Paul Within Judaism

Definition

A contemporary scholarly position (with deep historical roots) that argues Paul, the apostle, never stopped being a practicing Jew. He kept Torah, observed Sabbath and the festivals, ate kosher, identified himself as a Pharisee in the present tense (Acts 23:6), and understood himself as commissioned not to convert Jews away from Judaism but to bring the news of Israel’s Messiah to the Gentiles (Rom 11:13; Gal 2:7-9). His sustained critique of “the works of the law” (especially in Galatians and Romans) is not a Christian critique of Judaism as works-righteousness, and it is not an argument that Jewish believers in Messiah should abandon Torah. It is an intra-Jewish argument about whether Gentile converts must take on Jewish identity markers (circumcision, food laws, calendar) to be full members of the messianic community. Paul’s consistent answer is no: Gentiles do not need to become Jews. Their pistis (faithful allegiance) to Jesus as Messiah and Lord makes them full members of the family of Abraham without conversion. But by the same logic, Jews who follow Yeshua are not asked to abandon the covenant practices that have always marked them as Jews. The framework names this read of Paul, traces its lineage, and lays out the implications for the rest of the New Testament.

Key proponents

Modern academic

Krister Stendahl (1921 to 2008), Paul Among Jews and Gentiles (Fortress, 1976). The pioneering essay “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West” (1963) named the Lutheran reading of Paul as a modern projection and argued for a Paul whose actual question was Jew-Gentile relations, not individual conscience.
E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Fortress, 1977). The book that founded what came to be called the New Perspective on Paul. Sanders demolished the caricature of Second Temple Judaism as a religion of legalistic works-righteousness and recovered the framework of covenantal nomism (Torah-observance as the grateful response to covenant, not as the means of earning it).
James D.G. Dunn, who coined the phrase New Perspective on Paul in his 1982 Manson Memorial Lecture and developed it across multiple books (The Theology of Paul the Apostle, 1998; The New Perspective on Paul, 2005). Dunn argued that the works of the law in Paul refers specifically to the covenantal identity markers (circumcision, food laws, Sabbath, festivals) rather than to good deeds in general.
N.T. Wright, the most prolific and influential modern New Testament scholar working in this territory. What Saint Paul Really Said (1997), Justification (2009), and especially Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Fortress, 2013) develop a comprehensive reading of Paul as a Jewish thinker working out the implications of Israel’s Messiah for both Jews and Gentiles. Wright does not go all the way to the Paul Within Judaism position (he sees more transformation of Jewish categories in Paul than Nanos or Fredriksen do), but his work shares most of the framework’s core commitments.
Mark Nanos, the most insistent contemporary voice for the Paul Within Judaism reading proper. The Mystery of Romans (Fortress, 1996), The Irony of Galatians (Fortress, 2002), and Paul Within Judaism: Restoring the First-Century Context to the Apostle (co-edited with Magnus Zetterholm, Fortress, 2015) are the foundational works. Nanos argues that Paul’s letters consistently presume the continued validity of Torah for Jewish believers and that the Pauline communities were sub-groups within Diaspora synagogues, not separate institutions.
Pamela Eisenbaum, Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle (HarperOne, 2009). The popular-academic introduction to the framework, written by a Jewish scholar.
Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (Yale University Press, 2017). A historian’s account of Paul as a Jew working to bring Gentile pagans into the eschatological people of God before the imminent return of the Messiah.
Magnus Zetterholm, The Formation of Christianity in Antioch (Routledge, 2003) and Approaches to Paul (Fortress, 2009). The Swedish scholar who has done the most to develop the institutional-historical case for the framework.
John Gager, Reinventing Paul (Oxford University Press, 2000), the historical introduction to the radical New Perspective.
Lloyd Gaston, Paul and the Torah (UBC Press, 1987). An early articulation arguing that Paul’s negative statements about the law address Gentile attempts to enter the covenant through Torah-observance, not Jewish observance itself.
Matthew Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone (Baker Academic, 2017) and Gospel Allegiance (Brazos, 2019). Bates’s recovery of pistis as allegiance / faithfulness provides the pastoral bridge that makes the Paul Within Judaism position legible without requiring readers to master the academic literature. See also the gospel allegiance framework.
Scot McKnight, Reading Romans Backwards (Baylor, 2019) and Romans (NTEBS, HarperChristian, 2023). Reads Romans as a pastoral letter to a divided Roman house-church community where Strong (mostly gentile, mostly Torah-relaxed) and Weak (mostly Jewish, Torah-observant) believers were in conflict. McKnight’s Read Romans Backwards thesis (start at chs 12-16, then 9-11, then 1-8) shifts the entire reading of Romans toward the Paul Within Judaism lane by foregrounding the actual community problem the letter addresses.
Timothy Gombis, Romans podcast lecture series (2024-25). Develops the Paul Within Judaism reading inside a cruciform / new-creation frame across all 16 chapters of Romans.

