“Paul within Judaism” and Pauline Studies

Pauline studies has (rightly) pursued the reclamation of Paul’s Jewishness ever since the Second World War. This reclamation, especially in the work of E. P. Sanders and his students, began with his purported antinomianism.^{Footnote 3} The pendulum has swung (again, rightly so) away from the heirs of Albrecht Ritschl, Wilhelm Bousset, and Adolf von Harnack, who understood Paul as a radical rejector of a moribund Jewish legalism.^{Footnote 4} As John Gager argues, not only did Paul never reject the Law, but he is often found within Jewish history, memory, and religious identity in and beyond antiquity.^{Footnote 5} Carefully weighing these developments, Paula Fredriksen unapologetically examines Paul’s activity, and that of early Jesus-followers more generally, as Jewish activity.^{Footnote 6} In Fredriksen’s words, Paul held his convictions “as a committed Jew, and he enacted them as a committed Jew…. Paul lived his life entirely within his native Judaism.”^{Footnote 7}

This reclamation echoes centuries of Jewish theology which navigated Jewish/Christian relationships by reference to Paul’s Jewish identity, from, for example, Jacob Emden’s Seder Olam Rabbah Vezuta in early modernity, to the work of Michael Wyschogrod and Jacob Taubes.^{Footnote 8} Daniel Boyarin sums up: “On my reading of the Pauline corpus, Paul lived and died convinced that he was a Jew living out Judaism.”^{Footnote 9}

As scholars have extracted Paul from the frequently anti-Jewish trappings of Christian scholarly tradition, they have also reemphasized his own explicit commitment to the continuation of the tradition of Israel, related to his own identification as one “circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, Hebrew of the Hebrews, a Pharisee according to the law” (Phil 3:5); a “Hebrew … Israelite … of the seed of Abraham” (2 Cor 11:22–23); linked to his “kin according to the flesh … Israelites” (Rom 9:4); “an Israelite, from the seed of Abraham, from the tribe of Benjamin” (Rom 11:1–2). Insistence on Pauline Jewishness is an ongoing scholarly, theological, and ethical project.^{Footnote 10} It is not without its own complications, not least in Cynthia Baker’s observation that the word “Jew” tends to be used as an exonym by those outside the Jewish community, while those within the community preferred yisrael or b’nei yisrael.^{Footnote 11}

Here, however, is where an equivocation often slips into play. Scholars frequently treat references to “Israel” or “Israelites” as if equivalent to references to Jews or Jewish identity. This interchangeability is nowhere clearer than in the perennial debate over the proper translation of the Greek Ioudaioi. In his influential Beginnings of Jewishness, Shaye Cohen argued that during the Second Temple period, the meaning of Ioudaios shifted from an ethnic-geographic to a religious identity.^{Footnote 12} He then goes on in much of the rest of the book to deal with further changes in Jewish identity and identifiability in the rabbinic and postrabbinic period.^{Footnote 13} In contrast to the scope of Cohen’s approach, however, scholars have tended to focus more narrowly on whether the term Ioudaios is more “religious”—and translate “Jews”—or more “ethnic”—and translate “Judeans.”^{Footnote 14}

This equivocation between Jewishness and Israeliteness is, however, misleading. It takes the redactional form of the Hebrew Bible as a basic source text, when much of its editing signals effortful scribal intervention to direct heterogeneous source material into a Judah-centered narrative that presented Zion, Jerusalem, and the south as Israelite destiny. It also sidelines non-Jewish groups who claim Israelite inheritance, such as the Samaritans, with their own late antique communities, literature, and diaspora.^{Footnote 15}

Pauline studies also supplies, importantly, a corrective in the form of recent scholarship that notices how far this equivocation ignores—or compresses—Paul’s own ethnic rhetoric. As Jennifer Eyl convincingly argues, he downplays his connection to the term Ioudaios in favor of an (older) lexicon of belonging as an Israelitēs.^{Footnote 16} When Paul’s Jewishness is reclaimed by letting ancient complexities of Israelite identity disappear into a binary of Jewish/other, scholars risk maintaining the afterimage of the binary “Jewish/Christian.” Marking Paul as Jewish does not exhaust his options for expressing ethnic and/or religious belonging.

Eyl’s work within Pauline studies alerts us to the complexity of Paul’s ethnic self-representation, a complexity that bears discussion in an interwoven field in which the legacy of Paul resonates: the study of late antique Christianity. Scholars of late antiquity also often assume that “Israelite” in Christian texts denotes “Jewish,” limiting Israel’s legacy largely to the Second Temple period. That question was already settled by the time the church fathers got to it, according to this reading; the Jews had already inherited the scriptures, the history, and the memory of Israel.

By the era of Eusebius, John Chrysostom, Jerome, and Augustine, Christian views of the Jewish past do subordinate, package, and freeze Jewish history as the prehistory of the Christian church. Paul’s Jewishness—and Jewishness more generally—becomes a pivot point in the production of the ekklēsia (ἐκκλησία), manipulated to enable the departure of Christianity from the Judaism before it by an inheritance of Israel.^{Footnote 17} Leaning on this genealogy of Judaism, the task of the scholar often becomes the reclamation of Paul’s Jewish identity from the mistakes of early Christians and modern theologians alike, who mislabel his (well-defined) Jewishness by subordinating it to first-generation Christianity.

