Introduction
In Rom 9.30–1, Paul describes the double irony involved in Gentile acceptance of the gospel and Israelite rejection of it. Gentiles, he says, have caught up with righteousness without even pursuing it, but Israel, despite pursuing a righteous law, has failed to catch up with it. Paul expresses the reason for this failure in a notoriously compressed and difficult statement. In answer to his own rhetorically posed question about why Israel failed to catch up with the law (v. 32a), he says this happened ὅτι οὐκ ἐκ πίστεως ἀλλ᾽ ὡς ἐξ ἔργων (v. 32b). He then explains what he means by Israel's pursuit of the law ὡς ἐξ ἔργων with the comment that προσέκοψαν τῷ λίθῳ τοῦ προσκόμματος (v. 32c).Footnote 1 He elaborates on this explanation with a mixed quotation of Isa 28.16 and 8.14 (v. 33), two texts that, in their original contexts, identify the Lord (8.14) or his work (28.16) with a stone. Most interpreters of Romans agree that Paul identifies ‘the stone’ with Christ (cf. 10.11), and most students of the use of biblical stone texts in early Christianity agree that their use predates Paul.Footnote 2 Several interpreters have suggested that Paul's view of Israel's stumbling here is connected with the rejection of Jesus’ approach to the Mosaic law among some Jews during his ministry, although a detailed argument to this effect is lacking, and the position, at least in its older form, is often quickly dismissed.Footnote 3
I would like to argue that when this idea is pursued further it not only illumines Paul's argument in Rom 9.30–10.4 but makes sense of Paul's difficult statement about Jewish responsibility for Jesus’ death in 1 Thess 2.14–16 and points towards the historical origins of Paul's view of unbelieving Israel's misstep. Paul's use of two ‘stone’ texts in Rom 9.32c–33 links him not simply to Jewish rejection of Jesus’ view of the law, but to a specific set of historical circumstances in which Israel's political and intellectual elites in Jerusalem plotted Jesus’ death because they objected strongly to his view of the law and the temple. Paul saw this account of Jesus’ death as an example of the zealous approach to the law that he had himself followed before the risen Christ appeared to him (Phil 3.6; Gal 1.13–14). He also saw it as an example of the approach to the law that prompted some Judeans to persecute Jewish Christians and to drive him out of Judea (1 Thess 2.14–16; cf. 2 Cor 11.24, 26; Gal 4.29).
If this is correct, then when Paul faults Israel in Rom 9.30–32b for their works-oriented attitude to the law, he is not analysing the religious attitude of all non-Christian Jews.Footnote 4 He is speaking specifically of Israelites who have heard, understood and rejected the gospel, and especially of those who have rejected the gospel violently, following in the footsteps of the politically powerful priests and scribes that plotted Jesus’ death.
In 9.32c–33 Paul is concerned with a particularly egregious result of failing to believe the gospel and persisting instead in trying to find life by doing the law (9.32b; 10.3, 5). By recalling this result to the minds of his first hearers he illustrated what he was talking about when he described God as hardening part of Israel (9.18; cf. 9.11, 14, 22) in order that he might ultimately include within his believing people both Gentiles and a vast number of Israelites (9.23–4; 11.11–16, 25–32).
1. A Brief History of the Stone Image in Earliest Christianity
Although Paul is the earliest textual witness to the use of a biblical stone image in reference to Christ, it is unlikely that he was the first to employ it. The case that the image preceded Paul is straightforward.Footnote 5 Paul's use depends on two passages from Isaiah that also show up in 1 Pet 2.4–8, and almost all the variations from the LXX that appear in Paul's quotation of these passages also appear in 1 Peter. This harmony between Rom 9.32c–33 and 1 Pet 2.4–8 takes a form, however, that makes any direct literary connection between the two passages unlikely.
