prescriptions, and the history it relates are universal in that they teach everyone important truths. Paul went Philo one step further and concluded that that being the case, there is no need to continue the corporeal meaning of the concrete history and practices, and he then proceeded directly to the spiritual signified and thus created Gentile Christianity as a direct offshoot of Hellenistic Judaism.
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This solution had the cultural advantage of making the message of the Bible available to the entire world, and indeed Christianity was to become, of course, the dominant religious formation of the Western world, but it deracinated both the specificity of the Jewish historical and cultural experience, and, by implication (and in practice) that of all other peoples of the world. The Rabbis can be read, then, as a necessary critique of Paul (or, if I am wrong in my reading of Paul, of other, slightly later, Christian thinkers who certainly held such views), for if the Pauline move has within it the possibility of breaking out of the tribal allegiances and commitments to one's own family, it also contains the seeds of an imperialist and colonizing missionary practice. The very emphasis on a universalism, expressed as concern for all of the families of the world, turns rapidly (if not necessarily) into a doctrine that they must all
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 | | 7. Once again, I realize that this is a controversial interpretation of Paul's doctrine. I think it was truly a matter of near total indifference to Paul whether Jews kept the Law or not. I will defend this interpretation in my work in progress, tentatively entitled
A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity
. See for the nonce Sanders 1977 and 1983 and Segal 1990. Dunn seems to me also particularly accurate in identifying Paul's issue as the distinctiveness or "nationalism" of the Jews:
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| | Most persistent of all is the argument regarding the relation of faith and the law. How is (the initial expression of) faith to be correlated with "works of the law"? The implication of . . . [Galatians] 2:16a, especially in its context as referring back to the issue of food laws at Antioch (2:1114), is that Jewish Christians thought works of the law (like observance of the dietary laws) were quite compatible with faith in Christ and still a necessary (covenantal!) obligation for Jewish believers in Messiah Jesus. But Paul drives that distinction (faith in Christ and works of law) into an outright antithesis (2:16bc; 3:2, 5, 1012): to regard the law (covenantal nomism) as the outworking of faith is retrogressive, a stepping back from the freedom of the children of God into immature childhood and slavery (3:234: 11; 4:2131). The outworking of faith has to be conceived in different terms from works of the law (circumcision etc.): that is, in terms of the Spirit as against works of the flesh (5:1626; 6:79), a focusing on physical features which would include a nationalistic evaluation of circumcision (3:3; 4:2131; 6:1213). This outworking may be conceived in terms of the law, but not the law focused in such Jewish distinctives as circumcision, but focused rather in love of neighbor (5:6, 1314) as exemplified by Christ (6:14).
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| | (Dunn 1991, 129)
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