Christianity
Saul (Paul) and the Hellenist Faction 1
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, November 22, 2001
Epistles
No doubt there were several strands, such as Gnosticism, to the ultimate success of Christianity as a world religion but one of them recognized by the Christian churches was the evangelist, Paul.
The main sources of information about Paul are his epistles and the New Testament book, attributed to Luke, the Acts of the Apostles. The epistles naturally are partially autobiographical and liable to show him in the best light, and the author of the Acts of the Apostles, which was written later than the epistles, was partisan—he was a fervent supporter of Paul. In reading these sources, we therefore have to guard against the bias for Paul there naturally is within them.
Paul’s epistles are the earliest extant Christian texts that were written. The earliest known complete copies of the gospels are fourth-century or later, and in some respects vary from the texts from which our bibles were translated. Many errors crept into the manuscripts, and some deliberate falsifications were made. The early “Fathers of the Church” relied more on tradition than upon written books.
The methods by which the approximate date of the writing of an ancient book may be determined may roughly be divided into two classes—examining external evidence, and examining internal evidence. The former is obtained from references to a text in other books, or from traces of its influence upon other authors. The latter is obtained from passages in it to events whose dates are known.
The latest date a book can have been written is before the earliest external date, and the earliest date it can have been written is after the latest internal date. If a book were referred to by Clement of Rome, it must have been written before 95 AD, when Clement of Rome died, and if the book itself mentioned the siege of Jerusalem, it must have been written after 70 AD, when Jerusalem was captured. The book must therefore have been written between 70 and 95 AD, if these dates are not later insertions into an earlier book.
A scholar familiar with the literature of the day can judge, from the vocabulary, the phraseology, and even the grammar used in a book, whether it has been edited, and hints at institutions or theology that did not exist until after the date of an author’s death tell their own tale.
Twenty-one epistles are in the New Testament, fourteen attributed to S Paul. One of these fourteen, Hebrews, is not a Pauline writing, and all the others have at various times been rejected by critics as spurious. Some commentators place all the epistles in the second century, and if that is correct, none of the epistles were written by Paul.
Nowadays, Romans, both Corinthians, and Galatians are considered the genuine work of Paul, and certainly first and probably second Thessalonians are also thought to be his. Opinions are divided on Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians. All are doubtful. The rest of “Paul’s” epistles are thought spurious—later works called pseudepigraphs. In those days, pseudepigraphic authorship was not considered forgery. Works were written by Hermes, by Thoth, by Isis. Old Testament books were written by Moses, even one describing his own death. Christian authors too would adopt a well known pseudonym for their writings to attract attention, and affix to them a preface with the name of an apostle. “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ,” “Jude, the servant of Jesus Christ, and brother of James,” are doubtful, and even early were criticized as additions, or pseudonyms of the real authors. Even the genuine epistles have been in places interpolated by copyists, but to what degree is uncertain.
If the Pauline epistles were written between the years 50 and 60 AD, as is the traditional theory, they precede any of the gospels, and were addressed to people who had never read the gospel story at all. They are addressed to gentiles or Hellenized Jews in the Roman empire, and not to pious Palestinian Jews, who doubtless already knew the facts of the life of Jesus. Yet, we find in them little or nothing about the life or sayings of Jesus, though the Old Testament is freely quoted. Their authors are ignorant of the acts or sayings of Jesus, save for a few episodes connected with the passion and resurrection. If Paul’s teaching was founded upon the life and sayings of Jesus, how is it that he never quotes his Master? This omission can most simply be explained if he knew no sayings to quote, and his Christianity was not based upon the Jesus of the gospels.
Even when details of Jesus are given, or any words quoted, many scholars suspect them of being interpolations by late editors. Thus, the passage where Paul is made to claim that he had been given by Jesus a description of the Last Supper (1 Cor 11:23f), is thought suspect because, on the only occasion upon which Jesus spoke to by him, in the account of his vision of Jesus at his conversion, any such description is not mentioned. The passage is, moreover, a paraphrase of a description in a work admittedly later than Paul’s day, and is introduced into the middle of an exhortation which subsequently continues as if no interruption had occurred.
To support arguments on doctrines and ethical teaching, any author of such letters would naturally quote the words of Jesus himself, if he knew them. It is never done. The earliest Christian writings we have, Paul’s letters, alone would leave us in almost total ignorance of the story told in the gospels. The miracles, the birth narratives, the sayings of Jesus, would have been lost to Christianity though a few and brief references to the death and resurrection of Christ were preserved. The life and character of Jesus would have been lost and only a little about early Christian and ethical ideals would remain.
Jesus commanded his disciples to kill the Paschal Lamb, so, the author of the epistles would have quoted this in discussing whether it was lawful to eat meat, if he had known it. Discussing whether it is right or wrong to drink wine, the author might have quoted the marriage in Cana of Galilee, or the words of Jesus saying that he had come eating and drinking, and was therefore called a winebibber, or Jesus drinking wine at the Last Supper.
Paul declares his doctrine is not that taught by Jesus in the flesh, but that revealed to him by Jesus in a vision after his death.
But I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man. For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ.Galatians 1:11-12
After saying this, Paul relates the story of his conversion, differing fundamentally from Acts 9:1-9. Paul, writing to the Romans, never refers to the practice or to the preaching of Jesus, but “on his own” recommends his readers to abstain from wine, and the author of 1 Timothy, without any reference to the acts or teaching of Jesus, recommends Timothy to drink a little wine only because of his infirmities. Throughout the epistles this neglect to quote Jesus is marked. If authority is needed, an Old Testament citation is quoted, not any saying of Jesus. There seems little doubt that Paul considers himself the founder of this new philosophy, based on a code of ethics which he considers his own gospel. He preaches a doctrine about a spiritual being known as Christ who had previously inspired the man Jesus, and not a doctrine about a divinely born Jesus who worked miracles.
