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Matthew V. Novenson, "Paul and Judaism at the End of History" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
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- [00:00]
Matthew Novinson
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Matthew Novinson
Foreign welcome to the New Books Network.
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Jonathan Lookadoo
Hello everybody and welcome back to New Books and Biblical Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Jonathan look atou, the host of the channel. Today we'll be talking to Matthew Novinson about his new book Paul and Judaism at the End of History, published by Cambridge University Press in 2024. Matt, welcome to the show.
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Matthew Novinson
Thanks, Jonathan. It's a pleasure, pleasure to be with you.
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Jonathan Lookadoo
Yeah, well, it's great to be with you and thank you very much for, for coming on the show. Can I start by asking you just for our listeners who might not know you, just to start by introducing yourself to our listeners.
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Matthew Novinson
Yeah. My name is Matthew Novinson. I'm a Bible scholar. I work at Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey. I also, until recently taught for a long time at the University of Edinburgh in the uk. I'm from Chattanooga, Tennessee, but have lived elsewhere for a while now and I work on the New Testaments and a lot of other sort of aspects of ancient Judaism and Christianity.
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Jonathan Lookadoo
Very helpful.
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Matthew Novinson
Yeah.
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Jonathan Lookadoo
Well, I noticed when reading the book, the first Paragraph of the book, I thought, makes two important claims that clarify for readers both the main points of the book and also the scholarly context in which this topic is explored. I wonder if we can start with the academic background. You mentioned that the topics of Paul and the Law, and Paul and Judaism are often treated by New Testament scholars as being intractable. Could you say more about some of the methodological problems with studies on Paul and the Law and how we might proceed in a better way?
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Matthew Novinson
Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. So Paul and the Law, or Paul and Judaism? It's one of those classic puzzles that professors like to set for students. Call on the law, explain. And the reason it's a puzzle is that, as a lot of people have observed, Paul seems to. I mean, he's famous for saying a lot of things that sound critical of the Law of Moses, which is often interpreted as being critical of Judaism. And yet there's a few points at which he himself seems to know that people might think that about him. And so he denies it. He says, you know, I do not abolish the law, I uphold it. And he asks, am I saying that the Law is bad? No, I'm not. And it's precisely that he talks about the Law a good bit, but he seems to. People have thought he wants to have it both ways, both to criticize, to say critical things about the Law, and yet to insist that he's actually affirming it. And that puzzle is the classic, you know, problem that professors like to put to their students. And it is a real one. So I'm not making light of it, but I do think that there is a way out of it that's just not usually considered. And that's kind of the burden of the book is to show, well, it's intractable. We see it as intractable because we operate within certain categories, basically assuming religious norms like we're used to, that there's such a thing as Judaism and there's such a thing as Christianity, and, you know, those are two different religions. And so we're trying to place Paul in relation to the two of them. But I argue that he doesn't think about the world of religions in that way. And so there is a way out of the conundrum if we sort of bracket some of those assumptions about what Judaism and Christianity are and how they work.
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Jonathan Lookadoo
That's really, really helpful, I think, and forces us maybe to think about our categories as we're studying Paul and maybe religion more broadly. But I guess in the same paragraph, you also Say something about the topic of the book. And this is a book, of course, about Paul and Judaism, but more specifically, it is a book about how Paul understands time. What does Paul claim happened while he was living under the influence of the Roman Empire?
