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Reinventing Paul, by John G. Gager
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Throughout the Christian era, Paul has stood at the center of controversy, accused of being the father of Christian anti-Semitism. In this highly accessible book, John Gager challenges this entrenched view of Paul, arguing persuasively that Paul's words have been taken out of their original context, distorted, and generally misconstrued.
Using Paul's own writings, Gager brilliantly sets forth a controversial interpretation of the apostle's teaching as he takes us in search of the "real" Paul. Through an exhaustive analysis of Paul's letters to the Galatians and the Romans, he provides illuminating answers to the key questions: Did Paul repudiate the Law of Moses? Did he believe that Jews had been rejected by God and replaced as His chosen people by Gentiles? Did he consider circumcision to be necessary for salvation? And did he expect Jews to find salvation through Jesus? Gager tells us that Paul was an apostle to the Gentiles, not the Jews. His most vehement arguments were directed not against Judaism but against competing apostles in the Jesus movement who demanded that Gentiles be circumcised and conform to Jewish law in order to be saved. Moreover, Paul relied on rhetorical devices that were familiar to his intended audience but opaque to later readers of the letters. As a result, his message has been misunderstood by succeeding generations.
- Sales Rank: #604293 in Books
- Published on: 2002-05-16
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 5.20" h x .40" w x 7.90" l, .60 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 208 pages
From Publishers Weekly
In this slim book, Princeton religion professor Gager aims for nothing short of a revolution in Pauline studies; he maintains that Paul was not the founder of Christianity, did not condemn works in favor of faith, never claimed that Jews must accept Jesus as their savior and never criticized Judaism or the Jewish law. Paul's sole concern, Gager argues, was announcing God's intention to save gentiles through Christ. Gager wants to dispel what Paul Meyer has called the "dark Manichean shadow across the pages of Paul and his commentators"Athat is, the use of Paul to justify Christian anti-Semitism. He says that once one has crossed over to the new paradigm, every aspect of the old seems incredibleAand therein lies the book's central weakness. Gager strains to make contradictory passages fit, resorting to the alleged presence of rhetorical strategies such as the "unreliable author" and a fictive "fellow Jew" in order to disassociate Paul from statements that undercut the new paradigm. The raw truth, as most readers will acknowledge, is that Paul's ad-hoc, hastily written letters are not fully consistent. Yet Gager has still accomplished something important, sketching a new way of reading Paul that, if not always fully persuasive, nevertheless helps us see the man more clearly for what he was: a first-century Jew on fire with the belief that God through Jesus had opened salvation to all people. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Gager (religion, Princeton) has written an articulate and well-documented presentation of a controversial but increasingly popular point of view in Pauline studies. Traditionally, biblical scholars have held that Paul taught that the Church replaced the Jews as those now in covenant with God and that Paul thought the Law was no longer binding. Gager sees this as a complete misunderstanding that can be cleared up if we recognize that Paul's teachings on these issues were meant for Gentiles only. The essence of Gager's view is that since Gentiles are Paul's intended audience, it should be clear that rather than rejecting Judaism, Paul is rejecting "anti-Pauline apostles within the Jesus-movement." After he lays out the issues in question and summarizes traditional views of Paul, Gager then makes his argument and discusses various like-minded contemporary scholars, such as E.P. Sanders. He then shows how passages in the New Testament books of Galatians and Romans can be interpreted very differently when his Gentile audience is kept in mind. This informed and revolutionary view of Paul's thought will become one of the central books of modern scholarship on this subject. Highly recommended for any library.DDavid Bourquin, California State Univ., San Bernardino
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
The large project of this small book is to confront almost 20 centuries of misreading Paul as anti-Jewish, which, Gager argues, anachronistically projects later conflicts into Paul's context and fails to acknowledge that Paul never left Judaism and that the Christianity that incorporated Paul's writings into its scriptures came into being after Paul died. Because Gager's reading of Galatians and Romans plausibly assumes that Paul and his intended audiences were familiar with the rhetoric of their time, Gager uses its techniques convincingly to understand the epistles. He renders Paul as a complex figure who, even after becoming an apostle to the Gentiles, clearly was a member of the Jewish community. By reconsidering a putative font of Christian anti-Judaism, Gager makes an important contribution to Jewish-Christian dialogue and offers a richer conception of Paul than the one that has guided many who have struggled with him over the centuries. Given the importance of Paul and anti-Semitism in the history of Western thought, his book is relevant beyond the precincts of Christianity and Judaism. Steven Schroeder
Copyright � American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
25 of 27 people found the following review helpful.
