Paul, Jewish and gentile sin have different histories and characteristics. For Paul, whereas gentiles are dominated by their passions and have corrupt minds as a punishment for ‘idolatry,’ Jews of his cosmic era are not idolaters and are not by dominated by their passions and corrupted minds. Paul instead has a different myth of Jewish sin. Paul’s claims about Jewish sin focus on disobedience to God, failures in loyalty / faithfulness, and lack of understanding of God’s cosmic timing. And his explanation is eschatological: it is the penultimate stage in God’s plan when sin among his people is intensified. This approach makes Paul at home among other Jewish writers of the Hellenistic and Roman periods who similarly feature eschatological schemes that tinker with periods of Jewish sin, often for polemical purposes (e.g., depict your opponents as prophesied leaders in sin). Paul’s myth of Jewish sin thus also serves his competitive interests: it discredits competing (real or imagined) Jewish Christ-teachers of gentiles since they disobey God, don’t even understand his timing or law, & are failures in pistis. A key point is that interpreters should not mine Paul’s claims about Jewish sin for his timeless observations of the actual sins of real Jews. What drives his mythmaking about Jewish sin are his eschatological schemes and his competitive rhetoric. Interpret accordingly. One other key point: We shouldn’t think of this as “Jewish apocalyptic influence on Paul,” as though Paul had to “borrow” an idea. He was a literate Jew among others who innovated with shared writings, myths about their God’s cosmic plans, and interpretations of cosmic timing.
Introduction: Ethnic Differentiation in Paul’s Letters
Like other ancient Mediterranean writings that focus on gods, or cult or philosophy, Paul’s letters participate in Greek and Roman rhetorics of ethnic difference. The point is not just that categories of Jew and gentile permeate these texts. Rather, Paul’s writing on topics traditionally considered as ‘universalist’ – the high God, his promises, what Christ accomplishes and how initiates participate in Christ’s pneuma – is animated by ancient ideas about kinship, patrilineal descent and people groups (P. Fredriksen, ‘How Jewish is God?: Divine Ethnicity in Paul’s Theology’, JBL 137 (2018) 193−212; C. Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in the Letters of Paul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); L. Sechrest, A Former Jew: Paul and the Dialectics of Race (LNTS; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010); S.K. Stowers, ‘What is Pauline Participation in Christ?’, Redefining First-Century Jewish and Christian Identities (eds. F. Udoh, S. Heschel, M. Chancey, and G. Tatum; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press) 352–71).
The growing ‘Radical New Perspective’ or ‘Paul within Judaism’ movement relates to this ethnic redescription. One of its basic claims is that when Paul dissociates keeping the Jewish law from following Christ, his arguments are ethnically specific: he speaks to gentiles. Examples of proponents of this movement who relate their arguments to ancient ethnic ideas:
P. Eisenbaum, ‘A Remedy for Having Been Born of a Woman: Jesus, Gentiles, and Genealogy in Romans’, JBL 123 (2004) 671–702; P. Fredriksen, Paul, The Pagans’ Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017); S.K. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); M. Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). S. Emanuel further amplifies this approach in combination with metacritical interrogation of how ‘Paul the Jew’ often functions in NT scholarship to render Paul more ethically palatable (The Apostle Paul on Jews, Gentiles and Who Gets Saved.