Paul sought to prove from the scriptures that his death and resurrection were necessary, but nothing more about a historical Jesus. When Paul wishes to convince his hearers that Jesus was Christ, he uses quotations from the prophets, which his hearers, as Jews, should believe “must needs have been fulfilled”, but offers little about Jesus’s life. On the basis of their own scriptures, even if they were not well remembered by Hellenized Jews, Paul’s hearers could confirm Jesus as Christ when he seemed to fulfil them as prophecy.
Indeed, the gospel Jesus seems often explicitly to repudiate those theological claims which Paul advances on behalf of Christ. Paul knows next to nothing of the Jesus whose followers he persecuted so ruthlessly before he himself began to preach a new religion—that he was the long-expected Christ, that he had risen from the dead, had spoken to Paul, and then had disappeared again, since we hear no more about him.
If Paul did know the gospel story before he had persecuted the Nazarenes, it had not convinced him until the day when he had his vision or saw the risen Jesus. The greatest apostle of Jesus was not convinced by the gospel story but only by a direct vision! If he had not heard of it, he declares himself to be a bigot, harming people for reasons he did not know or understand, and a fraud, because it is impossible to teach what you do not understand. Paul was either an opportunist, seeing a chance to gain money from the gullible, or he was a Roman agent, assigned to weaken or sever the links between Hellenized diaspora Jews and the Zealots in Palestine by a divide-and-rule policy. Since Roman officials were often expected to pay themselves out of their assignments, both these alternatives could have been true.
Paul’s letters were written about 30 years after the crucifixion of Jesus, yet already they speak of serious disagreements between himself and the apostles in Jerusalem. As the true successors to the Nazarenes, it was the Ebionites not Paul who transmitted the pure teaching of Jesus, for their founders, Peter and James, had known Jesus in life. Also by 30 years after the crucifixion, the Pauline gentile churches of Italy, Greece and Asia Minor and the Gnostic churches of Libya and Egypt had split from the Nazarene church in Jerusalem. The latter, led by James the Just, remained under the authority of the Sanhedrin and followed Judaic conventions.
Acts of the Apostles
The Acts of the Apostles has many faults. It is a sorry mixture of several sources, compiled selectively and heavily edited. The sequence of events in it is confused. It is not historical. It was written in Greek for a Greek audience offering the Pauline view of the origin of Christianity. The only independent source we have about Paul is an extract from the writings of the Ebionites which gives quite a different picture. No unexpurgated memoirs have survived of the men who actually knew Barabbas. The Christianity which came down to us is Paul’s version—the version of a man who knew nothing about the life or work of Barabbas, had never met him and was not interested in him except as a divine sacrifice.
Acts but not Paul says he was born in Tarsus in Cilicia, Asia Minor (modern Turkey). Paul does not tell us his birthplace in his epistles but he does claim he was an Israelite of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew and a Pharisee. Paul wanted to be thought of as a full Jew (in Acts, a Hebrew) not a Hellenized one (in Acts, a Greek).
Paul seems desperate to be seen as an orthodox Jew of a respected party, for despite the impression given in the New Testament, the Pharisees were seen throughout the Roman and the Parthian Empires as a serious and respectable religious group. Yet, material relating to Paul seems uniformly anti-Pharisee. Thus, he says he was flogged five times by ”the Jews”, New Testament code for the Pharisees.
Why then did he claim to be a Pharisee? Biblical scholar, Hyam Maccoby, argues (MAC-MPIC) that by so doing he strengthened his argument that Pauline Christianity was the successor to the Jewish religion. Paul, the devout Jew, who persecuted the original followers of Barabbas, the Nazarenes, by the grace of God was converted and then saw in the new religion the successor to Judaism. There must be something in a religion that means more to a devoutly orthodox Jew than his own!
Acts says he left Tarsus to go to Israel to study with the leading Pharisee, Gamaliel. Paul however does not make this claim himself, and it is likely to be false, because the starting place for a student of Gamaliel was a profound knowledge of the Hebrew scriptures and, though Paul is well versed in the scriptures, most scholars cannot see sufficient depth in Paul’s writings for him to have been taught in the best school.
Acts claims that Paul was born a Roman citizen—his father must have been a Roman. Yet Acts also clearly implies that Paul was a member of the Sanhedrin (Acts 26:10 “My vote was cast against them,” suggesting that he had a vote in the Sanhedrin). Both statements could not be true. Acts and Paul’s own letters show that he was willing to distort the truth (“be all things to all men”). A blunt person would say he was a liar—he would say whatever was expedient.
Paul began his career as Saul (Paul’s name before his conversion—probably “Solon” because he was born in a Greek city), a brownshirt beating up Jesus’s followers. Saul’s family had had to flee from Gischala in Galilee, a breeding ground for revolutionaries, during some messianic disturbances—quite probably those involving Barabbas. Thereafter, he disliked messianic movements, whence his persecution of the Nazarenes. Temple thugs, apparently led by Saul were employed by the Sadducees to make havoc of the church, to arrest Nazarenes and to cast them into jail.
Saul was the ”young man” in the Acts of the Apostles who looked after the coats of the persecutors of the Nazarenes who were stoning the martyr, Stephen. But, though Saul was supposed to have been the leader, Luke says he merely watched the coats of Stephen’s killers. The Sanhedrin, normally a tolerant and civilized body in spite of the New Testament picture, seems unlikely to have commissioned such action. They had no power over the temple guard, whose direct authority was the Sadducee priesthood, effectively agents of the Romans who saw the community of Nazarenes as revolutionaries.
Stephen and the Hellenists
Luke begins a new pericope, in Acts 6:1, as the phrase “and in those days” shows. There is no more certainty here in Acts that the pericopes occur in the correct time sequence than there is in Mark. These verses might relate an incident that occurred not long after the defeat of the Nazarenes and the crucifixion of their leader.
