1. Introduction: Ethnic Differentiation in Paul's Letters

Like other ancient Mediterranean writings that focus on gods, or cult or philosophy, Paul's letters participate in Greek and Roman rhetorics of ethnic difference. The point is not just that categories of Jew and gentile permeate these texts. Rather, Paul's writing on topics traditionally considered as ‘universalist’ – the high God, his promises, what Christ accomplishes and how initiates participate in Christ's pneuma – is animated by ancient ideas about kinship, patrilineal descent and people groups.Footnote ¹ The growing ‘Radical New Perspective’ or ‘Paul within Judaism’ movement relates to this ethnic redescription. One of its basic claims is that when Paul dissociates keeping the Jewish law from following Christ, his arguments are ethnically specific: he speaks to gentiles.Footnote ²

This movement creates an opportunity to think about ethnicity more widely in Paul's mythmaking.Footnote ³ Like other ancient Mediterranean writers, he presumes that different ethnē and their deities have different characteristics, histories, customs and cultic relations.Footnote ⁴ My argument here is that this ethnic sensibility likewise permeates his mythmaking about sin. Paul's primary ethnic axis is Jews versus the ethnē, or gentiles.Footnote ⁵ Commentators already hold that Paul can distinguish between Jewish and gentile sin, often via common readings of Rom 2.12 and 5.13–14 with which I, perhaps unexpectedly given my interests in this article, disagree.Footnote ⁶ But we can be more specific about gentile versus Jewish sin: for Paul, these two distinct ethnic groups have different histories of sin that explain their respective sins’ distinct characteristics.Footnote ⁷

This article focuses, in particular, on how Paul writes about Jewish sin. Interpreters have generally assumed that his sparse claims on the topic reflect his experiences with or general observations about actual Jews. And these observations have traditionally been expected to reveal a deficient Judaism as a background or foil for a Christian Paul.Footnote ⁸ Such approaches obscure that Paul wields a myth of Jewish sin that is driven by his convictions about where things stand in the Jewish God's plan for history, the Jewish intellectual reservoirs he inhabits and his competitive rhetorical needs. Recognising the ethnic distinctions in Paul's myths of sin helps us both re-understand classic passages in his letters and re-situate him as a Jewish writer within his social landscapes. These were competitive landscapes wherein ethnic differentiation was an expected way of imagining the human and divine realms.

2. Not Idolatry, Passions, and Failed Minds for Jews

Any argument that Paul has ethnically inflected ideas about sin faces an obvious objection. According to long-established interpretive traditions in the field, Rom 5.12–21 offers Paul's universal account of human sin through Adam, and this narrative underlies 1.18–32's sketch of general human moral, cultic and cognitive corruption.Footnote ⁹ This is why 3.9 can declare ‘for we have already established that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin.’

Two points are relevant for clarifying my argument. First, I take Rom 1.18–32 to have only gentiles in view. Paul reuses culturally available mythological plotlines about the decline of civilisation in a Jewish idiom to sketch the corruptions of gentiles.Footnote ¹⁰ This sketch aligns with Paul's version of Jewish polemical tropes about gentile nations elsewhere in his letters. He often lists gentile vices and specifies their fleshly passions, cognitive failures and perversions in cult (‘idolatry’).Footnote ¹¹ Just as Wis 13.1 configures gentiles as foolish ‘by nature’ (φύσɛι) and expounds at length on their cultic corruptions (Wis 13.1–14.31), for Paul they are idolatrous sinners φύσɛι (e.g., Gal 2.15): this is their hereditary condition.Footnote ¹²

But Paul never writes in these ways about Jews.Footnote ¹³ In the apparent exception, 1 Cor 10.6–8, he clarifies the relevance of depicting ancient Israelites as idolaters who had excessive desire and engaged in porneia: ‘But these things came to pass for them as a figure/pattern (τυπικῶς), but they were written for our admonition, on whom the end of the ages has come’ (1 Cor 10.11). Such claims rhetorically concern, at least in this context, the Corinthian gentiles.Footnote ¹⁴ Furthermore, Paul only imagines Israelite idolatry in the past. Like the writer of Judith (8.18–20; see also 5.18–19), he does not represent Jews of his historical era as idolaters. They still have zeal for God (Rom 10.2). While Paul writes of Jewish ignorance and failure in knowledge (Rom 10.2–3, 19; see discussion below), he reserves cultic, moral-psychological and cognitive corruption for gentile sin, not Jewish. Romans 1.18–32's vivid images of gentile corruption thus cannot explain how Paul has already explicated not only gentile, but also Jewish sin by 3.9.

