I said I would come back to Matthew Thiessen’s “incoherent” account of Paul’s eschatology, so here we are. Chapter four of A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles is about Paul the “End-Time Jew.” Thiessen begins: “Paul never wrote an autobiography. Why would he when he expected an imminent end to the current structure of the cosmos?” (49).

I asked ChatGPT (Chat with Website) to summarise the “narrative-historical” approach to biblical interpretation that I pursue on this website. This is what it came up with. It’s not quite how I would have put it. I wouldn’t have said “empires like Rome,” for example; “historical context” is rather vaguely conceived; and I would probably have emphasised the eschatological outlook of Jesus and the apostles. But it gets the main points right, and it was smart to pick up the post-Christendom orientation. I especially like the concluding paragraph.

In a lengthy Theopolis essay entitled “Pentecost and the Gift of a New Politics,” Alastair Roberts asks why Jesus had so little to say about the evil empire in their midst. “Jesus declares the coming of the kingdom of God: should not such a kingdom have involved, at a bare minimum, the defeat of the Romans?” It’s a question worth asking today as the world waits with bated breath to see whom Americans will entrust with supreme power.

Matthew Thiessen says that to understand the historical Paul we must relocate him in the world of first century Judaism, and here’s a book that does just that: Ben C. Blackwell, John K. Goodrich, and Jason Maston, eds. Reading Romans in Context: Paul and Second Temple Judaism (2015). Twenty passages in Romans are read alongside a range of texts from the intertestamental period, the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, Qumran, Josephus, and Philo. Here’s an example.

Matthew Thiessen is keen to demonstrate that “Paul did not convert from an established religion called Judaism to a new religion called Christianity” (A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles, 57). We can agree on that.

His conversion was to a radical allegiance to the one whom he believed had been appointed by the living God to be Israel’s Messiah, the future judge and ruler of the nations. We somewhat disagree on that, I think—Thiessen’s account of Paul’s eschatology seems to me incoherent, but I’ll come back to that another day.

In the introduction to his book A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles (2023), Matthew Thiessen says that his broad aim is to present a reading of Paul that does not perpetuate an old “Christian” or “Lutheran” view of Judaism as “inferior or even pernicious, something left behind or something that has died” (4). He will argue against the conclusion, reached even by many more recent interpreters who have rejected the old perspective, that “Paul must have thought something was inherently flawed with, wrong about, or absent from Judaism” (9).

Jesus’ parable of the net in Matthew 13:47-50 is commonly read as a parable of indiscriminate inclusion: both good and bad people may come into the kingdom. For example, Hagner writes with respect to the phrase “fish of every kind”:

The exaggerated inclusiveness of this phrase may be an intentional reflection of the universality of the invitation to accept the good news of the kingdom. … Among those who respond are many who will not persevere in their initial commitment…; there will be those who do not live up to the standards of the Church.