The effort to turn Gentiles to the god of Israel, Munck urged, originated uniquely within Christianity, and even then only because it was linked there, from the beginning, to the over-arching faith of these earliest Christians as Jews in the biblical promises of (Jewish) Israel’s redemption (1959: 264–271). The apostles’ conviction that they stood at the edge of the end of time, between Christ’s resurrection and his imminent parousia, said Munck, fuelled their missions, and Paul’s as well (‘Christ will return soon’, 1959: 276; recalling Schweitzer 1912 and 1930). What then of ‘Paul the convert’? Insisting that Paul saw Christianity as entirely within and consonant with his native religion (Munck 1959: 279), reconfiguring the imagined relationships between Jews, Jewish Christians, and Paul as contiguous rather than contrasting, Munck urged as well that Paul’s ‘Damascus experience’ be seen not as a ‘conversion’ but as Paul’s reception of his prophetic ‘call’. (Indeed, Munck’s chapter, ‘The Call’, opens his book, 11‒35; see too Roetzel 1998: 44–68.) Paul’s own description of his experience in Gal 1:15—‘God. . . set me apart in my mother’s womb and called me [kalesas] through his grace [revealing] his son in me so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles’—echoes the language of Isaiah 49:1‒6, when the prophet received his call to preach salvation to the Gentiles, and the language of Jeremiah 1:4, whom God also knew ‘before I formed you in the womb and I appointed you a prophet to the Gentiles’ (Munck 1959: 24–26; enriched by further consideration of traditions in Ezekiel and in Enoch, 31‒33). Paul’s apostleship in his own view, insisted Munck, began with this commission, not with a ‘conversion’.
While Dahl held that ‘conversion’ was the term appropriate to Paul’s lifechanging experience, he also emphasized that it should not connote a ‘change of religion’ (1977 [orig. pub. 1956]: 72 n. 6). Paul and his fellow apostles, Dahl insisted, remained committed to the eschatological redemption of Israel, and it was to this end that Paul engaged in his mission to Gentiles (1991 [orig. pub. 1953]: 22). n Munck’s, Romans 9‒11, with its conviction that ‘all Israel will be saved’ (Rom 11:26), set the plumb line for Pauline interpretation. Stendahl, meanwhile, building upon Munck, championed ‘call’ over ‘conversion’ in his important essay, ‘Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West’ (1963; orig. Swedish 1960).
The three salient points made by these scholars were these: (1) constructed his mission within, not against, Judaism. (2) Paul’s transformation had nothing to do with a sense of personal sinfulness and frustration with the Law. (3) Paul’s time-frame was utterly eschatological.
Over the past several decades, looking back to the ‘Call, Commission’ model, another way of interpreting Paul has emerged: ‘Paul within Judaism’. (E.g., Johnson Hodge 2007: 6–9; Eisenbaum 2009: 216–249; Elliott 1990, 1994; Fredriksen 2017; Zetterholm 2009: 161–163; Nanos 1996, 2017; Novenson 2018, 2020; Runesson 2008; Thiessen 2016 Campbell 2018, Ehrensberger 2013). Like the mid-twentieth-century Scandinavian scholars, they see Paul’s transformative experience not as his ‘conversion’, but as his commission and call; and they emphasize eschatology. In his own view, Paul was always a Jew, in both phases of his life. In fact—and again in his own view—Paul was always an excellent Jew in both phases of his life. Before receiving his call, ‘I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people’ (Gal 1:14); ‘As to righteousness under the Law, I was blameless’ (Phil 3:6). And given his own understanding of the message of Christ, Paul was also convinced that he was a superior Jew: chosen before birth by God himself to be an apostle to the Gentiles (Gal 1:15‒16); empowered by God’s own spirit to prophesy and to teach (1 Cor 14 passim); superior to other missionaries to an extraordinary degree on account of his fortitude in suffering (2 Cor 11 passim) and on account of his elevated visions and revelations (2 Cor 12:1‒5). ‘By the grace of God I am what I am’, Paul proclaimed, adding (with no false modestly) ‘and God’s grace toward me was not in vain’ (1 Cor 15:10). Paul saw the message of Christ as absolutely synonymous with his native traditions and scriptures, thus with God’s ‘irrevocable’ promises to Israel, his ‘kinsmen by race’ (Rom 9:3; 11:19; cf. 15:8).
