The Apostle Paul in the Jewish Imagination is a pioneering multidisciplinary examination of Jewish perspectives on Paul of Tarsus. Here, the views of individual Jewish theologians, religious leaders, and biblical scholars of the last 150 years, together with artistic, literary, philosophical, and psychoanalytical approaches, are set alongside popular cultural attitudes. Few Jews, historically speaking, have engaged with the first-century Apostle to the Gentiles. The modern period has witnessed a burgeoning interest in this topic, however, with treatments reflecting profound concerns about the nature of Jewish authenticity and the developing intercourse between Jews and Christians. In exploring these issues, Jewish commentators have presented Paul in a number of apparently contradictory ways. The Apostle Paul in the Jewish Imagination represents an important contribution to Jewish cultural studies and to the study of Jewish-Christian relations.

A groundbreaking new portrait of the apostle Paul, from one of today’s leading historians of antiquity Often seen as the author of timeless Christian theology, Paul himself heatedly maintained that he lived and worked in history’s closing hours. His letters propel his readers into two ancient worlds, one Jewish, one pagan. The first was incandescent with apocalyptic hopes, expecting God through his messiah to fulfill his ancient promises of redemption to Israel. The second teemed with ancient actors, not only human but also divine: angry superhuman forces, jealous demons, and hostile cosmic gods. Both worlds are Paul’s, and his convictions about the first shaped his actions in the second. Only by situating Paul within this charged social context of gods and humans, pagans and Jews, cities, synagogues, and competing Christ-following assemblies can we begin to understand his mission and message. This original and provocative book offers a dramatically new perspective on one of history’s seminal figures.

In these chapters, a group of renowned international scholars seek to describe Paul and his work from “within Judaism,” rather than on the assumption, still current after thirty years of the “New Perspective,” that in practice Paul left behind aspects of Jewish living after his discovery of Jesus as Christ (Messiah). After an introduction that surveys recent study of Paul and highlights the centrality of questions about Paul’s Judaism, chapters explore the implications of reading Paul’s instructions as aimed at Christ-following non-Jews, teaching them how to live in ways consistent with Judaism while remaining non-Jews. The contributors take different methodological points of departure: historical, ideological-critical, gender-critical, and empire-critical, and examine issues of terminology and of interfaith relations. Surprising common ground among the contributors presents a coherent alternative to the “New Perspective.” The volume concludes with a critical evaluation of the Paul within Judaism perspective by Terence L. Donaldson, a well-known voice representative of the best insights of the New Perspective.

The Jewish study of Jesus has made enormous strides within the last two hundred years. Virtually every aspect of the life of Jesus and related themes have been analyzed and discussed. Jesus has been “reclaimed” as a fellow Jew by many, although what this actually means remains a matter for discussion. Ironically, the one event in the life of Jesus that has received significantly less attention is the one that the New Testament proclaims as the most important of all: his resurrection from the dead. This book is the first attempt to document Jewish views of the resurrection of Jesus in history and modern scholarship.

Paul as a radical Jewish mystic whose insights often anticipate the world of twentieth-century psychoanalysis.

What was piety like before the commandments were revealed? How did Abraham live in a way that fulfilled the ideals of piety without the Torah? This question, raised in the ancient Jewish theology of Philo and central to the struggle of Paul with his own Judaism and his emerging Christian faith, was raised once again by the Hasidic masters of Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century. In a series of powerful and spiritually searching sermons, the Hasidic masters reinterpret spiritually the ancient rabbis' insistence that the patriarchs lived within the Law. In centering their spiritualization of Judaism around the figure of Abraham, these latter-day Jewish thinkers express a position that stands midway between the claims of the Talmud and those of the Christian apostle. Arthur Green uses this Hasidic debate on the patriarchs and the commandments as a point of departure for a wide-ranging consideration of the relationship between piety and commandment in Hasidic Judaism. The result of this effort is a series of rather remarkable mystical defenses of the commandments and an original contribution of Hasidic thought to the ongoing history of Judaism.

The dominant portrayals of the apostle Paul are of a figure who no longer valued Jewish identity and behavior, opposing them for both Jew and non-Jew in his assemblies. This prevailing version of Paul depends heavily upon certain interpretations of key "flashpoint" passages. In this book and the subsequent volumes in this series, Mark Nanos undertakes to test a "Paul within Judaism" (re)reading of the apostle, especially of these "flashpoint" texts. Nanos demonstrates how traditional conclusions about Paul and the meaning of his letters are dramatically altered by testing the hypothesis that the historical Paul practiced a Jewish, Torah-observant way of life, and that he expected those whom he addressed to know that he did so. Nanos also tests the hypothesis that the non-Jews addressed were expected to know that his guidance was based on promoting a Jewish way of life for themselves, at the same time insisting that they remain non-Jews and thus not technically under Torah on the same terms as himself and the other Jews in this new (Jewish) movement. In conversation with the prevailing views, Nanos argues that the "Paul within Judaism" perspective offers not only more historically probable interpretations of Paul's texts, but also more promise for better relations between Christians and Jews, because these texts have informed Christian concepts of, ways of talking about, and behavior toward Jews based on the premise that Paul considered Jews and Judaism the mirror opposites of what Christians should be and become.