiment (Dodd) or the vagaries of
apocalyptic fantasy (Bultmann).”
7. As Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans, AB 33 (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 624,
observes, this is the view of Augustine in Ep. 149.19 (Corpus scriptorium ecclesi-
asticorum latinorum, ed. Alois Goldbacher [Vienna: Tempsky, 1895], 44.365),
but not in Quaestiones evangeliorum 2.33 (Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne
[Paris, 1844], 35.1347) or De civitate Dei 20.29 (Corpus scriptorium ecclesiasti-
corum latinorum, ed. E. Hoffman [Vienna, 1899], 40.503).
8. For a review of the full array of approaches to Romans 9–11 available in the
contemporary scholarly arena, see Christopher Zoccali, “‘And So All Israel Will
Be Saved’: Competing Interpretations of Romans 11.26 in Pauline Scholar-
ship,” JSNT 30, no. 3 (2008): 289–318; Jason A. Staples, “What Do the Gen-
tiles Have to Do with ‘All Israel’?: A Fresh Look at Romans 11:25–27,” JBL
130, no. 2 (2011): 371–90.
9. Many scholars feel compelled to apologize for this position before making it.
Wright, “The Letter to the Romans,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 10
(Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2002), 689, is exemplary: “To speak personally for
200 Notes
a moment. When I began my study of Romans I was strongly committed to

. . . understanding Paul to be saying that a very large number from national
Israel would be saved at or around the time of the second coming, through the
fresh revelation of the gospel that that event would supply. I changed my mind
reluctantly, because of what seemed to me strong exegetical arguments; and,
though this has put me in a minority even among my friends, let alone among
the guild of New Testament scholars, I have seen no reason to change my mind
again.”
10. Let me stress the word “facilitate,” because I do not believe this reading of
Romans 9–11 understands Paul himself to be a supersessionist. Rather, it facili-
tates the use of Paul by post-Pauline Christian supersessionists. The difference
is significant; as I understand it, Paul cannot be a Christian supersessionist
because he has not yet conceptualized something other than Judaism that can
therefore supersede Judaism. Yes, Paul is a critic of Judaism, indeed a severe one,
but his critique comes from within Judaism, not from without. For more on
Paul as a “Jewish cultural critic,” see the subsequent chapter, as well as Daniel
Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994), 52. Only after the emergence of Christianity, concep-
tualized as something different from Judaism, can Christian supersession over
Judaism be proclaimed. Once this has happened, then Paul’s understanding
of the fulfillment of Judaism in Christ becomes the fulfillment of Judaism in
Christianity—that is, Christian supersessionism.
11. For a fuller list of ancient advocates of this view, as well as a discussion of
Augustine’s ambivalence on the matter, see Fitzmyer, Romans, 623–24; for the
argument in modern times, see Hervé Ponsot, “Et Ainsi Tout Israel Sera Sauvé:
Rom, XI, 26a,” RB 89 (1982): 406–17; Francois Refoulé, “. . . Et Ainsi Tout
Israel Sera Sauvés”: Romains 11:25–32 (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1984); Wright,
“The Letter,” 672–99; and Wright, Climax, 231–57.
12. Wright, Climax, 238. Although Wright’s rhyme is catchy and memorable, his
choice of the term “race” is problematic. Presumably he means it to mark off
inclusion in a community based, among other things, on the perception of
shared physical descent from a common ancestor. The term “ethnicity” suf-
fices to delineate this. While in previous generations it was popular to speak of
Jews, both ancient and modern, in racial terms, obvious political circumstances
have made the use of racial terminology with respect to Jews unpalatable and
inappropriate, and in any case recent critical scholarship has suggested that
race as a concept for categorizing people is a uniquely modern and political
one and unhelpful in analysis of the ancient world. Others have challenged
the value of “race” as an analytical category in the modern world as well. For a
helpful introduction to this literature, see Denise Kimber Buell, Why This New
Race? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), especially 5–20. Buell cor-
rectly observes that “religion” and “ethnicity” are modern categories no less than
“race,” and she therefore proposes that race be reinjected where appropriate into
studies of antiquity, just as “ethnicity” and “religion” are. However, Buell fails
to demonstrate how “race” should be distinguished from “ethnicity” in such
Notes 201
studies, and resorts to using those terms interchangeably, often in the form
“race/ethnicity.” In my estimation, until it can be shown why “race,” as opposed
to “ethnicity,” is required for such studies—that is, how it facilitates a finer
degree of understanding—we are better off avoiding it for the reasons suggested
above.
13. I am indebted to Wright, “The Letter,” 690, for the expression, “polemical
redefinition.”
14. Jewett, Romans, 682, notes that “the idea of the dependency of branches on
roots is widely used in Jewish sources (Job 18:16; Jer. 17:18; Ezek. 31:8; Hos.
9:16; Sir. 1:20; 40:15), and there are many references to Israel having been
planted by God (Ps. 92:13; Jer. 11:17; Ps. Sol. 14:3–4; 1 Enoch 84.6). The ref-
erences to Israel as the ‘righteous plant’ in Jub. 1.16; 7.34; 16.26; 21.24; 36.6;
1 Enoch 10.16; 93.2–10 are particularly relevant for Paul’s reference to the root
as ‘holy.’” Jewett rightly dismisses as unpersuasive the effort to interpret the
olive tree as Christ by Maria Neubrand and Johannes Seidel, “‘Eingepfropft in
den edlen Ölbaum’ (Röm 11,24): Der Ölbaum ist nicht Israel,” Biblische Noti-
zen 105 (2000): 68–71. According to Dunn, Romans, 2:660, “It can hardly be
doubted that Paul has Israel as a people in view.”
15. For the intriguing suggestion that the “full number of Gentiles” envisioned by
Paul is in fact a remnant of the lost tribes of Israel (i.e., the Northern King-
dom), which joins a remnant from Judah (i.e., the Southern Kingdom) so as to
reconstitute “all Israel” of yore, see Staples, “What Do the Gentiles,” 374–88.
Staples’s interpretation dovetails nicely with the one proposed here, as it sup-
poses that Paul sees Gentiles saved as Israel, not as Gentiles, a scenario Staples
calls “a shocking affront and a grave threat to traditional Israelite identity”
(383).
16. Advocates for the view that Paul envisions a future salvation of Jews basically
fall into two camps, though variations are found within each. According to one
camp, Jews will be saved because some way or another they will come to faith
in Christ. According to the other, they will be saved by means of an unspecified
Sonderweg (Ger. “special way”) whose precise nature will be understood only
once it has occurred. The latter approach is associated most often with Krister
Stendahl, Meanings: The Bible as Document and as Guide (Philadelphia, PA:
Fortress, 1984), especially 213–15; and Franz Mussner, Traktat über die Juden
(München: Kösel, 1979), 60. For a thorough critique of the Sonderweg posi-
tion, see Reidar Hvalvik, “A ‘Sonderweg’ for Israel. A Critical Examination of a
Current Interpretation of Romans 11.25–27,” JSNT 38 (1990): 87–107.
17. Paul does not rest at reciting the facts, however. He also discloses why the gen-
erations turned out as they did. Isaac and Jacob were not chosen on the basis of
their own merits, but according to the discretion of God. Indeed, God decreed
the supplanting of Jacob over Esau while they were still in the womb, before
either could demonstrate his worthiness, thus indicating that membership in
God’s people is not only irrespective of physical descent, it is unaffected by
works as well. In this section, of course, Paul is again communicating with a
Gentile interlocutor. I do not know if this is the same Gentile interlocutor with
202 Notes
whom Paul conversed in Romans 2–4. According to Jewett, Romans, 581, he