Second, while Paul's discussions of Adam posit a primal origin of universal human plights, what he writes about Adam's significance for subsequent people suggests exploring ethnic difference. In Rom 5.12–21, Adam catalyses the spread of sin and death. In 1 Cor 15.20–49, Paul associates Adam with death, but not sin. In both cases, it is noteworthy that the dominant elements in Paul's portrayal of gentile sin are absent. In other words, a notable difference obtains between the passion-dominated, idolatrous and cognitively corrupt landscape of sin in Rom 1.18–32 versus the import of Adam for the spread of sin and death in 5.12–21. The former concerns the sinful degeneration of gentile peoples, and the latter concerns all humanity subsequent to Adam, thus Jews and gentiles. This leads to a crucial, neglected point. Even though Paul intensifies his discussion of sin and death in Rom 5.12–21 via the language of death (5.14, 17) and sin (5.21) reigning (ἐβασίλɛυσɛν), his writing about Adam in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 does not move beyond the generalities of death and sin because they are among the few passages in his letters that address the history of misery at a general enough level to include both Jews and gentiles. If Paul's histories of sin are ethnically specific, this makes sense. Gentiles are idolaters who are dominated by their passions, but Jews are not. If Paul's focus on human misery in Romans 5 is broad enough to include both Jews and gentiles, its characteristics must remain general enough to accommodate their different histories of sin.

Paul can thus offer a myth of Adam's transgression to explain general human sin and death while not using it to explicate the varied ethnic specifics of sin. Part of the issue here is that even in Rom 5.12–21, Paul's rhetorical focus remains on gentiles. Thus, his historical scheme in which Adam's transgression catalysed sin and death for all people can contextually transition into Romans 6–8's refocus on gentiles, their total moral failure and the Jewish God's pneumatic remedy for their passions through Christ. Paul can make connections between distinct discourses about sin without conflating them.Footnote ¹⁵ The combination of a general history of human sin (i.e., through Adam) and assertions about specifically gentile sins (i.e., idolatry, domination by passions, corrupted minds) thus prompts the question: what, for Paul the Jew, is Jewish sin?

3. Romans 9–11 and Paul's Eschatological Myth of Jewish Disobedience

Romans 9–11 provides Paul's clearest reflections on Jewish sin, though here he prefers the terminology of Israel.Footnote ¹⁶ As many interpreters have noted, throughout this section of Romans Paul uses the interrelated grammars of disobedience and failures in loyalty or belief to classify Israel's sin.Footnote ¹⁷ Thus in Rom 9.31–2 Israel did not reach a ‘law of righteousness’ because they did not pursue it ἐκ πίστɛως. When Paul writes of Israel's stumbling stone in 9.32–3, he contrasts them with whoever trusts (ὁ πιστɛύων). In 10.16 they have not all obeyed (ὑπήκουσαν) the Gospel, and Paul mobilises Isaiah to gloss this with, ‘Lord, who has trusted (τίς ἐπίστɛυσɛν)’—presumably also having Jews in view given how he continues writing in 10.18. In Rom 10.21, Israel has been a disobedient people (λαὸν ἀπɛιθοῦντα). Some among Israel find themselves broken off because of their distrust (ἀπιστία) in 11.20, though in 11.23 God will graft them in again if they do not persist in distrust (ἐὰν μὴ ἐπιμένωσιν τῇ ἀπιστίᾳ). Paul's programmatic claims about Israel's plight in 11.30–2 feature the language of disobeying (ἀπɛιθέω) and disobedience (ἀπɛίθɛια). He also coordinates Jewish disobedience with failures in their knowledge (10.2–3, 19) and with them being hardened (11.7, 25; see also 9.18).

