Observance or Faith? Jews and Christians Contend Over Abraham’s Legacy

We gratefully acknowledge that the work of one of the authors (TB) on this post was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – FOR 2779. On the apocalyptic movement, see, e.g., E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (Penguin, 1996); Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford University Press, 2001).

See discussions in Joshua D. Garroway, “Ioudaios,” in The Jewish Annotated New Testament, 2^nd ed., ed. Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford University Press, 2017), 596–599; Steve Mason, “Jews, Judaeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History,” JSJ 38 (2007): 457–512; John Van Maaren, “Mapping Jewishness in Antiquity: New Contributions from the Social Sciences,” JAJ 9 (2018): 421–54. Galilee and Judea shared overlapping sacred narratives, rituals, festivals, language, and so on, so a hard and fast distinction between the peoples of the two regions is unwarranted, even though they were geographically distinct in the first century CE, and geography was one of the key aspects of ancient discourses of ethnos or ethnicity.

Similar questions were raised outside the Jesus movement about how non-Judeans attracted to Judaism ought to adhere to Judean practices; see for example Mark D. Nanos, “The Question of Conceptualization: Qualifying Paul’s Position on Circumcision in Dialogue with Josephus’s Advisors to King Izates,” in Paul within Judaism: Restoring the First-Century Context of the Apostle, ed. Mark D. Nanos and Magnus Zetterholm (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 105–52; Katell Berthelot, “To Convert or Not to Convert: The Appropriation of Jewish Rituals, Customs and Beliefs by Non-Jews,” in Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World: Approaching Religious Transformations from Archaeology, History and Classics, ed. Valentino Gasparini, Maik Patzelt, Rubina Raja, Anna-Katharina Rieger, Jörg Rüpke, and Emiliano Urciuoli (de Gruyter, 2020), 493–515.

Paul interpreted Jesus as a combination messiah (i.e., “anointed” or “Christ”) and heavenly, apocalyptic deliverer figure like the angel Michael (Dan 7:9–14, 12:1–4), Melchizedek in 11QMelchizedek, and the “Son of Man” or “Elect One” in 1 Enoch (37–71). On these and related traditions, see John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature, 3rd ed. (Eerdmans, 2016); Frederick J. Murphy, Apocalypticism in the Bible and Its World: A Comprehensive Introduction (Baker, 2012).

See William S. Campbell, The Nations in the Divine Economy: Paul’s Covenantal Hermeneutics and Participation in Christ (Bloomsbury, 2018). Before the category of “religion” was developed over the second to fourth centuries—a development that we will describe shortly—the most salient way to identify people and groups in the ancient Mediterranean and Levant was according to their ethnos, a Greek word connoting geographic location and origins, language, sacred narratives, laws, gods/goddesses, and ritual and social practices, generally corresponding to ʿam in Hebrew and Aramaic. The English terms “ethnic” and “ethnicity” derive from the Greek, although they have their own overlapping but not identical connotations. People tracing geographic origins to Judea, for example, were labeled “Judeans,” while those from Greece were “Greeks,” and so on (e.g., Dan 3:4; Philo, Cher. 91; Cain 89–90; Abr. 188; Acts 2:5–11). Although Greek ethnos and Hebrew ʿam are often translated “nation,” that captures only part of the more expansive connotation of the terms in antiquity. For some discussion, see e.g., Paula Fredriksen, “How Do the Nations Relate to Israel? Family, Ethnicity, and Eschatological Inclusion in the Apostle Paul,” in In the Crucible of Empire: The Impact of Roman Citizenship upon Greeks, Jews and Christians, ed. Katell Berthelot and Jonathan Price (Peeters, 2019), 131–40.