Paul quotes mainly from Isa 28.16, differing from the LXX in small ways. His first-person reference to God is not as emphatic (Paul is missing the LXX's ἐγώ) and, in Paul's quotation, God speaks of placing a stone in Zion in the present (τίθημι ἐν Σιὼν λίθον) rather than of putting a stone into the foundations of Zion in the future (ἐμβαλῶ εἰς τὰ θεμέλια Σιων λίθον), a change that looks like a more literal rendering of the Hebrew (יסד בציון אבן).Footnote 6 In addition, Paul uses the negative of the simple future passive indicative at the end of the verse (οὐ καταισχυνθήσεται), whereas the LXX has a doubly negated aorist passive subjunctive (οὐ μὴ καταισχυνθῇ). Paul joins the LXX in using the phrase ἐπ᾿ αὐτῷ, which is missing from the Hebrew, and the verb καταισχύνω (‘put to shame’), which is not an obvious rendering of the Hebrew חוש (‘hurry, hasten’).Footnote 7
Paul supplements his quotation of Isa 28.16 with a phrase from Isa 8.14 that allows him to replace the reference in Isa 28 to a stone that is ‘precious’, ‘choice’, ‘architecturally most important’ and ‘highly valued’ (πολυτελῆ ἐκλεκτὸν ἀκρογωνιαῖον ἔντιμον) with a stone that instead causes stumbling and is a rock of offence.Footnote 8 When Paul makes this replacement, he differs from the wording of Isa 8.14 LXX in two significant ways. First, Paul follows the Hebrew more closely. Isa 8.14 LXX says, almost unintelligibly, that the prophet Isaiah ‘will not encounter’ (οὐχ … συναντήσεσθε) the Lord ‘as a stumbling caused by a stone nor as a fall caused by a rock’ (ὡς λίθου προσκόμματι … οὐδὲ ὡς πέτρας πτώματι). Paul omits any negation and simplifies the syntactical relationship between the expressions for the stone and the falling that it causes (והיה למקדש ולאבן נגף ולצור מכשול/ λίθον προσκόμματος καὶ πέτραν σκανδάλου). Second, whereas the LXX represents the Hebrew term מכשול with πτώματι, Paul has σκανδάλου.
Isa 28.16 and 8.14 also appear in 1 Pet 2.6 and 8 on either side of another stone text, Ps 117(MT 118).22 LXX. In 1 Peter, then, the two Isaiah texts appear separately from each other with no imposition of one text upon the other. Remarkably, with one exception, the same variations between the LXX of the two Isaiah passages and Paul's quotation show up in 1 Peter. 1 Peter has all of Paul's changes to the two Isaiah texts except his use of the simply negated future passive indicative (οὐ καταισχυνθήσεται) rather than the doubly negated aorist passive subjunctive (οὐ μὴ καταισχυνθῇ).
It is unlikely either that Paul somehow had access to 1 Peter or that Peter picked apart Paul's composite quotation to use its constituent parts separately.Footnote 9 Yet both texts exhibit the same curious combination of readings that sometimes represent the Hebrew more literally than the LXX and sometimes depart from the Hebrew in ways that match the LXX. The most reasonable explanation for the similarity between Paul and 1 Peter at this level of detail is the existence of an early tradition that brought Isa 28.16 and 8.14 together in the particular form that both Paul and Peter quote.Footnote 10
An allusion to Isa 8.14–15 also shows up in Luke and Matthew in an explanation of Jesus’ rejection by the chief priests, scribes, elders (Mark 11.27; Matt 21.23; Luke 20.1, 19) and Pharisees (Matt 21.45). Shortly after his action in the temple, and immediately after telling the Parable of the Wicked Tenants, Jesus quotes Ps 117(MT 118).22 LXX (cf. 1 Pet 2.4, 7) and then follows this quotation with a statement that looks like a paraphrase of Isa 8.14–15. The Isaiah text refers to a ‘stone’ (λίθος) that causes ‘stumbling’ (πρόσκομμα), to a ‘rock’ (πέτρα) that causes a ‘fall’ (πτῶμα), and to a group of people who ‘will fall’ (πεσοῦνται) and ‘be crushed’ (συντριβήσονται). This is similar to Jesus’ claim in Luke 20.18 that πᾶς ὁ πεσὼν ἐπ᾽ ἐκεῖνον τὸν λίθον συνθλασθήσεται· ἐϕ᾽ ὃν δ᾽ ἂν πέσῃ, λικμήσει αὐτόν, a sentence that, apart from two small changes, also appears in Matt 21.44 after Jesus tells the Parable of the Wicked Tenants to ‘the chief priests and the elders of the people’.Footnote 11