Popular-level and pastoral

Marty Solomon (Bema podcast), the most influential popular-level teacher in this lane. Solomon’s reading of Acts 10 (“Unclean Sheets”) names Peter’s vision as being about people, not food, and his broader teaching consistently affirms that Jewish believers in Messiah can and should continue their covenant practices. Solomon openly keeps kosher and observes the Hebrew Bible’s festivals.
Ray Vander Laan (That the World May Know), the cultural-context teacher whose work has trained generations of pastors and lay readers to see the Hebrew Bible’s continued life in the messianic community.
The Messianic Jewish tradition (David Stern’s Jewish New Testament Commentary; the work of Tikkun International, the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America, and the Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations). These communities have lived this framework, often controversially, for generations.

Premodern witnesses (debated but real)

Romans 11 itself. Paul’s olive tree (Rom 11:17-24) keeps the root and the natural branches as Israel; the Gentiles are grafted in. The tree does not become a different tree. The chapter is one of the New Testament’s clearest internal witnesses to the framework.
The Jerusalem Council (Acts 15). The council ruled that Gentiles do not need to be circumcised or keep the full Torah, but it did not require Jewish believers to abandon Torah. The Acts 15 decree (Acts 15:19-21, 28-29) restricted Gentiles to a short list of constraints (idol meat, blood, things strangled, porneia) that look like the Noahide constraints Second Temple Judaism applied to righteous Gentiles. James’s reasoning at 15:21 (for Moses has had in every city those who proclaim him, being read in the synagogues every Sabbath) presumes that Jewish believers continue their normal synagogue practice. The council is the framework’s earliest institutional witness.
The Didache (late first or early second century). The earliest non-canonical Christian instruction manual addressed to Gentile converts. The Didache assumes a community that is observably distinct from Judaism, but it preserves features (the daily prayer practice, the Eucharist as a Jewish-style berakhah meal, the moral teaching as a Two Ways document with Jewish parallels) that show how naturally early Gentile Christianity grew out of Diaspora-synagogue patterns.
The Quartodeciman controversy (second century). Christians in Asia Minor, descended from John’s circle, celebrated Easter on the Jewish Passover (the 14th of Nisan, hence Quarto-deciman). Their practice presumed that the messianic events fit into the Jewish festival cycle rather than replacing it. The Western church eventually moved to a Sunday-after-Passover date and the Quartodecimans were marginalized, but their existence into the late second century is testimony that the framework’s commitments were alive in actual Christian practice for at least 150 years after Paul.
Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho (mid-second century). Justin himself opposed continued Torah-observance, but the Dialogue records that there were Jewish believers in Messiah in his time who continued to observe Torah, and Justin grants them legitimacy as long as they do not require Gentiles to do the same. Justin’s grudging concession witnesses to the framework’s continued presence in the mid-second century.
The Ebionites (second through fifth centuries). A Jewish-Christian community that continued to observe Torah and read the Hebrew Bible alongside their Christian texts. Later patristic writers (Irenaeus, Eusebius, Epiphanius) treat them as heretical for their Christology, but their continued existence shows that some communities preserved the Jewish-Christian pattern of life for centuries.
Origen on Romans 9-11 (mid-third century). Origen reads the chapters as Paul intended them, with Israel remaining Israel and Gentile believers grafted into Israel’s olive tree without becoming Israel. The reading is not unique to Origen but is most clearly articulated in his Commentary on Romans.
John Chrysostom (intermittently). His Adversus Judaeos sermons are notoriously anti-Jewish, but his commentary work elsewhere preserves elements of the framework. He is a complicated witness.
The Council of Florence (1442) and the long Western Christian tradition formalized the supersessionist reading. The framework’s premodern witnesses are real but were progressively pushed to the margins of Christian theology by the medieval and Reformation-era consolidation of the supersessionist position.

