3.1 Natural Sinners (Gal 2:15, 1 Thess 4:3–5, 1 Cor 5:1)

In Gal 2:15, Paul suggests that Gentiles are sinners by definition. There are people like Peter and Paul himself who are “by nature Jews” (φύσει Ἰουδαῖοι) and they are to be distinguished from the rest of humanity: the “sinners from the Gentiles” (ἐξ ἐθνῶν ἁμαρτωλοί). The understanding that sinfulness and “Gentileness” were coterminous seems to be presupposed in a number of other statements in Paul’s letters that will be discussed later on in this section (1 Thess 4:3–5, 1 Cor 5:1). Paul does not explain in Galatians why he believed that Gentiles were sinners, but it is evident from his comments elsewhere that their misguided worship was at the heart of this assessment. In 1 Cor 12:2, Paul writes: “You know that when you were ethnē, you were enticed and led astray to idols that could not speak.” The Greek word ethnē (“Gentiles”) may alternatively be translated as “pagans” or “heathens,” which brings out more clearly that misguided worship and cultic practices were essential to their (ascribed) identity. Paul clearly has this sense in mind in 1 Cor 12:2: his addressees were ethnē no longer, because their allegiance had shifted to the God of Israel. Paul could, however, also refer to Christ-followers as ethnē (e.g., Rom 11:13, 15:27), suggesting that even though they had turned to the God of Israel, they were not fully incorporated into Israel, but remained non-Jews.Footnote ⁴

With the exception of the relatively tiny group that had turned to the God of Israel, the Gentiles were from Paul’s perspective “enticed and led astray to idols.” They were unfamiliar with God’s laws and purpose as revealed in the Torah. It is only to be expected, from that perspective, that they would engage in sinful behavior. It is tempting to conclude that any immorality that the Gentiles engaged in was simply a matter of erroneous religious conceptions. Yet Paul associates the difference between Jew and Gentile with “nature” or “birth” (physis). Paul may have reasoned along the same lines as Josephus when he wrote with regard to “our own writings” that it “it is innate in all Jews, right from birth (πᾶσι δὲ σύμφυτóν ἐστιν εὐθὺς ἐκ πρώτης γενέσεως Ἰουδαίοις), to regard them as decrees of God, to remain faithful to them and, if necessary, gladly to die on their behalf” (C. Apion. 1.42).Footnote ⁵ The key difference between Jews and Gentiles was that the former observed the Torah and the latter did not, but this difference, according to Josephus, was inborn. This passage nicely illustrates the intertwinement of genealogy and religion/cult in much of antiquity.Footnote ⁶ Whether Paul’s reference to nature means that he considered Gentiles to be hardwired as sinners or that he believed that they were doomed to engage in such behavior because they were born into idolatrous cultures, it is evident that he regarded sinfulness as a fundamental aspect of Gentile identity.Footnote ⁷

Paul’s key point in Galatians, though, is that this distinction between Law-observant Jews and “Law-less” Gentiles is no longer significant, because “we know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ” (Gal 2:16). Jew and Gentile are in the same position; they can be justified only through the faith(fulness) in (or of) Jesus Christ.Footnote ⁸ Was Paul then being ironic when he suggested that Gentiles are sinners by nature?Footnote ⁹ Or was he momentarily adopting the perspective of his opponents?Footnote ¹⁰ Not necessarily. Paul’s point is not that the Gentiles are not sinners after all but that Jews, despite the Law, are sinners also since they too cannot be justified by the Law but only through pistis. As Paul puts it in Gal 2:17, “in our effort to be justified in Christ, we too have been found to be sinners” (ζητοῦντες δικαιωθῆναι ἐν Χριστῷ εὑρέθημεν καὶ αὐτοὶ ἁμαρτωλοί). The sinfulness of the Gentiles is uncontested; the question at issue is whether Jews were any different, because if so, it would be advisable for Gentiles to start living like Jews or even become proselytes (cf. Gal 2:14). It is this view that Paul vehemently contests throughout the letter to the Galatians. Gentiles need not become or live like Jews, because even those who are Jews by nature are sinners who require justification by pistis and cannot be justified by works of the Law. As Paul would later put it in his letter to the Romans: “All, both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin” (Rom 3:9, cf. 3:23, Gal 3:22).