Nevertheless, I argue that decoupling Israelite and Jewish identifications in ancient sources—whenever appropriate, as with Paul’s own complex ethnicization—steers us toward a more nuanced account of the late antique Christian engagement with Jewish difference. To make the case, I examine one late antique reception of Paul’s ethnic identity in Epiphanius of Cyprus, heresiologist and one of the most notoriously Christianizing of fourth-century Christians. For Epiphanius, when Paul’s ethnic identity is in view at all, the focus falls on an Israelite, Benjaminite Paul. Paul’s Jewishness (or lack of it) becomes peripheral.

Analysis of Epiphanius’s disinterest in Paul’s Jewishness therefore provides an interpretive wedge with which to variegate our understanding of what identifications with Israel could signify. While in this section I have focused on Pauline studies, I will return at the end of this article to discuss rethinking the legacy of Paul’s ethnicity in the study of late antiquity. Epiphanius’s Benjaminite Paul, I think, also demonstrates the degree to which the desire of some post-Constantinian Christians to position monolithic or frozen Jewish pasts against a successful Christian present is a discursive strategy more so than a universal practice. We need to read late antique Christian representations of “Israel,” including representations of Jesus and Paul, within an ecosystem of categorization, classification, and overlapping identification. The legacy of Israel was much more complicated than the compressed binary “Jewish/Christian,” not only in universal histories like that of Eusebius, in which the Jewish people were divided from the ancient Hebrews, but even in texts that otherwise thrived on reified Jewish difference.

Epiphanius and the Jews

Epiphanius’s life and career span much of the fourth century.^{Footnote 18} Born in Palestine and educated in Egypt, he was for decades the abbot of a monastery he founded near his birthplace, Eleutheropolis. During those years, he affiliated with pro-Nicene bishops, including the exiled Italian Eusebius of Vercelli, and in 367 CE was ordained bishop of Constantia, on Cyprus.^{Footnote 19} Over the next forty years, he traveled extensively in the eastern Mediterranean and eventually died at sea on a trip back from Constantinople to Cyprus in the early fifth century.^{Footnote 20} An expansive hagiographical tradition grew up after his death, including a late fifth-century Greek Vita.^{Footnote 21}

Unlike other bishops of the time, even those actively embedded in monastic networks like Jerome, Basil of Caesarea, or Isidore of Pelusium, little of Epiphanius’s correspondence has survived. We possess only two understudied exegetical miscellanies, On Gems and On Weights and Measures; two treatises on church doctrine, the Ancoratus and the so-called De Fide; and the work for which the bishop of Cyprus is best known: his massive, three-volume work against heresies, the Panarion. In this article, I deal particularly with the Panarion and On Gems, since they contain Epiphanius’s explicit reflection on Paul’s identity.^{Footnote 22}

The Panarion was written between 374/5 and 377 CE, perhaps finished hastily in response to a request in 376 CE from two church officials for Epiphanius to expand on an earlier, rather minimally explained, list of sects in his Ancoratus.^{Footnote 23} It is a sprawling, Greek, three-volume work against heresies and incorporates an array of genres: sacred history, heresiological catalog, biblical criticism, and ecclesiastical document dump. The On Gems, written around twenty years later, probably in 394 CE, survives in partial Georgian and Latin translations and in Armenian, Coptic, Greek, and Syriac fragments.^{Footnote 24}

Throughout these two texts, and Epiphanius’s work in general, Jewishness acts as an important heresiological and conceptual category.^{Footnote 25} He is, in this respect, very much of his time. A frozen “Judaism” offers a reservoir of mistakes. Faithful Christians can classify heresies by their similarity to or difference from those “Jewish mistakes,” as well as absorbing and perfecting the partial truths of “the Jews” in orthodox Christian practice.^{Footnote 26}

The story of the count (comes) Josephus provides us with one of the clearest examples of the uses to which he puts the ethnicization of Jews. This narrative spins off from the claim that the Ebionites accept only the Gospel according to Matthew, correctly said, Epiphanius admits, to be the only person who “in Hebrew and Hebrew letters, in the New Testament, made the sequence and proclamation of the gospel” (ὅτι Ματθαῖος μόνος Ἑβραϊστὶ καὶ Ἑβραϊκοῖς γράμμασιν ἐν τῇ καινῇ διαθήκῃ ἐποιήσατο τὴν τοῦ εὐαγγελίου ἔκθεσίν τε καὶ κήρυγμα).^{Footnote 27} Unable to resist an erudite digression, Epiphanius then notes a translation of the Gospel of John from Greek to Hebrew is stored in the “treasuries of the Jews, I mean the ones at Tiberias,” (ἐν τοῖς τῶν Ἰουδαίων γαζοφυλακίοις, φημὶ δὲ τοῖς ἐν Τιβεριάδι).^{Footnote 28} According to Epiphanius, a copy of the Acts of the Apostles, similarly translated and stored, has even brought Jews “to having belief in Christ” (εἰς Χριστὸν πεπιστευκέναι).^{Footnote 29} Josephus is one of those Jews; he has told Epiphanius in detail (ὑφηγήσαντο ἡμῖν κατὰ λεπτότητα) what reading these translations did to them.^{Footnote 30}