See How We Read for the longer lineage of this and the other frameworks on this site.

Core insights

Paul writes as a Jew, not as a former Jew. Paul’s self-descriptions in his letters are consistently in the present tense. He is a Jew (2 Cor 11:22, are they Hebrews? So am I). He is of the people of Israel, the tribe of Benjamin (Rom 11:1; Phil 3:5). He is a Pharisee (Acts 23:6, on trial, decades after his Damascus encounter: I am a Pharisee, the son of Pharisees). The standard Christian reading of Paul as a converted Jew who abandoned Judaism for Christianity is, on this framework, anachronistic. Paul did not convert from one religion to another; he was called (Gal 1:15-16, the same vocabulary the Hebrew Bible’s prophets use of their commissions) to bring the messianic news to the Gentiles. He remained a Jew his whole life.

“The works of the law” refers to Jewish covenantal identity markers, not to “good deeds in general.” James Dunn’s central interpretive move: erga nomou (the works of the law) in Paul’s contested texts (Gal 2:16, 3:2, 3:5, 3:10; Rom 3:20, 3:27-28, 9:32) refers specifically to the practices that marked Jewish people as ethnically distinct from Gentiles: circumcision, food laws, calendar observance, Sabbath. Paul’s argument is that these practices are Israel’s, not requirements for Gentiles. When Paul writes that no one is justified by the works of the law, he is arguing that a Gentile cannot enter the covenant by taking on Jewish identity markers, and that a Jew does not have superior covenant standing by virtue of being marked. The verse is not saying that good moral effort is futile.

Acts 10 is about people, not food. Peter’s vision of the sheet with unclean animals is the framework’s most often-misread text in the New Testament. The chapter has Peter himself interpret the vision at Acts 10:28: God has shown me that I should not call any person common or unclean. The Greek emphasizes anthropon (any human being), not any food. Peter, when the sheet descends, refuses three times to eat because the animals on it are still unclean by the Torah he has kept his whole life. The voice does not say these are now clean; it says do not call unclean what God has called clean. The what in question is the Gentile household of Cornelius waiting down the road. The chapter settles the question of Gentile inclusion in the messianic community, not the question of Torah’s food laws.

Acts 15 left Jewish Torah-observance intact. The Jerusalem Council, the first major doctrinal council in the New Testament’s record, ruled that Gentile converts do not need to be circumcised or keep the full Torah (Acts 15:19-20, 28-29). The decree did not address whether Jewish believers should continue Torah-observance; James’s closing argument (v. 21) presumes that they will, as they have been doing in every city every Sabbath. The council established a two-track community: Jewish believers continue Jewish covenantal practice; Gentile believers are bound by a short list of constraints (no idol meat, no blood, no strangled meat, no porneia) that look like Second Temple Judaism’s Noahide constraints on righteous Gentiles.

