What is the Jewish view of St. Paul?

[Peter_J]

Why on earth would I even need to ‘defend’ my beliefs?

Presumably because of them being attacked.

 

[Peter_J]

And thereby hangs a tail/tale.

A story about someone’s rear end?

 

[SyroMalankara]

I often wonder this. Pre conversion he was a respected Pharisee who was taught by Galmiel, a highly respected teacher of the Jewish faith. Do Jews view him as heretic? Or do they just think he was someone who messed up? I mean his conversion in Acts is sudden and his thinking changed 180 degrees about truth in a matter of days. It must have really been interesting to have seen how Jewish leaders would have reacted to his conversion to what they believe was a blasphemous movement.

tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/20214/who-was-paul

Jews don’t like the apostle Paul. Jesus they can live with; he was a good-hearted rebbe whose words were twisted to say things he didn’t mean. But Paul was the twister, and can’t be forgiven. “Jesus, yes; Paul, never!” as one Jewish biographer of Paul puts it. As a zealous convert who equated the Torah with death, Paul is deemed the father of anti-Judaism (the theological critique of Judaism as a religion), the grandfather of anti-Semitism (the hatred of Jews as people), and the inventor of the theology of the Cross (an excuse for many massacres of Jews). Even Friedrich Nietzsche, no friend of the Jews, said Paul “falsified the history of Israel so as to make it appear as a prologue to his mission” and was “the genius in hatred, in the standpoint of hatred, and in the relentless logic of hatred.”.

Me, I came late to the Jewish dislike of Paul. I loved the Paul I read in college, the one who taught St. Augustine and Martin Luther and Pascal and Kierkegaard how to gaze ruefully into their divided selves. This was the Paul who wrote, like a Freudian neurotic, “For what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I.” I was well into my 30s when I discovered the unpalatable Paul. One night over maybe a third glass of wine, I proposed a book about Paul to an editor friend. My Paul would be a precursor to modern assimilationist Jews—embarrassed by Judaism, dismissive of his yeshivish education, fiendishly good at reading texts against themselves, a little too eager to please the goyim. My friend laughed at what he took to be my stab at provocativeness. “Judith,” he said gently, “you can’t defend Paul as a Jew.”

But now it seems that you can. Just as historians studying Jesus have uncovered a more Jewish version over the past 50 years or so by trying to understand him as a creature of his own place and time (first-century Palestine in the grip of apocalyptic fever), so a new generation of Pauline revisionists have discovered a more Jewish Paul, a product of the same place and time. Paul Was Not a Christian is the title of a book published this fall; what he was—and never stopped being—according to New Testament scholar Pamela Eisenbaum and the revisionists she echoes was a law-abiding Jew. He never converted to Christianity, because no such religion existed in his day. (Paul came along shortly after Jesus died.) All Paul did was switch his affiliation from one Jewish denomination to another, from Pharisaism to Jesus-ism. (Some other recent works of Paul revisionism include Reinventing Paul by John G. Gager, What Paul Meant by Garry Wills, and Paul Among the People by Sarah Ruden, which is coming out in February.)

— Judith Shulevitz

 

[Kaninchen]

Presumably because of them being attacked.

Oh, I’m at the point where I state things rather than argue them. After over a decade, it becomes repetitive - CAF needs new, fresher Jews.

 

[Peter_J]

Well, I guess it’s good that we only attack each others’ views, rather than physically attacking each other like in the good old days.

 

[ChineseCatholic]

Oh, I’m at the point where I state things rather than argue them. After over a decade, it becomes repetitive - CAF needs new, fresher Jews.

A smarter policy no doubt, given that the average lay person seems rather woefully ill-equipped to comb through the nuances of not only their own religious tradition but anothers.

I think that’s the thing that’s…irked me the most about internet forums somewhat devoted to the idea of comparative religious thought.

Rarely does one encounter an actual comparison - everyone seems to be dragging the concerns/terminology/aims of their chosen credo and evaluating all others based on a set of criteria that the other side may find irrelevant or nonsensical.

I’d love to see the day when someone might raise on this forum, a comparison between Rabbi Bahya Ibn Pakuda’s Duties of the Heart and say St. Augustine, both sharing a Neoplatonic tie but taking it in the direction of their respective faiths…

But yeah…we can’t even move beyond some rather seemingly basic ideas.

 

[Vonsalza]

Oh, I’m at the point where I state things rather than argue them. After over a decade, it becomes repetitive - CAF needs new, fresher Jews.

I got a good belly-laugh out of this. Thanks.

To the OP, I’ve read a few Jewish treatments and they generally range from general dismissal (as in “who is he to us?”) to critical of his bona fides as an authentic Pharisee. You have some supporters in the Messianic Jewish camp, but they’re not numerous.

I guess the answer to the thread question is “several”. Judaism experiences the same problems as broader Christianity when one tries to define who, exactly, is a Jew/Christian and who, exactly, is not a Jew/Christian.

Unsurprisingly, this wide spectrum will return a wide spectrum of replies to any given question; including those about St. Paul.

And greetings to my Jewish “older brothers” (vile ecumenist that I sometimes am).