There is good reason to think that for Paul, despite his view that Jews were under the power of sin as well, Gentiles engaged in sinful behavior more readily, frequently, and naturally. This is suggested not just by the language of “sinners from the Gentiles” in Gal 2:15 but also by his references to typical Gentile behavior elsewhere. One such reference appears in 1 Thess 4:3–7:

Much is contested in the interpretation of this passage. What is the meaning of σκεῦος (“vessel”)? Does this refer to the believer’s wife or to his body or perhaps, more specifically, to his sexual organ? Does κτᾶσθαι mean “to acquire,” “to live with,” or “to control”? In other words, is Paul speaking about “acquiring a wife,” “living with one’s wife,” or about “controlling one’s body” or, perhaps, “controlling one’s sexual organ”? And what does any of this have to do with wronging or exploiting one’s brother (4:6)?Footnote ¹¹ Finally, when Paul writes “not with lustful passion” in 4:5, is that an instruction that applies to “controlling the body”/“having a wife” or, more generally, to all sexual matters, so that he in effect continues the warning against sexual immorality (πορνεία) in 4:3?Footnote ¹² None of these questions have to be resolved, fortunately, to deduce that Paul regards “the Gentiles who do not know God” (perhaps understood by Paul as all Gentiles except for the Christ-believers among them), as sexual sinners; he describes them as acting “with lustful passion” (ἐν πάθει ἐπιθυμίας).Footnote ¹³

That Paul presents the behavior of Gentiles in this manner should perhaps not occasion much surprise. Although there are insufficient grounds to support the claim that “sinners of the Gentiles” (Gal 2:15) was “a colloquialism used by Jews,”Footnote ¹⁴ the notion that Gentiles frequently engaged in a variety of sins is attested in several roughly contemporaneous Jewish texts. Specifically, non-Jews were commonly regarded as sexually debased. According to Jubilees 25:1, “everything that they do (consists of) sexual impurity and lewdness.”Footnote ¹⁵ Wisdom 14:24–26 claims that “they no longer keep either their lives or their marriages pure, but they either kill one another by treachery or grieve one another by adultery. And all things are an overwhelming confusion of … sexual perversion, disorder in marriages, adultery and debauchery.”Footnote ¹⁶ Such assessments draw on biblical polemic against the Canaanites but also reflect the reality that Hellenistic and Roman sexual mores were generally quite different from what the Torah prescribes.

Still, when Paul suggests that non-believing Gentiles were without exception driven by “lustful passion” (ἐν πάθει ἐπιθυμίας, 1 Thess 4:5), this is hardly a nuanced or fair assessment.Footnote ¹⁷ Even if we restrict “the Gentiles” to the inhabitants of the Roman world, rather than non-Jews everywhere, counterevidence can readily be cited. Philosophers of various stripes promoted sexual restraint. Some argued that sexual activities should be limited to relations within marriage with procreative intent.Footnote ¹⁸ Others criticized adultery and prostitution, in ways not unlike Paul.Footnote ¹⁹ While such attitudes were comparatively common among philosophers, it was not limited to them. As Origen observed, “the philosophers who follow Zeno of Citium avoid adultery; but so do the Epicureans and also some who are quite uneducated” (Contra Celsum 7.63).Footnote ²⁰ Paul’s stress on the sexual deviance of Gentiles is also questionable inasmuch as it suggests that among Jews, impure desires and sexual malfeasance were not an issue, which was obviously not the case, as Paul was well aware (cf. 1 Cor 10:8).Footnote ²¹

It is implausible that Paul was unaware that not all Gentiles lived in “lustful passion,” not least because his writings evince familiarity with popular philosophical traditions. As Abraham Malherbe notes, “Paul’s familiarity with the philosophical traditions raises the question as to how his comment on pagan lustful passion is to be understood.” Malherbe observes that Paul’s use of “traditional polemic, however far off the mark it may be,” is driven by parenetic considerations. Paul draws a sharp contrast in order to incentivize his readers to avoid certain behavior and fully embrace their new identity.Footnote ²²

