How and why gentiles were saved by the blood of Jesus according to Paul

When Paul says that God put forward the death of Jesus as—in whatever sense—an “atonement” (Rom. 3:25), he has in mind specifically the salvation of the Jews. He is talking to Jews here, who are subject to the wrath of God (3:1-8); he has catalogued an extensive scriptural indictment of the Jews (3:10-18); the Law speaks to those under the Law, and no Jew will be justified by works of the Law (3:19-20); and the atonement ritual meant the forgiveness of “previously committed” Jewish sins.

But what about gentiles? The immediate argument in Romans is that the Jews, for this reason, no longer have cause to boast in their possession of Torah, because God has acted to establish his righteousness or rightness—which includes but is not limited to his faithfulness to the covenant—“apart from the Law” (3:21, 27). But if what matters in this historical moment of eschatological proportions is a person’s faith or belief in the crucified and resurrected Lord Jesus Christ, a Law-less gentile may be “justified” as easily as a Jew, serving to demonstrate that the God of the Jews is also God of the nations—at least of those nations encompassed in the apostolic mission (3:28-30).

So the death of Jesus means that God is now prepared to “overlook” (paresin) Israel’s long history of transgression and rebellion; and as a consequence of that limited action, notably Jews but also gentiles are justified by their belief in a glorious new future in which a descendant of David will rule over the nations (1:3-4; 15:12).

The Jew first, then the gentile

Another place in “Paul” where the significance of Jesus’ death for non-Jews is explored is Ephesians 2. What I’m wondering about here, specifically, in this piece of exploratory, incomplete, and a little rambling exegesis, is the argument about hostility and peace:

For he himself is our peace, who has made both one and has broken down the middle wall of the partition, the hostility, in his flesh abolishing the law of the commandments in decrees, that he might create the two in him/it into one new person making peace, and might reconcile both in one body to God through the cross, having killed the hostility in it; and having come he proclaimed peace to you, to those far off, and peace to those near; because through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. (Eph. 2:14-18*)

I think that Paul writes, in the first place, as a Jewish apostle to non-Jews who believe in Jesus. Ephesians 1:3-12 is about “we” and “us.” Some part of Israel has been chosen to participate in the eschatological transition triggered by the death and resurrection of Jesus in order to ensure that the God of Israel gets the recognition and credit—or “glory”—for what is happening. We Jews have been redeemed from the corporate sinfulness that is bringing disaster upon the “sons of disobedience” (2:2), and we have been given an insight into the “mystery” which at this time in history is coming to a climax—the reunification of a divided government of the nations in Christ.

That is all fundamentally a Jewish business. The messiah of the God of Israel is to rule from heaven over kings on earth. YHWH has raised him from the dead, has seated him at his right hand, and has given him the authority over all hostile powers for the sake of the security, well-being, and witness of the churches (1:20-23). This is how things are in the present evil age of Jewish and pagan opposition (cf. 6:13), but in the age to come the nations of the Greek-Roman world as nations will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of the one, living, creator God of the Jews.

Ideally, for the Jewish apostolic community, the restored nation of Israel will be at the geographical and geopolitical centre of this arrangement, even if it takes the trauma of the “wrath of God” to bring about repentance (Rom. 11:25-27). But eschatology takes a different course.

(If Christendom hadn’t happened, we might suppose that we are still waiting for this outcome—supposing the Jesus movement had survived at all. But Christendom did happen and embodied exactly the vision adumbrated in Ephesians and Colossians.)

But gentiles are also hearing the message; and they believe it, and receive the Holy Spirit as a guarantee of their inheritance in this future united kingdom (Eph. 1:13-14). They are “saved” from a decadent and obsolescent civilisation. But they are not “redeemed” in the same way by the death of Jesus from the historical legacy of Israel’s sins.

Seated with Christ in the heavenly places

It is the argument of Paul, or of whoever wrote this very Pauline letter, that these gentile believers were once dead in their sins, living according to the disruptive spiritual forces which were then wreaking havoc in Israel (2:1-2). The “sons of disobedience” are not gentiles; they are the rebellious Jews among whom Paul and his colleagues, as representatives of redeemed Israel, once led their lives “in the desires of our flesh, doing the wishes of the flesh and of the thoughts, and we were children by nature of wrath as also those remaining” (2:3*).

