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Ramabriga · Guest

Excerpts from The Mythmaker: Paul and The Invention of Christianity

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Chapter 1: The Problem of Paul

At the beginning of Christianity stand two figures: Jesus and Paul. Jesus is regarded by
Christians as the founder of their religion, in that the events of his life comprise the
foundation story of Christianity; but Paul is regarded as the great interpreter of Jesus'
mission, who explained, in a way that Jesus himself never did, how Jesus' life and death fitted
into a cosmic scheme of salvation, stretching from the creation of Adam to the end of time.

How should we understand the relationship between Jesus and Paul? We shall be approaching this
question not from the standpoint of faith, but from that of historians, who regard the Gospels
and the rest of the New Testament as an important source of evidence requiring careful sifting
and criticism, since their authors were propagating religious beliefs rather than conveying
dispassionate historical information. We shall also be taking into account all relevant
evidence from other sources, such as Josephus, the Talmud, the Church historians and the
Gnostic writings.

What would Jesus himself have thought of Paul? We must remember that Jesus never knew Paul; the
two men never once met. The disciples who knew Jesus best, such as Peter, James and John, have
left no writings behind them explaining how Jesus seemed to them or what they considered his
mission to have been. Did they agree with the interpretations disseminated by Paul in his
fluent, articulate writings? Or did they perhaps think that this newcomer to the scene,
spinning complicated theories about the place of Jesus in the scheme of things, was getting
everything wrong? Paul claimed that his interpretations were not just his own invention, but
had come to him by personal inspiration; he claimed that he had personal acquaintance with the
resurrected Jesus, even though he had never met him during his lifetime. Such acquaintance, he
claimed, gained through visions and transports, was actually superior to acquaintance with
Jesus during his lifetime, when Jesus was much more reticent about his purposes.

We know about Paul not only from his own letters but also from the book of Acts, which gives a
full account of his life. Paul, in fact, is the hero of Acts, which was written by an admirer
and follower of his, namely, Luke, who was also the author of the Gospel of that name. From
Acts, it would appear that there was some friction between Paul and the leaders of the
'Jerusalem Church', the surviving companions of Jesus; but this friction was resolved, and they
all became the best of friends, with common aims and purposes. From certain of Paul's letters,
particularly Galatians, it seems that the friction was more serious than in the picture given
in Acts, which thus appears to be partly a propaganda exercise, intended to portray unity in
the early Church. The question recurs: what would Jesus have thought of Paul, and what did the
Apostles think of him?

We should remember that the New Testament, as we have it, is much more dominated by Paul than
appears at first sight. As we read it, we come across the Four Gospels, of which Jesus is the
hero, and do not encounter Paul as a character until we embark on the post-Jesus narrative of
Acts. Then we finally come into contact with Paul himself, in his letters. But this impression
is misleading, for the earliest writings in the New Testament are actually Paul's letters,
which were written about AD 50-60, while the Gospels were not written until the period AD
70-110. This means that the theories of Paul were already before the writers of the Gospels and
coloured their interpretations of Jesus' activities. Paul is, in a sense, present from the very
first word of the New Testament. This is, of course, not the whole story, for the Gospels are
based on traditions and even written sources which go back to a time before the impact of Paul,
and these early traditions and sources are not entirely obliterated in the final version and
give valuable indications of what the story was like before Paulinist editors pulled it into
final shape. However, the dominant outlook and shaping perspective of the Gospels is that of
Paul, for the simple reason that it was the Paulinist view of what Jesus' sojourn on Earth had
been about that was triumphant in the Church as it developed in history. Rival interpretations,
which at one time had been orthodox, opposed to Paul's very individual views, now became
heretical and were crowded out of the final version of the writings adopted by the Pauline
Church as the inspired canon of the New Testament.

