World Council of Churches
Federation of Swiss Protestant Churches
Reformed Churches Bern-Jura-Solothurn

Palestine Israel Ecumenical Forum (PIEF)

INTERNATIONAL THEOLOGICAL CONFERENCE
“Promised Land”

Church Center Bürenpark, Bern, Switzerland
10 - 14 September 2008 

First and Second Testaments as One Bible
Paul: Bridge of Faiths

Prof. Dr Petros Vassiliadis
University of Thessaloniki, Greece

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For centuries the effective key for Christian theology was the antithesis between law and gospel, mainly as a result of Paul's doctrine of justification by faith (gospel), defined in antithesis to justification by the works of the Jewish law. Inevitably the antithesis between Christianity (gospel) and Judaism (law) came to the fore. Recent biblical scholarship, however, has convincingly demonstrated that the old (mostly but by no means exclusively Protestant) view owed more to Reformation polemics than to a critical study of Judaism and its canonical and extra-canonical texts. Many scholars nowadays underline the real character of Judaism in the early Christian period and Paul's more positive statements about the law.  In brief, Paul's gospel is for all who believe, Jews and gentiles alike.  

Critical here has been the recognition that Paul's conversion was in fact a prophetic calling, similar to the calling of the Old Testament prophets, or at least was not a conversion from first-century “Judaism” as we today would define the term. Rather it was a conversion within Judaism. To be more accurate, it was a conversion from one sect of Judaism to another, from a kind of Pharisaic Judaism to a conception of Israel more open to gentiles. Paul did not think of himself as an apostate, but rather as carrying forward Israel's task to be a blessing to the nations and a light to the gentiles. 

As a consequence Christianity is now defined not in opposition to Israel but by reference to Israel's heritage and missionary task. A fresh reading of Romans 9-11 has helped scholars to underline that Paul's hope was not for a Christianity distinct from Israel, but for an Israel defined by the grace and call of God, within which gentiles had an integral place.   

One should also recall that the church as a whole rejected voices to separate the first from the second testament and kept the Bible as one whole (pace Marcion and others). Of course, one cannot escape the radicalism with which Christianity referred to the scriptures. For Christians, a proper understanding of the Bible is in fact the necessary stage towards an authentic interpretation of the record of God’s revelation to humankind and the entire creation. 

The purpose of my short introduction is to go beyond the unity of the first and second testaments—this is uncontested—to raise the issue of scriptural authority in the early church and underline the inclusiveness of the new faith, especially through the radical views of Paul. After all, it was on a distorted reading of his epistles that in the history of the church anti-Semitism found a hidden and unnoticed refuge within its premises. Finally, I propose to present evidence that Paul is a bridge of faiths (beyond Judaism), and not a polemic against them. 

1. In contrast to the Judaism of Jesus’ day, in which the supreme authority of every single word of the Bible was unquestionable, Jesus and the early church did not hesitate to criticize scripture and interpret it in a very radical way. It was not just that they regarded the whole Bible in the light of the two great commandments (love of God and love of neighbour), or that Jesus established in the six antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount a new law; one can even argue that Jesus’ messianic interpretation of scripture—namely the fulfilment of the prophesies in his mission—was not novel, since similar messianic interpretations have been found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. What was novel and pioneer was Jesus’ revolutionary proclamation, and the early church's assured conviction, that the reign of God was at hand; in fact, it was inaugurated in Jesus’ own work. 

Moving now to Paul, we can say that it was not merely the rabbinic form in his exegesis of the Old Testament, with its striking verbalism and the emphasis on single words at the expense of context, that characterized the Pauline interpretation; nor can the remarkable similarity between the exegetical work of Paul (or the author of Hebrews) and that of Philo of Alexandria provide the clue to early Christian hermeneutics. The early church never denied the reality of the Old Testament history. Its main feature was its Christocentric dimension and character.  

