Matthew Thiessen, A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2023), 151-152.
Traditional Christian theology frequently reads Paul as though one can provide from his writings some grand theory of what is with Judaism as a religion. Especially since the Reformation, Christians have claimed that Paul abandoned Judaism because he came to see that it was a religion that required one to earn one’s deliverance through good deeds and effort. Having come to see his own sinfulness Paul must have been driven to despair only to find that God wanted or expected people to be saved not by their own righteousness but by trusting the Messiah. Those Jews who did not believe in Jesus had a misplaced confidence or arrogance in their own ability to please and obey God. This remains a common reading of Paul, but it better describes Martin Luther’s own life story. After all, Paul makes no claims about how sinful, hopeless, and full of despair he was prior to becoming a follower of Jesus. Instead, in the few places Paul describes his pre-messianic experience, he does so in rather glowing terms. He was advancing in “Judaism” far beyond his peers when God abruptly interrupted his life to make him the herald of the gentiles (Gal. 1:14-15). And, no doubt to Luther’s chagrin, Paul even boasts that with regard to righteousness in relation to the law, he was blameless (amemptos) (Phil. 3:6), the exact same language that gets used of Job (Job 1:1, 8; 2:3) and the state of being to which God calls Abraham (Gen. 17:1).
The Amateur Exegete 