This movement creates an opportunity to think about ethnicity more widely in Paul’s mythmaking (See S.L. Young, Paul Among the Mythmakers: Sins, Gods, and Scriptures). Like other ancient Mediterranean writers, he presumes that different ethnē and their deities have different characteristics, histories, customs and cultic relations (Fredriksen, ‘Divine Ethnicity in Paul’s Theology’; Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs, 43–66). This ethnic sensibility likewise permeates his mythmaking about sin. Paul’s primary ethnic axis is Jews versus the ethnē, or gentiles (Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs, 48–9, 51). Commentators already hold that Paul can distinguish between Jewish and gentile sin, often via common readings of Rom 2.12 and 5.13–14 with which I, perhaps unexpectedly given my interests in this article, disagree. It is the significant majority view to read Rom 2.12a’s ‘all who have sinned apart from the law’ as a reference to gentile sin and 2.12b’s ‘all who have sinned under the law’ as a reference to Jewish sin, understanding ἀνόμως in 2.12a to mean ‘apart from’ or ‘without’ the Mosaic law (e.g., J.D.G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998) 135–37; J.A. Fitzmyer, Romans (New York: Doubleday, 1993) 305–6, 307–8; R. Jewett, Romans: A Commentary (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006) 210–11; T.H. Tobin, ‘Controversy and Continuity in Romans 1:18–3:20’, CBQ 55 (1993) 298–318, at 308–9). Following the dominant use of ἀνόμως in Greek literature as meaning wicked or lawless (in the sense of unrestrained or evil), I instead understand Paul to be writing about those ‘who sinned wickedly’ (ἀνόμως ἥμαρτον) versus those who sinned in more restrained ways within the framework of the law. The distinction is not between Jews and gentiles.
For a detailed argument to this effect, see Stowers, Rereading Romans, 134–40. See below for discussion of Rom 5.13–14. But we can be more specific about gentile versus Jewish sin: for Paul, these two distinct ethnic groups have different histories of sin that explain their respective sins’ distinct characteristics (B. Rainey, Religion, Ethnicity, and Xenophobia in the Bible (New York: Routledge, 2019) 233–5; S.K. Stowers, ‘Paul’s Four Discourses about Sin’, Celebrating Paul: Festschrift in Honor of Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, O.P., and Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J. (ed. P. Spitaler; Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association, 2011) 100–27, at 118). And these observations have traditionally been expected to reveal a deficient Judaism as a background or foil for a Christian Paul (see P. Eisenbaum, ‘Paul, Polemics, and the Problem of Essentialism’, BI 13 (2005) 224–38, at 225–31; M. Thiessen, ‘Conjuring Paul and Judaism Forty Years After Paul and Palestinian Judaism’, JJMJS 5 (2018) 7–20, at 9–11).
Not Idolatry, Passions, and Failed Minds for Jews
Any argument that Paul has ethnically inflected ideas about sin faces an obvious objection. According to long-established interpretive traditions in the field, Rom 5.12–21 offer Paul’s universal account of human sin through Adam, and this narrative underlies 1.18– 32’s sketch of general human moral, cultic and cognitive corruption (Dunn, Paul the Apostle, 91–92; D. Garlington, Faith, Obedience, and Perseverance: Aspects of Paul’s Letter to the Romans (WUNT 79; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994) 34–43; M. Hooker, ‘Adam in Romans I’, NTS 6 (1959) 297–306; J. Jervell, Imago Dei: Gen 1,26f. im Spätjudentum, in der Gnosis und in den paulischen Briefen (Göttingen: V&R, 1960) 317–18; J. Linebaugh, God, Grace, and Righteousness in Wisdom of Solomon and Paul’s Letter to the Romans: Texts in Conversation (Leiden: Brill, 2013) 111–15). Rom 1.18–32 to have only gentiles in view. Paul reuses culturally available mythological plotlines about the decline of civilisation in a Jewish idiom to sketch the corruptions of gentiles
On Paul’s reuse of civilization-decline materials, see:
Stowers, Rereading Romans, 83–125; Young, Paul Among the Mythmakers, Chapter 2, ‘Make Gentiles Masculine Again: The Gender of Decline and Salvation’. Debate about whether Jews are included in Rom 1.18–32’s sketch of sin remain active (see the preceding note for scholars who say yes). For a recent argument that only gentiles are in view, see Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem, 47–52; see also Stowers, Rereading Romans, 86–97; D. Swancutt, ‘Sexy Stoics and the Rereading of Romans 1.18–2.16’, A Feminist Companion to Paul (ed. A.J. Levine and M. Blickenstaff; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2004) 42–73, at 43–47, 59–67.
