I. Appreciation

Beginning from the observation that “Qumran literature, Paul’s letters, and Tannaitic midrash are all exegetical enterprises that use the (re-)interpretation of scripture for the sake of building (and maintaining) sacred communities” (161), Yael Fisch undertakes a careful comparative study of the exegetical techniques, hermeneutical commitments, and pedagogical strategies evident in these three bodies of literature. With imagination and courage, she tackles complex comparative questions long deferred by experts in these three individual fields of inquiry. In doing so, she displays the virtue of intellectual humility she finds modeled by her Tannaitic interpreters.

I have learned a great deal from this book, especially about the distinctive character of Tannaitic interpretation. With respect to the subject area that I know best, however, I am left with the impression that, despite her careful study, Dr. Fisch has not revealed the heart of Paul’s hermeneutic. In what follows, I offer an all-too-brief justification for this rather bold assertion. My intention is not to foreclose discussion; rather, I hope, in the same spirit of intellectual humility modeled by Fisch, to spark further conversation and debate among scholars of these three significant interpretive traditions.

II. Reconsidering Pauline Hermeneutics

Foundational to my criticism of Fisch’s account of Pauline hermeneutics are the following three claims. First, on Paul’s own telling, the source of his message is nothing other than a divine apokalypsis, a divine revelation of Jesus Christ ἐν ἐμοί, so that not only Paul’s proclamation but the very pattern of his embodied existence bears witness to the Christ he proclaims among the Gentiles (Gal 1:12, 16).[2] Second, it is in response to this apokalypsis that Paul turns to his ancestral scriptures in a quest to make sense of what God of Israel has done, is doing, and will yet do for Israel and the nations—indeed, for all creation—in and through Jesus the Messiah. Third, Paul’s (re-)interpretation of the scriptures unfolds over the course of a decades-long apostolic mission “to bring about the obedience of faith among all the nations” (Rom 1:5). The apostle does not set out to interpret Israel’s scriptures per se. Time and again, his turn to these texts is prompted by contingent circumstances encountered in the course of his tireless labors to establish communities of Christ-followers across the Mediterranean.

As Fisch well recognizes (e.g., 172-173), we have access to Paul’s interpretive acts only through his extant letters. However, she has not sufficiently taken to heart the methodological corollary: viz,, that because Paul’s interpretations are embedded in discourses, careful consideration of the larger argumentative context is crucial to understanding any particular act of interpretation. Indeed, insufficient attention both to the apostolic character of Paul’s letters and to the wider discursive contexts of individual interpretive acts leads Fisch to downplay the crucial X-factor that lies at the heart of Paul’s hermeneutic: Χριστός. A brief look at the treatment of Paul in each of her three main chapters will flesh out this criticism.

II.A. Chapter 1: Two nomoi in Torah? (Romans 10)

In Chapter 1, Fisch argues that Paul’s strategy in Rom 10 and Rom 3 “is to make a division within scripture that allows him to marginalize many commandments with regards to the salvation of Gentiles, while embracing and promoting other scriptures for them, re-presented as oral and living teaching” (75). In a manner similar to the Tannaitic distinction of two Torot, the Written and the Oral, Paul finds that “there are two nomoi in Torah” (64).

One should note, however, that Fisch’s introduction of the term Torah into the discussion actually begs the question of what Paul means by nomos in these passages. With the expression “two nomoi in [one] Torah” (64), she inserts into the argument a verbal distinction that Paul himself fails to make. Yet it is crucial to stick closely to Paul’s terminology if we are to have any hope of understanding his somewhat convoluted reasoning in these passages.

