The Work
The Apostle was published in English translation in 1943 by G.P. Putnam's Sons (New York) and in Yiddish the same year. It was the second volume of Sholem Asch's Christ trilogy, following The Nazarene (1939) and followed by Mary (1949). The novel is approximately 750 pages. It presents a biographical fiction of the Apostle Paul, beginning with his early life as Saul of Tarsus, a student under Gamaliel, and tracing his persecution of the early Christians, his Damascus road conversion, and his missionary journeys through the Mediterranean world. Asch's Paul is a complex figure: deeply Jewish, theologically innovative, and ultimately the architect of a Christianity that Asch presents as both a fulfillment of and a departure from its Jewish origins.
Biblical Engagement
Acts 9:3-6 (Saul's encounter with the risen Christ on the Damascus road: "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?") is the hinge point of the novel, as it is of Paul's life. Asch depicts the Damascus experience with psychological intensity: Saul is not merely struck down by a vision but confronted by the one he has been persecuting in the persons of his disciples. The Damascus road experience in Acts is characteristically elusive (three accounts in Acts 9, 22, and 26 that differ in detail), and Asch uses this elusiveness to portray a transforming encounter that exceeds easy psychological explanation.
Acts 22:3 (Paul's autobiographical statement: "I am verily a man which am a Jew, born in Tarsus, a city in Cilicia, yet brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel, and taught according to the perfect manner of the law of the fathers, and was zealous toward God") is the foundational text for Asch's portrait of Paul's Jewishness. Asch insists throughout the novel that Paul never ceased to be a Jew -- that his theology of grace, far from being anti-Jewish, represents a creative transformation of Pharisaic Judaism's deepest insights. The Paul of The Apostle reads Torah as a Jewish rabbi reads it, even as he announces its fulfillment in Christ.
Romans 3:28 ("Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law") is the Pauline text that generates the most controversy in the novel, as it did historically. Asch portrays Paul's opponents -- James in Jerusalem, the Judaic faction -- as insisting on circumcision and Torah observance for Gentile converts. Paul's position (that faith in Christ, not Torah observance, is the basis of right standing with God) is presented sympathetically, but Asch does not suppress the genuine conflict it created within early Christianity.
Galatians 2:20 ("I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me") is the text that Asch uses to explore Paul's mystical theology -- the identification with Christ that is not a surrender of personal identity but a transformation of it. This passage, more than any other, captures the psychological intensity of Paul's religious experience as Asch portrays it.
Author and Context
Sholem Asch (1880-1957) was born in Kutno, Congress Poland, and became one of the greatest Yiddish writers of the twentieth century. He immigrated to the United States in 1914 and wrote his major novels in Yiddish, which were then translated into English. The Christ trilogy -- The Nazarene (1939), The Apostle (1943), and Mary (1949) -- generated enormous controversy in the Jewish community. Many Jewish readers and Yiddish literary figures accused Asch of betraying Jewish identity by presenting Jesus and Paul sympathetically, at a time when the Holocaust was destroying the Jewish people.
Asch's defense was that his Christ trilogy was an act of Jewish self-understanding: by showing the Jewish roots of Jesus, Paul, and Mary, he was reclaiming figures that anti-Semitic Christianity had used against Jews. His argument was that Christianity's anti-Semitism was a betrayal of its own founder, whose identity was thoroughly Jewish. This argument anticipated the "Jewish Jesus" scholarship of later decades.
The wartime context of the novel's publication gave it an additional dimension: as Jewish communities in Europe were being systematically murdered, Asch was insisting on the Jewish identity of the founder of the religion professed by the perpetrators -- a deeply ironic and courageous intervention.
Critical Reception
The novel received enthusiastic reviews in the general press and was a bestseller in the United States. Within the Yiddish literary community, the reception was divided and often hostile. The poet Abraham Cahan, editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, refused to publish excerpts from the Christ trilogy. Other Yiddish writers, including I.J. Singer, were more sympathetic.
Legacy
The Apostle is the most comprehensive fictional treatment of the Pauline mission ever written. Its sympathetic portrayal of Paul as a figure who maintained Jewish identity while pioneering a new movement anticipated the "New Perspective on Paul" scholarship of E.P. Sanders, James Dunn, and N.T. Wright by several decades. Its insistence on Paul's Jewishness -- against the tradition of reading Paul as the anti-Jewish founder of gentile Christianity -- has proved prescient.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Acts 7:58-8:3 (Saul's persecution of the early church), Acts 9:1-22 (the Damascus road), Acts 13-14 (the first missionary journey), Romans 3-5 (justification by faith), Galatians 1-2 (Paul's autobiography and the conflict at Antioch), and Philippians 3:4-11 (Paul's Jewish credentials and their surpassing by Christ).
Further Reading
- Sholem Asch, What I Believe (1941) -- Asch's defense of his theological position and his Christ trilogy. - Ben Siegel, The Controversial Sholem Asch (1976) -- the standard critical study in English. - E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977) -- the scholarly work that vindicated many of Asch's instincts about Paul's Jewishness.
Asch's portrayal of Paul also engages the complex relationship between Paul's theology and his Jewish formation. The Apostle argues that Paul's doctrine of justification by faith is not a repudiation of Judaism but a radicalization of prophetic Judaism's critique of mere legal observance - a position that anticipates, in fictional form, the New Perspective on Paul that Sanders and Dunn would develop in scholarly form decades later. Paul in Asch's novel remains recognizably Jewish in his argumentative style, his use of scripture, and his understanding of community, even as he draws consequences from the resurrection of Jesus that put him in fundamental conflict with the synagogue.
The Apostle was part of a trilogy that also included The Nazarene (1939) and Mary (1949), Asch's ambitious attempt to render the entire origin of Christianity through the eyes of a Yiddish-speaking Jewish writer who saw the Jewish Jesus and the Jewish Paul as figures of continuing significance for modern Jewish identity. The trilogy was controversial among both Jewish and Christian readers - too sympathetic to Christianity for some Jews, too Jewish in its framing for some Christians - but its ambition to hold together the Jewish and Christian dimensions of the New Testament story without suppressing either remains a significant achievement in twentieth-century religious fiction.