Paul in Context: A Historical Journey of Interpretation
If you try to understand Paul in historical context, it’s important to note that this has been the major emphasis of New Testament studies for the last 100–150 years: understanding Paul and the rest of the New Testament within the framework of Second Temple Judaism.
This shift began primarily in European scholarship, especially in Germany in the late 19th century. One of the foundational works was by Johannes Weiss, Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God. Weiss was pushing back against liberal scholarship of his day, which interpreted Jesus’ teaching on the kingdom of God as primarily a moral or idealistic vision of a Christian society—an interpretation strongly influenced by Constantinian and Hellenistic categories.
Weiss argued that this was a misreading. Drawing on the growing body of Jewish literature that had come to light through archaeological and historical study in the late 1800s, he insisted that Jesus’ understanding of the kingdom was rooted in the apocalyptic expectations of Second Temple Judaism. The kingdom of God, for Jesus and his contemporaries, was not an abstract moral ideal or a spiritualized, immaterial realm. Rather, it was bound up with concrete eschatological hopes:
The Day of the Lord
The judgment of the living and the dead
The resurrection of the dead
The punishment of the wicked
The restoration of the twelve tribes of Israel
The coming of a new heavens and new earth
A cataclysmic end to the present age
In other words, when Jesus proclaimed that “the kingdom of God is near,” Weiss argued, he meant that the Day of the Lord was at hand.
Weiss’s work was soon followed and popularized by another towering figure: Albert Schweitzer, whose landmark book The Quest of the Historical Jesus reshaped New Testament studies. Schweitzer was an extraordinary figure—a Renaissance man who was not only a scholar but also a gifted musician, a theologian, and even a medical doctor. His brilliance and wide-ranging talents brought enormous influence to his writings. While Weiss had been precise and technical, Schweitzer was more prolific, creative, and even whimsical in his style. Yet both men argued for essentially the same conclusion: Jesus (and by extension Paul) must be understood through the apocalyptic worldview of Second Temple Judaism.
Schweitzer’s Quest for the Historical Jesus was quickly translated into English and spread widely in the English-speaking world, giving it far greater impact than the work of Johannes Weiss. Weiss’s Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of Godwas not translated into English until the 1970s, which limited its influence outside continental Europe. Nevertheless, within German and continental scholarship, Weiss’s work was deeply influential.
Both Weiss and Schweitzer insisted that Jesus must be understood within His historical context—Second Temple Jewish apocalyptic thought. However, as secular evolutionists, their conclusion was ultimately skeptical. They argued that Jesus genuinely expected the imminent arrival of the Day of the Lord, the resurrection of the dead, and the coming of the messianic kingdom. When these events did not materialize, they claimed, the disciples covered it up, invented the story of the resurrection, and reshaped the narrative. In their view, by the second century the message had been “Hellenized” into a Greek philosophical story, and by the fourth and fifth centuries it had become thoroughly Romanized. History, they concluded, had simply moved on.
For evangelical and moderate scholars, these conclusions were deeply troubling. In the 1920s and 30s, a strong response arose, especially from the English school. One representative figure was Charles Dodd, professor at Oxford, who in his influential book The Parables of the Kingdom argued that while the historical context was indeed Jewish apocalyptic, Jesus had realized those expectations in His ministry and in the life of the early church.
Thus two opposing camps began to take shape:
Consistent eschatology: Jesus fully shared the apocalyptic expectations of His Jewish contemporaries (Weiss, Schweitzer).
Realized eschatology: Jesus fulfilled or realized those expectations in His ministry and in the early church (Dodd).
Over the next three decades, European scholarship debated vigorously between these two positions. A middle ground eventually emerged—inaugurated eschatology—which argued that both elements were true in some measure.
The most influential proponent of this view was Oscar Cullmann, a French-German scholar at the University of Strasbourg. Writing after World War II, Cullmann argued that the kingdom of God was both “already” and “not yet.” In other words, Jesus had inaugurated the kingdom in His ministry, but its consummation remained in the future. This “already/not yet” framework soon became the dominant paradigm in continental scholarship. By the mid-1950s, however, European debates over the matter had largely run their course.
Meanwhile, in America, evangelical scholarship was navigating its own challenges. Much of American conservative theology was still steeped in dispensationalism, which tended to divide God’s dealings with Israel and the church into separate ages. Into this context stepped George Eldon Ladd, who became a key figure in the neo-evangelical movement of the 1950s and 60s. Ladd integrated continental scholarship into evangelical theology, introducing the already/not yet framework as an alternative to dispensationalism.