Elsewhere too, disparaging comments about Gentiles function not to criticize any actual pagans who somehow encountered Paul’s letters but serve as a darkly hued foil for parenetic purposes. In 1 Corinthians 5:1, Paul expresses his utter horror at an instance of sexual impropriety (πορνεία) by characterizing it as worse than the behavior of Gentiles: “It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not even among the Gentiles; for a man is living with his father’s wife.” In reality, such things surely did take place among non-Jews, but Paul is right in the sense that this type of relationship was not generally accepted by Greeks and Romans. Perhaps then we should supply a verb like “tolerated” to Paul’s elliptic phrase: “immorality of a kind that is not even tolerated among the Gentiles.”Footnote ²³ Important for present purposes is that the rhetorical point hinges on the assumption that Gentiles engaged in all sorts of immorality. From Paul’s perspective, it is very telling that even the notoriously sexually deviant Gentiles disapproved of such relationships.

3.2 Filled With Every Kind of Wickedness (Rom 1:18–32)

Paul takes his critical caricaturing of non-Jews up a notch in the first chapter of Romans. He describes how they rejected God (1:18–23) and as a result “became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened” (1:21). God subsequently “gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves” (1:24) and to “dishonorable passions” (1:26), such that men and women exchanged “natural intercourse for unnatural” (1:26–27). This emphasis on what Paul regarded as sexual deviance is familiar from the passages previously discussed. In Romans 1, Paul continues with a list of Gentile traits that implicate them in all sorts of other immoral behavior as well:

Scholars have characterized Paul’s harsh denunciation in Rom 1:18–32 as utterly unfair in its depiction of the Gentiles. James Barr, for instance, argued that Paul’s argument “suffers in the last resort from a narrow prejudice,”Footnote ²⁴ E. P. Sanders claimed that “it rests on gross exaggeration,”Footnote ²⁵ and Heikki Räisänen even suggested that it would today be qualified as “hate speech.”Footnote ²⁶ Various scholars have used the language of “stereotyping” to describe Paul’s depiction of Gentiles in this passage.Footnote ²⁷

Such scholarly assessments have been questioned on a number of grounds. One common line of defense has been to argue that Paul’s depiction of the Gentile world was accurate. Paul was simply reporting the facts. Older commentaries offer various versions of this argument, as we will see when we turn to the history of interpretation later in this chapter. Yet it occurs in quite recent work as well. As critical and influential a scholar as C. H. Dodd could still write in 1959, “the facts to which he here calls attention are sufficiently attested by the satirists of the imperial period … ancient literature is full of evidence to corroborate Paul’s statements.”Footnote ²⁸ And William O. Walker Jr., in an essay published in New Testament Studies in 1999 implausibly claimed that “many non-Christian Gentiles could, without any difficulty, subscribe to everything in the passage.”Footnote ²⁹ The theory proposed by various scholars that Paul was influenced by his surroundings in Corinth when writing Rom 1:18–32 bears mentioning in this connection as well, as it suggests that even if Rom 1:18–32 was not an accurate depiction of Rome, it was an accurate reflection of Corinth at the time.Footnote ³⁰

E. P. Sanders wryly notes that such interpretations show that “we have become too accustomed to thinking of Paul as stating not only the truth of the gospel, but also the gospel truth.”Footnote ³¹ Even for readers who subscribe in general to Paul’s critical view of the Greco-Roman world, it should be obvious that any claim that non-Jews were invariably “filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice” – to quote but half a verse (1:29a) – bears little relation to reality. As James Barr puts it: “There are … some substantial gaps, to put it mildly, between the Hellenistic-Jewish anti-idolatrous rhetoric that Paul inherited and applied, and the realities of life in the Greco-Roman world.”Footnote ³²

