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A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity
By Daniel Boyarin
Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994. 366 pp. $29.75.
Multiculturalism, identity, sameness, difference--in these words that are as contemporary as the morning headlines, Daniel Boyarin sees the heart of the letters of Paul. Boyarin, Professor of Talmudic Culture at Berkeley, writes as a Jewish cultural critic about Paul, whom he understands to be an earlier Jewish cultural critic. Boyarin takes Galatians 3:28 as the lens through which to read Paul, arguing that Paul's major concern was "that humanity be One under the sign of the One God." Prior to his conversion, Paul is dismayed by the "ethnocentrism" of his own tradition. Reflection on the universalistic tendencies of biblical religion and contemporary Hellenistic notions of universalism lead to Paul's universalizing interpretation of Jesus Christ, in which sameness triumphs over differences, particularly ethnic and gender differences.
Because the church inherits Paul's radical universalism, the dichotomy that emerges in Boyarin's analysis is between the Christian impulse toward sameness and the Jewish impulse toward difference....