http://jdstone.org/cr/files/theproblemofpaul.html
The Problem of Paul
excerpt from: The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity
by Hyam Maccoby
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Preface
As a Talmudic scholar, I have found that knowledge of the Talmud and other
rabbinical works has opened up the meaning of many puzzling passages in the
New Testament. In my earlier book on Jesus, Revolution in Judaea, I showed
how, in the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus speaks and acts as a Pharisee, though
the Gospel editors have attempted to conceal this by representing him as
opposing Pharisaism even when his sayings were most in accordance with
Pharisee teaching. In the present book, I have used the rabbinical evidence
to establish an opposite contention: that Paul, whom the New Testament
wishes to portray as having been a trained Pharisee, never was one. The
consequences of this for the understanding of early Christianity are
immense.
In addition to the rabbinical writings, I have made great use of the ancient
historians, especially Josephus, Epiphanius and Eusebius. Their statements
must be weighed in relation to their particular interests and bias; but when
such bias has been identified and discounted, there remains a residue of
valuable information. Exactly the same applies to the New Testament itself.
Its information is often distorted by the bias of the author or editor, but
a knowledge of the nature of this bias makes possible the emergence of the
true shape of events.
For an explanation of my stance in relation to the various schools of New
Testament interpretation of modern times, the reader is referred to the Note
on Method, p. 206.
In using the Epistles as evidence of Paul's life, views and 'mythology', I
have confined myself to those Epistles which are accepted by the great
majority of New Testament scholars as the genuine work of Paul. Disputed
Epistles, such as Colossians, however pertinent to my argument, have been
ignored.
When quoting from the New Testament, I have usually used the New English
Bible version, but, from time to time, I have used the Authorized Version or
the Revised Version, when I thought them preferable in faithfulness to the
original. While the New English Bible is in general more intelligible to
modern readers than the older versions, its concern for modern English idiom
sometimes obscures important features of the original Greek; and its
readiness to paraphrase sometimes allows the translator's presuppositions to
colour his translation. I have pointed out several examples of this in the
text.
In considering the background of Paul, I have returned to one of the
earliest accounts of Paul in existence, that given by the Ebionites, as
reported by Epiphanius. This account has been neglected by scholars for
quite inadequate and tendentious reasons. Robert Graves and Joshua Podro in
The Nazarene Gospel Restored did take the Ebionite account seriously; but,
though they made some cogent remarks about it, their treatment of the matter
was brief. I hope that the present book will do more to alter the prevailing
dismissive attitude towards the evidence of this fascinating and important
ancient community.
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Part I
Saul
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Chapter 1
The Problem of Paul
At the beginning of Christianity stand two figures: Jesus and Paul. Jesus is
regarded by Christians as the founder of their religion, in that the events
of his life comprise the foundation story of Christianity; but Paul is
regarded as the great interpreter of Jesus' mission, who explained, in a way
that Jesus himself never did, how Jesus' life and death fitted into a cosmic
scheme of salvation, stretching from the creation of Adam to the end of
time.
How should we understand the relationship between Jesus and Paul? We shall
be approaching this question not from the standpoint of faith, but from that
of historians, who regard the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament as
an important source of evidence requiring careful sifting and criticism,
since their authors were propagating religious beliefs rather than conveying
dispassionate historical information. We shall also be taking into account
all relevant evidence from other sources, such as Josephus, the Talmud, the
Church historians and the Gnostic writings.
What would Jesus himself have thought of Paul? We must remember that Jesus
never knew Paul; the two men never once met. The disciples who knew Jesus
best, such as Peter, James and John, have left no writings behind them
explaining how Jesus seemed to them or what they considered his mission to
have been. Did they agree with the interpretations disseminated by Paul in
his fluent, articulate writings? Or did they perhaps think that this
newcomer to the scene, spinning complicated theories about the place of
Jesus in the scheme of things, was getting everything wrong? Paul claimed
that his interpretations were not just his own invention, but had come to
him by personal inspiration; he claimed that he had personal acquaintance
with the resurrected Jesus, even though he had never met him during his
lifetime. Such acquaintance, he claimed, gained through visions and
transports, was actually superior to acquaintance with Jesus during his
lifetime, when Jesus was much more reticent about his purposes.
We know about Paul not only from his own letters but also from the book of
Acts, which gives a full account of his life. Paul, in fact, is the hero of
Acts, which was written by an admirer and follower of his, namely, Luke, who
was also the author of the Gospel of that name. From Acts, it would appear
that there was some friction between Paul and the leaders of the 'Jerusalem
Church', the surviving companions of Jesus; but this friction was resolved,
and they all became the best of friends, with common aims and purposes. From
certain of Paul's letters, particularly Galatians, it seems that the
friction was more serious than in the picture given in Acts, which thus
appears to be partly a propaganda exercise, intended to portray unity in the
early Church. The question recurs: what would Jesus have thought of Paul,
and what did the Apostles think of him?