In Romans 3, Paul speaks of one nomos, whose testimony to those “in the nomos” (ἐν τῷ νόμῳ) is epitomized in a catena of scriptural citations (καθὼς γέγραπται ὅτι) proclaiming “no one righteous” (3:18). The speech of the nomos thereby shuts every mouth and renders the whole world liable to divine judgment (3:19). No one, Paul intones, will be put in the right before God “from works of the nomos” (ἐξ ἔργων νόμου), for “through the nomos” (διὰ νόμου) comes consciousness of sin (3:20). Now, however, “the righteousness of God” (δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ) has been disclosed—and this altogether “apart from the nomos” (χωρὶς νόμου). This righteousness, to which “the nomos and the prophets” bear witness (3:21), Paul identifies as “the righteousness of God through the pistis of Jesus Christ” (δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ διὰ πίστεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ) for all who display pistis (πιστεύειν), Jew and Gentile alike (3:22-23).

In the verses that follow, pistis remains central to Paul’s account of the divine justice enacted in God’s free determination to put right all whose identity is defined in relation to the pistis of Jesus (ὁ ἐκ πίστεως Ἰησοῦ, 3:26). All human boasting before God is correspondingly ruled out (3:27). Paul’s question, διὰ ποίου νόμου, is not “by which nomos?” (as if there might be more than one), but “by what sort of nomos?”[3] The apostle himself supplies the answer: it is νόμος πίστεως—the singular nomos in relation to pistis—rather than [νόμος] τῶν ἔργων—the singular nomos in relation to “works” (3:27). According to the νόμος πίστεως, Paul maintains, a person is put right by pistis—and this, once again, altogether “apart from the works of the nomos” (χωρὶς ἔργων νόμου, 3:28; cf. 3:21). Here, too, Paul finds no distinction between Jew and Gentile (cf. 3:22; 10:12); for is “through pistis” that the one God of Jews and Gentiles puts right both the circumcised and the uncircumcised (3:29-30).[4] Nevertheless, Paul insists that he does not abrogate the one nomos “through this pistis” (διὰ τῆς πίστεως, 3:31a). On the contrary, to identify the nomos as νόμος πίστεως is, in fact, to uphold the very character of this singular nomos (3:31b) – a claim that his somewhat tendentious retelling of Abraham’s story in Rom 4 will seek to demonstrate from the nomos itself (τί γὰρ ἡ γραφὴ λέγει, 4:3; cf. Gal 4:21).[5]

If, as I have argued, the apostle does not speak of two nomoi in Rom 3, how then are we to make sense of Rom 10, where Paul juxtaposes a citation of Lev 18:5 with a composite (and heavily interpolated) citation built upon verses from Deuteronomy (9:4; 30:12-13)? The key, I suggest, it to recognize that Paul speaks in Rom 10 not of two nomoi, but of two dikaiosynai, two “righteousnesses.” The first is “the righteousness from the nomos” (ἡ δικαιοσύνη ἡ ἐκ νόμου), concerning which Moses writes, “The person who does these things will live by them” (Rom 10:5/Lev 18:5). The second is “the righteousness from pistis” (ἡ ἐκ πίστεως δικαιοσύνη) which proclaims the mighty deeds of God who raised Christ Jesus from the dead (Rom 10:6-8/Deut 9:4; 30:12-13) and summons Jew and Greek alike to put their trust (πιστεύειν) in him (Rom 10:11/Isa 28:16) by calling on the name of the one who is Lord of all (Rom 10:13/Joel 3:5). Reading Rom 10:5-13 within its larger argumentative context (and with a glance at Paul’s two dikaiosynai in Phil 3:9)[6] suggests that one should identify “the righteousness from pistis” (10:6) with “the righteousness of God” mentioned in 10:3. Correspondingly, “the righteousness from nomos” in 10:5 should be understood as a reference to “their own righteousness” (10:3), i.e., that of Paul’s “kinspeople according to the flesh” (9:3).

What, then, does Paul tell us in Rom 10 about the relationship of the singular nomos to these two dikaiosynai, “the righteousness from nomos” and “the righteousness from pistis”? Much the same as in Rom 3. On the one hand, the righteousness from pistis consists not in “doing” the works of the nomos (Rom 10:5; cf. the contrast between ἐκ πίστεως and ἐξ ἔργων in Rom 9:31-32) but in responding with loyalty and trust to “the message of pistis” (τὸ ῥῆμα τῆς πίστεως, 10:8), that is, “the message about Christ” (ῥῆμα Χριστοῦ) that evokes trust (10:17). On the other hand, Paul insists in Rom 10:4 that the telos of the nomos itself is not “the righteousness from nomos” for which Jews alone might strive, but rather Christ—resulting in righteousness for everyone, Jew or Gentile, who displays pistis.