The statement's appearance in Matthew poses a well-known text-critical problem, and commentators often reject it.Footnote 12 It is reasonably clear, however, that it belongs to Matthew's original text.Footnote 13 The manuscript evidence in favour of accepting it is so weighty that the only basis for rejecting it is that it might be a scribal harmonisation to Luke's text.Footnote 14 The harmony, however, is inexact: not only does Matthew not have Luke's opening πᾶς, but instead of ἐπ᾽ ἐκεῖνον τὸν λίθον, Matthew has ἐπὶ τὸν λίθον τοῦτον. A scribe trying to create harmony between the two gospels, moreover, would have placed the sentence after Matt 21.42 to keep the Lukan order of the two stone sayings intact.Footnote 15 Paul's use of Isa 8.14 in Rom 9.33, then, forms a connection to the account in the synoptic tradition of Jesus’ rejection by the chief priests, scribes, Pharisees (Matt 21.45; cf. John 18.3) and elders, and this account circulated before the composition of either Matthew or Luke.Footnote 16
In light of this evidence from Paul, 1 Peter and the synoptics, it is reasonable to think that between Jesus’ death in 30 (or 33) ce and Paul's composition of Romans in 57 ce, Christians began telling the story of Jesus’ rejection using Ps 118.22 and Isa 8.14–15 and 28.16, and describing him as the rejected but costly stone. Since Paul quotes Isa 28.16 and 8.14 in Rom 9.32c–33, it is likely that he knew this collection of texts, perhaps in an oral rather than a written form.Footnote 17 If he knew this collection of texts, he probably also knew the story that accompanied them.
2. The Story of Jesus’ Rejection That Paul Knew
The form of the story about Jesus’ rejection that Paul received from early Christian tradition seems to parallel in its basic outline the form of the same story in the Synoptic Gospels. Both Paul and Peter refer to the stumbling stone (צור מכשול) of Isa 8.14 as πέτραν σκανδάλου, whereas the LXX translates this same phrase as πέτρας πτώματι (‘a fall caused by a rock’). It is possible that those who assembled the stone text collection used σκάνδαλον for מכשול simply because they relied on a Greek translation that differed from the LXX at this point.Footnote 18 It is also possible, however, that whoever added Isa 8.14 to the stone collection used σκάνδαλον for מכשול intentionally because it was an appropriate term for describing the law-oriented nature of Jesus’ rejection.
F. J. A. Hort noticed long ago in his commentary on 1 Pet 1.1–2.17 that this variation seemed to reflect the language of the gospels on the rejection of Jesus.Footnote 19 ‘The single word σκανδάλου, as used in this connection by St Paul and St Peter’, Hort observed, ‘pointed back to characteristic language of our Lord Himself as well as of the Evangelists on his being a “stumblingblock” to the Jews who refused him …’Footnote 20 Hort then listed a series of references that is strangely imprecise for so meticulous a scholar.Footnote 21 Jesus really uses the language of stumbling only once in response to Jewish sceptics other than his own disciples or John the Baptist (Matt 17.27), and there he takes action to avoid giving offence.
Despite this, Hort was perhaps on to something instinctively. The language of stumbling was especially suited to the notion of offending either God or another person by transgressing God's law or a particular interpretation of that law. This use of stumbling language is especially prominent in Matthew. Jesus’ interpretation of the Parable of the Tares says that it refers in part to the day when the angels of the Son of Man συλλέξουσιν ἐκ τῆς βασιλείας αὐτοῦ πάντα τὰ σκάνδαλα καὶ τοὺς ποιοῦντας τὴν ἀνομίαν (Matt 13.41). After Jesus tells the Pharisees and scribes that nothing going into a human being from outside defiles that person, but only what comes out of that person's mouth, the disciples come to him and say, οἶδας ὅτι οἱ Φαρισαῖοι ἀκούσαντες τὸν λόγον ἐσκανδαλίσθησαν; (15.12). Similarly, when Jesus tells Simon to pay the temple tax in Matthew's Gospel, he says they should do this ἵνα … μὴ σκανδαλίσωμεν (17.27).
