ST. PAUL FRAUD II
The Mythmaker:
Paul & the Invention of Christianity
by Hyam Maccoby
Paul & the Invention of Christianity
by Hyam Maccoby
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Paul and Jesus Never Met
The disciples who knew Jesus best, such as Peter, James and John, have left no writings behind them claiming how Jesus seemed to them or what they consider his mission to have been, Did they agree with the interpretations disseminated by Paul, and 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 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…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. …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. James …immediately after Jesus’ death…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…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, thought 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. Who is Paul? To understand this man we cannot trust his own words, but must turn to the accounts of the first Christians, who stayed true to their Pharisaism and who knew the real Jesus. It is there descendents who would be refuters of the Pauline doctrine. One of these sects was known as the Ebionites. According to their writings, Paul was the perverter of Jesus’ message and…founder of a new religion which Jesus himself would have rejected. According to the Ebionites, Saul was not a Pharisee and not even a Jew by birth. His parents in Tarsus were Gentiles, and he himself had become a convert and had thereupon journeyed in the Holy Land, where he found employment in the service of the High Priest. Tribe of Benjamin “I am an Israelite by race, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born and bred; in my attitude to the law, a Pharisee (see, Romans 11:2, Phillippians 3:5) This biographical anecdote also raises the eyebrows of competent Hebrew scholars, such as Maccoby who declare the facts which must have been evident to any educated, religiously mature Jews of the Holy Land. As it happens, it was impossible for any Jew at this time to describe himself truthfully as of the tribe of Benjamin…Only the Levites, the priestly tribe, and that section of the Levites called the Kohanim, or priests (the descendants of Aaron) retained their identity because they needed to do so for cultic reasons. All other Jews were simply known as Israelites for cultic purposes…and no distinctions was made for any religious purpose between Judahites or Benjaminites, so that there was not motive for preserving the distinction. Consequently, when Paul described himself as ‘of the tribe of Benjamin’ this was sheer bluff, though the recipients of his letters, being Gentile converts to Christianity, were in no position to know this. Paul’s Descriptions of Himself …the information given by any persona 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. The writings of Paul also reveal that he knew very little Hebrew. This again points to the inauthenticity of Paul’s autobiographical accounts, since in order to be a Pharisee one would have had to had a thorough knowledge of the Hebrew and be able to read the Bible in Hebrew, as well as in the Aramaic translations which were made for those unable to read the Hebrew. Paul’s numerous quotations from the Bible are taken from the Greek translation (the Septuagint) and not from the Hebrew. Sadly, the Christian hierarchy has paid little to no attention to the accounts of the Ebionites or the Nazarenes and accept the Pauline version wholesale, almost without exception despite the poor edits and glaring historical inconsistencies. Not being able to reconcile Paul’s admission that he was a Pharisee with his persecution of the same, the mythographers later concocted the untenable tale of Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. This story with its dramatic quality was enough to overwrite any stubborn historical inconsistencies. Paul - Not a Pharisee If it were proved that Paul was, in fact, never a Pharisee at all, a great mainstay of the traditional view of Christian origins would be knocked away. We would have to think Paul much more in the role of an innovator, who created a myth about Jesus that had no roots either in Judaism or the actual historical circumstances of Jesus’ life and teaching. James …immediately after Jesus’ death…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…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, thought 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. Birthplace of Paul Tarsus – a city in Asia Minor. Paul states that he is a Roman citizen. Strangely enough, however, Paul himself, in his letters, never mentions that he came from Tarsus, even when he is at his most autobiographical. The young Saul, we are told, left Yarsus and came to the Land of Israel, where he studied in the Pharisee academy of Gamaliel. (See Acts 22:3) Gamaliel was a highly respected figure in the rabbinical community. Yet Paul himself, in his letters, never mentions that he was a pupil of Gamaliel, even when he most concerned to stress his qualifications as a Pharisee. We encounter, then, right at the start of our enquiry into Paul’s background, the question: was Paul really from a genuine Pharisee family, as he says to his correspondents, or was this just something that he said to increase his status in their eyes? His True Ancestry …there is evidence, taken to be incontrovertible, that Paul’s father was a wealthy man: this is that he was both a Roan citizen and a citizen of Tarsus. Undoubtedly, Paul is represented as claiming that not only he, but his father too, were Roman citizens (Acts 22:28). His Death According to Church legend, Paul was martyred in Rome, but no reliance can be placed on this story. It is quite possible that he lived on to a ripe old age, building up the Gentile Christian Church which he had created, and for the sake of which he had brought to bear such ingenuity and resource. His Duplicity To Jews I became as a Jew, to win Jews; as they are subjects to the law of Moses, I put myself under that law to win them, although I am not myself subject to it. To win Gentiles, who are outside the Law, I made myself like one of them, although I am not in truth outside God’s law, being under the law of Christ. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. Indeed, I have become everything in turn to men of every sort, so that in one way or another I may save some – (Corinthians 9:20-22) This from the man who originally pronounced himself to be a Pharisee and member of the Sanhedrin. Was Paul a Pharisee? We encounter, then, right at the start of our inquiry into Paul’s background, the question: was Paul really from a genuine Pharisee family, as he says to his correspondents, or was this just something that he said to increase his status in their eyes? His claim to be still a Pharisee was simply a lie, and if his real views had been known, the Pharisees would certainly not have supported him. The High Priest (Ananias) could not stand Paul: We have found this man to be a perfect pest, a fomenter of discord among the Jews all over the world, a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes. He even made an attempt to profane the temple, and then we arrested him… (Acts 24: 1-9) Persecutor of Christians? We are also told of the young Saul that he was implicated, to some extent, in the death of the martyr Stephen…The death of Stephen is itself an episode that requires searching analysis, since it is full of problems and contradictions. Harrying the Church 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. (See 8:3). We are not told at this point by what authority or on whose orders he was carrying out this persecution…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. More Dubious Info on Saul Anyone with knowledge of the religious and political scene at this time in Judea feels the presence of an important problem here: the High Priest was not a Pharisee, but a Sadducee, and the Sadducee were bitterly opposed to the Pharisees. How is it that Saul, allegedly and enthusiastic Pharisee…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. 