The British Messianic Jewish Alliance

Was the Apostle Paul anti-Semitic?    

( Issue 206 - Summer 1999)

This is far from an exhaustive treatment of this subject. It is rather, a picture painted with broad strokes so that we can get a general view of the question before us and issues that relate to it. It is a huge subject that has prompted numerous  books from both Jewish and Gentile authors. 

         The questions before us are: Was Paul so angry with Judaism and the religious establishment that he became anti-Semitic? Is all that he said about Judaism and Jesus filtered through blind prejudice? Did Paul, in this fit of rage create a new religion called Christianity? Did he make Jesus claim to be something He never claimed to be, i.e. the Divine Messiah, because of his anti-Semitic rage? The most damning indictment is that Paul's alleged negative attitude to the Jews led logically to such events as the Crusades, the Inquisitions and the Holocaust. The blame for Christian anti Semitism and racial anti Semitism is laid at Paul’s door. Is this really where the blame should be laid? Is it fair to charge Paul with responsibility for the, “...centuries of Christian antipathy toward Jews (which) helped implant the cultural seedbed within which the germ of Nazi racial anti Semitism could grow and from which it could draw its ideological nourishment.” [1]

            The common short definition of ‘anti Semitism’ by the Oxford Dictionary is “Hostility to Jews”. Rabbi Eckstein writes. “Although ancient in concept, the term ‘anti Semitism’ is of a more recent vintage. It was coined in 1873 by Wilhelm Marr, a German who believed that the Jews as a group were unalterably tainted and ‘racially determined’ to overrun society and corrupt the pure Aryan German nation. The shift from a historic prejudice that was anti Jewish and a result  of Jewish behaviour or beliefs, to one that was anti Jews and racially motivated, was a fundamental one. For the first time in history, Jews were left with no option to 'change for the better' not even through their conversion to Christianity... the root of the problem was their blood.’ [2]

Was Paul ‘hostile’ to Jews? We need to turn to the evidence of his own writings to see if there was any hint of hostility or hatred toward his own people? But before we do, I would like to suggest that the only way we can gain an accurate picture of Paul is to see him as Paul the Jew. Unfortunately  for us he has been Gentilized by the Church and demonized by the Synagogue.

Paul the Jew. 

Everything that can be doubted about Paul has been doubted, apart from his confession that he was a sinner of the worst type! Hyam Maccoby for example, doubts he was a real Jew, a Pharisee,  well versed in Jewish tradition, his motives and even his studies under Gamaliel. To try to prove his theory, sources belonging to the natural enemies of Paul are appealed to, i.e. Gnostic and Ebionite writings, in which one would hardly expect a good word to be said about Paul. Everything Jewish about Paul is doubted with no good reason. Most scholars have no such doubts. To fully understand Paul and evaluate whether he really was anti-Semitic, we must see him in his true Jewish light. Love him or hate him, one cannot and should not get away from the fact that Paul was a Jew. Even Hugh Schonfield, in his book ‘Those Incredible Christians’ does not doubt Paul's credential as a Jew or Pharisee.

            Writers like Maccoby recognise that it has been harder to dismiss Jesus; He is somewhat of an enigma to the Jewish people. Yeshua has been reclaimed as a good rabbi who never claimed to be divine. He may have been a Messiah figure, in the sense of sent by God. However, it was wicked Paul who put words into Yeshua’s mouth about being the Divine Messiah who came to die for our sins. It has been easier to find a scapegoat in Paul for anti-Semitism than it has been to discredit Yeshua. Maccoby's view of Paul is:

            “Paul was never a Pharisee rabbi, but an adventurer of undistinguished background. He was attached to the Sadducees, as a police officer under the authority of the High Priest, before his conversion to belief in Jesus. His mastery of the kind of learning associated with the Pharisees was not great. He deliberately misrepresented his own biography in order to increase the effectiveness of his own missionary activities.” [3]

            Though this is a crude popularist presentation, it does draw on and exploit a more serious concern that many Jews have about Paul possibly being an anti Semite.

Paul's written testimony.   

The opponents of Paul take his own words and use them as damning evidence against him, Maccoby for example uses 1Thess 2:15 16. “...who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and also drove us out. They displease God and are hostile to all men in their effort to keep us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved. In this way they always heap up their sins to the limit. The wrath of God has come upon them at last.”

            This is viewed as a foundation of the charge of Deicide, the murder of God by the Jews and misanthropy (the hatred of humankind). But of whom is Paul speaking? His critique of the religious leaders is valid and if this makes Paul an anti-Semite, then what about Jeremiah, Isaiah and the other prophets? Criticism of corrupt religion was always part of Israel’s prophetic tradition. The problem lies with the use of such texts by sections of the Church prone to anti-Semitism. This is where the weakness has been and still exists. This needs to be recognised and compensated for. Paul's words taken by themselves are not anti-Semitic, but when filtered through 2,000 years of persecution they sound very sinister. The taunt of 'Christ killer' by those who brutally murdered millions in the death camps makes Paul's words uncomfortable. “It is he who first assigns to the Jews the role of the sacred executioner... He says that the Jews are treated as God's enemies for your sake (Rom 11:28) a phrase that sums up the role of the Jews in the Christian myth...” [4]

            Rather than vilify Paul, I believe that we must reclaim his Jewishness, de-mythologize his teaching which has been used and abused over the centuries. When you read Romans 9:1-5, the last thing you think of is an anti Semite; he loved his people so much he would have gone to hell for them, if he could. Paul, the Jew,  properly understood, is a powerful antidote to anti Semitism in the Church.

