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The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity
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Average Rating:  out of 52 Reviews
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Manufacturer: HarperCollins
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EAN (European Article Number): 9780062505859
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Paperback
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Author: Hyam Maccoby
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Publisher: HarperCollins
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Dewey Decimal Number: 225.924
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Publication Date: 1987-10
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Description: It is true. Most of the conclusions this book offers about the origins of the "Jerusalem Church," the Roman Christian Church and Paul of Tarsus, are actually intuitive assumptions and speculations based upon circumstantial evidence and hearsay. Hyam Maccoby's case would therefore be thrown out of court, or dismissed by any other professional fact-finding panel.
This is the argument usually resorted to by Maccoby's critics and, as a matter of fact, they're quite right. His book actually "proves" nothing. However, this argument fails simply because the same can be said for any book written about the origins of the Christian faith, regardless of its author's purpose.
How pleasant it must be for fundamentalists who understand the Holy Bible as the literal and unquestionable word of God, given to us through inspired writers. Everyone else has to struggle with faith, drawing conclusions by reading between lines and parsing obscure passages originally written in the archaic vernacular and unfamiliar language of some ancient culture. Jesus, as far as we know, never wrote anything. Neither did anyone else, for the most part - no newspapers, magazines or books, not much in the way of carefully documented and archived official records. Therefore, the only research materials available are the scant offerings of people who usually wrote for a targeted audience, and without the journalistic or secretarial scruples we now understand as appropriate to such efforts. We therefore do Bible studies, peruse Bible commentaries, and read books like this one, attempting to figure out what we believe and why, never finding any truth, because there is none to find.
Most of us are persuaded by the religion of our birth; I am no exception. As Christian children, we are taught the fundamentals. I was no exception to that either. While fundamentalism suffices for children, increasing age and experience is likely to bring a decreasing willingness to accept the nebulous and obscure explanations traditionally offered for various aspects of our faith. Frankly, I began to think that some of it, including even the sacraments, was poppycock - hocus-pocus that Jesus himself might have found strange, irrelevant and/or inappropriate.
I admit that I was therefore favorably disposed towards Maccoby's book from the very beginning. In it, I found confirmation of my surmise that what we call "Christianity" is really based more upon what Paul thought than what Jesus taught. Whatever else he was, Hyam Maccoby was a highly respected scholar with impressive credentials. His intuitive assumptions and speculations therefore cannot be dismissed out of hand as the work of some charlatan, religious kook or bitter Jew. Furthermore, his explanations and ideas seem quite plausible in light of our understandings of human nature, politics, and the way things usually work out in the real world.
In this respect, Maccoby is a problem only for bible-believing fundamentalists and mainline churches intent on rigidly adhering to sixteenth century theology. A thoughtful reader is likely to finish the book wondering if the time has come for another reformation, this time to sort out the Paul vs. Jesus questions, towards developing a faith that makes sense to intelligent, thinking adults. Ideas that cannot stand this kind of review are not worth holding on to, since they are bound to fail us in times of trials and troubles. To this extent, Maccoby's work is of great value to serious Christians.
The express purpose of this book, however, is not to defame Paul of Tarsus or debunk the Christian faith, but to show how and why Paul's invention created anti-Semitism, vaguely hinting that Christian anti-Semitism was ultimately responsible for the holocaust. It is not his first attempt. In other works, he dances around the same accusation, without ever coming right out with it.
I do not buy Maccoby's "Christ-killers" explanation for anti-Semitism. By kicking that dead horse, I'd say he exhibits a very poor understanding of what practical Christians really think about. My religious upbringing taught that some Jewish higher-ups in Jerusalem were complicit with the Roman government in an affair that was otherwise mainly political and Roman. We were more apt to attribute that complicity to the usual corruption of people in high places, rather than to Judaism as a whole. Having said that, I must also admit that one of the things I have always found somewhat confusing is that while Christians are taught to revere the Old Testament's Israel as the foundation of our faith, the New Testament's Jews seem to somehow become the bad guys.
After reading Maccoby's arguments, I am willing to consider the possibility that a generally negative attitude, which I am not sure rises to the level of anti-Semitism, arises from the various defamatory comments about the Jews, which appear here and there in the New Testament. Maccoby lays the direct or indirect responsibility for these on Paul's doorstep. To that extent, his assertions seem to have merit.
