Paul as Predecessor to Psychoanalysis

Jacob Taubes is a Jewish rabbi who proclaims to have discerned the fundamentally Jewish aspects of Paul’s thought. In that way Taubes reads against the whole tradition that sees Paul as the first Christian who definitely broke with Judaism. Nonetheless, Taubes deconstructs this Christian image of Paul partly through a comparison of Paul and Sigmund Freud that also relies significantly on earlier Christian layers of this reception of Paul. Moreover, Taubes claims that Paul is a predecessor of Freud, leading Taubes to read Paul as an introspective Jewish apostle, primarily based on Romans. This unique interpretative strategy with regard to Paul is made by the Jewish rabbi within a post-Holocaust world where biblical scholars have attempted to liberate Paul from Protestant readings of him as the introspective figure par excellance. Taubes, however, establishes Paul’s Jewishness by other means and comes close to considering Freudian psychoanalysis as a Pauline science. These idiosyncratic readings of Paul results in an intriguing deconstruction of what is “Jewish” and what is “Christian,” categories that are destabilized by Taubes’s provoking interpretations of Paul.