This explains the puzzling and ambiguous role given in the Gospels to the companions of Jesus,
the twelve disciples. They are shadowy figures, who are allowed little personality, except of a
schematic kind. They are also portrayed as stupid; they never quite understand what Jesus is up
to. Their importance in the origins of Christianity is played down in a remarkable way. For
example, we find immediately after Jesus' death that the leader of the Jerusalem Church is
Jesus' brother James. Yet in the Gospels, this James does not appear at all as having anything
to do with Jesus' mission and story. Instead, he is given a brief mention as one of the
brothers of Jesus who allegedly opposed Jesus during his lifetime and regarded him as mad. How
it came about that a brother who had been hostile to Jesus in his lifetime suddenly became the
revered leader of the Church immediately after Jesus' death is not explained, though one would
have thought that some explanation was called for. Later Church legends, of course, filled the
gap with stories of the miraculous conversion of James after the death of Jesus and his
development into a saint. But the most likely explanation is, as will be argued later, that the
erasure of Jesus' brother James (and his other brothers) from any significant role in the
Gospel story is part of the denigration of the early leaders who had been in close contact with
Jesus and regarded with great suspicion and dismay the Christological theories of the upstart
Paul, flaunting his brand new visions in interpretation of the Jesus whom he had never met in
the flesh.

Who, then, was Paul? Here we would seem to have a good deal of information; but on closer
examination, it will turn out to be full of problems. We have the information given by Paul
about himself in his letters, which are far from impersonal and often take an autobiographical
turn. Also we have the information given in Acts, in which Paul plays the chief role. But the
information given by any person about himself always has to be treated with a certain reserve,
since everyone has strong motives for putting himself in the best possible light. And the
information given about Paul in Acts also requires close scrutiny, since this work was written
by someone committed to the Pauline cause. Have we any other sources for Paul's biography? As a
matter of fact, we have, though they are scattered in various unexpected places, which it will
be our task to explore: in a fortuitously preserved extract from the otherwise lost writings of
the Ebionites, a sect of great importance for our quest; in a disguised attack on Paul included
in a text of orthodox Christian authority; and in an Arabic manuscript, in which a text of the
early Jewish Christians, the opponents of Paul, has been preserved by an unlikely chain of
circumstances.

Let us first survey the evidence found in the more obvious and well-known sources. It appears
from Acts that Paul was at first called 'Saul', and that his birthplace was Tarsus, a city in
Asia Minor (Acts 9:11, and 21:39, and 22:3). Strangely enough, however, Paul himself, in his
letters, never mentions that he came from Tarsus, even when he is at his most autobiographical.
Instead, he gives the following information about his origins: 'I am an Israelite myself, of
the stock of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin' (Romans 11:2); and '... circumcised on my
eighth day, Israelite by race, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born and bred; in my attitude
to the law, a Pharisee....' (Philippians 3:5). It seems that Paul was not anxious to impart to
the recipients of his letters that he came from somewhere so remote as Tarsus from Jerusalem,
the powerhouse of Pharisaism. The impression he wished to give, of coming from an unimpeachable
Pharisaic background, would have been much impaired by the admission that he in fact came from
Tarsus, where there were few, if any, Pharisee teachers and a Pharisee training would have been
hard to come by.

We encounter, then, right at the start of our enquiry into Paul's background, the question: was
Paul really from a genuine Pharisaic family, as he says to his correspondents, or was this just
something that he said to increase his status in their eyes? The fact that this question is
hardly ever asked shows how strong the influence of traditional religious attitudes still is in
Pauline studies. Scholars feel that, however objective their enquiry is supposed to be, they
must always preserve an attitude of deep reverence towards Paul, and never say anything to
suggest that he may have bent the truth at times, though the evidence is strong enough in
various parts of his life-story that he was not above deception when he felt it warranted by
circumstances.

It should be noted (in advance of a full discussion of the subject) that modern scholarship has
shown that, at this time, the Pharisees were held in high repute throughout the Roman and
Parthian empires as a dedicated group who upheld religious ideals in the face of tyranny,
supported leniency and mercy in the application of laws, and championed the rights of the poor
against the oppression of the rich. The undeserved reputation for hypocrisy which is attached
to the name 'Pharisee' in medieval and modern times is due to the campaign against the
Pharisees in the Gospels -- a campaign dictated by politico-religious considerations at the
time when the Gospels were given their final editing, about forty to eighty years after the
death of Jesus. Paul's desire to be thought of as a person of Pharisee upbringing should thus
be understood in the light of the actual reputation of the Pharisees in Paul's lifetime; Paul
was claiming a high honor, which would much enhance his status in the eyes of his correspondents.