Debate continues as to what exactly Jewish disobedience, disloyalty and unbelief consisted of in Paul's imagination. What deficient actions of some or all Jews led him to write in this way about them? New Testament scholars have proposed various answers: Jewish disbelief in Jesus as the Messiah, rejection of Paul's gentile mission, turning away from the gospel, ethnic pride, rejection of grace in favour of works-righteousness, persecution of Paul or other followers of Jesus or even the crucifixion of Jesus itself?Footnote ¹⁸ It is important to note that these different answers begin from the same presupposition: that Paul was writing from his own experience, observations or knowledge of his fellow Jews. I propose to move in a different direction; to capitalise on different questions that highlight overlooked paths in Paul's discourse.

As a starting point, one can note the consistency with Paul's rhetoric about Jewish problems in this section of Romans: disobedience and disloyalty or lack of trust. To develop Jennifer Eyl's argument, ‘Pistis is a central feature governing much of the relationship between Israelites (later, Judeans) and their god’ throughout the Greek versions of Jewish texts that make up a significant part of Paul's discursive reservoir.Footnote ¹⁹ It should thus not be surprising that failures in faithfulness or obedience feature when he writes of Jewish shortcomings in a part of Romans that frequently mobilises passages from these texts.Footnote ²⁰ Rather than only seeking explanations from Paul's actual experiences with his fellow Jews for his rhetoric of Israel's failures in trust and obedience, the intellectual repertoires with which he innovates are a better place to start. This shift parallels an important movement in scholarship on women in ancient Jewish and Christian sources. Rather than taking passages about women as windows into social realities, a crucial move has been approaching them first as evidence for studying elite male literary activities and the rhetorics that characterise such competitive arenas. In other words, we have come to understand, as Ross Kraemer elucidates, ‘that mistaking rhetorical women for real women makes for bad history’. It sets us up to misunderstand how our sources work.Footnote ²¹ This methodological point is important given the dominant paths interpreters have taken to discuss Israel's misstep in Romans 9–11. It directs us to continue attending to how Paul configures Jewish failures as a rhetorical, textual phenomenon.

From the perspective of textual logic, there is a key aspect of Paul's writing about Jewish failings: interpreters have noted that he relates his claims about Israel to his discussion of gentiles. After all, Romans 9–11 is, as Jill Hicks-Keeton explains, ‘the most fully developed version of Paul's thinking on gentile inclusion in his extant writings’.Footnote ²² Paul's writing about gentiles thus treats their inclusion – in the God of Israel's rescue through Christ as faithful subjects of the true God – as a thread interwoven with God's plans for Israel. That is a basic point of the otherwise highly debated passage, 11.25–32. Paul's claims about Jews here thus take shape in relation to his writing about the, as Elizabeth Johnson puts it, ‘interdependent’ futures of Israel and gentiles.Footnote ²³

I propose to dwell on something implicit in this common understanding of Romans 9–11. While it is widely accepted that this passage discusses gentiles and Israel eschatologically, a related point recedes into the background: it also imagines Israel's sin in an eschatological register. By eschatological here I mean that, for Paul, Israel's disobedience relates to specific stages or periods in God's ultimate plans for Jews and gentiles in the final eras of history. Paul may thus wield an eschatological myth of Israel's sin.

Though readers often brush up against this point, they rarely make it explicit – perhaps because it seems obvious. After all, Rom 11.11–12, 15, 25–32 (see below) are straightforward in constructing Israel's stumble, rejection, hardening and disobedience as stages in the divine plan. Oftentimes, however, it is fruitful to let our historical imaginations dwell on the obvious. Such an exercise allows things previously hidden behind the veil of the familiar to emerge into view. The eschatological nature of Paul's claims can refocus our analysis of Jewish sin in Romans given how interpreters have traditionally fixated on questions that direct our gaze outside the text.

