A Jewish Look at the Apostle Paul

Paul was not a Christian. Nor was he a convert.  He never converted to Christianity because there was no Christianity to convert to.  In Paul’s time the name Christian had not yet been coined.  He was a Jew first and foremost.  He lived as a Torah observing Jew and died as a Torah observing Jew.  He came to believe Jesus was the Christ.  And he came to believe non-Jews should be grafted into the Jewish covenant relationship with God.  He cautioned non-Jews to not get arrogant or snotty about their new faith.

For Paul, the words grace, faith, justification and Christ were important for non-Jews to trust and understand. He was convinced that Jesus Christ revealed the heart of God toward all human beings.  And that heart was centered in the love of God as he knew it from Jewish tradition.  Paul affirmed his Jewish tradition when he declared, despite all the craziness that happened to people in their lives, nothing would separate them from the love of God.

Most of his beliefs, especially the “despite” talk had always been part of what it meant to be Jewish.  If you read his chapters 9-11 in his letter to the Romans, Paul affirms that even without Jesus, God made promises to the Jewish people, and God has a special relationship with the Jewish people that will never end.  For Paul, Torah was the revelation which helped him define the meaning of Christ.

I agree with Mark Nanos, a Biblical theologian you should Google, if not read (www.marknanos.com).  He posits Paul as a Torah observing Jew who started small sub-groups or associations of non-Jews in the hope to make them as Jewish as possible.  His writing makes a lot more sense of Paul that any other interpretation I have read.

If Nanos is correct, while it still does not diminish the differences between Jews and Christians, it does challenge the way too many Christians have understood Paul, as a Jew who gave up Judaism, Torah and the Jewish community to become Christian.  Nothing, it appears, could be further from the truth. 

Common Words, Uncommon Meanings

There are words we all commonly use and think we know what these words mean.  Words like God, Jesus, Jew, Holocaust, evil, and death.  We commonly use these words as if to say we understand but the fact is we do not.

These words possess weight, heft, timber, threat and mystery.  Smart people, smarter than you or me, have investigated them for millennia and still their meaning eludes us.  But they are important words, vital words, and they will not go away for they touch something deep in our souls and they ought to.

We are creatures that long to understand what we are doing here on this planet that floats and rotates in black space.  And these common words with uncommon meanings pull at us because they are “limit” words.  They take us to those places where, if we’re honest, we know we do not know, but we act and talk like we know.

Look at the word Holocaust.  The word means burnt offering and gives the impression of something done to appease an angry god.  But the common meaning is that of a horrendous disaster and we think we know what that means.   But the word Holocaust points to something much deeper and profound, the ability of human beings to be inhuman and to arbitrarily and systematically murder a million children under the age of ten.  The horror of the event is so horrible we dare not get too close or precise for fear of what we will see and what it will do to us.

Or the word and name, Jesus.  Here is a man, a Jew who lived over two thousand years ago, some call him the Christ without a second thought, Jesus, who remains a mysterious puzzle to many of us wrapped and bound in ambiguous messianic scriptures, sophisticated theological language, awful Hollywood movies where he is always strangely pictured as having a British accent, Jesus, whose followers have loved and cared for the neighbor and who have also murdered the neighbor in Jesus name, Jesus disputed by Jews and Muslims with sound questions, weighted down with creeds, and dogmas and hymns and liturgies, books upon books and yet this poor Jew is still not understood.  For all the religious christological hoopla and faith, we do not know who he was and what he really accomplished.  Yet, the word Jesus, has an ongoing intricate place in our culture’s vocabulary.

There’s a wildness and a secrecy about these words that keeps us from getting too close.  Holocaust, God, Jesus, Jew, evil, and death:  all these common words along with others with uncommon meanings haunt us because they are so much part of our lives and yet we do not know what they mean.  We talk and write, not with these words but, against them.  And whether we are for or against them, they will not let us go. 

Mansplaining and Teaching Religion?

My wife tells me that I have a problem called mansplaining.  She says I explain things to her that do not require explaining and I sometimes do so in a condescending and patronizing manner.   Since she is quite honest and usually right, I am asking myself where I might have acquired this ailment.  Do all men have this problem or only male Religion professors and teachers?

Some have explained mansplaining as a combination of over confidence and misjudgment over what someone else (usually a woman) knows and does not know. 

I was not aware of my mansplaining, and I suppose it means I too easily and arrogantly assume I have knowledge which no one else possesses.  Or, the more likely, as a teacher, I am used to repeating myself since some students tend to forget and the exam is on Monday.

So, I hereby apologize to my wife for mansplaining and promise to be more aware and do better. 

Stephen Hawking and God

When asked what his thoughts were about God, Stephen Hawking replied:

“It is clear that we are just an advanced breed of primates on a minor planet orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among 100 billion galaxies.  But, ever since the dawn of civilization, people have craved for an understanding of the underlying order of the world. There ought to be something very special about the boundary conditions of the universe. And what can be more special than there is no boundary…And there should be no boundary to human endeavor. We are all different.  However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. While there is life, there is hope.”

Most of us were fascinated by Stephen Hawking.  Here was a brilliant physicist suffering from ALS, confined to a wheel chair for many years, unable to move but a muscle or two, suffering in ways most us will never have to experience, searching for the truth, and these were his thoughts about God.  We are compelled to engage his ideas.

He knew what religious people wanted to hear but that was not what his scientific enquiry into the universe had told him. 

We need to pay attention to Hawking and ask ourselves whether our images of God, given to us by our respective religious traditions are accurate. Do we need to rethink or reimagine what we mean when we say the word, God? What measure of God would create a universe that looks like this?  Could our way of talking about God be wrong?

The problem is we have so much invested in our ways of speaking about God.  And many are desperate to retain the old images of the deity.  And what new images would appeal to us?  How would we ever know whether they were correct?  But if Hawking is telling us something true about the nature of time and the universe, and if we care about the truth, must we not alter our way of talking about God?  After all, God does not live and is not boxed inside the Church or the Synagogue or the Mosque.  God lives in the world and in the energy of the universe and is not bound by our religious notions.

Some would argue, asking a scientist about the existence of God may not be wise.  Some religious folk will just ignore Hawking anyway and go on as usual.  But, I advise anybody out there who wants to be an honest religious person to ponder with care Hawking’s words and the mystery that is God.