is “traditionally identified as an unbelieving Jew,” citing Fréderic Godet, Com-
mentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, ed. T. W. Chambers (Grand Rapids,
MI: Kregel, 1977), 351; Piper, The Justification of God, 70–73. I do not think
the identity of the interlocutor is as important here as it is in Romans 2–4, for
Paul’s argument would be the same no matter who he is.
18. See Fitzmyer, Romans, 624: “The understanding of ‘all Israel’ in such a spiritual
sense, however, is scarcely correct; it goes against the meaning of Israēl in the rest
of Romans . . . and especially that in the immediately preceding v 25c.” Jewett,
Romans, 701, makes a similar claim: “Some interpreters have proposed that ‘all
Israel’ refers to elect believers, whether Jews or Gentiles, but in all of the earlier
references to ‘Israel’ in Romans, the ethnic Israel is in view.” Yet, when com-
menting on Romans 9:6b, Jewett, Romans, 575, claims that there is a distinction
“‘between believing and physical Israel’ as determined by their response to the
‘word of God.’” Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 1996), 721, offers a savvier version of the argument. In light of the
reevaluation of terminology in Galatians 6:16 and Philippians 3:3, he concedes
that Paul would have been capable of applying the name “Israel” to those who
believe in Romans 11:26a, but it cannot be so because it would have militated
against Paul’s exhortation against Gentile arrogance. To grant them the title of
“Israel” would have made them more arrogant, however, not less.
19. Wright, “The Letter,” 690: “9:6 gives the lie to the constantly repeated assertion
that one cannot make ‘Israel’ in 11:26 mean something different from what it
means in 11:25. ‘Not all who are of Israel are in fact Israel’; Paul opened his
great argument with a clear signal that he was redefining ‘Israel,’ and here the
argument comes full circle.”
20. Those advocating the “kingdom of God” include William Sanday and Arthur
C. Headlam, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans,
ICC 45 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1895), 335; Cranfield, Critical and Exegeti-
cal Commentary, 2:576; Fitzmyer, Romans, 622. Those preferring an eschato-
logical pilgrimage include Roger D. Aus, “Paul’s Travel Plans to Spain and the
‘Full Number of the Gentiles’ of Rom xi.25,” NovT 21, no. 3 (1979): 251–
52; Cristoph Plag, Israels Wege zum Heil. Eine Untersuchung zu Römer 9 bis
11 (Stuttgart: Calwer, 1969), 56–58; Heikki Räisänen, “Römer 9–11. Anal-
yse eines geistigen Ringens,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt 2.25.4
(1987): 2922.
21. Occasionally it has been argued that houtōs anticipates the kathōs in the follow-
ing verse, so that Paul provides the manner of Israel’s salvation in the subse-
quent proof text. Paul rarely uses this inverted construction, however. See Peter
Stuhlmacher, “Zur Interpretation von Röm 11:25–32,” in Probleme biblisher
Theologie, ed. Hans W. Wolff (Munich: Kaiser, 1971), 555–70.
22. Routinely it is claimed that the Greek term achri hou (“until”) in 11:25b intro-
duces such a temporal sequence. Dunn, Romans, 2:679–80, comments as fol-
lows: “‘until the full number of the Gentiles has come in. achri hou certainly
suggests a temporal sequence (‘until the time when’), implying that once the
Notes 203
full number of the Gentiles has come in Israel’s blindness will cease.” Ponsot,
“Et Ainsi,” 412–13, has shown, however, that this is not necessarily the case.
True, Paul uses achri hou to emphasize the culmination of a temporal sequence
in Galatians 3:2, when Paul says that a child “is subjected to stewards and
guardians until the time predetermined by his father.” In 1 Corinthians 11:26,
however, Paul’s use of achri hou emphasizes the performance of the Eucharist
prior to Christ’s arrival, not the culminating event. By eating the bread and
drinking the cup, the Corinthians “proclaim the death of the Lord until he
comes.” A similar emphasis on the duration, rather than the culmination, in
an achri hou clause appears in 1 Corinthians 15:25 and, outside of the Pauline
corpus, in Hebrews 3:13. Accordingly, Paul’s emphasis in Romans 11:25 is not
the event that follows Israel’s blindness, but the duration of Israel’s blindness.
23. Classic commentaries that see a temporal succession of events include, among
others, Cranfield, Critical and Exegetical Commentary, 2:575. See also Ernst
Käsemann, Commentary on Romans, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 1980), 314; C. K. Barrett, A Commentary on the Epistle to the
Romans, 2nd ed., BNTC 6 (London: A & C Black, 1991), 206.
24. Pieter W. van der Horst, “‘Only Then Will All Israel Be Saved’: A Short Note
on the Meaning of kai houtōs in Romans 11:26,” JBL 119 (2000): 521–25, has
shown a few instances in which Greek authors from Thucydides to Irenaeus
impute a temporal function to houtōs, but such usage pales in comparison to
the number of examples of houtōs in the standard modal sense, particularly
in the Pauline corpus. Van der Horst adduces just two examples from Paul, 1
Thessalonians 4:16–17 and 1 Corinthians 14:25. In 1 Thessalonians 4:16–17,
Paul writes: “The Lord himself will descend from heaven with a command,
with a voice from an archangel and a trumpet-blast from God, and the dead
in Christ will rise first. Then we who remain alive will be snatched up together
with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so (houtōs) we will be
with the Lord forever.” As Abraham J. Malherbe, The Letters to the Thessalo-
nians, AB 32B (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 277, has observed, the “so” in
this case does not introduce a new stage in a temporal sequence, but it “summa-
rizes what precedes . . . and adds that the association with the Lord will be eter-
nal.” The term operates similarly in 1 Corinthians 14:25, which describes the
experience of a stranger in a church: “The hidden matters of his heart become
exposed and so (houtōs) he will fall on his face and worship God, proclaiming,
‘God is truly among you!’” Again, the person’s prostration and proclamation do
not follow the exposure of his heart as a discrete event, but these events describe
the way in which his heart is laid bare. In any case, whereas these two cases are
debatable, there is no dispute that Paul presumes the modal sense of houtōs on
the sixty other occasions he employs the term.
25. To better understand the different implications of reading the adverb as causal
or temporal, consider the following sentences taken from the world of chess: If
I were to say, “I advanced my pawns, I promoted one to a queen, I trapped the
king on the back rank, and in this manner I won,” the emphasis would be on
the process by which I gained the victory. That is, my victory was won through
204 Notes
the movement of my pawns, my queen, and so on. Were I to say, “I advanced

