Judaism: How Can I Make God's Revelation in the Old Testament Less Jewish and More Greek?

My hypothesis is this. Christianity, in worldview, not necessarily in theology is inextricably attached as child is to parent to Judaism. This means that if my understanding of Judaism is correct that modern Christianity has to take a harder look at itself and change when necessary. The obvious disagreement is over the identity of the Messiah. And Paul’s understanding of Jesus as set forth in the New Testament doesn’t merely mean that God is giving the Jews time to figure out that Jesus is Messiah but that the Resurrection of Jesus has jump started the Messianic Age, and thus Judaism itself looks different. It is my opinion that an out of balanced and dare I say a medieval anti-Semitic attitude has hindered better interpretation of important Pauline epistles like Galatians and Romans. Today’s evangelical theologians take for granted that Paul’s polemic in Galatians is against a Pelagian works-based legalism. It can be easily detected by skillful and objective exegetes that the brilliant, prolific, and limited, if not overly introverted Martin Luther perhaps saw too much of his 16th century European self in the 1st century Asian Judaizers in Galatians. A polemic on top of a polemic was wrought by such an interpretation, and now while we evangelicals rightly throw out Pelagian Soteriology, we throw Judaism out with it supposing that Augustine’s famous 5th century opponent was simply rehashing the old Pharisaical legalism. And so following this misunderstanding is the misguided dismissal of the whole of Judaism, whether this dismissal shows up in the replacement theology of the Reformers or the awkward historical categorizations of the Dispensationalists.
In my opinion the truth is that Paul’s conversion to Christianity was not a move away from Jewish Pelagianism to Christian Calvinism. But was a move from Pharisaical (semi-pelagian; the Jews were not Platonists. They were not determinists) Judaism to Messianic Judaism. It wasn’t until after the Romans ransacked Jerusalem that the Apostles’ movement (Paul included) was anything more than a Jewish sect, even to the Jews. (Acts 7). There were Jews who believed that Jesus was the Messiah and Jews who believed that He was not. Paul’s task was to explain how Jesus was the Messiah and how the message that would go out to the nations, i.e. the Gentiles, as prophesied in the prophet Isaiah, was commissioned by Messiah’s atoning death and Resurrection. His theology was absolutely dependant on a Judaic worldview. It’s redundant to say that Christianity is different than Judaism. Of course it is. 2012 is not the same year as 2013, although you don’t have 2013 without 2012. Christianity’s theology must be different qualitatively that Judaism’s precisely because Christianity accepts Jesus as the Messiah, but the way that Christianity thinks about God, the way it forms a worldview, the way it tells its story, the way it relates to the world, in its essence, not in its particulars is nothing if not dependant on the way Judaism thinks about God, forms a worldview, tells its story, and relates to the world.
Of course, the truth of my hypothesis depends on whether Paul’s conversion was a conversion within Judaism, or an essential conversion of worldview. Did Paul see Jesus on the road to Damascus and find in that conversion a kind of enlightenment into the deterministic world of Plato? Did he make a clean break with his Pharisaic Judaism? I doubt it. I stand on the shoulders of better exegetes, critical-historical/textual scholars, who differ greatly on Paul, some saying he was thoroughly a Jew, and some saying he was a bitter antagonist to the Jews and invented a palatable anti-Jewish theology for the Gentiles. But as an amateur self-taught Bible College graduate, it seems most likely to me that Paul’s thought was held together by Jewish presuppositions and formed by faith in Jesus as Messiah and occasionally put in Westernish terms for the sake of evangelizing Westerners. I have argued for this in my statements above and I have argued from my understanding of the text that I am reading. In short I find it highly unlikely that God would preserve the canon of Scripture for the Church with Old and New Testaments and give us an Old Testament that has no real continuing narrative theme all the way through Revelation. Here’s a 600 page story about the Jews and how pitiful they are. Now here is the solution… Greek philosophy. Is the story of Israel the story of how totally depraved human beings really are, so that we see our need for the Gospel as revealed in Romans? This seems like a rather tedious way to go about proving the point, especially since the Bible speaks as if God really expects righteousness and rewards actual righteousness and punishes actual wickedness. Or is the story so nuanced and tangled because it takes a story like that to furnish a faith in Creator God? The Bible conceived as an intricate story is the only way to make sense of its own versatility and constant speaking out of three sides of its own mouth due to its relational nature, and it’s blatant disregard for man’s felt need for materialistic rationalism.
Finally if one accepts that there is a distinctly Judaic string from Genesis to Revelation, the following parallels (next post) will be so illuminating so as to make one wonder how he could have even missed the Old Testament. If I can show the parallels, I can show that at the very least that it’s possible that Christianity is very Jewish in worldview by showing the unlikelihood that the parallels are coincidences.