To begin where Paul ends, in Rom 11.25–32 he weaves together themes that have shaped his earlier discussion: the hardening of Israel, gentile inclusion, the salvation of Israel, election, gentile and Jewish disobedience and the determinative calling and mercy of God.Footnote ²⁴ Tellingly, he frames this summation as an explication of τὸ μυστήριον τοῦτο in 11.25. The terminology of mystery carried significance across multiple registers of language that Paul and his auditors inhabited. Of particular note, given the Jewish eschatological idiom of Romans 9–11, the language of mystery often marked God's secret eschatological plan in Jewish sources.Footnote ²⁵ Reflecting the periodising of the cosmos’ history often seen throughout other Jewish writings with eschatological interests, Paul lays out his relevant stages of history. First, ‘a hardening has come upon part of Israel’ until, next, ‘the fulness of the gentiles has come in’ (11.25). Thus the climax of the Jewish deity's plan can be, ‘and in this way (καὶ οὕτως) all Israel will be saved’ (11.26). Paul then claims to have excavated his temporal scheme from oracular writings, ‘just as it is written (καθὼς γέγραπται)’ and offers a combined quotation that includes a section of Isaiah (59.20–21) he deploys eschatologically.Footnote ²⁶ In other words, the hardening of Israel is a stage in God's ultimate plan.

Paul then continues explaining that Jewish (and also gentile) disobedience are stages in his God's plan: ‘For just as you (gentiles) were at one time (πότɛ) disobedient to God but now (νῦν δέ) have received mercy because of their (Israel's) disobedience, so they too have now (νῦν) disobeyed in order that by the mercy shown to you they may also now (νῦν) receive mercy’ (11.30–31). As Paul's syntax itself thus stresses, the key contours of Israel's disobedience are temporal and their significance eschatological. Lest the reader miss that Paul renders such timing as God's, 11.32 concludes this climactic passage: ‘For God has confined (συνέκλɛισɛν) all to disobedience (ɛἰς ἀπɛίθɛιαν) in order that he might have mercy on all’. Israel's disobedience is a matter of God's timing. It marks a notable stage in the divine plan for rescuing Israel and gentiles. This is an eschatological myth of Jewish sin.

The preceding discussion in Romans 11 similarly develops eschatological logic. That which Israel sought but did not reach was due to being hardened (11.7), which Paul then identifies as God's action in 11.8 by using a combined quotation from Deut 29.4 and Isa 29.10, ‘God gave them (Ἔδωκɛν αὐτοῖς ὁ θɛὸς) a spirit of bewilderment, eyes that would not see and ears that would not hear, until this very day’. Deuteronomy 29.4 contributes most to the language of ‘until this very day’Footnote ²⁷ and thus permits Paul to continue the temporal encoding of Israel's failure. Romans 11.11–12 and 11.15 then relate Israel's current misstep and rejection to God's plans for gentile inclusion, with both anticipating a later era of Israel's full inclusion and acceptance. And the olive tree analogy for the divine plan in 11.17–24 coordinates Israel's lack of trust with God breaking them off to create time for gentile grafting-in. But in the end God can graft them in again. In each case where Paul writes of Israel's disobedience and hardening and lack of trust, the decisive issue is the timing in the plans of Israel's God. If one is attempting to tease out the text's own theory of Jewish sin, the logic is consistently eschatological.

Paul's eschatological theory about Israel's failures should shape how we imagine his rhetoric about Israel's disobedience, distrust, failure at reaching the law and lack of understanding in Rom 9.30–10.21. As he continues clarifying throughout that section, especially by using marked-engagements with Jewish writings about God's unfolding cosmic designs,Footnote ²⁸ these are eschatological events. This point aligns with how in 9.6–29 Paul emphasises the Jewish deity's agency in hardening, selecting, calling and showing mercy (9.11, 16, 18, 23–4).