my pawns, I promoted one to a queen, I trapped the king on the back rank,
and then I won,” I would be describing a sequence of events and my emphasis
would be on the last unspecified stroke by which I achieved the victory. The
movement of my pawns and queen would no longer be there to describe the
way I won, but as a prelude to the subsequent final move.
26. See, for example, Jewett, Romans, 701; Dunn, Romans, 2:681.
27. Paul includes the Greek term ei pōs in his phrasing of the wish, a mitigating
expression that suggests Paul is not sure he will save anyone on account of the
jealousy he incites.
28. Admittedly, 11:28–32 are compatible with the prevailing reading, in which a
complete salvation of the Jews is foreseen. Paul emphasizes the ongoing love of
God for the forsaken Israelites (v. 28), as well as the unalienable nature of their
calling (v. 29). So too, he notes that the alienation of the Israelites has happened
in order that they might receive God’s mercy. Again, however, these statements
must be understood in view of the sense of contingency Paul has expressed pre-
viously. Yes, God still loves the forsaken Israelites; yes, they still have a natural
claim to belong in Israel; and yes, their forsakenness is intended to grant them
access to God’s mercy. But all these things depend on their recognition of Christ
as God’s Messiah, and Paul hopes for, but does not predict, this eventuality.
29. Interpreters generally overcome the discrepancy by allowing the modal sense
of houtōs to bleed into a temporal one, so that the conversion sparked by jeal-
ousy occurs in connection with the second coming even if the relationship
between these phenomena remains indecipherable. Even the finest of scholars
have failed to discern a sensible correlation between a conversion prompted
by jealousy and a proof text about divine intervention at the end of days. The
capitulation of Dunn, Romans, 2:692, is exemplary: “What role Christ’s return
would actually play in the end events is by no means clear, not least how it
would ‘turn away ungodliness from Jacob’ and how this fitted with Israel’s being
provoked to jealousy by the gentile influx.”
30. Most take Zion to be the “Jerusalem above” mentioned in Galatians 4:26, but
“Jerusalem above” is hardly a common figure in Paul’s thought and he does not
mention it in his description of Christ’s descent from heaven in 1 Thessalonians
4:16–17. Moreover, if Paul wished to say that Jesus would come from Zion
above, why did he not say “Zion above”? Surely he did not object to tinkering
with the verse.
31. It will not do to gainsay this interpretation of the first proof text on the grounds
that it is phrased in the future tense and therefore must refer to an event in the
future. Paul routinely adduces proof texts in the future tense to describe events
unfolding in his own time or events that already have taken place (e.g., Rom.
10:19, 15:21; 1 Cor. 1:19).
32. Caroline Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity
in the Letters of Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 143. See also
her earlier contribution in “Olive Trees and Ethnicities. Judeans and Gentiles
in Rom 11.17–24,” in Christians as a Religious Minority in a Multicultural City,
Notes 205
ed. Jürgen Zangenberg and Michael Labahn (London: T & T Clark, 2004),
77–89.
33. Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs, 144.
34. All these examples are mentioned by Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs, 25,
143–44: Homer, Illiad, 6.145–49, in LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1999), 1:284; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, viii.12.3, in LCL
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934), 498–500; Demosthenes,
LX.4, in LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), 7:8; Philo,
On Sobriety, 65, in LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930),
3:476; Philo, On Husbandry, 6, in LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1930), 3:110.
35. Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs, 144.
36. Ibid., 22–26 and 143–45. Consider, too, the words of W. D. Davies, Jewish and
Pauline Studies (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1984), 154: “Drawing upon ancient
Semitic concepts of solidarity, Paul indicates that the character of the root of a
plant or body carries over into the plant or body itself (the branches). A living
organism such as a tree cannot be divided into root and branches, as if these
were distinct entities: the quality of the root determines the quality of the tree
and its branches.”
37. Barrett, A Commentary, 169, proposes that the clause negated in 9:7 is “chil-
dren” rather than “all the seed of Abraham,” so that “seed of Abraham” becomes
the rarified grouping. Paul would thus say that “not all the children [e.g., Ish-
mael] are the seed of Abraham.” But this requires one to take “all the seed of
Abraham” as emphatic, which would be different from the parallel construc-
tions in 9:6b and 9:8a. All three clauses—9:6b, 9:7, and 9:8a—are parallel. The
negation at the beginning of the clause marks off the first term as the broader
category and the second as the more selective one.
38. Reading the dative Greek pronoun autois as “in place of them” follows, among
others, Ulrich Wilckens, Der Brief an die Römer, EKKNT 6 (Zürich: Benziger
Verlag, 1978), 2:246–47; John Ziesler, Paul’s Letter to the Romans, TPI New
Testament Commentaries (London: SCM Press, 1989), 279. More commonly
the pronoun is taken as referring to the branches remaining in the tree, so that
Gentiles have been grafted in “among them”—that is, among the remaining
Israelites, rather than in the place of the excised Israelites. See, for example,
Dunn, Romans, 2:661.Yet this requires the pronoun to stand for an unspoken
antecedent, which is not impossible, but is less preferable to linking it to the
existing antecedent: the branches that have been broken off.
39. Such newfound status should not become a source of arrogance for grafted
Gentiles, however, as Paul reveals in his rebuke of an imagined Gentile who
might boast that “branches were broken off in order that I could be grafted
in.” That may be true, Paul concedes, but Gentiles must remain ever wary of
the fact that, just as Jews lost their place in the tree because of faithlessness, the
Gentiles who replaced them will be likewise cut off if they commit the same
blunder. Dunn, Romans, 2:673–74, notes the correspondence between the
threat facing the Gentiles and that previously facing the befallen Israelites: “The
206 Notes
reason why so many Jewish branches were lopped off is not to be grasped solely
in terms of divine fiat, but is rather to be explained from Israel’s unfaith. And
gentile believers must never forget that their own insertion into the covenant
/ tree came about through their own faith, and that their continuance within
the covenant / tree is dependent on their continuing faith; Paul here echoes an
exhortation with which his readers may well have been already familiar (cf. 1
Cor. 15:1; 16:13; 2 Cor. 1:24). To rest solely on a partial grasp of God’s overall
purpose is to make the same mistake as Israel—to presume God’s favoritism.”
40. “Fu/sij,” in A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Chris-
tian Literature, ed. Frederick William Danker, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000), 1069.
41. Paul uses the term similarly on several occasions, including once previously
in his letter to the Romans. In Romans 2:27, “the uncircumcised ‘by nature’”
surely refers to Gentiles whose inherited lot is to be uncircumcised. This con-
trasts with Paul’s description of his own status as a Jew, in Galatians 2:15, when
he says, “We who are Jews ‘by nature.’”
42. Theophrastus, Enquiry Into Plants, 1.6.10, in LCL (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 1916), 1:48, describes the procedure in which cultivated
shoots were grafted into wild trees in order to produce the best fruit. Columella,
On Agriculture, 5.9.16, in LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1954), 2:84–86, attests to the practice of grafting wild shoots into cultivated
trees as a means of rejuvenating them. According to Philip Esler, “Ancient Olei-
culture and Ethnic Differentiation: The Meaning of the Olive-Tree Image in
Romans 11,” JSNT 26, no. 1 (2003): 103–24, Paul intentionally reversed the
well-known practice mentioned by Theophrastus so as to comport with his
rhetorical aim. On the other hand, A. G. Baxter and John A. Ziesler, “Paul
and Arboriculture. Romans 11.17–24,” JSNT 24 (1985): 25–32, think Paul
draws on the practice described by Columella, suggesting that Israel, as it was,
required invigoration by Gentiles. For the oft-repeated view that Paul, an urban
man, knew little of horticulture, see C. H. Dodd, The Epistle of Paul to the
Romans, MNTC 6 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1932), 180.
43. Dunn, Romans, 2:675 calls it a “physiological impossibility.”
44. The Elder Seneca, Controversiae, 2.4.14, in LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1974), 1:315, tells of an adoption whose legitimacy was being
challenged on the grounds that the adoptee was of too low a birth to merit the
new relationship, having been born of a prostitute. The orator speaking against
the adoption, Porcius Latro, proclaims that the boy “is being grafted from the
lowest depths into the nobility by means of the adoption.” I am indebted to
Michael Peppard for bringing this text to my attention. On the basis of this
and other evidence—for example, the connection Philo draws between adop-
tion and grafting (On Husbandry, 6)—Peppard argues in The Son of God in the
Roman World: Divine Sonship in Its Social and Political Context (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 51–57, that the grafting metaphor was a commonplace
in Roman rhetoric about adoption. See further James M. Scott, Adoption as
Notes 207
Sons of God: An Exegetical Investigation into the Background of UIOQESIA in the

