Matthew THIESSEN. A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2023. pp. 208. $24.99 pb. ISBN 9781540965714. Reviewed by Elvir CICEKLIC, Palm Beach Atlantic University, West Palm Beach FL 33401.

The author of 2 Peter (3:16) warns us that Paul’s letters are “hard to understand,” and that is coming from an ancient contemporary of the Apostle. This warning increases exponentially through the history of reception of Paul’s letters within different contexts throughout space and time. This warning of the difficulty of Paul’s writings has all but dissipated within the Christian context as Christian intellectuals from St. Augustine to Martin Luther to Karl Barth have so deeply incorporated and appropriated Paul’s theology to their own Christian situation that Paul’s Jewish identity all but vanished throughout the history of the church. In other words, Paul has become too familiar to Christianity, and therefore, he has become too similar to Christianity. But Paul was a Jew. He lived as a Jew, and he died a martyr’s death as a Jew. And, more importantly, he believed in Jesus the Jewish Messiah. Matthew Thiessen provides an antidote for the over- familiarization of Paul in contemporary (especially Protestant) Christianity: making Paul weird again (11).

Within modern Pauline scholarship, there are four major “schools” of Paul’s thought. The first is the more traditional “Lutheran” perspective that tends to read Paul’s letters primarily through an anti-legalistic or anti-works-righteousness lens by viewing Paul’s gospel as fundamentally contrary to Judaism. Then, E.P. Sander’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism marked a watershed moment that shifted worn-out scholarly assumptions of ancient Judaism, based on the “Lutheran” view, as a religion that promoted a [Pelagian] works-righteousness to a more historically accurate yet complex picture of Judaism that highlights salvation by unmerited grace, and a response to God’s salvation through a system of covenantal nomism. Sander’s work became fodder for what is known as the “new perspective” that reads Paul not through an anti- legalistic but anti-ethnocentric lens as diverging from ancient Jewish nationalism. The third school of interpretation is the “apocalyptic” reading of Paul that stresses a radical break from his past, including his Jewishness, because of the invasion-like disruption of God’s revelation in Jesus. The fourth school is the so-called “radical new perspective” or Paul within Judaism interpretation of Paul’s letters that seeks to situation Paul within Judaism as a Messiah follower and called by God specially as Apostle to the gentiles. Thiessen’s reading of Paul is situated within the general view of this fourth school as he “seeks to defuse Christian anti-Judaism and supersessionism” (161).

Thiessen’s book serves not only as an introduction to the Paul within Judaism school, but to the Apostle Paul himself and his letters. He maintains the big picture that within Paul’s ancient Mediterranean Jewish world, there were two types of people, Jews and non-Jews or gentiles. Furthermore, within Paul’s new up-side-down world in Jesus the Messiah, within these two categories “there were those people who followed Jesus and those who did not” (13). This picture of Paul’s theological anthropology shines a different light than viewing people within the categories of Jew vs Christians. Throughout the book, Thiessen unpacks what exactly the gentile problem was to which Jesus the Jewish Messiah is the solution: they are not children of Abraham (89). How can gentiles become children of Abraham, and thus inherit God’s promises to Abraham that are indicative of the Jews? The solution, as Thiessen sees it, is not “cosmic surgery” through circumcision, but rather “pneumatic gene therapy” by receiving the pneuma of the Messiah, the seed of Abraham. By receiving the Messiah’s pneuma, gentiles become made of the same spiritual stuff of the Messiah that is possible only through his resurrection from the dead (111). Thiessen writes, “And Paul believed that in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of this particular and peculiar son of God, a whole new generation of sons of God had come and would be coming into existence” (123). That is, Paul’s gentile problem was not a Jewish problem, it was a Messiah problem.

This is a must-read book for Christians because it challenges assumptions left and right.
Through erudite scholarship and careful reading of the text and context of Paul’s letters situated within his Jewish Mediterranean world, Thiessen gives us a healthy dose of an historical reality check on the difficult words of the Jewish Apostle to the gentiles. This is not to denigrate the importance of the Apostle’s theology for the Christian church, but it allows us to see Paul in his own strange world which can teach us to embrace the weird and to appreciate different perspectives to help broaden our theological horizons in space and time.