"Jesus' proclamation of the Way of the Cross has been replaced by Paul's proclamation of the Cross."

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Hyam Maccoby


Hyam Maccoby wrote a groundbreaking work entitled The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity (San Francisco: Harper, 1986).

A Talmudic scholar, Hyam Maccoby, does not believe in Paul's conversion, and in his work The Mythmaker he attempts to expose Paul as a self-deluded fraud (I believe Paul instead was a victim) and a "police officer" for the Sadducee High Priest.

Maccoby claims Paul subverted the beliefs of the Jerusalem Church, Jesus' earliest followers. In The Mythmaker, Hyam Maccoby theorizes that Paul was raised among mystery religions which featured dying and resurrected saviors, then later converted to Judaism, hoping to become a Pharisee. He went to Jerusalem with this goal, but was unsuccessful.

Needing work, Paul became a police officer under the authority of the Sadducee High Priest, and was assigned to persecute dissidents against Rome. This caused internal conflict. While traveling to Damascus on a clandestine mission to arrest Nazarenes, Maccoby says Paul's  psychological crisis peaked. Maccoby claims Paul's revelation was thus actually a resolution of his divided self. He fused the mystery religions,  Judaism and the Jerusalem Church into an entirely new belief and centered it on the figure of Jesus.

The rest of Paul's life was spent codifying the new faith. However, the Jerusalem Church members were devout Jews and did not hold with his beliefs. To strengthen his stand, Maccoby says Paul invented his own account of events of his life and claimed an early dispute and later agreement with the Jerusalem Church.

To the latter point, I concur; Paul implausibly claims in Galatians that the Jerusalem Church ceded him the sole right to evangelize Gentiles which contravenes Acts 10 and 15 where Peter is given a vision from God telling him to evangelize Gentiles. And in Acts 15, Peter recounts he, Peter, is the Apostle to the Gentiles by appointment of the Holy Spirit. Paul is listening, and says nothing in Luke's Acts Chapter 15.

Hyam Maccoby explains the fiction that was created later that Peter and Paul were in doctrinal agreement on Paul's anti-Law (Torah) views:

“As we have seen, 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 work of the author of Acts was well done; he rescued Christianity [i.e., PAULIANITY] from the imputation of being the individual creation of Paul, and instead gave it a respectable pedigree, as a doctrine with the authority of the so-called Jerusalem Church, conceived as continuous in spirit with the Pauline Gentile Church of Rome.

"Yet, for all his efforts, the truth of the matter is not hard to recover, if we examine the New Testament evidence with an eye to tell-tale inconsistencies and confusions, rather than with the determination to gloss over and harmonize all difficulties in the interests of an orthodox interpretation.” (The Mythmaker, supra, at 139.)

My Analysis

Maccoby frequently engages in speculation. However, because he is Jewish, he is willing to call out Paul for apostasy from the law, and unscrupulous behavior. The examples are self evident in the Book of Acts, but our Christian commentators will not make mention of these obvious points. Thus, while many inferences of Maccoby are plausible, they are nevertheless insubstantial speculation. No doubt they are interesting. They could be true. But we just don't know. On the other hand, Maccoby's freedom to make observations about Paul's character are refreshing and informative for true followers of Christ. We do not realize how years of conditioning through sermons have influenced us to not identify character flaws or immoral behavior in Paul.

Error of Rejecting Atonement Figure As A Pagan Idea

One error that Maccoby suffers from actually impacts his otherwise astute observations. Maccoby believes that a suffering Messiah who dies to atone for our sins is unique to Paul. He claims it is adopted from paganism. Thus,  Maccoby says whenever the Gospels mention the atoning sacrifice of Christ, this is supposedly a unique Pauline doctrine written into the Gospels. As a result, Maccoby contends that all four Gospels are Pauline. (Maccoby, The Mythmaker, at 4.)

Maccoby mixes in with this indeed some Christology by Paul that is false, and unbiblical. (I expose these errors in Paul's Flawed Christology). But one cannot throw out the baby with the bathwater. Maccoby depicts Paul as going beyond Judaism:

On the face of it, Paul's doctrine of Jesus is a daring departure from Judaism. Paul was advocating doctrine that seemed to have far more in common with pagan myths that 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. (Maccoby, The Mythmaker, at 12.)

But the bolded portion was Biblical in part and a mistranslation in another part. As to the mistranslation, the notion of a divine person who was a creator sent by Yahweh-Father to earth was built on a mistranslation in the Septuagint in 257 BC of Psalm 102. (See our discussion of "Son as Creator.") In that sense, it was 'biblical' although an error of translation.

As to the atonement principle by a Messiah-type human figure, that was properly Jewish as it most clearly exists in Isaiah 53. (See our discussion of "Isaiah 53: Messianic Fulfillment in Jesus.") 