Before looking further into Paul's claim to have come from a Pharisee background, let us
continue our survey of what we are told about Paul's career in the more accessible sources. The
young Saul, we are told, left Tarsus and came to the Land of Israel, where he studied in the
Pharisee academy of Gamaliel (Acts 22:3). We know from other sources about Gamaliel, who is a
highly respected figure in the rabbinical writings such as the Mishnah, and was given the title
'Rabban', as the leading sage of his day. That he was the leader of the whole Pharisee party is
attested also by the New Testament itself, for he plays a prominent role in one scene in the
book of Acts (chapter 5) -- a role that, as we shall see later, is hard to reconcile with the
general picture of the Pharisees given in the Gospels.

Yet Paul himself, in his letters, never mentions that he was a pupil of Gamaliel, even when he
is most concerned to stress his qualifications as a Pharisee. Here again, then, the question
has to be put: was Paul ever really a pupil of Gamaliel or was this claim made by Luke as an
embellishment to his narrative? As we shall see later, there are certain considerations which
make it most unlikely, quite apart from Paul's significant omission to say anything about the
matter, that Paul was ever a pupil of Gamaliel's.

We are also told of the young Saul that he was implicated, to some extent, in the death of the
martyr Stephen. The people who gave false evidence against Stephen, we are told, and who also
took the leading part in the stoning of their innocent victim, 'laid their coats at the feet of
a young man named Saul'. The death of Stephen is described, and it is added, 'And Saul was
among those who approved of his murder' (Acts 8:1). How much truth is there in this detail? Is
it to be regarded as historical fact or as dramatic embellishment, emphasizing the contrast
between Paul before and after conversion? The death of Stephen is itself an episode that
requires searching analysis, since it is full of problems and contradictions. Until we have a
better idea of why and by whom Stephen was killed and what were the views for which he died, we
can only note the alleged implication of Saul in the matter as a subject for further
investigation. For the moment, we also note that the alleged implication of Saul heightens the
impression that adherence to Pharisaism would mean violent hostility to the followers of Jesus.

The next thing we are told about Saul in Acts is that he was 'harrying the Church; he entered
house after house, seizing men and women, and sending them to prison' (Acts 8:3). We are not
told at this point by what authority or on whose orders he was carrying out this persecution.
It was clearly not a matter of merely individual action on his part, for sending people to
prison can only be done by some kind of official. Saul must have been acting on behalf of some
authority, and who this authority was can be gleaned from later incidents in which Saul was
acting on behalf of the High Priest. Anyone with knowledge of the religious and political scene
at this time in Judaea feels the presence of an important problem here: the High Priest was not
a Pharisee, but a Sadducee, and the Sadducees were bitterly opposed to the Pharisees. How is it
that Saul, allegedly an enthusiastic Pharisee ('a Pharisee of the Pharisees'), is acting hand
in glove with the High Priest? The picture we are given in our New Testament sources of Saul,
in the days before his conversion to Jesus, is contradictory and suspect.

The next we hear of Saul (Acts, chapter 9) is that he 'was still breathing murderous threats
against the disciples of the Lord. He went to the High Priest and applied for letters to the
synagogues at Damascus authorizing him to arrest anyone he found, men or women, who followed
the new way, and bring them to Jerusalem.' This incident is full of mystery. If Saul had his
hands so full in 'harrying the church' in Judaea, why did he suddenly have the idea of going
off to Damascus to harry the Church there? What was the special urgency of a visit to Damascus?
Further, what kind of jurisdiction did the Jewish High Priest have over the non-Jewish city of
Damascus that would enable him to authorize arrests and extraditions in that city? There is,
moreover, something very puzzling about the way in which Saul's relation to the High Priest is
described: as if he is a private citizen who wishes to make citizen's arrests according to some
plan of his own, and approaches the High Priest for the requisite authority. Surely there must
have been some much more definite official connection between the High Priest and Saul, not
merely that the High Priest was called upon to underwrite Saul's project. It seems more likely
that the plan was the High Priest's and not Saul's, and that Saul was acting as agent or
emissary of the High Priest. The whole incident needs to be considered in the light of
probabilities and current conditions.

