Paul makes the Messiah both hated and beloved, neighbor and enemy
Evidence
What begins to appear here is Paul’s own link between enmity and the messianic-more precisely, we witness a doubling of the messianic as what divides the subject (here, the son) in his subjection (“Therefore one must be subject, not only because of wrath but also because of conscience,” Rom. 13:5), as what divides the enemy as beloved (“love your enemies”). We will have to attend to these divisions and to the history of their elaborations, for in them and through them, the Messiah has become hated and beloved. (And, in the shadows of that link, another thread will have begun to guide our reading of the enemy: absolute subjection.) The Messiah, “who came and, as one says, became the neighbor,” the Messiah, then, has become the enemy. Such would be one of civilization’s great discomforts. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 114
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- XREF: The ‘Messiah has become the enemy’ figure resonates with the reading list’s interest in estrangement and the outsider — The Reluctant Fundamentalist or Home Boy explore similar blurrings of beloved/outsider identity.
- STORYSTEM: The doubling of the messianic — a figure who is simultaneously beloved enemy and hated neighbor — is a rich engine for a story about an ambivalent redeemer figure.
Related
- Pauline messianism divides the enemy into hated and beloved (similarity 0.92)
- Paul makes Israel simultaneously God’s beloved and God’s enemy depending on perspective (similarity 0.79)
- Christianity creates a new enemy by collapsing neighbor into enemy (similarity 0.79)
- Even the love command fails to end enmity, only recasting it. (similarity 0.78)