However, I cannot remember ever encountering anyone, even among the most zealous radicals, who found in any of that reason enough for Christians to hate Jews. Like everyone else, I learned about what had happened to European Jews at the hands of the Nazis shortly after World War II ended, but I never heard of "anti-Semitism" until age fifteen, when a traveling lecturer speaking at a school assembly explained the meaning of the word "restricted," as used on signs in front of real estate developments.
Through common sense, practical people understand that there are always two sides to every story. For the case in point, it seems obvious that any group seeming to have a "better than thou" attitude is likely to encounter some backlash. Claiming a preferential status in the eyes of God, a reluctance to socialize outside their particular faith or ethnic group, discouraging offspring from marrying "outsiders", being quick to remind others of their particular faith or ethnicity whatever the occasion, and maintaining an allegiance to a country and culture other than the one they are sharing with their present countrymen - these are good ways to distance one's self from others.
This is not "anti" anything. It is, for better or for worse, just human nature. During my life, where I live, I have seen the same negative attitude arise with respect to others, and for the same reasons: the Christian Reformed Dutch ("Holanders"), the Catholic Polish ("Polacks") and the Catholic Bohemians ("Bo-hunks"). This accompanied the arrival of nineteenth century immigrants, lasted for a generation or two, after which the ethnic and religious differences giving rise to these feelings faded away, and the discriminatory feelings were gradually forgotten.
Maccoby does not address this reality at all. In view of that, one can only conclude that his opinion was that the sole source of anti-Semitism was Paul and the Christian religion he "invented." That, unfortunately, discredits the quality of his thinking by revealing as underlying bias.
Were it not for this, I would give this work a five-star rating. As it is, I give it a one-star rating for Jewish readers, since its premise is mostly invalid, and it probably will not otherwise teach them anything they do not already know.
For Christian readers, however, I think it merits at least a four-star rating, the above notwithstanding - the reason being that the book includes a lot of historical and other background information that has significant value as part of a well-rounded program of religious study and spiritual growth.
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Customer Reviews
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Review Summary: Interesting and informative |
Date: 2009-01-03 |
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Details: This is by far the best book I've ever read about Paul. Maccoby dissects every aspect of early Christianity to come to his own conclusions about who was Paul (and, by extension, who was Jesus). His analysis is spot on and his reasoning is impeccable. He amply illustrates his thesis with examples from diverse texts.
There are a few problems with his analysis that I should like to mention. For one, he excludes the idea that a lot of the material about Paul or by Paul is pure fiction. Maccoby seems determined to examine every possible alternative hypothesis (e.g., Paul was a Pharisee but a bad one, Paul wasn't a Pharisee but wanted to be one, Paul became a Pharisee but was disillusioned, etc.) except the idea that some of the material is simply made up.
Another problem is that Maccoby doesn't apply to the story of Jesus the same type of analysis he uses on Paul. Using the gospel account of Jesus as a foundation stone gives us a very slippery foundation indeed, so that the attempts to match up his analysis of Paul sometimes falls short. Of course, this is a short book so perhaps such an analysis was not possible in the space.
Then there is the occasional comment that appears to be unsupported. For example, on page 115 he claims "His (the author of the Gospel of John) omission of the topic from the Last Supper must mean that he was unacquainted with the Epsitle of Paul in which the topic was attached..." Given that most people date John into the 2nd Century and Paul in the mid 1st Century, it's unlikely that the author(s) were unfamiliar with Paul's work.
On page 120 Maccoby says - "...the Gospels say quite distinctly that Jesus founded a Church." I'm not sure which gospels he's referring to, but it's not the gospels I'm familiar with. The one comment in Matthew about Peter is (1) a late addition and (2) says nothing about Jesus starting a new church. Indeed, Jesus is by all accounts, trying to reform the existing religion rather than create a new one. This issue also highlghts another annoying aspect to Maccoby's text - he is continually talking about "the gospels" as if they presented a unified position. They do not! In fact, they can be downriught contradictory. More precision in his references to particular gospels would be helpful.
These few negative comments aside, this is a great book, and certainly the best book ever done about Paul (Amazon insists on a 5 point scale so I've given it a 5 because of all its excellent points, but on a 10 point scale it would only rate a 9 due to the errors I've identified). Beginning and advanced readers will all benefit from it. |
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Review Summary: Maccoby the Mythmaker |
Date: 2008-11-25 |
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Details: There are a few interesting points made in this book regarding the earliest beliefs Jesus and his followers shared regarding his messianic mission while he was alive. However, in regard to Paul it is very biased. The author is arrogant enough to believe that because he is a Jewish scholar, he can tell us what is authentic in the New Testament. Based on his own prejudices, he gets to pick and choose what is authentic in the New Testament which, of course, conform to his own theories. This is not honest scholarship. Other Jewish scholars such as Alan Segal, Daniel Boyarin, and Samuel Sandmel, have tried to understand Paul as a fellow Jew. Maccoby does not.