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 Judea, 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? Paul, Judaism & Christianity …the conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus. It was through this event that Jesus’ movement changed from being a variety of Judaism into a new religion with a theology and myth distinct from those of Judaism. On the face of it, Paul’s doctrine of Jesus is a daring form of 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. 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. There were those who accepted Paul’s doctrine, but did regard it as a 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. The Jerusalem Church (The Nazarenes) 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 of 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 a Messianic kingdom…Having known Jesus personally, they were aware that he had observed the Jewish religious law all his life and had never rebelled against it…The Nazarenes were themselves very observant of Jewish law…The Nazarenes did not regard themselves as belonging to a new religion. 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 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. The Pharisees were not opposed to the Jesus movement, which was indeed a Pharisee movement. It was the Pauline Christian movement that blackened the name of the Pharisees by distorting their image in the New Testament, the scripture of Paulinism. Jesus was a Pharisee If any man therefore sets aside even the least of the Law’s demands, and teaches others to do the same, he will have the lowest place in the kingdom of Heaven, whereas anyone who keeps the Law and teaches others so, will stand high in the kingdom of heaven – (Matt 5:19) Attis 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 f these elements with features derived from Judaism, particularly the incorporation of the Jewish scriptures, re-interpreted to provide a background of sacred history for a 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 hum by Paul as a suffering deity. Paul’s Concoction …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 s 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. Paul Not a Pharisee If it were proved that Paul was, in fact, never a Pharisee at all, a great mainstay of the traditional view of Christian origins would be knocked away. We would have to think Paul much more in the role of an innovator, who created a myth about Jesus that had no roots either in Judaism or the actual historical circumstances of Jesus’ life and teaching. False Portrayals of Pharisees The Pharisees came to being around 160 BC. They were rebels from the beginning trying to resist and if possible overthrow foreign invaders such as the Greeks (Seleucid Greeks of Syria by that time) and Romans. They opposed the High Priest and his Sadducees also because of their political liaisons with the invaders. The Pharisees therefore considered it their duty to not only combat the foreign powers suppressing them, but also to expose and combat the High Priest whom they saw as a tool of their political enemies. The adversity between the Pharisees and the Sadducees was therefore chiefly political in nature, and not religious. Paul, in his writings, plays down the political conflict and falsely inflates the importance of the religious discordance. This also warps the readers sense of the times, and of the political and religious climate. The Gospels portray the Pharisees as the chief opponents of Jesus, criticizing him for curing people on the Sabbath, and even plotting to kill him because of these cures. The Gospels also represent Jesus as criticizing the Pharisees most strongly, calling them hypocrites and oppressors. Difference Between Pharisees & Sadducees Though not addicted to heresy hunting, the Pharisees did regard certain groups as heretical, largely because these groups did not accept the concept of the Oral Law. The most powerful group regarded as heretical by the Pharisees was that of the Sadducees, of whom frequent mention is made in the Gospels, where they are described as opponents of the Pharisees, without any clear exposition of the point of conflict involved. Rejecting the Oral Law, the Sadducees saw no need for a class of interpreters, sages or rabbis engaged in expounding the scriptures in accordance with new ideas and circumstances…The Sadducees turned for leadership to the priests and especially the High Priest, while the Pharisees were led by very different personalities, whose character was determined by the demands of the Oral Law. The priests were a hereditary caste, descended from Aaron, the brother of Moses. They had a special function to perform in the service of the Temple, and were supported by the tithes levied from the whole population…To look to the priesthood for leadership was thus to put the Temple into the center of one’s religious life. Three institutions thus comprised the focus of Sadducee religion: The Bible, the Temple and the priesthood. Among the priests, it was chiefly a few families of great wealth and political influence with the reigning power who were Sadducees. The Sadducee party, indeed, formed a small majority among the Jewish people, comprising wealthy landowners as well as wealthy priests. People such as these were the natural allies of whatever authority happened to be in power, whether Ptolemaic Greek, Seleucid Greeks, Hasmoneans, Herodians or Romans. Instead of the priests, the Pharisees looked for guidance to their own leaders, the “hakhamin” (sages), who were not a hereditary class but came from every level of society, including the poorest. The hakhamin or rabbis were really lay leaders, who achieved their authority by their ability to mater the extensive materials that comprised a Pharisee’s education. …while the Pharisees acknowledged the importance of animal and vegetable sacrifices…they did not consider these ceremonies as central to their religious life, which focused rather on the acquisition of knowledge about how people should live together in society, and on the carrying into practice the principles of justice and love. This decentralization and diffusion of religion into manifold local centers was typical of Pharisaism, and this meant that the common people regarded the priesthood in Jerusalem as rather remote and unreal figures compared with their local sage, to whom they could come with their problems and who gave them regular instruction in the synagogue. He came from their own ranks, and claimed no aristocratic superiority over them. But the real centers of Jewish religious authority, the synagogues in which the Pharisee leaders presided, were too humble and too decentralized to be taken over, even if the Roman authorities had known that this was where the road to control of the Jews lay. In the time of Jesus and Paul, the occupying power was the Romans, who actually appointed the High Priests, just