Unfortunately, there are too many interpreters who read the New Testament as supporting the notion that Christianity (never mentioned in the NT) was intended to replace Judaism as God’s saving religion and Christians were intended to displace Jews as God’s favored people. After all, as some still claim, “the Jews killed Christ.” Doesn’t that warrant a changing of the guard? Doesn’t the new covenant replace the old?

Tired notions such as these, whatever their value in apologetics, are simply not supported by the texts. Any objective reading of the gospels will reveal that it was the Roman administration under Pontius Pilate who executed Jesus even if some of the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem plotted his arrest and eventual handing over to Pilate. Similarly, those same gospels repeat time and again how many Jews did believe in Jesus. Often highlighted are the sheer size of the crowds who came to listen to, and be healed by, him, numbering even into the thousands (Matt. 14:21, 15:38; Mark 6:44, 8:9, 8:19; Luke 9:14, 12:1; John 6:10). After the crucifixion, when the Acts of the Apostles picks up the story, “thousands” of Jews are depicted joining the fledgling assembly of apostles in Jerusalem (Acts 2:41, 4:4, 21:20). It should be safe to presume, even if it is not specifically reported, that an equal number of Jews in Galilee and elsewhere also understood Jesus to be the messiah.

The mantra that “the Jews killed God” can only be traced back to the second-century Christian bishop of Sardis, a fellow named Melito. In his post-Easter screed, he blamed Jews for almost everything wrong in the world unwittingly perhaps ushering in the supersessionist, not to say anti-Jewish, form of religious expression that too many later Christian theologians adopted and embellished. Once Christians gained political power with the accession of the emperor Constantine in the fourth century, harsher means were turned against Jews. Needless to say, in one way or another, this has been reoccurring throughout history.

But our focus here is a more limited one than trying to unravel two thousand years of racial and religious hostility. We simply want to ask what the apostle Paul thought about his fellow Jews who did not see things the way he did with regard to Jesus Christ. To begin with, let’s put away the reference to First Thessalonians as determinative. Here is the text in the NET translation.

“For you [baptized Gentiles in Thessalonica] became imitators, brothers and sisters, of God’s churches in Christ Jesus that are in Judea, because you too suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they in fact did from the Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets and persecuted us severely. They are displeasing to God and are opposed to all people, because they hinder us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved. Thus they constantly fill up their measure of sins, but wrath has come upon them completely.” (1 Thessalonians 2:14–16)

Notice the line “from the Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets.” Reading it this way makes it sounds as if Paul also blamed the Jews for killing Christ. Unfortunately, for that interpretation to stand, the sentence requires the addition of something that is not in Paul’s original text: a comma. Notice where it is placed. The Greek manuscripts from which we derive the text of First Thessalonians do not have a comma here. In fact, there isn’t a comma anywhere in First Thessalonians or in the entire New Testament for that matter. The Greek texts behind the NT contain no punctuation. Neither do they feature spaces between words or divisions between paragraphs. They are written a fashion we call scriptura continua. Modern translators try to make the Greek text intelligible to today’s readers by adjusting the syntax, adding punctuation, paragraph divisions, and even headings and footnotes, all of which are not present in the original Greek. Christian translators, as you might suspect if you were critically thinking, often bring their religious biases to the texts they work with. This “antisemitic comma,” as it is known in scholarship, demonstrates such bias. What if we removed the comma? The passage would then read “from the Jews who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets.” On this reading we see that the passage does not condemn all Jews for killing Jesus although it does blame some of them, that is, the very Jerusalem leadership we mentioned above (and perhaps not even all of them).

