Introduction
The reading of Paul outlined thus far—situating his stance on works of the law within the concrete socio-political reality of the Roman Empire—was not always obvious to Christian interpreters. For much of Christian history, especially after the Reformation, Paul was viewed almost exclusively through a theological lens focused on individual salvation. Martin Luther’s sixteenth-century monastic struggle against “works” led him to equate Paul’s “law” with human striving, and to read justification by faith as the timeless drama of a guilty conscience seeking mercy.¹ However well this preaches, the specifically Jewish and corporate dimensions of Paul’s letters were eclipsed, and Judaism itself was caricatured as legalistic—awaiting liberation through grace.
The New Perspective and the Re-contextualization of Paul
In the late twentieth century a seismic shift occurred in Pauline studies. Krister Stendahl, E. P. Sanders, James D. G. Dunn, and N. T. Wright spearheaded what became known as the New Perspective on Paul. Stendahl’s essay “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West” (1963) argued that modern readers had projected their own psychological concerns onto Paul, whereas Paul’s own question was not “How can I find a gracious God?” but “How do Gentiles belong to Israel’s God?” ²
Building on that, E. P. Sanders’ Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977) demonstrated that Second-Temple Judaism operated on “covenantal nomism”—grace first, obedience second. ³ Israel’s law was the means of maintaining covenant fellowship, not earning it. Paul’s critique, therefore, could not have been directed against a works-righteousness that never existed.
James D. G. Dunn refined this by identifying the social function of the Law. In his 1983 lecture coining the “New Perspective,” Dunn argued that erga nomou referred to practices marking Jewish identity—circumcision, dietary rules, and Sabbaths.⁴ Paul’s opposition to these “badges of covenant membership” was not moral antinomianism but a protest against re-erecting ethnic boundaries that the Messiah had torn down. The justification of Jew and Gentile alike apart from works of the law created a single, trans-ethnic community of grace.⁵
N. T. Wright carried this further by embedding Paul’s gospel within the imperial world of Rome. Terms like euangelion (“gospel”) and titles like Kyrios (“Lord”) were already imperial slogans proclaiming Caesar’s dominion.⁶ For Wright, Paul’s announcement of Iēsous Kyrios was a deliberate inversion of imperial ideology: allegiance to a crucified Jew rather than the emperor. The apostle’s churches thus became “cells of people loyal to another king.”⁷ In this sense Paul’s doctrine of justification was politically charged; it inaugurated a multi-ethnic assembly that challenged Rome’s ethnos-based system of legitimacy.
Beyond the New Perspective: Paul within Judaism
A further wave of research—often gathered under the rubric “Paul within Judaism”—has taken these insights yet deeper, insisting that Paul never ceased to identify as a Torah-faithful Jew and that his Gentile mission must be read from inside that matrix rather than as its repudiation.
Mark D. Nanos re-situates Paul within synagogue life, portraying him as a Jewish emissary adjudicating halakhic questions for Gentiles entering Israel’s hope as gerim toshavim (resident sojourners).⁸ For Nanos, Paul’s rulings in Romans 14–15 about food and holy days are not dismissals of Torah but guidance for mixed communities to live together without Gentiles presuming Jewish status. By refusing circumcision for Gentiles, Paul protected both Jewish distinctiveness and the integrity of divine grace. His opposition to “works of law” thus refused not morality but ethnic gate-keeping and status-seeking—precisely the kind of religio licita maneuvering Rome rewarded.
Pamela Eisenbaum strengthens this covenantal reading. In Paul Was Not a Christian (2009) she dismantles the conversion paradigm that dominated Christian interpretation.⁹ Paul, she argues, was not founding a new religion but articulating Israel’s covenant for the nations. His gospel of grace is an intra-Jewish innovation that re-reads the Torah’s promise to Abraham as God’s plan to bless Gentiles through Israel’s faithfulness. Eisenbaum recasts pistis Christou as the faith-obedience of Christ and those who share it—a posture of emunah rather than a creed detached from Torah. Gentiles are justified as Gentiles; Jews remain Jews. This, she notes, dissolves the false dichotomy of “law versus grace” and aligns with the Torat Edom vision of covenantal reconciliation between Jacob and Edom: grace that perfects justice, not abolishes it.