I have thus far assumed, along with most scholars, that Rom 1:18–32 refers to Gentiles. Yet the matter is not entirely straightforward, to the possible effect that Paul is not, in fact, engaging in Gentile stereotyping. The question is complicated by Paul’s failure to mention the Gentiles directly in 1:18–32, as well as by his evident interest in the opening chapters of Romans in demonstrating the sinfulness of all people, Jews as well as Gentiles (Rom 3:9, cf. 1:16–17). There are nonetheless good grounds for believing that in this particular section of the argument, Paul is thinking primarily of Gentiles: (1) he speaks of people who worship images (1:23); (2) the people in question only have knowledge of God through nature, not revelation (1:18–20); (3) this section finds significant parallels in Jewish polemic against Gentiles (more on this shortly); and finally (4) Paul is addressing an audience of Gentiles, whom he has identified as such in 1:13–15, just prior to 1:18–32.Footnote ³³

In the section immediately following Rom 1:18–32, Paul shifts to the second person singular. The identity of the person whom Paul addresses here has been subject to considerable recent debate but is indecisive for the question of whether Rom 1:18–32 denounces Gentiles.Footnote ³⁴ As Matthew Thiessen notes, “However Rom 2:1–16 functions, one simply cannot read it in a way that absolves Paul of holding such negative perceptions of gentiles.”Footnote ³⁵

A more radical option that would clear Paul of any charge of stereotyping in Romans 1 is the hypothesis that he in fact disagrees with what is being said here. The basis for this argument is that much of what Paul says in this passage is similar to non-Christian Jewish texts, especially Wisdom 13–15.Footnote ³⁶ This observation, sometimes combined with perceived theological and linguistic differences with other Pauline passages and the absence of specifically Christian elements in 1:18–32, has given rise to various interpretive proposals that have as their common denominator that the passage does not reflect Paul’s true views.Footnote ³⁷ Whether Rom 1:18–32 is seen as an interpolation or as a section in which Paul impersonates the voice of a rival teacher, these hypotheses have failed to persuade most other scholars. Apart from exegetical objections, which have been detailed elsewhere,Footnote ³⁸ I am concerned about the politics of excising morally challenging parts from the Pauline corpus and especially about the common corollary of ascribing them to his Jewish contemporaries, Christ-believing or not. A similar dynamic is apparent when scholars insist that Paul’s position on, for example, gender inequality reflects his Jewish “past” rather than his true convictions. The net effect of such exegetical moves is that the Jews are blamed for aspects of Paul’s thought that interpreters find offensive or otherwise inconvenient.

Still another interpretation of the text that would absolve Paul from blame is to read the text as “enunciat[ing] the principle that all Gentiles commit sin, in thought, word, and deed,” rather than that “Paul is charging every single Gentile of these specific sins.”Footnote ³⁹ Perhaps this is what Paul meant, but it is not what he says; this construal does not line up with Paul’s actual words. This gets us to the heart of the problem with stereotypes: They express general claims about a group without recognizing obvious exceptions or counterevidence. Casting a wide swath of the world’s population as “full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness … gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless” (Rom 1:29b–31) is problematic if the aim is but to “enunciate the principle” that all of them at times “commit sin, in thought, word, and deed.” Paul does not say that some Gentiles are only guilty of some sins, but he describes them as collectively guilty of these heinous transgressions. His language is notably different from the Letter of Aristeas’ claim that “most of the rest of humankind (οἱ γὰρ πλείονες τῶν λοιπῶν ἀνθρώπων) defile themselves when they have associations” (152).Footnote ⁴⁰ Paul formulates his charge in a way that does not identify exceptions. It may be that Paul points toward such exceptions shortly afterwards when he speaks of Gentiles who keep the commandments of the Law in Rom 2:14–15, 26–27 (cf. also 2:6–11). It is more likely, however, that this refers to Christ-followers.Footnote ⁴¹ If so, the Gentile world apart from Christ stands condemned without exception. It is, in sum, difficult to avoid the conclusion that Paul sketches a deeply negative portrait of non-Jews in Rom 1:18–32, which is far too generalizing and deprecating to serve as a reliable description of the Greco-Roman world.

