[This Bible teaching is adapted from Prof. McDermott’s message at the ICEJ’s Feast of Tabernacles 2025.] 

There is much debate today concerning the New Perspective on Paul as it relates to Israel. The Apostle Paul is not always easy to comprehend. Even his fellow Apostle, Peter, wrote that Paul is sometimes “hard to understand,” and many twist his words “to their own destruction” (2 Peter 3:16). Twenty centuries later, perhaps the most debated aspect of Paul’s teachings centers on the question: What did Paul think was the relationship between first-century Judaism and this new Jesus movement? 

Luther’s legacy 
For five centuries, Protestants have largely read Paul through Martin Luther’s theology, which was shaped by his conflict with late-medieval Catholicism. In that battle, “works” were pitted against “grace,” and Luther concluded that first-century Judaism must have taught salvation by works. On that assumption, Paul’s critique of the “works of the law” came to mean a total rejection of Judaism and the inauguration of a wholly new religion – a Christianity detached from Israel’s people, story and Land. 

That reading quickly became the theological soil for Supersessionism, or Replacement theology, which came in two pieces. First, the people: the Church replaces Israel as God’s chosen people, and so Jews who do not follow Jesus are no longer the elect. Second, the Land: the Land of Israel loses its covenantal significance, is no longer holy, and the territorial promises are spiritualised. 

These thoughts took deep root and the consequences proved grave. Luther’s late work “On the Jews and Their Lies” would be weaponised centuries later by the Nazi regime, which distributed it widely to condition Christians – especially Lutherans – to accept anti-Jewish laws. While Luther fought abuses of his own day, falsely superimposing them on the first-century Church, his take on Paul helped make the Church susceptible to grievous errors about Israel. 
 
The New Perspective on Paul 
In the 1970s and 80s, a group of scholars – most notably E. P. Sanders, James D. G. Dunn, and N. T. Wright – challenged this Luther-shaped approach to Judaism. They demonstrated that Second Temple Judaism – Paul’s Judaism – did not preach salvation by works, but what Sanders called “covenantal nomism.” In brief, this means that Israel enters covenant by grace – signified for boys by infant circumcision – but remaining in that covenant requires faithful obedience to its terms. The entrance is a gift of grace, but to remain in the covenant requires obeying its terms. (We might observe this is not unlike what Rabbi Jesus teaches in John 15:14: “You are my friends if you keep my commandments.”) 

So, Paul is not an enemy of Torah. In fact, he says the opposite. “Do we then overthrow the Law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the Law.” (Romans 3:31) 

This correction to Luther is welcome. However, some versions of the New Perspective on Paul have drifted into a different distortion, interpreting Paul through a contemporary lens of race and identity politics. In this telling, Paul rejected Judaism not because it taught “works,” but because it was “ethnic” – a position summarised in the slogan “grace, not race.” 

But Paul did not think in modern racial categories. On the contrary, he writes: “From now on, we regard no one according to the flesh” (2 Corinthians 5:16). The Apostle’s logic is covenantal, not racial. Jesus thereby does not erase Israel, but confirms the promises to the Hebrew Patriarchs and brings Gentiles into Israel’s story (Romans 15:8-12). 
 
A new ‘Trojan Horse’ 
A widely discussed book by Jason Staples, Paul and the Resurrection of Israel: Jews, Former Gentiles, and Israelites (Cambridge University Press), is changing yet again the understanding of Jews and Israel in New Testament thinking. Its title sounds promising, but it is a Trojan horse. Why? 

Because Staples argues that the only true “Israel” now consists of Jesus-followers – Jew and Gentile believers together. In his view, Jews who do not confess Jesus are not “Israel,” their covenant has no continuing validity, and the Land promise is now defunct. To support his view, he says 1 Corinthians 12:2 refers to “former Gentiles,” as though Gentiles cease to be Gentiles upon believing – a reading unsupported by the Greek text. 

The net effect is a new Supersessionism in disguise. The names have changed, but the substance remains: Israel is replaced – this time by a Jesus-community whose identity erases the ongoing peoplehood of non-Messianic Jews, and the Land is detached from the covenant. 
 
What Paul Actually Taught 
Against such redefinitions, Paul speaks plainly in Romans 11:28–29 about Jews who had not accepted Jesus in his day, saying: “They are beloved for the sake of the fathers.” Not “were” but “are” – present tense – because of the fathers (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob). Why? Because “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.” 

The word “calling” here is a technical term; it refers to God’s election of Israel to be His firstborn son and priestly nation (Exodus 4:22; 19:5-6). That vocation is not annulled by Jewish unbelief; Paul says it cannot be revoked. If God’s faithfulness could be cancelled by human faithlessness, then grace would no longer be grace, and the Gentiles’ grafting into Israel’s olive tree (Romans 11:17–24) would itself be uncertain. Paul’s argument runs the other way: God’s steadfast love to Israel is the foundation of Gentile hope, not its opponent. 

