Paul and the Resurrection of Israel:
Jews, Former Gentiles, Israelites
by jason a. staples
cambridge university press, 350 pages, $39.99
The writings of the apostle Paul have confused many. Even his fellow apostle St. Peter wrote that Paul is sometimes “hard to understand,” and “the ignorant and unstable” twist his words “to their own destruction” (2 Peter 3:16). Two thousand years later, there is still much uncertainty about Paul. The Catholic philosopher Robert Royal, for example, recently confessed it was many years before he came to fathom St. Paul’s “mania.”
Perhaps the most controverted aspect of Paul’s thought has been his thinking about Judaism and its relation to the Jesus movement. Martin Luther convinced Protestants for centuries that Paul was attacking first-century Judaism for teaching salvation by works. But the “New Perspective on Paul,” a movement led by James Dunn and N. T. Wright, showed that Jews of Paul’s day held to a “covenantal nomism” whereby God elected Jews by grace but required obedience to remain within the covenant. So Jewish salvation was actually by grace, but faithfulness was necessary to remain in salvation.
This rethinking about Paul and Judaism was provoked by the Holocaust directed by Germany, the most Christianized country in history and birthplace of the Reformation. This attempted genocide of Jews forced biblical scholars and theologians to ask if previous Christian thinking—perhaps a misreading of Paul—had somehow contributed to this catastrophe. British New Testament scholar Charles Cranfield concluded that an impartial reading of chapters 9–11 in Paul’s epistle to the Romans “emphatically forbid[s] us to speak of the church as having once and for all taken the place of the Jewish people.” The Welsh historian W. D. Davies noted in his seminal work on the biblical concept of land that “Paul never calls the Church the New Israel or the Jewish people the Old Israel.”
If Pauline theology has been unsettled since World War II, it is now being shaken again by a provocative new book from Jason Staples, religious studies professor at North Carolina State University. In Paul and the Resurrection of Israel, Staples challenges centuries of Protestant thinking about Paul and proposes a new and arresting model for Pauline theology of Israel—that the apostle thought of Gentiles as the predominant Israelites. But Staples’s proposal is more clever than careful.
Staples deserves credit for his willingness to re-examine hoary traditions of Pauline scholarship. He insists that Paul never rejected the Judaism he inherited, and stressed the importance of works in ways that contradict the assumptions of many Protestant theologians: “Judgement based on works . . . is so foundational [to Paul’s thinking] that it appears in every undisputed Pauline letter except Philemon, being significantly more pervasive in that respect than justification by faith.”
Therefore faith (which Staples translates as “fidelity”) was never opposed to works in the apostle’s thinking: “Such a distinction between fidelity (pistis) and obedience puts asunder what Paul joins together—the apostle explicitly states that his mission is to bring about ‘the obedience of fidelity’ . . . indicating that he understands fidelity as defined by obedience.”
Staples also challenges Protestant appeals to divine sovereignty in salvation based on Paul’s analogy of a potter and his clay in Romans 9. Staples argues that Paul is actually using Jeremiah’s analogy (Jer. 18:1–11), where the prophet defends God against the accusation of arbitrariness. Jeremiah and Paul are drawing on the artisan’s understanding that clay is “an especially stubborn and willful material” that a potter must adapt to.
The implication is that God’s sovereignty is not unilateral or arbitrary but something like a conversation between the God of Israel and his human creations. In this sense, Paul is more Jewish than most Protestant interpreters have imagined.
But if these pushbacks against familiar Protestant readings are persuasive, Staples’s principal thesis is not. He argues that Paul considers all Gentile followers of Jesus to be “Israelites,” just as much as Jewish believers in Jesus. To continue to call them “Gentiles” is to misunderstand the gospel and the “resurrection of Israel.”
By “resurrection,” Staples means what Paul signified by “the hope of Israel” (Acts 28:20)—namely, the eschatological restoration of the Twelve Tribes when “all Israel will be saved” (Rom. 11:26). Staples takes as paradigmatic the experience of the Ten Lost Tribes who were probably assimilated into paganism (and gentilism) after the first exile to the Assyrian empire in 721 B.C. Because Paul is convinced they will be restored to Israelite status, and since this eschatological restoration will take place when “the fullness of the Gentiles has come in” (Rom. 11:25), this will involve their transition from “pagan/Gentile” status to “restored Israelite” status. And since Jesus-following Gentiles are also “grafted in” to the olive tree of Israel (Rom. 11:17), Paul must mean that in the new Body of Messiah, Gentiles are just as much Israelites as messianic Jews are.
