Two of the themes of Paul’s letters seem to have had a deep resonance for Jacob. The first was the inevitability of sin and need for divine compassion (Erbarmen) and grace (Gnade). The concept of divine compassion is both Jewish and Christian, but the theme of the inevitability of sin is a decidedly Pauline one. For Judaism, sin is due to a misdirection of the  will, and repentance (tshuvah) is the re orientation of the  will in the proper direction—a  process that ultimately affirms man’s w ill. For Paul, the will  is bound to be sinful, while repentance is only possible through surrender or abnegation of the  will. Taubes found this latter view more congenial, since it accorded with his sense that his  will was beyond his control.

The second concerned the Law. For Paul, the Law (halacha) was in itself a source of sin or at least of the consciousness of sin, for the existence of a prohibition evokes the sinful passion to violate it. The very existence of the Law tempts one to break it.99 But, thanks to God’s grace, man is set free of the Law— a message that Taubes found tempting.

In a letter to Margarete Susman written shortly before he left Switzerland, Jacob described his aspiration to do for Paul what Heidegger had done for Kierkegaard. “What Heidegger managed to do for Kierkegaard, namely to anchor Kierkegaard’s categories universally in an ontology, to unchain those concepts from Kierkegaard’s specific context— that is what I have in mind in regard to the apostle: just as the apostle unchained the content of Judaism into Christianity, so I want to unchain this Christian content into something universal, to make Paul’s categories universal by anchoring them in an ontology. Paul himself has shown how to do this, the way of un-chaining.” At this point in his life, Taubes thought that the essential content of Paul was to show that the way to God was through a recognition of the powerlessness of God in this world, his weakness, his seeming withdrawal from the world, his “nothingness” (Nichts). For the next four decades, Taubes would return time and again to this quest to take his interpretation of Paul’s insights and translate them from a Christian context to a more universal theology.

[…] The course started with Paul as articulating a messianic, antinomian view of history, which, Taubes claimed, freed man from the mythical forces ascribed to the cosmos and robbed the earthly powers of divine legitimacy (an interpretation he would repeat three de cades  later in his Political Theology of Paul). 

Jerry Z. Muller, Jacob Taubes: Professor of Apocalypse