Concluding remarks

It is appropriate now to summarise briefly some of our findings of the preceding chapters and to draw together the threads of the study as a whole. In general, it may fairly be claimed that the theme of the connections between Jewish attitudes toward the Gentiles and ethnic reconciliation has not been given sufficient attention in previous studies of Christian origins in general, and, not least, of ‘Pauline Christianity’ in particular. The present study of the dynamic between Jewish attitudes toward the Gentiles and ethnic reconciliation according to Ephesians 2 has attempted to fill that gap. Indeed, we will not fully understand the significance of ethnic reconciliation until we have grasped something of these attitudes.

We began our introductory chapter by surveying the previous scholarship which has been hampered by too rigid an understanding of ‘Pauline Christianity’. This can be attributed substantially to scholarly tradition whose hermeneutical ‘grid’ has been derived from the philosophy of dialectics or the Protestant Reformation. The ‘new perspective(s) on Paul’, however, shifts our perspective back to first-century Judaism and enables us to penetrate fully into the historical context of first-century Jews and Judaism. Because we cannot fully appreciate what the author is affirming (or repudiating) unless we recognise the importance of that ‘context’, we have taken pains to describe in chapter 2 some of the relevant Jewish features and demonstrated them by focusing particularly on Ephesians 2.1–10 and attempting to set it as fully as possible into its historical context.