The preceding chapters have explored some of the very different ways in which Jewish thinkers have constructed images of Paul. The range of often contradictory presentations is impressive, although arguably no more so than that offered by Christians over the same period. It seems fair to say that the one thing upon which those Jewish thinkers who have seriously engaged with the Apostle to the Gentiles can agree is that he is a vitally significant figure for the history of the Jewish people and even for Judaism, be it for good or ill. And yet such a claim sits uneasily with the fact that Paul barely registers on the popular Jewish cultural radar. If an individual's significance to a community is determined by his historical reception within that community as a whole, then one must admit that Paul's impact on the Jewish imagination has been a very minor one. It is hoped that this collected body of interpretations of the apostle will act as a corrective in bringing the historical Jewish engagement with him to the attention of a wider Jewish audience.

In Chapter one it was suggested that Jewish curiosity about Paul had its origins in the nineteenth-century emergence of historicism and the reinvention of the Jew in the modern world. Increasingly, naturalistic, rational explanations of the history of the Jewish people and their religion were privileged over supernatural, providential explanations.