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© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007, Unit 6, Th e Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW

[Expositions 1.1 (2007) 015–028] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368 
doi:10.1558/expo.v1i1.15 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

Jew, Greek and Christian: Some Refl ections on the Pauline 
Revolution

RÉMI BRAGUE

Th e Sorbonne, Paris

Paul of Tarsus addresses a central human problem: Why do we not do what 
we know we should? Th is presumes that we know what we should do.  
Paul’s claim that even those without the revealed law know what is right by 
means of “nature” and “conscience” may seem to impose Greek notions onto 
Hebrew religion, but in fact articulates suggestions already present in the 
law and prophets, namely that the revealed law codifi es and concretizes the 
law already written on the human heart by the Creator. Since this core of 
universal principles lacks specifi c normative content, Pauline Christianity 
necessarily seeks to absorb what is good from the content of existing civi-
lizations. In so doing, it separates the literature, thought and practices of 
the civilizations it absorbs from their religion, thus giving birth to the very 
notion of “culture,” and specifi cally to Greekness as a cultural entity that 
could be preserved and passed on without losing its otherness.

If we propose to refl ect upon Jews, Greeks and Christians at the begin-
ning of our era, this should not be understood as taking for granted 
that these three groups were already there during the period that we 
will explore. For one could claim that this period is precisely the one 
in which the three groups came into being or, more precisely, were 
defi ned either from the inside of from the outside, from themselves or 
from one another.

Th at the Christian group did not arise before this period, but pre-
cisely during it (Acts 11.26) will come as no surprise: in order to get 
Christians, you must have a Christ. Yet the other two groups received 
some new features, too, that gave them a decisive twist.

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16 Jew, Greek and Christian

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Th ree groups

A central fi gure in that story of mutual defi nition is Paul of Tarsus. I 
should like to make some very introductory statements about what he 
introduced into the Ancient world in the fi rst century of our era. Th is 
revolution of sorts has something to do with the three human groups 
mentioned above. Paul articulated the three elements relative to one 
another in a new confi guration that proved stable.

To begin with, the very way in which the topic is named has a Pauline 
ring. For we say: “Jews and Greeks.” We do not say “Jews and Pagans” 
more generally. Th is would be anachronistic, since the word “pagan” 
was coined when Christianity had already seized power, as a term of 
abuse lampooning those rednecks down in the sticks who still clung to 
their ancient gods. But it would make sense to say “Jews and Romans,” 
since our story takes place when the whole Mediterranean area was 
under the Roman Empire. Th e formula “Jews and Greeks” is almost a 
quotation from Paul (Rom. 1.16 et al.). Th e very fact that we choose 
to put things this way already betrays the depth of Paul’s infl uence over 
our parlance.

But more importantly, Paul’s revolution launched a process that was 
due to produce one of the three groups, the Christians, out of an origi-
nal identity with the people of Israel. Furthermore, this separation may 
have contributed, along with other factors, to the shaping of what was 
then crystallizing as “Judaism.” Th is point is diffi  cult to assess, so that 
it can be claimed that, without Paul, Judaism probably would have 
evolved along very much the same lines as the ones along which it 
really did. Th e Rabbis applied to the new religious group their usual 
tactics of “killing by silence.” As a consequence, it is pretty diffi  cult 
to pinpoint a precise allusion to Paul’s teaching in the whole Talmud.  
One of them, however, may be Rabbi Yehoshua b. Levi’s famous sen-
tence about the only free man being the one who sticks to the Torah.1 

Finally, the Pauline revolution had an eff ect on the “Greek” element.  
It enabled it to enter the Christian synthesis in a certain way. Greek is 
the name of a language and of a culture, not of a religion.  Greek is, as 
it were, what is left of Ancient culture when it is shorn of its religious 
dimension. Greek is the fi rst example of what we now call “culture.”  

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Now, my claim is that this rump Hellenism was the indirect result of 
the Pauline revolution.

Th e problem  

Paul’s problem is not what to do, but: how is it that we do not do what 
we should do?  

