In more recent years, though, there has been a countermovement to restore Paul to a more credible Hellenistic context. Suddenly, we now have not the Roman Paul whom Acts depicts, nor the Jewish Paul, immersed in the prophetic traditions, whom his recent apologists conjure, but the Hellenistic Paul—Paul being a man who, after all, wrote in Greek and drew his imagery and instances from Greek myth and literature. The stakes of these disputes are high because of what they say about his inheritance. If Paul’s creed is essentially Roman, then Christianity looks, from the outset, like a religion trained to live with empire, its compass always set toward placating power. If significantly Greek, then the question becomes how philosophical—and, more specifically, how Platonic—the religion is at its core, with doctrines that can seem mystical and otherworldly. If foundationally Jewish, or even anti-Jewish, then the question is: how much of the old faith remains in the bloodstream, and what did Paul think he was doing to it?

This new, revisionist view is well represented in a recent scholarly collection, “Paul Within Paganism: Restoring the Mediterranean Context to the Apostle” (Fortress), edited by Alexander Chantziantoniou, Paula Fredriksen, and Stephen L. Young. The Paul of these pages, sketched by sixteen scholars, is close to his contemporary Philo of Alexandria. Like Philo, he joins the Platonism current in his day, with its layered cosmos and transcendent God, to a boldly reworked reading of Biblical prophecy, encountered in Greek translation rather than in Hebrew. Robyn Faith Walsh offers a beautiful poetic analysis of Paul’s otherwise odd celestial obsessions, making the case that “Paul, like other Middle Platonists, saw the moon as a clearinghouse for souls awaiting a cosmic judgment.” He belongs to a liminal space where occult Jewish faith documents and the poetic universe of Plutarch and Platonists coexist. Trying to appease two audiences at once, Jewish and Greek, he instinctively combined their preoccupations.

In an even more startling essay, with the unforgettable title “Paul Among Pagan Penises,” Ryan D. Collman argues that Paul’s fixation on the politics of circumcision has been distorted by a simple mistranslation. A Greek term that means “foreskinned” has routinely been rendered as “uncircumcised.” Paul, Collman stresses, wasn’t saying that the Gentiles lack something the Jews have. He was talking about two different kinds of possession: Gentiles have foreskins; Jews have the ritual that removes them. More startling still, Collman demonstrates that, since the glans of the uncircumcised penis is visible only when aroused, Greeks assumed Jewish penises to be in a state of permanent arousal, thus producing a standing Hellenistic joke that only a “penis from Jerusalem” could satisfy a lustful woman. The politics of penises in this period gave enticing credit to Jews as erotic masters—an idea that sat well with the larger allure of Jewish exoticism to Christian converts. Rather like Indian gurus in nineteen-sixties hippie culture, the Jews were assumed to be repositories of every kind of mystical and human elevation. Indeed, Walsh is sympathetic to an account of Pauline Christianity’s allure that emphasizes its “exemptive” ostentation: the peasant simplicity and extreme antiquity of the Jewish-Christian faith was perfectly designed to appeal to alienated Roman urbanites who, like those hippie guru followers, wanted a new faith that was old, exotic, and of rustic origins, with incense burning day and night.

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What is ultimately at stake in the new literature is the question of Paul’s commitment to universalism and, through him, the universalism of his faith. We love Paul for his celebration of love, for his insistence, in a key that seems to echo Jesus, that “faith can move mountains,” and for his remarkable amendment of that claim: “If I have a faith that can move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing.” Yet his single-minded zeal is inseparable from his intolerance. As one revisionist scholar argues, this very insistence on doctrinal and moral boundaries became one of Christianity’s most serviceable features once it encountered imperial power. A religion that defined itself sharply could be mobilized by the state, because, from Paul onward, its leading voices showed a readiness to regulate and to enforce. Paul, in other words, hands down both the ethic of love and the habit of boundary-drawing, and leaves it to us to harmonize them.

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Where the consensus of disinterested scholars on matters Pauline leads is to the usual place: the texts, like all sacred texts, are a mishmash of literary tropes, polemical invention, retrospective editing, and emotive appeal. They are conflicted, as we are. Jewish believers have had to come to terms with the inarguable truth that the story of the Hebrew enslavement, flight, and deliverance from Egypt is almost entirely mythical. The Hebrew people were not held in bondage in Egypt, and, in any case, there was no promised land to go to, since it was already under Egyptian control. Yet the meaning of the ritual is undiminished for its participants. Passover is not about a historical event but about a metaphoric explication of an ideal. If its objects are Hebrew enslavement and escape, its subject is hope. It does not reduce the ritual or pietistic content to know that it is fiction. In fact, the allegory travels more easily once it is freed from literalism. The same applies to Paul’s case. “Fictional” needn’t mean either fatuous or false. Jesus, who speaks in parables, not in dicta or dogmas, provides us with a primary instance of the power of the nonliteral tale. We do not ask where the prodigal son’s father really lived, or whether the man who built his house on sand had a deed, or who could certify that the foolish virgins were virgins.