Radical Dualism and the Reading of Paul

Prooftexts103 Radical Dualism and the Reading of Paul Daniel Boyarín. A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics ofIdentity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, xi + 366 pp. This provocative book provides a reading of Paul openly informed by the cultural knowledge and subject-position of its producer: a male, practicing Jew, scholar of Talmud (1). Through this study, Daniel Boyarín aims to reclaim Paul as an importantJewish thinker, and Pauline studies as an integral part ofthe study of Judaism in the Roman period and late antiquity. Boyarin's specific interests are gender and ethnicity, in which Paul, in Boyarin's view, has set the agenda for Jews and Christians until this day (4). Boyarin's Paul, much like Boyarín himself, is a Jewish cultural critic, engaged in the perennial Jewish debate concerning the tension between universalism and particularism (8-9). Boyarin's starting point for addressing this set of issues is Paul's letter to the Galatians 3:28-29, "the baptismal declaration of the new humanity of no difference ," which declares that in Christ Jesus there is "neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, no male and female" (5). The ramifications of choosing these verses as hermeneutical and moral center are apparent in virtually every exegetical argument in Boyarin's study. But the Paul being constructed here is determined just as strongly by Boyarin's perception of Paul as a representative of a particular cultural and hermeneutical direction available within first-century Judaism (2). This construction is supported by Paul's Jewish pedigree as recited in Philippians 3:3: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews. Because Paul nowhere repudiates his Jewish identity, Boyarín takes Paul's Jewishness as a focal point for Paul's identity as well as a key to the exegesis of his letters. This approach bears fruit in many ways, of which I will single out two. The first is Boyarin's contention that Paul was working within the context of a Hellenized Judaism that had developed pessimistic notions of sexuality (160). For example, Boyarín argues that the inner struggle involving the will, the flesh, sin, and the law that is portrayed in Romans 7 does not only or even primarily reflect the background of the Decalogue, as many scholars have suggested. Rather, Romans 7 should be read in light of Genesis 1-3, which expresses a tension between the commandment to be fruitful and multiply and the prohibition against eating the fruit of the tree that would give the first humans the sexual knowledge and awareness necessary in order to fulfill the first commandment. According to this understanding, it is the command to procreate which is used by sin in order to arouse sinful desire. Believers have been released both from procreation and thus, from sexuality, and are thus enabled to bear spiritual fruit. This reading is anticipated by the marriage analogy at the beginning of Romans 7 and leads naturally into Romans 8, which alludes to spiritual procreation in its use of the imagery of labor and the birth of the first fruits of the spirit. The second example concerns the dualism of Paul's rhetoric. While the setting up of dichotomies, such as spirit/flesh, male/female, grace/law, freedom/ slavery, is a feature of Hellenistic philosophical and ethical tractates, Boyarín looks 104SHORT REVIEWS to Philo of Alexandria, a representative of Hellenistic Judaism, as a resource for understanding this element of Paul's thought. Both Philo and Paul exhibit the pessimism toward sexuality that Boyarín sees as characteristic of first-century Judaism. Their ambivalence, however, reflects quite different ways of understanding the human plight as well as the solutions to that plight. For Philo, sexuality is permissible as long as it is expressed within a legitimate marital relationship between a man and a woman and only for the purposes of procreation. He saves his highest praise for women who "have kept their chastity not under compulsion . . . but of their own free will in their ardent yearning for wisdom___ [T]hey desire no mortal offspring but those immortal children which...