We should remember that the New Testament, as we have it, is much more
dominated by Paul than appears at first sight. As we read it, we come across
the Four Gospels, of which Jesus is the hero, and do not encounter Paul as a
character until we embark on the post-Jesus narrative of Acts. Then we
finally come into contact with Paul himself, in his letters. But this
impression is misleading, for the earliest writings in the New Testament are
actually Paul's letters, which were written about AD 50-60, while the
Gospels were not written until the period AD 70-110. This means that the
theories of Paul were already before the writers of the Gospels and coloured
their interpretations of Jesus' activities. Paul is, in a sense, present
from the very first word of the New Testament. This is, of course, not the
whole story, for the Gospels are based on traditions and even written
sources which go back to a time before the impact of Paul, and these early
traditions and sources are not entirely obliterated in the final version and
give valuable indications of what the story was like before Paulinist
editors pulled it into final shape. However, the dominant outlook and
shaping perspective of the Gospels is that of Paul, for the simple reason
that it was the Paulinist view of what Jesus' sojourn on Earth had been
about that was triumphant in the Church as it developed in history. Rival
interpretations, which at one time had been orthodox, opposed to Paul's very
individual views, now became heretical and were crowded out of the final
version of the writings adopted by the Pauline Church as the inspired canon
of the New Testament.
This explains the puzzling and ambiguous role given in the Gospels to the
companions of Jesus, the twelve disciples. They are shadowy figures, who are
allowed little personality, except of a schematic kind. They are also
portrayed as stupid; they never quite understand what Jesus is up to. Their
importance in the origins of Christianity is played down in a remarkable
way. For example, we find immediately after Jesus' death that the leader of
the Jerusalem Church is Jesus' brother James. Yet in the Gospels, this James
does not appear at all as having anything to do with Jesus' mission and
story. Instead, he is given a brief mention as one of the brothers of Jesus
who allegedly opposed Jesus during his lifetime and regarded him as mad. How
it came about that a brother who had been hostile to Jesus in his lifetime
suddenly became the revered leader of the Church immediately after Jesus'
death is not explained, though one would have thought that some explanation
was called for. Later Church legends, of course, filled the gap with stories
of the miraculous conversion of James after the death of Jesus and his
development into a saint. But the most likely explanation is, as will be
argued later, that the erasure of Jesus' brother dames (and his other
brothers) from any significant role in the Gospel story is part of the
denigration of the early leaders who had been in close contact with Jesus
and regarded with great suspicion and dismay the Christological theories of
the upstart Paul, flaunting his brand new visions in interpretation of the
Jesus whom he had never met in the flesh.
Who, then, was Paul? Here we would seem to have a good deal of information;
but on closer examination, it will turn out to be full of problems. We have
the information given by Paul about himself in his letters, which are far
from impersonal and often take an autobiographical turn. Also we have the
information given in Acts, in which Paul plays the chief role. But the
information given by any person about himself always has to be treated with
a certain reserve, since everyone has strong motives for putting himself in
the best possible light. And the information given about Paul in Acts also
requires close scrutiny, since this work was written by someone committed to
the Pauline cause. Have we any other sources for Paul's biography? As a
matter of fact, we have, though they are scattered in various unexpected
places, which it will be our task to explore: in a fortuitously preserved
extract from the otherwise lost writings of the Ebionites, a sect of great
importance for our quest; in a disguised attack on Paul included in a text
of orthodox Christian authority; and in an Arabic manuscript, in which a
text of the early Jewish Christians, the opponents of Paul, has been
preserved by an unlikely chain of circumstances.
Let us first survey the evidence found in the more obvious and well-known
sources. It appears from Acts that Paul was at first called 'Saul', and that
his birthplace was Tarsus, a city in Asia Minor (Acts 9:11, and 21:39, and
22:3). Strangely enough, however, Paul himself, in his letters, never
mentions that he came from Tarsus, even when he is at his most
autobiographical. Instead, he gives the following information about his
origins: 'I am an Israelite myself, of the stock of Abraham, of the tribe of
Benjamin' (Romans 11:2); and '... circumcised on my eighth day, Israelite by
race, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born and bred; in my attitude to
the law, a Pharisee....' (Philippians 3:5). It seems that Paul was not
anxious to impart to the recipients of his letters that he came from
somewhere so remote as Tarsus from Jerusalem, the powerhouse of Pharisaism.