Pauline Corpus, WUNT II 48 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992), 81.
45. Adoptio enim naturam imitatur. The Institutes of Justinian 1.11.4 (ed. Thomas
Collett Sandars, 2nd ed. [London: John W. Parker and Son, 1859], 118).
46. Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, V.xix.9, in LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1927), 1:438, as translated in Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs, 30.
This translation, in turn, is drawn from Jane F. Gardner, Family and Familia in
Roman Law and Life (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 127. The ceremony described
is an adrogatio, an adoption of a man who is his own master, as opposed to an
adoptatio, in which a man already under the authority of a father is adopted.
See further Peppard, Son of God, 57, who suggests that there is no way to assess
how common this formula was. Papyri and inscriptions do not corroborate it,
though, indicating that it was probably not normative.
1981), 279.
48. Ibid., 293.
49. As I indicated in note 28 of this chapter, vv. 28–32 emphasize the uniquely
hybrid status of the disowned Israelites. Not only do they retain the physical
“stuff ” of the tree from which they have been excised, they remain beloved and
called. They have been “Gentilized,” but they are not quite Gentiles.
50. It is on this point where my view deviates considerably from Johnson Hodge,
to whose work I am much indebted, as the citations above indicate. Johnson
Hodge believes that Paul conceives of two linked but discrete peoples of God,
Jews- and Gentiles-in-Christ. On my reading, Paul sees but one people of God,
which is Israel. The distinction between “former” Jews and “former” Gentiles is
a hierarchal relationship within Israel, not between Israel and a second, attached
“people.” The discrepancy between the natural and unnatural branches is not
a case of a natural people of God (Israel) being ranked above an unnatural one
(Gentiles-in-Christ), but natural Israelites being ranked ahead of unnatural ones.
It is an instance of some Israelites being more “Israelitish” than others.
51. Homi Bhabha discusses “the ambivalent world of the ‘not quite/not white’”
throughout his essay titled, “Of Mimicry and Man,” in The Location of Culture
(London: Routledge, 1994), 121–31, cited here at 131.
52. Bhabha refers to “the menace of mimicry” throughout “Of Mimicry and Man,”
here cited at 126.
54. In terms of the controversial rhyme employed by Wright, Climax, 238, we
might say “grace makes race,” rather than “grace, not race.” See note 12 of this
chapter.
55. See, for example, Epistle of Barnabas 4.6–8, in The Apostolic Fathers, ed. Bart D.
Ehrman, LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 2:22; Justin,
Dialogue with Trypho 11, 123–24, in Patrologia graeca, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris,
1857), 6.500, 760–65; Melito of Sardis, On Pascha, trans. S. G. Hall (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1979), 21.
208 Notes
56. Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives

(Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1984).
57. See, for example, Scott Bader-Saye, Church and Israel after Christendom (Boul-
der, CO: Westview Press, 1999), especially 28–51.
58. MT Melakhim 11:4 (uncensored). The passage is translated in the introduc-
tion to The Code of Maimonides, Book Fourteen, trans. Abraham M. Hershman,
Yale Judaica Series (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1949), xxiii–xxiv.
Maimonides outlines an understanding of history in which the role of Chris-
tianity is to disperse Jewish monotheism throughout the world (albeit in a
contaminated form), in order to facilitate widespread acceptance of God’s rule
in the messianic age. For more on Maimonides’ attitude toward Christianity
(and Islam), see David Novak, Maimonides on Judaism and Other Religions
(Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 1997), 1–21. In a more mod-
ern context, although in very different terms, Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of
Redemption, trans. Barbara E. Galli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
2005), 438–40, also has articulated the idea of Christian partnership with Jews
in a shared religious purpose.
59. Cardinal Walter Kasper, in an address delivered on December 6, 2004, at the
Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations in Cambridge, Massachu-
setts, aptly identified the shortcomings of one-and two-covenant solutions:
“The One Covenant Theory . . . stands in danger of either claiming Judaism
for Christianity or making Christianity into a sort of reformed Judaism, thus
obscuring either the particularity of Judaism or the uniqueness and universal-
ity of Christ Jesus. The Two Covenant Theory . . . runs the risk of considering
[Judaism and Christianity] as totally independent entities. It must therefore
on the one hand play down the Jewish roots of the church while on the other
hand failing to do justice to the universal Christological claim” (http://www
.bc.edu/dam/files/research_sites/cjl/texts/cjrelations/resources/articles/Kasper
_Cambridge_6Dec04.htm; accessed July 18, 2012).
Conclusion
1. Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1994), 52.
2. Ibid.
3. See chapter 1 of this book.
4. James D. G. Dunn, Jesus, Paul and the Law: Studies in Mark and Galatians (Lou-
isville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1990), 197. Dunn attributes the phraseol-
ogy here to the PhD dissertation of N. T. Wright, “The Messiah and the People
of God: A Study in Pauline Theology with Particular Reference to the Argument
of the Epistle to the Romans” (PhD diss., Oxford University, 1980), 89.
5. Boyarin, A Radical Jew, 52–56.
6. Ibid.
7. Dunn, Romans, WBC 38A (Dallas, TX: Word, 1988), 1:125.
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Index
Aaron, 36–37 Ananias, 40

Abba bar Kahana, Rabbi, 35, 36 Ananus, High Priest, 28–29
Abraham, 118, 137 Antigonus, Hasmonean king of Judea,
circumcision and, 11, 83–85, 108, 30–31, 68, 172n27
128–29, 132–33, 164, 191n41, Antioch, 41, 75
192n48 Antiochus Epiphanes, 149
descent from, “according to the Antipater, father of Herod the Great,
flesh,” 101–11, 134, 139, 143, 28–30
148, 158, 164–65, 168n5 Antony, Mark, 30
descent from, and faith in Christ, Aphrodisias inscription, 37, 170n15
3–6, 8, 11–12, 53, 60–61, 67, 84– Aquila, 46, 76–77, 123
86, 101–11, 165 Aramaic language, 46, 47
descent from, spiritual vs. “reck- Aristotle, 149
oned,” 60–61, 164 Ash‘arite school, 135–36, 198nn1–2
“detergent” process begins with, 35 Ashi, Rav, 35
faith vs. works and, 82–85, 105–6 Assyrians, 32
as father of many nations, 120, 165 Augustine, bishop of Hippo, 138–39,
proselytes and, 34, 38 200n11
seed of, 120–21, 150–51, 154, 159,
205n37 Baal, 151
Achior, Ammonite general, 32 Babylonia, 52
Acts, 37, 178n12 Babylonian exile, 30
Acts 2:10, 37 Babylonian Talmud, 34–35, 115–16
Acts 6:5, 37 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 6, 64–66, 111–12,
Acts 13:43, 37 155, 182n39, 182n41
Adam, 64–65, 155 baptism, 126–29
Adiabene, royal house of, 40 circumcision and, 62–64, 76–77
adoption, 153–54, 206n44, 207n46 Gentiles become Jews through, 2–3,
Agrippa, King, 36 26, 58–60, 62–63, 67, 111
Agrippina, 15 patriarchal descent through, 11, 105,
Aha, Rav, the son of Raba, 35 121, 157–59
Alexander (great-great-grandson of Bar Kokhba Revolt, 50, 178n7
Herod), 42 Barnabas, 37
“already uttered,” 64–67, 111, 155 Barrett, C. K., 205n37
Ammonites, 36 Baxter, A. G., 206n42
Ammonius Grammaticus, 26 Becker, Adam H., 50, 53
226 Index
Berenice, daughter of Herod, 42 132, 134, 165–66, 193n9,