To sum up: at the heart of Paul’s argument in Romans 10 is a distinction, not between a written nomos and an oral nomos, but between the “righteousness from the nomos”—the promise of “life” to those who “do” its commands—and the “righteousness from pistis” that summons both Jew and Gentile to find “salvation” by confessing Christ as Lord and trusting in what God has accomplished by raising him from the dead (10:9-10). Most surprising of all, the righteousness from pistis turns out to be nothing other than the telos of the singular nomos itself.

Fisch asks why Paul “does not solve the tension between Lev 18:5 and the redacted passages from Deut 30,” and she turns to the hypothesis of a “double-torah” to make sense of the aporia (59). In contrast, I have argued that Paul finds the resolution of this conflict not within Torah, but beyond the text, in the outworking of the divine plan through Paul’s Gentile mission. Nowhere is this more evident than in his heavily redacted version of Deut 30:12-13, where the apostle systematically replaces every reference to human “doing” with a reminder of what God has already “done” in Christ.[7] In this respect, Rom 10:6-8 offers a striking contrast to one of Fisch’s Tannaitic parallels, m. Sot. 8:4 (pp. 49-50). The Mishnah elucidates Deut 24:5, phrase by phrase, by drawing on the itemized list in Deut 20:5-6—thus interpreting scripture by scripture. Paul, in contrast, elucidates Deut 30:12-13, not by means of other scriptural passages, but by interpolating into the passage an epitome of his gospel proclamation.[8]

And so, while I agree with Fisch that “generating unity within scripture is not one of Paul’s aims in Romans” (165), I would go on to say that, for the apostle, the fundamental coherence of these writings becomes apparent only when they are viewed from the standpoint of God’s self-disclosure in the Christ event.[9] To put it more pointedly: if, for Paul, the telos of the nomos is Christ, then the nomos is understood rightly only in light of God’s work ἐν Χριστῷ. Any account of Paul’s interpretive practice that fails to reckon fully with this christological X-factor has not yet penetrated to the heart of his hermeneutics.

II.B. Chapter 2: Pauline Allegory (Galatians 4)

A similar failure to observe the decisive role Paul’s message about Christ plays in shaping his scriptural exposition skews Fisch’s analysis of Gal 4:21-31. On her reading, “Paul’s interpretation of scripture in Galatians 4 is ... a genealogical allegory aimed to ground his gospel to the ethnē in scripture” (94; emphasis original). Paul’s strategy in constructing this allegory, she observes, places him closer to the enigmatic Dorshei Rashumot of Tannaitic literature than to Philo, for rather than legitimizing his allegory by appeal to extra-textual criteria (e.g., the categories of Middle Platonism), Paul finds the hermeneutical key to his allegory of Gen 16 in a “later boo[k] of scripture,” Isaiah, which is brought in “to solve [the] riddled narrativ[e] in the Torah” (126).

Yet despite the important part Paul’s citation from Isaiah 54 plays in his re-interpretation of Gen 16, it is a mistake to regard this intertext as the hermeneutical linchpin of his allegory. Rather, as in Romans 10, the key to Paul’s radical reinterpretation of what the nomos has to say (4:21) lies beyond the text, in the actions of God-in-Christ which Paul heralds and to which the nomos and the prophets bear witness.[10] Contra Fisch (94), the claim that Gentile Christ followers are descendants of Abraham is not argued in Gal 4:21-31 but assumed. By this point in the letter, Paul has already established the Abrahamic genealogy of Gentiles-in-Christ through a scriptural argument (Gal 3:15-29), one that, with its close attention to the lexical particularities of the text, bears more than passing resemblance to Tannaitic argumentation (172). The divine promises, Paul avers, were spoken to Abraham and to his singular seed (σπέρμα), who is Christ (3:16). But Paul’s Galatians have been baptized into Christ and have clothed themselves with Christ (3:27). They now belong to Christ (ὑμεῖς Χριστοῦ), and so, for just this reason, they are “seed (σπέρμα) of Abraham and heirs according to promise” (3:29).[11]