The story that Epiphanius claims Josephus told him is remarkable.^{Footnote 31} Made a comes (κομήτων ἔτυχε) by the emperor Constantine, and authorized to build churches in Tiberias, Diocaesarea, Capernaum, and elsewhere, he had already ranked highly among the Ioudaioi.^{Footnote 32} Apparently, Josephus even attended the patriarch of his time, whose name Epiphanius gives as Ellel (Ἐλλὴλ).^{Footnote 33}

Things start to get a little strange when Josephus witnesses Ellel’s deathbed baptism at the hands of the bishop of Tiberias, performed in secret.^{Footnote 34} Troubled by this, Josephus enters the gazophylacium (ἐν τοῖς γαζοφυλακίοις, “into the treasuries”) and finds the (translated) Gospel of John and the Acts of the Apostles and the (genuine?) Gospel of Matthew. Then the books, as well as the mysterious behaviour of Ellel, Epiphanius writes, provided “two basic premises” suggesting the truth of Christian pistis (τῆς πίστεως τοῦ Χριστοῦ).^{Footnote 35} A third “catechetical lesson” (κατηχήσεως ἔργον) came after the patriarch Ellel’s son, Judas, left in Josephus’s care, fell in love with a Christian woman, who did not yield to his amorous advances and, moreover, resisted the attempts of sorcery to bewitch her.^{Footnote 36} He learns, Epiphanius says, that “the power of pharmakeia has no strength wherever there is the name of Christ and the sign of the cross” (ὅτι οὐκ ἴσχυσεν, ἔνθα ὄνομα Χριστοῦ καὶ σφραγὶς σταυροῦ, φαρμακείας δύναμις).^{Footnote 37}

The lessons continue. Jesus appears to him in a dream, and tells Josephus to believe; he refuses, becomes ill, and only recovers after promising faith in a second encounter with dream-Jesus—a promise he rescinds. When those of his “Jewish kin” (τῶν συγγενῶν αὐτοῦ Ἰουδαίων) assume he is dying from a second illness, “a certain old man from among those learned in the law” (τῶν γὰρ νομομαθῶν ἀνήρ τις πρεσβύτης) whispers part of a creedal statement in his ear.^{Footnote 38} After two more encounters with dream-Jesus and yet another recovery from sickness, Jesus promises to work miracles to prove himself to Josephus. Josephus doubts, but nevertheless heals a madman in Tiberias with an exorcism formula invoking the name of Jesus of Nazareth.^{Footnote 39}

Crucially, while spending more time with “orthodox” Christians, Josephus remains Jewish throughout. Some years pass. Appointed by Patriarch Judas, when he came of age, to collect “tithes and firstfruit” (τὰ ἐπιδέκατα καὶ τὰς ἀπαρχάς) from the Jewish communities in Cilicia, Josephus also made friends with the bishop, and obtained gospels.^{Footnote 40} While serving in this official role for the patriarchate, Josephus’s dual affiliations come to a head. Attempting to reorder the synagogues of the city with purges of the leadership, a crowd bursts into his room, finds him poring over the gospels, seizes both man and books, and whips him in the synagogue “according to law.” Josephus is rescued at the last second by the bishop.^{Footnote 41} Another time, his opponents ambush him and throw him into a river.^{Footnote 42} In this moment, he is “found worthy of holy baptism, since he was saved” (λουτροῦ ἁγίου καταξιοῦται ἐσώθη γάρ), befriends the emperor Constantine, woos him with his story, and is granted his rank of comes and imperial documents certifying permission to build churches in places where it had been previously difficult due to a lack of Greeks, Samaritans, and Christians in those areas.^{Footnote 43}

In the final episode of Josephus’s story arc, he has a showdown with the Tiberias Ioudaioi, who try to delay his church-building with “magics and deceptions” (μαγείαις γάρ τισι καὶ περιεργίαις), binding the fire (τὸ πῦρ καταδῆσαι) needed to prepare lime and other building material. When Josephus hears of their actions, moved with zeal, he seizes a water vessel, traces the sign of the cross “with his own finger,” and issues a rather pointed, anti-Jewish magical invocation: “In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, whom my fathers and those of all here present crucified, may there be power in this water to set at naught all sorcery and enchantment these men have wrought, and to work a miracle on the fire that the Lord’s house may be furnished.”^{Footnote 44} When the water causes the fires to burn hot again, in a dramatic scene, those present cry, “One God, the one helping the Christians” (εἷς θεός, ὁ βοηθῶν τοῖς Χριστιανοῖς), and leave.^{Footnote 45}

Throughout this biographical digression, the identity of Josephus as Ioudaios serves at least three functions. First, his Jewish acquiescence to transformation serves as a negative contrast to Christian heretics, specifically the “Arians,” but also the Ebionites attacked in this section of the Panarion. The Ebionites fixate on a scripture that should, instead, spur them toward the holy texts read by the church. The Ebionites read the Gospel of Matthew in Hebrew as if it were a suitable endpoint for Christian practice. Josephus, instead, begins from the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew in the Jewish gazophylakium, which moves him toward the Gospels provided to him by a bishop, to becoming a church builder committed to the expansion of orthodox Christian building projects. As Epiphanius hints when he justifies his digression by reference to them, Hebrew translations in the Jewish treasury are supposed to lead to zeal and obedience to the orthodox church. Anyone who treats them as the end of a process of transformation rather than the beginning is, in other words, remaining, unlike Josephus, merely Jewish.