The Nazarenes consisted, in terms of Jewish scholarship, of mainly ignorant people—they were not devout being either sinners, non-practising Jews who nevertheless retained Jewish customs, speaking Aramaic, or publicans, Jewish collaborators who adopted the Hellenistic culture of their paymasters, speaking Greek. Most local Jews had no regard for the foreigner, gentiles, who they wanted to evict.
The Nazarenes had been convinced by Jesus that, when Jews demonstrated unequivocally that the foreigner was unwelcome, God would return to dwell with His people in His kingdom. Sinners and publicans had a common belief that they would see the face of God in His kingdom having repented their sins. Nevertheless, divisions in the Nazarene band had occurred several times during Jesus’s lifetime, but the Master had been able to contain them. With the death of their charismatic leader, the feeble unity of the Nazarenes became hard to maintain.
Luke admits that some of the Nazarenes spoke Greek and not Hebrew (Aramaic)—they were Hellenized Jews. Evidently, the simple followers of Jesus had split into two factions—the Hellenists or Grecians and the Hebrews or Jews. It is not surprising. As soon as the expected miracle did not happen, with their leader dead and no immediate prospect of meeting God, the Aramaic speakers and the Greek speakers must have been at loggerheads. Earlier, Luke had sought to disguise this truth because his aim is to demonstrate an unfolding of the Christian message from a purely Jewish milieu in Jerusalem to the whole world, and it would not do to admit too soon that many of Jesus’s converts, the Nazarenes, were not Jews by culture.
Evidently, the disdain of the Aramaic speaking Jews for the Greek speaking ones surfaced over the issue of handouts to the widows of the Nazarenes who had died in the two battles for Jerusalem, or in the exemplary crucifixions afterwards. The bursars had been favouring the widows of Aramaic speaking Jews, and the Hellenists had complained.
Here Luke uses the dissension to introduce seven prominent men. The seven deacons seems to be a reflexion of the Essene number of perfection—inherited from the Persians—a number which became important to Christians. All had Greek names and had the job of supervising the fair sharing of dole to the widows, but some of them turn out to be much more important. Indeed, one of them, Nicolaus of Antioch, became the first Christian heretic, his heresy being mentioned twice in Revelation (Rev 2:6, 15). Luke is admitting that, almost from the start, the followers of Jesus were split into Jewish traditionalists and Hellenized Jews, and it is from this latter group that Christianity sprang.
Luke is always anxious to show the church as united under the influence of the Holy Ghost, when evidently it was not, in fact, and he quickly moves from the dissension to great successes:
And the word of God increased, and the number of the disciples multiplied in Jerusalem greatly, and a great company of the priests were obedient to the faith.Acts 6:7
Later Christians see in the large number of priests that joined the embryonic Christian movement here in Acts, the beginning of the Judaizers who opposed Paul. The truth is quite the opposite, in that many of the priests were already influenced by foreign culture—they were already Hellenized. It was the Essenes and Pharisees who were steadfastly Jewish.
Priests were Sadducees who held only to the Torah, the five books of Moses, not to the rest of the scriptures or to the oral law of the Pharisees, except where it had been adopted by the Sanhedrin as the civic law that even the Sadducees accepted. Sadducees were not interested in study or scholarship, content that precise temple ritual and obedience satisfied God. They believed that God’s pleasure with them was proved by their wealth and power.
In 70 AD, the destruction of the Second Temple left them redundant. Where did they go? What did they do? They joined the Christians! Luke features the flood of priests joining the Nazarenes so early to provide an explanation why, after the destruction of the temple, so many former priests were Christians. Admittedly, the Hellenist Nazarenes were happy to accept them because there were Sadducees among the companions of Paul to judge by their names. Indeed, the recruitment of Levi in Mark shows that some junior priests, at least, were happy to join the Nazarenes when the prospect of God’s Vengeance had to be faced.
Oddly, in Acts it turns out that Stephen sounds much more like an Essene than a Greek, although Luke makes him abuse the Jews. Acts 6:8 says that Stephen was proselytizing among the synagogues of Hellenized Jews from different parts of the Roman Empire resident in Jerusalem. But the expression “wonders and signs” or “wonders and miracles” that occurs here is probably a reference back to the apocalypse of Joel, showing that Stephen had been using the fulfilment of Joel’s prophecy in the Nazarene victory over the Roman garrison of Jerusalem, to prove that the End was nigh.
Stephen was recruiting Jews for the kingdom just as Jesus and John the Baptist had—and precisely the same kingdom! Conceivably, they still felt they might be called upon to fight with the heavenly host at some stage in the forty years of cosmic conflict. The authorities certainly thought they had some such idea—the reason why they were often arrested.
Thus, for the first post-crucifixion Nazarenes, the message of Jesus remained the same—Jews had to repent sincerely, be baptized and be ready to lay down the life of their corruptible body in this wicked world in exchange for resurrection into everlasting life when God founded His kingdom on earth. The difference was that the heavenly host would be led by Jesus instead of the archangel Michael.
Some of the diaspora Jews took umbrage at Stephen’s message. They were worldly. They knew the power of Rome. They thought that talk of God’s Jewish kingdom was absurd and dangerous. Possibly, from Acts 6:11:
We have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses, and against God,
he even taught that Jesus had abrogated the laws of Moses, not knowing the special circumstances of Jesus’s concessions, or opportunistically feeling that many diaspora Jews would be glad to be freed of the burden of the law. Perhaps many would have been glad, but they saw such a danger to their vested interests in the zealotry of the Nazarene movement that they united with the orthodox to report Stephen to the authorities.
