Leaving Anhedonia

Reading James Tabor's Paul and Jesus, Part 1, "Paul Never Met Jesus"

Tabor wants to explore how Paul, who never met Jesus, could be such a dominant force in Christianity. Paul claims to have had out of body experiences and personal revelation of Jesus, making him the number one apostle. He also boasts of working harder than the others (3). He also has “far superior” commiseration with Christ (4) and wants to be known as Number One. 

There was a “Christianity before Paul” and one after (2). The Pauline version is a corruption of the Jesus version. 

Like Hyam Maccoby in The Mythmaker, Tabor argues that Paul had a “bitter break” with original Jesus movement and essentially invented Christianity. He did this through a “literary victory, reinforced by an emerging theological orthodoxy back by Roman political power after the time of the emperor Constantine” (7). 

Tabor argues that the “literary victory” is based on three things:

One, gospel of Mark is Pauline in theology.

Two, Luke-Acts expands Mark’s story and Pauline theology.

Three, “six later letters written in Paul’s name” “muted” his radical message and “pleased the church” (7).

Tabor calls Acts “the master narrative,” which he hints is deceptive because the author wants to be anonymous and make the document appear older than it is (7). 

The date of Acts could be 90 A.D. or even “well into the second century A.D.” (8). 

Such a manuscript should not be taken as history but as propaganda. For one, there is a “deliberate obscuring of the original Christianity before Paul” (9), a claim similar to Maccoby’s. 

Paul’s claim at being the number one apostle is reinforced when he says he was chosen, “unlike the other apostles, before he was even born--while still in his mother’s womb” (18). Paul is a “second Christ” commissioned to spread the gospel throughout the world (18). 

Paul’s rift with the others is indicated in his letters: “I am not the least inferior to these super-apostles,” whom he calls “false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ” (2 Corinthians 11:5, 13). 

That Paul is referring to the apostles and not unnamed Jews is Tabor’s claim (19). 

Tabor claims that pre-Paul Christians did not see Jesus as divine or as a “Dying-and-Rising Savior” (25). The James of the early Christians is “suppressed” and in effect canceled out (30). James argues for works and faith whereas Paul emphasizes the latter. 

Study of Hyam Maccoby’s The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, Chapter 13, The Split & Chapter 14, The Trial of Paul

I notice that books favorable to Paul (N.T. Wright) have cover art with him looking like romantic poet or heroic warrior; unfavorable books (Gerd Ludemann) have him look like a troll. Propaganda begins with the cover. 

In Chapter 13, HM argues that the author of Acts uses fiction and re-editing to great effect: He minimizes conflict between Paul and the other apostles, he washes over Paul’s invention of Christianity, “and instead gave it a respectable pedigree” (139). 

Maccoby paints Paul as a sniveling coward, someone who uses “subterfuge” and is not a martyr but a “survivor” (167), someone who shapes truth to whatever ends he has in the moment. At times, his portrait of a caricature, and his cowardly pomp at times brought to mind the actor Jonathan Harris playing the villain Dr. Zachary Smith in Lost in Space. 

Study of Hyam Maccoby’s The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, Chapter 10, Damascus and After

So far, Maccoby has painted Christianity as a fraud, the creation of a frustrated “adventurer” and “mythogogue” who with other writers has written a work of fiction and propaganda that demonizes the Jews as an evil force that kills the Christian savior. 

HM observes that Christianity exists separate from Judaism because of Paul’s revelations. This is the key. 

After Damascus, does Paul create a new religion or is he a convert to one already established? HM argues the former (105).

Acts, written 40 years after the events described, writes of Paul has having converted. 

Maccoby observes this bombshell, so to speak: “His ‘revelation’ is thus more than a revelation: it is a transformation and a deification of Paul himself as the supreme manifestation of the phenomenon of impregnation by God” (106). 

Paul becomes the ultimate “mystagogue” of his age (107). 

My struggle with The Mythmaker comprises of these questions: How much speculation is used to arrive at conclusions? How much conspiracy thinking informs Maccoby's narrative? 

How can we know Paul relied on mystery cults, and not the Old Testament itself, for the notion of salvation and sacrifice? 

Does one's cognitive bias affect one's willingness to accept Maccoby's points as credible?

The struggle to find the truth about Paul continues. 

Study of Hyam Maccoby’s The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, Chapter 3, The Pharisees

One of the most compelling themes throughout The Mythmaker is how New Testament writers, foremost Paul, demonized the Jews to make a new religion. Part of this demonization is a brutal and twisted portrayal of the Pharisees who are shown to be “the chief opponents of Jesus” and plotters to kill him. That the Pharisees are unfairly demonized in the NT speaks to how the Pharisees have been a stand-in for Jews in general, and this misrepresentation has contributed to anti-Antisemitism. 

