Patterns of Religion in Paul and Rabbinic Judaism: A Holistic Method of Comparison

There have been two principal ways of comparing Paul with Judaism, each of which has suffered from characteristic defects. One has been holistic in a certain sense. Taking “Paul” to be essentially represented by the doctrine of justification by faith and “Judaism” to be essentially represented by works righteousness, many Christian scholars have understood Paul and Judaism as antithetical. The characteristic weakness of this sort of comparison is that Paul is oversimplified, Judaism is both oversimplified and misrepresented, and the comparison is made in order to show the superiority of Paul to Judaism. That is, such comparisons have generally been pejorative and biased. The other principal method has resulted in more of a genuine comparison. Instead of dealing with generalized essences, this approach concentrates on individual motifs. It may properly be called atomistic, although the term Motivsgeschichte might better describe the method. Those who have followed this approach have generally answered the question of whether or not there is a positive relationship between Paul and Judaism affirmatively. The characteristic weakness of this approach — and this is a much less serious weakness than that of the other approach — is that a conclusion about some of the parts may lead too quickly to a conclusion about the whole. One may, for example, learn a great deal about the relation of what Paul says about Adam to Adamic speculation in Judaism without being able to determine whether or not Paul's religion was basically Jewish. As David Flusser has seen, building blocks from one edifice may be used to put together quite a different construction. Seeing the similarity, or even the identity, of some of the stones should not lead one to conclude that the building is the same. Thus a comparison of the two wholes as represented by their generalized essences generally goes awry, but the same may also be true of a comparison of any number of parts. Is there any way around this difficulty?