Paul’s letters are primarily addressed to Gentile believers. Romans 1:5-6 (we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations, including you who are called). Galatians is written to a community of Gentile believers being pressured by Jewish-Christian missionaries (the circumcision party) to take on Jewish identity markers. 1 Corinthians is written to a mostly-Gentile community in a Greek port city. The framework reads Paul’s letters as primarily addressing the Gentile question of what faithfulness to Israel’s Messiah looks like for those who were never under Torah’s specific obligations.

Romans 9-11 is the framework’s heart. Paul’s most extended treatment of Jewish-Christian relations. The olive tree (11:17-24) is Israel; the natural branches are Israel’s covenant family; the Gentile believers are wild olive shoots grafted in contrary to nature to the same tree. The tree does not become a different tree. Paul’s deepest warning, at 11:18-22, is that the Gentile branches not boast against the natural ones, because if God did not spare the natural branches, neither will he spare you. The whole later Christian supersessionist tradition (the church has replaced Israel) reads Romans 9-11 against its own grain. The site develops Romans 9-11 in its own dedicated framework, the olive tree, where the all Israel will be saved claim, the jealousy logic, and the partial and provisional hardening receive extended treatment.

Romans is the Paul-Within-Judaism lane’s most important single test case. No other Pauline letter has shaped Christian theology like Romans, and no other Pauline letter has been more thoroughly Augustinianized and Reformed-overlaid in the Western tradition. Reading Romans inside the PWJ frame requires four shifts at once:

Justification is the legal-courtroom dimension of God’s act of including both Jew and Gentile in one covenant family, not the whole gospel (see justification).
Works of the law (3:20, 27-28; 9:32) names the Torah boundary-marker triad (circumcision, food, calendar), not generic moralistic effort (see works of the law).
Adam Christology (5:12-21) is one historical articulation of human-corporate-condition theology, with recapitulation and federal headship as two distinct historical readings (see Adam Christology).
Israel’s election is irrevocable (11:29), the olive tree is cultivated not replanted, and all Israel will be saved names a future ethnic-Israel inclusion, not the church as the new Israel (see the olive tree). The site’s Romans chapter commentary holds all four shifts together, which is why the four Romans-era frameworks were added alongside this one rather than folded into it.

Pistis is faithful allegiance, not merely mental assent. Matthew Bates’s recovery of pistis as allegiance (see the gospel allegiance framework) provides the conceptual bridge that makes the Paul Within Judaism position pastorally legible. For Paul, both Jews and Gentiles practice pistis through embodied faithfulness to Israel’s Messiah. The Jewish believer’s pistis is embodied in continued Torah-observance, now reordered around Yeshua as Messiah. The Gentile believer’s pistis is embodied in the practices appropriate to Gentile life in the messianic community: baptism, eucharist, the moral teaching of the apostles, generosity, hospitality, and the shape of life that follows the apostolic teaching. Neither is reducible to mental belief.

The Hebrew Bible’s covenant categories are not retired in Christ. This is the framework’s deepest theological move. The supersessionist reading (Christ fulfills the Torah, therefore the Torah no longer applies) is, on this framework, a category error. Christ fulfills the priestly-sacrificial system (Hebrews develops this); he does not abolish the covenant identity of the Jewish people. The food laws, the festivals, the Sabbath, circumcision continue to mark the Jewish people as the covenant family they have always been. What Christ adds is the inclusion of Gentiles in the eschatological people of God, on the basis of pistis in him, without the requirement of becoming Jews first.

Implications. The framework reshapes how the site reads the entire New Testament. Galatians: Paul’s argument is against Gentile circumcision, not against Jewish Torah-observance. Romans 14: the strong and weak are Jewish and Gentile believers with different practices, and Paul commends mutual welcome rather than telling either group to abandon its practice. Hebrews: the priestly-sacrificial system finds its fulfillment in Christ, but the book is addressed to Jewish believers helping them understand how Christ relates to the temple system. 1 Corinthians 8-10: the question is idol-meat in a pagan context, not Torah food laws. Colossians 2:16-17: Paul warns Gentile believers not to be judged by Jewish believers for not keeping festivals and Sabbath, not the other way around. The whole later Christian tradition’s anti-Jewish theology, including the dark heritage that culminated in the Christian centuries-long persecution of Jews and Christian complicity in the Holocaust, has roots in the supersessionist misread of Paul that this framework corrects.