This shift reshaped American evangelical thought. On the one hand, it was positive: evangelicals were forced to take the historical context of Jesus seriously and to grapple with Second Temple Jewish apocalyptic thought. On the other hand, it also had drawbacks. Evangelicals often leaned heavily toward realized eschatology, while only giving lip service to consistent Jewish apocalyptic expectation. As a result, the apocalyptic framework was frequently downplayed.
This history matters because missiological studies—the theology of mission—tend to lag behind developments in New Testament studies by 20 to 40 years. So, as New Testament scholarship moved in these directions in the mid-20th century, missiology began to follow suit in the decades after World War II, often adopting the already/not yet framework shaped by Ladd and others.
After World War II, the German school of scholarship experienced a revival of interest in the historical context of Jewish apocalyptic thought. A central figure in this renewal was Ernst Käsemann, a student of Rudolf Bultmann.
Before the war, Bultmann had approached Jewish apocalyptic with suspicion. For him, apocalyptic language was mythological—an outdated framework that modern, naturalistic humanity could not accept literally. His famous project of demythologization argued that Jesus and the apostles were already in the process of stripping away this apocalyptic “husk” to reveal a timeless existential message.
In contrast, Käsemann and the postwar generation of German scholars argued the opposite: Jewish apocalyptic was not the husk, but the kernel itself. It did not merely cloak the message of Jesus and the apostles; it defined it. Apocalyptic expectation was not an obstacle to be overcome but the essential framework for understanding both Jesus and Paul.
Käsemann’s approach was carried into English-speaking scholarship largely through J. Christiaan Beker. In his influential work Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought, Beker built on Käsemann’s foundation to argue that Paul must be read within his historical context and apocalyptic worldview.
Shifting the Focus: Jesus to Paul
From roughly 1900 to 1970, New Testament scholarship was largely preoccupied with situating Jesus within Second Temple Judaism. Beginning in the 1970s, however, the focus shifted toward Paul. Käsemann, Beker, and later E.P. Sanders initiated the push to reinterpret Paul not against Judaism, but within it.
Two major trajectories emerged from this shift:
The “Apocalyptic Paul”
Rooted in Käsemann and Beker, this approach developed through scholars such as J. Louis Martyn at Union Theological Seminary.
This school emphasized God’s apocalyptic action in Christ as the central framework for Paul.
However, critics like J.P. Davies have argued that the “Apocalyptic Paul” eventually departed from authentic Second Temple apocalyptic thought and became something of its own construct.
The “New Perspective on Paul”
Initiated by E.P. Sanders, and carried forward by James D.G. Dunn and N.T. Wright, this trajectory stressed that Paul should be understood in continuity with Judaism rather than as its opponent.
Sanders’ landmark work, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977), challenged caricatures of Judaism as a works-based religion, introducing the concept of “covenantal nomism.”
Dunn coined the term “New Perspective on Paul” (NPP), and Wright expanded it further with his narrative-historical approach.
Yet over time, critics argued that even the New Perspective, while corrective in many ways, still produced a Paul who ultimately did not look very Jewish when measured against actual Second Temple sources.
Toward “Paul Within Judaism”
By the early 21st century, dissatisfaction with both the Apocalyptic Paul and the New Perspective gave rise to what was first called the Radical New Perspective on Paul. This movement coalesced with the publication of Paul Within Judaism(2015), edited by Mark Nanos and Magnus Zetterholm. These scholars contended that both earlier approaches fell short:
The Apocalyptic Paul often abstracted Paul from Second Temple Judaism.
The New Perspective tended to acknowledge Judaism only as a backdrop against which Paul painted something fundamentally new.
In contrast, the “Paul Within Judaism” school argues that Paul must be understood fully as a Jew operating within the worldview and categories of Second Temple Judaism. His novelties—such as his emphasis on the death of the Messiah and atonement, the unique gift of the Spirit, and the mission to the Gentiles—are not rejections of Judaism nor simply transformations of it. Rather, they are developments within it.
This represents a key methodological shift: instead of treating Judaism as a background (whether negative, neutral, or transformative), this approach insists that Second Temple Judaism is the framework itself within which Paul thought, wrote, and ministered.
John Harrigan’s doctoral thesis sought to bring missiological studies and theology of mission into this conversation. Harrigan argued that Paul should not be understood in contrast to Second Temple Judaism, nor as if Judaism were merely the “mother” giving rise to Christianity as a distinct child (to borrow Käsemann’s metaphor). Instead, Paul should be seen as operating squarely within the Second Temple Jewish worldview, with his distinctive contributions understood as additions within that native framework.
The central question, then, is not whether Paul was Jewish—he plainly was—but how his unique emphases (Messiah’s death, the Spirit, the Gentile mission) function within the apocalyptic worldview of late Second Temple Judaism.