Jason A. Staples provides the eschatological dimension. In The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism (2021) and Paul and the Resurrection of Israel (2024) he re-examines how Israel’s restoration was conceived in prophetic and apocalyptic sources. ¹⁰ For Staples, Paul’s incorporation of Gentiles fulfills Israel’s promised resurrection: the scattered tribes are re-gathered through the Messiah, and Gentiles, once “not my people,” are joined to that resurrected body. Paul’s “Israel of God” (Gal 6:16) is not a Gentile church replacing Israel but Israel renewed and expanded to include the nations. ¹¹ Staples’ analysis resolves the supersessionist dilemma and coheres with Nanos’s and Eisenbaum’s insistence on continuity.
Together, Nanos, Eisenbaum, and Staples complete the trajectory initiated by Sanders, Dunn, and Wright. They restore Paul’s covenantal realism: a Judaism open to the nations yet faithful to its ancestral law; a gospel that rejects both ethnic exclusivism and imperial assimilation. In Torat Edom terms, Paul’s theology enacts reconciliation between grace and justice, Israel and the nations—a divine economy where covenant fidelity transcends political privilege.
Paul Between Law and Empire
The intersection of Paul’s appeal to Caesar and his critique of works of the law reveals a profound convergence of theology, law, and empire. What might appear as two separate storylines—one juridical, one doctrinal—are in fact two dimensions of the same reality: the transformation of covenant identity in a world ruled by Rome.
By refusing to impose Jewish boundary markers on Gentiles, Paul not only upheld the gospel of grace but also relinquished the security of Judaism’s religio licita status. His decision thrust the early ekklesia into the uncertain space between legal recognition and suspicion—between the synagogue’s umbrella of protection and the empire’s instinct to suppress novelty. In Roman categories, a religion’s legitimacy rested on ancestry and antiquity; Paul’s assemblies possessed neither. Yet their message—faith in the crucified and risen Lord—claimed to be the consummation of Israel’s ancient faith.
This paradox becomes clearer through Gabriele Boccaccini’s reconstruction of the Second Temple matrix.¹³ Boccaccini perhaps overstates that Judaism in Paul’s day was not monolithic but a living spectrum of covenantal theologies—Torah-centered, sapiential, and apocalyptic—each seeking to reconcile divine justice and mercy. His mapping of the Enochic stream exposes the deep currents of angelology and predestined judgment that may have shaped much Jewish imagination in the late Second Temple age. Yet here lies a decisive divergence. See a fuller critique.
Perhaps Paul was addressing these Enochian stories as “fables” in Titus 1:14—myths that turned divine revelation into fatalism. The Enochic corpus, for all its grandeur, tends toward determinism: it envisions a cosmic order sealed in advance, a tribunal without appeal. Humanity’s role is largely negative in the narrative of Scripture, before decrees inscribed on heavenly tablets solidified this propositionally.
Paul, however—and the Torat Edom framework that retrieves his covenantal realism—moves in the opposite direction. He transforms apocalyptic inevitability into covenantal responsibility: grace re-opens what determinism closes, and mercy re-writes what fate inscribes. Where 1 Enoch envisions immutable cycles of fall and punishment, Paul proclaims the possibility of teshuvah by the imputation of Jesus Christ’s faithfulness. Thus, while Boccaccini supplies the historical matrix, Paul offers the midrashic inversion—the re-personalization of divine justice within the living covenant, moving from the collective to the individual.
Mark Nanos places Paul squarely within this halakhic world, distinguishing Gentile participation from Jewish covenant obligation.¹⁴ His Gentiles were gerim toshavim—righteous outsiders who honored Israel’s God without presuming Israel’s vocation. Pamela Eisenbaum clarifies that Paul was not an apostate but a covenant broker, interpreting Israel’s mission for the Gentiles and translating Torah-faithfulness into the Messiah’s universal mercy.¹⁵ Jason Staples extends the picture eschatologically: the inclusion of the nations does not replace Israel but fulfills Israel’s own resurrection and restoration.¹⁶ Together with Paula Fredriksen’s attention to Paul’s apocalyptic urgency, these scholars recover the apostle as a Jew whose gospel is both faithful to Israel and expansive toward the nations.
Against the backdrop of Roman jurisprudence, such faith was inherently subversive. Rome’s pax deorum was maintained by ritual conformity; Paul’s eirēnē tou Theou arose from divine reconciliation that abolished ethnic boasting. “There is neither Jew nor Greek… for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28) was not abstract spirituality but a social revolution transcending the empire’s ethnic and civic order. To live under this banner was to inhabit a gray zone—no longer protected by ancestral law, not yet recognized by imperial favor.