This sketch aligns with Paul’s version of Jewish polemical tropes about gentile nations elsewhere in his letters. He often lists gentile vices and specifies their fleshly passions, cognitive failures and perversions in cult (‘idolatry’) (1 Thess 1.9–10; 4.3–5; Gal 4.8–9; 5.16–26; 1 Cor 5.9–10; 6.9–11; 12.2; see also Eph 4.17–19). For discussion of these features of gentile sin in Paul, plus interrogation of how vice lists work see:
F. Ivarson, ‘Vice Lists and Deviant Masculinity: The Rhetorical Function of 1 Corinthians 5:10–11 and 6:9–10’, Mapping Gender in Ancient Religious Discourses (eds. T. Penner and C.V. Stichele; Leiden: Brill, 2007) 163–84; J. Knust, Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005) 15–112.
Just as Wis 13.1 configures gentiles as foolish ‘by nature’ (wύσει) and expounds at length on their cultic corruptions (Wis 13.1–14.31), for Paul they are idolatrous sinners wύσει (e.g., Gal 2.15): this is their hereditary condition (Xenophobia in the Bible, 229, 232, 234–35). But Paul never writes in these ways about Jews (Stowers, ‘Paul’s Four Discourses’, 125–6; Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem, 47). 1 Cor 10.6– 8, he clarifies the relevance of depicting ancient Israelites as idolaters who had excessive desire and engaged in porneia: ‘But these things came to pass for them as a figure/pattern (τυπικῶς), but they were written for our admonition, on whom the end of the ages has come’ (1 Cor 10.11). Such claims rhetorically concern, at least in this context, the Corinthian gentiles (P. Fredriksen, Sin: The Early History of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012) 26–7). Furthermore, Paul only imagines Israelite idolatry in the past. Like the writer of Judith (8.18–20; see also 5.18–19), he does not represent Jews of his historical era as idolaters. They still have zeal for God (Rom 10.2). While Paul writes of Jewish ignorance and failure in knowledge (Rom 10.2–3, 19; see discussion below), he reserves cultic, moral-psychological and cognitive corruption for gentile sin, not Jewish. Romans 1.18–32’s vivid images of gentile corruption thus cannot explain how Paul has already explicated not only gentile, but also Jewish sin by 3.9.
Second, while Paul’s discussions of Adam posit a primal origin of universal human plights, what he writes about Adam’s significance for subsequent people suggests exploring ethnic difference. In Rom 5.12–21, Adam catalyses the spread of sin and death. In 1 Cor 15.20–49, Paul associates Adam with death, but not sin. In both cases, it is noteworthy that the dominant elements in Paul’s portrayal of gentile sin are absent. In other words, a notable difference obtains between the passion-dominated, idolatrous and cognitively corrupt landscape of sin in Rom 1.18–32 versus the import of Adam for the spread of sin and death in 5.12–21. The former concerns the sinful degeneration of gentile peoples, and the latter concerns all humanity subsequent to Adam, thus Jews and gentiles. This leads to a crucial, neglected point. Even though Paul intensifies his discussion of sin and death in Rom 5.12–21 via the language of death (5.14, 17) and sin (5.21) reigning (ἐβασίλευσεν), his writing about Adam in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 does not move beyond the generalities of death and sin because they are among the few passages in his letters that address the history of misery at a general enough level to include both Jews and gentiles. If Paul’s histories of sin are ethnically specific, this makes sense. Gentiles are idolaters who are dominated by their passions, but Jews are not. If Paul’s focus on human misery in Romans 5 is broad enough to include both Jews and gentiles, its characteristics must remain general enough to accommodate their different histories of sin. Paul can thus offer a myth of Adam’s transgression to explain general human sin and death while not using it to explicate the varied ethnic specifics of sin. Part of the issue here is that even in Rom 5.12–21, Paul’s rhetorical focus remains on gentiles.
Thus, his historical scheme in which Adam’s transgression catalysed sin and death for all people can contextually transition into Romans 6–8’s refocus on gentiles, their total moral failure and the Jewish God’s pneumatic remedy for their passions through Christ. Paul can make connections between distinct discourses about sin without conflating them (Stowers, ‘Paul’s Four Discourses’, 100). The combination of a general history of human sin (i.e., through Adam) and assertions about specifically gentile sins (i.e., idolatry, domination by passions, corrupted minds) thus prompts the question: what, for Paul the Jew, is Jewish sin?
