Ethnic Ethics: Paul's Eschatological Myth of Jewish Sin

Abstract Paul's letters depict gentiles and Jews with different characteristics of sin. This article focuses on Paul's rhetoric about Jewish shortcomings and argues that he has an eschatological myth of Jewish sin: it is the period in the Jewish deity's plan when he has hardened his people into disobedience and disloyalty. While scholars have traditionally tried to connect Paul's ideas about Jewish sin to deficiencies of historical Jews, Paul's claims are primarily animated by his Jewish eschatological scheme and competitive rhetorical needs. Paul re-emerges as a Jewish writer within his competitive social landscape wherein ethnic differentiation was an expected way of imagining the human and divine realms.

This movement creates an opportunity to think about ethnicity more widely in Paul's mythmaking. 3Like other ancient Mediterranean writers, he presumes that different ethnē and their deities have different characteristics, histories, customs and cultic relations. 4My 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. 5Commentators 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. 6But 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. 7his 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. 8Such 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.

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 with metacritical interrogation of how 'Paul the Jew' often functions in NT scholarship to render Paul more ethically palatable (The Apostle Paul on Jews, Gentiles and Who Gets Saved (Minneapolis: Fortress -Forthcoming)). 3The category of mythmaking focuses on how claims about gods, origins and the nature of things can make some contested practices, social hierarchies or ideas-but not others-seem natural.When it comes to the study of sin in Paul's letters, thinking about mythmaking brings important comparisons with wider Greco-Roman materials, ideologies and forms of religious-philosophical competition into focus.See S.L. Young, Paul Among the Mythmakers: Sins, Gods, and Scriptures (Studies in Religion in Antiquity; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press -Forthcoming). 4 Fredriksen, 'Divine Ethnicity in Paul's Theology'; Johnson Hodge,If Sons,Then Heirs, While Paul sometimes uses specific ethnic terms (e.g., 'Greeks') instead of ethnē, these often function as part of Paul's 'oppositional ethnic thinking' of Jews vs. everyone else, and often Greeks are representative gentiles (Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs, 48-9, 51).
6 It is the significant majority view to read Rom 2.12a's 'all who have sinned apart from the law' as a reference to gentile sin and 2.12b's 'all who have sinned under the law' as a reference to Jewish sin, understanding ἀνόμως in 2.12a to mean 'apart from' or 'without' the Mosaic law (e.g., J.D.G.Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998) 135-37; J.A. Fitzmyer, Romans (New York: Doubleday, 1993) 305-6, 307-8; R. Jewett, Romans: A Commentary (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006) 210-11; T.H. Tobin, 'Controversy and Continuity in Romans 1: 18-3:20', CBQ 55 (1993) 298-318, at 308-9).Following the dominant use of ἀνόμως in Greek literature as meaning wicked or lawless (in the sense of unrestrained or evil), I instead understand Paul to be writing about those 'who sinned wickedly' (ἀνόμως ἥμαρτον) versus those who sinned in more restrained ways within the framework of the law.The distinction is not between Jews and gentiles.For a detailed argument to this effect, see Stowers, Rereading Romans, 134-40.See below for discussion of Rom 5.13-14.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.9This 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.10This 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'). 11Just as Wis 13.1 configures gentiles as foolish 'by nature' (wύσει) and expounds at length on their cultic corruptions (Wis 13.1-14.31),for Paul they are idolatrous sinners wύσει (e.g., Gal 2.15): this is their hereditary condition. 12ut Paul never writes in these ways about Jews. 13In 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. 14Furthermore, 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 (ἐβασίλευσεν), 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. 15The 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?

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. 16As 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. 17Thus in Rom 9.31-2 Israel did not reach a 'law of righteousness' because they did not pursue it ἐκ πίστεως.When Paul writes of Israel's stumbling stone in 9.32-3, he contrasts them with whoever trusts (ὁ πιστεύων).In 10.16 they have not all obeyed (ὑπήκουσαν) the Gospel, and Paul mobilises Isaiah to gloss this with, 'Lord, who has trusted (τίς ἐπίστευσεν)'-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 ἀπειθοῦντα).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 (ἀπειθέω) and disobedience (ἀπείθεια).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 15 Stowers, 'Paul's Four Discourses', 100. 16The meaning(s) of Israel in this section remains debated.Most interpreters acknowledge that it overlaps with what is commonly labelled 'ethnic Israel' and thus Jews.Paul's strategic differentiations within Israel (e.g., Rom 9.6 or his use of remnant tropes) and his category of 'all Israel' (11.26)  17 For illustrations of the interrelation of trust and obedience language in Romans, see 1. 5; 10.16; 16.26.On this point more widely, T. Morgan, Roman Faith and Christian Faith: Pistis and Fides in the Early Roman Empire and Early Churches (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015) 282-83.
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? 18It 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. 19It 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. 20Rather 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. 21This 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'. 22Paul's writing about gentiles thus treats their inclusionin the God of Israel's rescue through Christ as faithful subjects of the true Godas 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. 23 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 explicitperhaps 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. 24ellingly, 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. 25Reflecting 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. 26In 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 (πότε) 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 (συνέκλεισεν) all to disobedience (εἰς ἀπείθειαν) 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 (Ἔδωκεν αὐτοῖς ὁ θεὸς) 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' 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, 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, 29 is to blur our vision 27 Wagner, Heralds of the Good News, 242-44. 28Getty, 'Paul and the Salvation of Israel', 466-8; Johnson Hodge,'Role of Israel',171,Wagner,Heralds of the Good News, For example, E. Dinkler, Signum Crucis: Aufsätze zum Neuen Testament und zur christlichen Archäologie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1967) 241-69; C. Zoccali, '"And So All Israel Will Be Saved": Competing Interpretations of Romans 11.26 in Pauline Scholarship', JSNT 30 (2008) 289-318, at 301 n. 28, 306-7 n. 41.Even Bell, who critiques the position that 'God hardens Israel because Israel has hardened herself' (Irrevocable Call, 224-7), still orients his discussion of divine hardening around questions of human responsibility (219-33).In other words, this concern structures the doxa or commonsense of scholarship.

