Apaštalas Paulius kaip radikalus žydas Danieliaus Boyarino postmodernistinėje interpretacijoje
APOSTLE PAUL AS A RADICAL JEW IN THE POST-MODERN INTERPRETATION OF DANIEL BOYARIN

Summary/Abstract: One of the most known titles for Paul of Tarsus is the Apostle of Nations. To Galatians Paul writes that the Lord called him to “preach Him among the Gentiles [ethnēs]” (Gal 1:16). Nevertheless, during his mission, he always attempted to preach in synagogues, and only in the case of resistance he turned to the pagan citizens. The question about Paul’s relationship with his own Jewish background and even with Judaeo-Christian community is still one of the most problematic. During the course of two millennium of Christianity, he was treated as the inventor of Christianity, as a Pharisee convert and promoter of anti-Semitism. The work of the Jewish Talmud professor and post-modern culture critic Daniel Boyarin “A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity” (1994) was a radical novelty in the understanding of Paul from the Jewish orthodox perspective. The author not only calls a Christian apostle “an important Jewish thinker” and his letters “the most remarkable texts in the canon of western literature”, but tries to present him as a type of internal critic of the Jewish culture. Paul himself is in a sense paradigma of “the Jew”. Describing who Paul was and what was his impact on the formation of Christian and Jewish identity, he uses specific saussurian distinction of signified and signifier typical of postmodern text criticism. He tries to reveal the structure that lies behind the teaching of the “radical Jew”. Paul himself is a convert not from Judaism to Christianity, but rather a Pharisee who was caught by the Hellenist idea of human universality on his way to Damascus, if that concrete event had ever happened. He believes that Paul was motivated not by an abnormal psychological state but by a set of problems and ideas generated by his cultural, religious situation. D. Boyarin argues that Paul was an ecclesiological monist and ontological dualist in contrast to sociologically pluralist and ontologically monist rabbinism. Paul’s key texts to illustrate this for him are the ones where Paul uses the expressions kata sarka and kata pneuma: „But as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit…“ (Gal 4:29). Paul’s Platonist strive for human universality is expressed in another famous verse from the same letter: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28). According to D. Boyarin, a method that Paul uses in his discourse is mainly a contrast and allegorization: spirit and flesh, meaning and letter, Church and Israel, human Jesus and divine Christ – all these dualistic concepts provide Paul’s transition from the concrete, carnal and historical to universal, spiritual and apocalyptic. In this radical dualism of Paul, Boyarin recognizes the repressive, hierarchical structure of the whole western culture. In addition, he affirms that Paul was misread for centuries and proposes other ways

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