This fits with a characteristic use of stumbling language in the LXX. Ps 118.165 promises peace to those who love God's law, καὶ οὐκ ἔστιν αὐτοῖς σκάνδαλον. In 140.9 the psalmist prays, ϕύλαξόν με ἀπὸ παγίδος ἧς συνεστήσαντό μοι καὶ ἀπὸ σκανδάλων τῶν ἐργαζομένων τὴν ἀνομίαν, a notion that is reflected in Pss. Sol. 4.23, which speaks of the Lord's deliverance ἀπὸ παντὸς σκανδάλου παρανόμου. Judith explains to Holofernes that she cannot eat the food he has set before her ἵνα μὴ γένηται σκάνδαλον (12.2).Footnote 22
The term σκάνδαλον is rare outside the LXX and early Christian texts, and so it is likely that when Christians first used it in the version of Isa 8.14 in their collection of stone texts, it carried this nuance of offence against the law. This idea is consistent with the narrative context of the Parable of the Wicked Tenants in the Synoptic Gospels and the use of Ps 117.22 LXX and Isa 8.14–15 there. Although the term σκάνδαλον does not appear, οἱ οἰκοδομοῦντες who reject ‘the stone’ (Mark 12.10) correspond to ‘the chief priests, the scribes and the elders’ who control the temple and have objected to the disturbance Jesus created there (Mark 11.27–8).Footnote 23 In Acts 4, Peter will address the ‘rulers, elders and scribes … with Annas the high priest and Caiaphas, and John and Alexander, and all who were of the high priestly family’ (vv. 5–6) and tell them that Jesus is ὁ λίθος, ὁ ἐξουθενηθεὶς ὑϕ᾽ ὑμῶν τῶν οἰκοδόμων, ὁ γενόμενος εἰς κεϕαλὴν γωνίας (v. 11).
The collection of stone texts from which Paul cited Isa 28.16 and 8.14 in Rom 9.32c–33, therefore, probably interpreted the rejection of Jesus as the work of the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem and interpreted that rejection as focused on his controversial approach to the law and the temple. These elements of Jesus’ ministry caused Israel's Jerusalem-based leadership to ‘stumble’ over Jesus and send him to his death.Footnote 24
This understanding of the stone text collection fits well with what many historians of early Christianity acknowledge about the relationship between Jesus’ action in the temple and the Jewish involvement in his arrest, trial and crucifixion. In the words of Ben F. Meyer, ‘[t]he cleansing of the temple triggered a sequence of events that brought Jesus to his death on a cross outside the city wall.’Footnote 25 There is much controversy about whether Jesus’ temple action should be called a ‘cleansing’, and, if not, exactly why he did what he did, but many historians of early Christianity acknowledge that he did it, that he did it in order to make a point, and that, to use Meyer's words again, ‘it was an explosive act’.Footnote 26
It is likely that even before Paul's conversion he had heard about the connection between Jesus’ controversial approach to the temple and the reasons why the religious and political elites in Jerusalem sought his execution. The false charge at Jesus’ trial that he wanted to destroy the temple seems to have been widely known since it shows up in a number of different contexts in the gospels (Matt 26.60–2; 27.39–40 = Mark 14.56–60; John 2.18–22; cf. Gos. Thom. 71). Acts, moreover, depicts Paul in Jerusalem, only a short time after Jesus’ death, persecuting Christians such as Stephen because Stephen supposedly claimed Jesus the Nazarene would destroy the temple and ‘change the customs Moses handed down’ (Acts 6.14; cf. 8.1; 22.20).Footnote 27
According to the accounts of Paul's persecuting activity in Acts, he targeted Christians both in Jerusalem and Damascus with the written permission of the high priest and his associates (Acts 9.1–2; 26.10; cf. 22.4–5), the same group that had put Jesus on trial and sentenced him to death (cf. Acts 4.6; Luke 3.2; John 18.13, 24). Ernst Haenchen thought that Luke had made all this up based on what he read in 1 Macc 15.15–21 about the Romans giving the high priest Simon Maccabaeus the right of extradition. This approach to Acts 9.1–2, however, was part of Haenchen's otherwise improbable theory that Paul had never persecuted Christians in Jerusalem.Footnote 28 There is nothing unlikely about a well-educated member of the upper classes who received his training in Jerusalem having access to the high priestly circle in Jerusalem and using that access to facilitate his zeal for the law and the temple by persecuting Christians.Footnote 29 If, then, Haenchen is wrong about Luke and Luke is right about Paul, it is unlikely that Paul and ‘the chief priests’ failed to discuss the role that Jesus’ own approach to the temple played in his death.