Viewed in light of Gal 3, then, the burden of Paul’s allegory in chapter 4 is not to establish the Galatians’ descent from father Abraham but to identify their mother. In the Roman world, a mother’s status as enslaved or free was inherited by her children. Thus, enslaved Hagar/Sinai/present Jerusalem “bears children into slavery” (4:24-25). When it comes to identifying the free woman with her children, however, Paul’s reasoning runs backwards. The Galatians are “children of promise” (4:28) because they belong to Christ (3:29). Therefore (διό), Paul reasons, they must in fact be children of the free woman (4:31)/Jerusalem above (4:26-27), for it is her children that are born not “according to the flesh” but in fulfillment of the divine promise (4:23).

Thanks to Paul’s interpretive gymnastics in Gal 4:21-31, the nomos itself speaks of the Galatian Christ-followers’ freedom from bondage to the Sinai covenant. Yet that freedom is ultimately grounded, not in the scriptural text itself, but in what God has done for them in uniting them to Christ. For as the apostle hastens to remind them, “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand fast, then, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (5:1; cf. 5:13; 2:4).

II.C. Chapter 3: A Hermeneutics of Unveiling (2 Corinthians 3)

In chapter 3, Fisch contrasts Paul’s bold—even brazen—“hermeneutics of unveiling” with what she characterizes as a more chastened rabbinic “hermeneutic of modesty” (169). Of Paul, she writes, “In the context of 2 Corinthians 3, ‘unveiling’ is a metaphor implying that reading at the end of times [i]s full and final” (169).

In this case as well, however, Fisch’s treatment of Pauline hermeneutics occludes the centrality of God’s actions in Christ to the apostle’s understanding of “the nature and telos of scriptural interpretation” (169). In 2 Cor 3, the unveiling of the human heart by the Spirit does not lead to “an ultimate understanding of scripture” (169),[12] but to an unimpeded vision of the extra-textual reality to which the scriptural text bears witness: “the glory of the Lord” (2 Cor 3:18). Once again, Paul locates the hermeneutical key to scripture beyond the text, in God’s work of new creation in Christ: “For it is the God who said, ‘Light will shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (4:6).

Moreover, far from representing “reading at the end of times as full and final” (169), Paul describes the knowledge of God granted in Christ as an on-going process of human transformation “into the image [of the Lord], from one degree of glory to another” (3:18). Paradoxically, this Spirit-empowered transformation of human beings appears anything but glorious at present, for the image to which they are being conformed is that of the crucified Messiah. With unveiled faces, the ministers of the new covenant are “always carrying around in the body the death of Jesus.” Only in this way is “the life of Jesus ... also ... made visible in our mortal flesh” (4:10-11). Viewed within the larger context of 2 Cor 3-4, then, it is clear that the unveiled face is not primarily a metaphor about the reading of a text but a figural representation of the Spirit’s transformation of particular, embodied human beings into the image of Christ.[13]

III. Conclusion

Near the end of her monograph, Fisch recalls her teacher Ishay Rosen-Zvi’s warning that studies comparing Paul to the rabbis face the very real “danger of reading Pauline assertions as just Christological patina overlaying Jewish ideas and thus underplaying Paul’s theological innovation” (155). To the extent that her readings of Rom 10, Gal 4, and 2 Cor 3 underplay the difference Christ makes for Pauline hermeneutics, Dr. Fisch’s book does not escape this trap. Studies that seek to build on her path-breaking work in the history of midrash will have to pay closer attention to this fundamental X-factor in Pauline hermeneutics. Nonetheless, she has blazed a broad trail for us with exceptional imagination, courage, and skill. One can only hope that her work will inspire many more intrepid explorers to follow in her footsteps!

J. Ross Wagner, Duke University Divinity School

[1] JSJSup 202; Leiden: Brill, 2023.

