A. The Anti-Israel Set

B. The Pro-Israel Set

Contradictions of Paul:

Now the problem emerges. Point by point, the two sets contradict each other: Circumcision is of great value; it counts for nothing. The Law is holy; it places its followers under a curse and cannot justify them before God. All Israel will be saved; they are the enemies of God and have failed to fulfill their own Law.

While many readers, including many New Testament scholars, simply ignore the problem, most fall into the category of what I call the “contradictionists,” that is, those who recog nize the tensions between the two sets of passages and set out to recon cile them. Among contradictionist readers, one finds four basic techniques for resolving these tensions—psychology, resignation, elimination, and subordination. The psychological technique holds that Paul was lost in a hopeless quagmire of intellectual and emotional inconsistency. The converted ex- Pharisee sought to have it both ways. He had abandoned the Law and Juda ism, but could not bring himself to admit it. He was simply unwilling to face the radical consequences of his new commitments, namely, that the Law really was obsolete, that circumcision really was of no value, and that being a Jew no longer counted for anything. The contradictory passages are thus assigned to opposite poles of his anguished psyche—the anti-Israel statements reflecting his “real” views as a Christian convert, the pro-Israel statements preserving his unresolved and yet-to-be-discarded loyalties as a Jew. Robert Hamerton-Kelly has written that Paul held on to Israel’s role in the divine plan of salvation “due to personal factors” and “a case of nos talgia overcoming his judgment.”

The resigned technique simply leaves the contradictions as they stand, a position adopted by the Finnish scholar Heikki Räisänen. Paul was sim ply incapable of straightforward, logical, consistent thinking. One conse quence of this technique, and thus a significant handicap for many Chris tian readers, is that his thought is held to be of little theological value for Christians in their relations to Jews. Paul’s thinking is such a muddle that it yields no useful guidelines for modern Christians. Of Romans, O’Neill writes that its thought is “so obscure, so complicated, so disjointed, that it is hard to see how Paul could have exerted such an influence on his contemporaries if we assume that its preserved form represents his real thinking.”