The
Problem of Paul
Hyam
Maccoby
Excerpts
from The
Mythmaker: Paul and The Invention of Christianity
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 James (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 honor, 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
traveling 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 favorable 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 favorable to the Pharisees is the material
relating to Paul, which is, in all its aspects, unfavorable 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 labored 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
coloring of Judaism to a salvation cult that was really opposed to everything
that Judaism stood for?
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 savior 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' 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 colorful 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.