The book of Acts then continues with the account of Saul's conversion on the road to Damascus
through a vision of Jesus and the succeeding events of his life as a follower of Jesus. The
pre-Christian period of Saul's life, however, does receive further mention later in the book of
Acts, both in chapter 22 and chapter 26, where some interesting details are added, and also
some further puzzles.

In chapter 22, Saul (now called Paul), is shown giving his own account of his early life in a
speech to the people after the Roman commandant had questioned him. Paul speaks as follows:

"I am a true-born Jew, a native of Tarsus in Cilicia. I was brought up in this city, and as a
pupil of Gamaliel I was thoroughly trained in every point of our ancestral law. I have always
been ardent in God's service, as you all are today. And so I began to persecute this movement
to the death, arresting its followers, men and women alike, and putting them in chains. For
this I have as witnesses the High Priest and the whole Council of Elders. I was given letters
from them to our fellow-Jews at Damascus, and had started out to bring the Christians there to
Jerusalem as prisoners for punishment; and this is what happened...."

Paul then goes on to describe his vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus. Previously he had
described himself to the commandant as 'a Jew, a Tarsian from Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city'.

It is from this passage that we learn of Paul's native city, Tarsus, and of his alleged studies
under Gamaliel. Note that he says that, though born in Tarsus, he was 'brought up in this city'
(i.e. Jerusalem) which suggests that he spent his childhood in Jerusalem. Does this mean that
his parents moved from Tarsus to Jerusalem? Or that the child was sent to Jerusalem on his own,
which seems unlikely? If Paul spent only a few childhood years in Tarsus, he would hardly
describe himself proudly as 'a citizen of no mean city' (Tarsus). Jews who had spent most of
their lives in Jerusalem would be much more prone to describe themselves as citizens of
Jerusalem. The likelihood is that Paul moved to Jerusalem when he was already a grown man, and
he left his parents behind in Tarsus, which seems all the more probable in that they receive no
mention in any account of Paul's experiences in Jerusalem. As for Paul's alleged period of
studies under Gamaliel, this would have had to be in adulthood, for Gamaliel was a teacher of
advanced studies, not a teacher of children. He would accept as a pupil only someone well
grounded and regarded as suitable for the rabbinate. The question, then, is where and how Paul
received this thorough grounding, if at all. As pointed out above and argued fully below, there
are strong reasons to think that Paul never was a pupil of Gamaliel.

An important question that also arises in this chapter of Acts is that of Paul's Roman
citizenship. This is mentioned first in chapter 16. Paul claims to have been born a Roman
citizen, which would mean that his father was a Roman citizen. There are many problems to be
discussed in this connection, and some of these questions impinge on Paul's claim to have had a
Pharisaic background.

A further account of Paul's pre-Christian life is found in chapter 26 of Acts, in a speech
addressed by Paul to King Agrippa. Paul says:

"My life from my youth up, the life I led from the beginning among my people and in Jerusalem,
is familiar to all Jews. Indeed they have known me long enough and could testify, if they only
would, that I belonged to the strictest group in our religion: I lived as a Pharisee. And it is
for a hope kindled by God's promise to our forefathers that I stand in the dock today. Our
twelve tribes hope to see the fulfilment of that promise.... I myself once thought it my duty
to work actively against the name of Jesus of Nazareth; and I did so in Jerusalem. It was I who
imprisoned many of God's people by authority obtained from the chief priests; and when they
were condemned to death, my vote was cast against them. In all the synagogues I tried by
repeated punishment to make them renounce their faith; indeed my fury rose to such a pitch that
I extended my persecution to foreign cities. On one such occasion I was traveling to Damascus
with authority and commission from the chief priests...."

Again the account continues with the vision on the road to Damascus.