But now both groups have been merged into the same eschatological narrative, to the extent that they have together been raised and seated with Christ in the heavenly places in anticipation of a future régime change. They have been “saved” from those dark forces at work in the ancient world which would bring “wrath” upon disobedient Israel. They have been made or created (ktisthentes), instead, to live out in the chaotic and dangerous historical present the life of the historical age to come (2:8-10). But to the apocalyptically minded Jewish apostle, it is the future régime change that really matters.

So then he goes on to explain the means or manner of this salvation.

An end to hostilities

Gentiles are differentiated from Jews “in the flesh”; they are ‘called “uncircumcision” by what is called “circumcision” made by hands in the flesh’ (2:11*). This is the bloody rent that separated them from Christ, alienated them from the civic life (politeia) of Israel, and made them “strangers to the covenant of promise, not having hope and godless in the world” (2:12*).

This alienation should be conceived in very real, sociological terms. Paul is thinking about the actual relations between the synagogues and the diverse Greek-Roman societies in which they were embedded. There is a core theological component to this arrangement, but the reference to the politeia of Israel keeps community presence and communal dynamics in view.

The sociological division defined by circumcision was experienced as a long-standing, festering, inter-communal and inter-national “hostility” (echthran). It is this hostility, not merely the Law, which constitutes the “middle wall of the partition” (2:14*), which has been broken down, which has been “killed” or eliminated (apokteinas) through the event of the crucifixion of Jesus. I rather go with Markus Barth here:

The context identifies the “wall” in four ways: it is the fact of separation between Israel and the nations; it has to do with the law and its statutes and interpretations; it is experienced in the enmity between Jews and Gentiles; it also consists of the enmity of both Jews and Gentiles against God.1

The crucifixion of Jesus by the Roman forces in Israel was a quintessential expression of the hostility between Jews and gentiles. Jesus represented, embodied, identified with righteous Israel. This forced a division within Israel and a collaboration between unrighteous Israel and Rome, leading to his arrest and execution. In apocalyptic perspective this was one of the ways in which the “ruler of the power of the air” was at work in the “sons of disobedience” (2:2).

It is the point made by Peter and John after their brief detention:

Master, you are the one who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them, the one who said by the mouth of our father David, your servant, through the Holy Spirit, “Why did nations rage and peoples practise vain things? The kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers gathered for the same purpose against the Lord and against his Anointed.” For in truth, there were gathered together in this city against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, Herod and Pontius Pilate with gentiles and peoples of Israel to do whatever your hand and your intention decided beforehand to bring about. (Acts 4:24-28*)

In place of the political-religious enmity between Jews and gentiles, between Israel and the nations, there is now a limited “peace,” foreshadowing a very different political-religious settlement for the Greek-Roman world, in which the God who made the heaven and earth and sea and everything in them would be worshipped by both Jews and gentiles.

Awkward bed-fellows

So believing gentiles are no longer alienated from the politeia of the Jews; they are no longer “strangers to the covenant of promise”—the covenant with Abraham; they are no longer “godless”; they hold to the Jewish “hope” in the future government of Israel’s messiah (cf. Rom. 15:12); they are sympolitai—they share in the civic life of the Jews; they are family members of God” (2:19*); they have equal access to the same “temple.”

This is what it means to be “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets” (2:20). They participate together in a hybrid politeia defined by the preaching of the apostles and the visions of the prophets concerning the coming hegemony of those who already confessed Jesus as Lord (2:20-22).

The new arrangement has come about not because the death of Jesus had some obscure metaphysical or cosmic effect. The point is very simply that Jewish and gentile believers now have in common the decisive attribute or characteristic which will prove transformative for the ancient world “in the coming ages” —faith or belief in the rule of the Lord Jesus Christ, accompanied by a powerful and compelling experience of the same Spirit. That is their justificaition.

But Jews remain Jews and gentiles remain gentiles in this “household” because the Law has been rescinded only insofar as it has been used to aggravate Jewish-gentile relations—not least because, in the outlook of the historical Paul, all of Torah-observant Israel might yet be saved (cf. Rom. 11:26-27).

But it wasn’t going to be easy.

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  Markus Barth, Ephesians 1-3 (1978), 286.