“Scripture is its own light.” — Martin Luther
1. Bad Way, Bad Title, but a Helpful Matrix
Gabriele Boccaccini’s Paul’s Three Paths to Salvation is a bold attempt to resolve Paul’s paradoxes by mapping them onto a triptych of Jewish and Christian soteriologies. It is also, as its very title betrays, an unfortunate reduction. “Three paths” suggests a theology of religious parallelism—three ways to reach God—when Paul’s letters and the whole prophetic corpus testify to one revelation and one mission.
Gabriele Boccaccini’s Paul’s Three Paths to Salvation is a bold attempt to resolve Paul’s paradoxes by mapping them onto a triptych of Jewish and Christian soteriologies. It is also, as its very title betrays, an unfortunate reduction. “Three paths” suggests a theology of religious parallelism—three ways to reach God—when Paul’s letters and the whole prophetic corpus testify to one revelation and one mission.
Still, even a bad title can conceal a good map. Boccaccini’s work helps readers perceive what Torat Edom calls the matrix of covenantal diversity within Second Temple Judaism: Torah-faithful, Wisdom-mystical, and Apocalyptic-Enochic strands that debated how divine justice meets human freedom. His genius is cartographic, not theological. He sketches the terrain well, but he mistakes the landscape for the destination.
2. What Boccaccini Sees
Boccaccini reads Paul as a Jewish thinker standing amid these rival schools. In his reconstruction, Paul envisions:
1. A Jewish path—Torah observance within Israel’s covenant;
2. A Gentile path—righteousness by conscience or natural law; and
3. A universal path—forgiveness through the Messiah’s atoning faithfulness.
The proposal is attractive to scholars weary of Protestant-Catholic polemics. It resists supersessionism, honors Judaism’s integrity, and offers a taxonomy that keeps Paul within his own people. Yet the structure risks turning covenant into bureaucracy. “Three paths” evokes the bureaucratic pluralism of empire, not the living unity of revelation.
3. Why the Title Misleads
In Torat Edom, revelation is not divided. Israel’s Torah and the nations’ calling form one covenantal drama, not parallel routes to salvation. Boccaccini’s schema may mirror how the Roman world thought—multiple religiones licitae, each tolerated in its lane—but Scripture resists such partition. The prophets saw the nations streaming to Zion, not filing separate returns to their respective gods.
Paul likewise insists on unity within plurality. His Gentile mission is not an alternate covenant but Israel’s own vocation reaching maturity: “to bless all families of the earth.” (Gen 12:3; Rom 4:16-18) When Boccaccini multiplies “paths,” he unwittingly resurrects the very ethnic divisions Paul labored to transcend.
4. Determinism and the Enochic Matrix
To his credit, Boccaccini anchors Paul in the Enochic current of apocalyptic Judaism—the literature of watchers, heavenly tablets, and cosmic judgment. Yet this is precisely where his synthesis collapses.
Perhaps Paul was addressing these Enochian stories as “fables” in Titus 1:14—myths that turned 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 passive before decrees inscribed on heavenly tablets.
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; mercy re-writes what fate inscribes. Where 1 Enoch sees immutable cycles of fall and punishment, Paul proclaims the possibility of renewal—teshuvah—through participation in the Messiah’s faithfulness. Thus, while Boccaccini supplies the historical matrix, Paul offers the midrashic inversion: the re-personalization of divine justice within the living covenant.
Boccaccini’s Paul remains half-trapped in heaven’s ledger; the apostolic Paul writes mercy into history. The difference is not minor—it is the difference between prophecy and prognosis.
5. Works, Judgment, and the Return of Legalism
Boccaccini’s famous formula—“justified by faith, judged by works”—tries to balance grace and ethics, but it teeters back into the legalism Luther denounced and Paul dismantled. In his zeal to rehabilitate Jewish law, he forgets that Paul’s concern was never with Torah per se but with status—how the law’s boundary markers (circumcision, food, calendar) became criteria of belonging.
As Reformed interpreters such as Carson, Schreiner, Hamilton, and Seifrid have maintained, justification is a divine verdict of acquittal grounded in Christ’s atoning work—yet by isolating it from Israel’s covenantal calling, they truncate its purpose.
By re-introducing works at a final eschatological bar, Boccaccini blurs Paul’s radical claim that judgment itself has already been rendered in Messiah’s cross. The verdict—dikaios—is covenantal adoption, not moral probation though imputation but vivafication. Torat Edom insists that good works flow from restored relationship, not as a second trial after grace. To be “judged by works” is discipleship, not by a cosmic accounting system.