Romans 9–11 and Paul’s Eschatological Myth of Jewish Disobedience
Romans 9–11 provides Paul’s clearest reflections on Jewish sin, though here he prefers the terminology of Israel. Most interpreters acknowledge that it overlaps with what is commonly labelled ‘ethnic Israel’ and thus Jews. Paul’s strategic differentiations within Israel (e.g., Rom 9.6 or his use of remnant tropes) and his category of ‘all Israel’ (11.26) have amplified opportunities for disagreement (S. Sheinfeld, ‘Who Is the Righteous Remnant in Romans 9–11? The Concept of Remnant in Early Jewish Literature and Paul’s Letter to the Romans’, Paul the Jew: Rereading the Apostle as a Figure of Second Temple Judaism (ed. G. Boccaccini and C.A. Segovia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016) 233–50). As many interpreters have noted, throughout this section of Romans Paul uses the interrelated grammars of disobedience and failures in loyalty or belief to classify Israel’s sin. For illustrations of the interrelation of trust and obedience language in Romans, see:
1.5; 10.16; 16.26. On this point more widely, T. Morgan, Roman Faith and Christian Faith: Pistis and Fides in the Early Roman Empire and Early Churches (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015) 282–83
Thus in Rom 9.31–2 Israel did not reach a ‘law of righteousness’ because they did not pursue it ἐκ πίστεως. When Paul writes of Israel’s stumbling stone in 9.32–3, he contrasts them with whoever trusts (ὁ πιστεύων). In 10.16 they have not all obeyed (ὑπήκουσαν) the Gospel, and Paul mobilises Isaiah to gloss this with, ‘Lord, who has trusted (τίς ἐπίστευσεν)’—presumably also having Jews in view given how he continues writing in 10.18. In Rom 10.21, Israel has been a disobedient people (λαὸν ἀπειθοῦντα). Some among Israel find themselves broken off because of their distrust (ἀπιστία) in 11.20, though in 11.23 God will graft them in again if they do not persist in distrust (ἐὰν μὴ ἐπιμένωσιν τῇ ἀπιστίᾳ). Paul’s programmatic claims about Israel’s plight in 11.30–2 feature the language of disobeying (ἀπειθέω) and disobedience (ἀπείθεια). He also coordinates Jewish disobedience with failures in their knowledge (10.2–3, 19) and with them being hardened (11.7, 25; see also 9.18).
Debate continues as to what exactly Jewish disobedience, disloyalty and unbelief consisted of in Paul’s imagination. New Testament scholars have proposed various answers: Jewish disbelief in Jesus as the Messiah, rejection of Paul’s gentile mission, turning away from the gospel, ethnic pride, rejection of grace in favour of works-righteousness, persecution of Paul or other followers of Jesus or even the crucifixion of Jesus itself? (see R. Bell, The Irrevocable Call of God: An Inquiry into Paul’s Theology of Israel (WUNT 184; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005) 136, 223–24; T.L. Donaldson, Paul and the Gentiles: Remapping the Apostle’s Convictional World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997) 219–21; Dunn, Theology of Paul, 514–29; Garlington, Faith, Obedience, 32–71; L. Gaston, Paul and the Torah (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987) 135–50). It is important to note that these different answers begin from the same presupposition: that Paul was writing from his own experience, observations or knowledge of his fellow Jews. I propose to move in a different direction; to capitalise on different questions that highlight overlooked paths in Paul’s discourse.