Maccoby and others call this portrayal of the Pharisees propaganda. Pharisees were not severe and hateful biblical literalists; rather, they were “creative” and more benevolent than the NT would have us believe.

They were also tolerant of disagreement and resolved disagreements with majority vote (21).

In spite of their usual tolerance, they did have enmity with the Sadducees, especially their disagreement over the Oral Law, rejected by the Sadducees. Because of this rejection, the Pharisees considered them to be heretics. 

Maccoby paints the Pharisees as more democratic and taking wisdom from all economic classes and believing in “universal education” whereas the Sadducees are more rigidly focused on three things: “the Bible, the Temple, and the priesthood.” As such, the Sadducees were more elitist. They “regarded themselves as defending the status quo against the innovations of the Pharisees.”

We also read that during Jesus’ time, the High Priesthood was corrupt but not held in high regard by the Pharisees who saw the Priesthood as an insignificant part of their theology (27). 

Maccoby ends the chapter by stating that in Chapter 4, he will argue that the NT misrepresents history and the Pharisees in this regard: “In particular, a flood of light can be thrown on the New Testament story by bearing in mind the deep antagonism between the Pharisee movement and the High Priest of that period, not only a Sadducee, but an appointee of the Romans and a quisling collaborator with the Roman power.” 

 

Study of Hyam Maccoby’s The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, Chapter 2, The Standpoint of This Book

In Chapter 2, Maccoby wants to outline his objectives: explore the role of the Pharisees in the time of Jesus; he wants to contrast Jesus the Jewish Messiah with Paul’s notion of Jesus the Christ; he wants to contrast the early Church of Jerusalem with Pauline doctrine; he wants to explore the Ebionites and their antagonism toward Paul. 

He further outlines six propositions that are the grounds for his claim that Paul is a charlatan who created an anti-Semitic cult. 

Proposition One: Paul was not a Pharisee rabbi, “but an adventurer of undistinguished background” in search of a lofty status. He “deliberately misrepresented his own biography in order to increase the effectiveness of his missionary activities.” 

Proposition Two: Jesus and his followers, unlike Paul, were true Pharisees. They did not wish to create a new religion. This was Paul’s plan. 

Proposition Three: James and Peter were Nazarenes, and they held Pharisee beliefs, “except that they believed in the resurrection of Jesus in the purpose of fulfilling the Torah, not violating it. The Nazarenes and Paul had a rift, and Paul, so to speak, won. 

Proposition Four: Paul was the creator of Christianity by abolishing the Torah. Paul’s religion was a synthesis of Greek mystery cults, Gnosticism, and Judaism. 

Proposition Five: The Ebionites have valuable information about Paul that contradicts what we know about him in the New Testament. The Ebionates “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.”

Proposition Six: The church marginalized the Ebionites as heretics when in fact they are “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.”

My thoughts are this: We can side with orthodox Christianity or Maccoby and find reasons to support our position, but in the end, we are dealing with speculations and faith in our speculations to prop a worldview, which is a reflection of our values. 

If we see Christianity as an anti-Semitic force that appropriates Judaism for its dominance, as Maccoby does, then we will be sympathetic to Maccoby’s analysis and speculations. 

Study of Hyam Maccoby’s The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, Chapter 1, The Problem of Paul

I keep coming back to Hyam Maccoby’s The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity. For those of us with cognitive bias who cherry pick evidence to conform to our prejudices against the offputting, self-aggrandizing Paul, we have come to the right place in The Mythmaker. A Talmudic scholar, Maccoby sees Paul as an ambitious “adventurer” and “mythogogue” who appropriated Judaism, lied about his alleged Pharisee background, perverted the teachings of Jesus, synthesized Hellensistic religions, Gnosticism, and Judaism for his own personal designs, which he packaged for Rome, and is the inventor of the most widespread, virulent anti-Semitism in recorded history. 

If anyone has a visceral or intuitive dislike of Paul, they will have found a friend in Hyam Maccoby. 

But when a writer develops a narrative that confirms our prejudices, we have to step back and see if the evidence holds up to scrutiny. Is there manipulation being used? Overblown speculation? Unfounded bias? 

I want to explore these questions in a close reading of The Mythmaker to be fair to Paul and because since the age of 17 I’ve been afraid of eternal hell as described by orthodox Christianity. I can’t afford to be wrong, but nor do I want to rest on any faith as “hell insurance,” for such a position never lasts since it is not an authentic conversion. 

The conventional reading of Christianity is that Jesus is the founder and Paul is the interpreter of Jesus the founder. But for Maccoby this is a skewed representation. Paul does not so much interpret the life of Jesus as recreate it and in doing so he creates a schism with the other apostles who wanted to remain in the Jewish realm, as did Jesus. 