Maccoby uses the Talmud and Rabbinic Judaism to define Jesus. He assumes that Rabbinic Judaism is the direct heir of the first century Pharisees. Other Jewish scholars like Boyarin and Segal claim that neither the Talmud nor Rabbinic Judaism are necessarily linked to the Pharisees and that this is a false assumption. Jesus cannot be thought of as a modern Rabbinic Jew.
According to Maccoby, the conflicts between Jesus and the Pharisees were retroactively placed into the gospels by Pauline Christians. I won't deny that some Pharisees were sympathetic to Jesus and the apostles, but Maccoby wants us to believe that the Pharisees had no problem with Jesus' messianic claims, his prediction that the Temple would be destroyed, and the apostles claiming that Jesus had ascended to the right hand of God. I guess Jesus reading himself into a messianic prophecy of Isaiah in a synagogue would be perfectly acceptable to the other rabbis. This is like saying a Southern Baptist preacher reading himself into Revelation as the second coming of Christ would be perfectly acceptable to his congregation.
Maccoby assumes that everything in the gospels which don't conform to his own views were influenced by Paul. He shows his contempt for the New Testament by calling it "the scripture of Paulinism".
Maccoby claims that the book of Acts covers up the enmity between Paul and the Jerusalem apostles by saying that the unity between Paul and the Jerusalem Nazarenes in Acts is a sham. According to Maccoby, after James sends Paul to the Temple to carry out a vow, the Asian Jews who wanted to capture Paul were really Jewish Christians. If that were the case, James either deliberately double-crossed Paul or he didn't have control over his own people. Maccoby edits the book of Acts for himself to make it conform to his own agenda, that Paul was the enemy of the Nazarenes.
Maccoby resorts to slanderous accusations by suggesting that Paul embezzled the offering he brought to Jerusalem to buy his Roman citizenship and to bribe the Roman governor in order to save himself. Of course, Paul's admission of being a Roman citizen by birth had to be fabricated by Luke to cover that up.
Maccoby claims that Pauline Christian doctrine was fitted from the start to become the official religion of the Roman Empire. WHAT A SPIN!!! Let's skip over Paul's martyrdom by Romans and the 200 plus years of brutal persecution of "Pauline Christians" in the Roman Empire. Maccoby denies tha Paul was martyred in Rome and suggests that he lived to a ripe old age building up the gentile church. DURING THE REIGN OF NERO? YEAH RIGHT!!!
Maccoby uses the evidence of the Ebionites and the Pseudo-Clementine writings as witnesses against Paul. Apparently the earliest writings regarding the Nazarenes, who accepted Paul, were edited and the Ebionites were the real heirs of the Jerusalem apostles which is another false assumption. Maccoby claims that the second century fables known as the Pseudo-Clementines show strict adherence to the Torah. He obviously hasn't read the part that says the Torah was falsified by the sacrificial laws.
Maccoby then presents us with another important witness against Paul, a 10th century Arabic manuscript found by Israeli scholar Shlomo Pines which allegedly axhibits the views of a 5th century Jewish Christian community in Syria that talks of Jesus as a prophet (sounds an awful lot like the Koran) and that Paul abandoned the Torah to obtain the backing of Rome and achieve power and status for himself. OH PLEASE!!! I'm sure Paul, who was in chains awaiting his execution in Rome, after being beaten and flogged on numerous occasions by Romans, did it all to achieve power and influence among the Romans. Apparently, a 10th century Arabic manuscript carries more weight than the New Testament and the second century writings of the Apostolic Fathers.
In summation, Paul is a tormented self-seeking adventurer who failed as a Pharisee and who, through guile, set up a form of religion that was his own creation which was derived from pagan mystery cults. Paul was the greatest fantasist of all who was the originator of Christian anti-Semitism and the gospels were tainted by his ideas.