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Matthew Novinson
Yes, this is what the lattermost part of the book's title means to get at right? Pauline Judaism. That handle appears in scores or hundreds of book titles. And what I mean to say by titling my Paul and Judaism at the End of History is to signal that the direction for the answer to this conundrum lies in Paul's understanding of time, and in particular, the end of time or the end of history, or what in theological terms is traditionally called eschatology. And in theological terms, eschatology is discourse about a reflection upon the last things, as in Greek eschatos or eschato, which is usually thought of as something quite speculative and imagining what it might be like when the world is all put right, or things like that in a hypothetical future. But my claim in the book is that Paul, certainly differently from us, differently even from a number of other New Testament writers, writes about what we call eschatology as if it's present to him, as if it's not something in the distant future that he speculates about, but about something that is happening right now in his own lifetime. And my suggestion is that that fact actually accounts for a lot of the confusion around what Paul says about Judaism. And the reason that Paul's quite distinctive in this respect is because, I mean, another thing that I think we often forget or lose sight of is Paul is, as far as we know, I think this is the case, you know, a very near contemporary of Jesus himself. And we know Paul claims that he has had a revelation or a meeting with the risen Jesus, Jesus after Jesus crucifixion. And the key thing about that, it's not just that he's had a kind of, you know, an encounter with a God or something like that, but it's precisely the fact that Jesus, you know, and Paul knows this, had been a human being of recent memory and, you know, was executed and put to death and yet resurrected after. And this was a point that was hammered home to me by reading Albert Schweitzer, the Alsatian theologian and Bible scholar from a century ago. But Schweitzer points out, right, the resurrection of the dead is meant in general in the apocalypses and so on to herald the end of everything. This is the moment when God is making all things new, wrapping everything up. And, you know, Christian theology is accustomed now to thinking of Jesus's resurrection as something past that happened sort of in the middle of time, anticipating someday a general resurrection. But what Schweitzer thought and what I came to think is that Paul thinks that if he's just seen the risen Jesus, that means the resurrection is happening now in his generation. So that the eschaton, the end of everything, is not someday, but happening now. Right. Very soon and even now for Paul. And if that's the case, well, then that kind of skews the way he thinks about what Judaism, Christianity, you know, those terms and scare quotes and everything actually are, because the normal rules do not apply. The normal rules, as ancient people thought of them or as we modern people think of them.
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Jonathan Lookadoo
Really? Yeah, it's really a remarkable thing to imagine Paul thinking, because it does just change our categories and how we might typically perceive these things. I guess thinking of the Paul and Judaism issue just for a moment, I guess one of the reasons that some scholars have understood Paul's relation with. With Judaism to be one of perhaps rejection is found in the letter that he wrote to believers in Galatia. Paul speaks there, as you of course, know quite well, but in Galatians 1, 1314, about his former occupation in Eudaimos, which is conventionally translated as Judaism. Now, Judaism, of course, may be a transcription of Eudaismos, but transcription is not translation. So what does Paul mean by his former occupation in Yida is mos, and how do we know what he meant?
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Matthew Novinson
So that's a very good question that I ended up spending a good bit of time on working on this project. So the key observation that I made that affected then how I've come to interpret that word judaismos in Galatians and elsewhere is that it's an exceedingly rare Greek word. Right? We. Well, the word Christianity Christianitas in Latin or Christianismos in Greek appears nowhere in the New Testament, as is pretty well known. And the word judaismos, which we often translate Judaism, occurs only in the passage you mentioned, Galatians 1, 13 and 14. And yet there's all kinds of, you know, instances of Judaism, that is, of Jewish religious practice and life scattered across the New Testament. But what's interesting is they don't call it Judaismos. And in fact, most other ancient writers don't call, you know, descriptions of Jewish religion and practice Yudaismos either. It's not their name for it. And that observation began to strike me as more and more important. There's a good