Paul, Essentialism, and the Jewish Law: In Conversation with Christine Hayes

ABSTRACT Although Christine Hayes’s work shows that legal essentialism and legal nominalism are helpful categories for situating the Apostle Paul, it is vital to distinguish between the way that Paul himself viewed ethnicity (he was an ethnic essentialist) and the way that scholars today describe Paul’s handling of ethnicity (he was in practice an ethnic constructivist). In this connection, the invisible quality of Christ’s …