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C h a p t e r 1 “The Jews Perverted and the Gentiles Converted”: Confessions and Conversos The Wolfe is made a Sheepe euen then, when gaping, hee is at poynt to enter into the Fold. The Physitian of his soule (praysed be the power of his grace) heales him in the midst of his madnesse; and restores him in the very extremity of his Disease. No height of sinne can forbid the force of grace. Alwayes, the more the weight of sinne, the greater the worke of saluation. True Conuersion, is neuer too late: though late conuersion, proues scarcely true. —John Gaule, Practique Theories (1630) The Christian discourse of conversion begins with Paul, whose turn from Pharisaic persecutor of Jesus and his followers to apostle to the Gentiles (especially as it is described in Acts 9) marks a dramatic, miraculous transformation . The question of Paul’s conversion, however, has become a hotly contested one in recent years, part of a more extensive interrogation of the so-called parting of ways, the division (one of many, in fact) within the postTemple Mediterranean Jewish community that ultimately produced the two distinct religions we now call Judaism and Christianity. Though I do not intend to describe this lively and important scholarly controversy in any detail , it is worth observing that this very pressing contemporary question is also at the heart of the writings about conversion in early modernity. Nearly every Christian writer who speaks about the calling of the Jews or about the conversion of an individual Jew also conjures this primal scene of separation, the initiating division that must be healed through conversion. Perhaps the most vivid instance of this correlation appears in the work of the English “Jews Perverted” 17 millenarian Joseph Mede, whose “Mystery of S. Paul’s Conversion: or, The Type of the Calling of the Jews” sets out, in table form, ten aspects of Paul’s conversion that are prophesied to find direct parallels in the imminent conversion of the Jews.1 Paul’s writings—and particularly his conversion on the road to Damascus—mark the transformation of Jew to Christian for early modern readers far more so than do the events narrated in the gospels. In modern scholarship, Paul’s writings are also foundational, but their meanings for the question of conversion are far less clear. A. D. Nock’s seminal work on conversion, “the old and the new,” as his subtitle insists, renders Paul’s turn to Jesus as “a complete change of face . . . the first conversion to Christianity of which we have knowledge.”2 Alan Segal breaks down the influence of Paul’s conversion into stages, moving from Paul’s ecstatic, visionary experience as described in his letters, to Luke’s characterization in Acts of Paul’s experience as typical of all Gentile conversions, to the later attempts, first in pastoral epistles like 1 Timothy and then in early post-biblical Christian writings, to make Paul in an explicit paradigm for the conversion experience.3 More recently, Paula Fredriksen has argued for the “mandatory retirement” of the term “conversion” when speaking about Paul, who never thought of himself as anything but a Jew, even when he was preaching Christ’s salvation to the Gentiles.4 In many ways, this contemporary scholarly controversy captures the very tensions built into the early modern fictions of conversion under analysis in this book. Nock’s characterization of Paul’s conversion combines the language of continuity with radical change, as he describes Paul’s “inner need to discover an interpretation and reconciliation of the old and the new in his religious life.”5 I take Nock’s evocative phrase as a helpful expression of my provisional, working definition of conversion; the various formulations of conversion I shall be discussing participate in the rhetorical coordination of the impulse to reconcile old and new. Continuity and rupture figure side by side in the work of conversion; the language of change serves as a site of intense ambivalence. This chapter begins with an account of early Christian writings on conversion that will serve, in turn, as the context for a discussion of the particularly problematic discourse of conversion within the period of the English Reformation. The chapter concludes by making explicit the implicit ties these Reformation fictions of conversion had to the intensely anxious and ambivalent representations of Jewish conversion and marranism. As we saw in Donne’s sermon, some early modern readers looked to Paul’s experience on the road...

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