article by Steve Mason from a number of years ago that was very Kind of made a penny drop for me on this, and I interact with him a bit in this book. But so the key point is ancient people generally, and including ancient Jews writing in Greek, and including Paul in a number of instances, when he is just describing what we think of as Judaism, that is Jewish religious life and practice, he doesn't call it Judaism. He usually just calls it the laws or the customs or the traditions or the ancestral ways, which is basically a very normal ancient way of talking about one's own laws and customs and ways, et cetera. In other words, they didn't have ISM names for the most part, for those kinds of things. And I think when Paul uses the word Eudaismos, which is again, one of only a handful of references of that word in ancient texts, he's also. He means something very particular by it, as I think all the other small handful of instances of that word mean something very particular. And in. I mean, the precedent for Paul's use of it comes in the Second Book of Maccabees, 2 Maccabees or Second Maccabees, Greek Jewish text, right. Which is printed in Bibles in the Apocrypha or Deuterocanonico section. And that book is famously an account of the Hasmonean revolt in the 2nd century BCE where the Maccabees, Judah Maccabee and his brothers, wage war against the Seleucid Greeks. And second Maccabees calls the cause or the party of Judah Maccabee and his brothers Eudaimos. It says they were striving zealously for Eudaismos. And it occurs just a couple of times there. And what's significant about that in relation to Galatians one is that both, I mean, the historical context, very different, right? The Maccabees are at war. Paul says that he was sort of disciplining or bringing charges against Christ followers back in the time before he says he met the risen Jesus. But what they have in common is that both the Maccabees and two Maccabees and Paul in his retrospect, in Galatians one, they're not just when they use that word, talking about observing traditional Jewish piety. It's a fighting word. It's about a kind of a sectarian and a quite strident program for the defense and promotion of a certain vision of what we would call Judaism. And I think that's precisely the reason why that word does not occur all over ancient texts, because it's not the name for the religion in general. So I think in other words, it also occurs in a couple of later inscriptions, 3rd and 4th century inscriptions, where my own view is, and I argue in the book, it means the same thing yet again, not Judaism in general, but a particular kind of sectarian cause. So that's what I think Paul means by it. And I think we know what he means by. I mean, this is the customary way we do lexical work to look at other people who use it, which in this case is pretty easy because there's not that many people who use it. And I think there's a pretty clear case that the few texts that use it use it in basically the same way. And that despite what transliteration makes our modern eyes think, it actually does not mean Judaism in general. So, and that just. Right, that's only two little verses in the letters of Paul. But to the extent that those verses have made people think, oh, Paul talks about Judaism as something in his past that he left behind or even that he, you know, disapproves of in retrospect, well, if that word doesn't mean Judaism, then none of that holds right. And those questions are still open.
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Jonathan Lookadoo
That makes sense. Yeah. And it is really helpful for, I think, correcting or cautioning us against jumping too quickly to conclusions about what Paul meant by this word.
- [15:44]
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Jonathan Lookadoo
I guess. Skipping forward, there's so much in the book that, that I would like to discuss. But skipping forward a bit, in chapter six, you consider how Paul talks about his own ethnos, his own people group, if we can allow the translation, at least just for the moment, that Paul was a Jew. For Paul, what were the differences in nature between Jews and other nations? And in light of these differences that Paul understood to exist between Jews and other nations or Gentiles, how do we incorporate his statements that appear to place all nations on. On the same ground without distinction?
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Matthew Novinson