as Herod had done before them. They imagined that by appointing some subservient quisling to the post of High Priest, they had assumed control of the Jewish religion, little realizing that Judaism was a religion in which the apparent spiritual head, the High Priest, was in reality of little account being personally despised by the majority of the Jews, and even in his official capacity regarded a having no real authority. Power of the High Priest As an appointee of the Romans, the High Priest was not just a ceremonial official with jurisdiction over the Temple; he was, in effect, a chief of police with his own armed force, his own police tribunal which was concerned with political offenses, and his own penal system, including prisons and arrangements for flogging offenders. In the case of capital offenses, however, such as serious insurrection against the power of Rome, he would hand over the offender to the occupying Roman power rather than attempt to impose sentence himself. The situation can best be understood by comparison with occupied France during the Second World War. Destruction of the Temple Even the destruction of the Temple, which in the eyes of non-Jewish observers spelled the death of Judaism, had no such result, since the vitality of the religion did not depend on the Temple worship or on its practitioners. The Prophets In the Bible the chief teaching role in religion is given not to the priests, but to the prophets, who had no hereditary claims and might come from any section of the people…The rabbis regarded themselves as the heirs of the prophets and especially of Moses, and as having the teaching role that had always been carefully distinguished, in Jewish practice and religion, from the sacerdotal role. Dead Sea Scroll Sects Whereas the Pharisees did not attach a lot of importance to the status of the High Priest in Jerusalem, the Dead Sea Scroll Sects did. The Dead Sea Scroll sect, however, took the office of the High Priest far more seriously…and consequently, when they became convinced that the High Priesthood had become hopelessly corrupt, they withdrew from Jewish society The Anti-Christ The role of the Antichrist, the earthly power opposed to Jesus…was usually assigned to the Jews, so that populist millenarian movements were often viciously ‘anti-Semitic.' The term “Messiah” Jesus’ claim to be Messiah was not in any way blasphemous in the eyes of the Pharisees or, indeed, of any other Jews, for the title “Messiah” carried no connotation of deity or divinity. The word “Messiah” means “anointed one” and it is a title of kingship; every Jewish king of the Davidic line had this title. To claim to be the Messiah meant simply to claim the throne of Israel, and while this was a reckless and foolhardy thing to do when the Romans had abolished the Jewish monarchy, it did not constitute any offense in Jewish law. Paul’s Eucharist The Eucharist signifies the mystical incorporation of the initiate into the godhead by eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ. Such a ceremony implies the deification of Jesus and is quite impossible to reconcile with a view of Jesus as merely a Messiah in the Jewish sense…The implication of the Eucharist that salvation is to obtained through Jesus death and the shedding of his blood is thus a radical departure from Judaism and a return to pagan concepts of atonement. It is clear that Paul conceived of this Eucharist, and not Jesus. …the Eucharist was not observed by the ‘Jerusalem Church’ at all, but only by those churches that had come under the influence of Paul. For if Jesus himself had instituted the Eucharist, one would expect it to be observed, above all, by those who were actually present at the Last Supper – unless they had unaccountably forgotten Jesus’ worlds, and needed to be reminded of them through a special revelation given to Paul. The Crucifixion Paul…made the crucifixion of Jesus into the center of his thinking. Paul’s view of Jesus has coloured the story told in the Gospels and has thus influenced the imagination of all Western civilization…Blaming the Pharisees or Jewish religion generally for Jesus’ death was one of the by-products of this transformation of a man into a myth.
The Resurrection The belief that Jesus had been resurrected was indeed the mark of the movement after Jesus’ death. Without this belief, the movement would simply have ceased to exist, like other Messianic movements. Paul Nonsensical Account of Trial of Jesus in Sanhedrin The accounts of Jesus being questioned and condemned in the Jewish Sanhedrin, lead top Hebrew scholars to seriously doubt Paul’s knowledge of the Jewish religion. We have the trial accounts in Acts 5, and Mark 14. This travesty of legal procedure in a body like the Sanhedrin, famous for the dignity and formality of its legal procedures, is clearly fictional. This conclusion is reinforced by the consideration that the alleged blasphemy is not blasphemy in Jewish law at all…We must conclude, therefore, that the trial of Jesus…has been falsified…an originally political charge has been worked over in order to represent it as a religious charge of blasphemy. Paul’s Motive Scholars have written erudite volumes which try to estimate Paul’s reason for creating Christianity. The most erudite even speak of the psychological conflict within the pagan Paul, and point to his various frustrated desires mixed with his passion for fame and so on, as reasons pressing him to take the path he did. We do not believe that these explanations come anywhere near the truth of the matter. We are more interested in his connections to Roman and Sadducee elites. Paul is already clearly exposed as a “agent” of the High Priest, and of the Roman procurators, etc,. Can we not then accept that he remained an agent of such types, and that his work to fashion a new religion, based largely on paganism, Gnosticism and on mystery religions, was motivated by orders from these overlords? Paul was the very first to envisage Christianity as a new religion, different from Judaism. In order to do this, he asserted his own claim to special authority through his series of visions of the heavenly Jesus Christ (as he called him)…beginning with his Damascus vision. Message of Paul Paul interpretation dispenses with the Torah, and with the Law. Man does not need elaborate laws or moral codes. He does not have to live a pure life all through his life, and sacrifice, and align himself with written or time-honored codes of moral behavior. He can be a total sinner and yet by accepting Jesus, the Christ, the heavenly divine man into his heart, he can be saved. Jesus does it all. Man only requires receptivity and the awakening will follow. Jesus’ light will be on him, Jesus’ sacrifice will absolve him, and Jesus’ mercy will bring him to his desired repose in heaven. This absorption into the body of one’s god was a concept known to the mystery traditions. The members and mystagogues of the Cult of Attis, for instance, were of this belief. And many other cults of the ancient world believed in an ecstatic unification with their god or with his representative. Yet we must not forget the aspect that differentiated Paul from all the other mystagogues of the time and ensued that his religion, unlike theirs was not forgotten. This was Paul’s determination to connect his new religion to Judaism and thus give it an historical basis going back in time to the beginning of the world…This was the feature that gave Paul’s religion substance and impressiveness in the eyes