In a credulous interview with a podcaster who praises Hitler and Stalin, Tucker Carlson claimed that Christian Zionism is “heresy.” This is a particularly explosive claim, of course, but it is being made amidst less inflammatory debates about the same issues—Zionism, the place of the Jewish people in Christian theology, and how the Christian New Testament understands the relationship between the Jewish people of Israel and the Christian church.
The resolution of these more arcane debates hoists Carlson on his own petard, revealing his ignorance of theology and the Bible.
Those biblical debates are about questions like, “Did Paul teach that a new Israel with mostly Gentiles was superseding the old Israel of Jewish people?” and, “Did he teach that God’s promise of the land of the Canaanites to the Jewish people was now defunct?”
The theological term for those who answer those questions in the affirmative is “supersessionism,” and in particular those who affirm those questions would be best understood as fairly hard supersessionists. To be sure, one can be a hard supersessionist while also recognizing that claims like Carlson’s are ahistorical, at best, and that anti-Semitism is a great evil that all Christians should condemn. Yet it is also true that hard forms of supersessionism have often been fellow travelers with Christian anti-Semitism historically. So it is vitally important in a moment like this that Christian theologians writing about the relationship between ethnic Israel and the church do so with immense care and precision, lest they otherwise end up unintentionally supporting evils that they would otherwise loudly condemn.
Supersessionism is a fairly common view amongst Reformed Protestants in the contemporary church. Indeed, amongst Protestants concerned with these questions many seem to think the only options on offer are this sort of hard supersessionism or Dispensationalism—a 19th-century theology known for its fixation on “the rapture” (a lifting of true Christians off the planet years before the Second Coming) and detailed charts speculating about the precise schedule of last things.
For Reformed Christians who reject Dispensationalism, hard supersessionism is a tempting alternative. Yet it is not the only alternative to Dispensationalism on offer in Christian history. Important Reformed theologians like Increase Mather (17th century New England), Jonathan Edwards (18th century New England), and Karl Barth (20th century Europe) taught that God’s covenant with the Jewish people to be His “Chosen People” (not the same thing as promising salvation) is still in effect. They also held that the land promise which God made to Abraham and his progeny still holds. They held to a “soft” supersessionism which sees some continuity between Old Testament Israel and the Gentle church, but not the “hard” supersessionism that transfers every Old Testament promise to the Gentile church.
In other words, there is a Reformed tradition that is not dispensationalist but criticizes the “hard” supersessionism that spiritualizes all the Old Testament promises made to Jewish Israel and transfers every one of them to the Gentile church.
A hot new book in Pauline studies is making “hard” supersessionist claims again but in new form: Jason Staples’ Paul and the Resurrection of Israel: Jews, Former Gentiles, Israelites (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Staples says that the ten lost tribes were assimilated by the Assyrian Empire after 721 BC and therefore became “gentilized.” They will be Israelites when “all Israel will be saved” (Roman 11:26), as will Paul’s gentile converts from his mission fields in Syria, (what is now) Turkey, Greece and Italy. So Paul’s eschatological “Israel” will be dominated by Gentiles from the ten lost tribes and the mostly Gentile churches he evangelized.
Responding to these critiques, Staples has recently argued that my characterization of his book is a “misrepresentation” of his argument. He says he does not claim that Paul’s new “Israel” is mostly Gentile.
Staples complains that I give “no quotation or evidence” (but does not deny) that he portrays Paul’s “Israel” as predominantly Gentile. Yet in his book he writes that, “[T]he bulk of northern Israel [the ten lost tribes] has actually become ‘not my people’ (=gentiles)” (p. 286). “[T]he bulk of Israel was assimilated into the nations . . . and must now be resurrected [as] . . . spirit-filled gentiles” (316). “[T]he bulk of non-Jewish Israel had effectively become gentilized” (324; all emphases the author’s except “bulk”).
By Staples’ own admission, then, most of the ten lost tribes will be resurrected to become Israelites as “spirit-filled gentiles” (316).
Staples also acknowledges that “Paul believed his gentile converts had become ethnic Israelites” (337). When one realizes that Paul calls himself an “apostle to the Gentiles” (Rom 11:13) and most scholars say his churches were predominantly Gentile, and Staples himself says the “bulk” of the ten tribes had become Gentiles, it is strange that he wants to deflect my characterization of his Israel as “predominantly Gentile.”
Staples objects that he actually said that “Jews/Judah are the preeminent (‘the leading,’ page 48) portion of the larger category of Israel.” Yet the beginning of the sentence on page 48 indicates that this is so in “early Jewish literature”—not Paul’s letters. The gravamen of Staples’ argument is that for Paul, Israel is made up largely of “former gentiles.”
Here too Staples protests. When I cited his repeated claims that Paul “goes so far as to call them former gentiles” in 1 Cor 12:2 (9; see also on 331 three times: “former gentiles/pagans . . . they are no longer gentiles . . . his reference to them as former gentiles” and “former gentiles have become ethnically transformed” on 335), he says I am confusing an argument with a translation because on p. 331 he provides a rendering from the Greek, “when you were gentiles (ἔθνη).”
This is a distinction without a difference. The etymological meaning of “translation” is to “carry across” meaning from one language to another, which Staples himself says he is doing: “these persons [can] cease to be gentiles . . . Paul’s wording says exactly that.”