ἐν τῷ Ἰουδαϊσμῷ

When he speaks of his “adherence to a Judean way of life” as something that he formerly engaged in (Gal 1:13), he does not mean that he is no longer a Judean but that he no longer persecuted Christ-followers, but rather had become their advocate (Gal 1:21–24); notably, in Rom 3:9—written later than Galatians—Paul again self-identifies as Judean. His statement “there is no Judean and no Greek” (Gal 3:28) in the assemblies of Christ-devotees was hyperbolic, meant to promote group unity: all through his letters, Paul continues to make distinctions between ethnic groups. See also Mark D. Nanos, “Paul and Judaism: Why not Paul’s Judaism?,” in Paul Unbound: Other Perspectives on the Apostle, 2nd ed., ed. Mark D. Given (SBL Press, 2022), 157–216.

This was his attempt to institutionalize traditions outlined in scriptural texts like Isaiah 45:22–23 LXX, which he cites in his Epistle to the Romans (14:11): “Turn to me [YHWH] and be saved, you [nations] from the end(s) of the earth.… Every knee will bow to me, and every tongue will acknowledge God.” See further Isaiah 49:7, 22–23; 51:4–5; 55:5; Psalms 67, 107; Romans 15:7–13; and more generally Mark D. Nanos and Magnus Zetterholm, eds., Paul within Judaism: Restoring the First-Century Context to the Apostle (Fortress, 2015).

See Magnus Zetterholm, “Paul within Judaism: The State of the Questions,” in Paul within Judaism, ed. Nanos and Zetterholm (Fortress, 2015), 31–51; Paula Fredriksen, “Paul’s Letter to the Romans, the Ten Commandments, and Pagan ‘Justification by Faith,’” Journal of Biblical Literature 133, no. 4 (2014): 801–808.

See further Peter J. Tomson, Paul and the Jewish Law: Halakha in the Letters of the Apostle to the Gentiles (Van Gorcum; Fortress, 1990).

See, e.g., Mark Nanos, “The Myth of the ‘Law-Free’ Paul Standing between Christians and Jews,” in Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 4, no. 1 (2009): 1–21, https://ejournals.bc.edu/index.php/scjr/article/view/1511; Paula Fredriksen, “Judaizing the Nations: The Ritual Demands of Paul’s Gospel,” NTS 56 (2010): 232–52; Fredriksen, “Why Should a ‘Law-Free’ Mission Mean a ‘Law-Free’ Apostle?,” JBL 134, no. 3 (2015): 637–50. Editor’s note: For another analysis of Paul’s claims, see David M. Friedenreich, “What Does Sarah’s Expulsion of Hagar Signify for Abraham’s Descendants?” TheTorah (2018).

Critical scholars generally understand the New Testament letters including 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1–2 Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon, and Romans to be “genuinely” written by Paul and his associates; while other letters bearing his name, 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, Titus, and 1–2 Timothy, are considered either disputed or pseudepigraphic. The letter to the Hebrews was frequently transmitted with collections of “Pauline” letters, even though it does not claim to be such. On the early letter collections, see David Trobisch, Paul’s Letter Collection: Tracing the Origins (Fortress, 1994); more recently: Markus Vinzent, Von Paulus zu Saulus: Zwei Paulusbriefsammlungen im 2. Jahrhundert (Herder, 2025); Mark G. Bilby, Apostolos: Greek-English Reader’s Edition (Clavis, 2025).

Translations based on NRSVue, but with adjustments.

Greek: πατέρα πολλῶν ἐθνῶν

See, e.g., Gen 12:7; 13:15; 17:7–9. Of course, Paul is well aware that the singular “seed” can be used in a collective sense to refer to a group of people (e.g., Gal 3:29; Rom 4:16), but he nevertheless uses it here in classic midrash/homiletic fashion as a singular.

The Greek reads:

^{Gal 3:16} τῷ δὲ Ἀβραὰμ ἐρρέθησαν αἱ ἐπαγγελίαι καὶ τῷ σπέρματι αὐτοῦ. οὐ λέγει· καὶ τοῖς σπέρμασιν, ὡς ἐπὶ πολλῶν ἀλλ’ ὡς ἐφ’ ἑνός· καὶ τῷ σπέρματί σου, ὅς ἐστιν Χριστός.

See further Caroline Johnson Hodge, “Paul and Ethnicity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Pauline Studies, ed. Matthew V. Novenson and R. Barry Matlock (Oxford University Press, 2022), 547–61.

