Some Surprises: Dwight Pryor on Paul

I recently listened to a lecture series by the late Dwight Pryor entitled Paul, The Law and the Church.  Knowing that Pryor was the founder of The Center for Judaic Christian Studies, I was anticipating an insightful investigation of the Jewish character of Paul’s life and work.  But the longer I listened, the more I realized that Pryor’s view, in spite of his historical recognition of the Jewish context of Scripture, was still firmly entrenched in the Greek-Christian paradigm.  I was shocked when Pryor suggested that Paul was the bridge between Judaism and the Church, that Paul advocated the abolition of circumcision and the dietary regulations of Torah for both Jews and Gentiles under the “new covenant,” that Paul claimed that the ritual laws of Jewish identification no longer apply to either Jew or Gentile and that the covenant obligations of Israel have been done away with in the death and resurrection of Yeshua.  This is replacement theology.  It might be disguised in a form that advocates the Jewish character of Paul, but it is still the idea that Paul radically departed from his past, that he converted to the Christian faith and that Torah was a temporary identification marker of Jewish ethnicity.  For someone who studied with David Flusser and who knew Marvin Wilson, I found Pryor’s position astounding, confused and ultimately incompatible with Scriptural evidence.  It might be Hebraic in its language, but it is thoroughly Greek in its paradigm approach.

How could this have happened?

It seems to me that Pryor’s fundamental error comes in his assessment of Galatians.  His exegesis of this letter sets the stage for his assertions about Paul’s departure from Judaism and conversion to Christianity.  Pryor’s error begins with his belief that Paul’s opponents in the letter to the Galatians were fellow Jewish Messianic believers.  Once Pryor assumes this to be the case, he must conclude that Paul is driving a wedge between himself and those who are followers of Yeshua as the Messiah but continue to hold on to Jewish Torah observance.  This means that Pryor must treat Paul in opposition to the claims, not of non-Messianic Jews who were speaking from the position of accepted conditions of proselytizing, but rather to the claims of Jews who were also followers of Yeshua.  Pryor’s view forces us to think that Paul distinguishes himself from others within the Body on the basis of the acceptance or rejection of Torah, and Pryor concludes that the only possible distinction given this dichotomy is that Paul rejected Torah observance.  In other words, Pryor sees a clear distinction between the Christian church for the Gentiles and the Jewish congregation of Israel.  In his view, Paul opens the door to the Gentiles by removing the obstacle of Torah obedience and by doing this he insists that neither Jew nor Gentile is required to uphold the “ritual laws” of Torah in this new faith.

But all of this falls apart if we recognize that Paul’s opponents were not fellow Messianic believers but rather Jews who viewed the common expectations for proselytes as the only acceptable means for entering into fellowship with YHWH.  Mark Nanos has demonstrated that the Jews Paul opposes were the ones who taught that no one could truly worship YHWH or become part of His kingdom unless that person first became a Jew.  In the first century, in fact from the second century BCE, there was a standard procedure for a Gentile to become a Jew and enter into full fellowship with God’s people.  That procedure included circumcision and Torah obedience.  When Jews of this persuasion came to Galatia and taught the Gentile converts in that synagogue that they needed to become Jewish in order to enjoy the full rights of God-fearers, Paul objected.  But we cannot conclude that Paul objected to the obligations of Torah.  We can only conclude that Paul objected to the claim that God’s grace was available only to those who first became or already were Jewish.  In other words, the argument of Galatians is not about who must keep Torah.  It is about who will enter into fellowship with the Father and His children.  Paul teaches that all who come into God’s presence through grace are accepted.  The Jewish opponents taught that only those who were Jewish were accepted.  Paul opposed this typical ethnic qualification.  But once that issue is settled, it does not follow that Torah no longer applies.  It simply means that Torah is not, and never was, the means by which God’s grace is received.

Pryor’s error forces him to distinguish between two alternatives that in fact are not part of the Galatians debate.  He constructs an artificial and false dichotomy:  law or grace, or as he puts it, “law or gospel.”  For Pryor, this dichotomy is about salvation, acceptance into the community of God.  Therefore, Pryor views Jewish identification markers like Torah as impediments to God’s offer of grace.  Accordingly, those markers must be removed.

But the argument in Galatians is not about law or grace.  The argument is about unrestricted grace or limited grace.  Law has nothing to do with it.  Everyone knew that God saved by grace, not by law.  Rabbinic evidence from the second century BCE on clearly shows that the believing Jewish community recognized grace as God’s generous offer for fellowship.  But the Jews who opposed Paul believed that a man must first be acceptable in order to experience grace and that acceptability depended on being Jewish.  Paul says “No!”  Grace is open to all, not just to those who are ethnically or artificially Jewish.  But Torah is another matter all together.

As a result of this confusion, Pryor is led down the inevitable path of the separation of the role of law from the action of grace.  Therefore, he claims that the three specific demarcations of Jews during the Roman Empire, that is, kashrut,  circumcision and Torah ritual observance, have no place in the new covenant because in the new covenant the only demarcation is “the presence of God with the believer.”  Torah is to be “esteemed” but it is only applied “via the gospel.”  In this way, Pryor claims that Paul removed the “boundary markers” of Jewish identity so that Gentiles were no longer barred from entry into the Kingdom.  Pryor sees the law as “anticipatory,” foreshadowing the greater reality of “Jesus and the community.” Pryor says, “Paul lives between his Jewish past and the Gentile future of the church.”  According to Pryor, the law of Moses kept the Gentiles out of fellowship and it took Jesus to tear down this inappropriate barrier.  With the removal of Torah, what counts in the community is “faith acting in love,” not ritual observance of an outmoded code.  The law did its work sending us to Christ.  Now it is finished.