Second, the narrative of Josephus’s Jewishness emphasizes how far the holy power of God works for Christian causes. Not only is Josephus brought to Christian zeal by a series of remarkable coincidences and events, and not only does he manage, remarkably, to navigate a suitably hostile environment and gain titles from Emperor Constantine himself, but he, a Jew who turned to Christ, gains miraculous abilities to prove, against those who for most of the story remained his own people, that God comes to the aid of the Christians. The demon-possessed man whom he heals becomes a sign to the Jews. The acclamation of the crowds at the final furnace showdown demonstrates the supremacy of Christian power over against that of his Jewish opponents. His Jewishness sharpens the power of his transformation, from passive observer of the attraction of Jews to Christ (at least as Epiphanius narrates it), to invoking the name of Jesus to cure a demoniac and to enchant water so that it becomes able to break Jewish spells preventing furnaces from burning. Even when he performs miracles, he signals an awareness of his Jewish ancestry; those who crucified Christ, he says, were also his fathers.

Third, signaling Josephus’s Jewishness acts as a way for Epiphanius to render a grainy, believable, localized story of non-Christian difference contested, with Epiphanius himself as conduit.^{Footnote 46} It permits Epiphanius to flaunt knowledge of the internal politics of the Palestinian Jewish community, with reference to their “apostles,” the patrilineal succession of patriarchate, the method of raising funds, the “azanites” active in synagogue liturgy. It lets him emphasize the degree to which Josephus’s transformation is controversial as a community-disrupting event but that it was a transformation that took time—Josephus was doing important, well-meaning work to reorganize synagogue communities even while reading gospel books.^{Footnote 47} It also highlights a narrative logic that perceived Josephus’s building projects as successful only because he came from a Jewish background and was able to navigate local networks for a long time after he confessed—to Epiphanius on a hike—that he had come to believe in the power of Christ. As Jacobs writes of late antique Christianization, “the true Jews morph, slow-motion before our eyes, into orthodox Christians.”^{Footnote 48} In the case of Josephus, the process of making a landscape Christian relied, in fact, on milking his Jewishness for as long as possible.

The Benjaminite Paul in On Gems

Given Epiphanius’s emphatic deployment of Jewishness to cut against Christian opponents and provide narrative proof of the power of the orthodox, we might expect Paul’s identity to serve Epiphanius as an interpretive pivot, just as it often is for scholars exploring the developing ancient frontier zone between Judaism and Christianity, or was for late antique Christians like Augustine in (for example) his letters to Jerome.^{Footnote 49} True enough, Paul is important for Epiphanius, most often referred to simply as ὁ ἅγιος Παῦλος, “the holy Paul,” or ὁ ἀπόστολος Παῦλος, “the apostle Paul.”^{Footnote 50} Moreover, the entire Panarion is framed by a riff on Col 3:11 and Gal 6:15: “in Christ Jesus there is neither barbarian, Scythian, Hellene nor Jew but a new creation.”^{Footnote 51} Surprisingly, however, the question of Paul’s Jewishness so dominant in the history of scholarship is a nonstarter here. Epiphanius has no care for it, and the matter never comes up. Instead, when the case of Paul’s ethnicity arises, Epiphanius reflects not on any Jewishness but on his Israelite lineage.

In other words, instead of the Jewishness of Paul so important to contemporary scholarship, Epiphanius articulates Paul’s ethnicity via identification as a Benjaminite, situated within the tribal imaginary of biblical Israel.^{Footnote 52} Here, I depart from Andrew Jacobs’s representation of Epiphanius’s Paul as another example of the convert’s progression “from Jew to Christian.”^{Footnote 53} Although Jacobs guides us carefully through the matrix of Christian uses of Jewish religious transformation, it seems that “Jew/Christian” is not the main category for differentiation when it comes to Epiphanius’s Paul. First, Epiphanius has no qualms, as the Josephus narrative illustrates, when making explicit reference to Jewishness to make his point about religious transformation, but such explicit references are entirely absent from his treatment of Paul, either in the Panarion or in On Gems. Second, as Eyl has pointed out—and I will discuss further below—Paul himself refers to (older) Israelite and Benjaminite identity in the very passages Epiphanius cites, claims which do not reduce to Jewish identity.

Since Epiphanius views “Judaism” as a historically bounded name dating from the time of King David (Pan. 1.8.2.2–4; see also 1.8.3.5), Paul does not have to be “authentically Jewish before becoming truly Christian,” since Judaism is a later name given to the true religion of ancient Israel.^{Footnote 54} Jews are “Abraham’s lineal descendants and the heirs of his true religion” (Pan. 1.8.4.1), but they cannot claim a monopoly on that lineage. Therefore, Epiphanius’s claims to continuity with Israel, like those of Paul, are claims to something older than the (admittedly important) Judaism. This position is confirmed by the exegetical work in On Gems, a relatively underworked lithological and exegetical anthology, containing figural and allegorical exegesis of the twelve stones on the high priest’s breastplate in Exod 28. It was written to another bishop, Theodotus, who requested Epiphanius’s teaching on the matter.