Paul is interpreting Exodus 12:40 to be referring back to the covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15, when slavery is first mentioned, as opposed to how long the Israelites were in Egypt. This can also be found in Rabbinic interpretation. (See, e.g., Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael ad loc.)

For baptism as an initiation ritual in use in at least some of the communities with which Paul was connected, see 1 Cor 1:12–17; 15:29; Rom 6:1–4. Phrases involving baptism “into Christ” or “into one body” are used as metaphors for inclusion into the assembly of Christ-devotees (Rom 6:3; 1 Cor 12:13; Gal 3:27), presupposing the performance of the water ritual. Paul can even extend the metaphor ahistorically to describe the passage of Hebrews through the Red Sea as “baptism into Moses” (1 Cor 10:1–4).

Paul’s Judean near-contemporary in Alexandria, Philo, also made use of allegorical interpretation; the method has roots in the late sixth century BCE, in Greek philosophical reappropriations of older “classics” attributed to Homer and Orpheus, among others; see Gregory E. Sterling, “‘The Jewish Philosophy’: Reading Moses via Hellenistic Philosophy according to Philo,” in Reading Philo: A Handbook to Philo of Alexandria, ed. Torrey Seland (Eerdmans, 2014), 75–88; John T. Fitzgerald, “Myth, Allegory, and the Derveni Papyrus,” in Myth and Scripture: Contemporary Perspectives on Religion, Language, and Imagination, ed. Dexter E. Callender Jr. (SBL Press, 2014), 229–42.

Similarly in Revelation 21.

The reference to two covenants in Gal 4:24 has also been interpreted as a reference to Judaism and Christianity, but that too misrepresents Paul’s position; his ideas about a “new covenant” and its connection to God’s purifying spirit also derive from Judean tradition: Jer 31:31–33; 32:40; Ezek 36:24–28; Jub 1:22–25; 1QS 4:18–23. The question at issue was what laws of the Torah non-Judean Christ devotees needed to follow, especially circumcision. See further Thomas R. Blanton IV, “Paul’s Covenantal Theology in 2 Cor 2:14–7:4,” in Paul and Judaism: Crosscurrents in Pauline Exegesis and the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations, ed. Reimund Bieringer and Didier Pollefeyt (T&T Clark, 2012), 61–71; the same basic concepts appear in Galatians.

Paul’s hyperbolic denial that “works [erga] of the law” are important for non-Judean Christ-devotees to follow results in a problem: since the apocalyptic judgment is based on following Torah, or some version of it (2 Cor 5:10; Rom 2:6, 12–16; 14:10), Paul obviously thinks that “works” are crucial. So he later has to quality his argument: in Gal 5:13–26, he redefines transgressions against halakhic and communal norms as “works [erga] of the flesh,” which must be avoided, on pain of apocalyptic destruction. One’s behavior should be guided by “the Spirit,” Paul argues, implying that it would then come into conformity with legal norms, since “there is no law against such” actions as the Spirit inspires (Gal 5:22). Assembly members should constantly be scrutinized to ensure their practices conformed with communal expectation and implicitly with Torah; they should assess their own “work” (ergon = deeds) as well as others’, gently correcting offenders (Gal 6:1–4; cp. Matt 18:15–20). Paul’s debate with rival Christ-emissaries was not an “all or nothing” proposition involving following Torah or not; it was intead effectively a debate about which aspects of Torah needed to be followed, circumcision being the point of contention, in spite of his hyperbolic framing of the issue.

Notably, the term Ioudaios (“Judean”) and its cognates disappears in Galatians 4–6, precisely when Paul allegorically characterizes the two opposing positions.

In LXX: ἐπίστευσεν δὲ Ἀβραὰμ τῷ θεῷ καὶ ἐλογίσθη αὐτῷ εἰς δικαιοσύνην.

