Paul and Jesus

5. One of the classic Jewish treatises on the relationship of Israel and the nations of the world is that of the nineteenth-century Italian Rabbi Elijah Benamozegh, Israel and Humanity (Israël et l’Humanité), translated and edited by Maxwell Luria (New York: Paulist Press, 1994).

6. See Acts 15:19–21 plus references in Acts 10:1–2; 13:16, 26, 43, 50; 16:14; 17:4, 17; 18:7, as well as Luke 7:1–9. See the discussion, “The Godfearers: Did They Exist?,” which includes “The God-Fearers: A Literary and Theological Invention,” by Robert S. MacLennan and A. Thomas Kraabel; “Jews and God-Fearers in the Holy City of Aphrodite,” by Robert F. Tannenbaum; and “The Omnipresence of the God-Fearers,” by Louis H. Feldman, in Biblical Archaeology Review 12:5 (September/October 1986): 44–63.

7. Males, whatever their age, were required to undergo circumcision, and both males and females were immersed in a mikveh or Jewish ritual bath. See Louis H. Feldman, “Conversion to Judaism in Classical Judaism,” Hebrew Union College Annual 74 (2003): 115–56; Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 219–21; and Joseph R. Rosenbloom, Conversion to Judaism: From the Biblical Period to the Present (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1979).

8. The Talmud says that the twelfth petition of this prayer, the Birkat HaMinim, was added in the late first century by the rabbis, directed against Christians (notzerim) who were giving Jesus divine status. See Berachot 28b and William Horbury, “The Benediction of the ‘Minim’ and Early Jewish-Christian Controversy,” Journal of Theological Studies 33:1 (1982): 19–61.

9. Larry Hurtado and others have more recently advanced the argument that such worship of Jesus as divine originated not with Paul but among Jesus’ earliest Jewish followers, in response to faith in his resurrection and ascension to heaven. See Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005). Hurtado refers to this as “binitarian devotion,” as it includes always God the Father, but now with Jesus as Lord at the right hand of God. The latest contribution to this debate is James D. G. Dunn, Did the Early Christians Worship Jesus? The New Testament Evidence (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010).

10. Paul’s phrase “under the Torah of Christ” is literally “in (the) law of Christ,” meaning within its jurisdiction, just as one who is Jewish is “in (the) law of Moses” while Gentiles are “outside” that law.

11. Jubilees 7:20–28; Acts 15:19–20; Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 56a–56b.

12. The Apocrypha contains ten books, all dating to the two centuries before the time of Jesus, that are included in Catholic Bibles and the ancient Greek Old Testament (Septuagint) but excluded from the Hebrew Bible or Christian Old Testament.

CHAPTER 9: THE “BATTLE OF THE APOSTLES”

1. An impressive visual website of St. Peter’s Basilica with photos and descriptions is http://www.stpetersbasilica.org.

2. In the gospel of John there is an allusion to Peter’s death (John 21:18–19), and the pseudo-Pauline text of 2 Timothy 4:6–8 seems to know of Paul’s death. In both cases nothing that specific is related as to time, place, or manner of execution.

3. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.1.1; 3.3.2.

4. See Raymond E. Brown and John P. Meier, Antioch and Rome: New Testament Cradles of Catholic Christianity (New York: Paulist Press, 2004), p. 98.