Both Acts and the New Testament as a whole are far removed from Paul in time and circumstance, yet they gave birth to the traditional view of Paul. The unmistakable message of Acts—repeatedly placed in the mouth of Paul by scholars—is that gentiles have replaced the Jews as the people of God. And Acts is strategically placed before the letters of Paul, so that it is through Acts that we first meet Paul. In other words, a clear image of Paul is presented to us that preconditions our response to his letters.
Like Acts, the overall message of the New Testament regarding Judaism is that Judaism is rejected, invalidated and replaced by Christianity. And if this is the message of the New Testament as a whole, how can we doubt that its central figure (13 of its 27 writings claim to be written by Paul, and Acts is about him) preached this same message? In short, the other parts of the New Testament, particularly Acts, have always served as the lens through which Paul has been read and interpreted. This eschatological intensity is especially relevant to two central themes in Paul’s thinking. The first is the expectation in numerous Jewish texts of the time when the inclusion of the gentiles as children of God will take place at the end of history. The second is the elaborate scenario that maintains that the temporary blindness of the Jews is a divinely ordained precondition for the inclusion of the gentiles (Romans 11). According to the final stage of this scenario, once the gentiles are brought into a new relationship with God, Israel will come to its senses, and “All Israel will be saved” (Romans 11:26). Note that he does not say, “All Israel will come to believe in Jesus or Christianity,” just “All Israel will be saved.”
One final factor is important in understanding Paul’s letters from Paul’s viewpoint: Paul’s message contained instruction to and about gentiles—that they were being offered salvation outside the covenant with Israel—was actively and vociferously resisted by others within the Jesus movement. These anti-Pauline groups, whom Paul himself connects with Peter and James (the brother of Jesus) insisted that gentile followers of Jesus could be saved or redeemed only by becoming members of the people of Israel. For adult males, that meant circumcision. We also know that these anti-Pauline leaders from within the Jesus movement followed Paul from town to town, trying to impose their gospel of circumcision on his gentile believers. The issue between Paul and his opponents was not whether gentiles could become followers of Jesus. They could. The issue was whether they first had to become Jews or whether, as Paul insisted, a new way for them had been opened up by the faith and death of Jesus. It is these anti-Pauline apostles within the Jesus movement who are the targets of Paul’s anger. It is against them that his arguments are directed. His concern with circumcision has nothing to do with Jews outside the Jesus movement (as he tells us explicitly in Romans 2:25–3:4).
As the apostle, he is concerned exclusively with the issue of the circumcision of gentiles within the Jesus movement, but Paul never speaks of gentiles as replacing Israel. (Note that Paul never refers to gentile members of the Jesus movement as Christians; for him, humanity is always divided between Jews and gentiles.) And Paul never speaks of God as having rejected Israel in favor of a new chosen people. I cannot deny that interpreters throughout the ages have read him in this way. I believe that Paul vehemently repudiates this misreading of his thought: “I ask, then, has God rejected his people [Israel]? By no means!” (Romans 11:1).
Paul did not see the Mosaic Law as a bad thing or as somehow not being a revelation from God. The issue then is not whether Paul might have been anti-Law, because he wasn’t. Rather, the issue is how Paul viewed the Law’s role in the larger picture of salvation history, and the effect that Israel's Messiah had upon the Law. And what Paul says as clearly as he can in Galatians 3–4, in 2 Corinthians 3 and even in Romans is that the Law, though a very good thing, has been eclipsed by the revelation of God in Jesus Christ and must now be seen as obsolescent:
23 But before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed.
24 Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.
25 But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster. Gal. 3:23–25.
For Paul, the new covenant in Christ is the fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant. Paul views the Mosaic covenant as an interim solution for God’s people, and he believes that the covenant’s day has passed. In Galatians 4, Paul likens the Mosaic covenant to a minor’s guardian who plays an important role—but only until the youth comes of age. But as Galatians 4:4 says, when the fullness of time had come, God sent “forth his Son…born under the Law to redeem those who were under the Law.” Paul can only be referring to persons like himself, namely Jews. In other words, whether we agree with him or not, Paul believes Jesus is indeed the savior of Jews as well as gentiles. He believes that Jews need to be redeemed from the Law, not because the Law is a bad thing, but because it cannot save fallen human beings; it cannot make them new creatures. As Paul puts it: “For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the Law…Since God is one…he will justify the circumcised on the ground of faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith” (Romans 3:28–30).
Paul does not believe that Jews will be justified one way and gentiles another: He believes they will both be justified by a saving faith in the one Messiah for both Jews and gentiles, Jesus of Nazareth. We must make no mistake: In Romans 9:5, when Paul says the Messiah comes from Israel, he means the Messiah anticipated by Jews as their redeemer, whom he believes has now come in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Paul never refers to anyone other than Jesus as “the Christ.” As Paul says in Romans 1:16– 17, the good news (that is, the gospel about Jesus) is the power of salvation “for everyone who has faith to the Jew first and also to the Gentiles.” Such statements cannot be dismissed simply as rhetorical flourishes intended solely for gentiles to make them feel they have equal standing with Jews before God.