This is where Harrigan’s doctoral thesis intersects most directly with Paul’s mission to the Gentiles—the third major novelty in his thought. Paul’s mission is not about overturning the worldview of Second Temple Judaism. Rather, he functions fully within it, discipling Gentiles into the knowledge and hope of the God of Israel as understood in the late Second Temple period.
Paula Fredriksen makes this case well in her book Paul: The Pagan’s Apostle, where she frames Paul’s mission to Gentiles as a fundamentally Jewish project. Her work, along with that of Magnus Zetterholm, Mark Nanos, Matthew Thiessen, and Matthew Novenson, runs parallel to John Harrigan’s work. Yet one thing often lacking in historical scholarship is serious engagement with Paul’s theology of the cross.
For example, in Fredriksen’s work, terms like propitiation, redemption, and atonement scarcely appear. But for Paul, the proclamation of the cross and substitutionary atonement—set in the context of late Second Temple sacrificial tradition—was central. His gospel was not only about the Messiah’s death, but also about the gift of the Spirit and the hope of Jesus’ return, all within the apocalyptic expectation of Israel’s scriptures.
Here the work of Leon Morris becomes significant. In his The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross (originally his doctoral thesis), Morris examined Paul’s key terms—propitiation, justification, redemption, reconciliation—and rightly emphasized them as objective realities, not merely subjective experiences. However, Morris gave little attention to the apocalyptic framework of Second Temple Judaism. It was not until much later in his career that he considered apocalyptic literature seriously, and by then he concluded (in 1972) that the message of the cross did not fit within apocalyptic categories.
I would argue the opposite: the cross fits perfectly within Jewish apocalyptic hope. The mercy and kindness of God in the message of the cross is intelligible only against the backdrop of the severity of God—the coming Day of the Lord, the judgment of the wicked, the resurrection of the dead, and the hope of Israel’s restoration.
When we turn to missiological studies, however, we find a striking lack of interaction with this Jewish apocalyptic framework. Thinkers such as Peters, Kane, and Piper represent a purely “Biblicist” approach, largely disconnected from the historical context of Second Temple Judaism. They rarely engage with what Jews of the time actually meant by the kingdom of God, the Day of the Lord, or the resurrection of the dead.
There were exceptions. Ferdinand Hahn, a Catholic scholar, sought to apply New Testament studies to mission theology, and his contemporary Johannes Verkuyl, a Dutch Reformed scholar and missionary, offered a more robust missiological framework. Verkuyl’s work applied inaugurated eschatology to mission but was not widely received.
A more significant influence came from Donald Senior, a Catholic scholar whose work strongly influenced David Bosch, the South African missiologist. Bosch’s landmark book Transforming Mission (1991) became the watershed text in the field. Drawing from J.C. Beker and others, Bosch integrated the “already/not yet” framework of inaugurated eschatology into a theology of mission. This approach became the standard in the late 20th century.
In the American context, Arthur Glasser, long associated with Fuller Seminary, popularized Bosch’s synthesis for evangelical audiences. His Announcing the Kingdom represented a significant accommodation of Bosch’s South African missiology into neo-evangelical theology. Alongside Glasser, figures such as Andreas Köstenberger and Peter O’Brien extended the same framework in a more conservative, evangelical direction, generally leaning toward realized eschatology rather than consistent apocalyptic expectation.
Later voices like Christopher Wright and Michael Goheen carried this trend further into Reformed evangelical missiology. Their work, however, often tilted toward supersessionism, interpreting the church as the replacement of Israel within an inaugurated eschatological framework.
This trajectory highlights the problem: the standard “already/not yet” continuum itself is inadequate. The more fundamental question is not where theology lands on the realized/consistent spectrum, but rather: how does it engage with its historical context? The true continuum should be measured between Jewish apocalyptic—the worldview of Second Temple Judaism—and the various non-Jewish, non-apocalyptic reinterpretations that developed throughout church history.
Thus, the key questions become:
How faithfully does Paul remain within Jewish apocalyptic expectation?
In what ways does he develop or intensify it?
Where (if at all) does later Christian theology depart from that framework into something non-Jewish and non-apocalyptic?
Reading Paul this way allows us to see him neither as rejecting Judaism nor as painting over it, but as proclaiming the cross, the Spirit, and the mission to the Gentiles squarely within the Jewish apocalyptic hope of his own time.
We am framing Paul squarely within his historical context. He is not setting himself against it. He is not erasing it or painting something entirely new over it. Rather, Paul is interpreting three central realities—the death of the Messiah, the gift of the Spirit, and the mission to the Gentiles—within that established Jewish apocalyptic worldview of the late Second Temple period. I believe this approach does the most justice to Paul, his letters, and the way he himself speaks about these things.
References
This study draws on John Harrigan’s teaching, Discipling Gentiles into the Hope of Israel.