Bhabha, Homi K., 8–9, 43, 54–56, 194–95n17
156–57 “circumcision faction” and, 77
“How Newness Enters the World,” covenant and, 61–62, 130, 133
55 double voicedness and, 67–68
The Location of Culture, 180n20, faith and, 10–11, 111, 117–18
207n51 Galatians and, 132–34
Borgen, Peder, 198n38 genital, derogated, 110, 129–30
Bornkamm, Günther, 183n7, 184n8 Gentile-Jews and, 47
“The Letter to the Romans as Paul’s hybridity and, 63–67
Last Will and Testament,” 73–74 Jewish identity and, 5, 18–19, 32,
Boyarin, Daniel, 16–17, 53, 58, 163, 37, 40–41, 43
164, 177n5, 180n30 redefinition of, as reckoned, 60–61,
Brown, Raymond E., 196n25 108, 148–49
Buell, Denise Kimber, 200n12 Romans and, 57–59, 74, 76–80,
83–84
Caesarea, 30 “spiritual” or “of the heart,” 4, 60–61,
Cephas, 51, 188n14 91–96, 108, 131–32, 164, 193n12
Christian Jews, 2, 77 Talmud and, 115–16
Christians and Christianity, 208n58 “we are the circumcision” and, 130–
contemporary Judaism and, 161 32, 155
emergence of, and hybridity, 54–57, civilized natives, 39–40, 156–57
69, 166, 180n30 Claudius, emperor of Rome, 76
emergence of, as term, 8–10, 168n4, Clement of Alexandria, 139
176n4, 178n12, 179n15 Cohen, Shaye J. D., 34, 40–41
as expression of Judaism, 46 The Beginnings of Jewishness, 22–24,
“parting of the ways” paradigm and, 172n25
48–54, 177n6, 178n10 colonial discourse, 8, 39–40, 54–55,
as refashioning of Judaism, for Paul, 156–57
163 colonial vs. noncolonial other, 55
term “Gentile-Jew” vs., 68–69 Colossians, 74, 167n1, 196nn25–26
term not used by Paul, 2–5, 8, 52–53 Colossians 2:8, 125
circumcision, 3–6, 9–11, 51–52, 57–68, Colossians 2:8–23, 125
76–80, 83–84, 110–12, 115–19, Colossians 2:9–10, 125
129–34, 158, 164–66, 170n9, Colossians 2:11–13, 124–29, 132
192n3, 193nn11–12, 197nn32– Colossians 2:13, 127
33, 198nn36–38 Conrad, Joseph
Abraham and, 11, 106–8, 116–17, Heart of Darkness, 54
130, 133, 193n12 conversion to Judaism, 31–42, 156,
“already uttered” and, 111 172n39, 173n41–43, 174n53,
annulled, 112, 131 174n59, 174n61, 175n70
baptism and, 59–62, 158, 164–65, See also gerim
189n21 Corinthians, 45–49, 57, 63, 74, 75,
Christ as agent or servant of, 10–11, 77, 79
62, 91–97, 118–22, 124, 126–29, 1 Corinthians, 74, 167n1
Index 227
1 Corinthians 1:13–17, 129 dietary laws, 19, 74, 77

1 Corinthians 5:1, 47 Dio, Cassius, 15, 21, 40
1 Corinthians 7:19, 67 Donaldson, Terence L.
1 Corinthians 10, 47 Paul and the Gentiles, 168n9
1 Corinthians 10:18, 47, 110, 155 Donfried, Karl P., 183n7, 184n8
1 Corinthians 10:19, 191n36 Dositheos, 42
1 Corinthians 10:32, 179n14, 182n49 double voicedness, 6–7, 64–67, 111–
1 Corinthians 11:26, 203n22 12, 155–56
1 Corinthians 12:2, 47, 94 Dunn, James D. G., 51, 58–59, 163–
1 Corinthians 12:13, 129, 179n14, 64, 197n29, 199n5, 202n22,
183n49 204n29, 205n39
1 Corinthians 14:25, 203n24
2 Corinthians, 74, 167n1 Egypt, 20
2 Corinthians 3:6, 119–20 Eleazar, 40
2 Corinthians 3:14, 48 Elijah, 137
2 Corinthians 3:18–14:3, 52 Elisha, 32
2 Corinthians 5:1, 125 enunciation, 9–10, 56–57
Costobar, 31 Ephesians 2:11–13, 127–28, 132
covenant, 5–6 Ephraim, 43
Abraham and, 132–33, 163 Epictetus, 40
one- and two-covenant solutions and, Epistle of Barnabas, The, 159
161, 181n38, 208n59 Esau, 151, 201n17
redefined by Paul in terms of Christ, “eschatological Jew,” 58–59, 61, 164
11, 57–63, 74, 76, 78, 116–17, eschatological pilgrimage, 144
119–22, 134, 163–65 “eschatological present,” 58, 100, 110
Sinai and, 158 Esler, Philip, 206n42
Cranfield, C. E. B., 88, 107–8, 187n4, Ezekiel 44:7, 127
199n5
faith
Damascus Document, 36 Abraham and, 85, 105–6, 108, 116–
Das, A. Andrew, 195n20, 196n24 17, 120
David, 110–11 Abrahamic paternity reckoned by, 108
Davies, W. D., 205n36 baptism and, 137
Dead Sea Scrolls, 36–37, 156 circumcision and, 85, 108, 116–18,
1QpHab 11:13, 127 124–34, 164
Delos inscriptions, 43 covenant and, 85
Demosthenes, 149 freedom and love and, 74
Deuteronomy, 126 Gentile becomes Jew through, 85,
Deuteronomy 10–16, 127 112
Deuteronomy 26:5–10, 34 Israel determined by, 136–40
Deuteronomy 29:13–14, 35 Law and, 100–101
Deuteronomy 32:43, 121, 195n19 patriarchal descent through, 120,
diakonos peritomēs, 118–22, 194n15 139–40, 153–54, 157–59
dialogism, 64–65 salvation through, 102, 107, 109–10
See also double voicedness works vs., 101–2, 105–6
228 Index
4QFlorilegium, 36 as descendants of Israel, 149

drawbacks and advantages of, as
Gager, John, 78 term, 7–12, 68–69
Galatians, 3, 47, 57, 62, 67, 74–75, 77, first century production of, 21–26
79, 110, 132–34, 167n1 Gentile-Jewish spectrum and, 42–43,
Galatians 1:11–16, 51 46–49
Galatians 2:7, 79 hybridity and, 8–10, 12, 21–22, 55–
Galatians 2:14, 188n14 57, 67–69
Galatians 2:21, 62 Ioudaios and, 24
Galatians 3:1, 77 Paul’s reevaluation of Jewish identity
Galatians 3:1–29, 120–21 and, 58–59, 112
Galatians 3:10–13, 121 wave theory of identity and, 16–17
Galatians 3:18–19, 121 Gentiles
Galatians 3:22, 99, 121, 203n22 become Ioudaioi, pre-Paul, 40–41
Galatians 3:27, 129 become Jews through baptism, 46,
Galatians 3:27–29, 121 51–52, 58–61, 113, 156, 165
Galatians 3:28, 8, 51, 179n14, 183n49 controversy over terminology for,
Galatians 4:21–31, 110, 158 68–69
Galatians 5:6, 67 covenant available to, through Christ,
Galatians 5:11, 62, 133 121
Galatians 6:15, 67 covenant entered by, through bap-
Galatians 6:16, 155 tism, 76–77, 79
Gaston-Gager hypothesis, 78–79, descent from Abraham, through
186n16 faith, 106, 120, 158, 159
Gellius, Aulus, 153, 207n46 dire condition of, 86–89,
Genesis, 118, 133 186–87nn3–4
Genesis 12:3, 122 dire condition of, escaped through
Genesis 15, 82, 106 Christ, 91–95
Genesis 15:6, 102 dispute among, in Rome, 123
Genesis 17, 106 double voicing of discourse on, 8
Genesis 17:6, 122 extend kindness to each other, 134
Genesis 17:9, 115 God’s acceptance of, and disbelieving
Genesis 17:13, 115 Jews, 137
Genesis 21, 158 as interlocutor in Romans, 81–95,
Genesis 22:18, 122 169n14
Gentile-Christians Israel entered by, through Christ, 12,
Gentile-Jews as term vs., 46, 48–49, 144, 148–49, 151–57, 160
52–53 Jews’ advantage over, lapsed, 97–101
Jewish identity of, 1–5 Paul’s terms for, 2–3
Gentile-Jews, 12 reconcile with God through Christ,
constructing, and polythetic mode, 117–19
17–22 as target audience in Romans, 78–80,
converts and, 33–42 185nn12–13
defined, and Paul’s double voicing, See also Gentile-Jews
1–7 gerim, 32–36, 42
Index 229
Gerizim, Mount, 43 Hyrcanus, John, king of Hasmoneans,

