Abstract
‘Paul was Jewish. It is impossible to deny this basic fact’ (p. 1), Michael Bird writes in the opening sentence of his new book. In fact, it is not impossible, strictly speaking. The Ebionites denied it, according to Epiphanius (Panarion 30.16), and Hyam Maccoby denied it in his 1986 biography of the apostle (The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity). But it is certainly unreasonable to deny it, so on this point Bird is on the side of reason. Paul was Jewish, yes, but what follows from this axiom? In answering this question, contemporary scholarship scatters in myriad directions. An Anomalous Jew is Bird’s effort to reckon with the various answers on offer and to sketch the contours of his own.
By way of doing so, Bird gives us five numbered chapters plus a supernumerary introduction. Chapters 1, 4, and 5—roughly half the book, by volume—were previously published elsewhere, while the balance was newly written for this venue. The contents are: Introduction: Paul the Jew…of Sorts (a survey of recent research); Chapter 1: Salvation in Paul’s Judaism (a sympathetic response to the New Perspective on Paul); Chapter 2: Paul: Apostle to the Gentiles and Jews (a less sympathetic response to the Radical New Perspective on Paul); Chapter 3: An Invasive Story: An Apocalyptic and Salvation-Historical Rereading of Galatians (an attempt to mediate between Stendahl and Käsemann, Martyn and Wright); Chapter 4: The Incident at Antioch (Gal 2:11-14): The Beginnings of Paulinism (an argument for a Pauline Christ–Torah antithesis conceived at Antioch); and Chapter 5: The Apostle Paul and the Roman Empire (a Wright-esque, anti-imperial reading of Paul on politics).
The argument of the book is conspicuously derivative (though, to be fair, the author does not claim to be breaking new ground). The book’s title, as Bird acknowledges (pp. 25-27), is lifted directly from a chapter title in John Barclay’s 1996 monograph Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora (‘Paul: An Anomalous Diaspora Jew’). At numerous points, Bird concludes an argument by tweaking a famous comment from a past scholar, paraphrasing it in his own more expansive, more theologically conservative idiom: ‘[E. P. Sanders wrote,] ‘In short, this is what Paul finds wrong in Judaism: it is not Christianity’…. But I say unto you: This is what Paul finds wrong with Judaism: it looks to the Torah rather than to the Messiah for the revelation of God’s righteousness, for the reconciliation of the world, and for the renewal of creation’ (p. 68). And elsewhere: ‘Ernst Käsemann famously said that ‘even when he became a Christian, Paul remained an apocalypticist.’ I would change that to ‘even when Paul became a Christ-believer, he remained entrenched in Jewish apocalypticism and believed that, through the invasion of the gospel, God had brought about the long-awaited climax to Israel’s history, and through this climax, God is recapturing the world for himself’ (p. 166). This is fine, but one learns a good deal more from reading Barclay, Sanders, and Käsemann themselves.
It is accurate, I suppose, to call the apostle Paul ‘an anomalous Jew,’ but the designation could apply equally well to, say, Onias IV of Leontopolis, the Teacher of Righteousness, Salome Alexandra, Tiberius Julius Alexander, Philo of Alexandria, Jesus of Nazareth, Flavius Josephus, or Shimon bar Kosiba, to name just a few obvious ancient candidates. The problem is that anomaly is always defined relative to some assumed norm, so everything depends on what particular norm one has in mind when using the term. Bird explains what he has in mind thusly: ‘In sum, Paul was a religious anomaly. He appeared on the scene of the Greco-Roman world like a sudden yet small ripple moving upon the waters of a still river. He goes mostly unnoticed in his own time, and yet by the time the ripple reaches the shores of the modern age, it has become a tsunami. Paul’s anomaly, offensive as it was to Jews and odd as it was to Greeks, became the Gentile Christianity that eventually swallowed up the Roman Empire’ (p. 30). The phrase ‘an anomalous Jew,’ as Bird uses it of Paul, seems to me very close to what older scholars meant when they called the apostle ‘a religious genius.’