This means that Paul the Pharisee probably understood his own efforts at stamping out the new movement to be an extension of the opposition of ‘the chief priests, the scribes, the elders’ and ‘the Pharisees’ (Matt 21.45; cf. John 18.3) to Jesus’ criticism of what was happening in the temple complex. Paul and the chief priests may well have opposed Jesus’ approach to the temple for different reasons. The chief priests may have felt threatened by Jesus’ criticism of the way they ran the temple's financial affairs (Mark 11.15, 17; Matt 21.12–13; Luke 19.46). Paul, as a Pharisee, may have been more concerned with Jesus’ non-traditional approach to the Jewish law generally, including laws governing who was ritually qualified to worship in the temple (e.g. Mark 7.1–5; 12.17). They would both have nevertheless agreed that Jesus and his movement posed a threat to the temple.
When Paul used the stone texts of Rom 9.32c–33 to explain his statement in 9.32b that Israel did not attain the law because they pursued it οὐκ ἐκ πίστεως ἀλλ᾽ ὡς ἐξ ἔργων he was probably thinking of the reason why the chief priests, the scribes and the Pharisees rejected Jesus. They had stumbled over Jesus’ approach to the Jewish law, including the law's regulation of the temple.Footnote 30 Paul knew about this attitude first-hand from his own exposure to and participation in it in Jerusalem shortly after Jesus’ death. He also knew about it from the traditions about Jesus’ death that he inherited from the early Christian community and that used Ps 118.22 and Isa 8.14 and 28.16 to interpret Jesus’ rejection and execution by Israel's leadership in Jerusalem. The earliest Christians believed that Jesus was the most important stone in a temple not made with human hands (e.g. 1 Cor 3.11, 16–17; 6.19; 2 Cor 6.16–18; Acts 7.47–50; cf. 1 Kings 8.27), and the chief priests and elders of the people had plotted Jesus’ execution in part because they believed he threatened the physical temple in Jerusalem.
3. Evidence for This Approach to Rom 9.32–3 from 1 Thess 2.14–15
In 1 Thessalonians, perhaps the earliest extant Christian text, Paul compares the persecution of the Christians in Thessalonica by their συμϕυλέται with the suffering of the Judean churches ὑπὸ τῶν Ἰουδαίων τῶν καὶ τὸν κύριον ἀποκτεινάντων Ἰησοῦν καὶ τοὺς προϕήτας (1 Thess 2.14–15). Frank D. Gilliard offered a persuasive argument nearly thirty years ago that the participial clause in this prepositional phrase should be read as a restrictive rather than a descriptive clause. Everyone Paul refers to in this long sentence was Jewish, so it would be odd for Paul to say that ‘the Jews’ persecuted the churches in Judea and killed both Jesus and the prophets. Paul is instead saying that Jewish Christians in Judea suffered at the hands of a sub-group of their Jewish compatriots – οἱ καὶ τὸν κύριον ἀποκτείναντες Ἰησοῦν καὶ τοὺς προϕήτας.Footnote 31
If this is correct, then Paul refers to the politically powerful people – the ruling priests and the legal experts – who plotted Jesus’ execution because he opposed traditional interpretations of the law and seemed to threaten the operation of the temple in Jerusalem. Paul's claim that they also killed the prophets parallels the implicit claim in the Parable of the Wicked Tenants that Jesus was the last in a long line of Israel's prophets whom its leaders had rejected.Footnote 32
When Paul goes on to say that these same people drove him and his co-workers out he is probably describing in general terms the set of circumstances Luke narrates in Acts 9.28–30:Footnote 33
[Saul] went in and out among them in Jerusalem, speaking boldly in the name of the Lord. He spoke and argued with the Hellenists; but they were attempting to kill him. When the believers learned of it, they brought him down to Caesarea and sent him off to Tarsus.Footnote 34
