Spring 1992
Volume 18, Number 3

For the letter kills but the spirit gives life.
--2 Cor. 3:6

Behold Israel according to the flesh [1 Cor. 10:18]. This we know to be the carnal Israel; but the Jews do not grasp this meaning and as a result they prove themselves indisputably carnal.
--AUGUSTINE, Tractatus adversos Judaeos

When Augustine condemns the Jews to eternal carnality, he draws a direct connection between anthropology and hermeneutics. Because the Jews reject reading "in the spirit," they are therefore condemned to remain " Israel in the flesh." Allegory is thus, in his theory, a mode of relating to the body. In another part of the Christian world, Origen also described the failure of the Jews as owing to a literalist hermeneutic, one that is unwilling to go beyond the material language and discover its immaterial spirit.1 This way of thinking about language had been initially stimulated in the Fathers by Paul's usage of "in the flesh" and "in the spirit" respectively to mean literal and figurative. Romans 7:5-6 is a powerful example of this hermeneutic structure: "For when we were still in the flesh, our sinful passions, stirred up by the law, were at work on our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are fully freed from the law, dead to that in which we lay captive. We can thus serve in the new being of the Spirit and not the old one of the letter." In fact, the exact same metaphor is used independently of Paul by Philo, who writes that his interest is in "the hidden and inward meaning which appeals to the few who study soul characteristics rather than bodily forms."2 For both, hermeneutics becomes anthropology.

Pauline religion itself should be understood as a contiguous religiocultural formation with other Hellenistic Judaisms.3 Among the major supports for such a construction are the similarities between Paul and Philo--similarities that cannot easilv be accounted for by assuming influence, since both were active at the same time and in two quite separated places.4 The affinities between Philo and such texts as the fourth gospel or the Letter to the Hebrews are only slightly less compelling evidence because of the possibility that these texts already know Philo.5 I take these affinities as prima facie evidence for a Hellenistic Jewish cultural koine that undoubtedly varies in many respects but has some common elements throughout the eastern Mediterranean.

Moreover, as Wayne Meeks and others have pointed out, in the first century it is in fact impossible to draw hard and fast lines between Hellenistic and Rabbinic Jews.6 On the one hand, the Rabbinic movement per se did not yet exist, and on the other, Greek-speaking Jews, like Paul and Flavius Josephus, refer to themselves as Pharisees and, in Paul's case, as a disciple of Rabban Gamaliel, the very leader of the putative proto-Rabbinic party. I am going to suggest, however, that there were tendencies already in the first century that, while not sharply defined, separated Greek speakers more acculturated to Hellenism and Semitic speakers who were less so. These tendencies were, on my hypothesis, to become polarized as time went on, leading in the end to a sharp division between hellenizers who became absorbed into Christian groups and antihellenizers who formed the nascent Rabbinic movement. The adoption of Philo exclusively in the Church and the fact that he was ignored by the Rabbis is a sort of allegory of this relationship, by which the Christian movement became widely characterized by its connection with middle and Neoplatonism. In fact, this connection (between Philonic Judaism and Christianity) was realized in antiquity as well, for popular Christian legend had Philo convert to Christianity and even some fairly recent scholarship has attributed some of his works to Christians.7

The congruence of Paul and Philo suggests a common background to their thought in the thought-world of the eclectic middle Platonism of Greek-speaking Judaism in the first century.s Their allegorical reading practice and that of their intellectual descendants is founded on a binary opposition in which the meaning as a disembodied substance exists prior to its incarnation in language, that is, in a dualistic system in which spirit precedes and is primary over body.9 Midrash, as a hermeneutic system, seems precisely to refuse that dualism, eschewing the inner-outer, visible-invisible, body-soul dichotomies of allegorical reading. Midrash and Platonic allegory are alternate techniques of the body.

[....]

Carnal Israel

Plotinus, the philosopher of our times, seemed ashamed the body. As a result of this state of mind he could never bear to talk about his race or his parents or his native country.
--PORPHYRY, Life of Plotinus

It seems that for Philo, alongside traditional, orthodox Judaism, there was a philosophical outlook on life, involving the recognition of the purely spiritual nature of the Transcendent, in which one day, Philo believed, all mankind would share. In that Judaism the idealized Augustus, Julia Augusta and Petronius--among, no doubt, many others--had already participated.79

For Philo, such a spiritualized and philosophical Judaism, one in which a faith is substituted for works, remains only a theoretical possibility,80 whereas for Paul it becomes the actuality of a new religious formation that tends strongly to disembody Judaism.81 These elements of embodiment are inextricable from one another. If the body of language is its meaning and essence and the body of the person is his or her "self, then the history of Israel and the practices of that Israel are the physical history and practices of the body Israel. This resistance to dualism in language, body, and peoplehood is both the distinction of Rabbinic Judaism and its limitation, while post-Pauline Christianity, with its spiritualizing dualism, was universalizable but also paid an enormous price.