Yeah, I, I think, and I argue in this book because it's a, it's a good question and it needs, you know, a lot of time and space and word count to tease out. But the key thing, in my view, is that Paul says both of the. He makes both of these claims which seem to fit kind of awkwardly together in our minds. He makes the claim, and this is the one most of us are familiar with, or anyone who's at all familiar with the letters of Paul. He makes the claim that all people, Jews and Gentiles, or Jews and Greeks, as he sometimes puts it, are in a certain analysis, in the same boat. He says they're all under sin. He says that there's no distinction between them. But anyone who calls on the name of the Lord, you know, does so on the same ground, stands to gain the same eschatological blessing from God. So he's often read, and not inaccurately, in a kind of universalizing, humanistic way. Right? There is no distinction. I mean, a really famous verse to this effect is Galatians 3:28. In Christ, there is no Jew and Greek, right? So he makes that claim. So you have to account for what he thinks of that. But then he also makes the claim, and this, I think, is often ignored by his readers because they have on the brain those other things that he says. But Paul also sometimes speaks in a kind of breezy or offhanded way, in generalizing terms, about what Jews are like and what Gentiles are like. And when he does so, generally, his idea is that Jews, I think, because he thinks that they have the law of Moses, they've received revelation from God, that he thinks they're reasonably well behaved. And Gentiles. He sometimes speaks again offhandedly, in a breezy way, as if Gentiles are generally badly behaved. So in this, a great example is there's this discourse at the end of Romans 9, beginning of Romans 10, where he's talking about Israel and the nations respectively, and looking at where they stand now in relation to God sending God's Son. And he says Israel who, who pursue a law of righteousness did not attain it. And yet he says Gentiles who do not pursue righteousness have attained righteousness, the righteousness from faith or trust. So what I think is interesting about that is that he thinks that Israel does characteristically pursue a righteous law, which I think is the Torah of Moses. He says they didn't attain it, not in the sense he doesn't say what some Bible translations say, that they sort of did not keep the law. What he says is they didn't attain the righteous law they sought after, which I think means in that context, it's that Israel, Paul's contemporaries in Israel have not recognized the gospel about the Messiah the way Paul thinks they ought to have done. So what he does is generalizes about what Israel does and what the nations do. The one pursues righteousness, the other doesn't, and yet it finds itself righteous. And there are other places where Paul speaks again about Gentiles as if they normally behave badly, which is some other New Testament writers also do. I mean, the Gospel of Matthew sometimes glosses the word gentile with sinner. And I think that's kind of Paul's habit of speech. So what you have then is one kind of discourse where Paul talks about Gentiles as, you know, sinners in a characteristic way, and another where he can talk about all people as sinners or under sin, or subject to sin. And so the question is how you account for both of those. So my argument is that when he speaks in that kind of stereotyped way, what I call a kind of ethnic chauvinism, he does mean it. It's his actual assumption. And again, I interpret this alongside a number of ancient Jewish texts that make some similar kinds of moves which say, like, I think Paul thinks not that Gentiles are like ontologically evil or something. In a way Israel's not, but they're all human. But Paul thinks that there was this, the moment of God meeting the people, Israel at Mount Sinai and giving God's word revelation to them sort of made Israel morally continent or gave them a degree of self control that is lacking for the Gentile nations which didn't have the word of God, but the twist and the reason the other more sort of universalizing strand of language and Paul matters is that Paul thinks that sort of God's ultimate plan is to show final and total mercy on everyone. So that. Well, in First Corinthians 15, the final end goal is that the whole world becomes subject to the kingdom of God and finally God becomes all in everything. So God wants to sort of rectify not just, I mean, certainly all people, but indeed the entire cosmos. So in that respect, you know, it's not enough just to be relatively decent, right. Like more decent than your neighbor. Because what finally needs to happen, by Paul's lights, is for. For God to rectify everyone and everything, finally. So that. That's why I think. I think there is a logic between now Paul's discourse about Gentiles as being especially bad and then his discourse about everybody being bad in a way that needs God's intervention.
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Jonathan Lookadoo
Yeah, I found that a really helpful chapter to think through and particularly to put in light of Paul's vision of time, or eschatology, to use the theological word. But I noticed in chapter eight as well, you played with Francis Bellamy's American Pledge of Allegiance and the terms there. And in that chapter you provide an account of Paul's moral economy, terms of liberty and justice for all. How did Paul conceive of the changes that happen to someone who became a Christ follower?