Correspondingly, Epiphanius’s On Gems instead relies heavily on a Benjaminite Paul. The resonance between the life of Paul and Ps 115 (or Ps 116 in the Masoretic text) depends not on Paul’s Jewishness (or lack of it) but on his affiliation with Benjamin, and the status of Benjamin among his brothers. Close to the end of the most complete surviving text, On Gems turns to onyx, “the twelfth stone, which is the total and the consummation of all the stones, which are mounted on the oracular tablet of the law.”^{Footnote 55} Initially, Epiphanius ricochets back and forth between the attributes of Benjamin and the way both he and the tribe named after him resonate with the onyx. The gem is the last on the breastplate of Aaron, he writes; so too Benjamin was the youngest son of Jacob.^{Footnote 56} And just as the last gem completed the breastplate, so too did Benjaminite individuals direct the course of Israel, even though Benjamin was youngest. Saul, of Benjamin, was the first king, and judges also arose from Benjamin.^{Footnote 57} Esther, who saved Israel, came from Benjamin, and so too Mordecai.^{Footnote 58} As kings and daughters of kings love onyx, so did Joseph and Jacob love Benjamin, with Joseph giving Benjamin a share five times that of his brothers.^{Footnote 59} Two repeated themes emerge. First, onyx and Benjamin together signify completion, ending, and beginning. Second, Benjamin saves Israel, time and time again; his people were bowmen and warriors; Saul was a Benjaminite; Esther was a Benjaminite. Onyx, like Benjamin, and like the history of Israel, is about the last of a set, the one that completes a breastplate, a kingdom, or a history, being beloved.

Jeremy Schott has argued that Epiphanius interprets human history as a totalized narrative of religious error and ethnic corruption—a succession of periods defined by their peculiar forms of heresy and dissent.^{Footnote 60} Complementing, if somewhat complicating, Schott’s insight, On Gems supplies another periodization, overlapping but not identical. This periodization focuses on the lifespan of ancient Israel. From the time of Joseph to the time of Saul, the line of Benjamin guides the fortunes of Israel. Then, in the time of David, Benjamin yields to Judah. In exile, the Benjaminite Esther saves the people again, and Israel is guided not by Benjamin but by Levi. After the time of the Levites, and after all the apostles, a new Benjaminite appears. Epiphanius writes:

Here, Epiphanius’s magnification of the Benjaminite identity of Paul does a number of things for him. First, Epiphanius gains an opportunity to display his ability to read the Bible over against the capacities of his opponents. Epiphanius’s approach to scripture may begin by contesting the passage in question, but it works via a knowledge overflow, that is, his interpretation produces an excess of teachings by connecting together otherwise segmented knowledge. Paul exhibits his Israeliteness. Then Epiphanius acknowledges the identification, reemphasizes it, and thereby elevates the thoughts of Paul to the status of prophetic fulfilment.^{Footnote 62} When Samuel said to Saul, “Yours are the good things of Israel and of the house of your father,” he means the holy thoughts offered by Paul the apostle. Thus, David is spiritually fulfilled in Paul. Epiphanius uses Paul’s own intertext in 2 Cor 4:13, Ps 116, as well as Acts and Ps 67 (LXX/OG) to present Paul’s preaching as the act of a “fellow-singer” along with David, taking as its beginning Paul’s claims to Israelite ancestry.^{Footnote 63}

It is worth dwelling a little on the composite passage to draw out the logic. Epiphanius binds together the career of Paul from Acts, especially his Damascus road experience (Acts 9) and his recalling of that experience (specifically, Acts 22), and statements of Pauline suffering and exertion in the two canonical letters to the Corinthians (2 Cor 11:24; 1 Cor 15:10), with Ps 116:11–15 and the Greek text of Ps 67:28: ἐκεῖ Βενιαμιν νεώτερος ἐν ἐκστάσει, “There is Benjamin, the youngest, in a trance.”^{Footnote 64} Like Benjamin, the youngest, Paul of the tribe of Benjamin became the youngest apostle and, like Benjamin, achieved it via a state of ekstasis, special knowledge. Then to close the section, Epiphanius adds another exegetical flourish to return to the onyx, all framed through Benjamin’s name. Christ’s name, sweet-smelling, was spread abroad by Paul; the beauty of this teaching is mirrored by the beauty of the onyx, on which was inscribed the name of Benjamin, and by which the square set of stones was completed, consummated, and ended.