of the Greco-Roman world, so that his followers felt themselves to be carried along in the sweep of cosmic history. Messiah irrelevant to Gentiles …the Messiah, in the pre-Pauline movement was the King of the Jews and therefore not directly relevant to Gentiles. The Messiah was the human descendant of King David, who would restore Jewish monarchy and Jewish national independence. He would not reign over the whole world. The Messiah would only mean something to Gentiles insofar as he represented a political threat to oppressors such as the Roman Empire. The Messiah was a threat to these invading conquerors. He was a symbol of national independence, but not a spiritual icon to the world. Success of the New Religion …the Christian Church produced a proliferation of temples, for , while in Judaism only one sacramental center was allowed, i.e., the Jerusalem Temple, in Christianity every church was a centre for sacramental rites, while the vast cathedrals reached an ornateness undreamt of even in the Jewish Temple, much less the simple conventicles or synagogues in which ordinary prayer and study took place. New Christian Priesthood Moreover, the new priesthood instituted in the Pauline Christian Church was accorded an awesome authority which the Jewish priesthood never enjoyed, since the latter were regarded as mere functionaries with no authority to pronounce on matters of religious practice or ethics, or to perform absolutions or excommunications. …the “Jerusalem Church” which indeed was not a “Church” at all, but a monarchical movement within Judaism, with a belief in the miraculous resurrection of a human Jesus. The founder of Christianity as a separate religion was Paul, who first deified Jesus and claimed revelations from this new deity as the basis of the doctrines of his new religion. Conflict Between Paul & Jerusalem Church (of those who knew Jesus) …the purposes of the Book of Acts is to minimize the conflict between Paul and the leaders of the ‘Jerusalem Church,’ James and Peter. Peter and Paul, in later Christian tradition, became twin saints, brothers in faith, and the idea that they were historically bitter opponents standing for irreconcilable religious standpoints would have been repudiated with horror. The Torah was never meant for everyone. It was only meant for the small minority of mankind: those born Jews and who kept to its codes. This fact meant that the way was open for Paul to preach his version of the life and times of Jesus to the Gentiles and the rest of the world. Center in Rome Peter was conceived to have been the first Bishop of Rome or Pope and, since Peter had been declared by Jesus to be the rock on which the Church was to be built, this made Rome the center of Christendom, and the papal succession the true hierarchy founded by Jesus himself. There is no way that Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, would have allowed his Church to be centered in Rome. Real Meaning of Peter as the “Rock” When Peter…hailed Jesus as ‘Messiah’ he was using this word in its Jewish sense, not in the sense it acquired later in the Christian Church. In other words, Peter was hailing Jesus as King of Israel. Jesus’ response was to give Peter his title of ‘Rock’ and to tell him that he would have ‘the keys if the kingdom of Heaven.’ The meaning of this phrase, in its Jewish context, is quite different from what later Christian mythology made it, when it pictured Saint Peter standing at the gate of Heaven, holding the keys, and deciding which souls might enter. The ‘Kingdom of God’…and the reference is not to some paradise in the great beyond, but to a Messianic kingdom on Earth, of which Jesus had just allowed himself to be proclaimed King – i.e., the Jewish Kingdom, of which the Davidic monarch was constitutional ruler, while God was the only real King. Peter was to be the chief minister of the Messianic Kingdom Peter, then, is appointed chief minister of King Jesus. This explains fully the relationship between Peter and James, the brother of Jesus, in the movement, and why James so suddenly rises to prominence at this point. When Jesus became King, his family became the royal family, at least for those who believed in Jesus’ claim to the Messiahship. Thus, after Jesus’ death, his brother James, as his nearest relative, became his successor. The position of Peter, then, after the death of Jesus, is thus easily understood. He could not become the leader of the Jesus movement, because he was not of royal blood. But he could and did retain his position as chief adviser and minister of the royal court, the holder of the ‘keys of the kingdom.’ Paul Collects Funds from Jerusalem Church to become a Roman Citizen Paul would not consider it dishonest to use funds collected for the ‘Jerusalem Church’ for the purpose of acquiring Roman citizenship for himself, because this was not just a matter of personal advantage, but of high policy, affecting the whole future of Christianity…Felix, the Roman Governor, ‘had high hopes of a bribe from Paul; and for this reason he sent for him very often and talked with him’ (Acts 24:26). This happened while Paul was Felix’s prisoner, awaiting settlement of his case. Now a Roman Governor would not expect any paltry sum as a bribe, so he must have thought that Paul had considerable amounts at his disposal – p.162 Final Split with Jerusalem Church When Paul declared himself a Roman citizen, this was the end of his uneasy association with the ‘Jerusalem Church.’ The announcement would have come to James and the other leaders as a great shock. The Jesus movement was essentially an anti-Roman movement. Its aim was the freeing of the Jewish people from bondage to Rome. None of its members, therefore, would have sought Roman citizenship. Obedience to Rome Thus he urged his disciples to obey Rome, whose power was ‘ordained by God,’ and he also urged slaves to be contented with their lot and not to strive for freedom. This contempt for politics was in fact a political attitude – and acquiescence in the political status quo. Consequently, the Pauline Christian doctrine was fitted from the start to become the official religion of the Roman Empire. Nothing is more welcome to military empire than a religious doctrine that counsels obedience and acquiescence. That Paul, the creator of the doctrine that eventually became the official Roman religion, made himself into a Roman citizen is symptomatic. Obedience to Romans Requested Jewish hostility towards the Romans was well documented, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Paul held that Roman authorities were appointed by God….Therefore he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. (Romans 13:2) Problems with Paul Paul’s life is separated into two parts, that before his conversion, and that after. Previous to his conversion he claims to have been an ardent Pharisee opposed to the new religion of Jesus, but afterwards he claims to be Jew (Pharisee) who saw that Christianity was a fulfillment of the Torah and the precepts of Judaism. We know that the Book of Acts which is based on Paul’s visions was written by Luke, but was composed over 40 years after Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. …nothing is said here about the founding of a new religion. The doctrines characteristic of Christianity as it later developed under the influence of Paul are not present. Thus Jesus is not described as a divine Jesus, but as a man “singled out by God." Peter Knew Jesus was not Divine Men of Israel, listen to me: I