The Greek reads:

^{Rom 4:11–13} σημεῖον ἔλαβεν περιτομῆς σφραγῖδα τῆς δικαιοσύνης τῆς πίστεως τῆς ἐν τῇ ἀκροβυστίᾳ, εἰς τὸ εἶναι αὐτὸν πατέρα πάντων τῶν πιστευόντων δι’ ἀκροβυστίας, εἰς τὸ λογισθῆναι [καὶ] αὐτοῖς [τὴν] δικαιοσύνην, καὶ πατέρα περιτομῆς τοῖς οὐκ ἐκ περιτομῆς μόνον ἀλλὰ καὶ τοῖς στοιχοῦσιν τοῖς ἴχνεσιν τῆς ἐν ἀκροβυστίᾳ πίστεως τοῦ πατρὸς ἡμῶν Ἀβραάμ.

See further Mark D. Nanos, “Paul’s Non-Jews Do Not Become ‘Jews,’ but Do They Become ‘Jewish’?: Reading Romans 2:25–29 within Judaism, alongside Josephus,” Journal of the Jesus Movement in Its Jewish Setting 1 (2014): 26–53.

See also Kathy Ehrensperger, “Narratives of Belonging: The Role of Paul’s Genealogical Reasoning,” Early Christianity 8, no. 3 (2017): 373–92.

Following precedents in Isaiah 17:6, 24:3, and Jeremiah 11:14–16.

Paul’s image actually reverses the horticultural procedure, in which cultivated branches were grafted onto the root stock provided by a wild olive tree, so that it could nourish and grow olives that had thicker fruit and more oil than wild varieties. On olive grafting, see Lin Foxhall, Olive Cultivation in Ancient Greece: Seeking the Ancient Economy (Oxford University Press, 2007), 109–12; on Paul’s interpretation: Philip F. Esler, “Ancient Oleiculture and Ethnic Differentiation: The Meaning of the Olive-Tree Image in Romans 11,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 26, no. 1 (2003): 103–24.

In horticultural reality, branches were carefully cut, not torn off, in the grafting procedure.

The pist- word group for Paul, including “faith,” faithfulness,” and “unfaithfulness,” includes more than “belief,” but also trust and reliance on God, and in Jesus as apocalyptic redeemer; and includes behavioral aspects, basically adhering to halakhic and communal norms, as well as participating in associative practices like the Eucharist or Lord’s Supper. Belief was involved, too, including ideas about Jesus’ crucifixion, resurrection, ascent to heaven, and return from heaven prior to the apocalyptic judgment. See further Peter Oakes, “Pistis as Relational Way of Life in Galatians,” JSNT 40, no. 3 (2018): 255–75, and the literature cited there.

Dialogue with Trypho 11. See, e.g., James Carleton Paget, “Christianity and Judaism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Biblical Interpretation, ed. Paul M. Blowers and Peter W. Martens (Oxford University Press, 2019), 331–48; Zetterholm, “Paul within Judaism: The State of the Questions,” in Nanos and Zetterholm, Paul within Judaism, 31–51. Justin represents a transitional link in the shift from categorization based on ethnos to that based on “religion”: he classifies people primarily in terms of their ethnos (Dial. Trypho 28, 79, 119, 123, 130), as defined earlier, retaining geographic connotations, while at the same time adding an emerging classificatory category, “Christian,” an important step in the evolution of the classification of people into groups based on “religion.”

Discourses against Judaizing Christians 1.2.1–4

Paul W. Harkins, Saint John Chrysostom: Discourses Against Judaizing Christians (Catholic University of America Press, 1979), xxi–lxii.

We define “religion” for present purposes as a category that includes reverence towards a particular deity or deities, cultic practice, and corporate group identity. “Religion” itself is of course a highly contested category; see, e.g., Jonathan Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2004), 179–96; and Michael Stausberg and Mark Q. Gardiner, “Definition,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Study of Religion, ed. Michael Stausberg and Steven Engler (Oxford University Press, 2016), 9–32.

