Study of Hyam Maccoby’s The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, Chapter 7, Alleged Rabbinical Style in Paul’s Epistles

Maccoby makes the claim that Paul’s elevation of Jesus to divine status was for the Pharisees a “reversion to paganism” (62). 

The Jews saw their own anointed kings as humans. 

We read, “The religious outlook of Paul’s letters was thus shocking to Jews, but familiar to non-Jewish members of the Hellenistic culture” (63).

In this chapter, Maccoby argues that Paul’s uses sloppy syllogisms in his argumentation that does not reflect Pharisee training (64). 

In HM’s eyes, Paul is a hack using fraudulent, botched Pharisaic logic to appear to be a Pharisee scholar (68). 

In this regard, Paul is less a theologian and more of a “mythogogue,” a mythmaker.