Just as the Ten Lost Tribes to the east will one day transition from Gentile to Israelite status once again, Staples says Paul believes the same about Gentiles in the West. Paul “goes so far as to call them former gentiles” in 1 Cor. 12:2. And he refers “to them as descendants of biblical Israel” in 1 Cor. 10:1. Therefore, “they are not saved ‘as gentiles’ because they are no longer gentiles; instead they have become equal members of Israel” along with their Jewish siblings.
But Staples claims too much for his translations “when you were former gentiles” and “descendants of biblical Israel.” Most English translations render the first “when you were pagans” or “heathens,” because Paul immediately adds, “you were led astray to mute idols.” The word “former” is not in the Greek but inserted by Staples. Yet he reverts to this lone verse (and idiosyncratic translation) over and over throughout his book.
Staples claims that “Israelite” is never used for Jews in the New Testament era, but that “the term [Israelite] regularly refers to biblical [Old Testament] Israel or suggests an eschatological nuance,” as in “all Israel will be saved.” Yet the two terms—Israel/Israelite and Ioudaios/oi—are in fact treated as equivalent by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul himself, and in none of these cases does “Israel/Israelite” refer to Old Testament Israel or the eschaton.
Matthew, for example, says the Romans put a sign over Jesus’s head on the cross—“This is Jesus, King of the Jews (ὁ βασιλεῦς τῶν Ἰουδαίων)”—and then narrates what the chief priests and scribes said of him: “He is the King of Israel (βασιλεὺς Ἰσραήλ), let him come down now” (Matt. 27:37, 42). Matthew thus refers to the Jews of Judea as both Jews (Ioudaioi) and members of “Israel.”
In Acts of the Apostles, Luke does the same. In his Pentecost sermon, Peter first addresses the crowd as “men of Judaea” (Ἄνδρες Ἰουδαῖοι), and then refers to this same crowd as “men of Israel/Israelites” (Ἄνδρες Ἰσραηλῖται). As in Matthew, Mark, and John, the referents are neither Old Testament Israelites nor future denizens of an eschatological kingdom. “Judeans/Jews” and “Israelites” are synonymous.
This pattern is no less present in Paul’s largest letter. In Romans 9:6, when referring to Jews of his day, Paul distinguishes between those “from Israel” (ἐξ Ἰσραήλ) and those who “are Israel” (οὗτοι Ἰσραήλ). The latter are evidently messianic Jews, the “children of the promise” (9:8) who are the “remnant” (9:27; 11:5) who accept Jesus as messiah. They are the “called” (9:24) from the Jews (ἐξ Ἰουδαίων) alongside “called” Gentiles (ἐξ ἐθνῶν). Here Paul refers to Jewish believers both as “Israel” and as “Jews” (Ioudaioi).
In a revealing concession, Staples notes “the absence of any direct statement in Romans identifying gentiles as Israelites” and cites the distinguished Pauline scholar Douglas Moo, who writes that for at least ten times when Paul uses the term “Israel” in Romans 9–11, he “refers to ethnic Israel.”
If Staples is right about his thesis, non-messianic Jews are no longer Israelites and (by implication) God’s covenant with Abraham’s descendants no longer applies to them. And the land promise, repeated one thousand times in the Old Testament, is now defunct because all the promises are restricted to Jesus-followers. Yet Luke tells us that Paul was still affirming the land promise nearly thirty years after Jesus’s resurrection: “After destroying seven nations in the land of Canaan, [God] gave [this people Israel] their land as an inheritance” (Acts 13:19).
Contrary to Staples’s suggestion that non-messianic Jews no longer matter to God, Paul refers to them as still “beloved” and says their “calling” to be the chosen people is “irrevocable” (Rom. 11:28–29). Tellingly, this passage (which inspired Nostra Aetate at Vatican II) is buried in a single footnote.
This virtual omission demonstrates why this book matters. It perpetuates an ugly history in the Church’s use of Paul to denigrate those whom St. John Paul II called our “fathers in the faith.” Its message that the Church is the New or True Israel is familiar. But its use in this book implies that God has revoked the covenant promise that the Jewish people would remain a “nation” before him as long as the sun and moon and stars are in the sky (Jer. 31:35–36). This is standard supersessionism (the Gentile Church superseding and displacing Jewish Israel in God’s affections) that Rome has denounced at Vatican II and in recent documents.