speak of Jesus of Nazareth, a man singled out by God. He claimed to be a staunch Pharisee and to have been trained in all aspects of Judaism in the college of the most revered rabbinical scholar Gamaliel. There is not evidence that Paul had anything to do with this scholar or his school. Paul claims to be born in Tarsus, but to be a Roman citizen, which means his father was also of Roman citizenship. In fact, the most impartial evidence reveals that Paul was a Gentile and not a Jew at all and that he had, throughout his life, for the most part excellent relations with the Roman elite. The earliest and most authentic Christian sects, like the Ebionites and the Nazarenes, who were Pharisees and devout followers of Jesus the Messiah, were against Paul’s version of the teachings of their master, and proclaimed him to be a Gentile who sought work as a police agent for the High Priest of Judea, a Sadducee, who opposed the Ebionites and those of their ilk. The Nazarenes, were lead by James and Peter who actually knew the living Jesus. They had no time for the teachings of Paul whom they took for a cunning charlatan infusing the true teachings of the man Jesus with divine elements taken from paganism and from Gnosticism. Later, when Paul’s particular hybrid of the teachings became the mainstream, these sects were regarded and treated as heretics. Some of their writings still remain, and they have lead the top scholars to understand the true motives of Paul who rested his authority on supernatural visitations from the dead but divine Jesus. …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. The troubles of the world, especially in regards theology and epistemology, have a great deal to do with the world-wide acceptance of this brand of Christianity which had so little basis in fact, and in common with Judaism or the first actual Jerusalem Church founded by the physical friends and disciples of Jesus who were Pharisees and yet Christians also. The works of Paul distort not only the teachings of the master, but the role and mission of the Pharisees who obeyed the Torah, but who were also reverent toward Jesus as an authentic rabbi and “Messiah” (national and political leader). The Gospels portray the Pharisees as the chief opponents of Jesus, criticizing him for curing people on the Sabbath, and even plotting to kill him because of these cures. The Gospels also represent Jesus as criticizing the Pharisees most strongly, calling them hypocrites and oppressors. The Book of Acts, written by Luke, claims that Paul was a member of the Sanhedrin or the Council of Elders. Yet Paul himself, eager as he is to identify himself with the highest echelons of Judaic society, does not ever mention this membership in any of his own writings. Paul claims to be an ardent Pharisee, and to be against the new Christians, followers of Jesus. However, many passages of the same New Testament, as well as other historical accounts show that the Pharisees were not opposed at all to the new religion. The accounts say that the Pharisees of the Sanhedrin were eager to release Peter, when Paul was all for condemning him. How can this contradiction be logically explained? Moreover, the Book of Acts which exalts the life of Paul, the supposed Pharisee, has passage after passage which condemn the Pharisees, showing them in a very negative light. He was an agent of the High Priest of Judea, sent to arrest, harass and persecute Christians. However the High Priest is a Sadducee and Saul an avowed Pharisee. The two branches of rabbinical Judaism despised each other and could not have had the kind of intercourse advanced in these ambiguous New Testament accounts. We can only conclude that Paul was, in fact, an agent of the Sadducees, and not a Pharisee as he liked to claim. As an appointee of the Romans, the High Priest was not just a ceremonial official with jurisdiction over the Temple; he was, in effect, a chief of police with his own armed force, his own police tribunal which was concerned with political offenses, and his own penal system, including prisons and arrangements for flogging offenders. In the case of capital offenses, however, such as serious insurrection against the power of Rome, he would hand over the offender to the occupying Roman power rather than attempt to impose sentence himself. The situation can best be understood by comparison with occupied France during the Second World War. The only reason why the High Priest could use force at all is that he had been provided with the means by the Romans for their own purposes; and, thought the High Priests were not above using the machinery for their own benefit…their main concern was to produce results required by their Roman masters…If Saul was employed by the High Priest to arrest people and imprison them, it can only mean one thing: that Saul was a member of the High Priest’s police force and his job was to arrest anyone who constituted a threat to the occupations. The last person who would be employed by the High Priest would be a Pharisee, ergo, Saul was not a Pharisee. What should we believe, and take for irrefutable fact, from a the pen of a man who fabricates the evidence of his own origins? Early in his career, and while he worked for the High Priest of Judea, Saul applies for passes and authorization to travel to the non-Jewish city of Damascus to continue locating and punishing Christians. However, the High Priest of Judea has no dominion whatsoever over this far off city, which is, in fact, under Roman jurisdiction. If such a relationship did exist, which is not very likely, say the experts, then it was not Saul’s idea but the High Priests. The Pharisees came to being around 160 BC. They were rebels from the beginning trying to resist and if possible overthrow foreign invaders such as the Greeks (Seleucid Greeks of Syria by that time) and Romans. They opposed the High Priest and his Sadducees also because of their political liaisons with the invaders. The Pharisees therefore considered it their duty to not only combat the foreign powers suppressing them, but also to expose and combat the High Priest whom they saw as a tool of their political enemies. The adversity between the Pharisees and the Sadducees was therefore chiefly political in nature, and not religious. Paul, in his writings, plays down the political conflict and falsely inflates the importance of the religious discordance. This also warps the reader’s sense of the times, and of the political and religious climate. Given the extent of the distortion regarding the difference between these two important factions, from a writer sworn to honest avowals, from one sworn to be the medium of the heavenly Jesus, we can ask why Paul claimed to be a devout Pharisee, and why he should twist the truth, and paint the Pharisees in such a poor light? The record of the Pharisees as opponents of power is utterly unknown to those who base their ideas of the Pharisees on the biased and inadequate picture of them given in the Gospels. Far from being oppressors, the Pharisees were continually the party of opposition.
Among the priests, it was chiefly a few families of great wealth and political influence with the reigning power who were Sadducees. The Sadducee party, indeed, formed a small majority among the Jewish people, comprising wealthy landowners as well as wealthy priests. People such as these were the natural allies of whatever authority happened to be in power, whether Ptolemaic Greek, Seleucid Greeks, Hasmoneans, Herodians or Romans.