Paul builds on this portrait in subsequent chapters to argue that all of humanity, Jews included, are sinful (3:9, 3:23, 5:12). Making a similar argumentative move as in Galatians, where the sinfulness of Gentiles was taken as a given, Paul proceeds to argue that Jews are equally in need of justification by faith. This does not, however, mean that Jews are equally liable to engage in lawlessness and immorality of every kind as Gentiles are from Paul’s perspective.Footnote ⁴² The significance of Rom 1:18–32 for Paul’s theological argument intimates that it should not be read as an account that a sociologist might write but as the work of a preacher, whose rhetoric arguably takes a hyperbolic turn in Rom 1:18–32. Would his audience have recognized it as such? Perhaps this is likely, both because of the relative frequency of harsh invective in the ancient worldFootnote ⁴³ and because as ex-pagan Gentiles, they knew full well that the reality of non-Jewish life was not as dire as Paul describes it. They may well have recognized it as a forceful piece of rhetoric meant to convey that there was something fundamentally wrong with a society that was – literally – Godless.

Be this as it may, as time went on, Paul’s words did become “gospel truth,” and rather than as hyperbolic rhetoric, Paul’s description was taken as an accurate account of the “heathen world.” We will explore the impact of this way of reading Romans 1 in more detail in the section on reception history, but before we do, one remaining Pauline passage demands our attention.

3.3 Reception History

At various points in this chapter, I have pushed back against attempts to regard Paul’s anti-Gentile comments as accurate social description. I am hardly the first to do so. In 1895, William Sanday and Arthur Headlam, in their commentary on Romans in the International Critical Commentary series, devoted the better part of three pages to a discussion of the accuracy of Paul’s comments in Rom 1:18–32. They concluded that these verses cannot “be taken at once as supplying the place of scientific inquiry from the side of the Comparative History of Religion … neither can they be held to furnish data which can be utilized just as they stand by the historian. The standard which St. Paul applies is not that of the historian but of the preacher.”Footnote ⁵¹ They referred to Ludwig Friedländer’s then still relatively recent Sittengeschichte Roms (1869–71) for “a calm and dispassionate weighing of the facts,” tacitly implying that Paul’s account did not warrant that description.Footnote ⁵²

Sanday and Headlam’s careful and sober discussion has not become obsolete, because as noted above, the view that Rom 1:18–32 and similar passages like Eph 4:17–19 offer an accurate account of first-century Greco-Roman life is still found in quite recent publications. These studies are, however, generally a bit more circumspect than those of the Victorian age. For instance, Joseph Agar Beet, a leading English Methodist exegete,Footnote ⁵³ maintained in his 1881 Romans commentary that “Tacitus … who describes Roman society at this time, gives a terrible commentary upon this section, and a full proof of its truth.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Stuart Moses, the “father of Biblical learning in America,”Footnote ⁵⁵ even went so far as to state “there cannot be the least doubt” that “the picture is just, nay, that it actually comes short of the real state of things.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Supporting evidence was deduced from the moral critiques found in Roman historians, moral philosophers, and satirists; but rather than interpreting Paul’s jeremiad as a literary topos, these commentators took these diatribes as reliable, descriptive accounts of contemporary social life and identified Paul’s analysis as belonging to the same category.Footnote ⁵⁷

