Endnote 10 – Paul’s Contradictions

Michael Wyschogrod, “The Impact of Dialogue with Christianity on My Self-Understanding as a Jew,” in Die Hebraische Bibel und ihre zweifache Nachgeschichte, ed. Erhard Blum et al. (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1990), p. 731. Wyschogrod wavers a bit, but in the end seems convinced (p. 733). George Foot Moore, in his magisterial Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era: The Age of the Tannaim, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962), made a similar observation, but like much else in his work, no one bothered to follow up on it: “He [Paul] was, in fact, not writing to convince Jews but to keep his Gentile converts from being convinced by Jewish propagandists, who insisted that faith in Christ was not sufficient to salvation apart from the observance of the law” (vol. 3, p. 151). The “Jewish propagandists” are Paul’s opponents in the Jesus movement.