Paulus retro?

Abstract

The article discusses claims made in a recent Danish book
entitled Paul Plus – Four Prisms on Paul: Paul & Paul, & the Jews, &
Luther, & Nietzsche (ed. Anna Vind; Copenhagen: Publications of the
Faculty of Theology 30, 2012). Against the contributors, who are basically
presenting a traditional, Lutheran understanding of Paul in opposition
to the ‘New Perspective on Paul’, it is fi rst argued that not only was
Paul a Jew: he also continued to see himself as a Jew and took the new
Christ faith to be an eminently Jewish phenomenon; and secondly that
a number of further features of a ‘New Perspective’ on Paul (he speaks
ethnically about Jews and Gentiles, not about human beings vis-à-vis
God; and he envisages an actual fulfi llment of the Mosaic Law among
Christ believers, not a continued state of being simultaneously ‘justifi ed
and a sinner’) follow directly from the fi rst basic feature.