The Myth of Jewish-Christianity (QºM Pt4)

Pt1— Pt2 — Pt3a — Pt3b — Pt3c — Pt4  — Pt5 — Pt6 — Pt7 — Pt8 — Pt9 — Pt10 — Pt11 —Pt12

Throughout the preceding posts in this ongoing discussion, I have been suspending my disbelief just enough to allow for the authenticity of at least some core of the Pauline corpus, just as F.C. Baur had, when in fact I have come to view the ideas of the Dutch Radical school as generally correct. While some representatives of this proto-mythicist group would eventually muster the temerity to suggest that the Jesus story is probably almost entirely mythical in both form and function, the bulk of their fame (or infamy) came from their expositions on and critiques of the nature of the pauline epistles, which they (rightly) saw as a product of turn-of-the-century tensions between the emerging ecclesiastical institution and a rather more esoteric "paulinism" that resisted its authority. I am especially persuaded by what I've read from W.C. Van Manen to at least take seriously the probability that these documents that have served as the very cornerstone of such an ancient tradition which makes claims to the historicity of not a few crucial events having taken place at a certain time at a certain place, are essentially just as spurious as those that are similarly attributed to Peter, to James, or to Jude.
(No impartial scholar thinks these letters are authentic.)

So we have two sources of information regarding Christianity's birth and early formative period: the Acts of the Apostles and the pauline epistles. The historical reliability of the Acts has been the focus of much scholarship in the last century, especially as contrasted with the epistles, which at times contradict its outlined narrative. My own opinion is that Acts is likely a very deliberate attempt to synthesize the two hitherto irreconcilable rival camps into a resultant unified faith. I follow David Trobisch on this. Moreover, I follow John Knox and Joseph Tyson in their suggestion that the Acts was penned essentially an an anti-marcionite reaction. I will return to this idea later. For now, if this is so, and if we add to this mix the Dutch radical idea that the entire Pauline corpus is spurious, then we have to face a sobering possibility that we have no primary sources regarding pre-Jewish-Revolt Christianity. This is so significant a paradigm-shift that it merits repetition and highlighting:

We have no primary sources regarding pre-Jewish-Revolt Christianity.

Gloss that over at your own risk (or at your own benefit, as the case might be).

At any rate, for the sake of engaging Greg Boyd on his own playing field, I have been allowing for their authenticity because even if we downplay the many discrepancies and contradictions between the letters of Paul and the Acts of the Apostles, even if we just read them at face value, bracketing our higher-critical mind momentarily, it is pretty hard to elude the fact that Paul's intended audiences are markedly gentile.

The obviousness of this observation troubles me. I must confess that the fact that the Boyd objections, based as they are on such a demonstrably false premise, in retrospect, could have seemed like a compelling argument to me when I first heard him, now embarrasses me somewhat. There's something to be learned from every experience, though, and this one led me to a profound realization. That I fell for it at all, even for a moment, is indicative of a strange kind of cultural inertia that apparently no one is immune to.

Why is it that people tend to hold on to certain prescribed ideas about a thing even when evidence to the contrary is right in front of them? If a skeptic like me can sometimes fall prey to this kind of rehearsed irrelevant sidetracking, it's no wonder that the business of apologetics prospers like it does, sustained as it is by the general population's lack of familiarity with the texts. All our lives we in the west have heard the story of Jesus, even those of us whose parents weren't particularly religious. Just as it's not an axiom of faith to "know" that Jesus existed, it is not an axiom of faith to "know" that the early Christians were Jews. It is a part of the background noise in our civilization which, because we have no use for thinking about it outside of churchly settings, we don't pay any mind to. It's simply part of the social matrix that resulted from our peculiar historical inheritance, even though our culture is now primarily secular (functionally, at least). It seldom occurs to anyone, even skeptics, to question details such as a Bethlehem birth of Jesus, some kind of Galilean healing streak, the essential Jewishness of the authors and their readers, or his execution by Roman authorities at the instigation of the Jewish authorities. We take all these things for granted without too much consideration.

An illustrative example: I gave up the habit of watching television in 1991. Despite this fact, I can name and describe to some degree all of the four main characters in the Seinfeld television program (and probably a few of the supporting characters too) even though I spent the nineties completely television-free. When something is so pervasive, so ubiquitous in the cultural landscape, it tends to seep peripherally into your consciousness whether we care about that thing or not. Likewise, the basic outline of the Jesus legend is burned into our cultural retina, so to speak, even if we are not Christian. It is part of the cultural identity of even those who are not initiates into the religion. Being able to readily recall certain generalities about the Jesus story should not be mistaken for "knowing" they are true, however, particularly when the "remembered" bits don't match what the texts actually say.

So why is it so ingrained in us that the early Christians, Paul's communities of converts, were essentially Jews, when the epistles themselves are so obviously written to gentile audiences? Actually, it's not that hard to see why. It is because these epistles contain within them so many references and citations from the Hebrew scriptures, that we fail to see the forest for these trees being in the way. Yes, the character of Paul is infatuated with the Jewish Bible. Whatever incarnation he imagines for Jesus (it's notoriously hard to tell what he means), for him, it is all "according to the scriptures." We therefore make the mistake of interpreting this use of Jewish symbolism as though these addressed communities were Jewish, but we've already seen that this is not so. Clearly, it is "Paul" who uses the symbols and the rhetoric, not the communities he addresses.

Moreover, the symbolism and the rhetoric are problematic in themselves. As I have already mentioned¹, some scholars have argued against the authenticity of Paul's self-proclaimed pharisaism. This view was encapsulated concisely by C. G. Montefiore when he wrote :

"Either this man was never a Rabbinic Jew at all, or he has quite forgotten what Rabbinic Judaism was and is. … [on the other hand] … The Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels was a critic and pathologist of Judaism. His criticisms are real: they are flesh and blood.... But the author of the Epistle to the Romans fights, for the most part, in the air" ²

It is not enough to proclaim oneself a pharisee and to quote from the Hebrew Bible and engage in midrashic affectations. If it was, then many of the modern fringe religious groups (Jews for Jesus, Rastafarians, Mormons, Black Zionists) that lay claim to being the genuine inheritors of the tradition would have more of a legitimate basis to claim such a title than they actually do. Historical research, the science of genetics, and plain common sense all give the lie to such claims. To one who would ask why Paul would "lie" about such a thing, I would respond by asking them why Joseph Smith would "lie" about such a thing. Delusional people aren't necessarily "lying," they are simply delusional. I'm sure that in his own mind Paul was quite the experienced Jew of Jews. However, his rhetoric just doesn't match his claim to such a pedigree.

Those who would make use of any argument resembling the Boyd objections against mythicism that I outlined in part 2 of this series are holding on to an outmoded and demonstrably false premise. This includes Boyd, James White, William Craig, and many others. I have learned to understand a bit of why they do—conditioned habits are a real bitch to break—but such a stance is ultimately, demonstrably, indefensible. One simply cannot appeal to Paul when asserting the "thorough" Jewishness of the early Christians.

I think this is also the case with the rest of the New Testament writings, as I hope to show in future posts.

for now . . . . .

Ó

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¹ — Hyam Maccoby's The Mythmaker
² — Jewish Quarterly Review 13 [1901], pp. 167, 205-6