Luke does not say specifically who these Greek-speaking Jews were, but the assessment of Hengel and Schwemer that they were ‘his former friends … from the Greek-speaking synagogues of Jerusalem’ is probably right (Acts 6.9; 7.58; 8.1).Footnote 35 This was the same group that had ‘stirred up the people as well as the elders and the scribes’ against Stephen (Acts 6.9, 12), and brought him before the Sanhedrin, which included ‘the high priest’, for questioning (7.1). Although Paul was writing of events that probably occurred four or five years after the death of Jesus (Gal 1.18), Annas (or Ananus the elder) and Caiaphas were still among the ‘chief priests’ if Jesus’ death occurred in 30 ce.Footnote 36 Even if Jesus’ death happened in 33 ce and the events described in 1 Thess 2.14–16 occurred in 37 or 38 ce, however, one of Ananus the elder's sons (either Jonathan or Theophilus) would have been high priest (Josephus, Ant. 20.198).Footnote 37 Ananus himself may well have been living, and the rest of his powerful and wealthy family would still have had enormous sway over affairs in Jerusalem. Paul, then, could reasonably describe the chief priests and the Sanhedrin in the Jerusalem of the period 30–4 or 33–7 as ‘the Jews who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out’ (NRSV, altered).
If that is what he is doing in 1 Thess 2.14–15, then his next phrase, τῶν … θεῷ μὴ ἀρεσκόντων καὶ πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποις ἐναντίων, is not an echo of a common anti-Jewish slander, as commentators have sometimes suggested.Footnote 38 Rather, it is a theological comment on the character of the chief priests and legal scholars who arrested, tried and executed Jesus and then continued over the course of several decades to oppose his followers.
The opinion that in the mid-first century the high priestly class and those connected with them were corrupt, ruthless and violent shows up in a variety of ancient Jewish literary sources. The author of the Assumption of Moses, writing a few decades after the death of Herod the Great, accuses the priests of the Hasmonean period (5.4; 6.1) of aligning themselves with ‘the scholars who will be their teachers’, ‘impious judges’ who will, in their legal decisions, ‘favour the persons that please them, and accept gifts’ (5.5).Footnote 39 The author is not as specific about the abuses of the priests in the years during which Herod's sons were in power (6.7–7.10). His belief, however, that he was living in the final period of great evil before the eschaton probably also means that he would have considered the gospels’ ‘chief priests’ and ‘scribes’ to be among ‘the pestilent and impious’ rulers in the decades after Herod (7.3).Footnote 40 They ‘proclaim themselves to be righteous’, he says, all the while engaging in the worst vices (7.3–8). ‘Their hands and minds will deal with impurities, and their mouth will speak enormities, saying in addition to all this: “Keep off, do not touch me, lest you pollute me”’ (7.9–10). The author draws a portrait of hypocritical rulers who keep up an appearance of pious law-observance, including ‘compassion’ towards the poor (7.6) and ritual punctiliousness (7.10), but do so in the service of extravagant self-indulgence.Footnote 41
Josephus, describing events in Jerusalem in 59 ce, says that there was ‘mutual enmity and class warfare between the high priests, on the one hand, and the priests and the leaders of the populace of Jerusalem, on the other’ (Ant. 20.180; trans. L. H. Feldman, LCL). He seems to ascribe most of the blame to ‘the high priests’ (ἀρχιερεῖς), a term that refers to the ruling class of priests, some of whom had served for a time as high priest:Footnote 42
Such was the shamelessness and effrontery which possessed the high priests that they actually were so brazen as to send slaves to the threshing floors to receive the tithes that were due to the priests, with the result that the poorer priests starved to death. Thus did the violence of the contending factions suppress all justice. (Ant. 20.181; trans. L. H. Feldman, LCL).