As a starting point, one can note the consistency with Paul’s rhetoric about Jewish problems in this section of Romans: disobedience and disloyalty or lack of trust. To develop Jennifer Eyl’s argument, ‘Pistis is a central feature governing much of the relationship between Israelites (later, Judeans) and their god’ throughout the Greek versions of Jewish texts that make up a significant part of Paul’s discursive reservoir (J. Eyl, Signs, Wonders, and Gifts: Divination in the Letters of Paul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019) 172–77). It should thus not be surprising that failures in faithfulness or obedience feature when he writes of Jewish shortcomings in a part of Romans that frequently mobilises passages from these texts (see J.R. Wagner, Heralds of the Good News: Isaiah and Paul in Concert in the Letter to the Romans (Leiden: Brill, 2002) 43–305). Rather than only seeking explanations from Paul’s actual experiences with his fellow Jews for his rhetoric of Israel’s failures in trust and obedience, the intellectual repertoires with which he innovates are a better place to start. This shift parallels an important movement in scholarship on women in ancient Jewish and Christian sources. Rather than taking passages about women as windows into social realities, a crucial move has been approaching them first as evidence for studying elite male literary activities and the rhetorics that characterise such competitive arenas. In other words, we have come to understand, as Ross Kraemer elucidates, ‘that mistaking rhetorical women for real women makes for bad history’.
It sets us up to misunderstand how our sources work (R.S. Kraemer, ‘Becoming Christian’, A Companion to Women in the Ancient World (ed. S.L. James and S. Dillon; Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) 524–38, at 529. Bibliography for this movement in scholarship about gender, women and ancient Judaism/Christianity is immense. For classic discussions, see E.A. Clark, ‘Ideology, History, and the Construction of “Woman” in Late Ancient Christianity’, JECS 2 (1994) 155–84; eadem., ‘The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian after the “Linguistic Turn”’, CH 67 (1998) 1–31; A. Cwikla, ‘There’s Nothing About Mary: The Insignificance of Mary in the Gospel of Thomas 114’, Journal for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies 1 (2019) 95–112, at 98–107; R.S. Kraemer, Unreliable Witnesses: Religion, Gender, and History in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean). From the perspective of textual logic, there is a key aspect of Paul’s writing about Jewish failings: interpreters have noted that he relates his claims about Israel to his discussion of gentiles. After all, Romans 9–11 is, as Jill Hicks-Keeton explains, ‘the most fully developed version of Paul’s thinking on gentile inclusion in his extant writings’ (J. Hicks-Keeton, Arguing with Aseneth: Gentile Access to Israel’s Living God in Jewish Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018) 129). Paul’s writing about gentiles thus treats their inclusion – in the God of Israel’s rescue through Christ as faithful subjects of the true God – as a thread interwoven with God’s plans for Israel. That is a basic point of the otherwise highly debated passage, 11.25–32.
Paul’s claims about Jews here thus take shape in relation to his writing about the, as Elizabeth Johnson puts it, ‘interdependent’ futures of Israel and gentiles. For forceful articulations of these points about Israel, gentiles, and Romans 9–11, see:
C. Johnson Hodge, ‘“A Light to the Nations”: The Role ofIsrael in Romans 9–11’, Reading Paul’s Letter to the Romans(ed. J.L. Sumney; Atlanta: SBL, 2012) 169–86; Stowers, Rereading Romans, 286–316. The point that Paul’s discussion of Israel functions within a scheme of related Jew and gentile histories in God’s plan is widespread: J.M. Bassler, Navigating Paul: An Introduction to Key Theological Concepts (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007) 80; N.A. Dahl, Studies in Paul: Theology for the Early Christian Mission (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1977) 143–56; Fredriksen, Paul, 159–64; E.E. Johnson, The Function of Apocalyptic and Wisdom Traditions in Romans 9–11 (Atlanta: SBL, 1989) 143–7, 162–3 (for ‘interdependence’); E.P. Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1983) 193–6; Sheinfeld, ‘Righteous Remnant’, 41–6.