To be honest, from Paul onwards some criticism of the law reached an extreme position, sometimes even to the point of its absolute rejection. (Nobody can argue that this was a mere rejection of legalism.) The rejection of the law is related to a new hermeneutical principle. Christian theologians did not replace the first testament with the second. But from the beginning of the second century, especially in the case of Bishop Ignatius of Antioch, they simply did not appeal in their argumentation to any scripture, at least to the extent this has been done after the Reformation. It is significant that Ignatius’ only authority was Jesus Christ and his saving work and the faith that comes through him (emoi ta archeia Christos: to me the “charters” are Jesus Christ). 

In my view, this new understanding of scriptural authority—a unique phenomenon in Judeo-Christian religious thinking—was the result of early Christian pneumatology, with which Christianity opened up new dimensions in the understanding of the mystery of the divine revelation. For the first time humans ceased to look backwards to past authorities; instead they turned their attention to the future, to the eschaton. The past no longer suppressed the present but was dynamically reinterpreted in order to give new meaning and new perspective to the future. By placing the Holy Spirit to an equal status in the trinitarian dogma with the Father and the Son, the later Christian theology of the early undivided church broke the chains of fear and dependence on the past. The conciliar declaration of the divinity of the Holy Spirit was undoubtedly one of the most radical considerations of the mystery of deity. 

2. This openness to the future, springing from the church’s undisputed eschatological character and orientation, has been recently reinforced by developments in the sociology and cultural anthropology. Anthropologists have convincingly shown that food was an important language in which Jews of the time of Jesus expressed relations among human beings and especially between human beings and God.[1] Who eats what with whom and why was of extreme importance. “Anyone familiar with Jewish religious observance will notice that food plays a considerable part throughout” (Jacob Neusner). Especially during the inter-testamental period, violation of dietary rules and the inclusion at religious tables of non-Jews or unclean people became equivalent to apostasy. Recent biblical studies have shown that “what distinguished Jesus among many of his rabbinic contemporaries was his practice of fellowship at meals” (Bruce Chilton) and that “open table fellowship” and the absence of boundaries at meals are “characteristic and distinctive of the social-self-understanding that Jesus encouraged in his disciples” (J.D.G. Dunn). 

It was exactly this “open table fellowship” that Paul tried to implement with his Jewish (and Christian) fellows. In Galatians not only did he vigorously defend it (cf. his argument on Peter’s dining—before the arrival of James’ people—with the gentiles, Gal. 2:12), but it was on this very crucial position that he later developed his theory of justification by faith and his unconditioned march to the nations.   

If one accepts this approach to the New Testament data, then one has to start with the social and religious significance of the traditional Jewish regulations about “cleanness” and their theological and practical consequences. Jesus in numerous cases challenged the social and religious validity of some traditional regulations on clean and unclean. We know that most of his healings were directed toward people who were considered unclean: lepers (Μark 1:40-45; Μatt.  8:1-4; cf. Luke 17:11-19), the woman with a flow of blood (Μark 5:25-34; Μatt. 9:20-22; Luke 8:43-48), people possessed by demons, blind or crippled, etc. Whereas for most traditional Jews, the key question was “how and on what conditions can people approach God in order to be saved”, Paul and the early Christians after him put more emphasis on “how God approaches people and offers salvation”.  

This had dangerous consequences for the emerging new religion once it expanded beyond the boundaries of Judaism, its mother religion. Receiving new converts, of course, was never a real problem in the early church. Even Judeo-Christians could accept and endorse this. The problem arose with the practical consequences of such a move: at the common (eucharistic/eschatological/ messianic or otherwise) meals between circumcised Jews and former gentiles. 

Until quite recently, Paul’s letter to Galatians, especially its first autobiographical chapters, were almost exclusively read as an anti-authoritarian (and to a certain extent anti-Jewish) appeal. However, the “Antioch incident” was an appeal to the “inclusive” character of the new religion, embracing all people of faith regardless of their past. At the heart of the incident lies the problem of accepting gentiles at the eucharistic table with or without Jewish legal conditions. The expression “he ate with the gentiles” (Gal. 2:12) is quite characteristic.  