Paul's allegorical reading of the rite of circumcision is an almost perfect emblem of this difference. In one stroke, by interpreting circumcision as referring to a spiritual and not corporeal reality, Paul made it possible forJudaism to become a world religion. It is not that the rite was dlfflcult for adult Gentiles to perform--that would hardly have stopped devotees in the ancient world--it was rather that it symbolized the genetic, the genealogical moment of Judaism as the religion of a particular tribe of people. This is so both in the very fact of the physicality of the rite, of its grounding in the practice of the tribe, and in the way it marks the male members of that tribe (in both senses), but even more so, by being a marker on the organ of generation, it represents the genealogical claim for concrete historical memory as constitutive of Israel.82 By substituting a spiritual interpretation for a physical ritual, Paul was saying that the genealogical Israel, "according to the Flesh," is not the ultimate Israel; there is an "Israel in the spirit." The practices of the particular Jewish People are not what the Bible speaks of, but of faith, the allegorical meaning of those practices. It was Paul's genius to transcend "Israel in the flesh." On this reading, the "victory" to which Charles Mopsik refers was a necessary one "a split opened two millennia ago by the ideological victory over one part of the inhabited world of the Christian conception of carnal relation--and of carnal filiation--as separate from spiritual life and devalued in relation to it"83

On the other hand, the Rabbis can be read as a necessary critique of Paul as well--or, if I am wrong in my reading of Paul, of other Christian thinkers who certainly held such views--for if the Pauline move had within it the possibility of breaking out of the tribal allegiances and the commitments to one's own family as it were, it also contains the seeds of an imperialist and colonizing missionary practice. The very emphasis on a universalism, expressed as concern for all of the families of the world, turns very rapidly (if not necessarily) into a doctrine that they must all become part of our family of the spirit with all of the horrifying practices against Jews and other Others that Christian Europe produced.84 From the retrospective position of a world that has, at the end of the second Christian millennium, become thoroughly interdependent, each one of the options leaves something to be desired. If on the one hand the insistence on corporeal genealogy and the practice of tribal rites and customs produces an ethnocentric discourse, a discourse of separation and exclusiveness, on the other hand the allegorization, the disembodiment of those very practices, produces the discourse of conversion, colonialism, the "white man's burden"--universal brotherhood in "the body" of Christ85

**Dedicated in memoriam to Professor Ephraim Elimelech Urbach.
All biblical and midrashic translations are mine unless otherwise noted.
The initial impulse to do this work came from a seminar on circumcision in Spinoza and the question of nationalism given by Jacques Derrida at the School of Criticism and Theory at Dartmouth in the summer of 1987. An earlier version of this paper was delivered at Princeton University on 27 March 1991 and at the conference "People of the Body / People of the Book" held at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, 29-30 April 1991.

1. See Henri Cronzel, Origen, trans. A. S. Worrall (San Francisco, 1989), pp. 107-12.

2. Philo, On Abraham, sec. 147, in vol. 6 of Philo, trans. and ed. F. H. Colson (Cambridge, Mass., 1935), p. 75. It is very important to note that Philo himself is just the most visible representative of an entire school of people who understood the Bible, and indeed the philosophy of language, as he did. On this see David Winston, "Philo and the Contemplative Life," in Jewish Spirituality: From the Bible through the Middle Ages, ed. Arthur Creen (New York, 1986-87), pp. 198-231, esp. p. 211.

3. 1 am aware that here I am placing myself in the middle of a great contest in the interpretation of Paul. Suffice it to say here that I am cognizant of the different possibilities of reading the Pauline corpus, including in particular the stimulating revisionist reading of Lloyd Caston, Paul and the Torah (Vancouver, B. C., 1987).

4. See Henry Chadwick, Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition: Studies in Jushn, Clement, and Origen (1966; New York, 1984), and Peder Borgen, "Observations on the Theme 'Paul and Philo': Paul's Preaching of Circumcision in Galatia (Gal. 5: 11) and Debates on Circumcision in Philo," in The Pauline Literature and Theology, ed. Sigfred Pedersen (irhus, 1980), pp. 85-102.