New Testament interpreters have probed Paul's understandings of Israel's misstep by speculating outside the text into his own experience or observations of contemporary Jews, and then sought to coordinate these possibilities with claims in Romans. In other words, readers have fixated on how historical Jews had actually sinned. Such fixation has resulted in overlooking two pronounced contours in Paul's writing. First, Romans 9–11 continues manifesting Paul's distinction between characteristics of gentile sin (idolatry, cognitive corruption, extreme moral failure) versus Jewish (disobedience, lack of trust and misunderstanding). Second, and related, Paul resolutely promotes divine timing and agency as the key animating feature of Israel's failure. To interpret Paul's language about hardening via questions about whether this means God imprisoned Jews in a state they chose for themselves, perhaps by refusing Paul's Gospel,Footnote ²⁹ is to blur our vision of the text's own logic. While he sometimes, like other Greek and Roman period writers, reflects on the relationships between divine and human activity,Footnote ³⁰ here Paul emphasises God's action: ‘in order that God's purpose, in accordance with his choice, not because of works but because of him who calls’ or ‘So then not from will or running, but from God who has mercy’ (9.11, 16). Divine agency, choosing, hardening and confining are the pronounced features of Paul's eschatological mythmaking in Romans 9–11,Footnote ³¹ though traditional questions have sometimes hidden this behind the veil of the obvious.Footnote ³² It thus makes sense that Romans 9–11 lacks much attention to Israel's guilt or specific faults and, as a whole, does not indicate ‘gross moral turpitude’ on the part of Israel.Footnote ³³ God's ultimate plan is the primary issue – not Jewish activity; and certainly not passions, cognitive corruption or idolatry. Just as elsewhere, in Romans 9–11 Paul maintains his ethnic distinctions in the histories and characteristics of sin.

In Paul's sketch of Jewish sin, Israel is disobedient and ignorant and unfaithful because ‘now’ is the penultimate stage in their God's plan when he has hardened, caused to stumble or confined most of them for the purposes of gentile inclusion in his coming kingdom. Such mythmaking situates Paul among other writers who associate with Jewish texts and sometimes feature a stage of climactic Jewish sin in their eschatological schemes.Footnote ³⁴ Since Paul writes as though the death, resurrection and subsequent actions of Christ under God signal the turning of the ages (e.g., 1 Cor 10.11; 15.22–8; Gal 1.3–4), it makes sense that it would be the time of Jewish sin. Very soon (e.g., Rom 13.11), however, the next stage or period of history will come and all Israel will be saved.Footnote ³⁵ We may be able to probe further for how Paul imagines Israel's disobedience and whether he coordinates it with actions of Jews in his own time.Footnote ³⁶ But such concerns should follow rather than be permitted to obscure the eschatological myth of Jewish sin that Paul promotes in Romans 9–11.

4. Romans 2.17–24's Eschatological Resonance and Paul's Delegitimizing of Fellow Jewish Competitors

In Rom 2.17, Paul commences writing about the one who calls himself a Jew and, in 2.21–3, critiques this figure as a thief, adulterer, perpetrator of sacrilege and transgressor of the law. This passage is an obvious candidate for probing how Paul has explicated that Jews are also under sin alongside gentiles, as he claims to have done in 3.9.Footnote ³⁷ I offer three brief points about how Paul characterises the sins of some Jews here.

First, Paul does not claim to attend to the shortcomings of all Jews in Rom 2.17–24. Instead he signals other Jewish teachers of gentiles who advocate observance of their ethnic laws in a way with which he disagrees. These possibly fictive or hypothetical teachers are characters in this part of the letter's ‘speech-in-character’.Footnote ³⁸ This makes sense of the consistent association of the Jewish figure with language of instructing, teaching and guiding.Footnote ³⁹ It also speaks to an important point about 2.17–24 that interpreters have made over the past several decades: if one treats the passage as an empirical description of all Jews in Paul's time, it makes little sense.Footnote ⁴⁰ Instead of conjuring all Jews and their deficiencies for the audience, Paul paints a picture of a competing Jewish teacher of gentiles whose hypocrisy and general transgression of the law undermine his legitimacy. Attending to Paul's competitive rhetoric rather than looking outside the text for empirical Jews who match his depiction, even if he may have other real Jewish teachers of gentiles in mind,Footnote ⁴¹ then facilitates following his own logic.

