Theos-Talk Archives (February 2005 Message tt00808)

Excerpt from: The Mythmaker: Paul and the 
Invention of Christianity 
by Hyam Maccoby


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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.
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Quoted from:
http://www.dadsdayoff.net/paul.html