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Matthew Novinson
Yeah, so I'm. Well, I think I mentioned that. Right. You know, if I happen to have grown up as a child in American public schools where we had to memorize and then say the American Pledge of Allegiance. And it ends with those lines, you know, one nation under God with liberty and justice for all. And it occurred to me once when reading Romans 6, that there is this language, Greek, Eleutheria, or liberty, or freedom and justice, dikaisune, righteousness or justice. And all people in Romans, right. Jew and Greek alike, all. So the parallel stuck out of my mind. Liberty and justice for all is, in a word, it's kind of what Paul says God is bringing about by sending the Son the Messiah. And that's interesting because, I mean, one. Well, I think there are a number of accounts of Pauline theology or of the sort of ideas Paul articulates that kind of deflate or define down what it is Paul thinks happens to people in Christ. Finally, I mean, you know, in large parts of the theological tradition, Christian readers of Paul, who account for most readers of Paul over the centuries, would say something like, well, what people need and what Paul says God provides in the Gospel is forgiveness of sins. And Paul does say God provides forgiveness of Sins, though he doesn't talk a lot about it. But that's not quite as much as liberty and justice for all. Paul uses much bigger and broader terms here. And in some recent discussion, some of your listeners may, you know, there have been some really generative readings of Paul that have said, well, you know, because Paul styles himself apostle to the Gentiles, what he's really all about is trying to give access to Gentiles, to allow Gentiles the access that Israel already has to God. Right? Israel's met God before, but the Gentiles, as Paul himself says, are sort of strangers and cut off from this God's promises and covenants with Israel. And so what Paul does as apostle, the Gentiles, is give them access to that. And I mean, he does do that. But one of my arguments was that's not an entire novelty because there was such a thing as proselytism that Gentiles could, you know, study the law of Moses and even convert to Judaism before it was not an impossibility, if you're an ancient Gentile, to kind of align yourself with Israel's God. So this chapter says, I think Paul's vision is really big, really grand in this respect, that he thinks not even Israel, who he says, have always had these promises from God, but they don't have the thing itself, the thing God has long promised, which is for Paul, really, really maximal, that is eternal life itself, right? Like liberation, liberty, Eleutheria, freedom from the constraints of sin and death themselves, right? The very conditions of human existence which Paul thinks the law of Moses sort of took for granted and assumed, yes, people sin, people die. That's why there's atonement for sins. That's why there's means of purification for ritual impurity and so on. But Paul thinks that God promised all the way back to Abraham the patriarch, that all of that would one day come to an end and that God's people could actually live not just as mortals who are able to commune with God, you know, in the temple, but actually live the immortal life of God himself with God. And that's what liberty and justice for all means in Pauline terms. So as regards Israel, his argument is God is finally making good on those promises, right? That by raising the Messiah from the dead, which is the promise of the resurrection of all God's people, that God is finally doing what he told Abraham the patriarch, he would do. And that is, in Paul's interpretation, give resurrection and eternal life to Israel. But also the twist, Paul says, is God has come along and commissioned him, Paul to tell all the Gentiles that they can have the same right. They can join in the same blessed final inheritance that God promised to Israel long ago. And that's the for all bit, right? And that's why, apropos of the previous question, our discussion there is that he both makes a distinction between Israel and nations, and also in another respect doesn't make a distinction, but says that everyone now stands to gain the same.
- [29:37]
Jonathan Lookadoo
It's really, really helpful, and it does point to a certain grandness in Paul's vision. Thinking of how all things come together.
- [29:51]
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- [30:35]
Matthew Novinson
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- [31:07]
Jonathan Lookadoo
In in the next chapter, then you discuss Paul's statement in Romans 10:4 that Christ is the the end of the law. And I'll let you perhaps translate that or define that better than than I just did, but you discussed that alongside similar statements by origin and Eliyahu Cohen. What does Paul mean when he says that Christ is the end of the law? And how does that relate to the two kinds of justice that Paul then mentions immediately after that?