But Paul wants to take Jesus outside of Judaism into the Hellenistic mystery cults of sacrifice and atonement through blood. He is willing to demonize the Jews as rejecting his vision but then package his vision to more accepting gentiles, and he has no scruples in forwarding his plan and spreading it across the world. For Paul, his mission is less spiritual and more of an expression of personal power, vaunting ambition, and self-regard. 

Maccoby reminds us that Jesus never knew Paul, but Paul wants to be the primary apostle, towering over the others who actually knew Jesus in the flesh. 

Paul’s “personal inspiration” and visions, he would have us believe, make him the greatest of all the apostles. For all of Paul’s talk about humility and lowering oneself, his whole life is defined by lifting himself while castigating others. 

Maccoby observes that the book of Acts is “a propaganda exercise” which tries to conceal the rift between Paul and the other apostles. 

To be blunt, if Maccoby is correct in his assessment of Paul, then Christianity is a fraudulent religion fabricated by a malignant, ruthlessly ambitious personality who packaged his cult to the Roman world first and then to the world’s gentiles all of whom usurped the Jewish religion for their own customized faith while demonizing the people who evolved within the traditions of Judaism, a sensible spiritual orientation that contrasts deeply with the anti-life, anti-sex, anti-Semitic, pro-hell Pauline cult.

Such a claim must be examined closely.  

In Chapter 1, The Problem of Paul, Maccoby raises two questions: “what would Jesus have thought of Paul, and what did the Apostles think of him?”

Maccoby makes it clear that even though the New Testament begins with the Four Gospels about Jesus, it is actually Paul’s writings that dominate and that precede the Gospels. Paul is the director of the entire New Testament: “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.”

Paul’s influence, Maccoby points out, is at odds with other traditions and sources that remain “and give valuable indications of what the story was like before Paulinist editors pulled it into final shape.” 

There were rival interpretations, but they were dismissed as heretical by the orthodox establishment at the time. 

Paul’s dominance, Maccoby writes, accounts for “the puzzling and ambiguous role given in the Gospels to the companions of Jesus, the twelve disciples.” Paul has successfully become the main apostle while marginalizing others. He has even reshaped Jesus into a Greek myth, the Christos, a divine being much different than a Jewish messiah figure. 

In Chapter 1, Maccoby asks the question: “Who, then, was Paul?” He argues that the epistles and the book of Acts must be looked at with skepticism in light of all the information we have. 

Maccoby points out that Paul never cites in his letters his birthplace of Tarsus because he wants to downplay that he was born far from Jerusalem, a “powerhouse of Pharisaism.” Paul wants to create the impression that comes “from an unimpeachable Pharisaic background.” 

Maccoby argues that Paul is a fraud; he claims to be a Pharisee but is not. Maccoby is skeptical that Paul studies with the great Pharisee Gamaliel mentioned in Acts, and he raises the question: “was Paul ever really a pupil of Gamaliel or was this claim made by Luke as an embellishment to his his narrative?”

Maccoby also criticizes Paul for claiming to be a Pharisee who at the same time worked for the High Priest in his persecution of early Christians when in fact the High Priest worked for the Sadducees, who “were bitterly opposed to the Pharisees.”

Paul emphasizes his alleged Pharisee background to “stress the alleged continuity between Judaism and Pauline Christianity.” 

This of course is the great debate of Western History, and it is the final question of Chapter 1: “Did Paul truly stand in the Jewish tradition, or was he a person of basically Hellenistic religious type, but seeking to give a colouring of Judaism to a salvation cult that was really opposed to everything that Judaism stood for?”

What can we make of Maccoby’s skepticism of Paul’s self-portrait? On one hand, we can argue that Maccoby makes an acute observation of Paul’s inconsistencies and malignant personality profile and shows how Paul doesn’t square with the other apostles and with history. But as a rebuttal, we can argue that Maccoby doesn’t have any definitive proof. He is merely speculating based on his character assessment of Paul. 

In other words, his picture of Paul is subjective, colored by Maccoby’s intense dislike of a figure who Maccoby sees as a malignant force of anti-Semitism. 

Truth be told, the Pauline religion has done a great deal to demonize the Jews, so Maccoby stands on some firm ground here. 

 

Trump Tweeted He Wanted to be Putin's Best Friend in 2013: Study of The Road to Unfreedom, Part 8

In Timothy Snyder's The Road to Unfreedom, he explains how Putin was recruiting white nationalists, and included Trump in this category, in the 2010s. Richard Spencer was one recruit. Putin relied on fictions to remain Russia's leader. Richard Spencer relied on fiction to uphold his white supremacy religion. Trump relied on a myriad of fictions, the self-made billionaire, the man who exposed the "truth" about Barack Obama's illegitimate presidency. While insulting Obama, Trump was "eager to flatter the president of another country. On June 18, 2013, Trump wondered in a tweet whether Putin 'will become my new best friend?'"