Many modern scholars have taken the Sadducees as the representatives of ancient Judaism, standing out against Pharisee innovation; but this picture has serious defects. The Sadducees were indeed defending the status quo, but it was a status quo of fairly recent duration, dating from the third century BC, when Judea was ruled by the Ptolemaic Greeks of Egypt. Under this regime, the High Priest was given central status and power by the Greek overlords, successors in the region to the power of Alexander the Great. The High Priesthood in this era was made an instrument of foreign rule, a role which it was to retain into the era of the Romans. Paul, the self-proclaimed Pharisee, but who denigrates the same, declares himself to be a police agent for the High Priest in Judea, who happened to be an elite member of the rival sect of the Sadducees. Saul goes about persecuting the original Christians at the behest of the High Priest. After conversion, he ceases his persecutions and yet maintains his appreciation of the Sadducees that he now should be thoroughly opposing. Moreover, his admittance of his early work raises some questions about his personal morality and penchant for the truth. It is clear that Paul’s allegiance to the High Priest was a sign of his allegiance to the invading Roman authorities which were despised by the Pharisees and Zealots and by most of the Jewish population, bar the elite minority of Sadducees: …the real centers of Jewish religious authority, the synagogues in which the Pharisee leaders presided, were too humble and too decentralized to be taken over, even if the Roman authorities had known that this was where the road to control of the Jews lay. In the time of Jesus and Paul, the occupying power was the Romans, who actually appointed the High Priests, just as Herod had done before them. They imagined that by appointing some subservient quisling to the post of High Priest, they had assumed control of the Jewish religion, little realizing that Judaism was a religion in which the apparent spiritual head, the High Priest, was in reality of little account being personally despised by the majority of the Jews, and even in his official capacity regarded a having no real authority. If the Sadducee High Priest was therefore little more than a puppet of the Romans what are we to think of Paul who was, as we read from his own letters, his ready and willing servant. Paul is exposed as a ladder-climbing opportunist and liar of the first degree. How much veracity is there in his claim that he received direct visitation from a dead Jesus, all of a sudden, on the dusty road to Damascus. How much authority does such a duplicitous personage have to declare himself to be the chief minister of the new religion which will turn Judaism on its head and bring salvation to Jews and Gentiles alike. And would this message be directed toward the hard-core Pharisees or toward the hordes of Judeans whose only desire was to secure political emancipation from a pagan invader? We are to accept that a people deeply suspicious of pagan beliefs, attitudes and rites, were to accept the concoction which Paul presented before them? Ironically, the fact that Paul did misrepresent the Pharisees has assisted scholars in dating his Gospels. By making Jesus, the man and the Pharisee appear to be the enemy of the Pharisees we can date the composition of the Gospels to quite some time after the events they are supposed to be describing. The flaws in detail together with the shoddy editing reveal the inauthenticity not only of the accounts but of their composer’s status as a divinely inspired medium for the postmortem “message” of Jesus. Synopsis We know that the High Priest became thoroughly corrupt because of the various Dead Sea Scrolls which reveal that the Sects who penned them moved away to remote locations in order to distance themselves from Jerusalem and all that went on there. Scholars believe that this strong reaction could only come from break-away Sadducee groups who had become deeply disenchanted with the status quo. They seem to be elites whose beliefs are in accord with Sadducee philosophy prior to the degradation. It also appears that these break-away groups had little respect for the Pharisees, confirming that the Pharisees had little time for the High Priest or the centralized power emanating from Jerusalem’s Temple. It was on the road to Damascus that Saul is converted to Christianity. After his conversion, the persecutor of Christians, not only becomes a believer in the message of Jesus, but insists that Judaism was merely the prelude to this new religion which is Judaism’s fulfillment. This radical idea has no place in Judaism, which recognized the central ideas of Christianity to be quite pagan in nature, with much in common with the ancient mystery religions which also believed in divine saviors, whose blood sacrifice saved mankind, and who rose again in some spectacular resurrection event. None of this had any currency in orthodox Judaism which believed in good works and adherence to the Torah to be mankind’s only salvation. So, if Paul was in truth a Pharisaic scholar, as he claims to have been, and a member of the Sanhedrin, as the Book of Acts claims he was, would he not have known this, and known how preposterous his post-conversion declarations sounded to his fellow Jews? There were those who accepted Paul’s doctrine, but did regard it as a 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, and the later Christians of his ilk, continually asserted that Christianity was a culmination of the Torah, the Midrash and the Talmud, and that the role of the divinely incarnated son of god, Jesus, made the old Judaic system of salvation invalid. They did this by arguing the Jewish Messiah to be Jesus. This did not hold currency for orthodox Jews, since the Messiah spoken of by the ancient prophets was an exclusively political figure and not a religious one. The Messiah came to restore Jewish national sovereignty and to put an end to oppressive foreign conquests. He was not a person with a divine mission of saving souls. …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? Paul’s works lead us to believe that a man he never personally met, Jesus, wanted to create a new religion to stand as the fulfillment of the Judaic Torah. Yet again, there is precious little evidence that Jesus or the men who personally knew him, ever wanted such a thing. The evidence indicates that they were strict followers of the Torah, and not in any way trying to create a new religion. Paul tries to assure us that a thoroughly Jewish man, sworn to love and honor God and the Torah, and who had no desire to die for humanity or form a new religion, was the being who, later after his horrific death, came to him in a vision, on the road to Damascus, to reveal a plan for the future that he had never enunciated to anyone when he was alive. Paul claims that he, a violent persecutor of Jesus’ first devotees, was chosen to create Christianity, and so ensure constant foment, religiously and socially, throughout the already war-torn, divided lands of Palestine and through-out the world. We were to believe that what Jesus did not bother to do when he alive, with time on his hands, he actually wished done after his death, by Paul to whom he came in a vision. That which he failed to reveal to any living person in front of him during his own time, he revealed to Paul decades later, in a vision. 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…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. 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 of 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 a Messianic kingdom…Having known Jesus personally, they were aware that he had observed the Jewish religious law all his life and had never rebelled against it…The Nazarenes were themselves very observant of Jewish law…The Nazarenes did not regard themselves as belonging to a new religion. We are also asked to believe, by those who identify with Pauline Christianity, that man’s only road to salvation comes when he believes in the death and resurrection of the divine-man Jesus, whose death on the cross at the hands of his own enemies, somehow atones for our sins. We are to believe this even when there is no precedence for this in Judaic theology. 