The claim
Novenson uses "chauvinism" in its precise and old-fashioned sense, Chauvin's own: an intractable belief in the superiority of one's own ethnos. The claim is that Paul held one, and that the tradition cannot see it because it cast him as the first theoretician of the universal.
The surface of the text is where the chapter starts. "We who are by nature Jews and not sinners from among the gentiles", Paul says to Cephas, and he means both halves: gentiles are naturally foreskinned and naturally sinners, Jews naturally circumcised and naturally decent. Romans 1:18 to 32 is Paul's own account of how the gentiles came to be as they are, adapted from the Wisdom of Solomon. There is no Adam in it and no fall; there is only "they", the nations, handed over to dishonour for choosing idols.
Against this the chapter sets three readings that agree with each other and, on Novenson's argument, are wrong in the same way: Wright's, on which one God requires one people or the scheme lapses into a pagan pantheon of tribal deities; Boyarin's, on which Paul is driven by a Hellenistic desire for the One; and Badiou's, on which he is the poet-thinker of the universal.
The two consequences
Two implications follow that the literature has not drawn, and they are the chapter's real contribution.
The first concerns grace. John Barclay showed that for Paul the Christ-gift is given without regard to worth. Novenson's addition is that the incongruity was visible to Paul precisely because it was unscrupulous gentiles who were receiving it. Paul's doctrine of grace is predicated on his ethnic chauvinism: the gift is startling in proportion to how badly he thinks of the recipients.
The second concerns time. Paul never experiences the delay of the eschaton as a problem because he does not know there is a delay. He believes he is watching the end with his own eyes, and his evidence is empirical: gentiles living morally excellent lives, which on his own anthropology is an impossibility, occurring daily in his assemblies. Had he thought better of gentile moral capacity he might have had to give up the apocalyptic certainty. He did not think better of it, so he did not.
On the universalising sayings, Novenson follows Origen's method: identify the particular distinction being denied. Read that way, even "neither Jew nor Greek" presupposes the distinction it sets aside.
The objections
Wright is quoted from The Climax of the Covenant, page 170, and would stand by the sentence. One God, therefore one people; the alternative is a pantheon with a tribal deity apiece; and the logic is Paul's own, since Paul argues that God is one, who will justify circumcision from faith and foreskin through faith. He would then separate himself from his co-defendants. The one family does not erase the parts, and he has never claimed it did; the featureless universal Paul belongs to Boyarin and Badiou. He would concede that the grace-and-chauvinism argument is new and lands, since he and Barclay have both preached the incongruous gift without asking whose unworthiness made it visible. And he would hold that "chauvinist" buys drama at the cost of precision, because priority in the story is not superiority at the end.
Fredriksen would take the baptismal formula as repealing privilege rather than difference. The same Paul who wrote "no male and female" wrote chapters of instruction assuming men and women throughout. So with Jew and Greek: one body, and an eschaton that remains a choir with parts, in which the nations rejoice with his people rather than as them. She would call the chapter's word a crowbar, and the door it opens real: difference, ordered and unerased, at the End.
Schweitzer would seize on the argument about time, since it is his. That Paul does not experience the delay as a problem because he does not know there is one is consistent eschatology stated as psychology, and grounded empirically: the assemblies were the evidence, and when the evidence is a miracle the timetable needs no defence. The problem of the delay was inherited by the heirs, not felt by the apostle.
Luther would enter one point, and it is the one his own tradition needed most. Whoever teaches the church that the branches outrank the root teaches her to boast, and history has shown what the boasting costs. If an ugly word makes a gentile preacher remember that he is grafted in, contrary to nature and by mercy alone, the word can stand.
Paul's own account
The letters carry the binary the chapter describes, and carry it without softening. Paul distinguishes Jews by nature from sinners from among the gentiles. He writes an aetiology of gentile depravity and attaches no corresponding account of Jewish failure in the same terms. He assumes that his readers will find the moral transformation of gentiles remarkable, because he finds it remarkable himself.
The letters also carry the correction Luther points to, and Paul states it as a warning rather than a concession. He tells gentile readers that they were grafted in contrary to nature, that they do not support the root but the root supports them, and that they should not boast over the branches. The passage assumes the priority the chapter calls chauvinism, and forbids the inference that would make it contempt.
Both things are in Romans, in the same argument, a few verses apart. Any reading that keeps only one of them is keeping half the text.
The remaining disagreement
The evidence is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether "chauvinism" names it or misnames it.
Novenson would say the word is exact in its old sense and that the discomfort it causes is the point, since the discomfort is what has kept the field from seeing the text. Wright would say the word imports a modern moral charge that the ancient evidence does not support, and that priority is not superiority. Fredriksen would say that the substance is right and that the word is a tool for getting at it rather than a description to be kept. Luther would say that the church has erred so far in the other direction that the correction is worth the word.
The same chapter as a dialogue sets these positions in the participants' own voices, which is how this was first written.