There, Judaism already had that concept. It is very clearly outlined in Isaiah chapter 53, about an atoning sacrifice of a human figure in the future. While parts of this passage were deliberately mistranslated by the Masoretes in the 9th Century AD, the Dead Sea Scrolls allow us to affirmatively prove the deception.  (See our discussion of "Isaiah 53: Messianic Fulfillment in Jesus.") 

This passage indeed is about an atoning figure who after death sees the light (of life) again.

Hence it is scurrilous to call pagan what we find are teachings of the Bible. However, many Jewish educators seek to do so to try to distance Judaism further from Christianity than is appropriate or necessary. Judaism is completely justified in rejecting Pauline Christianity because it defines itself as an anti-Torah version of a Jewish sect. However, for Jewish leaders / voices to claim that it is a pagan notion that there will be an atoning figure in the future, even though clearly depicted in Isaiah 53, is unjustified.

I will highlight below various topics where Maccoby makes sober commentary about Paul that is valid for Christians to consider.

Paul Admits to Unscrupulous Hiding of His Views

Maccoby on page 156-57 highlights facts that support that in Acts 21 verse 27 that the" Jews from Asia" was a reference to Christian Jews. In the course of trying to prove that point, which is indeed likely true, Maccoby mentions points that I would cite as proof why Luke himself is unaware of Paul's anti-Torah position. Maccoby does not see that point from what he is saying, but it equally follows. I suspect Maccoby believes that Luke also is anti-nomian (anti-Torah) because Maccoby assumes Luke and all the gospels are "Pauline." But this is unjustified in light of the fact that Luke's gospel has Jesus endorse the continuity of the law itself. See Luke chapter 16.

In any event, here is the very informative opinion of Maccoby:

who were the Jews from Asia? Why were they so violently opposed to Paul? If what Paul himself says about his preaching Jews on his missionary journeys is correct, they had no reason to believe him to be an apostate from Judaism, for Paul's method when approaching Jews is described by him as:"To Jews I became like a Jew, to win Jews; as they are subject to the law of Moses, I put myself under that law to win them, although I am not myself subject to it." (One Corinthians 9:20-22). It was only to his Gentile converts that Paul revealed that he regarded the Torah as obsolete; and he may have revealed this also to Jewish converts to Christianity, when he considered that their progress in understanding had reached such a level that they would be receptive to anti-Torah teaching. The news of his abandonment of the Torah was thus confined to the Jesus movement itself, where it caused such anxiety that Jewish Christian emissaries have been sent out combat his teaching, and Paul himself had been summoned twice to Jerusalem to answer charges before the supreme Tribunal of the Nazarenes. (Maccoby, The Mythmaker (1986) at 156-57.)

Thus, Maccoby recognizes that Paul selectively reveals his anti-Torah doctrine. But it is not necessarily the case that Paul revealed to Luke, a Gentile convert, that this was the case. For clearly Luke in his Gospel portrays Jesus as saying that the law would never be taken away for the duration of generations of humans on earth. See Luke chapter 16. So had Maccoby taken that fact into account, he would have realized that it would be more correct to say Paul would not reveal himself to anyone, even a Gentile convert, who felt strongly that the Torah continued in the New Testament.

Maccoby then correctly observes the implication of what the epistles of Paul then represent. They clearly were intended for an audience who Paul already knew were receptive to the doctrines they taught. Maccoby on page 157 continues:

Paul's main interest, in any case, was not in converting Jews, but in converting Gentiles, in accordance with his self-description as the' apostle to the Gentiles." It is in his Epistles to is Gentile converts, which have been preserved in the New Testament, that he pours out his real thoughts and expresses his view that salvation does not come from observance of the Torah. These thoughts became known to the Jewish adherents of Jesus in the natural course of events, but the Jews as a whole would have no means of learning about them. (Maccoby, The Mythmaker (1986) at 157.)

This is very astute reasoning which we can apply to address the question of why Luke includes many embarrassing statements by Paul in the Book of Acts which prove embarrassing only in the light of Paul's Epistles. I have done so elsewhere in the article on Luke's Gospel is a non-Pauline Gospel.

Maccoby Summarizes Ebionites Correctly

This portion is essentially correct.  I would add that "Ebionite" was the name by which Christians originally called themselves while simultaneously being known as the Nazarenes. It was not a sect distinct from the original church. Here is what Maccoby says at page 17:

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 them; 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. ****

The Ebionites were stigmatized by the Church as heretics who fail 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, the Jesus abolished or abrogated the Torah, the Jewish law. Instead the Ebionites observed the Jewish law and regard 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 actions they faithfully transmitted, believing correctly that they were derived from Jesus itself. They were the same group that had earlier been called the Nazarenes, were led by James and Peter, who is known Jesus during his lifetime, and worn a far better position to know his aims to Paul, who met Jesus only in dreams and visions. Thus the opinion held by the Ebionites Nepal is of extraordinary interest deserves respectful consideration, instead of dismissal as scurrilous propaganda, the reaction of Christian scholars from ancient to modern times.