The impression he wished to give, of coming from an unimpeachable Pharisaic
background, would have been much impaired by the admission that he in fact
came from Tarsus, where there were few, if any, Pharisee teachers and a
Pharisee training would have been hard to come by.
We encounter, then, right at the start of our enquiry into Paul's
background, the question: was Paul really from a genuine Pharisaic family,
as he says to his correspondents, or was this just something that he said to
increase his status in their eyes? The fact that this question is hardly
ever asked shows how strong the influence of traditional religious attitudes
still is in Pauline studies. Scholars feel that, however objective their
enquiry is supposed to be, they must always preserve an attitude of deep
reverence towards Paul, and never say anything to suggest that he may have
bent the truth at times, though the evidence is strong enough in various
parts of his life-story that he was not above deception when he felt it
warranted by circumstances.
It should be noted (in advance of a full discussion of the subject) that
modern scholarship has shown that, at this time, the Pharisees were held in
high repute throughout the Roman and Parthian empires as a dedicated group
who upheld religious ideals in the face of tyranny, supported leniency and
mercy in the application of laws, and championed the rights of the poor
against the oppression of the rich. The undeserved reputation for hypocrisy
which is attached to the name 'Pharisee' in medieval and modern times is due
to the campaign against the Pharisees in the Gospels -- a campaign dictated
by politico-religious considerations at the time when the Gospels were given
their final editing, about forty to eighty years after the death of Jesus.
Paul's desire to be thought of as a person of Pharisee upbringing should
thus be understood in the light of the actual reputation of the Pharisees in
Paul's lifetime; Paul was claiming a high honour, which would much enhance
his status in the eyes of his correspondents.
Before looking further into Paul's claim to have come from a Pharisee
background, let us continue our survey of what we are told about Paul's
career in the more accessible sources. The young Saul, we are told, left
Tarsus and came to the Land of Israel, where he studied in the Pharisee
academy of Gamaliel (Acts 22:3). We know from other sources about Gamaliel,
who is a highly respected figure in the rabbinical writings such as the
Mishnah, and was given the title 'Rabban', as the leading sage of his day.
That he was the leader of the whole Pharisee party is attested also by the
New Testament itself, for he plays a prominent role in one scene in the book
of Acts (chapter 5) -- a role that, as we shall see later, is hard to
reconcile with the general picture of the Pharisees given in the Gospels.
Yet Paul himself, in his letters, never mentions that he was a pupil of
Gamaliel, even when he is most concerned to stress his qualifications as a
Pharisee. Here again, then, the question has to be put: was Paul ever really
a pupil of Gamaliel or was this claim made by Luke as an embellishment to
his narrative? As we shall see later, there are certain considerations which
make it most unlikely, quite apart from Paul's significant omission to say
anything about the matter, that Paul was ever a pupil of Gamaliel's.
We are also told of the young Saul that he was implicated, to some extent,
in the death of the martyr Stephen. The people who gave false evidence
against Stephen, we are told, and who also took the leading part in the
stoning of their innocent victim, 'laid their coats at the feet of a young
man named Saul'. The death of Stephen is described, and it is added, 'And
Saul was among those who approved of his murder' (Acts 8:1). How much truth
is there in this detail? Is it to be regarded as historical fact or as
dramatic embellishment, emphasizing the contrast between Paul before and
after conversion? The death of Stephen is itself an episode that requires
searching analysis, since it is full of problems and contradictions. Until
we have a better idea of why and by whom Stephen was killed and what were
the views for which he died, we can only note the alleged implication of
Saul in the matter as a subject for further investigation. For the moment,
we also note that the alleged implication of Saul heightens the impression
that adherence to Pharisaism would mean violent hostility to the followers
of Jesus.
The next thing we are told about Saul in Acts is that he was 'harrying the
Church; he entered house after house, seizing men and women, and sending
them to prison' (Acts 8:3). We are not told at this point by what authority
or on whose orders he was carrying out this persecution. It was clearly not
a matter of merely individual action on his part, for sending people to
prison can only be done by some kind of official. Saul must have been acting
on behalf of some authority, and who this authority was can be gleaned from
later incidents in which Saul was acting on behalf of the High Priest.
Anyone with knowledge of the religious and political scene at this time in
Judaea feels the presence of an important problem here: the High Priest was
not a Pharisee, but a Sadducee, and the Sadducees were bitterly opposed to
the Pharisees. How is it that Saul, allegedly an enthusiastic Pharisee ('a
Pharisee of the Pharisees'), is acting hand in glove with the High Priest?
The picture we are given in our New Testament sources of Saul, in the days
before his conversion to Jesus, is contradictory and suspect.