To make sense of this we have to believe that Paul could foresee himself and his writings being canonized by a Roman church hundreds of years after his death and that somehow he led a life of luxury being wined and dined by the Romans during his travels. We also have to deny his own admission that he encouraged his converts to collect tithes for the "saints in Jerusalem", made a dangerous journey to deliver it, and placed himself at the mercy of James and the other apostles while he was there. We also have to disregard the earliest evidence of the Nazarenes (see Ray Pritz's Nazarene Jewish Christianity) who accepted Paul as an apostle, who disparaged the sages in their own writings, and were cursed as heretics in the synagogues because they refused to accept rabbinic authority and the oral law.
In his biased attempt to debunk the myth of "Pauline" Christianity, Maccoby himself has become the mythmaker. |
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Review Summary: Paul's "Christ crucified" motif an add-on to the historic Jesus. |
Date: 2008-11-18 |
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Details: I've heard Hyam Maccoby refered to as a "kook" by certain Evangelical Christians, but I truly believe most of what Maccoby has to say makes a lot of sense. [...] Paul himself said he desired to be "all things to all people", and so why not tell Gentiles about the Mysteries of Christ Crucified, since these Gentiles were used to Mystery Religions, not Jweish Messiahs?
It always made me wonder that the original Jerusalem followers of Christ were called Judaizers. Jesus was, in fact, a practicing 1st Century CE Palestinian Jew. His disciples were all Jews like him. Some fundamentalist Evangelical Christians would like you to believe that Jesus was teaching his disciples to break the 7th Day Sabbath, and etc. However, when it comes time to share the Gospel with Gentiles in the book of Acts, why does Peter declare that he as always obeyed the Law?
The fact is, if one has always practiced Judaism, even after becoming a follower of Jesus, they cannot be a "Judaizer". These disciples did not go back to Judaism. They had never left in the first place! Thus, in the 2nd century, when Gentile Christians desired to find the original Christians in Palestine, they found Christians who practiced Judaism. This was not the Gospel as preached by Paul, so these original followers of Jesus must certainly be heretics and Judaizers, correct?
Certainly, Maccoby makes assumptions, but the are logical ones. The book is worth reading and the theory worth considering. I also recommend reading "The Brother of Jesus and the Lost Teachings of Christianity by Jeffrey J Butz afterwards.
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Review Summary: Forensic? No! Thought-provoking? Yes! |
Date: 2008-04-02 |
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Details: *Paul was not an ethnic Jew, but rather a convert.
*Paul was not a Pharisee; he impersonated that role.
*Paul and Peter were not co-workers but rivals and perhaps enemies.
*James the brother of Jesus was the key figure in Jewish Christianity and therefore in the first great schism of the Christian cults.
*Paul was the true founder of what "we" consider Christianity.
Those are my five stars for this provocative but very well reasoned examination of Paul, based on "evidence" drawn from the wiles and files of rabbinical wisdom. They're intended as teasers, to get you interested in reading Maccoby. Any correlation between them and my own opinions is purely insignificant.
Postscript: I should add that it's content rather than style that makes this book worth reading. |
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Review Summary: Case Dismissed for Lack of Evidence |
Date: 2007-11-10 |
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Details: It is true. Most of the conclusions this book offers about the origins of the "Jerusalem Church," the Roman Christian Church and Paul of Tarsus, are actually intuitive assumptions and speculations based upon circumstantial evidence and hearsay. Hyam Maccoby's case would therefore be thrown out of court, or dismissed by any other professional fact-finding panel.
This is the argument usually resorted to by Maccoby's critics and, as a matter of fact, they're quite right. His book actually "proves" nothing. However, this argument fails simply because the same can be said for any book written about the origins of the Christian faith, regardless of its author's purpose.
How pleasant it must be for fundamentalists who understand the Holy Bible as the literal and unquestionable word of God, given to us through inspired writers. Everyone else has to struggle with faith, drawing conclusions by reading between lines and parsing obscure passages originally written in the archaic vernacular and unfamiliar language of some ancient culture. Jesus, as far as we know, never wrote anything. Neither did anyone else, for the most part - no newspapers, magazines or books, not much in the way of carefully documented and archived official records. Therefore, the only research materials available are the scant offerings of people who usually wrote for a targeted audience, and without the journalistic or secretarial scruples we now understand as appropriate to such efforts. We therefore do Bible studies, peruse Bible commentaries, and read books like this one, attempting to figure out what we believe and why, never finding any truth, because there is none to find.
Most of us are persuaded by the religion of our birth; I am no exception. As Christian children, we are taught the fundamentals. I was no exception to that either. While fundamentalism suffices for children, increasing age and experience is likely to bring a decreasing willingness to accept the nebulous and obscure explanations traditionally offered for various aspects of our faith. Frankly, I began to think that some of it, including even the sacraments, was poppycock - hocus-pocus that Jesus himself might have found strange, irrelevant and/or inappropriate.