Jewish communities in the land of Israel had been decimated in the wake of the great revolt in 70 CE the Bar Kochba rebellion (132–136 CE), traditional representatives of Temple and Torah no longer had coercive power, and Roman imperial institutions emerged as the dominant ones in Palestine. Yet, at the beginning of the fourth century, the archeological record demonstrates that a massive number of synagogues were constructed in Palestine. While this institution was hardly new, having predated the destruction of the temple by many decades, in this period it seems to have become fused with the kind of Judaism we know from the Mishnah, the Jerusalem Talmud, and the Midrash—that is to say, Rabbinic Judaism. The Rabbis whose statements make up the bulk of these texts made a compelling argument to those who continued to identify as members of the Judean ethnos.

Daily prayer at the times of day when the sacrifices were once offered, and the study of the Torah and the observing of the laws contained therein could enable Jews to continue to connect with one another and with the divine until the time at which the messiah would arrive and build the Temple once again.

This has been the case ever since tales about him were written down in the Pentateuch. The tradition-history of the Pentateuchal material is complex, and competing models are currently championed. Here we follow recent arguments in favor for the production and editing of non-Priestly (or “Yahwistic”) and Priestly Pentateuchal material in the Babylonian and Persian periods; see, e.g., John Van Seters, “Dating the Yahwist’s History: Principles and Perspectives,” Biblica 96, no. 1 (2015): 1–25; Thomas Dozeman and Konrad Schmid, eds., A Farewell to the Yahwist? The Composition of the Pentateuch in Recent European Interpretation (SBL Press, 2006).

For recent work on Abraham and his literary legacy, see Sean A. Adams and Zanne Domoney-Lyttle, eds., Abraham in Jewish and Early Christian Literature (T&T Clark, 2019); Claudia D. Bergmann and Thomas R. Blanton IV, eds. Imitating Abraham: Ritual and Exemplarity in Jewish and Christian Contexts (Brill, 2025). For the portrayal of “religion” as eternal and unchanging, see Bruce Lincoln, “Theses on Method,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 17, no. 1 (2005): 8–10.

For some discussion of Genesis Rabbah’s tendency to engage or respond to Christian interpretation, see Jacob Neusner, “Genesis Rabbah as Polemic: An Introductory Account,” HAR 9 (1985): 252–265; Maren R. Niehoff, “Origen’s Commentary on Genesis as a Key to Genesis Rabbah,” in Genesis Rabbah in Text and Context, ed., Sarit Kattan Gribetz, David M. Grossberg, Martha Himmelfarb, and Peter Schäfer (Mohr Siebeck, 2016), 129–154.

This is part of a general approach among the sages to conserve biblical personalities, which Joseph Heinemann has labelled בריחה מאנונימיות, “flight from anonymity.”

In the verse, this phrase is likely returning to describe the man, and not the product of a tree, but the rabbis interpret this phrase as a third tree product so they can have each represent the offspring of one mother.

The expression כרת ברית means entering the covenant, but literally means cutting the covenant. Here the midrash is playing with the expression, treating it as if it means that someone it was temporarily broken or cut by Abraham, only to regrow later.

Based on an oft-quoted homily on Isaiah 55:1, in rabbinic midrash, water=Torah (see e.g., b. Baba Kama 17a), which is the basis for the homily here.

It is also possible that this was meant to be a play on the similar sounding word כתר “crown,” though, of course, these words do not share the same root or even letters, though in the rabbinic period, they would have been pronounced similarly.

Whatever the original context for the debate between R. Judah and R. Nehemiah may have been, Genesis Rabbah uses it here to support the image of Abraham as a tree growing stronger over time.

See Deeana Klepper, “Historicizing Allegory: The Jew as Hagar in Medieval Christian Text and Image,” Church History 84, no. 2 (2015): 308–44.

A dominant metaphor within the Prophets of the Hebrew Bible is the (deeply problematic) assertion that YHWH and the people of Israel are to be seen as a man and woman in an abusive marriage. Israel’s idolatry is a kind of sexual betrayal of her divine husband, but that God’s love for Israel will, in the soteriological future, lead to a forgiving of the wandering bride and a resumption of their marriage. Editor’s note: See some discussion in Tamara Cohn Eskenazi, “Hosea’s Abusive Marital Metaphor Ends with Courtship, Not Violence,” TheTorah (2023).