“ACCORDING TO HIS OWN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNT, PAUL OF TARSUS grew up as a religious Jew named Saul. In his youth, he writes, he was a Pharisee and a follower of Rabbi Gamliel; he claims that he even persecuted Jesus’ followers for their false beliefs.

On a trip to Damascus, Paul had a mind-altering experience, a vision of Jesus as god. This vision transformed not only his own life, but the history of the world as well. Before Paul’s vision, Jesus’ followers saw themselves as Jews and observed the Torah. The characteristic that set them apart from other Jews was their belief that Jesus was the *Messiah, and that he would one day return to redeem the Jewish people. Paul radically redefined this small Jewish sect into a new religion that sharply broke with Judaism. According to him, what mattered to God was not observance of the Torah, but faith in Jesus.

Those surviving Christians who had known Jesus personally—Paul had not—strenuously resisted this teaching. The New Testament Book of Acts 10:14 records that Peter, whom the Catholic Church regards as its first pope, scrupulously observed kashrut. According to Acts 2:46 and 3:1, Jesus’ disciples regularly prayed at the Temple. Jesus’ brother, James, dispatched emissaries to teach that everyone born Jewish was required to be circumcised (Acts 15:1; see also Galatians 2:12): He also ordered Paul to observe Jewish law (Acts 21:24). Paul rejected James’s command. “We conclude,” he taught instead, “that a man is put right with God only through faith and not by doing what the Law commands” (Romans 3:28; my emphasis).

Paul’s, not James’s, teaching prevailed in Christianity. Consequently, Catholics came to assess people’s righteousness in God’s eyes primarily by virtue of their faith in Jesus as well as their performance of the sacraments. Protestantism’s founder, Martin Luther, differed from the Church only in teaching that faith alone (without sacraments) is sufficient. In On Christian Liberty, a pamphlet he issued in 1520, Luther wrote: “Above all things, bear in mind what I have said, that faith alone without works, justifies, sets free and saves.”

Paul vigorously fought the Jewish belief that observing the Torah’s ritual and ethical laws made one righteous in God’s eyes. If that were true, he reasoned, people could achieve righteousness through their own efforts: It would mean that there was no purpose to the crucifixion, and “Christ would have died in vain” (Galatians 2:21).

Paul believed, as did the Jews, that God had given mankind the Torah. However, unlike the Jews, he maintained that people could only be saved if they followed the Torah’s laws perfectly. Since it is impossible to do so, and since God will damn people for any violations whatsoever, the Torah’s many laws must be seen as a curse, not a blessing. To be saved, mankind must be redeemed from the Law, a redemption which can only come through belief in Jesus (see Galatians 3:10, 21–22; and Romans 3:28).

Judaism rejected virtually every element in Paul’s reasoning process. While it advocated complete observance of the Torah, it also recognized that people inevitably would sin (Ecclesiastes 7:20). Well before Jesus and Paul, it had worked out an extensive process for repentance (known in Hebrew as *teshuva).

Unfortunately, Paul’s claim that God damns people for violating any Torah law has helped lead many people in the Western world to believe that the God of the Hebrew Bible is a harsh, vengeful figure. As long as the small sect of Christians differed from their fellow Jews only with regard to certain beliefs about Jesus, they remained part of the Jewish community. But once Paul dropped the Torah, and dropped any legal requirements for converting to Judaism, Christianity ceased being a sect and became a separate religion. From the perspective of Christianity, this made Paul into a great hero, Saint Paul. Most Jews find it hard to regard him with equal adulation.


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