An Anomalous Jew!? What Does it Mean to See Paul 'Within Judaism'?
Paula Fredriksen has a new article out in the Journal of Biblical Literature entitled “What Does It Mean to See Paul ‘within Judaism’?” (JBL 141, 2, 2022: 359-380). It is a great intervention into, among other things, the newer perspectives on Paul which, despite attempting to overcome harder forms of the old Paul vs Jewish legalism trope, nonetheless retain softer forms of this supercessionist framing, whether intentional or not. One of her targets is Michael Bird’s 2016 book An Anomalous Jew. She writes “The New Perspective 2.0’s Paul, if no longer actively anti-νόμος, is at the very least ‘anomalous’; Jewish but not too Jewish”, and Bird’s book is featured prominently in the footnote (361).
Back in 2017, I undertook my own intervention into this curious descriptor of Paul as “anomalous”. This included some hilarious Twitter exchanges with Bird defending his astute observation that “Paul is like and unlike many of his Judean contemporaries.” No kidding!
I also wrote a blog post on my old blog (since deleted) entitled “Michael Bird’s fetish for an ‘anomalously Jewish’ Paul”. I have managed to recover the text and include it below. Enjoy!
Michael Bird’s fetish for an “anomalously Jewish” Paul
The other day I had a look at Michael Bird’s An Anomalous Jew: Paul among Jews, Greeks, and Romans (2016). I was initially surprised at the title given I thought the well-worn trope of highlighting Paul’s exceptionalism was, in some circles at least, passé – due not least to the influence of recent discussions of Paul “within Judaism” (which Bird mentions in passing) but also the more substantial critiques–especially in historical Jesus research–against using the trappings of Judaism to effectively sharpen Jesus/Paul’s distinctiveness and subtly imply superiority – even if this isn’t the author’s intention. I’m thinking in particular of the work of Bill Arnal, James Crossley, Shawn Kelley, Amy-Jill Levine, Halvor Moxnes, and others.
In Jesus in an Age of Terror (2008), for example, Crossley identifies the all-too-common construction of a “Jewish but not that Jewish” Jesus in which scholars seek to have their cake and to eat it too: Jesus is Jewish but also different (i.e. better) in some way. Crossley’s 2012 book Jesus in an Age of Neoliberalism specifically calls out Michael Bird on this exact point, so it is curious Bird appears not to have absorbed this critique. Here Crossley suggests that although “very Jewish” and “Jewishness” are common phrases in NT scholarly discourse, they often go unexplained, as if their meaning was obvious. A case in point, he turns to an article by Bird which attempts to unpack the meaning of “Jewishness”. While Bird appeals to the Jewishness of Jesus as “the fail safe” to stop modernizing Jesus against Cynic or Hellenized (i.e. “de-Judaized”) portrayals of Jesus, Bird seems, at the same moment, uninterested in the masses of interdisciplinary research that would undermine this somewhat wooden use of identarian categories to begin with. Indeed, Bird seems to proceed assuming identity is a relatively fixed or “essential” category. The phrase “thoroughly Jewish” for instance, implies “Jewishness” has an essence or kernel than can be pinned down. Moreover, Crossley observes that “Bird does not spell out key underlying assumptions concerning ‘very Jewish’ and so on, namely, that if we talk about something or someone being ‘very Jewish’ we are talking about measurements of identity” (p. 107). Such an understanding of identity is obviously anachronistic when applied to the first century and, as such, its usefulness for categorizing “Jewishness” is limited. As I have suggested elsewhere, various attempts to dissect Jesus’s complex identity over the past forty years or so probably draws on the prevalence of “identity politics” in Anglo-American forms of political theorization and expression today.
By definition, an “anomaly” presumes a stable or fixed category against which a person or thing doesn’t quite fit. So to move back to Bird’s recent book on Paul, what, then, does he actually mean by the curious descriptor “anomalous Jew”? For Bird the “anomaly” has to do with Paul’s apparent innovation or distinctiveness within his own time, place, and ethnic-social grouping. He introduces the book with the following paragraph that could almost be mistaken for a caricature of the “Jewish but not that Jewish” trope noted above:
Paul was clearly a very Jewish person with a Jewish way of life and a very Jewish worldview. Even so, he still came into conflict with Jewish communities in both the Diaspora and Judea, aroused the angst of fellow Jewish Christians, and was eventually put to death by the Roman authorities as a Jewish agitator. My aim in this volume is to identify how Paul could be thoroughly Jewish and yet become a figure of notoriety and controversy among his Jewish compatriots. My answer, in short, is that Paul was an anomalous Jew, a strange figure with a blend of common and controversial Jewish beliefs that brought him into conflict with the socioreligious scene around him. (p. vii)
Note that Bird appears not to have abandoned his intriguing view of a “measurable” Jewish identity for which he was previously critiqued: Paul is described as “very Jewish”, “thoroughly Jewish”, and so on. Where does his language of “anomalous Jew” come from, however? Bird acknowledges later in the first chapter that he borrows the phrase from John Barclay, although he modifies its meaning somewhat. Bird clarifies:
unlike Barclay, I do not see the essence of the Pauline anomaly to be the paradoxes involved in Paul’s attempt to negotiate his way with Diaspora Hellenism, but more properly related to the social epiphenomenon that follows on from his messianic eschatology, namely, his attempt to create a social space for a unified body of Jewish and Gentile Christ-believers worshiping God. (pp. 27-8)
In other words, and put more crudely, Bird’s Paul invents the Church/Christianity which becomes an “anomaly” within Judaism and the Greco-Roman world. For me, this immediately raises the question of whether other forms of “innovation” within first-century Jewish thought and practice (i.e. as a result of the careful negotiation of what a “Jewish identity” might look like after the central institution of the Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E., for example) could also be couched in the language of anomaly? Indeed, despite my appreciation for a good paradox, a “thoroughly Jewish” Paul isn’t really anomalous at all, at least no more than any other Jewish thinker/organizer of the time who was attempting to balance received truths and traditions with an eye to the new realities before him. Paul was simply a Jew trying to unravel the mystery of what it means to be a Jew in the wake of a cataclysmic event (in his case, the resurrection of Christ).