Book review by Rich Robinson

Matthew Thiessen. A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2023.

Reviewed by Rich Robinson, Senior Researcher, Jews for Jesus

The past couple of centuries have seen a “Jewish reclamation” of Jesus, whereby Jewish scholars have appraised Jesus positively. Lately, Paul is being similarly “reclaimed” after a long time in which he was seen as the bad boy who took the message of Jesus, changed it to make it palatable to Gentiles, and invented the new religion of Christianity—along with abandoning the Torah.

Matthew Thiessen teaches at McMaster University in Canada. His aim is to acquaint readers with this new way of approaching Paul and thereby aid in Jewish-Christian relations. His book actually goes beyond this aim into broader areas.

First off, Thiessen helpfully gives an overview of current approaches relating Paul to Judaism (there are several viewpoints out there in the scholarly world.) Interestingly, at a time when many scholars discount the book of Acts for evidence about Paul, seeing it as unhistorical and unreliable, Thiessen makes Acts his primary piece of evidence for Paul’s Jewishness.

A Jewish Paul has twelve chapters. Chapter 1 is “Making Paul Weird Again.” Weird, that is, for people who don’t think of Paul in Jewish terms, which may well characterize many people in church pews. For Jewish followers of Jesus, Paul’s Jewishness is not weird at all!

Chapter 2, “A Radically New or a Long-Lost Reading of Paul?” takes us to the book of Acts as well as Paul’s letters to describe Paul’s Jewishness. In chapter 3, “Judaism Doesn’t Believe Anything,” the point is that there was no monolithic Judaism in the first century; Jews believed many different things. Here Galatians 1:13-14 is explained in terms of Paul changing what today we’d call branches of Judaism; he did not abandon Judaism or being Jewish.

Chapter 4, “Paul, an End-Time Jew,” affirms that in Thiessen’s view, Paul expected the end to come at any moment, and furthermore that Paul believed that being Jewish was something set in stone (my words, not Thiessen’s) through one’s ancestry.

All the above will be something that many Jewish believers can affirm (whether Paul thought the end was right at hand is debated). Then we get to the more interesting parts of the book concerning Gentiles. Chapter 5 is “The Gentile Problem.” Thiessen argues that in Romans 1, Paul is not addressing the universal human condition, but Gentile idolatry (he draws on Roman and Jewish sources here). Why do Gentiles need to hear the gospel? Because, unlike Jews, they were idolators.

Chapter 6 is a bit of a detour. Titled “Jesus the Messiah,” it explores what Paul thought about Jesus, the question then being how Gentiles can access God’s promises in Jesus.

Chapter 7, “The Gentile Problem and Cosmetic Surgery,” explains why for Paul circumcision for Gentiles will avail nothing. And then comes Chapter 8, “Pneumatic Gene Therapy.” Now is the time to hold onto your hats, because Thiessen engages in some very creative but very idiosyncratic ideas. He believes Paul draws on Stoicism (Tarsus being a “hotbed” of that philosophy). The Messiah’s pneuma (Greek for spirit, but Thiessen never uses the word spirit) is for Paul and for Stoicism a kind of matter, which is infused or inserted into the bodies of Gentiles so that they now contain the Messiah’s DNA, so to speak. The Messiah is “inserted” into Gentile believers, thereby relating them to Abraham!

Chapter 9 is “The Bodies of Messiah.” Thiessen draws on Benjamin Sommer of Jewish Theological Seminary, who shows that in ancient Israel and surrounding cultures, divinities could take on multiple bodies. The “rock” of 1 Corinthians 10:4 was therefore not a metaphor or a midrash; the Messiah literally was “embodied in rock.” He memorably writes, “The Messiah’s petrification preceded his incarnation.”

There are three more chapters, but I will leave those to you to read. I think you will find this a stimulating, although at key points unusual, treatment of Paul and his Jewishness. At least Paul’s Jewishness is being recognized, and that is a welcome development.

For a longer review of A Jewish Paul, see https://www.kesherjournal.com/article/a-jewish-paul-the-messiahs-herald-to-the-gentiles-by-matthew-thiessen/