The introduction of the “stirring up of the people” in this context confirms the surmise that the ordinary Jews of Palestine, though favourable to the Nazarenes led by Peter and the apostles, were not favourable to the Hellenizers (Grecians) like Stephen and readily joined the haranguing of him.
The charges against Stephen before the Jewish court are clearly expressed in Acts 6:14:
This Jesus of Nazareth shall destroy this place, and shall change the customs which Moses delivered us.
The Sanhedrin met in the Temple precinct, so the threat to destroy “this place” was the threat to destroy the Temple. Abrogation of the law is also cited. The supposed false witnesses are simply to harmonize with the trial of Jesus in Mark’s gospel. If Stephen had been preaching violation of the law, the witnesses were not false ones.
Christians are certain that Jesus advocated abandonment of the Mosaic law and that Stephen, the first Christian martyr, preached the same. But yet the law was the law of the land and, if Christian belief is true, both men were urging it to be broken. Few liberal governments let alone conservative ones would be happy with such disrespect for the law even today.
This is the key schism in the foundation of Christianity. Jesus had not taught the abrogation of the law of Moses but simply an expedient for soldiers in battle who had written the law in their hearts. Converts like Stephen, many of whom were not strict adherents of the law, took it as a license for the repentant and ultimately as an abrogation. It is precisely from this point of schism that the myth was introduced that Jesus had actually abrogated the law, the myth which allowed Judaism to spread to gentiles unadorned with the trappings of the Mosaic law.
Stephen’s speech in his defence
Stephen’s speech in his own defence is remarkably long—52 verses. It is not really a defence against his charges except in a small part. Rather its importance is that it highlights the split between the proto-Christian and the Jew. Its length is an indication of the importance Luke placed upon it for later Christianity, and its composition is that of a speech to be read rather than one which was actually spoken in court. For Luke, the speech is a challenge to, and an accusation of, the whole of Judaism and the position of Jews in God’s plan.
Nevertheless, Luke has told us that he had sources and this speech shows every indication of having its origin in an Essene polemic against the froward priests of Jerusalem and backsliding Jews. Indeed, in many ways it is similar to parts of the Damascus Rule which relates the repeated straying of the children of Israel ultimately necessitating the New Covenant made by God and the remnant of Israel who remained friends of God.
Stephen’s scriptural quotations are from the Septuagint though some are inaccurate, just as we find with quotations by Paul and Philo, but the Dead Sea Scrolls have shown that the Septuagint had a basis in variant manuscripts of Hebrew scriptures some of which were preserved by the Essenes, so this too is possibly evidence that Luke’s source was Essene.
The parallel of Jesus with Joshua in Acts 7:45 also suggests an Essene influence, and much of it also compares Jesus as messiah with the first messiah, Moses. The Essenes would certainly have considered their messiah as prophet, priest and king to be an embodiment of Moses, so, much of the comparison can convincingly be attributed to the Essenes. Moses, like the Essene Righteous Teacher and Jesus, had been rejected by the Jews and had to go in exile into the wilderness. Moses led the Jews for forty years in the wilderness before reaching the promised land and the messiah’s promise of God’s kingdom took forty years of tribulations before it was realized.
Interestingly, Stephen, rather pointedly, in the light of the expectation of a forty years wait for the coming, mentions “forty years” four times in his story of Moses. It seems unnecessary to keep saying it except for the sake of a reader, and is probably an editorial refinement by Luke—another way of showing to the faithful how the idea of a forty year interlude before the Parousia had arisen. It was simply a standard mystic number of the Hebrews.
Stephen speaks (Acts 7:37) of “that prophet” promised by Moses whom I have argued Jesus believed he became at his transfiguration—a ritual coronation of him as “that prophet” making him the prophet, priest and king—the messiah. Stephen highlights the rejection of Moses and the oracles of God by the Jews in favour of the idols of the Egyptians—the golden calf—and the tabernacles of Moloch and Rephan. This is a veiled reference to the Hellenizers who were influenced by Greek culture including their pantheon of gods so could not have been said by a Hellenizer like Stephen, showing that it is an unedited portion of an Essene screed.
The building of the temple by Solomon is picked out as an error because the God of the Hebrews did not live in a house built by hands—another echo of the Persian religion which preferred worship in open spaces, and, incidentally, yet another biblical warning ignored by Christians who have long been fond of building enormously elaborate houses for God. Finally, the habit of the Jews of killing God’s prophets is also criticised. Luke even uses the expression, “The Righteous One”, of Jesus the expression used by the Essenes of their Righteous Teacher.
The whole of the history of the Jews cited by Stephen seems to be directed at establishing that at no time did God ever want to have an immovable house to dwell in. From the covenant with Abraham, God was with His people wherever they went. The inference is that God resides with, or even in, His people not in stone houses. God’s true temple is a living temple as Jesus believed and the Essenes before him.
Essenes did not believe in the built temple but in the temple of the community, a temple of the human spirit. They rejected the Sadducees as idolators, influenced by the Greeks. They honoured their Righteous Teacher who, it seems, had died in the first century BC at the hands of the wicked priest of Jerusalem. They saw the coming of the everlasting kingdom as the equivalent of the seed of Abraham entering the promised land. They considered the heroes of Stephen’s speech as being the Righteous Ones of Jewish history.
Luke has manifestly cribbed an Essene exhortation, proving yet again that the early Christians drew heavily on Essene tradition. Stephen who was a backslider and an idolator as far as Jews were concerned could not have made such a speech. Luke has placed in Stephen’s mouth the words of an Essene critique of the wayward children of Israel, their temple and the delinquent priests who served in it.