For all that Epiphanius often railed against the Alexandrian exegete Origen, this whole section depends on Origen’s Homilies on Psalms, at least as far as we can tell from the surviving text of the Alexandrian’s work.^{Footnote 65} It may even preserve Origen’s thinking on verses 11–13, which is otherwise lost, as attested by the silence of the Migne text after verse 8 of the nineteen-verse psalm.^{Footnote 66} In his reverence for the teachings of Origen, Epiphanius looks more like his contemporaries than biographical efforts focused on his heresiological work in isolation might suggest. Likewise, Epiphanius, like his contemporaries, leans heavily on 1 and 2 Corinthians, through the lens of Origen, as an exegetical mainstay to reframe scripture. As Margaret Mitchell notices of Gregory of Nyssa’s Commentary on the Song of Songs: “the road to early Christian hermeneutics run[s] through Corinth.”^{Footnote 67}

As a second result of magnifying Benjamin, Epiphanius grafts orthodoxy and its liturgy into internal Israelite history. As Benjamin to the tribes, and Saul to Israel, and onyx in the breastplate of Aaron, so Paul and his writings among the churches. As the cup of Joseph to his beloved brother Benjamin, so the “spiritual vessel” that is Paul’s writing returned to daily in the liturgy: “They read the book of the Apostle and the apostolic letters at one time during the year, but the book of Paul every day and every hour; by this spiritual vessel they moisten and bring gifts to the church of God.”^{Footnote 68} Reading Paul as a recapitulation of Israel expresses the consummation of a divine plan embedded in the history of Israel itself.

Paul’s Benjaminite identity hooks Paul into the Israelite past, an opportunity for the compression of time pressed into new shapes through a set of interpretive forms: Benjamin, Paul, David, onyx, Israel. Thus, the text emphasizes continuity with a larger pattern of righteousness that bypasses explicit mention of Judaism or Jewishness. We see this elsewhere in On Gems as well. Mary, for example, is a “virgin who was of both the race of the circumcised and the uncircumcised.”^{Footnote 69} Christ the precious gem, Epiphanius writes elsewhere, “allied Himself with both sides, with Rahab the stranger, whose sins he drove out, and with Solomon the Israelite of the tribe of Judah, and again with Thamar of the Philistines and Judah of the tribe of Abraham the blessed, with Ruth of the Ammonites and the Sodomites and Boaz of Judah and of the tribe….”^{Footnote 70}

Even with the lacunae caused by a lost leaf in the Georgian, we have enough of the list to see a quasi-ethnographic account of differences between humans drawn from scripture, stratified in terms of Israel and non-Israel, without the mediation of “Jewish” (or “Christian”) as categories. This is quite different from the organization of the ethnic past found in, for example, Eusebius of Caesarea. In Eusebius’s Preparation for the Gospel, the separation of Jewish identity from Hebrew identity served to retcon Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and Moses as proto-Christians. Eusebius again, this time in his Demonstration of the Gospel (1.2, 1.5, etc.), explicitly calls these “Hebrews” the first “Christians,” with their philosophical religion taking the appropriate middle way between the excesses of Judaism and Hellenism.^{Footnote 71} In contrast, Epiphanius focuses on the plurality of Israel, sorting the genealogy of Jesus from Matt 1:1–7 into “sides” defined by circumcised and uncircumcised groups then themselves subdivided: the Israelites of Judah and Abraham over against the strangers, the Philistines, the Ammonites, and the Sodomites. He even spends time identifying the prophet Elijah’s descent from the tribe of Gad.^{Footnote 72}

This involves theological anti-Judaism, in a sense, but not in the way that the Josephus narrative in Epiphanius’s Ebionite section cuts against “the Jews” as a people. Rather, this account sidesteps Jewishness. Perhaps this is deliberate erasure. I think, rather, that we see something else; an incidentally anti-Jewish theology of Israelite continuity. Just as, to quote Kathy Ehrensperger, “the purpose of Paul’s genealogical reasoning thus can be seen in rendering (representatives of) the nations heirs or rather co-heirs to the promises,” so also the purpose of drawing attention to Paul’s Benjaminite genealogical claim renders the liturgical life of the orthodox as directly inheriting the intramural Israelite interactions of the twelve tribes.^{Footnote 73}

Instead, Epiphanius’s Paul consummates the tribes, taking the letters of the high priests and combining them with heavenly instruction—like onyx, and like the tribe of Benjamin, the fulfillment of what came before.^{Footnote 74} Epiphanius thereby claims and refashions “Israel,” rendering the “good things of Israel” spoken of by Samuel to Saul as “the holy thoughts which appeared … brought as offerings by Paul the apostle.”^{Footnote 75} Paul can uniquely prove to be the renewal and reformulation of Israel, because of his Benjaminite lineage. Thus, Epiphanius’s own orthodox church maintains the observance and lineage of Israel.

Third, Epiphanius’s emphasis on the Israelite Paul embraces and reiterates Paul’s own strategies of ethnological reasoning. Thus, he binds his own scriptural interpretation to the genealogical placement of Paul as the prophetic fulfilment of ancient Israel. To quote Jennifer Eyl:

Paul himself, in other words, had little interest in consistently classifying himself as Ioudaios. Rather, Paul’s Israelite lineage mattered more. Paula Fredriksen has called Paul’s Christ the “vanishing point for Paul’s new perspective on scripture”—the event horizon according to which the dramatic compression of sacred and human time permits the total reconfiguration of scriptural meaning.^{Footnote 77} For Epiphanius, at least, Paul’s Benjaminite ethnicity is the vanishing point permitting the smooth grafting of ecclesiastical liturgy, practice, and holiness into the line of Israel.

