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legalistic, intellectual, socially tolerant of sin, intellectually arrogant in putting law over revelation and faith, lost to Christ through intellection and abstraction and legalism and social liberalism, having a false relationship to God (no longer God’s people).

Paul was not talking about some Jews who did this and some Jew s

who did that; Paul was talking about the Jews.

It was especially important for Paul, in getting power, to change

the perception of what Jew ish law was and how it functioned.

Turning something holy, from God, into something cultural, the

work of a group of corrupt men, is to turn the absolute into the

relative. A nything cultural can be changed or abandoned or manipulated. The people whose law begins to represent culture, not divinity, are more imperiled than they were because their status depends on the status of culture in general in any given society: the

infamous “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun”

denotes how low the status of culture can be with obvious consequences to those who represent it. Also, unless the law is made concrete because people obey it, it is abstract: and the abstraction

of Jewish law became, in Paul’s rhetoric, a major synonym for sin;

in a sense, concentrating on the abstraction of the law literally

turned intellection (more abstraction) into sin. What was not faith

in Christ was Jewish stuff: abstract laws, tolerance of sin, law and

writing and thinking as cultural diversions from the true faith.

What does it mean that Paul especially concentrates on the sin of

homosexuality in relation to the Jews and their law: the homosexual Greeks were at the pinnacle of culture five centuries before the birth of Christ—reading, writing, and ideas were their domain;

Paul passed the mantle of high culture to the Jews after the demise

of Greek culture—law substituted for both dialogue and tragedy.

Culture, through Paul’s agency, came to mean both homosexuals

(the Greek heritage) and Jews (the law as a basis for culture). For

hundreds of centuries, believing Christians have committed mass

murders, pogroms, vast persecutions, crafted and enforced systems

of civil and religious law so vicious and discriminatory that Jews

have been prohibited from owning land, denied citizenship and all

manner of civil rights, and even been defined as subhuman: sexual

intercourse with them has been regarded as a form of bestiality. In

at least two genocides of indescribable cruelty, both Jews and homosexuals were searched for, found, and killed: the Inquisition and the Holocaust.

The suffering of the Jews, the seemingly endless attempt to

purge the Jew from history and from society by driving him out or

exterminating him, has not made the Jews good. Jews remain human, to the astonishment of everyone, including Jews. But even more shocking to Christians is the undeniable fact that persecution

has not made Jews into Christians. As one liberal Christian leader

said on Sunday-morning television: we thought the Jews would

wither away; we have to face the fact that the Jews are still with us

and that even after the Holocaust there are still Jews who cling to

their identity as Jews; those of us who thought that conversion was

the answer to the Jewish problem have to face the fact that we

were wrong; we are going to have accept the fact that these are

God’s people in a very special sense— they cannot be wiped out, as

recent history has shown, as our attempts to convert them have

shown.

Not being Christian in a world that hates the Jew , the homosexual, the castrated male, haunts the post-Holocaust Jew : he has seen the future and it is annihilation. Especially the contemporary Jew

is fighting for his m asculinity. In the camps Jew ish men were castrated: some, only some. The castration was literal for individuals; two thirds of the world’s Jew ry was exterminated, which castrates

the people as a whole rather effectively. Nothing threatens the

Jewish male now more than a perception of him as being deficient

in m asculinity. For this reason, Israel is a m ilitarist nation: no one

will ever again accuse the Jew s of being soft. For this reason,

Amerikan Jew ish writers are apostles of machismo and pimp masculinity. And for this reason, there is a growing segment of the Amerikan Jew ish population that is part of the Christian evangelical Right.

First, there is the trade-off. On television, a rabbi and a priest