Stephen’s speech tells us quite the opposite of the Christian clergy. The true covenant of God was with Abraham and was denoted by circumcision. God reinforced the covenant by giving through Moses his oracles, the law and the commandments, to guide His people. The law came via the angels:
Who have received the law by the disposition of angels, and have not kept it.Acts 7:53
And at Acts 7:39, the speech criticises the Jews for not obeying the law. These are strange words for a man who was defending himself against abrogating the law. In Acts 7:24-25, Stephen describes Moses as trying to deliver the Jews by smiting the foreigner, apparently admitting that the latter day Moses, Jesus, had done the same.
In Acts 7:42-43, Stephen quotes from Amos 5:25-27, where God berates the Jews for insincerely giving sacrifices and offering up hymns to God but not being righteous. The same quotation appears in the Damascus Rule where it is interpreted, using the pesher method of the Essenes, in messianic terms. The pesharists word associations lead to references to king David, the books of the prophets despised by Israel, the interpreter of the law who would come as a star out of Damascus (correct, Stephen’s ”Babylon” being an error), and a sceptre who is the prince of the congregation who will smite all the gentiles. As a result, at the day of the Lord (the Day of God’s Vengeance) apostates would be given up to the sword, particularly those who have walked in the ways of whoredom and wicked wealth. These people were none other than the scoffers of the Jerusalem temple who married foreign women and got rich from pandering to the foreign occupiers and extorting the people.
The speech continues (Acts 7:44-45) saying that God’s presence is with His people, wherever they were, not in an immovable building. The movable home, the tent or tabernacle, signified that God was always with His people wherever they went. Essenes considered themselves the tabernacle of the Covenant—the place where God dwelt. They, as people, were a holy house for Aaron—a temple. They considered that their dedication was more solid than a house of stone—they were the precious corner stone which supported God’s house.
The quotation from Isaiah 66:1-2 is not accurately Septuagint, suggesting an independent translation of an Essene original. An identical quotation appears in the, non-canonical but strongly Essene, Epistle of Barnabas. The verses in Isaiah are part of a devastating criticism of temple practices, not merely animal sacrifices but cereal offerings and even the burning of incense. Those who followed such wrongful practices were to be severely punished. The target of the criticism was the Sadducees and the priests and the implication that their practices were pagan is plain. This quotation is again indicative of the speech being a comprehensive attack on the temple priesthood not on Judaism in general.
Having related Jewish history, the speech becomes a direct attack on the froward priests. In Jewish legend, the prophets were considered as martyrs murdered by Jewish leaders treading the paths of idolatry. Jesus used the same idea in the parable of the wicked husbandmen, the chief priests.
Stephen is Martyred
At the end of the speech Stephen declares a vision of the Son of man standing at God’s right hand.
He looked up stedfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God, and said, Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God.
Here Jesus is called the Son of man in the only place outside the gospels and plainly in the context of a vision like Daniel’s. This should be proof enough that almost every gospel—or at least synoptic gospel—instance of the title is really a modest circumlocution and not a messianic boast. But the martyr does not say that he sees Jesus. He says that he sees the “Son of man”. It is Luke who tells us that the “Son of man” is Jesus! From Stephen’s direct speech as quoted by Luke all we know is that he had a vision akin to Daniel’s, and that was the very vision that all Essenes had. They expected the archangel Michael to come with a host of saints and angels to refine the wicked world. Daniel does not say that his vision was a man but that it was “like unto a Son of man”. In short, in his dream it looked like a man but wasn’t one. It was an angel.
Curiously enough, Jesus, thought by Christians to be simply a name, is apparently an Essene title. In Hebrew, Jesus is Joshua, and Joshua it was who, on the death of Moses, actually led the Israelites into the promised land. Thus, even if Stephen had announced that he had seen Jesus as the Son of man, he need not have meant this particular Jesus but whoever had the title, Jesus.
The figure was at God’s right hand because the right hand was a symbol of power, but he was standing at God’s right hand as in Daniel’s vision, whereas in Mark 14:62, Jesus, apparently referring to himself, speaks of the Son of man sitting at God’s right hand. Thus, Stephen was not referring to whatever Jesus had said about himself, if Mark is to be accepted, but to the original vision of Daniel. All of it implies that the Christian Jesus has been imposed by Luke on to his source which was an Essene messianic exhortation.
Luke depicts the reaction of the Sanhedrin as that of a mob (Acts 7:57-60). The speech as given to us by Luke was quite insulting, especially its conclusion, and perhaps even the powerful and distinguished members of the council got enraged when faced with such taunts. Luke tries to pretend that the rage was caused by Stephen’s vision but he had already said that the counsellors were cut to the heart by his speech, before the vision. The vision looks rather like an after thought. Of course, a general vision of God with a messianic figure could not have been blasphemous—it was the hope of all pious Jews—but no doubt the identification of the messianic figure next to God with a crucified bandit would have been regarded as pretty awful, if that is what he did.
Having been stoned, Stephen calls on God to receive his spirit (Acts 7:59) but instead of simply saying Lord he says Lord Jesus. The insertion of Jesus after Lord makes Jesus into God, and that certainly was blasphemous. But Stephen was not an orthodox Jew but a Hellenist who might have been already influenced by the dying and resurrected Gods of the Greeks and Romans. If so, he had already seen Jesus as Attis and appealed to him as a god, and so has a claim to be the true founder of Christianity. More likely, Luke added this to his composition from a later age because Jesus was by then being seen by gentiles exactly as a dying and resurrected god.
After forgiving his murderers, another harmonization, Stephen “fell asleep”, a euphemism for death but one which Essenes might have literally accepted. Death was only sleeping, but real death or everlasting life were the result of God’s judgement.
In this scene (Acts 7:58), Saul stands by guarding coats and is described as a young man. Around 60 AD, if Philemon is to be attributed to Paul, he describes himself as an old man now, presumably meaning he was about sixty and was therefore born about 1 AD. Jesus conventionally died in 33 AD when Saul was about 33. In fact by his own reckoning Paul must have converted around 32 AD implying that a date of 33 AD for the crucifixion is too late. But even if the older preferred date for the crucifixion (29 AD) is reinstated, Paul was still older than 30 when all this occurs, scarcely a young man. If, however, as the Acta Pilati maintain, Jesus was crucified in 21 AD, this incident could have occurred when Paul was barely twenty and the description of him as young is true.
