If you've ever wondered about the origins of anti-semitism, you might be surprised to learn that it is the unfortunate consequence of trying to make people feel better about their foreskins.
It's all in the book of Galatians, a letter Paul wrote to try to assuage the concerns of newly-converted gentile Christians who raised an issue that Paul had not anticipated, and which he addressed just as you would expect anyone to react to a surprise. Clumsily.
The Galations had a huge difference of opinion on whether or not they had to follow Jewish religious rituals, even though they were themselves gentiles. Some were adamant that they had to be circumcised, e.g., in order to be Christians, and others would be damned (literally) before anyone cut on their dingaling.
Seeing that the pro-snipping Galatians correctly recognized the connection between Judaism and Christianity, but that the anti-snips were on board with Paul's very original idea that the law of Moses did not apply to Christians, he came up with a novel solution that would satisfy both sides and relieve them of a dead-on-arrival fight to get Cigna and Blue Cross to cover a medically unnecessary procedure.
Like a lot of solutions to problems in the moment, the long-lasting effect missed the point of the original intent of the solver, with disastrous results for posterity.
Paul realized that he would have to find justification within the scriptures themselves if he was going to rationalize Christianity's Jewish roots with its Pauline rejection of the Torah. Finding insurmountable obstacles within the law of Moses itself, Paul skipped over that can of worms altogether, and went straight to God's covenant with Israel and rewrote it in Greek. Why Greek?
You see, while Paul was a devout Jew before his revelation on the road to Damascus, he was also a product of his hellenized upbringing in Graeco-Roman Tarsus, in what is now Turkey. He was not by any stretch a product of Israel. Consequently, his bible by choice was the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Jewish bible translated by his time, including the Pentateuch. And it was in that translation that the seed (pardon the pun in advance) of anti-semitism germinated.
Paul's idea was to co-opt God's promise to Abraham in Genesis that he would bless his "seed," and turn that promise inside out. He could do it because the Greek word for "seed" in the Septuagint was "sperma," which is singular. Of course the context of Genesis makes it abundantly clear that the promise was made to Abraham's progeny, i.e., the "children (plural) of Israel," and Paul was no fool, he knew this. And knowing this, there was a bit of Pat Robertson in his explanation of this promise to the gentiles in Galatia.
Paul argued that since "sperma" was singular, God could not possibly have been speaking of the "children of Israel" (plural) when he made the promise, but must have been alluding to one person, and that one person must have been Christ Jesus, a claim Paul makes explicitly in Galatians 3:16. His conclusion was that the gentile Christians in Galatia had their Jewish anchor in Abraham and that was prior to the law of Moses, so gentiles could literally skip over the entire Bible until the death and resurrection of Jesus, when Abraham's promise to Jesus was, in his tortured logic, fulfilled.
Because of one mistranslated Greek word, Christians are therefore justified by their faith in Jesus alone, and are not bound by the law of Moses, which, in Paul's eyes, was only written because of the faithlessness of the Jews in the first place.
Of course, as is often the case when you turn history on its head, there are unintended consequences, like those which later turned up in Corinth, when the recently converted Corinthians (previously worshippers of Zeus and company) took him very literally, and decided that, being infused with the spirit of Christ, they were not bound by anything at all, and to Paul's horror, embraced all sorts of morally questionable practices, including sexual ones.
Paul wrote the book of Corinthians trying to "walk back" the consequences of his "sperma" declaration, without walking back the declaration itself, in order to rein in the Corinthians. Yes, the seed was out of the sac, off the reservation. He had to remind them that there are certain moral laws that stand independent of the law of Moses. Ironically, some of the activities to which Paul objected (taking more than one wife, e.g.) were perfectly acceptable to God in the life of Abraham, to whose covenant with God Paul had directly tied gentile Christians in the book of Galatians (although the Corinthians were not necessarily aware of the hat trick in Galatians).
So, there you have it. There were more direct anti-semitic remarks in the New Testament, including Paul's own assertion that the Jews killed Jesus, but the "sperma" declaration was both the explanation for the "faithlessness of the Jews" and the unintended justification of the anti-semitism for succeeding generations of those Christians (and only those Christians) with a determination to justify every word in the Bible as the dictation of God (and with a predilection toward bigotry).
If one wonders why Paul's writings are sometimes confusing and apparently contradictory, this is an example of one reason why. When you say one thing to one group of people and another thing to another group of people, and someone saves and canonizes ALL your words, it becomes impossible to selectively walk any of them back, and so the only way for later Christians to reconcile the inconsistencies is to conflate them all and create additional explanations, which, honed by centuries of scholarly redaction, sound perfectly rational on their face.
I can't help at this point comparing Paul's flip-flopping to Mitt Romney's. Paul enjoys the benefit of all those centuries of conflating and explaining. Romney does not. Should be a deliciously interesting presidential race.
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