The Mystery of Romans: The Jewish Context of Paul's Letter. - book reviews

Christian Century, Sept 25, 1996 by Charles Kiker

By Mark D. Nanos. Fortress, 435 pp., $18.00 paperback.

OCCASIONALLY a book comes along that changes the way we read our basic texts. As a result of this volume, I will never again read the Pauline Epistles as setting aside the Torah. The author of this iconoclastic work is not a member of the academy but a businessman who has personally experienced Jewish-Christian tensions. His studies in Judaica and the Holocaust made him fear that the widespread understanding of the formative texts of Christianity as anti-Semitic could make something like the Holocaust happen again. But Mark Nanos lets Romans speak for itself, rather than reading his concern for Jewish-Christian relations back into the text.

Nanos is well versed in the primary and secondary literature concerning Paul and rabbinic Judaism. He argues that Paul remained a "good" Jew who, although shaped by his conviction that Jesus is the Christ, never parted company with the essential tenets and practices of Judaism.

Paul, as Nanos understands him, could not allow gentile Christians to become Jews, for that would compromise the unity of God as revealed in the Shema (Deut. 6:4). However, gentile believers should respect the commandments to Noah as summarized in Acts 15. When, in Romans 14-15, "strong" Christians disregard this halakah, they become a stumbling stone to the "weak," whom Nanos identifies as Jews who have not yet come to faith in Jesus as the Christ. It is arrogant to demand that Jews become gentiles in order to be followers of God's Christ.

Nanos assumes that the recipients of Paul's Letter to the Romans were still integrally related to the synagogue. As a result, he is able to argue that the "governing authorities" of Romans 13:1-7 were synagogue rulers, not civic authorities.

Nanos's positions are always interesting and provocative, and often compelling and convincing. If accepted they could go far toward modifying the perceived animosity toward Jewishness in a formative text of Christianity. But even if Paul expected gentile Christians to be subject to the apostolic decree for the sake of the weak, does it follow that gentile Christians today, when the church-synagogue rift is complete, should do so? Nanos does not suggest that it does, but neither does he ask the hermeneutical "so what?"

In his introduction Nanos expresses his hope that respect for things Jewish can reach into Christian pulpits and Sunday school classes. But this book is a work of technical New Testament scholarship, linguistically inaccessible to many of those who occupy pulpits and to most of those who sit in the pews. If Nanos's convictions are to reach pulpit and pew, they will have to be translated into the language of preacher and parishioner. Perhaps a succeeding work can address that need, as well as the hermeneutical question.