Romans 2.17–24’s Eschatological Resonance and Paul’s Delegitimizing of Fellow Jewish Competitors
In Rom 2.17, Paul commences writing about the one who calls himself a Jew and, in 2.21–3, critiques this figure as a thief, adulterer, perpetrator of sacrilege and transgressor of the law. This passage is an obvious candidate for probing how Paul has explicated that Jews are also under sin alongside gentiles, as he claims to have done in 3.9. R.M. Thorsteinsson has argued that this figure is, instead, a gentile who adopts Jewish laws (Paul’s Interlocutor in Romans 2: Function and Identity in the Context of Ancient Epistolography (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiskell, 2003) 196–221). Though a minority interpretation, it has been taken up and elaborated on, e.g., Fredriksen, Paul, 156–7; R. Rodríguez, If You Call Yourself a Jew: Reappraising Paul’s Letter to the Romans (Eugene: Cascade, 2014); Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem, 54–5, 59–64).
- First, Paul does not claim to attend to the shortcomings of all Jews in Rom 2.17–24. Instead he signals other Jewish teachers of gentiles who advocate observance of their ethnic laws in a way with which he disagrees. These possibly fictive or hypothetical teachers are characters in this part of the letter’s ‘speech-in-character’ (Stowers, Rereading Romans, 143–53).
- Second, the textual images of Jewish sin in Rom 2.17–24 continue manifesting Paul’s ethnic distinctions.
- Third, in Rom 2.23–4, Paul uses Isa 52.5 (Greek) as an oracular encapsulation of his assertions about the competing Jewish teacher’s sin: ‘For as it is written, “the name of God is blasphemed among the gentiles because of you”’.
Romans 2.17–24 emerges as another locus of Paul’s eschatological myth of Jewish sin. To understand the text as such does not require taking it as Paul’s ideas about ‘typical Jews’.
Historical Periods and Divine Agency in Paul’s Mythmaking about Sin Elsewhere
Paul’s myth of Jewish failure reflects the same historical literary strategies he deploys elsewhere to elaborate on sin. For example, his narrative of decline in Rom 1.18–32 sketches stages within the history of gentile sin. There was an early cosmic period in which gentiles knew God (1.19–21a), but then they corrupted their cultic engagement (1.21–3) and Israel’s God responded by handing them over (παραδίδωμι) to their passions with further resulting impurity and shaming of their bodies because of their iconic cultic error (1.24–5). God’s infliction of moral-psychological corruption continues in 1.26–32, with past degeneration shading into Paul’s address of his contemporary gentiles in 2.1. Romans 1.18–32 thus does not have a flat vision of gentile sin, but a history marked by different stages or periods in their decline (Young, ‘Make Gentiles Masculine Again’). Furthermore, Paul emphasises the Jewish God’s agency in the decline. God hands them over to (i.e., inflicts) further cognitive and moral-psychological corruption as an expression of his wrath ( B. Brooten, ‘Romans 1:18–32: A Commentary’, Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) 219–302, at 231; Jewett, Romans, 166–69; U. Wilckens, Der Brief an die Römer (EKKNT 6; 3d Ed.; Zurich: Benziger, 1987) 113–14. Combined with 1.18 introducing the passage as an illustration of God’s wrath, the effect is emphasising God’s agency in gentiles’ decline into corruption; e.g., H. Schlier, Der Römerbrief (HThKNT 6; Freiburg: Herder, 1977) 58–60; Stowers, Rereading Romans, 92–4). In Rom 5.12–21, Paul similarly periodises the history of misery for humanity, etching temporal contours into his myth of Adam’s catastrophic effects.
These stages are marked in particular by the law of Moses (Stowers, Rereading Romans, 92–4). In Rom 5.12–21, Paul similarly periodises the history of misery for humanity, etching temporal contours into his myth of Adam’s catastrophic effects. These stages are marked in particular by the law of Moses (Jewett, Romans, 370–9; E. Jüngel, Unterwegs zur Sache. Theologische Bemerkungen (Munich: Kaiser, 1972) 145–72). The sketches of sin in Rom 1.18–32, 5.12–14, Gal 3.15–25 and 1 Thess 2.14–16 reflect the eschatological literary strategies of periodising and promoting divine agency that Romans 9–11 features in its myth of Jewish disobedience. Galatians 3.23 even raises the eschatological revelatory volume by featuring ἀποκαλύπτω in its temporal scheme just as Romans 9–11, and especially 11.25–36, feature linguistic resources from the revelatory repertoire.