This speech, of course, cannot be regarded as the authentic words addressed by Paul to King
Agrippa, but rather as a rhetorical speech composed by Luke, the author of Acts, in the style
of ancient historians. Thus the claim made in the speech that Paul's career as a Pharisee of
high standing was known to 'all Jews' cannot be taken at face value. It is interesting that
Paul is represented as saying that he 'cast his vote' against the followers of Jesus, thus
helping to condemn them to death. This can only refer to the voting of the Sanhedrin or Council
of Elders, which was convened to try capital cases; so what Luke is claiming here for his hero
Paul is that he was at one time a member of the Sanhedrin. This is highly unlikely, for Paul
would surely have made this claim in his letters, when writing about his credentials as a
Pharisee, if it had been true. There is, however, some confusion both in this account and in
the accounts quoted above about whether the Sanhedrin, as well as the High Priest or 'chief
priests', was involved in the persecution of the followers of Jesus. Sometimes the High Priest
alone is mentioned, sometimes the Sanhedrin is coupled with him, as if the two are inseparable.
But we see on two occasions cited in Acts that the High Priest was outvoted by the Pharisees in
the Sanhedrin; on both occasions, the Pharisees were opposing an attempt to persecute the
followers of Jesus; so the representation of High Priest and Sanhedrin as having identical aims
is one of the suspect features of these accounts.

It will be seen from the above collation of passages in the book of Acts concerning Paul's
background and early life, together with Paul's own references to his background in his
letters, that the same strong picture emerges: that Paul was at first a highly trained Pharisee
rabbi, learned in all the intricacies of the rabbinical commentaries on scripture and legal
traditions (afterwards collected in the rabbinical compilations, the Talmud and Midrash). As a
Pharisee, Paul was strongly opposed to the new sect which followed Jesus and which believed
that he had been resurrected after his crucifixion. So opposed was Paul to this sect that he
took violent action against it, dragging its adherents to prison. Though this strong picture
has emerged, some doubts have also arisen, which, so far, have only been lightly sketched in:
how is it, for example, that Paul claims to have voted against Christians on trial for their
lives before the Sanhedrin, when in fact, in the graphically described trial of Peter before
the Sanhedrin (Acts 5), the Pharisees, led by Gamaliel, voted for the release of Peter? What
kind of Pharisee was Paul, if he took an attitude towards the early Christians which, on the
evidence of the same book of Acts, was untypical of the Pharisees? And how is it that this book
of Acts is so inconsistent within itself that it describes Paul as violently opposed to
Christianity because of his deep attachment to Pharisaism, and yet also describes the Pharisees
as being friendly towards the early Christians, standing up for them and saving their lives?

It has been pointed out by many scholars that the book of Acts, on the whole, contains a
surprising amount of evidence favorable to the Pharisees, showing them to have been tolerant
and merciful. Some scholars have even argued that the book of Acts is a pro-Pharisee work; but
this can hardly be maintained. For, outweighing all the evidence favorable to the Pharisees is
the material relating to Paul, which is, in all its aspects, unfavorable to the Pharisees; not
only is Paul himself portrayed as being a virulent persecutor when he was a Pharisee, but Paul
declares that he himself was punished by flogging five times (II Corinthians 11:24) by the
'Jews' (usually taken to mean the Pharisees). So no one really comes away from reading Acts
with any good impression of the Pharisees, but rather with the negative impressions derived
from the Gospels reinforced.

Why, therefore, is Paul always so concerned to stress that he came from a Pharisee background?
A great many motives can be discerned, but there is one that needs to be singled out here: the
desire to stress the alleged continuity between Judaism and Pauline Christianity. Paul wishes
to say that whereas, when he was a Pharisee, he mistakenly regarded the early Christians as
heretics who had departed from true Judaism, after his conversion he took the opposite view,
that Christianity was the true Judaism. All his training as a Pharisee, he wishes to say -- all
his study of scripture and tradition -- really leads to the acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah
prophesied in the Old Testament. So when Paul declares his Pharisee past, he is not merely
proclaiming his own sins -- 'See how I have changed, from being a Pharisee persecutor to being
a devoted follower of Jesus!' -- he is also proclaiming his credentials -- 'If someone as
learned as I can believe that Jesus was the fulfilment of the Torah, who is there fearless
enough to disagree?'

On the face of it, Paul's doctrine of Jesus is a daring departure from Judaism. Paul was
advocating a doctrine that seemed to have far more in common with pagan myths than with
Judaism: that Jesus was a divine-human person who had descended to Earth from the heavens and
experienced death for the express purpose of saving mankind. The very fact that the Jews found
this doctrine new and shocking shows that it plays no role in the Jewish scripture, at least
not in any way easily discernible. Yet Paul was not content to say that his doctrine was new;
on the contrary, he wished to say that every line of the Jewish scripture was a foreshadowing
of the Jesus-event as he understood it, and that those who understood the scripture in any
other way were failing in comprehension of what Judaism had always been about. So his
insistence on his Pharisaic upbringing was part of his insistence on continuity.

