By Stewart Clem
OhOn this day, January 25, Anglicans and other Christians around the world celebrate the conversion of the Apostle Saint Paul. What kind of conversion did Paul experience?
Many Christians would be inclined to answer this question by saying that Paul converted from Judaism to Christianity. In other words, he changed his religion. It’s an oft-told story, but it’s a modern invention. This is not the conversion that Christians should celebrate today – precisely because that’s not what happened.
On the one hand, the modern concept of “religion”, of which Judaism and Christianity are species, is based on a dubious intellectual history. In this sense, a religion is a system of beliefs and practices that one adopts for oneself. These beliefs and practices are linked to spiritual and intangible concerns, and a person’s religious identity can be clearly separated from other identity markers. This is one of many categories that has boxes to check when we fill out applications and government forms: age, gender, ethnicity, citizenship, marital status, religion.
In this view, belonging to a religion is very much like belonging to a political party. If you change your political opinion or don’t like the direction a party is going, you can change parties. Or you can simply unsubscribe completely and become independent.
In a certain sense, this is entirely reasonable. When someone says, “My friend Mohammed was a devout Muslim, but he converted to Judaism for his fiancée,” or “My coworker grew up in a Christian home but now doesn’t identify with any specific religion,” we know what they mean. It is easy to imagine what this change of status entails.
But this understanding of religion becomes problematic when we try to reread it in Antiquity. What we identify today as distinctly “religious” beliefs were actually deeply intertwined with many other cultural, ethnic, and political patterns of thought. Observations like these have led some scholars to question, for example, the classical discourse that “religion” caused most of the wars in human history. This also means that it is almost impossible to describe people in ancient times converting from one religion to another without project modern (and quite foreign) ideas onto them. Paul did not convert from Judaism to Christianity.
That’s fair enough, you might say. We must be careful when we speak of the “conversion” of the Apostle Paul. But let’s be clear: this is not just an academic exercise. It’s not just about using the correct terminology. What we celebrate today goes to the very heart of what Christianity is – and what it is not. And it is perhaps easier than we think to go astray when we describe the conversion of Saint Paul.
OhOn this Christian holiday, we would do well to recognize that there is simply no biblical or historical evidence that Paul renounced Judaism or ceased to view himself as a Torah-observant Jew.
Many Christians find this statement shocking, even inconceivable. They assume that Paul must have rejected Judaism, because in his epistles he taught that we are saved by grace and not by works (ROM. 11:6; Eph. 2:8-9). There are many assumptions here that need to be untangled and examined, but the characterization of Judaism as a religion of works righteousness is one of the most stubborn sins of the Christian Church from which we must repent.
To put it in the simplest possible terms: if it were true that the apostle Paul, a circumcised, Torah-observant Jew (Acts 22:3; Phil. 3:5-6) decided to become a Christian and abandon the Mosaic law because of an inherent flaw in it (namely that it is a system of righteousness by works), then he would be guilty of ‘heresy of Marcionism. The second-century heretic Marcion taught that the God of the Hebrew Scriptures is not the same God that Jesus taught us to worship.
A more subtle form of Marcionism might suggest that the way the Mosaic law teaches us to relate to God is fundamentally at odds with the way Jesus teaches us to relate to God. But this is irreconcilable with the New Testament description of Jesus as a law-keeping Jew who taught that the Law would never be abolished (Mast. 5:17-20 p.m.; Luke 16:16-17).
Yet this characterization of Judaism persists. As Rabbi Evan Moffic writes“An old stereotype is that Jews are more concerned with following the precise details of the law – with doing things right – than with doing what is right. They care more about the letter than the spirit of the law. The Old Testament, according to this view, depicts a God of vengeance and law, and the New Testament presents a God of love and forgiveness. Christianity, it is said, set aside this legalism as it developed into its own religion. Although many Christians have cast aside this stereotype, it persists in sermons and even secular publications.
Indeed, it is. And not just in sermons and books; it also appears on T-shirts that poorly attempt to exegete 2 Cor. 3:6as this one:
I realize that until now I have spoken a lot about what the conversion of Saint Paul was not but nothing yet on what it is was. So what kind of conversion did Paul experience? What should we celebrate today?
This is not an exhaustive description, but Paul’s conversion began with the recognition that Jesus of Nazareth was in fact the Jewish Messiah. Before his conversion, he zealously rejected this assertion; after his conversion, he devoted his life to it (Acts 9). Another significant change in his thinking (yes, a conversion) was the realization that this messiah had opened a new way for Gentiles to relate to the God of Israel.
Against the Judaizers, who demanded that Gentiles be circumcised and follow the Mosaic law in its entirety, Paul taught that Gentiles could become “Abraham’s seed” (Girl. 3:16) not by circumcision, but by receiving the spirit of Christ (ROM. 8:9). This teaching was new and radical but also entirely Jewish. This meant that Gentiles could also be saved by Jewish flesh – even if it is not by the carnal rite of circumcision.
Paul received a call from God to be an “apostle to the Gentiles” (ROM. 11:13 a.m.), but he did not convert from Judaism to Christianity. Paul’s conversion lies in his new purpose: “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing value of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil. 3:8). It is a conversion worth celebrating on this holy day, and we can give thanks for God’s salvation, which is “a light to enlighten the Gentiles” and the glory of God’s people Israel (Luke 2:32).
