Paul’s Three Paths to Salvation. By Gabriele Boccaccini. Foreword by David Bentley Hart

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a rapid growth in works studying ‘Paul within Judaism’. Gabriele Boccaccini’s Paul’s Three Paths to Salvation is a welcome addition to this burgeoning subfield. Simultaneously wide-ranging and concise, Boccaccini’s book sets Paul firmly within Second Temple Judaism. The results are often illuminating and always thought-provoking. One of Boccaccini’s central claims is that Paul must be understood as a first-century Jew who never abandoned his religious heritage. Rather, Paul became a member of and quickly thereafter a leader in a new movement within Judaism, the movement of Jesus followers. To describe Paul’s life in this way is in no way to deny just how radical the effect of his encounter with Jesus was. Rather, it is to acknowledge, as Boccaccini puts it, that ‘the Jesus movement in the first century was a Jewish messianic movement, not a separate religion’ (p. 33). Seen in this light, dramatic though...