- [31:37]
Matthew Novinson
In verses 5 and 6, this phrase Christ is the end of the law. This is one of those passages that are often cited in the discussion that you raised in your very first question about right the supposedly intractable problem of Paul and Judaism is people will quote lines like that, Paul says Christ is the end of the law, and then say, but of course, for Judaism that's nonsense, because right. To live within Judaism is precisely to live with God's law as a norm, as a way of life. It's to live with the Torah. And so clearly there's some, you know, unbridgeable divide between Paul and Judaism here, because the statement that Christ at the end of the law just is unthinkable on those kind of terms. And so in this chapter I try to square that circle to explain why I think it's not the case. So, I mean, a lot of very smart people have worked on this text before. One thing a lot of people have done have tried to say, ah, if we translate it differently, then the problem is solved, which I actually don't exactly think is the case. So, you know, in English language discussion, there's a lot of debate about when Paul says end, does he mean termination? Christ is the termination of the law, which does, you know, if you translate it like that, it sounds maybe maximally kind of against Judaism or something. Or can it mean like English, end can sometimes mean something like, you know, the purpose or the goal of the law, Christ is the goal of the laws and the end toward which we work, or something like that. And that people who translate it that way can say, oh, well, you see, it's maybe a little bit closer to Judaism than we thought, or something like that. I actually think the translation of that word doesn't really resolve anything, partly because the Greek word there, telos, means, I think, something extremely close to what the English word end means. And it has exactly the same kind of ambiguity. Right? I mean, I think Paul does say that Christ is the goal to which the law sort of points or witnesses or something like that. But in a certain respect, in Romans 10, he also wants to say that there is an end in the sense of a termination to the law as we've known it. But my argument there is there are actually quite a few figures in the history of Judaism who have made an argument like that that is not that the law is just, you know, ever just abolished, thrown out the window or something. But there's a number of figures, especially in the history of Jewish mysticism and later in Kabbalism, the Kabbalah like you mentioned, Eliyahu Cohen Itamari, who's this early modern Jewish Kabbalist, and I quote him because he has some very sophisticated discussion of this. But he asked the Question, which in a different way, in a more cursory way, the rabbis also ask in the Talmud, they say, well, if the law is the word of God, then it has to abide forever. But if God will usher all of Israel into the age to come and into the resurrection of the dead and into a kind of blessed eternal life with God, then how does the law work then? Because if you stop and think about almost any of the commandments, the commandments assume, well, one, that you could break them, right? So there's such a thing as transgression or sin. But also they everywhere assume the reality of death and everything that goes with death. Childbirth, growing old, right? Death and burial, burial of your parents or grandparents, and therefore property, inheritance, and everything that coincides with the human life cycle. But lots of the Jewish tradition, I mean, including, you know, it becomes effectively Orthodoxy in rabbinic Judaism, believes in the resurrection, final resurrection. And so what some of these thinkers, mystics and others like Eliukohen do is they say, they try to think that through. They say, well, how can the word, how can the law abide forever? Because it's God's word. And yet it's not that any problem arises in the law, but rather that Israel, the people of God, become the kinds of creatures for whom the law as it's written sort of isn't apt anymore once they don't sin and die anymore. Right. And my argument in that chapter is that that is more or less, I think, exactly Paul's view, exactly Paul's point about the law. So when he says. When he says Christ is the end of the law, and yet he also says, I'm not abolishing it, I'm upholding it, he means both of those. And actually he can kind of get away with holding both of those. If he means something like, you know, the law as we know it, the law in the form it was given to legislate for, you know, us poor mortal creatures, if the resurrection is at hand, then it won't be exactly itself anymore. Well, it won't be exactly what it has been, but it will still be itself because. Yeah, and as you mentioned, there is some of this even in the Christian tradition as well. It's not the Christian tradition's majority way of reading Paul, but I have some discussion in that chapter of Origen of Alexandria, who in his commentary on Romans, does make something like this point. And Origen points out that when Paul says exactly this at the Beginning of Romans 10, Paul also talks about two righteousnesses, the righteousness from the Law or the Torah, and then the righteousness from Pistis, trust or faith. And Origen says what I came to think is right. He says Paul talks about two kinds of righteousness because Paul believes there are two kinds of life, right? The mortal life that humanity, including Israel, has lived for a very, very long time. And then the life of the resurrection, what Paul, along with other New Testament authors, calls eternal life. And so Origen's point is, Paul can say what he says about the law because he's recognizing a transition from the one kind of life to the other now that the life of the Resurrection is at hand. And so it's not that there's anything or that there ever was anything wrong with the law. It's just that the law cannot be what it always was once human beings become what they. Something different from. From what they were. And that it's part of the wisdom and the love of God that God accounts for that, right? That God sort of builds in. In God's Word, in the. In the law, in revelation itself, an ability to. To. To accommodate the change in anthropology, in. In the state of human existence there. They are some kind of complicated and even wild ideas, but I think actually they track really well with what Paul says. And they are there in the history of Judaism, not to mention some instances, the history of Christianity too. It's just that they are thinking a little more radically than most of us usually do.