6. The Centrality of Judaism and the One Revelation
Boccaccini’s empathy for Judaism is laudable, but his tri-path model isolates it. The Torah becomes one compartment in a theological triage. Torat Edom restores Judaism to the center: Israel is not one path among three but the root from which the others draw life. Gentile participation is grafting, not parallel gardening.
Here Mark Nanos is closer to the mark: Paul’s Gentiles are gerim toshavim—righteous outsiders attached to Israel’s covenantal orbit. ¹ Pamela Eisenbaum expands this, portraying Paul not as apostate but as covenant broker, translating Israel’s faith for the nations. ² And Jason Staples reminds us that Israel’s restoration and the nations’ inclusion are one eschatological act, not two dispensations. ³ Together they retrieve what Torat Edom names the one revelation, one mission principle: God’s covenant extends, it never divides.
7. Beyond Conscience: The Noahide Witness of the Nations
Boccaccini’s “Gentile path by conscience” assumes an interior moral faculty detached from Sinai—a modern echo of Stoic natural law. But Paul’s world, and the Torah’s, knew no such autonomous ethics. Torat Edom reclaims this ground through the Noahide covenant, the original charter of moral partnership between God and the nations.
Boccaccini’s “Gentile path by conscience” assumes an interior moral faculty detached from Sinai—a modern echo of Stoic natural law. But Paul’s world, and the Torah’s, knew no such autonomous ethics. Torat Edom reclaims this ground through the Noahide covenant, the original charter of moral partnership between God and the nations.
When Paul speaks of the law “written on their hearts” (Rom 2:14–15), he is not inventing a universal conscience; he is invoking the sheva mitzvot b’nei Noach—the moral code entrusted to humanity after the Flood. These are not an alternate salvation system but the minimal conditions for covenantal participation. The nations are judged by how they honor life, justice, and fidelity—commandments that echo Sinai yet predate it.
Thus, the so-called “Gentile path” is not a separate route of righteousness by conscience, but the Noahide vocation itself: to live faithfully within creation’s moral order under Israel’s light. Paul’s mission to the nations is not a concession to pluralism but the renewal of that primeval covenant through Messiah.
The Chochmei Umot HaOlam—the wise of the nations—stand here as witnesses, not as independent moralists, but sadly still on their own. Their pursuit of justice is meaningful precisely because it resonates with Torah’s melody. Even outside formal revelation, they echo its rhythm. To speak of “conscience” apart from this covenantal grammar is to sever ethics from revelation—a move both the Enlightenment and Boccaccini make, though for different reasons.
The Noahide framework, by contrast, keeps moral knowledge relational. It binds reason to mercy, justice to revelation. It situates every Gentile virtue within the same covenantal economy that binds Israel. There are not three paths but one path walked at different altitudes—Israel on the mountain, the nations ascending by the same trail. Let conscience NOT be your guide!
8. Luther and the Perspicuity of Scripture
Here Luther’s defiant axiom—Scripture is its own light—becomes prophetic again. Against both medieval allegory and modern determinism, Luther insisted that revelation needs no secondary illumination; its clarity is covenantal, born of God’s trustworthiness. The same conviction animates Paul’s letters: God has spoken once, through Israel, and the echo fills the world.
Here Luther’s defiant axiom—Scripture is its own light—becomes prophetic again. Against both medieval allegory and modern determinism, Luther insisted that revelation needs no secondary illumination; its clarity is covenantal, born of God’s trustworthiness. The same conviction animates Paul’s letters: God has spoken once, through Israel, and the echo fills the world.
Where Boccaccini multiplies interpretive lenses—Jewish, Gentile, universal—Paul keeps one flame. The Gospel’s light is not refracted through sectarian prisms but shines as a single beam of grace. That unity of illumination is what Torat Edom calls covenantal realism: revelation is cruciform, concrete, moral, and historical, not abstract or fated.
9. Historical Value, Theological Cost
None of this nullifies the value of Boccaccini’s book. His matrix is immensely helpful for students trying to locate Paul within Judaism rather than against it. It also nudges Protestant readers to stop caricaturing Jewish “works.” E. P. Sanders, Dunn, and Wright prepared that path; Boccaccini maps parts of it. Yet the theological cost of his tripartite scheme is high as are the former as guides Christ’s cross. By granting parallel salvations, he risks reviving precisely what Paul feared in Galatians: a gospel “of another kind.” (Gal 1:6) Plurality becomes parity; covenant becomes concession. The Messiah’s faithfulness becomes one option among several.