Where it shows up in Scripture

Acts 10, Peter’s vision and Cornelius’s conversion
Acts 15, the Jerusalem Council
Acts 21:17-26, Paul, in Jerusalem after his missionary work, undergoes a Nazirite purification rite to demonstrate that he himself walks orderly, keeping the law. The chapter is the New Testament’s clearest internal witness that Paul continued Jewish practice his whole life.
Acts 23:6, Paul’s present-tense self-identification as a Pharisee
Romans 9-11, the olive tree and the continuing election of Israel
Romans 11:1, has God rejected his people? By no means!
Romans 11:25-32, the partial hardening of Israel and the eschatological salvation of all Israel
Romans 14, mutual welcome between Jewish and Gentile believers with different practices
Galatians 2:7-9, the agreement at Antioch: Peter to the circumcised, Paul to the Gentiles; not two gospels, two missions
Galatians 2:11-14, the Antioch incident: Paul’s rebuke of Peter is about table fellowship between Jewish and Gentile believers, not about whether either group should keep Torah
1 Corinthians 7:17-20, let each one remain in the calling in which he was called: the circumcised man should not seek to be uncircumcised; the uncircumcised should not be circumcised
2 Corinthians 11:22, Paul’s present-tense Hebrew/Israelite/Abrahamic identity
Philippians 3:5-7, Paul’s Jewish credentials, counted as loss not because Judaism is wrong but because knowing Christ surpasses every other ground for boasting
Ephesians 2:11-22, the one new humanity of Jews and Gentiles together in Christ, with the dividing wall taken down and both groups brought near; the chapter does not say Israel ceases to be Israel
1 Timothy 1:8, the law is good if one uses it lawfully: Paul affirms the law’s continued value in its proper use

Common misreadings to avoid

“Paul abandoned Judaism.” No: Paul remained Jewish all his life.
“Paul invented Christianity as a religion distinct from Judaism.” No: Paul preached the Jewish Messiah to Gentiles within a Jewish covenantal framework. The institutional separation came later.
“The works of the law means good deeds.” No: in Paul’s contested texts, it refers specifically to Jewish covenantal identity markers.
“Acts 10 declared all foods clean.” No: the vision was about people. Peter says so himself at Acts 10:28.
“Romans 9-11 teaches replacement theology.” No: the chapters are Paul’s argument against any such reading.
“Jewish believers in Messiah must abandon Torah.” No: nothing in the New Testament requires this. Acts 21:17-26 records Paul himself participating in Jewish Temple practice years after his Damascus encounter.
“Gentile believers must keep Torah.” No: this is the position Paul most vigorously opposes. Gentiles enter the covenant family by pistis in Israel’s Messiah, without requirement of Jewish observance.
“The framework is anti-Pauline or progressive theology.” No: it is a recovery of Paul’s actual first-century context, supported by the most careful contemporary New Testament scholarship and consistent with the Hebrew Bible’s own teaching that Israel’s covenant is irrevocable.
“The framework is the same as Messianic Judaism.” Partly: the framework agrees with Messianic Jews that Jewish believers continue Torah-observance, but the framework is a scholarly position about how to read Paul, not a community identity. Both Messianic Jews and Gentile Christians can hold the framework.
“The framework collapses the difference between Jews and Christians.” No: the framework preserves the difference. Jews remain Jews; Gentile Christians remain Gentile Christians; both belong to the family of Abraham through pistis in the Messiah.

Definition

Key proponents

Core insights

Where it shows up in Scripture

Common misreadings to avoid

Further reading