Paul casts it in the form of a personal confession: “For to will is 
present in me; but how to perform that which is good I fi nd not. For 
the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I 
do” (Rom. 7.18–19). Probably, we should not take this too literally or 
too psychologically as a sigh of “Mr. Paul of Tarsus.” Th e literary “ego” 
stands for the situation of each and every son of Adam. Little wonder 
that Paul echoes well-known formulas in the “pagan” literature, Greek 
and Roman in expression, of roughly the same period, like Ovid, Sene-
ca or Epictetus.2

We do not have to ask what to do, for we somehow know that al-
ready. What we have to look for is the reason why we do not abide by 
a law that we are perfectly familiar with.  

Paul’s positive answer moves in two directions, towards the past and 
towards the future. Towards the past, there is God’s mercy that forgives 
our trespasses. Towards the future, there is God’s grace that enables us 
to do what we could not do if we were left to our own resources. Th is 
would lead us deep into Paul’s theology, where I cannot follow him 
here. 

Instead, I will focus on Paul’s fi rst thesis, i.e.: we know what we 
should do.

Norms 

In order adequately to appreciate the breadth of Paul’s revolution, we 
have to cast a glance at the whole realm of human action. 

Whatever we do or make is regulated by a set of rules. No human 
society is devoid of such rules. Th ey extend from phonology and gram-
mar to limitations of marriage, prohibiting the wedlock between some 
parents, and include cooking recipes, table manners, etc. In each case, 
some behavior is supposed to be the right one, whereas the other ones 

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are excluded and punished in various ways, from a sneer to death pen-
alty. I am not allowed to marry just any female; some are excluded. I 
cannot utter meaningless sounds while pretending to make sense. I 
cannot do whatever I want to my body, but I have to paint it, tatoo it, 
cut it, wash it, clothe it in a defi nite way, etc.  

Th e presence or absence of some defi nite rules may defi ne the identity 
of a human group, hence, the identity of the person who belongs to 
this group. Judaism, by the way, is the paramount example of a human 
group defi ned by its abiding by a defi nite Law and only thereby. 

Th e presence of rules in general defi nes humanity, because it defi nes 
culture at large. Th e basic question is Kant’s second query in the Cri-
tique of Pure Reason: “what should I do?” As Kant himself observed, 
this question branches off  from the more fundamental one: “what is 
man?”3

Paul’s revolution implied a full-fl edged new anthropology. 
For the Jews of the fi rst century, the question “what should I do?” was 

not a central issue. If they were pious, they had a ready answer with 
Moses’ law and in the “right path” [halakha] that was already evolving 
from it. Paul, himself an observing Jew, is no exception. Jesus’ original 
message already supposed that the rules were known: “change your 
heart” [metanoeite] supposes some knowledge of the direction in which 
we have to turn in order to fi nd God; “the reign of God is at hand” [èg-
giken hè basileia tou Ouranou] supposes that we know what the laws of 
His kingdom will be; “God forgives your sins” supposes that we know 
which sins are forgiven, etc. 

Th e problem already took a trickier turn when the Christian mis-
sion turned towards larger circles—fi rst, probably, towards half-Pagans 
standing on the threshold of Judaism but hesitating in front of some 
unpleasant commands like circumcision, the so-called “God-fearing” 
[seboumenoi, metuentes] who did not accept the Law in its entirety, but 
chose à la carte. 

Ultimately, the most diffi  cult question arose: What about real pa-
gans, who simply do not have Moses’ law to tell them what to do? 

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Th e answer

According to Paul, non-Jews possess another principle by which to 
distinguish the right from the wrong: 

For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature [phusis] 
the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law 
unto themselves [heautois … nomos]: Which shew the work of the law 
written in their hearts, their conscience [suneidesis] also bearing wit-
ness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one 
another (Rom. 2.14–15).

