ABSTRACT
I To speak of "the Jew Paul" has an unnerving ring about it. The tradition in Protestant New Testament scholarship has been rather to distance Paul as far as possible from his Jewish heritage. The classic Reformation "law/gospel" antithesis usually carried with it as its fateful shadow the more virulent antithesis "Judaism/Christianity;' with the assumption that it was Paul's formulation of the gospel in conflict with his Jewish opponents that is crystallized in that antithesis. At the beginning of the modern period of Pauline scholarship, F.C. Baur formulated Paul's theological significance in terms of Christianity's breaking through and free from the bounds of national Iudaism.! And a hundred years ago Adolf Harnack could characterize Paul's greatness as lying in the fact that he broke tyranny of the law and transplanted the gospel into the Gentile world.? There is no need to dwell on the horrors of sixty years ago. But the fact remains that it was still easier in the Bultmann and post-Bultmann generation-the postHolocaust decades-to speak denigratingly of the Jewas Paul's opponent, as the type of "sinful; self-reliance" and "unceasing self-assurance,"> rather than of Paul himself as "the Jew."