5. See Borgen, Bread from Heaven: An Exegetical Study of the Concept of Manna in the Gospel of John and the Writings of Philo (Leiden, 1965), and Ronald Williamson, Philo and the Epistle to the Hebrews (Leiden, 1970).

6. See Wayne A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul (New Haven, Conn., 1983), p. 33.

7. See J. Edgar Bruns, "Philo Christianus: The Debris of a Legend," Harvard Theological Review 66 (Jan. 1973): 141-45, and John Dillon, preface to Philo of Alexandria: The Contemplative Life, the Giants, and Selections, trans. and ed. Winston (New York, 1981), pp. xi-xii, and pp. 313-14.

8. See Chadwick, Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition. The notion that Paul has a background in Hellenistic Judaism has been advanced fairly often in the past. It has generally had a pejorative tinge to it, as if only Palestinian Judaism was "authentic," and terms like "lax" or surprisingly enough "coldly legal" are used to describe Paul's alleged Hellenistic environment. Recently this idea has been rightly discarded on the grounds that there is no sharp dividing line between Hellenism and Palestinian Judaism. If we abandon the ex post facto judgments of history, moreover, there is no reason to accept the previous notions of margin and center in the description of late antique Jewish groups, no reason why Philo should be considered less authentic than Rabban Gamaliel. The question of cultural differences between Greek- and Hebrew-speakingJews can be treated in a different nonjudgmental territory. In that light I find the similarities between Paul and Philo, who could have had no contact with each other whatsoever, very exciting evidence for first century Greek-speaking Jews.

9. I have limited the scope of this ciaim to allow for other types of allegory, including such phenomena as Joseph's interpretations of Pharaoh's dreams, as well as an untheorized allegorical tradition in reading Homer. When I use the term allegory, therefore, this is to be understood as shorthand for allegoresis of the type we know from Philo on.

10. Philo, Allegorical Interpretation of Genesis 2, 3, bk. 2 sec. 5, in vol. I of Philo, trans. Rev. C. H. Whitaker, ed. Colson and Whitaker (New York, 1929), p. 227; hereafter abbreviated Al, bk.: sec.

79. Williamson, Jews in the Hellenistic World: Philo (Cambridge, 1989), p. 13.

80. According to H. A. Wolfson, Philo allowed tor the possibility of uncircumcised "spiritual" proselytes. See Harry Austryn Woltson, Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (1947; Cambridge, Mass., 1982), p. 369. Borgen ("Observations on the Theme 'Paul and Philo,'" p. 87) seems to think that such uncircumcised proselytes could have heen fully accepted as Jews by Philo, a proposition that I find unconvincing. Nor am I convinced by Borgen's reading of the Talmud at Shabbath 51a to the effect that for Hillel circumcision was not a prerequisite for conversion. Shaye Cohen's comprehensive work in progress on conversion in late antique Judaism should clear up many of these doubtful issues.

81. In a recent letter to me, John Miles has made the following very important comments:

The faith-vs.-works dispute which you present as Christianity-vs.-Judaism has a long history, starting well before the Reformation, as a dispute within Christianity. A pagan who converted even to the Pauline form of Christianity was enjoined to follow a strikingly different ethical code and to abstain from a host of usages that were incompatible with monotheism. The result did not put him in continuity with Judah as a tribal, genetic community, but it was works, nonetheless, not just faith. It is, in fact, the survival of this much of the concrete Jewish program that makes Christianitv indigestible for Gnosticism. The sentence to which I allude continues "whereas for Paul it becomes the actuality of a new religious formation which disembodies Judaism entire." Christianity looks disembodied by comparison with Rabbinic Judaism, but by comparison with Gnosticism it looks pretty corporeal. [John Miles,letter toauthor, Mar 1991]

82. See the brilliant interpretation of circumcision in Eilberg-Schwartz, "The Fruitful Cut: Circumcision and Israel's Symbolic Language of Fertility, Descent, and Gender," chap. 6 of The Savage in Judaism, pp. 141-76, and Eilberg-Schwartz, 'The Nakedness of a Woman's Voice, the Pleasure in a Man's Mouth."

83. Charles Mopsik, "The Body of Engenderment in the Hebrew Bible, the Rabbinic Tradition and the Kabbalah," trans. Matthew Ward, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, ed. Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaff, and Nadia Tazi, 3 vols. (New York, 1989), 1:49.

84. See Marc Shell, "Marranos (Pigs), or From Coexistence to Toleration," Critical Inquiry 17 (Winter 1991): 306-35.

85. See ibid.