Would the Christian Paul Consider Himself a Jew?

Abstract

This schematic lecture’s point of departure was the apparent difficulty experienced by various translators in rendering some plain Pauline texts concerning Jews and Judaism. Thus, for the example that first piqued my curiosity, the German Einheitsübersetzung has Paul relate in Galatians 1:13 to ‘wie ich früher als gesetzestreuer Jude gelebt habe’, and in the next verse to the way that ‘in der Treue zum jüdischen Gesetz’ he surpassed his contemporaries. But the Greek has no such specific reference to law in either verse. Rather, it refers to Ioudaïsmos, ‘Judaism’, which we normally take to be much more general. Luther, whose canonical German translation was replaced by the Einheitsübersetzung, had no trouble about using ‘Judentum’ in both verses; why did the Einheitsübersetzung deviate from that obvious and traditional translation?