Paul’s Letter to the Romans 12:17-21
paraphrased in The Message
Don’t hit back; discover beauty in everyone. If you’ve got it in you, get along with everybody. Don’t insist on getting even; that’s not for you to do. “I’ll do the judging,” says God. “I’ll take care of it.”
Our Scriptures tell us that if you see your enemy hungry, go buy that person lunch, or if he’s thirsty, get him a drink. Your generosity will surprise him with goodness. Don’t let evil get the best of you; get the best of evil by doing good.
Reframing the Apostle through
the lens of Torah, mission, and Torat Edom
Perhaps the Apostle Paul was the most agile and prolific Pharisee of the Hillelite School. His real opposition was not to Torah itself but first to the political messianism that had fused nationalist fervor with apocalyptic expectation but then to opportunity to diversify the growing Jesus Movement among the nations.
He operated within Pikuach Nefesh (to save a life especially on the Sabbath). His “conversion,” then, was not a betrayal of Judaism but the kind of spiritual awakening found throughout the faithful — a turning from zeal for control to zeal for grace. Included in this is the understanding of what Paul meant by the works of the law.
James Tabor rightly emphasizes Paul’s importance for understanding Jesus of Nazareth. Yet he continues to read both figures through the lens of older German-critical paradigms—Bauer, Schweitzer, and the early “historical Jesus” school—which remain bound to Roman revisionism and its false dichotomy between law and grace. They overlook that Jesus Himself stood firmly within the Hillelite tradition: a preacher of mercy, not revolution; of repentance, not revolt.
Paul simply carried that same Hillelite impulse beyond Judea, embodying what Torat Edom calls the reconciliation of justice and mercy across nations. Yet before his encounter on the Damascus road—preceded by his resistance to false messianic movements—Paul may well have regarded Jesus of Nazareth and His talmudim as representing the same political distortions he opposed. This helps explain his presence at the stoning of Stephen in Acts 7, when zeal for purity eclipsed mercy.
Therefore, I believe Tabor misses a crucial foundation: Paul’s transformation was not from Judaism to Christianity, but from defensive zeal to faithful discernment—the awakening of a Hillelite heart under Gamaliel’s tutelage, in a time when Shammaite Pharisees clearly held sway.
In Paul and Jesus (2012) and The Jesus Dynasty (2006), Tabor portrays Paul as a radical innovator who diverged sharply from the original Jerusalem leadership (James and Peter). He argues that Paul’s theology introduced a new, mystical Christ-religion that broke continuity with Torah observance and Jewish identity. Tabor sees Paul as influenced more by apocalyptic revelation and Greco-Roman mystery traditions than by any rabbinic or Pharisaic school.
Within Torat Edom, Paul becomes the hinge between Israel and Edom, between the prophetic conscience of Torah and the philosophical restlessness of the Gentile world. He translates the faith of Abraham into covenantal language that Edom could hear without severing Israel’s root. His mission was not to invent a new religion but to graft estranged branches back into the cultivated tree — to bring the spirit of Hillel into the world of Caesar, where mercy would have to take the form of mission.
Paul’s intensity about the “Second Coming” must be read through that same lens. His expectation of the Lord’s return was not obsession but prophetic urgency — the Hillelite conviction that redemption begins whenever heaven touches earth through acts of mercy. His cry of Maranatha! expresses the nearness of the world-to-come pressing into history, not escapism from it. For him, the “coming” was both a promise and a present reality: the Kingdom already breaking in through transformed lives.
Seen this way, Paul is not the founder of Christianity but the redeemer of misunderstanding — the bridge where the light of Torah begins to heal the nations and where Jacob and Esau start, at last, to recognize one another again.
As someone who has served in Christian mission for more than forty years, I understand this deeply. Paul’s urgency, his crossing of cultural boundaries, and his unrelenting hope for the Lord’s appearing are not abstractions — they are the missionary heartbeat itself. Wherever the gospel enters new soil, it meets the same tension between zeal and mercy, nationalism and grace, that Paul faced. His letters read less like theological essays and more like field reports from the frontier of redemption.
And perhaps that is what Paul knew most clearly: life is short.
Not short in despair, but short in opportunity — short enough that mercy must never wait, that reconciliation must never be postponed. His haste was not fear of time running out, but love refusing to waste a moment.