One Trick Pony, but what a trick!
By Jean E. Pouliot
"Reinventing Paul" is John Gager's attempt to solve one of the most vexing problems of New Testament scholarship: Saint Paul's seeming anti-Judaism, if not outright anti-Semitism. The view that Paul (and God!) turned against his own people had been considered self-evident to a long line of scholars and theologians stretching back at least to St. Augustine. But the history of the 20th century, soaked copiously with the blood of innocent Jews, made many New Testament scholars hope that a less Jew-hating Paul could be salvaged from Paul's writing.
Gager reviews the roots of traditional view of Paul -- the "obvious" view discerned by the casual modern reader of the New Testament. Saul/Paul in this view is an observant Jew who is converted to Christianity by a miraculous experience of the Risen Christ, and who then proceeds to condemn his own people based on their "rejection" of Jesus as the promised Messiah. Gager re-examines this view in the light of new scholarship and new attitudes since the Shoah. How can Paul, he asks, "convert" to a faith that does not yet exist? Paul's conversion is an event that is "read back" into his story based on the post-70 CE split of Judaism and Christianity. Paul, whose Damascus Road experience dates to the years immediately following Christ's crucifixion in 30 CE, would not have thought of his experience as a conversion *from* Judaism, but at most from one expression of Judaism to another.
But what of Paul's seeming citations against Jews and Judaism? Gager's thesis is that Paul's enemies were not Christ-denying Jews, but Christ-*affirming* Jews within the Jesus movement. To Paul, these Jewish-born Christians misunderstood the meaning of Christ's death, which to Paul was the way that God extended salvation from the Jews to the Gentiles. Read in this light, a citation like "The Jew has no advantage and circumcision is of no value" (Romans 3:1) does not signal God's rejection of Jews, but that Gentiles need not become Jews to gain salvation.
Gager's thesis is sound and based on a sensible reading of the New Testament. However, Gager works too hard to show how much better his thesis is than that of his predecessors. The book is also much too long, repeating the same points ad nauseum. In spite of these faults, I found "Reinventing Paul" to be a valuable contribution that makes Paul's thinking not only tolerable but even laudatory.
33 of 37 people found the following review helpful.
Gager - required reading for the student of Paul
By Amazon Customer
Gager's text, "Reinventing Paul" is perhaps mislabeled, as he does less re-inventing than "recovering." With the sort of exasperation characteristic of E.P. Sanders' in "Paul and Palestinian Judaism" Gager dismantles, by way of a thorough review of recent Pauline scholarship, the age-old distortions of Paul and first century Judaism that have plagued Christianity from the outset.
His dismay is easily understood as he makes plain the way that Paul, the "Apostle to the Gentiles" was forced into the role of "Paul, critic of all that is Jewish." (my phrase) Indeed, the only regret that I had as I read his book was that he seemed unaware of the groundbreaking work of Mark Nanos' "The Mystery of Romans." Nanos' work would only have bolstered Gager's conclusions, but from a Jewish perspective.
It is no longer excusable for Christian students of the New Testament to set Paul up as an opponent of the "straw man" of Pharisaic Judaism created in the late 19th century and utterly discredited by Sanders, George Foote Moore, and Charlotte Klein. In concise form, Gager has catalogued the breaches in the dam of tradition that will, one hopes, lead to its imminent collapse. The hope, however, falters briefly when one reads critiques of Gager's book that seek to cite brief passages from Romans or Galatians once again as support for Paul's rejection of the meaningfulness of Torah for Jews of his day. Still the misrepresentations of the Judaism of that day raise their misshapen heads to perpetuate the abuses of the past.
His analysis of Romans and Galatians, while hardly exhaustive, give us an exciting taste of the benefits of real rhetorical analysis of Paul's letters, without weighing the reader down with excessive jargon. Perhaps the most wonderful bits of the whole book are the footnotes, which lead the reader from his tight digest to a variety of authors whose works explore the questions in much greater detail.
One hopes that Gager's text will become a staple in the teaching establishments of the Church. It would be a shame if any student graduated from a seminary in the next ten years without having read it.
18 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
Will the Real Paul please stand up?
