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.

Why did the Jewish authorities hand Jesus over to Rome for crucifixion? It cannot have been because he was judged to have been a false prophet, a deceiver of the people, opposed to Torah, opposed to the temple, or even a messianic pretender. On the last point, Brant Pitre quotes the Spanish theologian Armand Puig I Tàrrech: ‘[N]ever in the history of the Jewish people had a messianic pretender, for the simple fact of being such, been accused of being an enemy of God’s and sentenced to death” (249). Rather, Pitre will argue that Jesus was condemned and executed because he was found guilty, on more than one occasion, of blasphemy.

In some recent comments on a post about the salvation of “all Israel” Alfred encouraged me to look at the argument of Jason Staples that the “fulness of the nations” (Rom. 11:25) is a reference to the northern kingdom of Israel or Ephraim, and that the salvation of “all Israel” must consist in the reunification of the two kingdoms. Staples’ book is The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism: A New Theory of People, Exile, and Israelite Identity.