In August 1998 I took part in a day-long symposium organised by this Council of
Christians and Jews in St. Kilda around the topic of the Torah. My colleague and friend
Frank Moloney, now a professor in Washington, spoke on "Jesus and the Torah". I
spoke on "Paul and the Torah". But before both of us, Rabbi Philip Heilbrunn had
been asked to speak on the topic "Israel and the Torah". Very forcefully and
vigorously, as many here present this evening may recall, he began by dismissing out of hand
the title proposed to him. "I cannot speak on 'Israel and the Torah'. The conjunction
and is totally out of place. Israel and Torah are not two separable entities. Israel
is Torah and Torah is Israel. That is the only matter I can address".
As a New Testament scholar and a Pauline scholar I learned a very great deal from that
opening to Rabbi Heilbrunn's talk. I learned a lot from the rest of it too. But the impact
of that opening salvo was very great. I don't think I had ever appreciated why the issue of
"Torah" bulked so large in the writings of Paul and roused such passion. I learned
or at least had strongly reinforced that when Paul was talking about Torah or
"law", he was inevitably talking about Israel. You cannot have Israel without
Torah and you cannot have Torah without raising the issue of Israel.
The document that is being launched this evening [Re-Reading Paul],
in so far as I have had a hand in it, owes a good deal to that exchange in August 1998. It
attempts to summarise and convey a very significant change that has developed in Christian
understanding of Paul in the scholarship of recent decades. For far too long Christians, led
to some extent by Augustine but much more by Martin Luther, read out of Paul a caricature of
Judaism which it was certainly not Paul's intention to convey. Luther felt that what he
found objectionable in certain aspects of late medieval Catholicism was exactly what Paul
found objectionable in certain aspects of his ancestral religion. This gave rise to the
belief that Paul was somehow against Judaism as his major antagonist. It led to the classic
Lutheran dichotomy of "Gospel" and "Law".
It is strange that Christian interpreters so long neglected Paul's repeated assertions in
his major writing, the Letter to the Romans, about the holiness and essential goodness of
the Torah (Rom 7:12,14); his denial that he was trying to overthrow it (3:31); his repeated
statements of anguish at any suggestion that he believed God had abandoned his people (Rom
11:1). In fact, far from being a document hostile to Jews and Judaism, we now understand the
Letter to the Romans as largely an attempt to commend to Gentile believers in Jesus as the
Christ a positive, respectful and sympathetic attitude to that great bulk of Israel that had
not come to such a belief. Paul is in fact at great pains to correct any impression that he
is indifferent to the fate of his own people (Rom 9:1-5; 10:1). He severely admonishes his
readers against taking up any attitude of superiority, insisting that they are the
"Johnnie come lately's" (Rom 11:17-25) and that Israel remains holy, chosen and
beloved because of the fathers (Rom 11:15; 11:28-29). Would that Christians down the ages
had spent as much time on chapter 11 (especially verses 25-26) of the Letter to the Romans
as they did on earlier ones and also on the Letter to the Galatians.
Paul was, of course, projecting a great vision of God's people that, in the end, proved
impossible to realize. He wanted to see his Gentile Christian converts included among the
endtime People of God specifically as Gentiles, that is, without compulsion to take on
Jewish identity as proselytes by submission to circumcision and the full requirements of
Torah. He tried to forge and commend an expanded concept of "Israel" that would
include Gentile believers in this sense. He knew, as Rabbi Heilbrunn reminded us, that you
could not have Israel without Torah. So he maintained that the Spirit functioned as
"Torah" (cf. Rom 8:2), justifying his claim on a particular combination of
prophecies from Ezekiel and Jeremiah (Ezek 36:26; Jer 31:33).
But Paul was stretching things too far. You couldn't put that much fresh air into the
"Israel" balloon and not have it burst which, imaginatively at least, it
eventually did. But that rupture I mean the coming to be of Christianity as a new
religion distinct from Judaism occurred well after his death. So that in the end, as the
Jewish Pauline scholar Alan Segal has maintained, you had Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity
coming into being as the distinct adolescent offspring of Second Temple Judaism, with all
the mutual loves and hates that mark adolescent striving for identity. But Paul would never
have thought of himself as critiquing Judaism from without; rather, he saw himself in the
line of prophetic figures who critiqued it from within passionately and vigorously, it
is true, but with appeal above all to the sacred Schema of Deuteronomy 6 and to the vision
of God that it enshrines.
That is the new vision of Paul which we have tried to encapsulate and convey in the
document that Prof. Robert Anderson and others have so labored to put together. Our concern
has not been so much to defend the reputation of Paul. Paul can look after himself. The
question is the use that Christians make from now on of his writings. Those who saw the film
Titanic had conveyed to them very dramatically how difficult it is to alter the
course of a great ship steaming full speed ahead. Traditional Christian interpretation of
scripture has something of the momentum of a great ship like that. It takes a lot to alter
its course even more to set it in a wholly new direction or put it astern. We hope that Re-Reading
Paul may do its bit, as its elder sibling Rightly Explaining
the Word of Truth has already done to set it on a more correct and responsible
course.
Brendan Byrne, S.J., is professor at the Jesuit Theological College, Melbourne,
Australia. This talk was given at the launching of the new Guidelines for Christian
Clergy and Teachers in their use of the New Testament with reference to the New Testament's
presentation of Jews and Judaism.