From the point of view of the historian of ideas, Paul introduced 
into the religious view of moral life concepts that are philosophical in 
origin: nature and conscience.  He may have borrowed them from the 
kind of popular philosophical literature, mainly Stoic in origin, that 
fl ooded the Roman word. It looks like Paul is “Greek to the Greeks,” 
as he claimed to be Jew to the Jews (1 Cor. 9.20). He thinks in Greek 
terms while addressing Greeks. Th e problem that Paul answered by 
bringing onto the stage ideas from the outside, “Greek” ideas, was 
solved by the Talmudic Sages in a purely immanent way, on the basis of 
inner-biblical history: there are, prior to Moses’ Law, seven commands 
that were given to Noah and that hold good for whoever left the Ark, 
i.e. the whole mankind.4

Are Paul’s two basic ideas utterly foreign to the Bible (the “Old Testa-
ment”)? As for words, this is clear. Th e Old Testament has no word for 
“nature”; the Hebrew word for that is not to be found earlier than in 
the Mishna. Furthermore, this word [teva’] hasn’t anything to do with 
the idea of growth that Greek ears felt in the word fu/sij (nature), de-
spite scientifi c etymology (see Aristotle 1957, 4.4 (1014b16–18)). Paul 
knew enough Greek to feel this (Rom. 11. 21–24). But the Hebraic 
word meant rather the cast, the mold, the type that gives a thing its 
character. Th e idea of a moral conscience is expressed in modern He-
brew by a medieval word [matspûn], which in turn is a loan translation 
from an Arabic word [damîr]. Th e oldest example quoted in Klatzkin’s 
philosophical Th esaurus is to be found in Judah Ibn Tibbon’s Hebrew 
translation of Bahya Ibn Paquda’s Duties of the Heart, in the prologue.  
With that we are as late as the twelth century already (Klein 1987, 

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376b; Klatzkin 1968 (vol. 2), 260). Whether the idea itself is extant in 
earlier times is controversial. Y. Leibowitz fl atly considered conscience 
as a pagan idea that has no place whatsoever in Judaism (quoted in Falk 
1981, 66).

I will endeavor to show that Paul develops some possibilities con-
tained in the Old Testament.5 Pagan conceptions played the part of the 
midwife and helped out what was implicit.

Conscience

In the Old Testament, some passages suggest that rules of conduct 
need not be formulated, because they are there already and have always 
been there. A well-known passage reads: “He hath shewed thee, o man, 
what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, 
and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” (Mic. 6.8). Th e 
verse is never explicitly quoted in the New Testament, but it may be 
alluded to, rather obscurely, in the First Gospel: a harsh critique of the 
scribes and Pharisees is put into Jesus’ mouth, who taunts them with 
stressing minute details of the law and neglecting the weightier ele-
ments [ta barutera], i.e. judgment [krisis], compassion [eleos] and faith 
[pistis] (Matt. 23.23). 

In Micah, the context is an attempt at playing down the importance 
of the sacrifi cial cult. Th e verb that is translated here by “to show” is 
often used for the instructions given by priests on the right way to of-
fer sacrifi ces. Micah may have played on the word of art and given it a 
twist that runs counter its original context. 

Th e subject of the sentence is not that clear, however: who does 
the teaching? I have quoted the Authorized Version. It translates the 
Masoretic text that has in fact the active form [higgîd], “he has told 
you”; but the Septuagint supposes the passive form [huggad], under-
stood as an impersonal: “it was told to you.” If we stick to the Masoret-
ic text, we still have to ask who the subject is, and the context does not 
help us a great deal. A further question is the content of the teaching: 
it might be that each of the three keywords alludes to the basic message 
of earlier prophets, i.e. Amos (justice), Hosea (love), Isaiah (humility).  
But this does hardly more than push back the question: what those 

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three forerunners have preached is alluded to only vaguely. We do not 
know how to act justly, how to love, how to walk humbly. To put it in 
quite anachronistic terms: we do not receive any law-book, any hand-
book of ethics, any treatise on spirituality. Now, this very imprecision 
may be essential and emphatically positive in nature.

A similar question occurs in Deuteronomy: 
And now, Israel, what doth the Lord thy God require of thee, but to 
fear the Lord thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to love him, and to 
serve the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy soul. To keep the 
commandments of the Lord and his statutes, which I command thee 
this day for thy good? (10.12–13).

