Paul’s Ethnic Gospel

"Grace, not race”—so goes the tidy maxim by which many modern interpreters characterize Paul’s gospel. In this reading, Paul severs the covenant community from its ethnic roots and replaces it with a universal spiritual entity transcending the particularities of Israel. Jewish insistence on ethnic identity as necessary for membership in the covenant community is seen as the problem Paul overcame; the gospel, in this telling, is a triumph of post-ethnic inclusion. The gospel moves away from ethnocentrism, we have been told. Paul is the apostle of progressive cosmopolitanism. But what if this narrative has it backward?