I admit that I was therefore favorably disposed towards Maccoby's book from the very beginning. In it, I found confirmation of my surmise that what we call "Christianity" is really based more upon what Paul thought than what Jesus taught. Whatever else he was, Hyam Maccoby was a highly respected scholar with impressive credentials. His intuitive assumptions and speculations therefore cannot be dismissed out of hand as the work of some charlatan, religious kook or bitter Jew. Furthermore, his explanations and ideas seem quite plausible in light of our understandings of human nature, politics, and the way things usually work out in the real world.
In this respect, Maccoby is a problem only for bible-believing fundamentalists and mainline churches intent on rigidly adhering to sixteenth century theology. A thoughtful reader is likely to finish the book wondering if the time has come for another reformation, this time to sort out the Paul vs. Jesus questions, towards developing a faith that makes sense to intelligent, thinking adults. Ideas that cannot stand this kind of review are not worth holding on to, since they are bound to fail us in times of trials and troubles. To this extent, Maccoby's work is of great value to serious Christians.
The express purpose of this book, however, is not to defame Paul of Tarsus or debunk the Christian faith, but to show how and why Paul's invention created anti-Semitism, vaguely hinting that Christian anti-Semitism was ultimately responsible for the holocaust. It is not his first attempt. In other works, he dances around the same accusation, without ever coming right out with it.
I do not buy Maccoby's "Christ-killers" explanation for anti-Semitism. By kicking that dead horse, I'd say he exhibits a very poor understanding of what practical Christians really think about. My religious upbringing taught that some Jewish higher-ups in Jerusalem were complicit with the Roman government in an affair that was otherwise mainly political and Roman. We were more apt to attribute that complicity to the usual corruption of people in high places, rather than to Judaism as a whole. Having said that, I must also admit that one of the things I have always found somewhat confusing is that while Christians are taught to revere the Old Testament's Israel as the foundation of our faith, the New Testament's Jews seem to somehow become the bad guys.
After reading Maccoby's arguments, I am willing to consider the possibility that a generally negative attitude, which I am not sure rises to the level of anti-Semitism, arises from the various defamatory comments about the Jews, which appear here and there in the New Testament. Maccoby lays the direct or indirect responsibility for these on Paul's doorstep. To that extent, his assertions seem to have merit.
However, I cannot remember ever encountering anyone, even among the most zealous radicals, who found in any of that reason enough for Christians to hate Jews. Like everyone else, I learned about what had happened to European Jews at the hands of the Nazis shortly after World War II ended, but I never heard of "anti-Semitism" until age fifteen, when a traveling lecturer speaking at a school assembly explained the meaning of the word "restricted," as used on signs in front of real estate developments.
Through common sense, practical people understand that there are always two sides to every story. For the case in point, it seems obvious that any group seeming to have a "better than thou" attitude is likely to encounter some backlash. Claiming a preferential status in the eyes of God, a reluctance to socialize outside their particular faith or ethnic group, discouraging offspring from marrying "outsiders", being quick to remind others of their particular faith or ethnicity whatever the occasion, and maintaining an allegiance to a country and culture other than the one they are sharing with their present countrymen - these are good ways to distance one's self from others.
This is not "anti" anything. It is, for better or for worse, just human nature. During my life, where I live, I have seen the same negative attitude arise with respect to others, and for the same reasons: the Christian Reformed Dutch ("Holanders"), the Catholic Polish ("Polacks") and the Catholic Bohemians ("Bo-hunks"). This accompanied the arrival of nineteenth century immigrants, lasted for a generation or two, after which the ethnic and religious differences giving rise to these feelings faded away, and the discriminatory feelings were gradually forgotten.
Maccoby does not address this reality at all. In view of that, one can only conclude that his opinion was that the sole source of anti-Semitism was Paul and the Christian religion he "invented." That, unfortunately, discredits the quality of his thinking by revealing as underlying bias.
Were it not for this, I would give this work a five-star rating. As it is, I give it a one-star rating for Jewish readers, since its premise is mostly invalid, and it probably will not otherwise teach them anything they do not already know.
For Christian readers, however, I think it merits at least a four-star rating, the above notwithstanding - the reason being that the book includes a lot of historical and other background information that has significant value as part of a well-rounded program of religious study and spiritual growth.
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