- [38:45]
Jonathan Lookadoo
It's really helpful. I think it helps to make sense of a lot of things that are in Paul's letters. It also shows, I think, the value of reading figures later in the interpretive tradition, or perhaps not in the Pauline interpretive tradition, but that still can shed light on things that are going on within Paul's letters. So I found that chapter really helpful.
- [39:12]
Matthew Novinson
Yeah, there's a good. So Philip Alexander, who's an Irish and British rabbinic scholar, makes this point about the study of, like, the long tradition of Jewish and Christian interpretation. He says, of course, the rabbis or certain medieval Jewish mystics, they're not just interpreting Paul like Origen is when he writes a commentary. But Alexander's point, which has been really helpful to me, is both Jews and Christians, they're not reading exactly the same holy books in the same language. And Christians are, of course, reading New Testament as well as an Old and so on. But Alexander's point is, inasmuch as the Jewish and Christian traditions inherit the same corpus of scriptures in the form of the Jewish scriptures, Hebrew Bible, Old Testament, then they have a lot of the same puzzles. They have to solve and like this issue about the law and resurrection. And so it's not that there's many instances of direct literary dependence or that they're arguing with each other, although sometimes they do that. But it's really just these received theological or philosophical problems that come if you're reading the same scriptures. And so that methodological point from Alexander was really helpful to me in this kind of line of argument.
- [40:37]
Jonathan Lookadoo
That makes sense, that clarifies a lot. Well, there's much, hopefully our listeners will, I'm sure, have recognized, but there's much for anyone who's interested in what Paul said to consider as they're reading your book. I wonder what have I not asked about that our listeners should know?
- [40:58]
Matthew Novinson
Oh, it's hard to think of things because that was some very fine question asking. I mean, you know, if, if listeners are interested, you know, there are more. There are chapters on justification by faith versus justification from works of the law. There's a discussion of who Paul's opponents are. The, you know, the, the question whether Paul is opposed to not just Judaism, but quote unquote, Jewish Christianity, which is a long kind of problem in New Testament studies. There's a chapter about legalism, which is another one of these modern terms that has done a lot of work for readers of Paul. But I try to resolve that to my own satisfaction at least. There's a chapter on the phenomenon of Christians coming to call themselves the true spiritual Israel, which happens certainly in the second century, and a lot of people have attributed to Paul, although I argue that Paul does not, in fact, do that. So there's a lot. There's lots more there, although you have, you know, pretty well drawn out a lot of the main lines of the argument. So thanks for that.
- [42:09]
Jonathan Lookadoo
Oh, not at all. And there is, yeah, there's. There's much more that podcasts can cover. A lot. But maybe not everything so.
- [42:17]
Matthew Novinson
Well.
- [42:18]
Jonathan Lookadoo
Matt, I know we've taken up a lot of your time today, I guess. Can I ask you what you're working on now and what we might then look forward to from you in the future?
- [42:29]
Matthew Novinson
Yeah, well, as you and I are talking, you know, the new semester has just started, so at the moment, I'm most of all teaching. I'm teaching a course on Judaism in the New Testament at Princeton Seminary and also a PhD seminar reading Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho. So interesting teaching stuff going on. But, you know, research wise, I'm still working on Paul. And in particular, the big project presently is a commentary on Paul's letter to the Philippians. So, yeah, that's the main project that's always waiting between classroom sessions and so on.
- [43:10]
Jonathan Lookadoo
Commentaries have a way of doing that. They're always there. Well, the commentary on Philippians sounds like a great project, so I know I will be looking forward to that very much. But thank you very much for being on the show today to discuss your book, Paul and Judaism at the End of History. I've really enjoyed this conversation.
- [43:32]
Matthew Novinson
Yeah. Thanks to you, Jonathan.
- [43:33]
Jonathan Lookadoo
Yeah. Well, thank you very much. And thanks so much to our listeners. Take care, everyone.
- [43:51]
Matthew Novinson
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