By FrKurt Messick
Gager could perhaps be starting a quest similar in intent if not in form to that of the Jesus Seminar, namely, the search for the 'real' Paul, or at least the 'real meaning' of Paul. Paul has been reinterpreted and recast in many ways over the past 2000 years, for denominational and sociological reasons. To build upon Schweitzer's observations about the changing images of Jesus, just as each age reinterprets Jesus to, in one way or another, recast Jesus in the image of that age, so too does Paul undergo a similar change. What Gager is doing, however, is not merely reinterpreting the meaning of Paul -- he is offering a new way of asking the interpretative questions, offering a paradigm shift that casts doubts upon traditional interpretations and offers a new way of thinking about the texts. Once we begin to question not just specific texts or issues within that paradigm, but the paradigm itself, nothing in the old model makes sense. (Gager, p. 145)
The Traditional View
Gager specifically does not want to start a 'Quest for the Historical Paul' a la the Jesus Seminar model, but does feel that re-examination is necessary to shift emphasis away from traditionally-held views of Paul. Even if such a search for the 'real' Paul is not undertaken, due to the lack of 'reality' in such a search, this does not mean that there are not bad interpretations, even wrong ones when it comes to examining Pauline literature for intent, background, and context. (Gager, pp. vii-viii)
Traditionally, Paul is turned into a sort of universal preacher; the particular advice and conversations he has in his letters to specific communities made into universally applicable principles and precepts. Gager disputes the authority of each of these assumptions, and puts forward arguments against each of these assumptions within the framework of his new paradigm.
The New View
Gager sees the fundamental mis-understanding of Paul (a mis-understanding of centuries-long standing) to be primarily focussed upon the context of audience of Paul. Working from scholars who in various ways began to challenge basic assumptions (albeit, incompletely, Gager would argue) such as Kirster Stendahl, Lloyd Gaston, and E.P. Sanders, Gager sets up criteria which must be kept in mind when examining any passage or writing of Paul's. These include the realisation that Paul remained a Jew throughout his life, adhering to the context of traditional Jewish thought; Paul's 'conversion' was not from one religion to another (for, arguably, Christianity as a separate religion could be said not to have existed at this point) but rather a transformation of thought fully within the framework of the same religion (namely, Judaism); and primarily, that Paul must be seen as the apostle to the Gentiles, with specific intent to speak to the Gentiles in a way that would make sense to them. Paul was not concerned with Jews or Jewish-Jesus movement people (except insofar as they impacted and/or interfered with his own ministries). Even when Paul speaks in the synagogues, this speaking was primarily intended for the Gentile audience. Gentiles frequented synagogues throughout the Greco-Roman world. (Gager, p. 51)
This argues against the universality of Paul's messages as is held in the traditional view. If one takes the context of speaking to Jews, or of speaking to all of humanity which includes Jews, out of the paradigm, and concentrates on the message for Gentiles, and read as such, many (but not all) of Paul's apparent contradictions fall away. Likewise, a Paul who is seen to have remained completely within the framework of Judaism, with honour and respect for the Torah as it applies to the Jews, can be seen as less the fountainhead of Christian anti-Judaism. Christian readers no longer feel compelled to insulate Paul from Judaism, while Jewish readers no longer strive to protect Judaism from Paul. (Gager, p. 57)
A Lingering Doubt
Gager claims a certain theological purity -- my fundamental concern is historical and that my primary goal is to get it right, Gager claims. (Gager, p. 18) He claims that he doesn't have the specific intent of proving any particular denominational or theological viewpoint correct. This may or may not be correct. Clearly as Gager speaks of the reasons why a reinterpretation of Paul might be needed -- the Nazi Holocaust, together with the founding of the state of Israel, account for the possibility of reading Paul in a new way -- he has an agenda which is he is trying to promote, however subtle that promotion may be. This is, of course, an agenda which would be welcomed at this seminary, with its strong emphasis on Jewish-Christian dialogue and relationship.
But is this reinterpretation really a reinvention? Is this so much a radical shift of paradigm (as Gager likes to think it is), or more of a logical next-step in the progression of modern studies as the underlying assumptions of most everything (from physics to medicine to history to mathematics to art and music and much more) have come under scrutiny in the modern (and, as some like to say, post-modern) era? While Gager's insights and analyses are welcome, perhaps they are not quite the sound-barrier-breaking ideas that he wishes they were.
And what of the traditional views? Even if thoroughly discounted and discredited in Gager's paradigm, we again run into a similar as the Jesus Seminar and its critics. How can we state the Holy Spirit has had charge of the image of Jesus through two millenniums, and thus it is the traditional Jesus who is most 'real', but, on the other hand, the traditional Paul cannot be most 'real'? Where was the Holy Spirit in this regard? Can the Holy Spirit only take charge of one?
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