Taking Paul’s statements about the Gentile world at face value would have real-world consequences. They would have a major influence on how modern Christians viewed non-Christian ethnic groups in their own day. The modern missionary movement, which was arguably at its zenith during the Victorian era, assigned Rom 1:18–32 an important place.Footnote ⁵⁸ It is no coincidence that we find a reference to that passage, along with an emphasis on its accuracy, on the first page of The Missionary World, Being an Encyclopædia of Information, published in London in 1872.Footnote ⁵⁹ Paul’s observations on Gentile conduct described, from the perspective of Victorian-age missionaries, what the “heathen world” was like. The terrible realities that Paul insisted were characteristic of the lives of the heathens gave Christians a sense of what to expect of the world beyond the Christian West. Reports of missionary activities claim that Rom 1:18–32 accurately described the peoples encountered by missionaries. As an 1847 issue of the Baptist Missionary Magazine put it: “This corrupt state of the heathen was not confined to the days of the apostles. Again and again we have been told by modern missionaries, that if Paul the apostle had visited the heathen of modern days and witnessed their hideous corruption, he could not have penned a more accurate description of them, than in the words … from Romans 1.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Ephesians 4:17–19 functioned in much the same way. George Trevor, who worked in India as an Anglican priest from 1837 to 1845, reminisced a few years later, when he served as Canon of York: “Every sojourner in India must be continually affected with the terrible exactness of the Apostle’s description in Ephesians iv. ‘The Gentiles walk in the vanity of their mind … who, being past feeling, have given themselves over unto lasciviousness to work all uncleanness with greediness.’”Footnote ⁶¹ In Chapter 2, I discussed how confirmation bias leads to perceiving stereotype-confirming data more easily than contradicting data (pp. 30–37). That mechanism seems to be in play here. Missionaries expected “heathens” to conform to Paul’s description and hence readily noted evidence that confirmed the accuracy of this picture.Footnote ⁶²

It was also noted in Chapter 2 that stereotype-inconsistent data is often explained in such a way as to allow the stereotype to remain intact, for instance, by categorizing such data as exceptions to the rule (pp. 36–37). An example of this at limited chronological and geographical remove from the Victorian world may be found in Johannes Warneck’s influential Paulus im Lichte der heutigen Heidenmission, which maintained that while Rom 1:18–32 accurately describes contemporary heathens, an exception is to be made for the same-sex relations mentioned in 1:26–27, which was not nearly as universal in the non-Christian world as Paul’s account would lead one to expect!Footnote ⁶³ In other cases where counterevidence was observed, a solution was found by regarding admirable aspects of heathen life as due to prior contact with Judaism or Christianity or by claiming that the people in question were distant descendants of one of the lost tribes of Israel.Footnote ⁶⁴ Both strategies allowed the accuracy of Paul’s account of heathen life to be upheld by arguing that the people who demonstrated these virtues were not “pure” heathens.

The claim that Rom 1:18–32 accurately described non-Christians outside of the West made its way into biblical exegesis as well. One example is the claim that missionaries were accused by “heathens” of having falsified this text, since it was deemed impossible that a text from centuries ago could so accurately describe their own behavior. This claim shows up, for instance, in the Romans commentary by Charles Hodge of Princeton Theological Seminary. He writes, commenting on the vice catalog of 1:29–31:

Although Hodge does not draw the connection directly, the claim that Paul’s account was “true, in all of its essential features” during the nineteenth century, effectively proves that it must have been true during the first century as well.Footnote ⁶⁶ This brings the argument full circle: The understanding of Rom 1:18–32 as accurate social description shaped the expectations of missionaries going out into the “heathen world,” who unsurprisingly found much to confirm the apostle’s judgment, and this in turn was used to support the reliability of Paul’s assessment of the Gentiles in Romans and elsewhere.

Conclusion

Despite Paul’s firm belief that the ethnic identity of Gentiles did not constitute an obstacle to their incorporation into the Christ-believing communities, his letters feature a number of passages in which Gentiles are depicted in an essentializing, generalizing, depreciatory manner. Paul’s conviction that there was no distinction between Jew and Gentile in terms of justification by faith and inclusion in the assemblies of Christ-followers did not mean that he regarded Jews and Gentiles as morally equal. Various moments throughout the Pauline corpus intimate that he regarded Gentiles as especially liable to engage in a wide variety of sinful acts and thoughts.

Whether it is apt to think of these characterizations in terms of ethnic stereotyping depends in part on whether Gentiles (ta ethnē) is understood as an ethnic category. Ta ethnē and ethnic are obviously related, but the etymological connection does not necessarily settle the case. Like “barbarians” (i.e., non-Greeks), “Gentiles” is a negative label, referring to what these people are not. “Gentiles” is accordingly an almost purely ascribed ethnic identity; Gentiles did not think of themselves as Gentiles, at least not outside of a Jewish (or early Christian) context. There is broad scholarly agreement that ancient Jewish identity had an ethnic quality.Footnote ⁶⁷ In Jonathan Hall’s terms, for many ancient authors, Jewishness involved “a putative subscription to a myth of common descent and kinship, an association with a specific territory and a sense of shared history.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Inasmuch as Jewish identity is ethnic, its negative counterpart, Gentile identity, can be thought of as ethnic as well. The Gentiles’ defining characteristic may be “idolatry,” but this is a constitutive element and function of ethnic identity; they worship other gods, because they were born and raised non-Jewish.