Again, the verses are never quoted in the New Testament, at least in 
a recognizable way. Th e fi rst verse sounds very much like the passage 
from Micah. Th e second, which many commentators consider as sim-
ply a later addition, defi nitely bears the stamp of Deuteronomic style. 
It introduces the idea of divine commands. Hence, the text that began 
with rather sketchy indications, shifts to a more precise focus and ends 
with a circular reference to the content of the book in which it is to be 
read. 

By so doing, the movement of the text mirrors on a smaller scale the 
whole evolution of later Judaism: the rather vague appeal of the Proph-
ets crystallized into a whole “teaching” [torah]. And the torah was to 
become a code of behaviour that is supposed, at least in principle, to 
answer any possible question about the right path [halakha].

Nature

Th e idea of nature is delineated in another complex of ideas. We have 
just seen that the basic rules of decency are known to mankind. Let us 
ask at present what kind of attitude God can have towards this set of 
rules.

Let us have a look at the famous Song of the vineyard in Isaiah. Th e 
peasant does not spare any eff ort and does for his vineyard everything 
that can be done. Th en it is said: “and he looked that it should bring 
forth grapes” (5.2). As we know, he was bitterly disappointed. But I 
will leave this aside and focus on his attitude. Th e formula is repeated 

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in the dialogue of reproach [rîb] in which the wine-grower addresses 
the men in Judah: “wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth 
grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?” (5.4). Finally, we are given the 
key of the parable: this peasant is nobody less than the God of Israel 
in His dealings with his chosen people: “He looked for judgment, but 
behold oppression; for righteousness, but behold a cry” (5.7). Th e verb 
here translated by “look that, look for” [le-qawwoth] frequently means, 
in other contexts, “to hope.” In the former passages, other verbs were 
used. Micah said that God “requires” [li-sh’ol] something from man, 
i.e. justice, pity, humility. Th e Deuteronomy passage in the King James 
version has “to require” too, though for a diff erent Hebrew word [li-
drosh].

Th e diff erence between “expecting” and “asking” can be accounted 
for by the diff erent identity of the addressee: God can talk to the peo-
ple and tell him what he expects. But you simply cannot speak with a 
vineyard. Nevertheless, there is a common feature. What Isaiah stresses 
is that the wine-grower was not expecting something extraordinary.  As 
a rule, a vine produces grapes and not, say, bananas. Growing grapes 
is what the vineyard spontaneously does, and the grapes should taste 
good provided the soil was well tilled, etc. It is the nature of plants to 
yield seed and fruit “after its kind [mîn]” (Gen. 1.11). Th is example 
enables us to draw a line between two kinds of actions. 

Let us call them “asking” and “expecting.” We can ask a person to do 
something; we can expect from him that he will do something. In this 
second case, we hardly need to ask.  At most, we can remind a person 
to do things: do not forget to do this or, more politely: I am sure that 
you will do that, etc. When we really must ask is when some behaviour 
is not natural, not spontaneous.  

Even when God asks something from mankind, He only recalls what 
He expects from it.  

To expect is what we do when we are facing the nature of some-
thing.  Even when God addresses His people and gives commands, he 
is not looking forward to miracles, but to plain decency. Th is involves 
that good behaviour is somehow “natural” to mankind. As a matter of 
course, this does not mean that we spontaneously perform just actions, 

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without our having to go through a process of education, of self-im-
provement, etc. Th is means that such behaviour is nothing more than 
the way in which mankind can reach its own fulfi lment, by developing 
the features that make it specifi cally human up to their fullness.  

A contrary behaviour would thwart the progress of mankind; it would 
even endanger its survival in the long run. Hence, Deuteronomy can 
make at the same time, almost in the same breath, two statements: 
(a) the choice between good and evil is not a trifl e, what is at stake is 
ultimately life or death (30.15), and (b) the criterion of choice is “not 
hidden from thee, neither it is far off ,” far-fetched, but “very nigh unto 
thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart” (30.11, 14). Curiously, this for-
mula echoes Seneca’s later words about conscience as the inner God: 
“God is near to you, with you, in you [prope est a te deus, tecum est, 
intus est]” (Letters to Lucilius (in Seneca 1965), 41.1–2).

A shift in the origin of norms

What the Pauline revolution achieved did not amount to simply cast-
ing away the yoke of the Law. What Paul did discard was the idea ac-
cording to which God has to dictate rules of conduct. Paul kept the 
idea of a set of rules, and even the idea of a divine origin of those rules, 
but he put the idea of a divine origin of norms at one further remove.  
Norms are not dictated by God through the mediation of a Prophet at 
some point of history; they are inscribed in the “heart” of man (Rom. 
2.15). If I may bring to bear an anachronistic opposition, they do not 
belong to the realm of history, but to the realm of something like “na-
ture,” such as it was understood as God’s creation.  

Th is has to be brought back to our memories, because the Pauline 
revolution was misunderstood by many, from the beginning, as if it 
boiled down to simply casting away the yoke of the commands. Now, 
the frequently levelled accusation of anomianism is hardly fair. Paul 
himself, probably, had coined the catchword that “everything is permit-
ted” [panta <moi> exestin]. He had to qualify it by adding a rider: “All 
things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient; all things are 
lawful to me, but all things edify not” (1 Cor. 10.23; see 6.12).  “Eve-
rything is permitted” does not mean that the boundary between good 

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and evil, between life and death is erased. Th is means that this limit is 
not adequately expressed by the opposition of the permitted and the 
forbidden. When we address children who have no idea of electricity, 
we can take a short cut and say that it is forbidden to put one’s fi ngers 
into the electric outlet. What we really mean is that this is dangerous.  
Some things are allowed because they are intrinsically good, whereas 
some other ones are forbidden because they are intrinsically bad. 

Th e basic idea is that God does not replace our judgment of the right 
way to do things.  No doubt, He sheds light upon it, He reminds us of 
some basic principles, but He never dictates what is to be done.

What remained after Paul’s razor was the basic survival kit of man-
kind. Th e content of this kit is already part of the seven commands 
given to Noah and the ten given to Moses (Exod. 20.1–17). We could 
even say that it is nothing more than the eternal Tao without which 
mankind could not lead a human life or even, perhaps, could not live 
tout court.

Culture

Th ose basic rules of decency are admittedly not enough for us to an-
swer the manifold questions that arise from human life in its personal 
and social dimensions. Th is is obvious as for legal systems and political 
organisation. Th is is all the more blatant if we think of the ways in 
which human life can fl ourish in the diff erent realms of higher culture, 
which involves artistic creativity, religious imagination, care and con-
trol of the body, refi nement of mores, etc. 

About all this, Paul has nothing very much to say, barring some 
elementary principles about the necessity of a government to which 
obedience is due (Rom. 13.1). As for the other elements of culture, 
Paul probably had some smattering of Greek popular literature and 
philosophy. He can quote from Aratos (Acts 17.28), Epimenides (Tit. 
1.12) and Menander (1 Cor. 15.33)—all stock-phrases, anyway. But 
his writings betray scarcely any interest in those issues. Nevertheless, 
the religious revolution he introduced had among its most lasting con-
sequences a new stance towards culture, not to say the birth of the very 
idea of culture.   

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Why? Pauline Christianity lacks a defi nite content, it is empty, it 
produced a momentous ebb that left bare the whole realm of norms.  
Precisely for this reason, it had to fi ll itself with a content that it had to 
borrow from the outside. Christianity has to suck into itself what was 
already available on the market of civilizations. Th is is what it later did, 
fi rst with Roman culture, i.e. the Roman system of law and of admin-
istration, together with what the Roman world already had borrowed 
from Greek scientifi c, literary, philosophic, etc. lore.  

Th is brings me back to my fi rst remark on things “Greek.” Th ere is 
something like Greek culture only since the Pauline revolution. What 
undoubtedly existed previously was the Greek paidei/a (education, 
formation). It was a way of life.  To be sure, paidei/a included what 
we call “culture,” i.e. literature and art, and even culture of the body: 
it was inseparably gymnastic and music, two pursuits that are, in Pla-
to’s words, “sisters.” But the package included at the same time what 
we call “religion,” wherefore Plato is careful to sketch a “theology” 
too.6 Th is cult addressed the gods of the po/lij (city) or, later, of the 
ko/smoj (world) as the Stoics experienced it and as it was mirrored in 
the Roman Empire. Th is cult was not palatable for Jews and, for that 
matter, not for Christians either.