Provided with the opportunity of Paul’s Israelite self-designations, Epiphanius runs with it. He goes well beyond Paul’s own strategic references to his own ethnoreligious identities, however. By identifying a Benjaminite Paul, Epiphanius bypasses Jewish claims to history to instead make a larger argument about the transferral, through Paul, of the deposit of ancient Israel into the life of the orthodox. The absolute culmination of Israelite religion in Christian teaching lies not in overcoming a specific opponent, Judaism, but in spiritual continuity with ancient Israelite sacral practices.

Paul in the Panarion: Between Epiphanius and the Ebionites

Ultimately, in the section of On Gems dedicated to onyx, Paul’s identification as Benjaminite does heavy duty for Epiphanius. That identity serves him as an exegetical hook, a site of continuity with biblical Israel, and an inspiration to homiletic connection between Paul and specific details of the Israelite past. When talking about Paul, Epiphanius bypasses Jewish/Christian categorical difference and burrows instead into the intricacies of internal Israelite identity, at least as attested by the Hebrew Bible. This, in turn, tells us something important about the variety of late antique interactions with their scriptural reservoir, in ways that we risk effacing if we only consider those interactions at the level of Paul’s Jewishness.

It might be objected that On Gems is largely exegesis tagged to the book of Exodus. What else would we expect other than a detail-oriented approach to the tribal composition of ancient Israel? Epiphanius’s Israelite Paul is not, however, only an artefact of his exegetical interests, as we see from the only other place in Epiphanius’s surviving literature where we get close to the ethnic identity of Paul. An Israelite Paul also serves as an important window into Epiphanius’s categories for ordering people and their pasts in the Panarion.

For example, as part of the same broadside against the Ebionites that includes Josephus’s biographical adventures, Epiphanius combats a series of arguments attributed to the sect. As part of their revisionist approach to scriptural canon—including the aforementioned “Hebrew” Matthew (with falsified genealogical tables), the Travels of Peter, the “Ascents of James,” and other Acts of Apostles—the Ebionites, Epiphanius argues, produce an anti-Pauline doctrine ultimately linked to dismissing Paul as Greek. The passage is worth quoting:

Epiphanius initially seems to dismiss this claim of gentile parents, uniquely attested here in the Panarion, out of hand.^{Footnote 79} But he later returns to Paul’s parentage with a vengeance. It is even possible that his overly fast dismissal was meant to set the stage for the extended ethnic argument that follows.^{Footnote 80} After a litany of refutations of Ebionite stupidity, he amplifies their position on Paul to constitute blasphemy and leans in hard on Paul’s Israelite lineage.^{Footnote 81} The full text of this section is lengthy, so I review only the three key arguments.

For the first argument, Epiphanius challenges his opponents to make sense of the cluster of passages in which Paul calls himself “a Hebrew,” “of the seed of Abraham,” “of the tribe of Benjamin,” and “a Pharisee, more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my fathers,” “an Israelite.”^{Footnote 82} The followers of Ebion might dismiss these testimonies. But if they do, Epiphanius suggests, thus making Paul a liar, they must also say Peter lies when he calls Paul “my brother” (ὁ ἀδελφός μου Παῦλος; 2 Pet 3:15–16), interpreted by Epiphanius in the sense of ethnic kinship.

The second argument is more interesting.^{Footnote 83} Epiphanius argues, sensibly, that locative identity and ethnic origins are not the same thing. He has two cases, both focused specifically on Cypriote examples. In the first, the case of Barnabas taken from Acts, Barnabas (a Cypriote) can still be descended from Levi, due to diaspora Israelite identity. Thus, he defuses the argument that a Tarsean Paul must be a Greek Paul. In the second, he draws on the dislocative effects of warfare, especially during the time of Antiochus Epiphanes (διασπαρέντων γὰρ πολλῶν ἐν τοῖς χρόνοις Ἀντιόχου τοῦ Ἐπιφανοῦς καὶ ἐν χρόνοις ἄλλοις). Siege and captivity, he points out, meant the relocation of captives. Isaiah 23:12, in referring to Citians, means the relocation of Israelites to Cyprus; likewise, he reads 1 Macc 1:1 as demonstrating that Alexander, while of Macedon, was of Citian descent (ἐκ σπέρματος τῶν Κιτιέων).^{Footnote 84} On the basis of this historia (τὴν ἱστορίαν), as Epiphanius calls it, it is clear that many of those who settle outside Israel nevertheless have Israelite ancestry. In this case, the heresiologist reflects with some sensitivity on the continued effects of felt diaspora, including forcible dislocation, on ethnic identification.^{Footnote 85}

His third and final argument recalls the account of Moses as an “Egyptian” given by the daughters of Jethro in Exod 2:18–20.^{Footnote 86} Is scripture lying, he asks, given that Moses, son of Amram, son of Kohath, was a direct lineal descendant of Abraham? With heavy sarcasm, Epiphanius adds another question: Did Abraham’s line die out because Moses is called “Egyptian”? Epiphanius does not complete the logic here—the answer is clearly a resounding no. Instead he notices rather snippily that the followers of Ebion have an uphill slog ahead of them.

Thus, in addition to the exegetical usefulness of Paul’s Benjaminite identity in On Gems, the Panarion demonstrates that Epiphanius’s emphasis on Paul’s Israelite identity—when his ethnicity comes up at all—is consistent across his surviving works. Here, emphasis on Paul’s importance constitutes a direct challenge to the Ebionite insistence, at least as Epiphanius perceives it, that they are the inheritors of the Israelite past. By emphasizing Paul’s Israelite identity, just as when he stressed Josephus’s transformation, Epiphanius can dismiss the Ebionites most effectively as merely Jewish, peripheral to the true story of a larger Israel embodied in the Benjaminite Paul.