A few years later, in 62 ce, something similar happened under the ‘high priest’ Ananias son of Nedebaeus (cf. Acts 23.1–5; 24.1), whom Agrippa II had recently deposed. Despite losing his official position, he seems to have continued to exercise significant political power in the city, along with the group that Josephus calls ‘the high priests’.Footnote 43 Unless the story is a duplicate (its details are similar to the previous account), then once again ‘the high priests’ stole the tithes of the poorer priests with the result that many of them starved to death (Ant. 20.206–7).Footnote 44 This period of the high priesthood's history probably lies behind the description of the high priests in t. Menaḥ. 13.21 F (cf. b. Pesaḥ. 57a):
For they are high priests, and their sons, treasurers, and their sons in law, supervisors, and their servants come and beat us with staves.Footnote 45
Josephus also says that Ananias retained his power as Jerusalem descended into political chaos in the years before the outbreak of the Jewish war by the use of ‘his wealth to attract those who were willing to receive bribes’ (Ant. 20.213; trans. L. H. Feldman, LCL).Footnote 46
A Jew such as Paul, who felt that he and other Jewish Christians had been the victims of the Jewish ruling elites in Jerusalem, might well describe them, therefore, as people who do not please God and oppose all people. As long as we are willing to allow for some hyperbole in the use of the term ‘all’, what Paul says here is consistent with what some other Jews from roughly his own time and later said about their character. If Paul did have in mind the politically and intellectually influential Jews in Jerusalem in the decade following Jesus’ death when he wrote 1 Thess 2.14–15, then v. 16 probably refers to the contentious debates he had with his former Greek-speaking Jewish colleagues in Jerusalem. According to Luke these debates led his opponents to try to kill him and led him to flee to Tarsus (Acts 9.29–30).
He may have discussed with this group God's commission to send him to the Gentiles, something that, in the words of 1 Thess 2.16, they strongly opposed (κωλυόντων ἡμᾶς τοῖς ἔθνεσιν λαλῆσαι), and that would have also fed into Paul's description of them as τῶν … πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποις ἐναντίων. Luke, at least, seems to have understood the reason for Paul's departure from Jerusalem this way. Towards the end of his narrative, he describes how Paul was again in Jerusalem and near the temple when an angry mob accused him of bringing Gentiles into temple areas forbidden to them (Acts 21.27–8). Paul's speech of defence says that during his first post-conversion trip to Jerusalem (cf. Acts 9.26–30) he visited the temple to pray, and that he entered a trance there in which God directed him to preach the gospel to the Gentiles (22.17–21). Luke probably viewed this ecstatically experienced call to preach to the Gentiles as the source of the tension that led Paul's former ‘Hellenist’ colleagues to seek his death (Acts 9.29).
From the perspective of Rom 9.30–10.4, it is also hermeneutically helpful to observe what ancient Jewish literature outside the NT says about the devotion of the priestly class of this period to the law. In a famous passage (Ant. 20.199–203), Josephus describes how Ananus, son of the NT ‘Annas’ (Luke 3.2; John 18.13, 24; Acts 4.6), took advantage of his briefly held position as the official high priest in 62 ce to arrest James ‘the brother of Jesus who was called the Christ, and certain others’ whom ‘he accused … of having transgressed the law (παρανομησάντων)’ (trans. L. H. Feldman, LCL). James and the others (perhaps other Jewish Christians) were convicted by the Sanhedrin and delivered over for stoning. Josephus considered this action to be an example of the ‘heartless’ (ὡμοί) judgements of the Sadducees, the sect to which Ananus belonged, and gives the impression that he thought Ananus’ enthusiasm for punishing those who violated the law had blinded him to the injustice of what he was doing.
In a similar vein, t. Menḥ. 13.22B–E reflects on the reason for the destruction of the temple in 70 ce by comparing it with the destruction of the first temple:
As to Jerusalem's first building, on what account was it destroyed? Because of idolatry and licentiousness and bloodshed which was in it. But [as to] the latter [building] we know that they devoted themselves to Torah and were meticulous about tithes. On what account did they go into exile? Because they love money and hate one another. This teaches you that hatred of one for another is evil before the Omnipresent, and Scripture deems it equivalent to idolatry, licentiousness, and bloodshed.Footnote 47
This text seems to draw a contrast between the lawlessness of those who controlled the first temple and the devotion to the law, particularly the law of tithing from which they benefited, of those who controlled the second temple. The problem with those who controlled the second temple was not their attention to the details of the law, but their failure to attend to its weightier matters. Being meticulous about tithes yet being greedy and hateful is equivalent to being an idolater in God's eyes, and this form of idolatry characterises Israel's rulers in the first century (t. Menḥ. 13.21B–E; cf. Matt 23.23).