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 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. The Gospels are anti-Pharisaic. Jesus is depicted as being sorely out of favor with the Pharisees. He is shown to despise them, and we are told that they finally bring Jesus to trial for breaches of their law. However, Jesus was himself as Pharisee and also the Messiah. Since the Messiah was a political figure meant to assist in the removal of oppression, Jesus would have had a much greater, and much more rational antipathy toward the Sadducees who were in collusion with the Romans. The accounts within the Gospels where Jesus condemns Pharisees and where Pharisees foment “plots” against Jesus, and where they entered into secret pacts with Herod Antipas (a Roman appointee) against Jesus, where the Sanhedrin condemns Jesus the “Blasphemer,” are accounts which are not only suspect but totally false, being the later interpolations of Paul and his followers. …the New Testament has created conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees, not by altering “Sadducees” to “Pharisees” or by removing some essential element from the story, but simply by turning what was originally a friendly argument into a hostile confrontation. Jesus’ claim to be Messiah was not in any way blasphemous in the eyes of the Pharisees or, indeed, of any other Jews, for the title “Messiah” carried no connotation of deity or divinity. The word “Messiah” means “anointed one” and it is a title of kingship; every Jewish king of the Davidic line had this title. To claim to be the Messiah meant simply to claim the throne of Israel, and while this was a reckless and foolhardy thing to do when the Romans had abolished the Jewish monarchy, it did not constitute any offense in Jewish law…In later Christianity, however, after the death of Jesus, the Greek translation of the Hebrew word Messiah (i.e., Christ) had come to mean a deity or divine being. Scholars such as Hyam Maccoby who have looked deeply into these interpolations have questioned why Paul would have decided to twist history in this manner, and have the Pharisees take the blame for the intrigues, against Jesus, of the elite Sadducees. After a close reading of the Gospels and the scriptures we discover Paul’s motive. His distortion of the facts occurred due to his allegiance with Rome. It was this allegiance to the elites of Rome and to their puppets the Sadducees that compelled him to make it appear that Jesus’ accusers and destroyers were the Pharisaic Jews and not the Romans. Since the Pharisees were avowed political opponents of the Romans it was not possible to have Jesus be one of their number, or have him be seen as favoring them religiously. The Sadducees were political allies of the invading Romans, but since Paul was ever conscious of the duration of his brand of Christianity, he chose to play spiritualize the “Messiah” aspect of Jesus’ sojourn and to play up his antipathy against Rome’s enemies, the Pharisees. To remain true to the facts would mean the end of Paul’s religious aspirations. He new religion could only succeed if it was different from the Judaic religion and if it presented a Jesus palatable to the Roman audience. Better to make Jesus a virulent opposer of Judaism than of Roman occupation. Better for Paul that is. Paul downplays the foment between the Jews and the Romans. In his Gospels we do not read true accounts of the political climate, and this oversight also prevents readers from comprehending the reasons for the stance of the Jews. It prevents us from knowing a great deal about Jesus that was known to his first followers. But it does allow us, yet again, to estimate the motives of the composer of the Gospels. If Paul was, as he asserts, a true Pharisee, would he not have provided accurate accounts of the conflict which plagued Judea during the time of Jesus? …the element of emergency has been removed from the whole of the Gospels, which portray Judea and Galilee as peaceful areas under benign Roman rule, instead of what they were historical reality at this time, areas of bitter unrest and constant rebellion against the savage oppression of the Romans…If the sense of emergency had been retained in the story, not only would it have to be revealed that Jesus was not flouting Pharisee law but also that he was a hunted man, wanted by Herod and the Romans, and in rebellion against them. Against the desire of the living Jesus and his true followers, Paul decided to deconstruct the truth and to exalt the death of Jesus into mythic proportions. His treatment of the death of Jesus at the hands of the Sanhedrin was sensationalized for the western palate. Paul drew from ancient paganism for his treatment. He drew on elements which he knew would endear his brand of Jesus theology to the pagan Romans. Paul’s emphasis on the crucifixion of a divine being sent to save mankind, had the kind of impact that he was hoping for. But it was anything but the truth. It was myth. Paul…made the crucifixion of Jesus into the center of his thinking. Paul’s view of Jesus has coloured the story told in the Gospels and has thus influenced the imagination of all Western civilization…Blaming the Pharisees or Jewish religion generally for Jesus’ death was one of the by-products of this transformation of a man into a myth - HM Hyman Maccoby again puts the record straight, and helps us make sense of one of the most important incidents in history: …the desperate attempts of the Gospels to show that Jesus was in some way a rebel against Jewish religion are utterly implausible in the light of any genuine understanding of Jewish religion at the time. Only none of the Gospels, that of John, portrays Jesus as expressing ideas that would indeed have shocked the Jewish religious authorities and Jews generally…but John’s is the latest and least authentic of the Gospels, and lacks all the Jewish flavoring found in the other Gospels. Maccoby continues: Jesus…had never declared himself to be a divine figure or claimed that his death would atone for the sins of mankind; his failure to overcome the Romans by a great miracle from God was the end of all his hopes, as his despairing cry on the cross shows. Jesus’ scenario of the future contained the Jews as the people of God, restored to independence in their Holy Land, and acting as a nation of priests for the whole world in the Kingdom of God. So, clearly Paul chose to give the term Messiah a connotation which it previously did not have. The connotation he gave this term was not only false and misleading, it was against the wishes of Jesus’ true followers. It served to confusticate our understanding of the times, of the true role and intent of Jesus and ensured that we would accept the Paul’s fabricated mythic Christ. To apply the name Kurios or Lord in its divine sense to a human being who had recently lived and died on Earth would have seemed to any Pharisee or other Jew sheer blasphemy. However, to the recipients of Paul’s letters, the use of the term “Lord” would not have seemed shocking at all, for this was the regular term for the deities of the mystery cults, those salvation gods with whom the devotees united their souls in communal dying and resurrection. Paul nonsensical account of the trial of Jesus in the Sanhedrin’s The accounts of Jesus being questioned and condemned in the Jewish Sanhedrin, lead top Hebrew scholars to seriously doubt Paul’s knowledge of the Jewish religion. We have the trial accounts in Acts 5, and Mark 14. This travesty of legal procedure in a body like the Sanhedrin, famous for the dignity and formality of its legal procedures, is clearly fictional. This conclusion is reinforced by the consideration that the alleged blasphemy is not blasphemy in Jewish law at all…We must conclude, therefore, that the trial of Jesus…has been falsified…an originally political charge has been worked over in order to represent it as a religious charge of blasphemy. Paul’s Nonsensical Account of Synagogues Before his conversion Paul, when called Saul, was on his way to Damascus. He says that he had applied for permission to harry the Christians of Damascus and investigate the synagogues there. He needed the High Priest of Jerusalem to give him letters of authority