Undoubtedly the most frequent accusation leveled against Saul of Tarsus, a.k.a. Apostle Paul, is that he was a hateful anti-Semite, who was the first to call the Jews “Christ-killers,” and thus formally opened the door to two thousand years of the Christian persecution of the Jews.
It is easy to disagree with this shallow assessment, as many have. But in this entry I am going much farther than his usual defenders. I see Saul/Paul as an exceptional Jewish nationalist visionary, who saw his mission not in putting down the Jews, but in elevating them to new heights, as befitted God’s “Chosen People.” His being used later for anti-Semitic propaganda directed against the Jews as a race, was one of the unintended consequences of his Jewish nationalist zeal.
But let us first follow the more usual argument contra Paul’s “anti-Semitism.”
Saint Paul was of course a Jew himself. It is therefore clear that, when he talks negatively about “the Jews,” what he has in mind are the unredeemed Jews, that is, all those Jews who have not believed in Jesus Christ, and therefore have not been cleansed of their collective sin of “killing the Lord Jesus.” Thus, for him, being “a Jew,” with the highly negative implications, is defined not along the ethnic lines, but wholly by religion. Here is his most famous rant against the Jews, which is obviously not “anti-Semitic” at all, because, I repeat, it is by no means directed against the “chosen race,” but against the deniers of the divinity of Jesus Christ:
“Who [the Jews] both killed the Lord Jesus and their own prophets and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men.” (I Thessalonians 2:15.)
On the other hand, here is Paul’s clear statement on race: “Are they Hebrews? so am I. Are they Israelites? so am I. Are they the seed of Abraham? so am I.” (II Corinthians 11:22.)
Everything clear here? But now comes my next argument. Read the following part from Paul’s letter to the Galatian Christians, which very much reminds me of the Marx contra Bauer argument on the Judenfrage:
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28.)
Marx in his polemic suggested that the goal of the Jews was not the recognition of Judaism as a legitimate minority religion, but the abolition of Judaism and all other religions as the only way for the Jews to achieve full equality with the Gentiles, to become “all one” in Marx’s Third Testament. Exactly the same thinking, I believe, can be found behind Paul’s letter, and his new religion.
The letter addresses the rising disputes between Jewish and Gentile Christians. The Gentiles do not wish to be circumcised, nor to follow the other Mosaic laws. The way for the Jews to overcome these potentially self-defeating disputes is to abolish those divisive laws, becoming “all one in Christ Jesus.” Let us not forget in this context that Christianity was, for Paul, a distinctly Jewish religion, much of which he developed on his own. Clearly, Paul saw a Jewish triumph in the world’s adoption of the Jewish faith as the universal faith of the future. His attack against the Jews who resisted his teachings was therefore an aggressive defense of the Jewish Manifest Destiny, as he envisioned it at the time.
...Come to think of it, having compared Apostle Paul to Karl Marx, I am not going to stop there. St. Paul’s passionate combativeness against all those who stood in his way strongly reminds me of Lenin’s. May I be forgiven this irreverent comparison, but the two of them, Paul and Lenin, were truly birds of a feather…
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