There were those who accepted Paul's doctrine, but did regard it as a radical new departure,
with nothing in the Jewish scriptures foreshadowing it. The best known figure of this kind was
Marcion, who lived about a hundred years after Paul, and regarded Paul as his chief
inspiration. Yet Marcion refused to see anything Jewish in Paul's doctrine, but regarded it as
a new revelation. He regarded the Jewish scriptures as the work of the Devil and he excluded
the Old Testament from his version of the Bible.

Paul himself rejected this view. Though he regarded much of the Old Testament as obsolete,
superseded by the advent of Jesus, he still regarded it as the Word of God, prophesying the new
Christian Church and giving it authority. So his picture of himself as a Pharisee symbolizes
the continuity between the old dispensation and the new: a figure who comprised in his own
person the turning-point at which Judaism was transformed into Christianity.

Throughout the Christian centuries, there have been Christian scholars who have seen Paul's
claim to a Pharisee background in this light. In the medieval Disputations convened by
Christians to convert Jews, arguments were put forward purporting to show that not only the
Jewish scriptures but even the rabbinical writings, the Talmud and the Midrash, supported the
claims of Christianity that Jesus was the Messiah, that he was divine and that he had to suffer
death for mankind. Though Paul was not often mentioned in these Disputations, the project was
one of which he would have approved. In modern times, scholars have labored to argue that
Paul's doctrines about the Messiah and divine suffering are continuous with Judaism as it
appears in the Bible, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, and in the rabbinical writings (the
best-known effort of this nature is Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, by W.D. Davies).

So Paul's claim to expert Pharisee learning is relevant to a very important and central issue
-- whether Christianity, in the form given to it by Paul, is really continuous with Judaism or
whether it is a new doctrine, having no roots in Judaism, but deriving, in so far as it has an
historical background, from pagan myths of dying and resurrected gods and Gnostic myths of
heaven-descended redeemers. Did Paul truly stand in the Jewish tradition, or was he a person of
basically Hellenistic religious type, but seeking to give a coloring of Judaism to a salvation
cult that was really opposed to everything that Judaism stood for?

Chapter 2: The Standpoint of this Book

As against the conventional picture of Paul, outlined in the last chapter, the present book has
an entirely different and unfamiliar view to put forward. This view of Paul is not only
unfamiliar in itself, but it also involves many unfamiliar standpoints about other issues which
are relevant and indeed essential to a correct assessment of Paul; for example:

Who and what were the Pharisees? What were their religious and political views as opposed to
those of the Sadducees and other religious and political groups of the time? What was their
attitude to Jesus? What was their attitude towards the early Jerusalem Church?

Who and what was Jesus? Did he really see himself as a savior who had descended from heaven in
order to suffer crucifixion? Or did he have entirely different aims, more in accordance with
the Jewish thoughts and hopes of his time? Was the historical Jesus quite a different person
from the Jesus of Paul's ideology, based on Paul's visions and trances?

Who and what were the early Church of Jerusalem, the first followers of Jesus? Have their views
been correctly represented by the later Church? Did James and Peter, the leaders of the
Jerusalem Church, agree with Paul's views (as orthodox Christianity claims) or did they oppose
him bitterly, regarding him as a heretic and a betrayer of the aims of Jesus?

Who and what were the Ebionites, whose opinions and writings were suppressed by the orthodox
Church? Why did they denounce Paul? Why did they combine belief in Jesus with the practice of
Judaism?

Why did they believe in Jesus as Messiah, but not as God? Were they a later 'Judaizing' group,
or were they, as they claimed to be, the remnants of the authentic followers of Jesus, the
church of James and Peter?

