The Problem of Paul
excerpt from: The
Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity
by 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 '
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-
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
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-
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-
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-
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
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
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
The book of Acts then continues with the
account of Saul's conversion on the road to
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-
Paul then goes on to describe his vision
of Jesus on the road to
It is from this passage that we learn of
Paul's native city,
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-
My life from my youth up, the life I led
from the beginning among my people and in
Again the account continues with the
vision on the road to
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-
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-
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-
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-
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-
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
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
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
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
3 The first followers of Jesus, under
James and Peter, founded the
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
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
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-
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-
SOURCE:
The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, by Hyam Maccoby
ISBN: 0760707871
Publisher:
Barnes & Noble Books
Format: Hardcover, 237pp
Edition Description: Only From
B&N Books
Pub. Date: February 1998 Edition Number: 7
Edition Description: Only From B&N Books
Copyright © 1998, Hyam Maccoby. All
rights reserved.