Some of my students betray this kind of preprogrammed anti-semitism without even realizing it. For example, they think of all Pharisees as anti-Christ and anti-Christian even though the New Testament makes a more nuanced case. Luke understood there to be some Pharisees who were friendly to Jesus (Luke 7:36, 11:37, 13:31). Nicodemus was such a Pharisee (John 3:1). He (secretly) sought out Jesus’s opinions and even assisted with giving Jesus an honorable burial (John 19:39). The author of the Acts of the Apostles knew of Pharisees who had joined the young Jesus movement (15:5). One of the Sanhedrin Pharisees, an actual historical figure named Gamaliel, stood up in council to prevent further harassment of the movement, acknowledging the possibility, at least, that what the apostles were doing was divinely inspired (Acts 5:34f). If the evidence for Pharisaic hostility is so mixed, why do so many people continue to stereotype them based only on the negative encounters? Could it be that they read “Pharisee” as “Jew”?

Many of my students are not even aware that Jesus’s initial followers, as well as his disciples and apostles, were Jews. They think Paul, whom some are surprised to learn was a Jew, was a champion of a new anti-Jewish religion. Learning of his origins, they suggest he exchanged his birthright (“converted”) for a religious movement called Christianity that did not even exist in Paul’s day. They hold these views despite the absence of evidence to support them.

So what did Paul really think? My readers know, as my students come to know, that I do not follow the traditionalist view that Paul founded a new religion or abandoned his Jewishness. I go to greater lengths to describe and defend these views in my book, Meet Paul Again for the First Time: Jewish Apostle of Pagan Redemption (Wipf and Stock, 2021). Here we will simply focus on a few passages representing the most important statements Paul made about his fellow Jews.

It should come as no surprise that most Jews did not accept Jesus as the messiah. This troubled Paul and he wrote about it, mostly in his letter to the baptized Gentiles in Rome. Paul prefaced his remarks about his fellow Jews, whom he referred to as Israelites, by first appealing to something known as Jewish remnant theology (Rom. 9:27-29). He began with a quote from the Greek translation of the prophet Isaiah (10:22-23). In the Isaiah passage, the prophet announced that “only the remnant [of the children of Israel] will be saved (sōzō).” Historically speaking, Isaiah was bemoaning the involvement of the 8^th-century BCE Kingdom of Judah in alliances with foreign powers; better, he urged, to rely on God to protect them. Disaster would befall the first option but even so God would preserve the faithful as a remnant for a new, purified Israel. The remnant would live on to guarantee that Judah would continue as a people. This is the point of remnant theology.

Paul quoted Isaiah again (1:9) as the prophet recalled the prototypical remnant story: Abraham and the pending destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. According to Genesis (18-19), Abraham bargained with God as he was about to destroy these two wicked cities. Abraham pleaded with God to save Sodom if a certain number of righteous people, ultimately ten, could be found living there. God agreed. As it turned out, only four could be found: Lot, his wife and their two daughters who fled the city before the catastrophe. The point of all this is that the existence of a righteous remnant can save the majority who may or may not be righteous. Paul will cite yet another example of remnant theology further on.

At the start of Romans 10, Paul wrote that he prayed for Israel’s “salvation.” The Greek word here is sōzō, which literally means deliverance. We should not load the term with later Christian ideas about going to heaven or forgiveness from sin. Paul probably meant deliverance from the impending wrath that he believed was imminent. Why would he need to pray about that since he then acknowledged that Jews were zealous for God. He meant that they were faithful and obedient with respect to what God required of them. But Paul also lamented that they were not “in line with the truth.” Paul was referring to the truth of his gospel to the Gentiles. He confirmed this when he characterized his fellow Jews as seeking their own righteousness, not the righteousness that comes from God. He did not mean that Jews were making themselves righteous in their own eyes. He already said they were zealous for God. He meant that they sought righteousness only for themselves (Paul is stereotyping here – he is not referring to Jewish followers of Jesus like himself). Most Jews were not open to Paul’s mission to bring the Gentile nations to a righteous status in the name of Jesus; this was a righteousness that came directly from God in the form of grace, not as a result of Torah obedience within a covenant relationship.

In an infamous passage, often misunderstood, Paul remarked that “Christ is the telos of the law, with the result that there is righteousness for everyone who believes.” Interpreters who think the Torah had been abolished translate telos as “the end.” The word more properly means fulfillment or culmination. Jesus made a similar claim in Matthew (5:17), hardly a gospel that invalidated Torah. Paul believed that the Torah envisioned the salvation of the whole world, even if Jews were initially the only race of people to accept God’s rule of law. But Torah’s ultimate fulfillment was now possible since Christ’s death could serve to make those from the nations righteous. Paul did not mean or teach that God has abolished the Torah.