The arguments in this book will inevitably become complicated, since every issue is bound up
with every other. It is impossible to answer any of the above questions without bringing all
the other questions into consideration. It is, therefore, convenient at this point to give an
outline of the standpoint to which all the arguments of this book converge. This is not an
attempt to prejudge the issue. The following summary of the findings of this book may seem
dogmatic at this stage, but it is intended merely as a guide to the ramifications of the
ensuing arguments and a bird's eye view of the book, and as such will stand or fall with the
cogency of the arguments themselves. The following, then, are the propositions argued in the
present book:

1. Paul was never a Pharisee rabbi, but was an adventurer of undistinguished background. He was
attached to the Sadducees, as a police officer under the authority of the High Priest, before
his conversion to belief in Jesus. His mastery of the kind of learning associated with the
Pharisees was not great. He deliberately misrepresented his own biography in order to increase
the effectiveness of missionary activities.

2. Jesus and his immediate followers were Pharisees. Jesus had no intention of founding a new
religion. He regarded himself as the Messiah in the normal Jewish sense of the term, i.e. a
human leader who would restore the Jewish monarchy, drive out the Roman invaders, set up an
independent Jewish state, and inaugurate an era of peace, justice and prosperity (known as 'the
kingdom of God,) for the whole world. Jesus believed himself to be the figure prophesied in the
Hebrew Bible who would do all these things. He was not a militarist and did not build up an
army to fight the Romans, since he believed that God would perform a great miracle to break the
power of Rome. This miracle would take place on the Mount of Olives, as prophesied in the book
of Zechariah. When this miracle did not occur, his mission had failed. He had no intention of
being crucified in order to save mankind from eternal damnation by his sacrifice. He never
regarded himself as a divine being, and would have regarded such an idea as pagan and
idolatrous, an infringement of the first of the Ten Commandments.

3. The first followers of Jesus, under James and Peter, founded the Jerusalem Church after
Jesus' death. They were called the Nazarenes, and in all their beliefs they were
indistinguishable from the Pharisees, except that they believed in the resurrection of Jesus,
and that Jesus was still the promised Messiah. They did not believe that Jesus was a divine
person, but that, by a miracle from God, he had been brought back to life after his death on
the cross, and would soon come back to complete his mission of overthrowing the Romans and
setting up the Messianic kingdom. The Nazarenes did not believe that Jesus had abrogated the
Jewish religion, or Torah. Having known Jesus personally, they were aware that he had observed
the Jewish religious law all his life and had never rebelled against it. His sabbath cures were
not against Pharisee law. The Nazarenes were themselves very observant of Jewish religious law.
They practiced circumcision, did not eat the forbidden foods and showed great respect to the
Temple. The Nazarenes did not regard themselves as belonging to a new religion; their religion
was Judaism. They set up synagogues of their own, but they also attended non-Nazarene
synagogues on occasion, and performed the same kind of worship in their own synagogues as was
practiced by all observant Jews. The Nazarenes became suspicious of Paul when they heard that
he was preaching that Jesus was the founder of a new religion and that he had abrogated the
Torah. After an attempt to reach an understanding with Paul, the Nazarenes (i.e. the Jerusalem
Church under James and Peter) broke irrevocably with Paul and disowned him.

4. Paul, not Jesus, was the founder of Christianity as a new religion which developed away from
both normal Judaism and the Nazarene variety of Judaism. In this new religion, the Torah was
abrogated as having had only temporary validity. The central myth of the new religion was that
of an atoning death of a divine being. Belief in this sacrifice, and a mystical sharing of the
death of the deity, formed the only path to salvation. Paul derived this religion from
Hellenistic sources, chiefly by a fusion of concepts taken from Gnosticism and concepts taken
from the mystery religions, particularly from that of Attis. The combination of these elements
with features derived from Judaism, particularly the incorporation of the Jewish scriptures,
reinterpreted to provide a background of sacred history for the new myth, was unique; and Paul
alone was the creator of this amalgam. Jesus himself had no idea of it, and would have been
amazed and shocked at the role assigned to him by Paul as a suffering deity. Nor did Paul have
any predecessors among the Nazarenes though later mythography tried to assign this role to
Stephen, and modern scholars have discovered equally mythical predecessors for Paul in a group
called the 'Hellenists'. Paul, as the personal begetter of the Christian myth, has never been
given sufficient credit for his originality. The reverence paid through the centuries to the
great Saint Paul has quite obscured the more colorful features of his personality. Like many
evangelical leaders, he was a compound of sincerity and charlatanry. Evangelical leaders of his
kind were common at this time in the Greco-Roman world (e.g. Simon Magus, Apollonius of Tyana).