Paul’s claims about Gentiles certainly qualify as ethnic stereotyping in the sense that these are not idiosyncratic views but reflect culturally shared knowledge, beliefs, and expectations about Gentiles. Even if Rom 1:18–32 is marked by comparatively extreme rhetoric, it is clear that Paul is drawing on a reservoir of Jewish antipagan polemic. This does not imply that all Jews thought about Gentiles in this manner. I noted above that pseudo-Aristeas, despite his depreciatory view of non-Jews, allowed for exceptions to the rule. In the work of other authors, like Philo, one searches in vain for comparably harsh assessments of non-Jews.Footnote ⁶⁹ Paul’s harsh statements about Gentiles were therefore not necessitated by his Jewish identity. While he drew on views to which some or even many Jews adhered, his decision to paint such a dark picture of the Gentiles, arguably owed much also to his convictions as a Christ-follower, specifically to his conviction that he had to persuade Gentiles to change their way of life.Footnote ⁷⁰

Paul’s missionary efforts among Gentiles bring us back to Pheme Perkins’ comment on Gal 2:15: “One wonders how a person who has spent at least fifteen years preaching to and living with Gentiles came out with” such a “blatant example of Jewish ethnic stereotyping.”Footnote ⁷¹ Over the course of his many years of living among Gentiles, even prior to his apostolic ministry, Paul must have noticed a great deal of stereotype-inconsistent evidence. It was noted above that Paul’s gloomy portrayal of Gentile life served various rhetorical purposes. Yet it does not seem compelling to try to explain these sections of his letters as “mere rhetoric” entirely at odds with Paul’s true estimation of Gentiles. It may be useful to recall, at this point, the research discussed in Chapter 2 (pp. 36–37) that indicates that if stereotype-inconsistent evidence is registered (which may not even happen, due to confirmation bias), we sometimes ascribe it to a subcategory of the stereotyped group. This allows the stereotype about the broader group to remain unaffected. Such cognitive processes may help explain why Paul continued to espouse deeply negative views about Gentiles. Evidence that could serve to confirm his stereotypical understanding of non-Jews would have been more readily noted than counterevidence. And any counterevidence he did register could be assigned to a subcategory. Paul would have confronted such counterevidence especially among Gentiles with whom he stayed in close contact, a group that probably overlapped to a considerable extent with Gentiles that accepted his message. The conditions were optimal, then, for devising a subgroup: Christ-following Gentiles. Stereotypes about Gentiles no longer applied to this subgroup but remained in force with respect to the broader category of Gentiles, with whom Paul’s interactions were more limited and less personal. The Gentiles at large remained “natural sinners,” in Paul’s view, but the Christ-believers among them had been miraculously transformed through the power of the gospel.Footnote ⁷²

Paul’s stereotypical treatment of non-Jews would have a profound impact on how Christians would view the non-Christian world in the modern period. In the nineteenth century, even though the British Empire had an unprecedented global reach, much of the world remained relatively unfamiliar. What was well known, however, about the “heathens” outside of the Christian realm was what Paul had written about them in his letter to the Romans and elsewhere. Paul’s letters functioned as a lens through which the non-Christian world was perceived. Unsurprisingly, given the effects of confirmation bias, missionaries found plenty of evidence that supported Paul’s assessments of “heathen life.” These experiences in turn were used to reinforce the accuracy of Paul’s searing indictments of the Gentiles. While some New Testament texts (e.g., Acts 17:22–31) were cited in support of an open and more tolerant interaction between Christians and “heathens,”Footnote ⁷³ the sections of Paul’s letters discussed in this chapter facilitated a much darker picture of religious and ethnic outsiders.