The Mythmaker

Most Christians think of the "early Christians" as one group, the followers of Jesus who stayed together after the crucifixion. Believing Jesus had risen from the dead, then ascended to heaven, they awaited his return and spread his message. These followers included the original apostles, minus Judas who had hanged himself, and they were led by Jesus' brother, James. And then there was Paul, a man who had never met Jesus but had experienced a vision that brought him into the fold. Whatever happened to him as he traveled the road to Damascus convinced him that Jesus really had conquered death. Paul joined the group at Jeruselem and declared himself "apostle to the gentiles."

Who was this Paul? Was he a Jew, a Pharisee who has persecuted the followers of Jesus, then later became the greatest advocate of Christian ideas? That is the conventional view of him, largely supported by the Bible, but it is not the view presented in The Mythmaker. Hyam Maccoby lives up to his name (the Maccabees of the Bible were hereditary High Priests who rebelled against Roman rule) and refuses to accept the status quo. He says the poor Pharisees have been given a bum rap, that far from being the hypocrites Christians believe them to be, they were actually very flexible and tolerant in their beliefs, and maintained dialogs on every subject, always examining new points of view. In fact, Maccoby tells us that most likely Jesus was himself a Pharisee. He says Jesus' teachings were identical to the Pharisee teachings, while Paul falls far short of the elegant logic and extensive knowledge required of a Pharisee.

We learn in this book that it was the Saducees who were stooges of the Romans. They were connected to the High Priest who was selected by the Romans. Maccoby's theory is that Paul, before his so-called conversion, was working for the High Priest who would have been trying to stamp out the Jesus movement because it was a threat to Rome. In Maccoby's view, Jesus was a political agitator who adhered to the Jewish idea of the messiah as one who would deliver the Jews from political (not spiritual) bondage. Maccoby says Jesus was just one more failed messiah. His death on the cross basically ended his movement. Except for one thing. His followers believed they had seen him alive after he'd been placed in a tomb. Because of this, they continued to believe he was the messiah. Maccoby does not offer an explanation of how Jesus could have been seen alive; he does not deal with the difficult -- and crucial -- question of whether Jesus actually rose from the dead. But the implications of the situation he describes have nothing to do with founding a new religion. Jesus and his followers were Jews who were looking for an earthly delivery from hundreds of years of subjugation by the brutality of Rome.

So, if that is the case, how did the Christian religion get started? Enter Paul, with his vision and his guilt for having persecuted the disciples of Jesus. Paul never shared the same idea of the Jesus movement as the Jeruselem apostles who had actually known Jesus. Paul instead devised his own version of Jesus, based largely on existing pagan religions. Under Paul's teaching, Jesus became the son of God, the suffering savior who died to redeem the rest of us. This was not a new idea, but borrows from older religions like Zoroastrianism, and also takes on some of the flavor of the mystery cults of the day. In the idea of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the savior, a kind of "magic" that became the eucharist that gives us instant salvation based only on faith, Paul roams a long way from traditional Jewish ideas. The eucharist is a basically pagan form of ritual, a practice that learned Jewish scholars of the time would have abhorred.

Paul's ideas were not Jewish ideas, but Jesus was a loyal Jew, always faithful to the Torah. Maccoby suspects that Paul was no Jew, but had converted to Judaism and tried to become a scholar like the Pharisees but could not make the grade. The simple ideas of the Christianity he invented gave him the power and prestige he craved. Did Paul break away from the Jeruselem church and go it alone? Maccoby looks for clues in the Bible, and is willing to throw away the passages that don't match his theory and accept those that do. He sees in Paul's invention the origins of Christian anti-semitism, which go back to the idea that "the Jews killed Jesus." He says since the gospels were written well after Paul had established his myth, they are not accurate. It is necessary, in his view, to look beneath the surface for evidence of the original story that can still be discerned if one knows how to interpret the words. In Maccoby's version, there is no religious conflict because Jesus and all his followers were Jews with no interest in converting any gentiles; there was nothing to convert them to. It was the Jews and only the Jews who needed a messiah.

Is Maccoby right about any of this? Or is he one more Jew bummed out about Christians? His views on Paul are extreme, but there is evidence in the Dead Sea Scrolls that the community at Qumran, which those scrolls document, was probably the same as the so-called Jeruselem Church, and though these ancient documents are cryptic, many scholars think they show an early "Christian" community that was essentially Jewish. It comes down to a question of whether Jesus intended to begin a new church and why that church was based in Rome, the site of the enemy of James and his band of disciples who believed in the messiahship (but not the divinity) of Jesus.

Is the Christianity that dominates the world today based on a myth invented by Paul and finally allied with the Roman enemy through its ultimate acceptance by Constantine? If these questions interest you, you might want to read Hyam Maccoby's book.

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