Conversion of an Ethiopian Eunuch
The conversion of an Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:25) is another composed passage furthering Luke’s objective of showing the spread of Christianity from the Jewish domain to the gentile one. It has several points of similarity with Zephaniah chapters 2 and 3, where we find a desolate Gaza, an Ethiopian, rivers and an Ethiopian woman coming in supplication. These chapters are apocalyptic and the context is God’s judgement. The appearance of the poor, the remnant who will not be wicked or deceitful, and God’s punishing the nations suggests that Luke has had an Essene scriptural citation before him and he has re-written it to suit his purpose.
Eunuchs were not admitted as Jews so again we have a deliberate contrast between the hidebound, unforgiving, God forsaken Mosaic Jews and the kindly forgiving Hellenizers. The Hellenizer, Philip, has to travel by a desert or a lonely road to avoid his persecutors, traditional Jews or Pharisees.
The eunuch asks (Acts 8:36), “What forbids?”. The question was part of the early baptismal ritual reflecting Jesus’s injunction to the apostles in Mark 10:14:
Forbid them not, for such is the kingdom of God,
meaning the kingdom of God was open to any of the children of Israel—providing they were righteous or repentant. If the story were true, he would have had to repent his sins, meaning his transgressions of the law of Moses. Luke overcomes the problem of having an African repent of transgressions of a law which did not apply to him by depicting him as a godfearer, an unconverted believer in Judaism.
Later, Christians were not required to repent at all, indeed eventually they were corralled into the faith at birth before they had had chance to sin at all so no repentance was necessary. Baptism into the Christian faith abandoned the repentance of the Essenes, John and Jesus, and instead required mere belief in “Jesus Christ, the Son of God”. Acts 8:37 has this very formula, proving its late composition. Early Greek manuscripts do not have it, but it is often cited by the church fathers who were probably responsible for its inclusion.
Agrippa Kills James of Zebedee
So far, the orthodox Jews have been supportive of the apostles, though they had persecuted the Hellenized members of the church, but now Luke says that the death of the apostle James, the brother of John, pleased the Jews. Why their change in attitude? Herod Agrippa reigned from 41-44 AD and the Nazarene church continued in Jerusalem until the Jewish War so this accusation looks suspicious. Luke has here reverted once more to anti-Semitism and to his scriptural style of writing suggesting that the passage is inserted.
If “the Jews” did not like all Nazarenes, as Luke now wants us to believe, why should they have tolerated them for another twenty years? Luke is deliberately painting the Jews as enemies of the Nazarenes to explain the separation of Christianity and Judaism as being the fault of the intolerant Jews. Agrippa doubtless did harass the Nazarenes to please his allies the Sadducees and the Roman colonial administration, who would still have had them down as trouble-makers, but the expression “the Jews” is propaganda, like that in the gospels, especially John’s. It has a racist intent that only a gentile could accept. The same intent appears in 12:11. It all confirms that the passage is added.
Herod apparently killed James with a sword, not a traditionally Jewish method of killing, unless he was beheaded with a sword. People who die by sword wounds are normally soldiers. Had James been part of another uprising? Rebellions were still ocurring because within five years, Josephus tells us that Tiberius Alexander crucified two “sons” of Judas the Galilaean.
Acts relates next the death of Herod Agrippa, which is also related by Josephus in Antiquities of the Jews. Lampe in Peake’s Commentary asserts that the two stories are widely different in detail, showing that Luke had not read Josephus. One tends to accept experts like Lampe, but inspection shows that Luke’s account is simply shorter than Josephus’s, and therefore misses out much of Josephus’s detail, while adding one detail of his own by contriving to have Agrippa eaten by worms like his grandfather, Herod the Great. Josephus said Agrippa was dead within five days of being a healthy man, while being eaten by worms suggests a gradual decay of the flesh by cancer or gangrene—Herod the Great was an old man, but did not die quickly, and suffered from maggots eating his privvy member.
In Antiquities, Agrippa looked up to see an owl which had been foretold would herald his death within five days. Josephus actually describes it as a “messenger of ill-tidings”. In Greek, a messenger is an angel. Luke says Agrippa was struck by an angel of the Lord. The story in Acts therefore is remarkably similar to that of Josephus in this particular unusual detail, and could show that Luke had indeed read Josephus. Eusebius relates the story from Josephus, but omits the explicit words pertaining to the owl, leaving only the mention of the angel, although he retains the explanation of the bird as a herald of death. It looks as though Eusebius, or more likely a simpler editor, has just excised the words about the owl to leave an apparent harmony.
That Josephus took his story from Luke is impossible, because it is Josephus’s account which is the more detailed. It is true that Luke has some tradition to work on because of his introductory sentences about a quarrel between Agrippa and the rulers of Tyre and Sidon ameliorated by one Blastus that Josephus omits.
The Church is Persecuted and Saul Appears
And at that time there was a great persecution against the church which was at Jerusalem, and they were all scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judaea and Samaria, except the apostles.Acts 8:1
This is one of those verses that indicate the true story of early Christianity. Hitherto, Luke has told us that the Nazarenes were greatly popular with the multitudes, except apparently those Nazarenes who were Hellenists, Jews who had adopted the Greek culture and language. One of them, Stephen, is stoned to death and the church in Jerusalem is greatly persecuted and scattered—except the apostles!
