Wrestling with Paul
The Apostle, His Readers, and the Fate of the Jews
- Biblical Studies & Commentaries
- Publisher: Fortress Press (Augsburg Fortress)
- Published: 2025
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Publisher's Description
In this book, Sarah Emanuel, a Jewish scholar of the New Testament, argues that Paul was not a universalist. Instead, Emanuel shows that, stemming from his Hellenistic Jewish worldview, Paul understood Jews as needing to maintain the law in Christ and gentiles as needing to abstain from the law in Christ. Both groups, in other words, needed to maintain particular ethnic difference in their Christ-following orientations lest they be "left behind" from Paul's imagined end of days. Emanuel also argues that the way in which Paul understood these groups was through ethno-nationalistic and hierarchical means. By "ethno-nationalistic," she means that Paul viewed the end of days as a new, Israel-centric nation requiring particular polyethnic-cultural affiliation: Jews for Christ and gentiles for Christ. By "hierarchical," she means that Paul valued Jews for Christ over gentiles for Christ (and also males over females and free persons over enslaved persons); after all, Paul's end of days was itself Israel-centered (i.e., Jewish-centered) with the God of Israel (i.e., the Jewish God) at the helm. Finally, none of these beliefs made Paul exceptional in his Judaism. It made him average in his Judaism. Wrestling with Paul shows that scholars in a post-Holocaust world have often sanitized this ethnocentric exclusivism so as to make Paul ahistorically "good" for modern Jews and Judaism. It also shows that readers of Paul have--for millenia--made sense of him in light of contemporaneous attitudes toward Jews.
Endorsements (3)
“Bold and original, compelling and honest. This book is not just about who Paul was, but about what he does and what we are willing to do with him. With verve, Sarah Emanuel provides a robust historical and metacritical engagement with Paul and his interpreters. She brilliantly wrestles them all to the ground and helps us face our worst fears about them—and discover, in some cases, that they’re true. If we keep trying to rehabilitate Paul without truly facing him and what we’ve done with him, we are doomed to continue misusing him—to our own detriment. This is, quite simply, one of the most important books in Pauline studies in the past decade.”
“takes her reader along while she wrestles with Paul and—more importantly—his interpreters. She asks the hard question of who benefits from interpreting Paul and shows how some contemporary understandings may be just as dangerous for Jews today as interpretations have been in the past. Elegantly written and astutely argued, this book should be read by scholars, students, and lay readers alike.”
“Sarah Emanuel’s Wrestling with Paul challenges our usual exceptionalist readings of the apostle, excavating the ethnocentric and exclusionary eschatology that slots him within, and not against, ancient Judaism’s varied textual landscape. As clever as it is insightful, Emanuel’s work does not shy away from hard questions—and even harder answers—about why New Testament Studies has worked so hard to erase Paul’s rough edges. I dare you to put it down.”
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