On Paul and Jesus

James Tabor’s Paul and Jesus was a remarkably illuminating book. I suspect there isn’t much here new to Biblical scholars, unless Tabor is making a fundamentally heterodox argument, which I can’t really assess — though given his academic post, I doubt it. The book works on three levels: a deep probe of Pauline Christianity; a comparison of it with the “Jewish Christianity” governed by James, Peter, and John; and, most interestingly, an attempt to excavate the early, pre-Pauline Christianity. That last is admirable and enormously difficult. Tabor points out that we tend to read the New Testament backwards in terms of chronology: the four Gospels and Acts present themselves as first in line, and the events in them are first, but in truth all the Pauline epistles were written well before the Gospels — and the canonical Gospels and Acts were heavily shaped by Paul’s followers, since he knew Mark personally and Luke is nothing if not Pauline. So even when we read the Gospels, we read them through Paul’s eyes.

That wouldn’t be a problem in itself, except that Paul’s epistemology is suspect at best. Tabor notes, rightly, that Jesus never actually knew Paul: Paul converted some four to seven years after Jesus’s death and pays remarkably little attention to the other apostles, claiming instead that his visions of a spiritual, mystical Jesus carry more weight than the lived experience of the Twelve. Naturally that put him on a collision course with Jesus’s disciples, and some early Christians went so far as to call him a heretic. Yet Paul’s voice is nearly all we have, with two major exceptions: “Q,” the source Matthew and Luke lean on, and the Epistle of James. We don’t have an original “Q,” but it can be partly reconstructed, and it appears to be a list of Jesus’s sayings (a little like the hadith in Islam?), with little mention of resurrection, virgin birth, or Jesus as God incarnate. The same goes for James — who, as Jesus’s brother, you’d expect to insist his sibling was God incarnate, and yet doesn’t; instead we find advocacy for Jesus as the Messiah, and a zealous Judaism the Romans sought to repress.

Most of the practices we think fundamental to Christianity — baptism, communion — are Paul’s innovations. We don’t even have a fully reliable account of the Last Supper beyond the fact that one happened, unless you believe the spirit of Jesus literally convened with Paul and gave him guidance quite different from what he’d given the others in life. I wouldn’t entirely rule out that Paul saw visions, but I’m skeptical they were of the historical Jesus, and I’d be far more interested in what James, Peter, and John had to say. Yet with Peter and John we meet silence — the documents supposedly theirs were more likely written by others, inserting Pauline views — so all we really have from the original apostles is one brief letter from James. A great deal is at stake in this. Paul urged Gentile converts not to become Jewish; the Jerusalem leadership was willing to allow that, but Paul went further, arguing that the Torah of Moses had been wholly superseded, even for Jews, by a new covenant made in the crucifixion — which was unacceptable to James, Peter, and John. Stranger still, and this is something I don’t yet fully grasp, Tabor argues that Paul’s vision of Jesus amounted to the creation of a new, spiritual species of human — not biologically, but in that the nature of those “in Christ” was, for Paul, qualitatively different from everyone else’s. I may write to Tabor for clarification on that one.

In the end Paul won the theological battle, and by around 100 CE he’d won completely. Those persuaded by him might make a providential argument — Paul won because God meant him to — but more critically, he won for social reasons. Gentile Christians quickly outnumbered Jewish ones; the early councils in Jerusalem were smashed with the sacking of the Second Temple in 70 CE; and Peter and James, like Paul, were killed under Nero, wiping out the first generation’s leadership. The Jerusalem faction was, as far as I can tell, more centralized than Paul’s, and the dispersion of Jews across the Roman Empire was devastating for it. Altogether, Paul and Jesus is a fascinating, critical examination of early Christianity that may not sit well with churchgoers or with more orthodox readers, but it’s a necessary corrective on the early history of the faith, and it bridges academic and popular analysis as well as anything I’ve read.