If the church were persecuted, surely its leaders, the apostles, would be the first to suffer. This can only make sense if Luke means by the church only the Hellenist members of the Nazarene sect. In this, Luke might not have been careless, for that is what the church became. Evidently the apostles, who had been personally appointed by Jesus, a strictly Mosaic Jew, were recognized as Hebrews by the traditional Jews of Palestine, and were not persecuted. This confirms that the Nazarenes had split into two factions, a traditional faction and a Hellenised faction. Only the Hellenised faction survived to become Christianity.
The point Luke wants to make however is that the developing religion had spread beyond Jerusalem to Judaea and Samaria. There were Essenes in these areas, perhaps even Nazarenes, the converts of John and Jesus, but Luke makes it clear that the Hellenised faction is what he is talking about. Simultaneously, he introduces Saul who would become Paul, the proximate leader of the Hellenistic faction of the Nazarenes that was to become the Christians.
Saul appears in Acts 8:1, standing by at the death of Stephen and in Acts 8:3 laying waste to the church—persecuting the Hellenistic faction with great vigour even into their own homes. Despite his own statements that he was a “Hebrew of the Hebrews” and of the “seed of Abraham”, he was more likely a first generation Jew, the child of gentile godfearers brought up as a Jew. He proves to have Roman citizenship and he spoke and wrote Greek, so he was a Hellenised Jew himself. He wanted to be known as a Hebrew of the Hebrews—a true Jew—precisely because he was not, and he hoped to prove his Jewishness by vehemently persecuting the Grecized Nazarenes, shameful apostates of the Jewish religion. But such a vigorous persecution might have had even more certain grounds.
In sensitive areas, the Romans were keen to maintain peace not to stir up trouble. After the Nazarene rebellion in which a Roman battalion had been defeated, they will have pressurized the local authorities, the High Priest and the Sanhedrin to keep troublemakers clearly in sight and to root them out if they offered any threats. The Sadducees evidently still regarded the Nazarenes as seditionists keeping a close watch on them and, applying the stratagem of “divide and rule”, were delighted to profit from the split in their ranks, turning the people against them by encouraging their chauvinistic feelings against those influenced by foreign culture. Saul could effect to prove that all Greek speaking Jews, specifically himself, were not apostates by pursuing his job with vigour.
I say “his job” because later he seeks the authority of the High Priest to follow the Nazarenes to Damascus and it seems quite likely that he was in his employ from the beginning. A Greek speaking Jew who was a citizen of Rome and employed by the collaborating High Priest to maintain public order in a time of insurrection and who later infiltrated the organization he was persecuting—Saul begins to sound a more sinister figure than Christians would have us believe.
The Greek for “made havoc” is an expression commonly used of the savage mauling of its prey by a wild beast. If Luke here in Acts is faithfully rendering his source the implication might be that Saul was indeed a Roman agent. “Wild beasts” is code for lawless (without the Law of Moses) gentiles in the scriptures and the same code is found in Revelation. By using the verb meaning the mauling of a beast, Luke subtly identifies Saul as a Roman counter insurgent. Today, he would doubtless be called an “advisor”. He was Jewish, a big help to a military advisor to the Jews, but his loyalties were to Rome.
There are other historical examples for such people. Tiberius Alexander, the nephew of Philo of Alexandria, one of the classical authors to describe the Essenes, was a Roman procurator of Judaea. Though a Jew, he dutifully crucified Jewish rebels just as Pilate did. Saul infiltrated the Essenes then the Nazarenes then the Christians, ostensibly becoming their main evangelist but possibly serving as a Roman spy throughout—he was all things to all men (1 Cor 9:22). Christian scholars have puzzled why Acts does not finish with the trial and martyrdom of Paul at Rome. The truth might be that he was pensioned off to Spain.
Saul, yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the high priest, And desired of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound unto Jerusalem.
Saul went to the High Priest for letters to the synagogues in Damascus giving permission to seek out and arrest any that were “of the way” there (Acts 9:2) and bring them back to Jerusalem. Christians consider the use of the outmoded expression “the way” proves the authenticity of this passage. But if they want to argue thus, they have to accept that it is plainly indebted to the language of the Essenes who always spoke of their movement as “the way”. And, if the passage is genuine it offers real historical problems. Damascus was not administered from Judaea but directly by the Romans. What authority then had the High Priest who was merely the local ruler of Judaea.
In a vision on the way to Damascus Saul is confronted by Jesus who asks “why are you persecuting me?”, and Paul becomes convinced that it is the heretics who preach Jesus’s message, not the appointed apostles. He becomes a convert to the Hellenist sect taking the name Paul and appoints himself as apostle to the gentiles.
Such is the story, but could a “Pharisee of the Pharisees” work for the collaborating High Priest? It seems unlikely, even if the traditional enemies, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, were united in wanting to punish the Hellenistic branch of the Nazarenes opposing the Laws of Moses. Hyam Maccoby poses the following questions.
- Why should Saul go to Damascus when he evidently had plenty of work harrying the Nazarenes in Judaea?
- Why should an apparently private citizen apply for permission to pursue the Nazarenes abroad—surely it was a job for the authorities if it had to be done at all?
- What authority would the High Priest of Judaea have over people living in Damascus, a Syrian city?
- What authority would the High Priest have over synagogues, teaching establishments run by rabbis and supported by local Jewish communities, wherever they were?
If Nazarenes had to be pursued, it is difficult to see why the High Priest would not have sent one of his own Temple Guard. That is the point noted above. All of this persecution by Paul would be better explained if he were a member of the Temple Guard, implying that Paul was a paid agent of the High Priest and therefore directly or indirectly an agent of the Romans. If Paul worked for the High Priest, it suggests that his claim to be a Pharisee is a lie.
The idea of any local body like the Jewish Sanhedrin having any juridiction over the citizens of Damascus, the famous Arab city in Syria, seems absurd. Furthermore, the High Priest had no authority over synagogues, all of which had their own president who was a Pharisee. Even if the expatriate Pharisees of Damascus had supported the persecution of Hellenised Jewish apostates by Saul, which seems possible, it is difficult to accept that the local Roman governor would have been happy that Jews were kidnapping Greek speakers to take them back to Judaea.