This priestly vocation is a witness, to show the world the one true God of Israel who has revealed Himself supremely in Israel’s Messiah. Gentile believers share this vocation not by replacing Israel, but by being grafted into Israel’s story of a covenant-keeping God. 
 
Paul and the Land 
Supersessionist theologians usually insist the Land promise drops out of New Testament theology. Paul himself assumes the Land’s enduring significance. Consider Acts 13:19–20, where Paul rehearses Israel’s history: God chose the patriarchs, delivered Israel from Egypt, endured them in the wilderness, “and after destroying seven nations in the land of Canaan, He gave them their land as an inheritance.” Paul does not blush at Joshua’s conquest or reinterpret the inheritance as a metaphor. Instead, he states it plainly as covenantal history and present reality.  

In Jewish intellectual life around Paul’s time, when Philo, Josephus and others catalogue God’s “gifts” to Israel, they regularly place the Land at or near the top. Thus, when Paul writes that “the gifts of God are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29), he speaks with that understanding of “gifts.” He names many gifts in Romans 9:3-5 and the Land sits clearly within them. 

Historically, Paul likely wrote Romans around 57 A.D., roughly 25 years after his encounter with Christ. At that mature stage of reflection, his conviction about Israel’s election and the permanence of God’s gifts is explicit. The Land promise is not a vestige of a discarded dispensation, but is a sign of the God who keeps His promises. 
 
Reading Paul without erasing Israel 
What then of the Law? Paul’s language is careful. He never teaches that Torah is bad; he insists it is holy and good (Romans 7:12). He criticizes not Torah but sin’s misuse of the Law and its powerlessness to deliver from sin’s dominion – something only accomplished in Christ (Romans 8:1-4). 

Nor does Paul reduce Israel’s identity to ethnic markers. He celebrates Gentiles streaming into Israel’s hope (Romans 15:8-12) and insists there is no “second-class” status among the redeemed. But as Gentiles are welcomed, Paul refuses to erase Israel. He draws a distinction in Romans 9:6 between those who are “from Israel” and those who are truly “Israel,” but that is an intra-Jewish distinction between unbelieving and believing Jews – not a license to expel non-Messianic Jews from Israel altogether. Indeed, the “remnant” of believing Jews confirms that Israel’s calling endures. It does not erase the unbelieving majority’s belovedness, for God keeps His promises to the patriarchs.  Therefore non-Messianic Jews are still beloved  “for the sake of the fathers” (Romans 11:5, 28). 

When Gentiles presume upon their ingrafted status and boast over the natural branches, Paul rebukes them sharply: “Remember it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you.” (Romans 11:18) Supersessionism is not merely a misreading; Paul treats it as spiritual arrogance. 
 
Ideas have consequences. A Paul stripped of Israel’s ongoing election made it easier, in modern Europe, to rationalise contempt for Jews and indifference to their suffering. Supersessionist ideas in Luther’s later writings were harnessed by the Nazi state to teach Christians to accept state antisemitism. This is not to equate today’s scholars with totalitarian regimes, but a similar misreading of Paul – however well-intentioned – can again dispossess Jews of their God-given identity. 

Today, Jews in many places face renewed hostility. Tragically, some Gentile Christians, influenced by theological redefinitions that hollow out Israel’s peoplehood and Land promise, unwittingly join the chorus. The Church must resist this. Faithfulness to God requires faithfulness to all His promises – to the Church and to Israel. 
 
Seeing what we were told not to see 
Many Christians have been taught the New Testament leaves the Land promise behind. As a result, generations have read the text and never noticed Paul’s straightforward retellings of the gift of the Land or his sweeping affirmation that God’s “gifts and calling” stand irrevocably. 

When we pay attention, a coherent portrait emerges. Paul honours Torah as holy, even while insisting on Christ as the fullness of God’s saving work. He insists on the unity of Jew and Gentile in Messiah, while refusing to abolish Israel’s identity or vocation. He calls Gentiles into Israel’s hope, while refusing their boasting over the natural branches. He takes for granted the historic gift of the Land, while insisting that its deepest meaning is bound to God’s faithfulness. The thread that ties it all together is covenant – that God keeps His word to the fathers. In Jesus, the Messiah of Israel, God extends mercy to the nations. 

The stakes in this debate are not merely academic. Christians are joining the new explosion of antisemitism because they have accepted Supersessionist views of Paul. But to join the true Paul is to confess, with joy and trembling, that the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable – and to order our doctrine, our witness, and our politics accordingly.