NOVENSON. The chapter opens with Lenny Bruce's immortal riff — 'I'm Jewish. Count Basie's Jewish. Ray Charles is Jewish. Eddie Cantor's goyish… White bread is very goyish' — because Paul trades on the same folk binary, though with none of Bruce's sparkling wit. In Paul's idiom: circumcision is Jewish; having a foreskin is goyish; idol temples are so goyish that Jews won't go near them; lust is goyish; Greeks are goyish — bad sauce. And unlike Bruce's, Paul's binary carries heavy moral valuations. I use 'chauvinism' in its precise, old-fashioned sense — Chauvin's own: an intractable belief in the superiority of one's ethnos. The tradition cannot think it of Paul because the tradition cast him as the first theoretician of the universal, and here, Tom, I must read a deposition once more: 'Were there to be two or more peoples, the whole theological scheme would lapse back into some sort of paganism, with each tribe or race possessing its own national deities' — The Climax of the Covenant, page 170. Alongside Boyarin's Paul, driven by a Hellenistic desire for the One, and Badiou's Paul, poet-thinker of the universal. A conservative Anglican bishop, a postmodern Jewish critic, and a French Marxist in perfect agreement is a rare and beautiful thing, and all three are wrong the same way. Now the text's surface: 'We who are by nature Jews and not sinners from among the gentiles' — Paul to Kephas's face, and he means both halves: gentiles are naturally foreskinned and naturally sinners; Jews naturally circumcised and naturally decent. Romans 1:18–32 is Paul's own etiological just-so story of the gentile catastrophe, cribbed from the Wisdom of Solomon — no Adam in it, no 'fall'; only 'they,' the nations, handed over to dishonor for choosing idols. And two consequences nobody expects. First, grace: Barclay showed the Christ-gift is given without regard to worth; my finer point is that the incongruity was evident to Paul precisely because unscrupulous gentiles were receiving it. Paul's celebrated doctrine of grace presupposes — is predicated on — his ethnic chauvinism. Second, imminence: Paul never experiences the delay of the eschaton as a problem because he does not realize the eschaton is delayed at all. He thinks he is beholding it with his own eyes — gentiles living morally excellent lives, an impossible feat, happening daily in his assemblies. Had Paul been more charitable in his estimation of gentile moral capacity, he might have had to give up his apocalyptic certainty. But he was not, so he did not. As for 'neither Jew nor Greek' — Origen already taught us the method: identify the particular distinction being denied. Even the most universalizing sayings presuppose and underline the chauvinism. Paul did not repent of it at Damascus and become a nineteenth-century humanist. Paul remained a chauvinist. His big idea lay elsewhere.
WRIGHT. Page 170 of my own book, read into the record as evidence for the prosecution — very well, I stand by the sentence. One God, therefore one people; the alternative is a pantheon with a tribal deity apiece; and I did not invent that logic — Paul did: 'God is one, who will justify circumcision from faith and foreskin through faith.' But notice what the chapter's own evidence concedes: the one family does not erase the parts, and I have never claimed it did — the beige-humanity Paul is Boyarin's and Badiou's, not mine; I decline to be averaged with a Marxist however distinguished. Where the chapter lands a real blow, I confess it: the grace-and-chauvinism argument is new, and it stings precisely because Barclay and I have both preached the incongruous gift without asking whose unworthiness made it visible. I will think about that. But 'chauvinist' still buys drama and sells precision — priority in the story is not superiority at the end, and the end is one body at one table.
FREDRIKSEN. Tom quotes the baptismal formula as though it repealed creation. It repeals privilege, not parts: the same Paul who said 'no male and female' wrote a chapter of instructions that assume men and women all the way down. So with Jew and Greek — one body, and the eschaton is still a choir with parts; the nations rejoice with his people, not as them. Matthew's word is a crowbar, but the door it opens is real: difference, ordered, unerased, at the End. That is Paul's actual universalism, and it is better than the beige one.
SCHWEITZER. And seize the chapter's strongest sentence, for it concerns time, which is to say, it concerns me. Paul does not experience the delay as a problem because he does not know there is a delay — he believes he is beholding the end with his own eyes. There is my consistent eschatology stated as psychology, and grounded, note, empirically: the gentile assemblies were his evidence. Sinners made saints could only mean the aeon had turned; when the evidence is a miracle, the timetable needs no defense. It was we, the heirs, who inherited the problem — as I have said at this table until even I am tired of hearing it.
LUTHER. I will say only this, and briefly, because my name is in this chapter's footnotes where it deserves to be: whoever teaches the church that the branches outrank the root, teaches her to boast; and I have shown the world what the boasting costs. If the Professor's ugly word makes one gentile preacher remember that he is grafted — contrary to nature, by mercy alone — then let the word stand, ugly as it is.