Second, the textual images of Jewish sin in Rom 2.17–24 continue manifesting Paul's ethnic distinctions. He accuses the Jewish teacher with the verbs of κλέπτω, μοιχɛύω, and ἱɛροσυλέω in 2.21–2. The first two charges come in syntactic pairs with the thing taught against being the thing hypocritically done (e.g., ‘The one who proclaims not to steal, do you steal?’). But the third charge differs. Where we might expect, ‘The one who abhors idols, do you engage in idolatry?’, Paul instead writes, ‘The one who abhors idols, do you commit sacrilege?’ As Brian Rainey has argued, Paul disrupts his own structure of pairs because he would not characterise Jews of his time as idolaters.Footnote ⁴² Sacrilege (ἱɛροσυλέω) could offer a more general charge of impiety that aligns with Paul's following claim that the teacher dishonours God by transgressing the law and causing his name to be blasphemed among the nations.Footnote ⁴³

Third, in Rom 2.23–4, Paul uses Isa 52.5 (Greek) as an oracular encapsulation of his assertions about the competing Jewish teacher's sin: ‘For as it is written, “the name of God is blasphemed among the gentiles because of you”’. More is happening here than Paul zeroing in on a passage from Isaiah to illustrate general Jewish sin. Isaiah 52.5 derives from a passage in this prophetic writing that Paul uses to depict eschatological events. In Rom 10.14–17, he draws twice from this passage to discuss disobedience, the trust that reverses it, and how such rescue comes through Christ (Isa 52.7 and 53.1 in Rom 10.15–16). Then in Rom 15.21, Paul again adapts from this spot in Isaiah (52.15) to imagine his eschatological efforts to bring about gentile inclusion.Footnote ⁴⁴ In other words, Paul encodes Jewish transgression of the law in Rom 2.21–4, which transitions into claims about some Jews being unfaithful (ἠπίστησάν τινɛς) in 3.3, with the same literary resources he uses for eschatological mythmaking. One can imagine Paul treating Isa 52.5 as the stage of Jewish sin immediately preceding God's ultimate rescue that he finds spelled out in the following sentence: ‘Therefore my people shall know my name in that day, because I myself am the one who speaks: I am here, like season upon the mountains, like the feet of one bringing good news of a report of peace, like one bringing good news of good things, because I will make your salvation heard, saying to Zion, “Your God shall reign”’ (Isa 52.6–7 Greek). This is not that speculative of a suggestion given that in Rom 10.15 Paul treats Isa 52.7 as an oracle about the end-times rescue that he claims Israel's God is enacting.Footnote ⁴⁵

Romans 2.17–24 emerges as another locus of Paul's eschatological myth of Jewish sin. To understand the text as such does not require taking it as Paul's ideas about ‘typical Jews’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Regardless of whether he has actual competing Jewish teachers of gentiles in mind, we can attend to his theory of Jewish sin in the passage. The Jewish teacher of 2.17–24 is not dominated by passions, corrupted in mind or an idolater like the gentiles of 1.18–32.Footnote ⁴⁷ His transgression of the law (2.23) – a characteristic that aligns with Romans 9–11's emphasis on disobedience – is a manifestation of the penultimate stage in God's plan that Paul finds in Isa 52.5, which immediately precedes the ultimate rescue. In this way Paul's imagination of Jewish sin aligns with other Jews who wrote about Jewish disobedience to the law in the context of eschatological schemes (e.g., Jub 23.16, 19; 4 Ez 7.19–24, 68–72; 9.31–7; 14.29–30; 2 Bar 19.3–8). Whether or not the addressees of Romans could follow the specifics of Paul's adaptation of Isaiah in Rom 2.23–4, this passage in Romans reflects Paul's eschatological theory of Jewish sin. And this reading of Rom 2.17–24 combines with 3.3a to clarify how Paul can write in 3.9, ‘for we have already established (προῃτιασάμɛθα)Footnote ⁴⁸ that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin’.

5. Historical Periods and Divine Agency in Paul's Mythmaking about Sin Elsewhere

Paul's myth of Jewish failure reflects the same historical literary strategies he deploys elsewhere to elaborate on sin. For example, his narrative of decline in Rom 1.18–32 sketches stages within the history of gentile sin. There was an early cosmic period in which gentiles knew God (1.19–21a), but then they corrupted their cultic engagement (1.21–3) and Israel's God responded by handing them over (παραδίδωμι) to their passions with further resulting impurity and shaming of their bodies because of their iconic cultic error (1.24–5). God's infliction of moral-psychological corruption continues in 1.26–32, with past degeneration shading into Paul's address of his contemporary gentiles in 2.1. Romans 1.18–32 thus does not have a flat vision of gentile sin, but a history marked by different stages or periods in their decline.Footnote ⁴⁹ Furthermore, Paul emphasises the Jewish God's agency in the decline. God hands them over to (i.e., inflicts) further cognitive and moral-psychological corruption as an expression of his wrath.Footnote ⁵⁰

