Back in 2021, I announced that a symposium on “Paul within Judaism” that was hosted by Ridley College was posted on youtube. There will be a forthcoming publication based on the conference entitled Paul within Judaism (ed. Michael Bird, Ruben A. Bühner, Jörg Frey, and Brian Rosner; WUNT 507; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2023) that should be released in July and you can find more information about it on the Mohr Siebeck website. I contributed a chapter entitled “The Heresiological Portrayals of the Ebionites and the Nazoraeans and Their Reception of Paul.” I tried to make the following points in the chapter:

• The Patristic writers depict the “Ebionites” (i.e. “poor ones”) and Nazoraeans as distinct sects, but I think that the reality is that these titles were probably used by a diverse variety of Jewish followers. The “poor” could have been a popular self-designation given the important theme of eschatological reversal for the poor and marginalized in the Jesus tradition, while non-Greek and non-Latin speaking followers of Jesus (including Jewish ones) who did not take on the title “Christian” could have been known as Nazoraeans.
• Many of the Patristic reports from the second to the fourth century state that the Ebionites believed that Jesus was a human who had been exalted by God to his messianic status, though there was debate over whether he was the biological son of Joseph or was born of a virgin that I think may have been due to different Jewish Christ followers privileging either the Gospel of Mark or the Gospel of Matthew. The fourth-century bishop Epiphanius had a range of Jewish sources with a range of views about Jesus from presenting him as a prophet like Moses to an angel, but his mistake was assuming that a single group of Ebionites held all of these diverse Christologies.
• Paul was likely widely regarded as an apostate who abandoned the Law, for the Patristic reports on the “Ebionites” are fairly consistent on this point. Epiphanius even found a source that invents a story about how Paul was not Jewish and that his failure to marry the Jerusalem high priest’s daughter lead him to reject the Jewish Law.
• Jerome had contact with Jesus followers known as Nazoraeans in the fourth century, though he was misled by Epiphanius’s depiction of them as a sect that emerged after the Jewish Christ followers escaped to Pella in the aftermath of the Jewish War against Rome. A commentary on Isaiah was written by one of them and the author both polemicized against Rabbinic Judaism and accepted Paul’s mission to the nations.
• To conclude on the reception of Paul among Jesus Christ-followers in the Patristic era, he could be regarded as either an apostate from the Law or a Jewish apostle to the nations.

I have finally decided to create an academia.edu page. Check it out if you are interested in any books, chapters in edited volumes, articles, or book reviews that I have written. I tried to provide links for material that was open-access online.