The next we hear of Saul (Acts, chapter 9) is that he 'was still breathing
murderous threats against the disciples of the Lord. He went to the High
Priest and applied for letters to the synagogues at Damascus authorizing him
to arrest anyone he found, men or women, who followed the new way, and bring
them to Jerusalem.' This incident is full of mystery. If Saul had his hands
so full in 'harrying the church' in Judaea, why did he suddenly have the
idea of going off to Damascus to harry the Church there? What was the
special urgency of a visit to Damascus? Further, what kind of jurisdiction
did the Jewish High Priest have over the non-Jewish city of Damascus that
would enable him to authorize arrests and extraditions in that city? There
is, moreover, something very puzzling about the way in which Saul's relation
to the High Priest is described: as if he is a private citizen who wishes to
make citizen's arrests according to some plan of his own, and approaches the
High Priest for the requisite authority. Surely there must have been some
much more definite official connection between the High Priest and Saul, not
merely that the High Priest was called upon to underwrite Saul's project. It
seems more likely that the plan was the High Priest's and not Saul's, and
that Saul was acting as agent or emissary of the High Priest. The whole
incident needs to be considered in the light of probabilities and current
conditions.
The book of Acts then continues with the account of Saul's conversion on the
road to Damascus through a vision of Jesus and the succeeding events of his
life as a follower of Jesus. The pre-Christian period of Saul's life,
however, does receive further mention later in the book of Acts, both in
chapter 22 and chapter 26, where some interesting details are added, and
also some further puzzles.
In chapter 22, Saul (now called Paul), is shown giving his own account of
his early life in a speech to the people after the Roman commandant had
questioned him. Paul speaks as follows:
I am a true-born Jew, a native of Tarsus in Cilicia. I was brought up in
this city, and as a pupil of Gamaliel I was thoroughly trained in every
point of our ancestral law. I have always been ardent in God's service, as
you all are today. And so I began to persecute this movement to the death,
arresting its followers, men and women alike, and putting them in chains.
For this I have as witnesses the High Priest and the whole Council of
Elders. I was given letters from them to our fellow-Jews at Damascus, and
had started out to bring the Christians there to Jerusalem as prisoners for
punishment; and this is what happened....
Paul then goes on to describe his vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus.
Previously he had described himself to the commandant as 'a Jew, a Tarsian
from Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city'.
It is from this passage that we learn of Paul's native city, Tarsus, and of
his alleged studies under Gamaliel. Note that he says that, though born in
Tarsus, he was 'brought up in this city' (i.e. Jerusalem) which suggests
that he spent his childhood in Jerusalem. Does this mean that his parents
moved from Tarsus to Jerusalem? Or that the child was sent to Jerusalem on
his own, which seems unlikely? If Paul spent only a few childhood years in
Tarsus, he would hardly describe himself proudly as 'a citizen of no mean
city' (Tarsus). Jews who had spent most of their lives in Jerusalem would be
much more prone to describe themselves as citizens of Jerusalem. The
likelihood is that Paul moved to Jerusalem when he was already a grown man,
and he left his parents behind in Tarsus, which seems all the more probable
in that they receive no mention in any account of Paul's experiences in
Jerusalem. As for Paul's alleged period of studies under Gamaliel, this
would have had to be in adulthood, for Gamaliel was a teacher of advanced
studies, not a teacher of children. He would accept as a pupil only someone
well grounded and regarded as suitable for the rabbinate. The question,
then, is where and how Paul received this thorough grounding, if at all. As
pointed out above and argued fully below, there are strong reasons to think
that Paul never was a pupil of Gamaliel.
An important question that also arises in this chapter of Acts is that of
Paul's Roman citizenship. This is mentioned first in chapter 16. Paul claims
to have been born a Roman citizen, which would mean that his father was a
Roman citizen. There are many problems to be discussed in this connection,
and some of these questions impinge on Paul's claim to have had a Pharisaic
background.
A further account of Paul's pre-Christian life is found in chapter 26 of
Acts, in a speech addressed by Paul to King Agrippa. Paul says:
My life from my youth up, the life I led from the beginning among my people
and in Jerusalem, is familiar to all Jews. Indeed they have known me long
enough and could testify, if they only would, that I belonged to the
strictest group in our religion: I lived as a Pharisee. And it is for a hope
kindled by God's promise to our forefathers that I stand in the dock today.
Our twelve tribes hope to see the fulfilment of that promise.... I myself
once thought it my duty to work actively against the name of Jesus of
Nazareth; and I did so in Jerusalem. It was I who imprisoned many of God's
people by authority obtained from the chief priests; and when they were
condemned to death, my vote was cast against them. In all the synagogues I
tried by repeated punishment to make them renounce their faith; indeed my
fury rose to such a pitch that I extended my persecution to foreign cities.