In Rom 5.12–21, Paul similarly periodises the history of misery for humanity, etching temporal contours into his myth of Adam's catastrophic effects. These stages are marked in particular by the law of Moses.Footnote ⁵¹ Romans 5.12–21 does not portray an undifferentiated idea of sin. Sin, instead, has a history that divides into different periods, with the qualities or significance of sin differing between each period. Immediately after writing that ‘and thus death spread into all men, with the result that all sinned’ (5.12), Paul interrupts his own sentence. He specifies that ‘for up to the law sin was in the cosmos, but sin is not reckoned when there is not law. But death ruled from Adam even to Moses, even upon the ones not sinning similarly to the transgression of Adam’ (5:13–14). Paul's writing about Adam in Romans 5 thus distinguishes three periods in sin's history. First, the period of Adam and transgressingFootnote ⁵² a divine command. Second, people before Moses sinning in the absence of a divine command. And third, people subsequent to Moses and the law transgressing revealed divine commands.Footnote ⁵³ Paul periodises sin and death in relation to events from Jewish lore.Footnote ⁵⁴

In Gal 3.15–25, Paul also deploys a periodising, stages-of-history scheme for discussing sin, the law and the coming of pistis. One can note Paul's temporal rhetoric. The law ‘was added because of transgressions, until (ἄχρις) the offspring would come to whom the promise had been made’ (3.19). Before (πρό) the coming of pistis ‘we were guarded under the law, being confined until the coming of pistis would be revealed (ɛἰς τὴν μέλλουσαν πίστιν ἀποκαλυφθῆναι)’. ‘The law was our guardian until the Christ came’ (γέγονɛν ɛἰς Χριστόν). But now we are no longer (οὐκέτι) under a guardian’ (3.23–5). Furthermore, as with disobedience in Rom 11.30–2, divine agency is behind the confining (συγκλɛίω) in Gal 3.22. This confining also has an eschatological purpose. Just as God ‘confined (συνέκλɛισɛν) all to disobedience in order that (ἵνα) he might have mercy on all’ in Rom 11.32, in Gal 3.22 ‘the writing confined (συνέκλɛισɛν) all under sin in order that (ἵνα) the promise from the faithfulness of Jesus Christ might be given to those who trust’.Footnote ⁵⁵ The similar syntax and diction is striking: a divinely associated agent confines (συγκλɛίω) all (τοὺς πάντας and τὰ πάντα) to either disobedience or sin so that (ἵνα) God's rescue might befall (aorist subjunctive) whomever Paul has in view.Footnote ⁵⁶

Though Paul's responsibility for the passage is debated, 1 Thess 2.14–16 arguably discusses the sin of some (not all) Jews eschatologically.Footnote ⁵⁷ Just as other Jewish texts imagine that there will be a climactic limit or apex of sin (e.g., Gen 15.6; Dan 8.23; Jub 14.16; 2 Macc 6.12–16; 4 Ez 12.25), 1 Thess 2.14–16 claims that the Jews in view there are filling up the measure of their sins (ɛἰς τὸ ἀναπληρῶσαι αὐτῶν τὰς ἁμαρτίας πάντοτɛ) with the result that God's wrath has come upon them in a way leading to the completion or consummation of his anger (ɛἰς τέλος).Footnote ⁵⁸ Rather than being an eruption of Christian anti-Judaism within 1 Thessalonians, in this passage Paul, like other Jewish writers, criticises some of his contemporary (competing or opposing) Jews by deploying eschatological rhetorics. Notably for my argument, this reading aligns with the idea that Paul's writing about Jewish sin stresses divine agency and dwells not primarily on the specifics of their sin but an eschatological framework for it.Footnote ⁵⁹

The sketches of sin in Rom 1.18–32, 5.12–14, Gal 3.15–25 and 1 Thess 2.14–16 reflect the eschatological literary strategies of periodising and promoting divine agency that Romans 9–11 features in its myth of Jewish disobedience. Galatians 3.23 even raises the eschatological revelatory volume by featuring ἀποκαλύπτω in its temporal scheme just as Romans 9–11, and especially 11.25–36, feature linguistic resources from the revelatory repertoire.Footnote ⁶⁰ Though some of these passages concern gentile or even general human sin, they indicate the ordinariness for Paul of wielding his ethnic literary culture's eschatological frameworks for sin. It is not surprising that his ideas about Jewish lack of trust, disobedience or misunderstanding then reflect such eschatological ideas.