Ethnic Ethics
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,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, 31 though traditional questions have sometimes hidden this behind the veil of the obvious. 32It 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. 33God's ultimate plan is the primary issuenot 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. 34Since 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. 35We 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. 36But such concerns should follow rather than be permitted to obscure the eschatological myth of Jewish sin that Paul promotes in Romans 9-11.

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. 37I 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'. 38This makes sense of the consistent association of the Jewish figure with language of instructing, teaching and guiding. 39It 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. 40Instead 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, 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, μοιχεύω, and ἱεροσυλέω 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. 42Sacrilege (ἱεροσυλέω) could offer a more general charge of impiety that aligns with Paul's following 37 R.M. Thorsteinsson has argued that this figure is, instead, a gentile who adopts Jewish laws (Paul's Interlocutor in Romans 2: Function and Identity in the Context of Ancient Epistolography (Stockholm: Almqvist &  Wiskell, 2003) 196-221).Though a minority interpretation, it has been taken up and elaborated on, e.g., Fredriksen, Paul, 156-7; R. Rodríguez, If You Call Yourself a Jew: Reappraising Paul's Letter to the Romans (Eugene: Cascade, 2014); Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem, 54-5, 59-64.This article is not the place to engage with Thorsteinsson's arguments.Suffice it to say that I appreciate them and agree with his emphasis on a gentile-encoded audience for Romans, though I still understand the figure about whom Paul writes in 2.17-24 as a competing Jewish teacher of gentiles (for limited critique, see Stowers's review in JTS 56 (2005) 561-5). 38Stowers, Rereading Romans, 143-53 (e.g., 'a polemical construction of "missionary" opponents.This Jew is one of Paul's competitors for gentiles', at 150).While demurring about the Jewish identification of the teacher, Thorsteinsson similarly explicates the diatribal, speech-in-character textures of the passage (Paul's Interlocutor,  123-50, 196-204).
transgressing revealed divine commands. 53Paul periodises sin and death in relation to events from Jewish lore. 54n 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 (εἰς τὴν μέλλουσαν πίστιν ἀποκαλυwθῆναι)'.'The law was our guardian until the Christ came' (γέγονεν εἰς 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 (συγκλείω) in Gal This confining also has an eschatological purpose.Just as God 'confined (συνέκλεισεν) all to disobedience in order that (ἵνα) he might have mercy on all' in Rom 11.32, in Gal 3.22 'the writing confined (συνέκλεισεν) all under sin in order that (ἵνα) the promise from the faithfulness of Jesus Christ might be given to those who trust'. 55The similar syntax and diction is striking: a divinely associated agent confines (συγκλείω) 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. 56hough Paul's responsibility for the passage is debated, 1 Thess 2.14-16 arguably discusses the sin of some (not all) Jews eschatologically.57Just 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 (εἰς τὸ ἀναπληρῶσαι αὐτῶν τὰς ἁμαρτίας πάντοτε) with the result that God's wrath has come upon them in a way leading to the completion or consummation of his anger (εἰς τέλος).58Rather 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. 59he 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.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 passionsthe characteristics of gentile sinto 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. 61his 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). 62Such 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). 63Thus 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 60 See fn.25. 61 See Fredriksen,Paul,Novenson,Thiessen,'Conjuring Paul',15 n. 25,[19][20] On Paul's criticism being of Jewish teachers urging gentile observance of the law, Johnson Hodge,'Role of Israel',Stowers,Rereading Romans, For similar approaches to these writings, see S.  64-5, 98-116.Reed  in particular (Demons, 200-240) critiques influential 'reductive' 'symbolic' interpretations of fallen angels in the Book of the Watchers that correlate them primarily with foreign-empire or human referents.She instead proposes a potential 'negative exempla' approach that still respects these angels' existence in the cosmic-histories of the myths in the Book of the Watchers: the scribes responsible for the text systematised, listed and categorised these divine beings while weaving myths (e.g., 1 En 15.1-16.4)that locate the origins of trouble with some divine beings in ways that also delegitimate potential rival Jewish experts to 'appropriate' their authority / expertise over spirts for their scribal repertoire.
have amplified opportunities for disagreement.For an insightful discussion, see S. Sheinfeld, 'Who Is the Righteous Remnant in Romans 9-11?The Concept of Remnant in Early Jewish Literature and Paul's Letter to the Romans', Paul the Jew: Rereading the Apostle as a Figure of Second Temple Judaism (ed.G. Boccaccini and C.A. Segovia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016) 233-50.