Paul and Jesus

Circumcision means “being a Jew,” either by birth or conversion, but that genealogical connection to Abraham counts for nothing now that the new creation has come. However, as was the case with male and female, or slave and free, the problem that Paul and his adherents faced was that Jews and Judaism did not disappear with the coming of Christ. Far from it. The Temple in Jerusalem continued as Judaism’s center, the Torah was honored and observed, Jewish learning flourished, and there were synagogues in every major city and town throughout the Roman Empire. Even those Jews who accepted Jesus as Messiah never imagined that this implied they should cease to practice their Jewish faith or that the coming of Jesus redefined the Jewish people. Jesus himself had lived as an observant Jew. His brother James was known for his piety and devotion to the Torah.

James and the Jerusalem apostles would have agreed with Paul on many points but the Jewish people were still Israel, the Torah remained valid “until heaven and earth passed away,” and God alone was to be worshipped, with none beside him. Jesus had not come to destroy the Torah. He had upheld even the “least” of its commandments.

FOLLOWING THE TORAH OF CHRIST

Paul finds himself caught between two worlds and cannot resist operating, even as a Jew, as if the old world has already passed away and been replaced by the new creation. He adopts a situational stance that was difficult to characterize, since he believed that whether one lived as a Jew or as a Gentile was a matter of indifference to one in Christ. He offers this surprisingly candid assessment of his own approach to Jews as well as Gentiles:

To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win over Jews; to those under the Torah I became as one under the Torah—though not myself under the Torah—that I might win those under the Torah. To those outside the Torah [i.e., Gentiles], I became as one outside the Torah—not being without “Torah” to God, but under the Torah of Christ—that I might win those outside the Torah. (1 Corinthians 9:20–21)¹⁰

Paul says here that all of those in Christ, whether Jew or Gentile, are under a new Law or Torah—the Law of Christ. He clearly has no written code in mind, so what is this Law of Christ—what are its precepts and contents and what does it mean to be under its jurisdiction? The answer is quite surprising.

Paul believed that Gentiles, who he says are “outside the Torah,” were not part of the special covenant God made with the nation of Israel and thus had no formally written Law. He also agreed with the rabbis who taught that the nations of the world were still morally responsible for a minimum set of universal human ethics that had been revealed to Noah as the father of the entire human race after the Flood. These “Noahide” laws were variously enumerated in Jewish sources, both before and after the time of Jesus, but they included prohibitions against idolatry, sexual immorality, murder, stealing, cruelty to animals, and eating blood, as well as positive injunctions to honor parents and practice social justice, including loving one’s neighbor.¹¹ Like other Jews of his time, Paul considered all humankind morally responsible to God as Creator through the gift of reason and the natural law revealed by one’s conscience. Paul believed that Gentiles had no excuse for turning from worship of the Creator to worshipping the forces of nature. He writes the Romans:

For the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity; that they may be without excuse: because that, knowing God, they glorified him not as God, neither gave thanks; but became vain in their reasoning, and their senseless heart was darkened . . . they changed the glory of the incorruptible God for the likeness of an image of corruptible man, and of birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things. (Romans 1:20–23)

This is a common Jewish polemic against the Gentile world and what was viewed as their willful foolishness in turning to idols. Paul follows here, almost word for word, the thoughts of the author of the Wisdom of Solomon, a first-century B.C. Jewish text now included in the Apocrypha:¹²

For all people who were ignorant of God were foolish by nature; and they were unable from the good things that are seen to know the one who exists, nor did they recognize the artisan while paying heed to his works . . . Yet again, not even they are to be excused; for if they had the power to know so much [about science] they could find sooner the one who made these things. (Wisdom 13:1, 9)

The author of the Wisdom of Solomon goes on to argue that “the idea of making idols was the beginning of sexual immorality,” which then led to all other sins, and Paul follows his chain of thought precisely, offering a long litany of Gentile vices: