Book Review: If you Call Yourself a Jew: Reappraising Paul's Letter to the Romans

Abstract

If You Call Yourself a Jew: Reappraising Paul's Letter to the Romans. By Rafael Rodriguez. Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books, 2014. 317 pp. $62.00 (cloth); $37.00 (paper).Considering the abundance of Romans commentaries, why consider buying this one? In short: this brief reappraisal (rather than full-length commentary) develops a promising minority perspective of which we should not be uninformed. In fact, predict this work may propel this interesting perspective discussed among specialists into a mainstream, popularly accessible approach.Appreciation for classical rhetoric has moved to the forefront of Pauline scholarship. Rafael Rodriguez is no exception to that trend. Like virtually all contemporary New Testament scholars, he builds on the insights of the New Perspective on Paul (Sanders, Dunn, Wright, for example). Rodriguez differs, however, in identifying Paul's audience. He joins a small but important minority of arguing Paul wrote exclusively to gentile believers in the Jewish Messiah in Rome (p. 7). Paul explicitly identifies this audience in four places (1:5-6, 1:13, 11:13, 15:15-16) and nowhere points to another. The suggestion strikes me as refreshing. Paul says he is writing to gentiles. From this and other letters, we know him as the apostle to the gentiles, distinguished from the Twelve and their mission among the Jews. Whether or not we ultimately agree, the approach is remarkably reasonable and not easy to dismiss.Rodriguez pushes the thesis further (as have Thorsteinsson, Stowers, and Thiessen). He begins with a simple thought experiment: I decided to read Paul's diatribe as a dialogue with a gentile proselyte to Judaism-a 'Judaizer'-simply to see what effect if would have on my reading of Romans as a whole. . . . After all, how much difference could it make whether Paul imagined himself in dialogue with an actual Jew or a gentile who calls himself a Jew? (p. ix). Quite a bit, he discovered.Rodriguez's handling of chapter seven highlights how reading Romans this way helps solve some challenging interpretive problems. Popular, devotional readings of Romans 7 see it as dramatically introspective: Paul is showing that even saintly apostles share the inner psychological angst at the enormity of God's righteous requirements (p. 139). Yet despite being common in American pulpits and Bible studies, this interpretation cannot make sense of the text. Reading 7:7-25 as direct statements from Paul would unravel... the coherence of the letter as a whole (p. 133), since Paul had already contradicted many of the arguments put forward there.Almost no biblical scholars holds to that view. These contradictory statements, Rodriguez explains, suggest that Paul is not speaking in his own, authorial voice (p. …