At the beginning of Romans 11, Paul made his view on this quite clear in a question-and-answer type of rhetoric called hypophora (Hebrew: pilpul): He asked: Had God rejected his people? “Absolutely not!” he responded. This statement should guide everything we read about Paul’s opinion regarding his fellow unbelieving Jews. It is at this point that Paul introduces his third and final example of remnant theology from the scriptures. Quoting First Kings, he noted that Elijah had complained to God that the royal house of the northern kingdom of Israel (King Omri, his son Ahaz, and Ahaz’s wife Jezebel) had succeeded in establishing pagan altars throughout the land, destroyed altars to Yahweh, and killed Yahweh’s prophets. Now they were seeking Elijah’s life as well. God replied that he had kept a remnant of 7,000 righteous Israelites in Israel who would preserve the kingdom.

Paul then revealed the reason for the remnant stories. In his view, Christ-believing Jews (a remnant chosen “by grace” – in other words, not as a requirement of Torah observance but from revelation and trust) was the remnant that would preserve Israel. Paul observed that Israel (those who did not accept Jesus) failed to obtain what it was seeking; but “the elect” did obtain it. In other words, Jews who were looking for the messiah elsewhere were making a mistake; Paul wrote that they had been temporarily “hardened.”

And just to drive home the point that Jews were not abandoned by God, Paul again employed his hypophora means of argumentation: “I ask then, did they [Jewish non-believers] not stumble [i.e., with regard to accepting Jesus as the messiah; remember, the crucified messiah was for them a “stumbling stone” – 1 Cor. 1:23] into an irrevocable fall, did they? Absolutely not!” Why not? Paul would get to that. But the failure of some Jews to accept Jesus as the messiah created, in Paul’s view, an opportunity for Gentiles to come to trust in Christ. For Paul this was a divine mystery (Rom. 11:25). The hardening was actually part of God’s plan to keep Israel partially unresponsive “until the fullness of the Gentiles comes in. And thus all Israel will be preserved.”

We must read these lines (and all Paul’s writings) in the context of the time in which it was written. There was in the first century a popular belief among Jews that a messiah would soon come. The rise of quite a number of Jews claiming to be the messiah, or the end-time prophet, or some other eschatological figure, was documented by the first-century Jewish historian Josephus and referenced in the gospels (Matt. 24:11; Mark 13:5) and Acts (5:36-37; 21:38). The general expectation was that the messiah would right the wrongs done to the Jewish people after centuries of foreign domination. In Paul’s day, the evil was concentrated in the hands of the Roman emperors and their administrators, leaders empowered by Satan. The messiah would defeat these oppressive forces and return the promised land back to the people under the rule of their own messianic king.

But Jesus did not do that. Paul understood Jesus’s mission in two parts. Initially, his arrival fulfilled scriptural promises regarding a deliverer. Primarily, however, Jesus’s death was necessary for the redemption of Gentiles (“Christ died for the ungodly” – Rom. 5:6). The salvation of the nations was necessary based on Day-of-the-Lord-type prophecies (Ps. 22:27; Is. 11:12; 49:6, 56:6; Jer. 16:19-21; Zech. 2:11). If Jesus had done what Jews expected the messiah to do on first arrival, the Gentiles would have had no chance for redemption and the divine prophecies would have gone unfulfilled (an impossibility for Paul). Paul and other Jews who put their trust in Christ knew that he was soon to return. It would be the second visit that would put an end to the presence of evil in God’s world. Tying together all that Paul had to say about his fellow Jews, it seems he expected that, once the remaining unbelieving Jews saw Jesus in all his messianic glory doing what they expected the messiah would do, the temporary hardening would be lifted and they would collectively embrace him as their messiah. In that way that “all Israel would be preserved.”