Putin then used Trump to champion "global heterosexuality" by bringing beauty pageants to Moscow. 

Snyder points out numerous money schemes between Trump and Putin's oligarchs, one in April 2013 causing the FBI to arrest 39 men "suspected of running two gambling rings inside Trump Tower." The operation was coordinated by Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, a Russian citizen and known money-launderer. 

Timothy Snyder Explains Fascist Impulse to Deify Trump: Study of The Road to Unfreedom, Part 7

How do America's white evangelicals deify a sociopathic hedonist as their Lord and Savior? Why are so many self-proclaimed Christians parading Trump Messiah artwork on bumper stickers, posters, and T-shirts?

Timothy Snyder in his book The Road to Unfreedom traces this cultish worship to Russian fascism authored by Ivan Ilyin. Snyder writes:

"Ilyin placed a human being in the role of the true Christ, required to break the laws of love in the name of God. In doing so, he blurred the line between what is human and what is not, and between what is possible and what is not. The fantasy of an eternally innocent Russia includes the fantasy of an eternally innocent redeemer, who does no wrong and therefore will not die."

Xenophobia, the hatred of The Other, and warmongering are two symptoms of this man-worship. Snyder writes:

"The very dread of what comes next generates a sense of threat than can be projected upon others as foreign policy. Totalitarianism is its own enemy, and that is the secret it keeps from itself by attacking others."

A third symptom is upholding the kleptocracy by using propaganda to manipulate the masses into believing that siphoning all a nation's wealth to the kleptocrats is in the nation's best interests. 

 

Trumpism Is Sycophants Enslaved to a Sociopath: Timothy Snyder's The Road to Unfreedom, Part 6

In Timothy Snyder's The Road to Unfreedom, he shows the influence of little known fascist named Ivan Ilyin on Putin and Trump. We see that Ilyin is the inversion of Christianity and democracy, a narcissistic fascist with no will to build society, uphold law, or encourage the freedoms of individuals.

Snyder writes:

"The weakness of state policy is then recast as the mystical connection of a leader with his people. Rather than governing, the leader produces crisis and spectacle."

Most of Trump's efforts are creating "crisis and spectacle" on Twitter and at his cultish rallies. 

Snyder continues:

"Law ceases to signify neutral norms that allow social advance, and comes to mean subordination to the status quo: the right to watch, the duty to be entertained."

How nicely this fits a president who made his career as a "reality TV star."

Our president is also lawless. Snyder continues:

"Ilyin used the word 'law,' but he did not endorse the rule of law. By 'law' he meant the relationship between the caprice of the redeemer and the obedience of everyone else."

Notice Trump fires anyone who challenges and hires sycophants. 

Such sycophants are slaves to the sociopath. As Snyder writes:

"The loving duty of the Russian masses was to translate the redeemer's every whim into a sense of legal obligation on their part. The obligation, of course, was not reciprocal. Russians had a 'special arrangement of the soul' that allowed them to suppress their own reason and accept 'the law in our hearts.' By this Ilyin understood the suppression of individual reason in favor of national submission. With the redeemer in command of such a system, Russia would exhibit 'the metaphysical identity of all people of the same nation.'"

As more and more sycophants tow the line, totalitarianism can be reached based on a fiction. As Snyder writes the country becomes "a creature rendered divine by its submission an arbitrary leader who emerged from fiction. The redeemer would take upon himself the burden of dissolving all facts and passions, thereby rendering senseless any aspiration of any individual Russian to see or feel or change the world. . . . Christian fascist totalitarianism is an invitation to God to return to the world and help Russia bring an end to history everywhere."

 

 

Trumpism Is the Cult of Inverted Christianity: Study of Timothy Snyder's The Road to Unfreedom, Part 5

Trumpism is Christianity without the love and an abundance of tribalistic hatred of others. We learn that this perversion of Christianity takes root in the Russian fascist philosopher Ivan Ilyn. Putin has embraced this fascist, and Trump has embraced Putin, so to understand the fascism of Putin and Trump we must understand Ivan Ilyin. 

Snyder observes that Ilyn took the love out of Christianity for a perverted form of Russian tribalism with a similar narrative found in Hitler's Mein Kampf. For Hitler, redemption was killing the Jews. For Ilyin, Russian redemption was hatred of the outsider. Snyder writes:

"The men who redeemed God's flawed world had to ignore what God said about love." This includes loving your neighbor. But Snyder writes, "For Ilyin there were no neighbors. Individuality is corrupt and transient, and the only meaningful connection is the lost divine totality. So long as the world is fractured, loving God means a constant struggle 'against the enemies of divine order on earth.' To do anything but to join this war was to enact evil: "He who opposes the chivalrous struggle against the devil is himself the devil.' Faith meant war: 'May your prayer be a sword and your sword be a prayer!'"