Pryor’s argument is filled with mistakes, exegetical assumptions and contradiction with other scriptural passages.  Yes, it fits the accepted replacement view, even as it offers Hebraic condolences, but it does not advance the discussion nor clarify the real issue.  Every scholar knows that Paul continued to practice Jewish ritual such as Nazarite vows and that Paul claimed a lifetime of Torah obedience.  How does Pryor account for this apparent anomaly?  Pryor suggests that the answer is found in Paul’s comment, “a Jew to the Jews, a Gentile to the Gentiles.”  In other words, Paul was duplicitous.  He acted like a Jew among the Jews even though he knew that none of the rituals mattered and he acted like a Gentile among the Gentiles because this was the true character of his converted heart.

Can anyone imagine that Paul represented himself in this light unless we come to the text with a “conversion” mentality?  Paul’s life and his own words tell a different story if they are taken at face value.  Pryor’s explanation requires us to read behind Paul’s words to see a man who is willing to portray himself according to his surroundings.  This hardly seems like the character of the one Luke writes about.  Pryor’s “solution” means Paul deliberately stretches the truth.  But for what reason?  To fool his Jewish brothers into the faith?

Let’s examine some of Pryor’s other claims in these lectures.  Pryor says that Judaism was “missionary-minded” during this period.  But the historical record does not support this.  Pagans did convert to Judaism but they did so on the basis of self-interest in the Jewish way of life.  Pagans of this period saw Judaism as a philosophy, not a religion.  In fact, the concept “religion” doesn’t even exist until after the formation of the Christian church some 300 years later.  Furthermore, Pryor continually refers to the converts from paganism as “Gentile Christians.”  This is also an anachronism.  Neither Paul nor any of the apostles nor anyone within the Body in the first century referred to themselves as “Christian.”  That appellation did not come into existence as a positive identifying marker until the second century CE.  Evidence from this period in the Roman Empire demonstrates that pagan conversions to the Jewish way of living were not conversions to Judaism but rather adoptions of the practices of the Jews in one form or another.  And the evidence is also clear that the Jews did not typically welcome such conversion and hardly ever sought them.  There were simply no Jewish “missionaries.”

Pryor’s false differentiation forces him to conclude that the Torah does not apply to either Jew or Gentile after the death of Yeshua.  Instead, the “new covenant community” acts on the basis of love.  But this defies all of what we know about the men recounted in the Scriptures and the historical evidence that Messianic communities continued to be Torah observant into the fourth century CE.  They were eliminated not by choice but rather by compulsion under the auspices of the Christian Church backed by Roman authority.  Pryor’s claim is paradigmatically based, not exegetical or historical.

This brings up another important historical fact.  The evidence shows that in an effort to identify itself as distinct from Jewish practice and to attract converts from paganism, it was Christianity that abolished the three practices of the Jews that were antithetical to the Roman ideals.  Those three practices were circumcision, eating pork and Sabbath rest.  In other words, to be Jewish in the Roman world meant to be circumcised, to follow the dietary laws and to rest on the Sabbath.  If Christianity, as conceived by the early church fathers of the second and third centuries CE, was to be seen as a distinct practice, it could not follow these Jewish patterns.  It had to be different.  Furthermore, since the Jewish way of life remained a viable and active choice for pagans, Christianity had to offer “conversion” in an easier, more Roman way.  The Roman ideals already considered circumcision a barbaric practice (after all, who would dare deliberately cut the penis).  They considered eating pork a typical part of the Roman diet.  And they had no patience for a group of people who did not work on Saturday.  The evidence suggests that the Christian church accommodated Roman expectations in an effort to increase its converts.  Pryor’s claim that Paul abolished these Jewish practices is, in fact, an historical error, viewing the church’s accommodation to the Roman way as Pauline and anachronistically making Paul the equivalent of Justin Martyr or Marcion.

Pryor’s assertion that Torah has been replaced by “faith acting in love” leaves him with an impossible ethical formula.  What does “faith acting in love” really mean?  Does it mean that I can choose whatever action I believe is loving?  Does it mean that I am free to decide for myself, with the prompting of the Spirit of course, to do what I wish in terms of worship, identification, charity, community responsibility, etc.?  This is the ethical dilemma of all replacement theology.  How do I know what to do?  Do I wait for the Spirit’s direction – and end up with 32,000 distinct denominations?  Am I the sole arbiter of proper conduct?  Once we abandon a revealed code of conduct, we become the authors of our own behavioral code.  How has that worked for the church?  Eighty million dead as a result of spiritual guidance during the Crusades, the Inquisition and the pogroms.  Pryor’s answer is no answer at all.  It is the hope that men will somehow know what is right.  It is Kant’s “religion by reason alone.”

Pryor certainly must recognize the tenuous nature of his solution, so he acknowledges that the Christian community must “esteem” the Torah.  But what does that mean when we explicitly set it aside as a code of conduct.  It means that we acknowledge its historical usefulness just as we acknowledge the Wright brothers historical usefulness in flight.  But we don’t fly on bi-planes anymore, do we?  So Pryor wants to hang on to the Commandments (at least some of them) but he can’t compel us to keep them because that would be a return to those things that barred the Gentiles (in his view).  He is left with nothing to stand on except his plea for the intervention of the Spirit.  And that is ethics on air, as any good historian can demonstrate.

In the end, Pryor is no different than Harnack , Jeremias, Luther or Calvin.  He might wish to be more Hebraic.  He might use more Hebrew terms.  But in the end, he has cast aside the authority of the revelation of God to Moses on Sinai and in so doing cast himself, and the Church, on the waters of epistemological self-authentication.  In the end, his view of Paul says exactly the opposite of what Paul claims about himself.  Unfortunately, it seems that Pryor is still Greek under the skin.