Final Thoughts

By capitalizing on the gap between Israelite identity and Jewish identity, Epiphanius’s ethnicization of Paul provides a counterexample to a common scholarly image of post-Constantinian Christian identity. According to this interpretation, imperial Christianity successfully reified Judaism for its own self-fashioning, with fluidity between Jewish and Christian identity limited to earlier centuries. True enough, an imperial Christianity could and did freeze its opponents, Jewish, pagan, and otherwise, as boxed-up entities that erudite Christians could define themselves against. Epiphanius’s Paul, however, also provides evidence for the fourth-century vitality of the specifically Israelite past, and other ethnicized pasts associated with it.^{Footnote 87}

Even scholars who resist an early Jewish/Christian “parting” or tension for the first century often retain a narrative of late antique religious change that contains a comparable binary. According to this understanding, supersessionist Christianity, especially after Constantine, increasingly defines itself with reference to a reified, “othered” Judaism.^{Footnote 88} While Pauline studies intertwines with theological anti-Judaism and its afterimage, this scholarship on late antique anti-Jewishness aims to locate the origins of European anti-Semitism, to look back and ask, in Paula Fredriksen’s snappy phrasing, “Why and how did relations between Christians and Jews ever become so terrible in the first place?”^{Footnote 89}

Scholars of late antique religion justifiably represent earlier institutionalized Christianity, in particular, the bitter cocktail of patristic theology and Roman law from the fourth century onward, as forging its identity by exclusion and suppression of Jews both real and imagined.^{Footnote 90} In this way they extend back in time a medievalist identification of the late eleventh century as a moment of change and, in particular, the origins of anti-Semitism.^{Footnote 91} In the wake of the First Crusade in 1095–1098 CE, the reorganization of the papacy, and the institutionalized management (by governmental, judicial, social, and scribal means) of lepers, Jews, and heretics, as Richard I. Moore writes, “Europe became a persecuting society, and … it has remained one.”^{Footnote 92}

This understanding correctly recognizes the long shadow of late antique Christian cultural and legal forms, but it also simplifies Christian entanglement with the legacy of Israel—in its plurality—into a bipartisan matter of Jewish/Christian. The idea that they replaced the Jewish people as the chosen of Israel was fundamental for many late antique Christian authors and arguments. But the precise content of the Israel they contested was not predetermined. After all, Christian self-definition often rested on writings like those of Paul or the Greek Bible. Israel was hardly monolithic in those texts.

Epiphanius’s Paul therefore encourages a reconsideration of the categorical practices of late antique Christian polemic. The Israelite Paul of Epiphanius demonstrates how Christian theological anti-Judaism—not just in the first two centuries—functions within an array of differentiating techniques, used at various times and in wildly divergent ways. Christian theological anti-Judaism is one of the modes in which disagreement over scripture, tradition, observance, and belief was thrashed out. But, although powerful and often violent, it was never the only resort by which Christians figured out their relationship to Jewishness. It was not the only operating frontier at which Christians or Jews made sense of their communal self-identification.

True enough, Epiphanius does frequently use ethnic categorization, and polemic against Jewishness, to manufacture orthodoxy. Epiphanius’s representation of Paul’s ethnicity, however, also retains the ethnic complexity of the Israelite past, the organizational complexity of biblical Israel, and Paul’s participation in this complex. As Eyl suggests, Paul himself performs intermittent Jewish identity, deploying various elements within a lexicon of Israelite belonging. Epiphanius uses this Benjaminite Paul to contest categories of lineage and antiquity beyond Ioudaios and Christianos (Χριστιανός), focused on the web of identification that positioned Paul in the patrimony of ancient Israel.

Rather than fixed as the proximate other of Christian self-definition, therefore, the significance of fourth-century Jewishness was sometimes overshadowed by Christian engagement with other identities also present in the legacy of the Israelite past.^{Footnote 93} At least with respect to Paul’s identity, Epiphanius slips beyond the bounds of modern scholarly fixation on the incompatibility (or compatibility) of Jewishness (whether ethnic or religious) with emergent Christianity.^{Footnote 94} The irrelevance to Epiphanius of explicitly signaling Paul’s “Jewishness,” in contrast to the deployment of that rhetoric in the comes Josephus narrative, renders Epiphanius’s Paul an important prompt to reconceptualize religious identity in the post-Constantinian religious landscape. Epiphanius’s Israelite image of the apostle witnesses how post-Constantinian Christianity, even while it could—and did—often reify a fixed Jewish “other,” retained a deep reservoir of interconnections with the Israelite past, some mediated by exhaustive obsession with Judaism, and others not.

Recently, Adi Ophir and Ishay Rosen-Zvi even attributed the functional binary of “gentile” and “Jew” to Paul: Goy: Israel’s Multiple Others and the Birth of the Gentile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), esp. 140–78; by the same authors, “Paul and the Invention of the Gentiles,” JQR 105 (2015) 1–41. I review more general scholarly discussion below.