[2] Paul’s ἐν ἐμοί arguably emphasizes his bodily reception of this revelation. Cf. H.D. Betz (Galatians [Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979], 71): “The ‘in me’ corresponds to Gal 2:20 (‘Christ ... lives in me’) and 4:6 (‘God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts’).

[3] This is disputed, of course, as is nearly every other aspect of Paul’s argument in this passage. For arguments in support of taking ποῖος in the sense “of what sort?” (cf. 1 Cor 15:35), see G. Friedrich, “Das Gesetz des Glaubens Röm 3,27,” TZ 10 (1954), 401-417, esp. 415. See also J.D.G. Dunn (Romans 1–8 [WBC 38A; Dallas: Word, 1988], 185-187), C.E.B. Cranfield (A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans 1: Romans I–VIII [ICC; 6th ed; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975], 220), U. Wilckens (Der Brief an der Römer 1: Röm 1–5 [EKK 6.1; Zürich: Benziger; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1978], 245).

[4] I take ἐκ πίστεως and διὰ τῆς πίστεως to be synonymous here (so Cranfield, Romans, 222; M. Wolter, Der Brief an der Römer 1: Röm 1-8 [EKK 6.1; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Theologie; Ostfildern: Patmos Verlag, 2014], 272), as in Gal 2:16 (so Betz, Galatians, 117 n. 40).

[5] Scripture (Gen 15:6 etc.) testifies that righteousness was credited to Abraham not “from works” (4:2), but through pistis (vv. 3-5), “apart from works” (3:6).

[6] ... μὴ ἔχων ἐμὴν δικαιοσύνην τὴν ἐκ νόμου ἀλλὰ τὴν διὰ πίστεως Χριστοῦ, τὴν ἐκ θεοῦ δικαιοσύνην ἐπὶ τῇ πίστει.

[7] See J. Ross Wagner, Heralds of the Good News: Paul and Isaiah in Concert in the Letter to the Romans [NovTSup 101; Leiden: Brill, 2001], 159-165, although my treatment of the passage there fails to acknowledge the extent to which Paul draws a contrast between the claims (both of which he regards as truthful) in Rom 10:5 and Rom 10:6-13. My current views on the logic of Paul’s argument in Rom 10:5-13 largely align with those of John Barclay in Paul and the Gift (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 542-543.

[8] The priority of the good news in Paul’s mission to the nations is suggested by the lack of explicit reference to scripture in 1 Thessalonians (cf. Markus Öhler, “Rezeption des Alten Testaments im 1.Thessalonischerbrief und im Philipperbrief?” Paulinische Schriftrezeption [ed. F. Wilk and M. Öhler; FRLANT 268; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017], 113-135).

[9] The clearest evidence for this appears in Paul’s reasoning “from solution to plight” in passages such as Gal 2:21 and 3:21; cf. E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), 482-484.

[10] That God’s action in Christ is Paul’s extra-textual key to the scriptures is further seen in Gal 4:1-7, where divine sonship is established through the sending of the Sprit of God’s Son into “our” hearts (cf. Gal 3:1-5).

[11] I am thus puzzled by Fisch’s claim that Paul “does not work exegetically to root this genealogy [stated in Gal 3:7] in Scripture” (94).

[12] Paul claims that what is veiled when the “old covenant” is read (κάλυμμα ἐπὶ τῇ ἀναγνώσει τῆς παλαιᾶς διαθήκης μένει, 3:14b) is not the scriptural text, but “their hearts” (κάλυμμα ἐπὶ τὴν καρδίαν αὐτῶν κεῖται, 3:15; cf. “their minds were made dull,” ἐπωρώθη τὰ νοήματα αὐτῶν, 3:14a).

[13] So, rightly, John David Dawson, Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002): “Paul’s underlying questions [in 2 Cor 3] are, after all, religiously central. Is this community fashioned by God or not?” (35). “Paul is not talking about a text but about a people, and about the transformative actions of God that have consequences for the historical life of that people” (226 n. 2).