6. Ethnic Specificity, Competition, and Paul Among other Jewish Teachers and Writers

Identifying Paul's myth of Jewish sin permits us to put a variety of pieces together. He does not attribute idolatry, corrupted minds and domination by passions – the characteristics of gentile sin – to Jews. Paul instead focuses on their disobedience, transgression of the law and misunderstanding. This distinction in characteristics of sin coordinates with Paul having different myths of gentile versus Jewish sin. If Jewish sin boils down to God's timing, then passions and idolatry and corrupt minds are not the issue. Instead, God's cosmic plan is determinative, and it plays out in Jewish rejection of Paul's authority and message, a rejection he bemoans (e.g., Rom 9.1–5).

I have urged attention to Paul's textual logic as opposed to fixation on usual questions like ‘What exactly did Jewish sin consist of for Paul?’ Having interrogated his own rhetoric, we can follow it and suggest that Paul signals to Jewish disobedience or lack of trust in (his interpretation of) what their God was doing through Christ.Footnote ⁶¹ This would also be an efficient strategy for Paul to delegitimate competing Jewish teachers of gentiles who urge them to keep the law in ways that diverge from his message, which helps explain Paul's focus on Jewish failures as teachers of gentiles (Rom 2.17–24).Footnote ⁶² Such an approach situates Paul among other Jews who wrote about the sin of their fellow Jews to delegitimate teachers, experts or leaders they deemed competitors (e.g., Book of the Watchers, Jubilees, Epistle of Enoch, 4QMMT).Footnote ⁶³ Thus in Paul's rhetoric, rather than being true guides who wield expertise in the God of Israel's plans, and thus knowledge for how gentiles can gain access to his powers, his fellow Jewish competitors instead lack trust, are disobedient, do not understand and transgress the very law they are teaching about. These rhetorical jabs are particularly significant since Paul also configures pistis as a technology for gentile access to the Jewish deity's benefits,Footnote ⁶⁴ and he represents these Jews as failures in pistis.

Paul's myth of Jewish sin also situates him recognisably in his social and intellectual landscapes wherein ethnic differentiation was an expected way of imagining the human and divine realms. Approaching Paul in this manner makes him a literate Jew among others who drew on resources from their intellectual repertoires to write about God's ultimate plans. While some interpreters have sought to explain Romans 9–11 in terms of ‘influence’ from ‘Jewish apocalyptic’ scenarios seen in other sources, this misses the point. Yes, other Jewish writers deployed eschatological schemes in which the consummation of God's rescue awaited Israel's repentance, and thus presumed Israel's sin. But the issue is not ‘influence’ on Paul. We do not need to identify a precise precursor for his eschatological scheme that he could have ‘borrowed’ while possibly changing the order of an item within it, as though he was ‘borrowing’ or being ‘influenced’ by something from the outside.Footnote ⁶⁵ Paul was one among these Jewish writers who engaged in textual mythmaking by mobilising shared ethnic resources such as earlier Jewish writings, myths about their God's cosmic plans and their interpretations of cosmic timing. Many of the templates and sensitivities (e.g., the assumption of the high God's determinative agency, God delaying the consummation of his plan to allow more time for progress or periodising history) in these intellectual reservoirs are also themselves examples of Jews participating in wider Mediterranean ways of imagining how the cosmos works.Footnote ⁶⁶ Paul's ethnically varied eschatological mythmaking is thus another example of literate Jews participating in characteristic ways that Greek and Roman period writers construed the politics of the cosmos. In other words, Paul's ethnic ethics – his eschatological myth of Jewish sin – make him an intelligible actor in his social and intellectual environments.