On one such occasion I was travelling to Damascus with authority and
commission from the chief priests....
Again the account continues with the vision on the road to Damascus.
This speech, of course, cannot be regarded as the authentic words addressed
by Paul to King Agrippa, but rather as a rhetorical speech composed by Luke,
the author of Acts, in the style of ancient historians. Thus the claim made
in the speech that Paul's career as a Pharisee of high standing was known to
'all Jews' cannot be taken at face value. It is interesting that Paul is
represented as saying that he 'cast his vote' against the followers of
Jesus, thus helping to condemn them to death. This can only refer to the
voting of the Sanhedrin or Council of Elders, which was convened to try
capital cases; so what Luke is claiming here for his hero Paul is that he
was at one time a member of the Sanhedrin. This is highly unlikely, for Paul
would surely have made this claim in his letters, when writing about his
credentials as a Pharisee, if it had been true. There is, however, some
confusion both in this account and in the accounts quoted above about
whether the Sanhedrin, as well as the High Priest or 'chief priests', was
involved in the persecution of the followers of Jesus. Sometimes the High
Priest alone is mentioned, sometimes the Sanhedrin is coupled with him, as
if the two are inseparable. But we see on two occasions cited in Acts that
the High Priest was outvoted by the Pharisees in the Sanhedrin; on both
occasions, the Pharisees were opposing an attempt to persecute the followers
of Jesus; so the representation of High Priest and Sanhedrin as having
identical aims is one of the suspect features of these accounts.
It will be seen from the above collation of passages in the book of Acts
concerning Paul's background and early life, together with Paul's own
references to his background in his letters, that the same strong picture
emerges: that Paul was at first a highly trained Pharisee rabbi, learned in
all the intricacies of the rabbinical commentaries on scripture and legal
traditions (afterwards collected in the rabbinical compilations, the Talmud
and Midrash). As a Pharisee, Paul was strongly opposed to the new sect which
followed Jesus and which believed that he had been resurrected after his
crucifixion. So opposed was Paul to this sect that he took violent action
against it, dragging its adherents to prison. Though this strong picture has
emerged, some doubts have also arisen, which, so far, have only been lightly
sketched in: how is it, for example, that Paul claims to have voted against
Christians on trial for their lives before the Sanhedrin, when in fact, in
the graphically described trial of Peter before the Sanhedrin (Acts 5), the
Pharisees, led by Gamaliel, voted for the release of Peter? What kind of
Pharisee was Paul, if he took an attitude towards the early Christians
which, on the evidence of the same book of Acts, was untypical of the
Pharisees? And how is it that this book of Acts is so inconsistent within
itself that it describes Paul as violently opposed to Christianity because
of his deep attachment to Pharisaism, and yet also describes the Pharisees
as being friendly towards the early Christians, standing up for them and
saving their lives?
It has been pointed out by many scholars that the book of Acts, on the
whole, contains a surprising amount of evidence favourable to the Pharisees,
showing them to have been tolerant and merciful. Some scholars have even
argued that the book of Acts is a pro-Pharisee work; but this can hardly be
maintained. For, outweighing all the evidence favourable to the Pharisees is
the material relating to Paul, which is, in all its aspects, unfavourable to
the Pharisees; not only is Paul himself portrayed as being a virulent
persecutor when he was a Pharisee, but Paul declares that he himself was
punished by flogging five times (II Corinthians 11:24) by the 'Jews'
(usually taken to mean the Pharisees). So no one really comes away from
reading Acts with any good impression of the Pharisees, but rather with the
negative impressions derived from the Gospels reinforced.
Why, therefore, is Paul always so concerned to stress that he came from a
Pharisee background? A great many motives can be discerned, but there is one
that needs to be singled out here: the desire to stress the alleged
continuity between Judaism and Pauline Christianity. Paul wishes to say that
whereas, when he was a Pharisee, he mistakenly regarded the early Christians
as heretics who had departed from true Judaism, after his conversion he took
the opposite view, that Christianity was the true Judaism. All his training
as a Pharisee, he wishes to say -- all his study of scripture and
tradition -- really leads to the acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah
prophesied in the Old Testament. So when Paul declares his Pharisee past, he
is not merely proclaiming his own sins -- 'See how I have changed, from
being a Pharisee persecutor to being a devoted follower of Jesus!' -- he is
also proclaiming his credentials -- 'If someone as learned as I can believe
that Jesus was the fulfilment of the Torah, who is there fearless enough to
disagree?'
