"You don't have to be a genius to understand these things, just use your common sense!!"
Luke 12:57 The Message
The Problem of Paul
excerpt from: The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity Hyam Maccoby
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.
Part I Saul
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?
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.
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