The Myth of the ‘Traditional View of Paul’ and the Role of the Apostle in Modern Jewish-Christian Polemics

Abstract

This is the first of two related studies of Jewish approaches to the apostle Paul. The context of the first is that of Jewish-Christian dialogue, while the context of the second is that of intra-Jewish ideological debate. Rarely mentioned by Jewish writers before the nineteenth century, the Apostle to the Gentiles took his place as the Great Apostate in the popular Jewish imagination only in the modern period. Jewish Pauline scholarship proper developed alongside the nineteenth- and twentieth-century reclamation of Jesus as a Jew. The primary context in which Paul’s background and teachings were considered was that of interfaith polemic; the apostle functioned as a means by which individual writers could explore the relationship between Judaism and Christianity more generally. Some of the key figures considered in this schematic survey of the history of the Jewish interpretation of Paul include Heinrich Graetz, Isaac Meyer Wise, Claude Montefiore, Kaufman Kohler, Joseph Krauskaupf, Martin Buber, Hyam Maccoby, Pinchas Lapide and Mark Nanos.