Paul Within Judaism Within Paganism

Judaism was not Paul’s background, but his context, and much of his gospel’s content. Modern Pauline Studies, however, often see Paul’s mission as an expression of what he found wrong with Judaism, a Judaism that supposedly discouraged relations with Gentiles. This essay investigates all the various ways that Jews and Gentiles comfortably cohabited the Graeco-Roman Diaspora. What spurred Paul’s mission was not a critique of an ethnically exclusive Judaism, but his conviction that, in Christ, the end times had arrived. Accordingly, he taught that Gentiles should repudiate their own gods and commit exclusively to the worship of Israel’s god. Paul’s contest was not with Jewish law. It was with pagan gods. Both his mission and his message place him firmly within the pluriform Judaism of his time, a Judaism that took its place within the god-congested world of first-century Mediterranean paganism.