10. The Torat Edom Alternative
In Torat Edom, the contrast is stark: revelation is singular. The Torah is not one lane of redemption but the grammar of all redemption. Paul’s proclamation to the nations is the Torah spoken in another tongue, not a new religion. The so-called “three paths” collapse into one pilgrimage—the nations ascending to Zion through the covenant’s mercy.
In Torat Edom, the contrast is stark: revelation is singular. The Torah is not one lane of redemption but the grammar of all redemption. Paul’s proclamation to the nations is the Torah spoken in another tongue, not a new religion. The so-called “three paths” collapse into one pilgrimage—the nations ascending to Zion through the covenant’s mercy.
Boccaccini’s pluralism, though historically plausible, is theologically thin. History shows that whenever Israel’s covenant is decentered, the nations lose their compass. Without the root, the branches wither into mere ethics or mysticisms.
11. Re-reading Paul: From Determinism to Responsibility
Paul’s letters invert the fatalism of both empire and apocalyptic myth. “God has consigned all to disobedience that He may have mercy on all” (Rom 11:32). This is not predestination; it is paradoxical freedom. God’s sovereignty is revealed not in cosmic automation but in mercy that re-opens history.
Here Torat Edom parts ways with both Enochic fatalism and Reformed determinism. The covenant is relational, not mechanical. Human beings are responsible partners in divine mission. Paul’s vision of grace—unmerited yet transformative—calls forth active obedience. Determinism deadens; covenant in mission awakens.
12. One Revelation, One Mission
Ultimately, Paul’s Three Paths fails because it fractures what the prophets and apostles hold together. There is only one revelation—the Word given to Israel—and only one mission—the reconciliation of the nations through that Word. The multiplicity Boccaccini celebrates must be gathered, not scattered.
To read Paul rightly is to stand where he stood: between Torah and Empire, faith and fate, Israel and the nations. The apostle’s genius was not to invent a new religion but to unveil the Torah’s universal horizon. That horizon is where Torat Edom locates itself—a covenantal realism that refuses both supersessionism and relativism.
13. Conclusion: The Light Remains One
Boccaccini’s book is worth reading precisely because it irritates the complacent. It reminds scholars that Paul was thoroughly Jewish and that Second Temple Judaism was diverse.
This is precisely where Boccaccini could have consulted Harvey Falk’s Jesus the Pharisee. Falk recovers the early rabbinic vision of Gentile righteousness as Noahide faithfulness—a category that predates and undergirds Paul’s mission. Had Boccaccini followed Falk, he might have seen that Paul’s “Gentiles by faith” are not inventing a new moral order but fulfilling the ger toshav ideal: those attached to Israel’s covenant without becoming proselytes. Falk’s framework dissolves the illusion of a purely “conscience-based” path and restores the Pharisaic universalism that already welcomed Gentile obedience within Torah’s light.
Luther’s dictum still stands: Scripture is its own light. The Torah interprets itself in the Messiah; the Messiah fulfills the Torah by extending its mercy to the nations. Paul, read through Torat Edom, is the herald of that indivisible grace—a Jew of Jews who saw in Israel’s wounds the healing of the world though a very precise narrative.
Bad title, bad way—but a helpful matrix. And perhaps that is how God unfolds revelation: on crooked scrolls, with straight light.
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Endnotes
1. Mark D. Nanos, The Mystery of Romans: The Jewish Context of Paul’s Letter (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996).
1. Mark D. Nanos, The Mystery of Romans: The Jewish Context of Paul’s Letter (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996).
2. Pamela Eisenbaum, Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle (New York: HarperOne, 2009).
3. Jason A. Staples, The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); idem, Paul and the Resurrection of Israel (Cambridge: CUP, 2024).
4. Gabriele Boccaccini, Paul’s Three Paths to Salvation: The Good News and the Law (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020).
5. E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977).
6. James D. G. Dunn, “The New Perspective on Paul,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 65 (1983): 95–122.
7. N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013).
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. Harvey Falk, Jesus the Pharisee: A New Look at the Jewishness of Jesus (New York: Paulist, 1985; repr. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2003).
11. Martin Luther, De Servo Arbitrio (On the Bondage of the Will), 1525.