God-fearers, 21–22, 32, 40–43, 25–30
170n15, 185n13, 196n24, 170n15
God of Israel Idumeans, 22–31, 36, 42, 43, 172n37
Jewish identity and, 18–19 Ignatius, 9, 52
Paul introduces Gentiles to, 1–2, immaculate 12 sons of Israel, 35
45–47 Institutes of Justinian, 153
grafting metaphor, 12, 152–53, Ioudaios (Ioudaioi), 22–37
205nn38–39, 206n42, 206n44 apostates and, 42
gerim and, 32–37
Hagar, 110, 151, 158 Idumeans and, 26–31
Hasmoneans, 18, 20, 22–23, 25 priests and, 36–37
Hays, Richard, 103–4 Samaritans and, 43
Hebrew Bible, 32, 99, 121, 127 translation of, 23–25
gerim in, 32 Irenaeus, 52, 139
Jewish identity and, 19 Isaac, 34, 60, 110, 118, 120, 137, 158
olive tree and, 141 sons of, 143, 151, 201n17
See also specific parts Isaiah 11:10, 121
Hebrew language, 19, 46, 47 Isaiah 52:4, 189n20
Helena of Adiabene, 40 Isaiah 59:20–21, 146–46
Hellenizing Jews, 18 Ishmael, 110, 151, 158
hemiioudaios (half-Ioudaios), 30–31 Israel, 199nn4–5
hemophiliacs, 18, 116 competing uses of term and, 21
Herod the Great, 26, 28–31, 68 double voicedness and, 6–8, 67
Himmelfarb, Martha, 50–51 final redemption of, 181n32, 204n29
Holocaust, 138, 160 hybridity and, 11–12
Homer, 149 olive tree metaphor and, 149–57,
Hosea, 52 160–61
houtōs, 144–45, 202n21, 203n24, Paul’s redefinition of, through faith,
204n29 5–7, 11–12, 47–48, 63, 136–61,
hybridity, 8–10, 11–12, 16–17, 21–22, 180n31, 202nn18–19, 207n50
43, 48, 169n11 polemical redefinition and, 140–49
Bakhtin on, 64–65 supersessionism vs., 159–61
Bhabha on, 9, 54–56 Israelites
Christian origins and, 54–57 conversion of non-Israelites and,
circumcision and, 63–64, 67–68 31–42
converts and, 35 idolaters vs., 34–35
ethnic redefinition and, 55, 57–68 See also Ioudaios
internally polemical discourse and, Izates, crown prince of Adiabene, 40–41
65–67
patriarchal descent and, 63–64, 67 Jacob, 6, 34–36, 60, 118, 120, 137,
Paul on Israel and, 157, 159 147, 201n17
Paul on Jewish identity and, 166 James, 46, 51, 53, 77
Romans 4:1–12 and, 86 Jeremiah, 126
Rushdie on, 55–56 Jeremiah 2–3, 88
230 Index
Jeremiah 4:4, 127 proselytes or gerim and, 32–42

Jeremiah 9:24, 197n33 reckoned ethnicity and, 165–66
Jerusalem, 46, 47, 50–52, 61 spectral nature of, in antiquity, 42,
siege of, 28–30 46–47
See also Temple spiritualized, and ethnic Gentiles,
Jerusalem Council, 79 1–6
Jesus, chief priest, 29 wave theory of identity on, 16–17
Jesus Christ Jewish mother, 18–19
as agent or servant of circumcision, Jewish scriptures, 47, 97–98
11, 62, 118–22, 126, 134, 164– Jewish war with Rome, 28
65, 193n9 Jewish women, 115–17, 192n3
cleansing of Temple and, 49 Jews
covenant and, 58, 132 advantage of, lapses with Christ,
impact of death and resurrection of, 95–102
5, 26, 57–58, 147–49, 163 hardened or unbelieving, 11–12,
Israel reconstituted in wake of, 5, 26, 78–80, 95, 112–13, 120, 137,
136–37 141–48, 150, 152, 154, 156, 158,
Jewish identity through, 5–8, 66–67, 160, 201n16, 204n28, 205n39,
95 207n49
Jews and Gentiles leveled by, 97–101 Paul’s use of term, 6
“parting of the ways” and, 51 reconciliation among Gentiles and,
patriarchal descent and, 110–11, 117–19
120–21 return to Rome, 76
salvation through, 79–80 John, 51
as son of God of Israel, 1–2, 45–46 Johnson Hodge, Caroline, 149, 207n50
Jewett, Robert, 189n23, 199n3, 199n5, If Sons, Then Heirs, 4–5, 181n38
201n14 Josephus, 15–16, 20–21, 26–31, 36, 38,
Jewish-Christians, 2, 46, 78 40–43, 156, 172n25
Jewish-Christian schism, 9, 52–53 The Jewish War, 41–42
Jewish identity, 170n12 Jubilees, 37, 174n59
contested, 22 Jubilees 1:23, 127
essentialist approaches to, 18–19 Judaeo-Christianity, 17
ethnic vs. religious components, 34, Judaism
200n12 bypassing of, 2–3, 51–52, 58
genealogical view of, 36–37 Christianity as species of, 46, 176n1
Idumeans and, 26–31 “parting of the ways” and, 49–54
Jews baptized as Christians retain, 46 Judaizers, 41–42
Paul redefines, through faith, 6, 10– Judea, 18–23, 25–27
12, 57–61, 74, 85–86, 95–102, Judith, book of, 32, 173n41
104–5, 110–13, 148, 149, 163, justification by faith alone, 74, 102, 106
164, 181n38, 183n49 Justin, 9, 52
Paul’s double voicedness on, 6–7,
63–68, 111–12, 155–56 Käsemann, Ernst, 88, 187n4
polythetic method of defining, Kasper, Cardinal Walter, 208n59
19–21 Keturah, 151
Index 231
Koze (goddess), 31 occasionalism, 135–36

