“*WE* are the circumcision ..” (Phil 3:3)

Many Christian scholars see this text as referring to the church. 

Typical of this view is this statement from a very well known Christian scholar and Professor:

“Since WE means the church, then WE are the true Jews, Jews and circumcision being the same.”

My argument is that WE does NOT mean the church but that it means Israel, as 'circumcision ' is a metonym for being an Israelite or Jewish. 

The whole problem with this faulty understanding both here and throughout all of Paul's epistles stems from a triumphalistic ‘church’ based worldview.

This worldview leads to a great many problems in Christian practice as well as much more significantly, anti-Semitism and all the great evil that has arisen from this baseless hostility.

I have addressed this faulty understanding of the Apostle Paul a little in a number of places and most specifically in my article 'The Apostle Paul: Disciple or Fraud" (at www.circumcisedheart.info )

While I have been aware of these problems with the traditional approaches to Paul's epistles for some years, I have only very recently been introduced to a Jewish theologian, Prof. Mark Nanos, who addresses these problems brilliantly and suggests a much more satisfactory perspective and approach.

He argues that the solution lies in seeing Paul’s work as the writings of a Torah observant Jew from an inter/intra Jewish position.

This is brilliantly summed up in this quote from one of his articles below:

“Scholars should consider approaching the historical and rhetorical situations for interpreting

Paul’s texts on thoroughly inter/intra-Jewish instead of inter/intra-Christian models, and they

should be careful not to mix them, which can undermine the effort. There is good historical

reason to explore these approaches, since Paul and the other early believers in Jesus were Jewish and understood what they were doing to be Jewish.

I think it likely that they thought of themselves in terms of a coalition, a Jewish subgroup or subgroups engaged in a temporary task on behalf of Israel, and not founding a new religion or sect that was in some way less Jewish.

These approaches (and they) have a better chance of yielding the desired ideological benefit, to the degree that they consistently recognize the issues at dispute in Paul’s letters did not revolve around the question of whether or to what extent Jewish norms such as Torah applied, but to how they applied to the new reality he claimed his groups represented; namely, the dawning of the age to come within the present age, so that Israelites and members of the nations worshipped the Creator God of all humankind as one, however, remaining both Israelites and representatives of the nations when doing so.

When the shared term is Jewishness, as it is in intra-Jewish terms, the contrast shifts from discussing whether there is something problematic with Jewishness, to whether or not a person or group believes in Jesus Christ, and the associated claims for what difference that makes. In other words, unlike when the shared term is Christ, the difference between two groups does not fall along a line differentiating levels of respect for Jewish identity and Torah, since Jewishness is likely upheld to be essential by Jewish groups.

Imagining the dispute between and within Jewish group boundaries keeps the focus on the meaning of faith in Jesus for themselves, and others, as Jewish groups.

Another benefit of this conceptualization is that difference is respected. The intra-Jewish

construction allows the historical participants as well as the interpreter to respect that having a different opinion about the meaning of Jesus Christ or of appeals to him to legitimate social change within Jewish groups need not represent value judgments that one decision or the other is better, just different.

As I understand Paul, he upheld the Jewish notion that, although social (and biological) differences remain in the present age, that is, there remains Jews and non-Jews in Christ, the discrimination usually associated with such differences should not prevail, just as is expected to be the case in the age to come, when even the wolf and the lamb will dwell together.

This seems to me to be a sensible and noble ideal for how to approach each other today in Jewish/Christian relations’ terms, whether sharing his belief that this age has dawned in Jesus Christ, or not." - from http://www.marknanos.com/SBL-03-Inter-Christian-Prob.pdf 

see also http://www.marknanos.com/Phil3Dogs-Reverse-6-27-07.pdf

I highly recommend these articles.