from "Cultural and historical background of Jesus" at Wiki

in the section: The Emergence of Christianity (section 4.3)

"According to Daniel Boyarin, in A Radical Jew, Paul of Tarsus combined the life of Jesus with Greek philosophy to reinterpret the Hebrew Bible in terms of the Platonic opposition between the ideal (which is real) and the material (which is false), see also Paul of Tarsus and Judaism. Judaism is a corporeal religion, in which membership is based not on belief but rather descent from Abraham, physically marked by circumcision, and focussing on how to live this life properly. Paul saw in the symbol of a resurrected Jesus the possibility of a spiritual rather than corporeal messiah. He used this notion of messiah to argue for a religion through which all people — not just descendants of Abraham — could worship the God of Abraham. Unlike Judaism, which holds that it is the proper religion only of the Jews (except see Noahide Laws), Pauline Christianity claimed to be the proper religion for all people. In other words, by appealing to the Platonic distinction between the material and the ideal, Paul showed how the spirit of Christ could provide all people a way to worship God — the God who had previsously been worshipped only by Jews, and Jewish Proselytes, although Jews claimed that He was the one and only God of all (see, for example, Romans 8: 1-4; II Corinthians 3:3; Galatians 3: 14; Philippians 3:3). Although Boyarin roots Paul's work in Hellenistic Judaism, he sees this Platonic reworking of both Jesus's teachings and Pharisaic Judaism as essential to the emergence of Christianity as a distinct religion."

This theory makes sense to me. I had been thinking that Paul was, before he found Jesus as the solution, was looking for something to "break out" Judaism and bring it to the world. He might have been struck by the idea of a God who demands so much from one tiny group of people and virtually ignores 99% of humanity. It just doesn't make much sense. A Jew like Paul would have wondered that if it is true that there is only one god and it is yahweh -- and also if it's true that not everyone is to become a Jew -- then how to reconcile that the one god of all humanity has only spoken to the Jews -- and not inclined them to spread their faith to others. How to make yahweh more than a tribal god, competing with others in the roman empire? How to "universalize" Judaism?

His answer was Jesus.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_and_historical_background_of_Jesus