5. A source of information about Paul that has never been taken seriously enough is a group
called the Ebionites. Their writings were suppressed by the Church, but some of their views and
traditions were preserved in the writings of their opponents, particularly in the huge treatise
on Heresies by Epiphanius. From this it appears that the Ebionites had a very different account
to give of Paul's background and early life from that found in the New Testament and fostered
by Paul himself. The Ebionites testified that Paul had no Pharisaic background or training; he
was the son of Gentiles, converted to Judaism in Tarsus, came to Jerusalem when an adult, and
attached himself to the High Priest as a henchman. Disappointed in his hopes of advancement, he
broke with the High Priest and sought fame by founding a new religion. This account, while not
reliable in all its details, is substantially correct. It makes far more sense of all the
puzzling and contradictory features of the story of Paul than the account of the official
documents of the Church.

6. The Ebionites were stigmatized by the Church as heretics who failed to understand that Jesus
was a divine person and asserted instead that he was a human being who came to inaugurate a new
earthly age, as prophesied by the Jewish prophets of the Bible. Moreover, the Ebionites refused
to accept the Church doctrine, derived from Paul, that Jesus abolished or abrogated the Torah,
the Jewish law. Instead, the Ebionites observed the Jewish law and regarded themselves as Jews.
The Ebionites were not heretics, as the Church asserted, nor 're-Judaizers', as modern scholars
call them, but the authentic successors of the immediate disciples and followers of Jesus,
whose views and doctrines they faithfully transmitted, believing correctly that they were
derived from Jesus himself. They were the same group that had earlier been called the
Nazarenes, who were led by James and Peter, who had known Jesus during his lifetime, and were
in a far better position to know his aims than Paul, who met Jesus only in dreams and visions.
Thus the opinion held by the Ebionites about Paul is of extraordinary interest and deserves
respectful consideration, instead of dismissal as 'scurrilous' propaganda -- the reaction of
Christian scholars from ancient to modern times.

The above conspectus brings into sharper relief our question, was Paul a Pharisee? It will be
seen that this is not merely a matter of biography or idle curiosity. It is bound up with the
whole question of the origins of Christianity. A tremendous amount depends on this question,
for, if Paul was not a Pharisee rooted in Jewish learning and tradition, but instead a
Hellenistic adventurer whose acquaintance with Judaism was recent and shallow, the construction
of myth and theology which he elaborated in his letters becomes a very different thing. Instead
of searching through his system for signs of continuity with Judaism, we shall be able to
recognize it for what it is -- a brilliant concoction of Hellenism, superficially connecting
itself with the Jewish scriptures and tradition, by which it seeks to give itself a history and
an air of authority.

Christian attitudes towards the Pharisees and thus towards the picture of Paul as a Pharisee
have always been strikingly ambivalent. In the Gospels, the Pharisees are attacked as
hypocrites and would-be murderers: yet the Gospels also convey an impression of the Pharisees
as figures of immense authority and dignity. This ambivalence reflects the attitude of
Christianity to Judaism itself; on the one hand, an allegedly outdated ritualism, but on the
other, a panorama of awesome history, a source of authority and blessing, so that at all costs
the Church must display itself as the new Israel, the true Judaism. Thus Paul, as Pharisee, is
the subject of alternating attitudes. In the nineteenth century, when Jesus was regarded (by
Renan, for example) as a Romantic liberal, rebelling against the authoritarianism of Pharisaic
Judaism, Paul was deprecated as a typical Pharisee, enveloping the sweet simplicity of Jesus in
clouds of theology and difficult formulations. In the twentieth century, when the concern is
more to discover the essential Jewishness of Christianity, the Pharisee aspect of Paul is used
to connect Pauline doctrines with the rabbinical writings -- again Paul is regarded as never
losing his essential Pharisaism, but this is now viewed as good, and as a means of rescuing
Christianity from isolation from Judaism. To be Jewish and yet not to be Jewish, this is the
essential dilemma of Christianity, and the figure of Paul, abjuring his alleged Pharisaism as a
hindrance to salvation and yet somehow clinging to it as a guarantee of authority, is symbolic.
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