            Eckstein comments. “In Romans, Paul admonishes  the Gentiles not to be hauty, nor forget that it is the root that supports the branch, not the opposite (Rom11:18). The Jewish rejection of Jesus, he decried, was for the Gentiles' own sake, so that they could be grafted onto the rich (Jewish) olive tree and share in a covenantal relationship with God (Rom11:11) As the church became increasingly Gentile, however, its Jewish roots became more and more denied. All that was remembered from Paul's admonition was that the Jews rejected Jesus: The portion that claimed the rejection was ‘for the Gentiles sake’ was conveniently dropped.”[5]

            Implicit in this we see the recognition that it is not Paul per se, but a faulty understanding of Paul that leads to anti Semitism. We need to correct that view and not trash Paul altogether. An honest reader of Paul in the NT epistles would find it hard to come away with a picture of an anti-Semitic Paul; how is it managed?

            Maccoby is a good representative of the modern attempts to discredit Paul.

“While anti Semitism (in the sense of intense dislike of Jews) was not uncommon in the ancient world, it was probably among the Gnostic sects that the most radical form of anti Semitism originated the view that the Jews are the representatives of cosmic evil, the people of the devil.” [6]

            Maccoby tries, with subtlety, to connect Paul's teaching with, of all people, his natural theological enemies, the Gnostics, thus guilt by association! Further:

“An important aspect of Paul's mythology is the strong potential for anti Semitism which it shares with Gnosticism. If Paul was the creator of the Christian myth, he was also the creator of the anti Semitism which has been inseparable from that myth, and which eventually produced the medieval diabolization of the Jews, evidenced in the stories of the 'blood liable' and the alleged desecration of the Host.” [7]

The Displacement of the Jews.

Alongside the charge of deicide and misanthropy comes the displacement of the Jews from God's covenant and promise. This is a relevant theme today as it is this very concept that constitutes Evangelicalism with its weakest point in regard to anti Semitism.

     The fact is that Paul does not replace the “Old Israel” with a “New Israel”, he teaches a “grafting in” of “unnatural branches” to the Jewish olive tree (Rom 11:11-24). He never calls the Gentile believers, or the NT Church “the New Israel” rather, the language he uses is more careful: spiritual “children of Abraham”. There is no displacement but rather inclusion. Those natural branches that are cut off are not cut off for being Jewish, but for unbelief. Gentiles are grafted in not to displace and replace, rather to join and be part of the one Covenant people of God. In this sense there is no Jew or Greek, male or female.

     Again, rather than replace the people of the Old Covenant, Paul recognises that the New Covenant people will not be complete till it includes the Old Covenant people as well.

     The sad reality is that anti Semitism entered the fabric of Western civilization through Christianity and only through the correct exegesis of the Apostle Paul can Christianity hope to cleanse that fabric. The common view and it probably has some truth to it is, that “What began as anti Phariseeism, was in time transformed into anti Judaism, later to anti Jewishness, and finally into racial anti Semitism.” [8]

     Paul was not anti Semitic, neither was his teaching. Certain Church leaders took up Paul's words and theologized their pre-existent hatred of the Jews. The blame does not lie at Paul's feet but, rather, at the feet of later Church Fathers. But does their misuse of Paul make his teaching invalid? Does it naturally always inculcate anti-Semitic feeling? Is it true as Cohn Sherbock asserts that.  “...Paul stressed that the Jewish nation had been rejected by God and that the Old Covenant had been superseded... The New Testament thus sowed the seeds of contempt for Judaism and the Jewish people.”[9]

      Can this accusation be sustained when we read the writings of Paul? Yes, and no! The answer depends on what is meant by the term “superseded” (replaced).  We need to understand the nature of the covenants. There are many continuities and discontinuities, which takes us onto a different subject. The Old Covenant never provided unconditional salvation for a Jewish person just for being Jewish! i.e. the rebellion of Korah, children of Israel 40 years in the wilderness, the fiery serpents etc... It functioned in many ways as a national identity marker.

     So yes, Paul did teach a kind of supersessionism with regard to the Covenants, but not with regard to the Jewish people. No, The New Covenant in itself did not sow the seeds of contempt for the Jewish people. The antagonism that existed between the early Church and Synagogue was due more to the violent persecutions that were instigated on the early Jewish Christians by their non believing brethren. It has been described as a family feud that got out of hand! But it is a family feud made worse by perpetuating anti-Semitic attitudes covered up by what some scholars have the chutzpah to call Pauline theology.

By Richard Gibson

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