We cannot capture the essence of the Pauline revolution by simply 
saying that it built a synthesis between the Greek and the Jewish by 
enabling the Greek element to enter the Christian synthesis. At the 
same time, it allowed the Greek element in culture to develop as such, 
i.e. while keeping its otherness with regard to the synthesis in which it 
entered without its melting away in it. 

Th is enables me, let me say en passant, to build a bridge between the 
theses developed in my last book on divine law (Brague 2007b) and 
a previous book that I wrote more than ten years ago on nothing less 
than the essence of Western culture (Brague 2002). To cast the matter 
in the mold of the concepts that I coined there: “secondarity” towards 
Judaism enabled “secondarity” towards Hellenism; Greek culture could 
be “included” and not “digested.”7

In conclusion, let me sum up my thesis: Paul’s revolution may have 
helped Rabbinic Judaism to shape itself indirectly. It certainly gave 

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birth directly to Christianity as a group diff erent from Judaism. At 
the same time, it produced indirectly Greek culture as an independent 
entity. Paul was the father of at least two of the three groups that we 
are concerned with. 

Endnotes

1. Pirqey Aboth 6.2. For other examples, see Urbach 1979, 258, 295, 302, 427ff .  
On the context, see Pines 1984, 247–65, esp. 256–259; my translation in 
Pines 1997, 67–73.

2. See Ovid 2004, 7.20f; Seneca 1965, 21.1; Epictetus 1898, 2.26.4; for Jewish 
literature, see Book of Secrets (1Q 27), 8–12 (García Martinez and Tigchelaar 
1967, 66–68). 

3. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft A 804f. / B 832f. and Introduction to Vor-
lesung über Logik. In Kant 1921–23, vol. 8.

4. Tosefta Avoda Zara, 8 (9), 4 and b Sanhedrin, 56a; see Zuckermandel 1970, 
473.  Maimonides 2000, commentary on Sanhedrin 9.1.

5. For further discussion, see Brague 2006.

6. See Plato, Republic 404b4–5; 379a5–6.  On the Greek idea of culture, see 
Jaeger 1934.

7. More on “inclusion” and “digestion” in Brague 2000; French version in Brague 
2007a,167–185.

References

Aristotle
1957 Metaphysica. Ed. W. Jaeger. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Brague, R.
2002 Eccentric Culture: A Th eory of Western Civilization.  Tr. S. Lester.  South 

Bend:  Saint Augustine’s Press. 
2000 Inklusion und Verdauung: Zwei Modelle kultureller Aneignung.  In Her-

meneutische Wege: Hans-Georg Gadamer zum Hundertsten, ed. G. Figal, J. 
Grondin, D. J. Schmidt. Tübingen: Mohr. 

2006 Dieu ne nous demande rien. Critique 62.704–705: 179–191.
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islam.  Chatou: Editions de la Transparence.
2007b Th e Law of God: Th e Philosophic History of an Idea. Tr. L. Cochrane. Chi-

cago: Th e University of Chicago Press.

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Epictetus
1898 Dissertationes. Ed. H. Schenkl.  Leipzig: Teubner.

Falk, Z.V.
1981 Law and Religion: Th e Jewish Experience.  Jerusalem: Mesharim.

García Martinez, F. and Tigchelaar, E.J.C.
1967 Th e Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition.  Leiden: Brill.

Jaeger, W.
1934 Paideia: Die Formung des griechischen Menschen, Vol. 1.  Berlin: W. de 

Gruyter.

Kant, Immanuel

1921–23 Werke.  Ed. E. Cassirer.  Berlin: Cassirer.

Klatzkin, J.
1968 Th esaurus philosophicus linguae hebraicae antiquae et recentioris, Vol. 2.  

New York: Feldheim.

Klein, E.
1987 A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language for Read-

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