TOPIC: The Apostle Paul: A First Century Reform Jew?

Jews typically hold the Christian Apostle Paul in low esteem as one who left Judaism to create another religion. His critical comments about the Torah and his conferring of the Abrahamic covenant on Gentiles have earned him the reputation as a perfidious huckster. Is it possible we have been too hard on Paul? Might modern Jews learn to see him as a loyal Jew. Indeed, a Jew much like ourselves? If so, what might this mean for the way we live as Jews.

Rabbi Joshua Garroway, Ph.D., serves as Associate Professor of Early Christianity and the Second Commonwealth at the Jack H. Skirball Campus of the HUC-JIR. Ordained at HUC-JIR and receiving his doctorate from Yale University, his first book, Paul’s Gentile-Jews: Neither Jew nor Gentile, but Both, explores the ways in which Paul's epistle to the Romans constructs Jewish identity, and the role played by this construction in the ensuing emergence of Christianity. His second book, The Beginning of the Gospel: Paul, Philippi, and the Origins of Christianity, offers a revisionist understanding of the origins of the word "Gospel" in earliest Christianity.

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