that would be recognized by the priests of the various synagogues that he would be visiting. However, scholars know that this also rings strange, since the High Priest had little to no authority over the regional synagogues which operated very differently from the Temple, and which were very independent. Moreover, the various priests did not necessarily esteem or revere the High Priest and certainly would not have abetted some agent investigating their congregations and making accusations and arrests. Paul may have intended to accuse and arrest, and he certainly may have wished to get his kicks that way, but he certainly would not have been assisted by the leaders of any outlying synagogues. The priests of Kohanim (descendants of Aaron) were given certain honours n the synagogue service…but they had no role of leadership in the synagogue community. The lay administrators of the synagogue were elected by its members, and the spiritual guidance of the community was in the hands of a rabbi, at this time not a paid office. The High Priest, therefore, had no right to send his officers into synagogues to arrest people whose activities he disapproved of. When police were sent into the synagogues by the High Priest it would have been for political reasons and not religious ones. Someone or some group would have had to have been a threat to the Romans and thereby to the Sadducees who served as agents of the Romans. So, if Paul is confessing himself to be an agent of the High Priest, a Sadducee, confessing himself to be a police agent of the High Priest, he is admitting that he also serves the Romans. Paul’s Eucharist The Eurcharist is the center of Christianity. It was based on Christ’s Last Supper declarations. But scholars know for sure that the Eucharist was not a known tradition prior to Paul. It has been exposed as yet another later concoction with a basis only in pagan traditions, which were familiar to a Gentile Paul, but loathed by the Pharisees of Judaism. The Eucharist signifies the mystical incorporation of the initiate into the godhead by eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ. Such a ceremony implies the deification of Jesus and is quite impossible to reconcile with a view of Jesus as merely a Messiah in the Jewish sense…The implication of the Eucharist that salvation is to obtained through Jesus death and the shedding of his blood is thus a radical departure from Judaism and a return to pagan concepts of atonement. It is clear that Paul conceived of this Eucharist, and not Jesus. …the Eucharist was not observed by the ‘Jerusalem Church’ at all, but only by those churches that had come under the influence of Paul. For if Jesus himself had instituted the Eucharist, one would expect it to be observed, above all, by those who were actually present at the Last Supper – unless they had unaccountably forgotten Jesus’ worlds, and needed to be reminded of them through a special revelation given to Paul. A survey of the evidence thus confirms that Paul and no one else was the creator of the Eucharist. Paul’s Christianity Established after Temple’s Destruction When the Jews were broken by the Romans and their Temple destroyed in AD 70, the Jewish Christians shared n the horrors of the defeat, and the Jerusalem Nazarenes were dispersed to Caesarea and other cities, even as far as Alexandria in Egypt. Its power and influence as the Mother Church and center of the Jesus movement was ended, and the Pauline Christian Movement, which up to AD 66 had been struggling to survive against the strong disapproval of Jerusalem, now began to make great headway. Rome: The New Center After the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Romans in AD 70. Jerusalem…never regained its former centrality. In the now dominant Pauline Christian Church, the center was Rome; while the descendants of the former proud “Jerusalem Church” now scattered and poor…were despised as heretics, since they refused to accept the doctrines of Paul…Another name by which these later Jewish Christians were known according to the Church historians, was “Nazarene.” This name goes back to very early times, for it is found in the New Testament itself, not only applying to Jesus (“Jesus the Nazarene”) but also…to the members of the “Jerusalem Church” in the denunciation by the High Priest. It seems, then, that “Nazarenes” was the original name for the followers of Jesus; the name “Christians” was a later development, not in Jerusalem, but in Antioch. Abandonment of the Torah Paul abandoned the observance of the Torah mainly in order to obtain the backing of Rome and achieve power and influence for himself, Paul is even held responsible for the destruction of the Temple by the Romans, since his anti-Jewish propaganda inflamed the Romans against the Jews. Paul saw the Torah as …merely temporary and as foreshadowing something greater that would supersede it, the advent of the savior…Paul thus rejects as inferior the Jewish concept of the dignity of human nature, by which the Torah constitutes a covenant and agreement between two partners, God and Israel. …Jesus did not found a new religion at all, but simply sought to play an accepted role in the story of an existing religion, Judaism. It was Paul who founded Christianity, and he did so by creating a new story, one sufficiently powerful and gripping enough to launch a world religion. In this new story Jesus was given a leading role, but this does not make him the creator of Christianity. The Jesus of Paul’s story was a fictional character, just as Shakespeare, breathed new imaginative life into the bones of the historical figure Hamlet the Dane. …He asserted that all the main prophets of the Hebrew Bible were proto-Christians. None of them (not even Moses) had regarded the Torah as permanently binding; all of them had looked forward to the advent of the saviour who would abrogate the Torah and show the true way of faith and salvation. Being Saved People who are supposed to be ‘saved’ behave, unaccountably, just as badly as before they were saved, so that the law has to be reintroduced to restrain them. Also, there are always logically minded people to say that if they are ‘saved’ all their behavior must be correct, so they can indulge in any kind of behavior that happens to appeal to them…in the confidence that nothing they do can be wrong. In other words, by being ‘saved’ people may behave worse instead of better. Paul the Fantasist Paul was the greatest fantasist of all. He created the Christian myth be deifying Jesus, a Jewish Messiah figure whose real aims were on the plane of Jewish political Utopianism. Paul transformed Jesus’ death into a cosmic sacrifice in which the powers of evil sought to overwhelm the power of good, but, against their will, only succeeded in bringing about a salvific event. This also transforms the Jews, as Paul’s writings indicate, into the unwitting agents of salvation, whose malice in bringing about the death of Jesus is turned to good because this death is the very thing needed for the salvation of sinful mankind. Out of his own despair and agony, Paul created his myth. His belief that he received the myth from the heavenly Jesus has obscured Paul’s own role in creating it. The misunderstandings which he fostered about his own background have prevented readers of the New Testament from disentangling Paul’s myth from the historical facts about Jesus, the so-called Jerusalem Church, and Paul’s own adventures and clashes with his contemporaries. Recent Researches …scientific principles to the study of the New Testament, this was begun in a massive way only in the nineteenth century…It was recognized that the books of the New Testment were derived from various sources, stitched together as best the editors could manage, and that the editors had been much affected by considerations of bias and propaganda in their work, suppressing or altering what did not suit their religious standpoint in the controversies of the early Church. Gnosticism …the story is the same as that found in the type of religion known as Gnosticism. Recent discoveries have shown that, contrary to what was previously argued, Gnosticism existed before Christianity, though it later took Christian forms. |
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