Die politische Theologie des Paulus

In February 1987, just a few weeks before his death, in front of a small crowd of an audience, Jacob Taubes presented four lectures about Paul, which he viewed as his intellectual legacy. In these, he enters the field of Pauline research, a field of Christian biblical study, as a radical outsider. In his alternative reading of the Epistle to the Romans, he places the traditional themes in totally new contexts and in so doing excavates the suppressed Jewish traits from the Christian Paul. Taubes does not see his discussion of the Jewish Paul as an exercise in academic historical reconstruction. Rather what matters to him, is to open up perspectives on ways of belief and life at this crossroads of Judaism and early Christianity, which have been smothered by institutional sclerosis and completely displaced by historical developments. The lectures are a Jewish deconstruction of the Christian effective history of the Epistle to the Romans, which falls under the heading of “Faith not Works”.