A common move in Hebrew Roots Movement teaching is to describe the apostle Paul's interpretive method as "Jewish midrash" - by which is meant a culturally conditioned, non-binding form of creative exegesis that draws connections between texts without claiming strict logical or historical validity. The implication is significant: if Paul's arguments about the Torah are midrashic moves rather than authoritative doctrine, then they carry the weight of one rabbi's clever reading rather than the weight of divinely inspired scripture. You can appreciate them as culturally interesting while not being bound by their conclusions.

This argument has the surface appearance of scholarly sophistication. It sounds like it is taking the Jewish background of the New Testament seriously. In fact, it misunderstands what midrash is, misidentifies Paul's method, and - most importantly - evacuates the New Testament of its authority by treating the apostolic interpretation of scripture as a culturally relative exercise rather than the inspired Word of God.

What Midrash Actually Is

Midrash is a Hebrew term from the root darash - to seek, to inquire, to interpret. In its broadest sense, it refers to any interpretive engagement with the biblical text. In its more technical sense, it refers to a body of Jewish literature - the midrashim - produced from roughly the third century AD onward, consisting of homiletical and exegetical commentary on scripture.

Second Temple period midrash (the period contemporary with Paul) is distinct from later rabbinic midrash. It includes pesher (the Qumran community's reading of prophecy as addressed to their own situation), rewritten Bible (paraphrastic expansions of biblical narratives), and various forms of intertextual reading that connect passages from different parts of scripture. Some of this literature is highly creative. Some of it reads scripture through highly particular community lenses that are not easily generalised.

The defining feature of midrash as a category is that it is human interpretation - the work of a rabbi or community reading the text with their own questions and concerns. Even the most respected rabbinic midrash is authoritative only to those who accept the authority of the rabbi in question. It is not the same category as scripture.

Paul's Method Is Not Midrash

Paul's interpretive practice shares some formal features with Second Temple Jewish exegesis - he uses intertextual connections, he reads earlier texts in the light of later events, he sometimes applies passages to situations beyond their immediate context. These formal similarities are genuine and worth studying. But identifying his method as midrash in the full sense misses several crucial differences.

First, Paul claims apostolic authority for his interpretation - authority directly derived from the risen Christ (Galatians 1:11–12). He is not offering a rabbi's reading to be weighed and potentially rejected. He is delivering what he received by revelation. This claim may be evaluated but it cannot be collapsed into ordinary midrashic authority.

Second, Paul's interpretive moves are not arbitrary or merely homiletical. They are grounded in the actual historical correspondence between the Old Testament text and the events of the gospel. When Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10:4 that the rock in the wilderness "was Christ," he is not producing a clever verbal connection. He is identifying a real typological relationship grounded in the nature of the events themselves - the provision of water in the wilderness was genuinely an act of the pre-incarnate Christ, the agent of creation and sustainer of Israel's life.

Third, the christological reading of the Old Testament is not Paul's invention. It is Jesus's own claim. In Luke 24:27, the risen Christ interprets "in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself." In John 5:39, he says the scriptures "bear witness about me." Paul's christological interpretation of the Torah is not a creative midrashic application - it is the transmission of what Jesus himself taught his disciples the scriptures meant.

Why the Argument Is Used

The HRM deploys the "midrash" label for specific strategic reasons. Paul's letters are the most comprehensive and theologically explicit New Testament treatment of the Torah, the law, and Gentile obligation. If Paul can be relativised - his arguments treated as culturally conditioned exegetical moves rather than apostolic doctrine - then his conclusions about the Torah become optional. Galatians is no longer a doctrinal argument but a midrashic performance. Romans 7 is no longer normative but contextual.

This move has a name in theology: it is a form of the "New Perspective on Paul," developed in academic scholarship by E.P. Sanders, James Dunn, and N.T. Wright, and often appropriated in popularised and distorted form by the HRM. Even within that scholarly conversation - which contains genuine insights about the Jewish context of Paul's letters - the conclusions the HRM draws are not supported. Sanders, Dunn, and Wright do not argue that Paul's authority is midrashic and therefore non-binding. They argue about the precise social and theological content of Paul's argument.

The Practical Consequence

If Paul's interpretive method is just midrash, then the entire New Testament's reading of the Old Testament can be relativised by the same move. Matthew's fulfilment quotations are midrash. John's identification of Jesus as the Word become flesh is a midrashic development. Hebrews' argument about the supersession of the Levitical priesthood is a midrashic exercise. The result is a Bible in which the New Testament has no authority to interpret the Old - which means the Torah stands alone as the governing document, exactly where the HRM wants to end up.

The New Testament writers were not producing midrash. They were delivering the authoritative interpretation of Israel's scriptures that Jesus himself had opened to them. Calling their work midrash is not a scholarly observation. It is a strategy to escape the authority of what they wrote.

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness. - 2 Timothy 3:16