Josephus’ perspective on Ananus’ execution of James and the rabbis’ perspective in t. Menḥ. 13.22B–E are both reminiscent of the description in the Assumption of Moses of Jerusalem's Jewish leadership in the period after the death of Herod the Great. These leaders were scrupulous in their public commitments to ritual purity and the poor but were ruthless and violent towards others in their actual behaviour (As. Mos. 7.2–10; cf. Mark 12.38–9; Matt 23.5–7, 23–8; Luke 20.45–7).
When Paul speaks of ‘the Jews who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out’, and says that ‘they displease God and oppose everyone by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved’, therefore, he is not talking about ‘the Jews’ generally but about the group of political, judicial and intellectual leaders in Jerusalem who plotted Jesus’ death and persecuted his earliest followers after his death. These were leaders who, from Paul's post-conversion perspective (and the perspective of other Jews in his time and afterwards), pursued doing the law but failed to attend to its weightier matters.
Conclusion
For Paul, the law's weightiest matter – its τέλος – was Christ himself. This is why he chose to illustrate his statement in Rom 9.31–32b that unbelieving Israel had pursued the law ‘as if by works’ rather than ‘by faith’ with a set of traditional stone texts recalling Jesus’ final conflict with Jerusalem's social elites (9.32c–33). When those within Israel whom God had hardened (9.18) heard the gospel (10.14–21), they did not submit to it (10.3, 16) because they thought they could attain life by doing what the law required (10.5). They knew the gospel in the sense that they were exposed to it (10.19), but they were ignorant of its real significance as the revelation of God's free gift of righteousness to the wicked and undeserving (1.18–5.21) and continued to try to establish their own righteousness by keeping the law (10.3). Paul's citation of two texts from an already traditional collection of stone texts that explained Jesus’ rejection at the hands of Jerusalem's leadership provided a clear example of this focus on the law's details to the neglect of its weightier matters.
It was an attitude towards the law with which Paul was familiar because he had once shared it. Just as the unbelieving Israelites of Rom 9.31–10.3 pursue the law because of their ‘zeal (ζῆλον) for God’, so Paul's ‘zeal’ (ζῆλος) led him to follow the Pharisees in interpreting the law, to attain blamelessness with respect to the law, and to persecute the church (Phil 3.5–9). He was so committed to his ‘way of life in Judaism’, and so ‘extremely zealous (περισσοτέρως ζηλωτὴς ὑπάρχων)’ for his ancestral traditions, that he ‘persecuted the church of God to an extraordinary degree (καθ᾽ ὑπερβολὴν) and tried to annihilate (ἐπόρθουν) it’ (Gal 1.13–14).
He was also familiar with this attitude towards the gospel because he had experienced persecution from those who continued to hold it (2 Cor 11.24, 26; 1 Thess 2.15; cf. Gal 4.29). Paul's reference to persecution in Rom 8.35–6, his use of Pharaoh in 9.17 and his reference to the embattled prophet Elijah in 11.2–4 show that the persecution of God's people was not far from his mind when he wrote Romans 9–11. This receives confirmation from 15.31, where he asks the Roman Christians for their prayers that he ‘may be rescued from the unbelievers in Judea’.
In Paul's view, this law-based resistance to the gospel should be a cause neither for retaliation (Rom 12.14, 18–21) nor alarm (9.6a) among Christians because it was part of God's merciful design to enclose everyone within disobedience ‘that he may be merciful to all’ (11.32). He placed the stone in Zion that became a stumbling stone to some and the object of faith for others, and he continues to stretch out his hands to the part of Israel that disobeys and opposes the gospel (10.21; cf. Isa 65.2). In the end, Paul argues, history will reveal that Israel has not ‘stumbled (ἔπταισαν) so as to fall’ but so that ‘through their stumbling (παραπτώματι) salvation has come to the Gentiles’ (11.11).Footnote 48
