NOVENSON. Let me open as the book opens — with an ambush. According to one Jewish writer of this period, when God sends his son the messiah in the fullness of time, the messiah's job is: to die, so that all his people can participate in his death, and then to effect the resurrection of the dead and the new creation. The Jewish writer I mean is the anonymous author of the apocalypse 4 Ezra — although every word of that summary is also true of his near-contemporary Paul. The difference between them is a tense. 4 Ezra awaits that messiah; Paul thinks he has just now — within Paul's own lifetime — come, died, and risen. Hence the end of the age has come and the new creation is here: the ends of the ages have arrived, the form of this cosmos is passing away, Christ is the last man, ὁ ἔσχατος Ἀδάμ, the last mere mortal. Everything Paul says about the Jewish law follows from this premise. So the famous 'problem of Paul and Judaism' — reputed intractable, like the problem of evil in philosophical theology or cold fusion in nuclear physics — is in fact very simple. Simple, but not easy, because the solution has proved existentially intolerable to Paul's readers: it requires taking seriously an idea we moderns find unthinkable — that the world itself came to an end in the first century of the Roman Empire. And a corollary about method: Judaism is not a thing Paul stands outside of and critiques. Judaism is the air Paul breathes, the water he swims in; he does not stand in a subject-object relation to it. Most later Christians did and do — hence their misreading of the apostle as if he did too. The thesis, then, in the book's own closing words, which I will spend eight further chapters proving: because of this peculiar combination of ethnicity and eschatology, the religion of Paul is neither what we normally think of as Judaism, nor what we normally think of as Christianity. And that fact is the cause of most of the confusion in the long history of Paul-and-Judaism debates.
LUTHER. There is the flaw in your foundation, Professor, laid on page one. You call it contamination that the church read Paul as her own; I call it the letters arriving at their address. Paul wrote to congregations of the Messiah — those congregations became the church that canonized him. If reading him with the church is anachronism, then the letters have no rightful readers at all, only coroners. And 'existentially intolerable' — to whom, pray? I found the letters tolerable only after they had terrified and then consoled me. Your method disqualifies every reading with living stakes as 'Christian,' and the field is left to the men with no stakes.
HART. No, Martin — the field is left to the text, which is where the stakes actually live. I spent years scraping the varnish off this corpus, and Matthew's first chapter says in method what I found in translation: the sediment is real, it is thick, and it is late. One can honor the church's reading as the church's — a long, creative, occasionally catastrophic reception — without mistaking it for the letters. The coroner, if you like, at least tells you how the man actually died.
WRIGHT. Before the coroners congratulate one another — I arrive in this chapter by name, and I would like to be read as well as cited. Page twenty-two: popular rubrics like 'inaugurated eschatology,' à la Vos, Cullmann, Ladd, 'N. T. Wright, and many others,' elide Paul's perspective on time with our own; one might argue this makes for good theology, 'but it certainly makes for bad history.' A pretty cut, Matthew. But observe what it assumes: that Paul's 'very soon' and my 'already and not yet' cannot be the same shape — that inauguration is necessarily a modern comfort smuggled backwards rather than Paul's own grammar of resurrection-first. I will accept the warning about smuggled clocks; Vos and Cullmann and I must carry our luggage through customs like everyone else. But your context is also a construction, assembled by scholars with their own century in their bones — your first book taught us all exactly that. The choice is never between a theological Paul and a neutral one. It is between frames examined and frames smuggled.
SCHWEITZER. And note whom the chapter enrolls before it names its enemies: 'a number of interpreters before me — Albert Schweitzer, late-career Krister Stendahl, Dale Allison, and Paula Fredriksen — have argued along these lines, but they have often been dismissed with criticisms that are not really to the point.' Then the sentence I have wanted from the guild for a hundred years: Paul's expectation is not, strictly speaking, falsified — but neither is it vindicated. It is the 'very soon,' not the red herring of a set date, that needs accounting for. There is the whole matter, stated with a fairness my century never managed. The accounting is the book. Proceed.
NOVENSON. My luggage is cheerfully declared at customs, Tom — that is the whole difference I claim. And let me declare the deepest item now, since it governs everything after: I come to interpret Paul, not to praise him. No Great Man, no hero, no villain either. I am happy to let Paul be useless for our modern projects — and I think that by doing so we stand to understand him better.
PAUL. One word before the chapters, on the ambush. You set me beside the seer of 4 Ezra, and the trap is fair — his messiah and mine have the same work: to die, and to raise the dead. He wept for the world in visions; I ran through it with letters; and the difference you marked is the right one — he said four hundred years, and I said now. As for being useless to your projects, Professor — brother, I have been called worse, and you may find me less biddable than useless before we are done. Your thesis says my religion is neither your Judaism nor your Christianity. Hear how it sounds from my side of the desk: I called it the gospel of God, promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, concerning his Son. Name it as your guild requires. I named it good news. Now prove your thesis, and I will listen like a man listening to his own eulogy — critically, and with interest.