Octavia, empress of Rome, 15
language olive tree, 11–12, 112, 139–42, 144–
hybridity and, 64–65 46, 148–57, 159–60, 165–66,
identity and, 111–12 205n36, 205nn38–39, 206n42
Law observance, 5, 10
Abrahamic covenant precedes, Palestine, 20, 52
132–34 “parting of the ways” paradigm, 48–54,
baptism as attainment of, 164 177n6, 178n10
lapses with advent of Christ, 3, 9, patriarchal descent, 5
51–52, 76–80, 84–85, 91–101 Paul’s hybridized discourse on, 63–
redefinition of, and double voiced- 64, 66–67
ness, 63 Paul’s reinterpretation of, 59–60,
“Law of faith,” 102, 107 154, 158
Leppä, Outi, 196n26 physical, 139, 154, 158–59, 165–66
Levinson, Joshua, 35 See also Abraham; Isaac; Jacob; olive
Levites, 36 tree
patriarchal promises, 118, 120–21,
Lieu, Judith, 49
193n9, 194n16, 195n17
Luther, Martin, 73
Paul of Tarsus
adversaries labeling of, 77
3 Maccabees, 42
brings gospel outside Jewish com-
4 Maccabees, 149
munity, 1, 51
4 Maccabees 13:18–19, 149
“Christian” not used by, 2, 53,
Maimonides, 161, 208n58
178n12
Manasseh, 43
conflicting views of, 53–54
Manson, T. W., 183n7
contradictory use of Jewish and Gen-
Mark 14:58, 125 tile terminology by, 7–8
Martyr, Justin, 4 Corinthians and (see Corinthians)
Dialogue with Trypho, 159 Galatians and (see Galatians)
Melanchthon, Philipp, 73 Gentiles as ethnic Jews through
Melito of Sardis baptism and, 62–63
On the Passover, 159 Gentiles as ethnic Jews through
“mimic men,” 156–57, 207n52 Christ and, 1–5
Mishnah Bikkurim 1:4, 34 hybridized Gentile-Jewish identity
Moabites, 36 and, 8–9, 55–69
monothetic method, 19 internally polemical discourse and,
Moses, 38–39, 117 65–67
Jewish Christians and, 46
Naaman of Aram, 32 as Jewish cultural critic, 163–66,
Nabatea, 26 200n10
Nero, emperor of Rome, 15–17, 45–46, ministry of, contextualized, 12
48, 178n12 neglect of, by revisionists, 53
Nicholas, proselyte from Antioch, 37 “new” Israel of, vs. supersessionists,
Nicholas of Damascus, 30 160–61
232 Index
Paul of Tarsus (continued) Pompeii, 15

New Testament epistles written by, Ponsot, Hervé, 139, 203n22
167n1, 196nn25–26 Poppaea, empress of Rome, 15–16,
“parting of the ways” and, 50–53 45–46, 48
Philippians and (see Philippians) Porton, Gary, 33–36
reality constructed through Christ postcolonialism, 8, 180n20
and faith and, 165 postmodern theorists, 64
role of, in emergence of Christianity, priests, 36–37
9–10, 53–54 Priscilla (Prisca), 46, 76, 77, 123
Romans and (see Romans) proaitiaomai, 99
sermon at Antioch of Pisidia, 37 Prophets, 118, 121
spiritual Israel and, 4 proselytes, 25, 32, 34, 37–43, 47, 156,
spiritualized vs. reckoned Jewish 175n64, 176n84
identity and, 60–61 prosōpopoieia, 89
“What shall we say?” question and, Psalms 18:49, 121
103–5 Psalms 31, 106
See also baptism; circumcision; Psalms 51:4, 98
covenant; Gentile-Jews; Gentiles; Psalms 105, 88
Israel; Jewish identity; and specific Psalms 117:1, 121
biblical figures, concepts, and epistles Ptolemy, 26–28, 31, 172n25
Pella, flight to, 50
Pentateuch, 81 Qumran community, 36
Peppard, Michael, 206n44 Quo Vadis (film), 15
Peter, 2, 46, 53, 79
petichtah (homiletical proem), 81 rabbinic literature, 33–36, 156
Pharisees, 46 rabbis
Philemon, 167n1 “parting of ways” and, 52
Philippi, 75, 61 petichtah and, 81
Philippians, 3, 57, 67, 74, 79, 167n1 Rav, 115, 192n3
Philippians 3:2–3, 124, 129–31, 139 Refoulé, Francois, 139
Philippians 3:3, 61, 67, 130, 166 revisionists, 53, 56, 61, 69
Philippians 3:5, 67 Roman churches, Jewish vs. Gentile
Philippians 3:18–20, 52 constituencies, 122–23
Philo of Alexandria, 18, 20, 38–40, Romans, 3, 57, 61, 133–34, 167n1,
149, 156, 175n64, 206n44, 204n28
206n44 audience in, 78–80, 85
De Specialibus Legibus, 127 interlocutor in, 169n14, 187nn8–9,
On the Virtues, 38 189n23, 189n26
physis, 152 polemical character and, 75–78
Piper, John, 199n4 purpose of, 73–77, 184n9
Plutarch as “summary of Pauline religion,”
Moralia, 92 74–75
Polemo, king of Cicilia, 42 Romans 1:3, 110
politeia, 38–39 Romans 1–3, 190n30
polythetic method, 19–20 Romans 1:13, 78
Index 233
Romans 1:13–15, 89 Romans 3:19, 99

Romans 1:13–17, 87 Romans 3:19–20, 100
Romans 1:16, 78, 79 Romans 3:19–22, 79
Romans 1:16–17, 89, 95, 100 Romans 3:20, 78
Romans 1:18, 88 Romans 3:21, 95, 100, 109
Romans 1:18–14:16, 74 Romans 3:22–23, 100
Romans 1:18–32, 85–89, 92, 98, 100, Romans 3:24–26, 190n32
112, 190n30 Romans 3:25, 147
Romans 1:21, 90 Romans 3:27–28, 102
Romans 1:23, 88 Romans 3:27–31, 100
Romans 2, 116 Romans 3:29, 78
Romans 2:1, 84 Romans 3:29–31, 102
Romans 2:1–16, 85, 89–92, 100 Romans 3:30, 112, 118
Romans 2–3, 84 Romans 3:31, 75
Romans 2–4, 10, 164, 166 Romans 4, 110, 117–18, 120
Romans 2:6–16, 90–91 Romans 4:1, 84, 102–5, 124, 191n38,
Romans 2:9, 78 191n40
Romans 2:10, 78 Romans 4:1–4, 111
Romans 2:10–11, 79 Romans 4:1–12, 81–85, 101–13, 118,
Romans 2:11, 91 128–29, 139, 158
Romans 2:12–13, 91 four premises prior to, 85–101
Romans 2:14–16, 91, 100 NRSV, vs. original Greek, 82–83,
Romans 2:15, 91 101–3
Romans 2:16, 59 Romans 4:1–16, 11, 111, 117, 154, 164
Romans 2:17, 67, 92–95, 188n16 Romans 4:2, 105–6, 191n41
Romans 2:17–29, 85, 95, 100 Romans 4:2–8, 106
Romans 2:25, 60 Romans 4:2–10, 109
Romans 2:25–29, 52, 67, 94, 98, 100, Romans 4:9–11, 109
102, 111–12, 124, 129–31, 139, Romans 4:9–12, 106
166 Romans 4:10, 108
Romans 2:26, 106–7, 189n21 Romans 4:10–12, 108
Romans 2:26–29, 108 Romans 4:11, 108
Romans 2:28–29, 52, 58–59, 95 Romans 4:11–12, 11, 84–85
Romans 2:29, 155 Romans 4:12, 83, 108–9
Romans 3:1–2, 100, 112 Romans 4:13–16, 109, 120
Romans 3:1–20, 100 Romans 4:16, 109
Romans 3:1–31, 85, 95–101 Romans 5, 147
Romans 3:2, 97–98 Romans 6:1, 75
Romans 3:2–9, 189n27 Romans 6:3–4, 129
Romans 3:3, 98 Romans 6:14–15, 103
Romans 3–4, 116 Romans 6:15, 75, 104
Romans 3:8, 75, 103 Romans 7:1, 78
Romans 3:9, 98–100 Romans 7:7, 75
Romans 3:9–20, 100 Romans 8:15, 154
Romans 3:10–18, 100 Romans 8:31, 103
234 Index
Romans 9:1–5, 137, 141 Rome