It is central to Staples’ argument that once they are “inside” the Body of Christ Paul never distinguishes between Jews and Gentiles, for they are Israelites of equal standing. “[T]he binary distinction between Jew and Greek remains for those outside . . . [but, quoting Normand Bonneau] to continue maintaining the Jew-Gentile distinction . . . is tantamount to saying that Christ has not been raised” (336, 339).
Yet Paul keeps maintaining this distinction when writing to those inside his churches, which means for him inside the Body of Christ. To the church in Ephesus he addresses “you Gentiles in the flesh” and explains that “this mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body” (2:11; 3:6). To the mostly Gentile church in Galatia he proclaims that the Scriptures foretold that “God would justify the Gentiles by faith” and “the blessing of Abraham [has] come to the Gentiles”(3:8; 3:14). To the Roman church he commends the inclusion of believing Gentiles as “the offering of the Gentiles,” speaks of what God has accomplished through him “to bring the Gentiles to obedience,” and gives thanks that “the Gentiles have come to share in the spiritual blessings’ of the saints in Jerusalem (15:16, 18, 27).
Another claim central to Staples’ argument is that in the New Testament “Israel/Israelite is nowhere treated as equivalent to Ioudaios [Jew or Judean]” (67). For, according to Staples, Paul’s Gentiles are Israelites just as much as Jews, and Paul does not think of Jews, especially the two southern tribes of Judah and Benjamin, as the majority of Israel. Yet the most damning evidence against this thesis is that Paul never once calls Gentiles “Israelites.” And Paul says in Romans that “my kindred according to the flesh are Israelites” and “I myself am an Israelite . . . a member of the tribe of Benjamin” (Rom 9:3-4; 11:1; my emphasis).
Staples dismisses without explanation my evidence for Paul’s making Jew (Ioudaios) and “Israelite” equivalent. Readers can judge for themselves: He claims that Israel/Israelite “regularly refers to biblical Israel [in the Old Testament] or suggests an eschatological nuance,” but “Israel/Israelite is nowhere [in the New Testament] treated as equivalent to Ioudaios” (66-67).
Yet Luke tells us that in his his Pentecost sermon, Peter first addresses the crowd as “men of Judaea” (Ἄνδρες Ἰουδαῖοι), and then refers to this same crowd as “men of Israel/Israelites” (Ἄνδρες Ἰσραηλῖται). Peter’s referents are neither Old Testament Israelites nor future denizens of an eschatological kingdom. Ἰουδαῖοι and Ἰσραηλῖται are synonymous.
We see the same thing in Paul. In Romans 9:6 when referring to Jews of his day, he distinguishes between those “from Israel” (ἐξ Ἰσραήλ) and those who “are Israel” (οὗτοι Ἰσραήλ). The latter are evidently messianic Jews, the “children of the promise” (9:8) who are the “remnant” (9:27; 11:5) who accept Jesus as messiah. They are the “called” (9:24) from the Jews (ἐξ Ἰουδαίων) alongside “called” gentiles (ἐξ ἐθνῶν). Here Paul refers to Jewish believers both as Ἰσραήλ and as Ioudaioi—again contrary to Staples’ claim that the two are never treated as equivalent.
Finally, Staples is right to say that I ignored his citation of Paul’s all-important declaration that Jews who reject Jesus are still “beloved” to God because the promises he made to the patriarchs are “irrevocable” (Rom 11:28-29). I ignored it because his explanation of it is so ambiguous: “contemporary unfaithful Israelites have in no way lost their election” (my emphasis). Israelites? What about non-messianic Jews? That was the heart of my criticism: When Paul makes clear that non-messianic Jews are still “beloved” to God in Rom 11:28, why does Staples evade the point and refer instead to “Israelites”?
This question is especially puzzling given that it concerns the core claim of hard supersessionism—that God has revoked his covenant with (non-messianic) Jewish Israel. Perhaps Staples dodges the point because he is a hard supersessionist after all. And his book is a disguised version of hard supersessionism.
Another signal that Staples’ book is hard supersessionism in disguise is that the land promise—despite Paul’s reassertion of it more than twenty years after Jesus’ resurrection (“The God of this people Israel chose our fathers . . . [and] gave them their land as an inheritance”; Acts 13:17, 19)—is nowhere to be seen in this book. Nor does Staples acknowledge that the Old Testament repeats the land promise one thousand times and Jesus affirms the divine inspiration of every stroke of the pen in that Testament (Matt 5:17-18).
Staples denies he is a supersessionist by redefining the term. Supersessionism, he declares, is treating the ekklesia (Church) as discontinuous with Israel (344). He can say that since his book is all about the restoration of Israel, there is no discontinuity. But since he has redefined Israel in ways that defy Paul’s own words, he fails to avoid hard supersessionism. A horse of another color is still a horse. The Pauline Israel he constructs leaves out the Jewish Israel which Paul did not leave out in Rom 11:28-29. And the land promise—which Paul himself affirmed (implicitly in Rom 11:29 and explicitly in Acts 13:19)—is nowhere to be seen.
This is a hard supersessionist “Paul” that kicks the true apostle to the Gentiles out of the plain sense of his texts.
Distinguishing true from false readings of Paul also sheds light on today’s political debates. It means not only that American conservatives must decide whether to allow anti-semitism to poison their waters, but also whether biblical Christians will permit a broadcaster to parody orthodoxy.