Luke’s portrait of Paul before Felix, Festus, Agrippa, and Caesar dramatizes his audacity in the face of much opposition. Each Roman magistrate finds no crime in him, yet none can classify the ekklesia under Rome’s legal taxonomy. Paul’s appeal forced the empire to confront a people who were neither a nation nor a cult but a trans-ethnic covenant body. His journey to Rome was thus more than a missionary itinerary—it was a theological trial: would the empire’s justice make room for the justice of God?
In the years that followed, Nero’s persecutions, the fiscus Iudaicus, and Trajan’s edicts made the answer tragically clear. Christianity, stripped of Judaism’s legal charter, was declared a superstitio nova et malefica. Yet this loss of legal protection became paradoxically the ground of the church’s universality. In Torat Edom terms, Paul’s rejection of works of the law was also his refusal of imperial validation—the renunciation of righteousness by statute, whether Torah’s or Caesar’s.
Paul’s theology is therefore both cosmic and covenantal. The Messiah fulfills the Torah not by abolishing it but by universalizing its justice (mishpat ) through grace (chesed ). The Law that once marked the Jewish nation becomes, through the Spirit, the moral architecture of a renewed creation. Yet, as Nanos and Eisenbaum insist, Israel’s vocation endures; the root still sustains the grafted branches. The nations are redeemed with Israel, never apart from her.
From this vantage, justification is both spiritual and political. It is spiritual because it grounds righteousness in divine mercy rather than ritual status; political because it dethrones every empire—religious or civic—that defines worth through ancestry or power. The Messiah’s cross unmasks both Jewish and Roman systems of privilege. “God has shut up all in disobedience that He may have mercy on all” (Rom 11:32) remains a sentence of universal emancipation.
When Paul appealed to Caesar, he embodied the ekklesia’s appeal to history itself. His chains mark the hinge where covenant passes through empire and grace triumphs over legality. Rome’s verdict was death, but God’s was resurrection. In time, the persecuted faith would transform the very empire that condemned it.
Thus the legacy of Paul’s decision—to trust grace over law and truth over security—became the pattern of the church’s life. The ekklesia that arose from his mission is defined not by ethnicity, circumcision, or charter, but by faith working through love (pistis di’ agapēs energoumenē). It is a people licensed not by Rome but by heaven, still living between law and empire, bearing the same paradoxical freedom: “as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich” (2 Cor 6:10).
Endnotes
1. Martin Luther, Preface to the Epistle to the Romans (1522).
2. Krister Stendahl, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” Harvard Theological Review 56 (1963): 199–215.
3. E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), esp. 236–238.
4. James D. G. Dunn, “The New Perspective on Paul,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 65 (1983): 95–122.
5. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 344–351.
6. N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 1020–1030.
7. Wright, “Paul’s Gospel and Caesar’s Empire,” in Paul and Politics, ed. R. A. Horsley (Harrisburg: Trinity Press, 2000), 160–183.
8. Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).
9. Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (New York: Vintage, 2008).
10. Josephus, Antiquities 14.185–264; 19.278–291 (edicts of Julius Caesar and Claudius).
11. Philo, Legatio ad Gaium (Embassy to Gaius), §§ 154–331.
12. Tacitus, Annals 15.44; Suetonius, Claudius 25.4; Nero 16.2.
13. Gabriele Boccaccini, Beyond the Essene Hypothesis: The Parting of the Ways between Qumran and Enochic Judaism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998); idem, Paul’s Three Paths to Salvation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020). While Boccaccini tends toward an Enochic determinism that contradicts the covenantal freedom central to Torat Edom, his taxonomy of Second Temple theologies remains indispensable for mapping Paul’s context. See my critique.
14. Mark D. Nanos, The Mystery of Romans: The Jewish Context of Paul’s Letter (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996).
15. Pamela Eisenbaum, Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle (New York: HarperOne, 2009).
16. Jason A. Staples, The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); idem, Paul and the Resurrection of Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024).
17. Krister Stendahl, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” HTR 56 (1963): 199–215 (repr. for reference).
18. E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977) (repr. for reference).
19. James D. G. Dunn, “The New Perspective on Paul,” BJR 65 (1983): 95–122 (repr. for reference).
20. N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (2013); idem, “Paul’s Gospel and Caesar’s Empire,” in Paul and Politics (2000).