On the face of it, Paul's doctrine of Jesus is a daring departure from
Judaism. Paul was advocating a doctrine that seemed to have far more in
common with pagan myths than with Judaism: that Jesus was a divine-human
person who had descended to Earth from the heavens and experienced death for
the express purpose of saving mankind. The very fact that the Jews found
this doctrine new and shocking shows that it plays no role in the Jewish
scripture, at least not in any way easily discernible. Yet Paul was not
content to say that his doctrine was new; on the contrary, he wished to say
that every line of the Jewish scripture was a foreshadowing of the
Jesus-event as he understood it, and that those who understood the scripture
in any other way were failing in comprehension of what Judaism had always
been about. So his insistence on his Pharisaic upbringing was part of his
insistence on continuity.
There were those who accepted Paul's doctrine, but did regard it as a
radical new departure, with nothing in the Jewish scriptures foreshadowing
it. The best known figure of this kind was Marcion, who lived about a
hundred years after Paul, and regarded Paul as his chief inspiration. Yet
Marcion refused to see anything Jewish in Paul's doctrine, but regarded it
as a new revelation. He regarded the Jewish scriptures as the work of the
Devil and he excluded the Old Testament from his version of the Bible.
Paul himself rejected this view. Though he regarded much of the Old
Testament as obsolete, superseded by the advent of Jesus, he still regarded
it as the Word of God, prophesying the new Christian Church and giving it
authority. So his picture of himself as a Pharisee symbolizes the continuity
between the old dispensation and the new: a figure who comprised in his own
person the turning-point at which Judaism was transformed into Christianity.
Throughout the Christian centuries, there have been Christian scholars who
have seen Paul's claim to a Pharisee background in this light. In the
medieval Disputations convened by Christians to convert Jews, arguments were
put forward purporting to show that not only the Jewish scriptures but even
the rabbinical writings, the Talmud and the Midrash, supported the claims of
Christianity that Jesus was the Messiah, that he was divine and that he had
to suffer death for mankind. Though Paul was not often mentioned in these
Disputations, the project was one of which he would have approved. In modern
times, scholars have laboured to argue that Paul's doctrines about the
Messiah and divine suffering are continuous with Judaism as it appears in
the Bible, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, and in the rabbinical writings
(the best-known effort of this nature is Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, by W.D.
Davies).
So Paul's claim to expert Pharisee learning is relevant to a very important
and central issue -- whether Christianity, in the form given to it by Paul,
is really continuous with Judaism or whether it is a new doctrine, having no
roots in Judaism, but deriving, in so far as it has an historical
background, from pagan myths of dying and resurrected gods and Gnostic myths
of heaven-descended redeemers. Did Paul truly stand in the Jewish tradition,
or was he a person of basically Hellenistic religious type, but seeking to
give a colouring of Judaism to a salvation cult that was really opposed to
everything that Judaism stood for?
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Chapter 2
The Standpoint of this Book
As against the conventional picture of Paul, outlined in the last chapter,
the present book has an entirely different and unfamiliar view to put
forward. This view of Paul is not only unfamiliar in itself, but it also
involves many unfamiliar standpoints about other issues which are relevant
and indeed essential to a correct assessment of Paul; for example:
Who and what were the Pharisees? What were their religious and political
views as opposed to those of the Sadducees and other religious and political
groups of the time? What was their attitude to Jesus? What was their
attitude towards the early Jerusalem Church?
Who and what was Jesus? Did he really see himself as a saviour who had
descended from heaven in order to suffer crucifixion? Or did he have
entirely different aims, more in accordance with the Jewish thoughts and
hopes of his time? Was the historical Jesus quite a different person from
the Jesus of Paul's ideology, based on Paul's visions and trances?
Who and what were the early Church of Jerusalem, the first followers of
Jesus? Have their views been correctly represented by the later Church? Did
James and Peter, the leaders of the Jerusalem Church, agree with Paul's
views (as orthodox Christianity claims) or did they oppose him bitterly,
regarding him as a heretic and a betrayer of the aims of Jesus?
Who and what were the Ebionites, whose opinions and writings were suppressed
by the orthodox Church? Why did they denounce Paul? Why did they combine
belief in Jesus with the practice of Judaism?
Why did they believe in Jesus as Messiah, but not as God? Were they a later
'Judaizing' group, or were they, as they claimed to be, the remnants of the
authentic followers of Jesus, the church of James and Peter?
The arguments in this book will inevitably become complicated, since every
issue is bound up with every other. It is impossible to answer any of the
above questions without bringing all the other questions into consideration.