Romans 9:3–5, 110, 154 Jews return to, 74
Romans 9:6, 52, 136, 138, 142–44, 154 rebellions vs., 51
Romans 9:6–8, 150 “weak” and “strong” elements in,
Romans 9:6–23, 143 122–24, 196nn21–22, 196n24
Romans 9:7–8, 110, 111, 158 Rushdie, Salman, 55–56
Romans 9–10, 137 East, West, 55
Romans 9–11, 6, 11–12, 60, 63, 74, The Satanic Verses, 55
78–79, 120, 135–61, 165, 200n10
Romans 9:14, 104 Sadducees, 46
Romans 9:15–18, 120 Samaritans, 43, 46
Romans 9:24, 151–52 Sanders, E. P., 52
Romans 9:24–10:18, 143 Sarah, 110, 158
Romans 9:25, 52 Schmithals, Walter, 184n9, 185n13
Romans 9:30, 104 Schwartz, Daniel, 36
Romans 9:30–31, 105 second coming, 146–47
Romans 9:31–32, 105 Second Temple literature, 127, 141
Romans 10:1, 142, 148 Seneca, 92
Romans 10:12, 78 Seneca, Elder, 206n44
Romans 11, 137, 166 Septuagint, 118, 197n31, 197n31
Romans 11:1–16, 143 Sienkiewicz, Henry, 15
Romans 11:7, 104, 105 Silo, 30
Romans 11:8, 105 Simon, 36, 172n29
Romans 11:11, 146 Sinai, Mount, 35–36
Romans 11:11–14, 145 Smith, Jonathan Z., 18–19
Romans 11:13, 66, 78, 79 Smyrna, 42
Romans 11:15, 146 Sonderweg, 201n16
Romans 11:16–24, 140–41 Staples, Jason A., 201n15
Romans 11:17–24, 11–12, 143, 150 Stendahl, Krister, 58, 186n15
Romans 11:23, 145–46 Stowers, Stanley K., 78, 169n14
Romans 11:25–26, 143–48, 203n22 Strabo, 26–28, 31, 172n25
Romans 11:25–32, 141–42 Stuhlmacher, Peter, 184n9
Romans 11:26, 137–39, 199n5 Suetonius, 15, 178n12
Romans 11:26–27, 146–49 supersessionism, 138–39, 159–61,
Romans 11:28–32, 146 177n6, 200n10
Romans 14, 74 Swancutt, Diana, 181n38
Romans 14:1, 122 Syria, 30, 41
Romans 14:1–15:13, 77, 124
Romans 15, 121, 164–65 Tacitus, 15, 178n12
Romans 15:1, 123 Talmud, 18, 117, 192n3
Romans 15:7–13, 11, 74, 117–24, 132, See also Babylonian Talmud
139 Temple
Romans 15:8, 11, 120, 124, 129, 132 converts deliver first fruits to, 34
Romans 15:14, 123 destruction of Second Temple, 50,
Romans 16:17, 76 178n7
Index 235
Temple (continued) “uncircumcision,” 51–52, 79, 127, 198n37

gerim excluded from, 36–37 universalism, 59, 164
zealots besieged in, 28–29 Ustinov, Peter, 15
See also Second Temple literature
Temple Scroll, 36 Valerius, L., 153–54
Temple tax, 20 Van der Horst, Pieter W., 203n24
Tertius, 108
Theophrastus, 206n42 Wagner, J. Ross, 195n17
1 Thessalonians, 167n1 wave theory of identity, 16–17, 163
1 Thessalonians 1:9, 186n3 Wedderburn, A. J. M., 185n13
1 Thessalonians 4:16, 147 Wisdom of Solomon, 88
1 Thessalonians 4:16–17, 203n24, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 19
204n30 Wright, N. T., 139, 199n6, 199n9,
2 Thessalonians, 167n1 200n12, 207n54
third space (liminal, in-between), 8–9, Writings, 81, 121
33, 35–36, 54–56, 69, 176n3,
179n14 Yohanan, Rabbi, 34–35, 15–16, 192n3
Thorsteinsson, Runar, 169n14, 188n15, Yoshiko Reed, Annette, 50, 53
189n20 Young, Robert, 66
Timothy, 119–20
Titius, L., 153 zealots, 28–29
Torah, 18, 50–51, 121 Ziesler, John A., 206n42
Trible, Phyllis, 160 Zion, redeemer from, 146–47, 204n30

Joshua D. Garroway Pauls Gentile-Jews Neither Jew Nor Gentile, But Both

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Joshua D. Garroway Pauls Gentile-Jews Neither Jew Nor Gentile, But Both

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Paul’s Gentile-Jews

Neither Jew nor Gentile, but Both

All rights reserved.

First published in 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a

An earlier version of Chapter 5 originally appeared as “The Circumcision of Christ:

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Scribe Inc.

First edition: November 2012

Jews, Gentiles, and Christians

Hence the strangeness of my opening remark: on the standard reckoning,

Importing the term “Christian” has long served as the solution to

physical descendants of Abraham and constituents of the people Israel,

latter he refers to “Israel” as it is normatively construed. This paradox is

rife with contradictory deployment of Jewish and Gentile terminology

identity—a non-Jewish Jew, a Gentile-Jew—which he can neither repre-

explain in Romans 4:1–16, the transformation of the Gentile into a Jew is

as God incorporates Gentiles into the family tree of Israel on account of

Nero’s Nuptials: A Thought Experiment

this chapter’s exploration of the category “Gentile-Jew.” The experiment

Dispensing with Essences:

“polythetic” method of classifying groups.11 In contrast to the “mono-

11 coming next, and so forth, would there be a single point at which a

in determining Jewish identity; whereas according to the Roman histo-

just that—a purely theoretical, hypothetical construction. What evidence

The Production of Gentile-Jewish

Nevertheless it seemed best to call in the Idumeans. They wrote a brief

Thus insofar as the Ioudaioi constitute a unique ethnos, then Idumeans,

Herod’s court historian, Nicholas of Damascus, doctored Antipater’s fam-

totalizing expressions that presume that Jewish identity is a strictly

Priests—those with a monopoly on access to the sacred precincts and cult—

their ambiguous status, acknowledging their entrance and participation

Introduction: A Corinthian “Christian” Meets Nero

Corinth displays no shortage of Jewish attributes: a fierce devotion to the

“according to the flesh.” This incongruity is compounded in Paul’s second

The Parting of the Ways

Both “Judaism” and “Christianity” have come to elude our conceptual

The paradigm currently preferred in scholarship, called the “parting

I have italicized a portion of this citation in order to accentuate the criti-

summarized—that Gentiles could become Christians without becoming Jews

the origins of Christianity without inappropriately ascribing to him terms

Hybridity and Christian Origins

As Rushdie’s own contributions reveal, however, the anonymity of

Paul’s Production of Hybrid Identity

eschatological present, the faith made available through Christ became

Paul is attacking a concept of law-keeping which was tightly tied to mem-

The “properly defined” Jew, also dubbed by Dunn the “eschatological

a notion of spiritual descent. Physical descent from Abraham, Isaac, and

one to become reckoned as possessing the fleshly, genital circumcision

he at times use explicitly Jewish terminology to describe them? My open-

be “real” descendants in the normative sense. They are “really” descen-

exclaiming, “circumcised” or “Jew.” These terms were already loaded,

However monological the utterance may be . . . , it cannot but be, in some

No matter how much one tries to speak as though in a vacuum, to rep-

oppose it explicitly, as in Romans 2:17, where he initiates a conversation

and “really” not circumcised, with each claim on reality simultaneously

letters and the hybridized “in-between” identity emerging as a result. Fur-

The Purpose of Romans

allusions to specific people and to local circumstances that we find in

doing so would constitute a rejection of the gift graciously granted them

The Audience in Romans

Introduction: An Impossible Conclusion

the astonishing conclusion in fact proceeds logically from what comes