Paul Endorsement of Obeying Rome Was Ready-Made To Become Official Religion

Maccoby explains why Rome gladly endorsed Christianity of Paul in the 300s:

To Paul, it did not matter whether person was physically enslaved, since this did not affect his spiritual salvation. Thus he urged his disciples to obey Rome,  whose power was "ordained of God," and he also urged slaves to be contented with their lot and not to strive for freedom. [1 Cor. 7:22.] 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 a military empire than a religious doctrine that counsels obedience and acquiescence. (Maccoby, The Mythmaker (1986) at 163.)


 Study Notes

An excerpt from his book Paul, the Mythmaker is made at this link and this link. Just in case it disappears, here is the text excerpt at that page:

The Problem of Paul 
excerpt from: The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity 
by Hyam Maccoby




For an explanation of my stance in relation to the various schools of New Testament interpretation of modern times, the reader is referred to the Note on Method, p. 206.




Part I 

Chapter 1 
The Problem of Paul


































Chapter 2 
The Standpoint of this Book
















Paul's Bungling Attempt
At Sounding Pharisaic
excerpt from: The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity
by Hyam Maccoby

Some passages in Paul's Epistles have been thought to be typically Pharisaic simply because their argument has a legalistic air. When these passages are critically examined, however, the superficiality of the legal colouring soon appears, and it is apparent that the use of illustrations from law is merely a vague, rhetorical device, without any real legal precision, such as is found in the Pharisaic writings even when the legal style is used for homiletic biblical exegesis. An example from Romans is the following:

You cannot be unaware, my friends -- I am speaking to those who have some knowledge of law -- that a person is subject to the law so long as he is alive, and no longer. For example, a married woman is by law bound to her husband while he lives; but if her husband dies, she is discharged from the obligations of the marriage-law. If, therefore, in her husband's lifetime she consorts with another man, she will incur the charge of adultery; but if her husband dies she is free of the law, and she does not commit adultery by consorting with another man. So you, my friends, have died to the law by becoming identified with the body of Christ, and accordingly you have found another husband in him who rose from the dead, so that we may bear fruit for God. While we lived on the level of our lower nature, the sinful passions evoked by the law worked in our bodies, to bear fruit for death. But now, having died to that which held us bound, we are discharged from the law, to serve God in a new way, the way of the spirit, in contrast to the old way, the way of a written code. (Romans 7: 1-6)

The above passage is remarkably muddle-headed. Paul is trying to compare the abrogation of the Torah and the advent of the new covenant of Christianity with a second marriage contracted by a widow. But he is unable to keep clear in his mind who it is that corresponds to the wife and who to the husband -- or even who is supposed to have died, the husband or the wife. It seems that the correspondence intended is the following: the wife is the Church; the former husband is the Torah, and the new husband is Christ. Paul tells us that a wife is released by the death of her husband to marry a new husband; this should read, therefore, in the comparison, that the Church was freed, by the death of the Torah, to marry Christ. Instead, it is the wife-Church that dies ('you, my friends, have died to the law by becoming identified with the body of Christ') and there is even some play with the idea that the new husband, Christ, has died. The only term in the comparison that is not mentioned as having died is the Torah; yet this is the only thing that would make the comparison valid.

On the other hand, there is also present in the passage an entirely different idea: that a person becomes free of legal obligations after his or her own death. This indeed seems to be the theme first announced: 'that a person is subject to the law so long as he is alive, and no longer.' The theme of the widow being free to marry after the death of her first husband is quite incompatible with this; yet Paul confuses the two themes throughout -- so much so that at one point he even seems to be talking about a widow and a husband who are free to marry each other and have acceptable children because both widow and new husband are dead. Confusion cannot be worse confounded than this.

Thus what we have here is a case of someone trying to construct a legal analogy and failing miserably because of his inability to think in the logical manner one expects of a legal expert. The passage thus does not prove that Paul had Pharisee training -- just the contrary. What we can say, however, is that Paul is here trying to sound like a trained Pharisee. He announces in a somewhat portentous way that what he is going to say will be understood only by those who 'have some knowledge of law', and he is clearly intending to display legal expertise. It is only natural that Paul, having claimed so often to have been trained as a Pharisee, should occasionally attempt to play the part, especially when speaking or writing for people who would not be able to detect any shortcomings in his performance. In the event, he has produced a ludicrous travesty of Pharisee thinking. In the whole of Pharisee literature, there is nothing to parallel such an exhibition of lame reasoning.

What Paul is saying, in a general way, is that death dissolves legal ties. Therefore, the death of Jesus and the symbolic death of members of the Church by identifying themselves with Jesus' sacrifice all contribute to a loosening of ties with the old covenant. This general theme is clear enough; it is only when Paul tries to work out a kind of legal conceit or parable, based on the law of marriage and remarriage, that he ties himself in knots. Thus he loses cogency just where a Pharisee training, if he had ever had one, would have asserted itself; once more, he is shown to have the rhetorical style of the Hellenistic preachers of popular Stoicism, not the terse logic of the rabbis.