It is, therefore, convenient at this point to give an outline of the
standpoint to which all the arguments of this book converge. This is not an
attempt to prejudge the issue. The following summary of the findings of this
book may seem dogmatic at this stage, but it is intended merely as a guide
to the ramifications of the ensuing arguments and a bird's eye view of the
book, and as such will stand or fall with the cogency of the arguments
themselves. The following, then, are the propositions argued in the present
book:
1 Paul was never a Pharisee rabbi, but was an adventurer of undistinguished
background. He was attached to the Sadducees, as a police officer under the
authority of the High Priest, before his conversion to belief in Jesus. His
mastery of the kind of learning associated with the Pharisees was not great.
He deliberately misrepresented his own biography in order to increase the
effectiveness of missionary activities.
2 Jesus and his immediate followers were Pharisees. Jesus had no intention
of founding a new religion. He regarded himself as the Messiah in the normal
Jewish sense of the term, i.e. a human leader who would restore the Jewish
monarchy, drive out the Roman invaders, set up an independent Jewish state,
and inaugurate an era of peace, justice and prosperity (known as 'the
kingdom of God,) for the whole world. Jesus believed himself to be the
figure prophesied in the Hebrew Bible who would do all these things. He was
not a militarist and did not build up an army to fight the Romans, since he
believed that God would perform a great miracle to break the power of Rome.
This miracle would take place on the Mount of Olives, as prophesied in the
book of Zechariah. When this miracle did not occur, his mission had failed.
He had no intention of being crucified in order to save mankind from eternal
damnation by his sacrifice. He never regarded himself as a divine being, and
would have regarded such an idea as pagan and idolatrous, an infringement of
the first of the Ten Commandments.
3 The first followers of Jesus, under James and Peter, founded the Jerusalem
Church after Jesus's death. They were called the Nazarenes, and in all their
beliefs they were indistinguishable from the Pharisees, except that they
believed in the resurrection of Jesus, and that Jesus was still the promised
Messiah. They did not believe that Jesus was a divine person, but that, by a
miracle from God, he had been brought back to life after his death on the
cross, and would soon come back to complete his mission of overthrowing the
Romans and setting up the Messianic kingdom. The Nazarenes did not believe
that Jesus had abrogated the Jewish religion, or Torah. Having known Jesus
personally, they were aware that he had observed the Jewish religious law
all his life and had never rebelled against it. His sabbath cures were not
against Pharisee law. The Nazarenes were themselves very observant of Jewish
religious law. They practiced circumcision, did not eat the forbidden foods
and showed great respect to the Temple. The Nazarenes did not regard
themselves as belonging to a new religion; their religion was Judaism. They
set up synagogues of their own, but they also attended non-Nazarene
synagogues on occasion, and performed the same kind of worship in their own
synagogues as was practiced by all observant Jews. The Nazarenes became
suspicious of Paul when they heard that he was preaching that Jesus was the
founder of a new religion and that he had abrogated the Torah. After an
attempt to reach an understanding with Paul, the Nazarenes (i.e. the
Jerusalem Church under James and Peter) broke irrevocably with Paul and
disowned him.
4 Paul, not Jesus, was the founder of Christianity as a new religion which
developed away from both normal Judaism and the Nazarene variety of Judaism.
In this new religion, the Torah was abrogated as having had only temporary
validity. The central myth of the new religion was that of an atoning death
of a divine being. Belief in this sacrifice, and a mystical sharing of the
death of the deity, formed the only path to salvation. Paul derived this
religion from Hellenistic sources, chiefly by a fusion of concepts taken
from Gnosticism and concepts taken from the mystery religions, particularly
from that of Attis. The combination of these elements with features derived
from Judaism, particularly the incorporation of the Jewish scriptures,
reinterpreted to provide a background of sacred history for the new myth,
was unique; and Paul alone was the creator of this amalgam. Jesus himself
had no idea of it, and would have been amazed and shocked at the role
assigned to him by Paul as a suffering deity. Nor did Paul have any
predecessors among the Nazarenes though later mythography tried to assign
this role to Stephen, and modern scholars have discovered equally mythical
predecessors for Paul in a group called the 'Hellenists'. Paul, as the
personal begetter of the Christian myth, has never been given sufficient
credit for his originality. The reverence paid through the centuries to the
great Saint Paul has quite obscured the more colourful features of his
personality. Like many evangelical leaders, he was a compound of sincerity
and charlatanry. Evangelical leaders of his kind were common at this time in
the Greco-Roman world (e.g. Simon Magus, Apollonius of Tyana).
