NOVENSON. This time with the text open. Ἰουδαϊσμός occurs twice in one sentence of Galatians 1 — and those are the only two instances in the entire New Testament. In my rendering: 'For you heard of my former occupation in Ἰουδαϊσμός, that I was prosecuting the assembly of God aggressively, and was destroying it, and was excelling in Ἰουδαϊσμός beyond many of my peers among my people, being exceedingly zealous for my ancestral traditions.' Since Ignatius — who may himself have coined Χριστιανισμός as its rival — the tradition has heard Paul naming a religion he was in and then out of. Dr. Luther heard 'the pope, the Turks, the Jews, and all such as trust in their own merits' — forgive me, Doctor; I quote your Galatians. Then in 2007 Steve Mason proposed the radical revision: there was no category 'Judaism' in the Graeco-Roman world at all, and Ἰουδαϊσμός is the nominal form of the verb 'to judaize' — which, this is the crucial point, is something only non-Jews can do. As Shaye Cohen puts it, Jews do not judaize, any more than Medes medize or Greeks hellenize. My modest proposal is that Mason is partly right and partly wrong. Right about the verb: its grammatical subject is always a gentile, never a Jew — so the scholarly convention that calls Paul's opponents 'judaizers' is exactly the wrong way around. Judaizing is not what Paul's opponents are doing; it is what the Galatian believers are contemplating doing. But wrong about the noun, for in every pre-Christian instance Ἰουδαϊσμός is something Jews do: in 2 and 4 Maccabees it is the name of the cause championed by Judah Maccabee and his partisans. Virtually all Jews follow the ancestral traditions; only a subset fight for the cause of judaization — defending the traditions even to the point of harassing other Jews suspected of endangering them, as both Judah Maccabee and Paul did. To summarize as the book does: the verb means for non-Jews to observe Jewish customs, whereas the cognate noun means the defense and promotion of Jewish customs by Jewish people — contrary to the rules of etymology, but it is the case; the vicissitudes of language use yield an anomaly, and the anomaly becomes fixed as a new pattern of speech. Indeed, before the persecutions under Antiochus there was no such thing as Ἰουδαϊσμός at all — the traditions were just 'what we Jews do,' needing no name until they had to be chosen and defended. So: Paul's former occupation was militancy, not membership. He was very much involved in his ancestral religion before his apostolic call — and very much involved in it after his apostolic call, to the very end of his life. Indeed, even at the end of his epistolary career, Paul did not yet imagine Judaism as we know it.
LUTHER. You subpoena my commentary to my face, Professor, and I will not disown it — I read his Ἰουδαϊσμός as every preacher reads, by the fires of my own day. Grant your philology entire: the word names a cause, not a creed. My sermon stands one inch behind it. For whatever the occupation was called, the man himself tells us what he found when he left it — that what had been gain he counted loss. You have renamed the office. You have not yet told me why the wages turned to refuse in his hand.
SANDERS. And there Dr. Luther and I ask the same question for once, from opposite ends of the church. But first let me commend the chapter's honesty at its hardest point. On Galatians 5:11 — whether Paul once, before his call, actually preached circumcision, as Donaldson and Thiessen would have it — you write: 'Maybe. I am not certain that this view is wrong, but neither do I have much confidence that it is right.' Historians should frame that sentence and hang it over their desks. Now the objection: if Ἰουδαϊσμός was a political occupation, what accounts for the violence of the language about leaving it? Men do not speak of a lapsed job the way Philippians 3 speaks. Something larger than an employment history turned over near Damascus, and the chapter, having sharpened the word admirably, stays quiet about the man.
FREDRIKSEN. While the gentlemen hunt Paul's soul, let me note what the chapter settles. The 'conversion' dissolves: Paul does not leave a religion, because nobody in antiquity could — your gods came with your people. The persecuting becomes intelligible: zeal is intramural; you discipline your own precisely because they are your own and remain so. And Matthew has conceded my footnote, so I will collect it aloud: technically Paul does expect his gentiles to judaize — they must abandon their ancestral gods for Israel's God, which is the biggest ethnic-custom transfer of all — but so little, compared to what his rivals demand, that as Paul himself sees it, he demands no judaizing at all. The militant of the traditions became the man who waived them for the nations. That is a career change worth a book.
PAUL. Let the subject testify. Matthew has read my grammar as I wrote it: Ἰουδαϊσμός was a thing I did — an occupation, a cause — not a box I sat in and then left. I prosecuted the assembly of God aggressively; I excelled beyond my peers; I was exceedingly zealous for my ancestral traditions — and I was zealous for them still when I wrote those words, brother; ask anyone who watched me keep a vow. And you saw what my Galatians letter assumes: that the ingathering of my kinsmen would take care of itself, through Kephas's mission as mine ran to the nations. So I thought, when I wrote to Galatia. Romans 9 through 11 is what it cost me to stop thinking it. But Martin and Ed have their fingers on the seam. When the Son was revealed in me, I did not merely change employers. The zeal was my glory and my sin in one body, and what died near Damascus was not a job. It was a whole righteousness — mine. Write the occupation, Professor; it is true. But leave a margin for the man, or you have written half of me.