Obviously in the early church there were leaders insisting on separate eucharistic celebrations, so that the basic rules of cleanness be kept. This tendency followed the line of “eucharistic exclusiveness”. Paul, on the contrary, understood the fundamental issue of salvation “in Christ” in an inclusive way. He saw separate eucharistic tables as inconceivable, insisting on a common eucharistic table for both Jews and gentiles. For Paul there was no way other than “eucharistic inclusiveness”; compromise would destroy the basis of his faith. 

Despite the compromise adopted at the Apostolic Council, the early church up to the Constantinian era was an “open society for all who believed in Christ”, with “open table fellowship”, and with unconditional participation in all Eucharistic tables. For most scholars it was the “Antioch incident”, as it is more faithfully reported in Galatians that “convinced Paul of the need to assert his apostolic status” and “reinforced the importance of justification by faith as central to the gospel and the ongoing relations between Jewish and Gentile believers” (Dunn).  

However, what is even more important was a—so far almost ignored—reference in Galatians that Paul initiated his journey to the gentiles (hence his title as “apostle of the gentiles”) by starting from Arabia. In Gal. 1:17, immediately after his prophetic calling, which Luke in Acts interpreted and narrated in the form of a visionary “conversion story”, Paul “went away into Arabia”. Both where exactly he went and why he started from Arabia, are the subject of some dispute.  

The word “Arabia” could refer to anywhere west of Mesopotamia, east and south of Syria and Palestine, including the isthmus of Suez (cf. Gal. 4:25—the Sinai peninsula). But the proximity to Damascus (implied by the next clause) points most naturally to the kingdom of Nabatea, immediately to the south of Damascus.  This fits best with our other evidence, including the reference in 2 Cor. 11:32 to “King Aretas”, who would be the Nabatean king Aretas IV. 

But what seems more important is why Paul went to Arabia. There have been suggestions that Paul’s move to Arabia was a “retreat”, perhaps out of a psychological need, in order to reconstruct his theology (Burton, Duncan) or a period of withdrawal into an uninhabited region, following a revelatory or visionary experience, in preparation for his prophet role, perhaps parallel with the tradition of Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness. Some scholars, in accordance with the old polemical paradigm, insisted that the only reason Paul chose to go to Arabia was to underline his independence from the Jerusalem leadership; in Arabia there was no one whom he could consult (Linton). J.D.G. Dunn in his commentary came to the conclusion that “Paul has left the point unclear and further clarity is not possible”.  

Nevertheless, it is quite natural to argue (with Bornkamm, Betz and Barrett) that Paul went to Arabia in order to preach Christ among the gentiles. Actually he started from the East and then moved to the West, where his preaching of the good news of the salvation of all humankind had a lasting effect, thus determining the fate of what we nowadays call the “western world”. It is my firm conviction that Paul’s reference to Arabia points to his intention to include also—in fact start with—those outside traditional Judaism, in other words to include the seed of Abraham from his maiden Hagar, i.e. the offspring of Ishmael, then identified with the Arab nation, and nowadays with those belonging to Islam. 

Most scholars, even today, consider Gal. 4:21-31 as “a cruel and anti-Jewish…a truly anti-ecumenical statement” (Moxnes). They take Paul as an accuser of those Jews who continue to live “under the law” as being the descendants of Abraham through Hagar, like Ishmael. Only Christians, those who live “according to the promise”, are—according to this traditional exegesis—considered by Paul as the proper descendants of Abraham through Sarah, like Isaac. 

When, however, one takes the missiological significance of Paul’s reference to his journey to Arabia, then his allegorical statement concerning Hagar and her sons is neither anti-Jewish nor anti-Muslim;[2] it is rather a reference to the new inclusive and ecumenical reality of the “new Jerusalem from the high”. 

If the above sketchy and by no means thorough argument is at all sound, then Paul—who for centuries was seen in exclusive terms, as an “apostate” from Judaism, but is now seen more and more as a bridge between Judaism and Christianity—can become a bridge between all three monotheistic religions.