5 A source of information about Paul that has never been taken seriously
enough is a group called the Ebionites. Their writings were suppressed by
the Church, but some of their views and traditions were preserved in the
writings of their opponents, particularly in the huge treatise on Heresies
by Epiphanius. >From this it appears that the Ebionites had a very different
account to give of Paul's background and early life from that found in the
New Testament and fostered by Paul himself. The Ebionites testified that
Paul had no Pharisaic background or training; he was the son of Gentiles,
converted to Judaism in Tarsus, came to Jerusalem when an adult, and
attached himself to the High Priest as a henchman. Disappointed in his hopes
of advancement, he broke with the High Priest and sought fame by founding a
new religion. This account, while not reliable in all its details, is
substantially correct. It makes far more sense of all the puzzling and
contradictory features of the story of Paul than the account of the official
documents of the Church.
6 The Ebionites were stigmatized by the Church as heretics who failed to
understand that Jesus was a divine person and asserted instead that he was a
human being who came to inaugurate a new earthly age, as prophesied by the
Jewish prophets of the Bible. Moreover, the Ebionites refused to accept the
Church doctrine, derived from Paul, that Jesus abolished or abrogated the
Torah, the Jewish law. Instead, the Ebionites observed the Jewish law and
regarded themselves as Jews. The Ebionites were not heretics, as the Church
asserted, nor 're-Judaizers', as modern scholars call them, but the
authentic successors of the immediate disciples and followers of Jesus,
whose views and doctrines they faithfully transmitted, believing correctly
that they were derived from Jesus himself. They were the same group that had
earlier been called the Nazarenes, who were led by James and Peter, who had
known Jesus during his lifetime, and were in a far better position to know
his aims than Paul, who met Jesus only in dreams and visions. Thus the
opinion held by the Ebionites about Paul is of extraordinary interest and
deserves respectful consideration, instead of dismissal as 'scurrilous'
propaganda -- the reaction of Christian scholars from ancient to modern
times.
The above conspectus brings into sharper relief our question, was Paul a
Pharisee? It will be seen that this is not merely a matter of biography or
idle curiosity. It is bound up with the whole question of the origins of
Christianity. A tremendous amount depends on this question, for, if Paul was
not a Pharisee rooted in Jewish learning and tradition, but instead a
Hellenistic adventurer whose acquaintance with Judaism was recent and
shallow, the construction of myth and theology which he elaborated in his
letters becomes a very different thing. Instead of searching through his
system for signs of continuity with Judaism, we shall be able to recognize
it for what it is -- a brilliant concoction of Hellenism, superficially
connecting itself with the Jewish scriptures and tradition, by which it
seeks to give itself a history and an air of authority.
Christian attitudes towards the Pharisees and thus towards the picture of
Paul as a Pharisee have always been strikingly ambivalent. In the Gospels,
the Pharisees are attacked as hypocrites and would-be murderers: yet the
Gospels also convey an impression of the Pharisees as figures of immense
authority and dignity. This ambivalence reflects the attitude of
Christianity to Judaism itself; on the one hand, an allegedly outdated
ritualism, but on the other, a panorama of awesome history, a source of
authority and blessing, so that at all costs the Church must display itself
as the new Israel, the true Judaism. Thus Paul, as Pharisee, is the subject
of alternating attitudes. In the nineteenth century, when Jesus was regarded
(by Renan, for example) as a Romantic liberal, rebelling against the
authoritarianism of Pharisaic Judaism, Paul was deprecated as a typical
Pharisee, enveloping the sweet simplicity of Jesus in clouds of theology and
difficult formulations. In the twentieth century, when the concern is more
to discover the essential Jewishness of Christianity, the Pharisee aspect of
Paul is used to connect Pauline doctrines with the rabbinical writings --
again Paul is regarded as never losing his essential Pharisaism, but this is
now viewed as good, and as a means of rescuing Christianity from isolation
from Judaism. To be Jewish and yet not to be Jewish, this is the essential
dilemma of Christianity, and the figure of Paul, abjuring his alleged
Pharisaism as a hindrance to salvation and yet somehow clinging to it as a
guarantee of authority, is symbolic
SOURCE:
The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, by Hyam Maccoby
ISBN: 0760707871 Publisher: Barnes & Noble Books
Format: Hardcover, 237pp Edition Description: Only From B&N Books
Pub. Date: February 1998 Edition Number: 7
Edition Description: Only From B&N Books
<***@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:***@posting.google.com...
| "Be it known unto you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by
| the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God
| raised from the dead, even by him doth this man stand here before you
| whole. This is the stone which was set at nought of you builders,
| which is become the head of the corner. Neither is there salvation in
| any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men,
| whereby we must be saved."
|
| -- Acts 4:10-12