Moreover, Paul tells us elsewhere that Damascus was ruled by king Harith of the Nabataean Arabs. There is no other extant source for such an assertion. Damascus was an Arab city, but Harith ruled much further south, and it is hard to see any convincing reason why the Romans would have let such an important and strategic centre as Damascus be ruled by a relatively minor sheikh from the south.
Did “Damascus” mean the Arab city? The reference in Acts to the street called “Straight” seems to confirm that it is. But if there were another Damascus in Judaea, it could have fallen under the jurisdiction of the High Priest who could therefore have legally sent his policeman. If ”Damascus” were a code word for the Essene community at Qumran then Paul would not have been going outside of Judaea to get to “Damascus”. Acceptance of this idea would directly link Paul, the early Christians and the Qumran Community.
Now in Galatians, Paul says after his conversion:
I went away into Arabia and again I returned unto Damascus. Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem.
This confounded scholars until the Essene headquarters was recognised as Damascus but now it is clear. After becoming a follower of Jesus, Paul went to Qumran to be initiated as an Essene, a procedure which takes three years. This is further demonstrated in his writings which use more Essene words than any other books of the New Testament. The references to the street named Straight and to Arabia evidently are editors’ additions inserted through ignorance or deceit. And in Acts, Paul’s sojourn in Damascus is turned in typical fashion into a dispute with Jews not the period of initiation it really was—the disputes came later.
It seems that the Essenes called their headquarters at Qumran by the name “Damascus”. If this is the Damascus meant, then these problems are easier to solve. It was in Judaea and therefore subject to the jurisdiction of the High Priest, was a place where Essenes or their converts might be expected to go under duress, and, being on the boundary with Nabataea, might well have been occupied or put under siege by Harith explaining Paul’s own tale.
Saul is Converted
Saul had an experience on the road to Damascus described three times in Acts, beginning at Acts 9:3-18. However, only Acts, not Paul himself, speaks of it, Paul implying his conversion occurred in Damascus. It is a healing miracle like those in Mark and has the same meaning. Saul was an enemy and a disbeliever but, through God’s grace, becomes a believer. In Acts 9:18-19, the scales fell from Paul’s eyes giving him his sight, he arose and was baptized and took food and was strengthened. It is a parable expressed in Essenic terms invented by Luke.
As a disbeliever, he was blind, but when he believed he recovered his sight. Saul was never really blinded physically, as we know because Paul has nothing to say about it himself in his letters, but, as an unbeliever, a sinner, a man of darkness—he was metaphorically blind. He received his sight because he had seen the errors of his ways—the miracle is a metaphor. Jesus is depicted as light, in contrast to the darkness of Saul—Essene concepts. The implication of darkness comes from Saul falling to the ground like Heliodorus (2 Macc 3:27-28) upon whom came “great darkness”. He repented and was baptized, and he received the bread and wine—the messianic meal which spiritually strengthened him. Eschew miracles and think in Essenic terms and all is clear.
The three days without his sight is an harmonization with Jesus’s stay in the tomb, and his not eating at the same time represents the fast which Christians originally undertook before their baptism, showing this is early church not Nazarene tradition.
Ananias is the agent of Saul’s conversion but when Paul relates his own history he never mentions him. He is part of the metaphor of Saul’s conversion, a construct by Luke or an even later editor. Ananias means “the grace of God”. Saul is converted by Ananias. Saul is converted by the grace of God. In Galatians 1:15, Paul tells us that God called him “through his grace”. Luke or the editor has personified Paul’s phrase and dramatized his description of his conversion.
Luke or the editor think the conversion happened in the Damascus in Syria and therefore introduce its most famous street, an attempt to add local colour and proving that all of this is composed, if Damascus was really Qumran. In Acts 9:13, Ananias refers to the “saints”, the Essenes’ name for themselves as the perfectly holy ones.
Saul immediately preached Christ in the synagogues (Acts 9:20). If Saul was at Qumran, there were no synagogues and this is composition, but “synagogue” simply means “assembly” and might be an alternative translation of the word “qahal”, used by the Essenes. Indeed, it is far from the bounds of possibility that the original use of “synagogue” meant the assemblies of the Essenes, and the usage here reflects it. Maccoby then is wrong in assuming that the syunagogues meant in the New Testament were what they became!
Paul tells us, in his own history, that he spent three years in Arabia. Acts makes no mention of a visit to Arabia even though it must have been important because, in his own account, he goes there directly after his conversion without even visiting Jerusalem. According to Galatians 1:11, Paul started his ministry in Damascus stating (Gal 1:17-18) he had already been there, but his visit to Jerusalem three years later was his first—directly contradicting the story given three times in Acts 9:1-28; 21:6ff; 26:12ff. Paul seems to say Damascus was in Arabia. Qumran was in the stretch of wilderness called Arabah and the period of initiation for an Essene was three years. Obviously, Paul served it, but for some reason that we now do not know, he was not admitted. After three years in Damascus learning the new teaching (Gal 1:18), Paul escaped (2 Cor 11:32-33):
The Jews took counsel to kill him.Acts 9:24
If this was Damascus in Syria, it must have been a very lawless town that gangs of Jewish vigilantes could command the city’s gates. Damascus was not a Jewish town, though it would have had a considerable Jewish population, so where were the local authorities and the Roman legions? “The plot to kill him” is probably an Essene excommunication which meant eternal death, and, for a devout Essene, physical death, because he could accept no help from others without the permission of his mebaqqer. Paul was not humble enough and not honest enough to submit to the rigours of being a lifetime Essene and, having offended the community, he was excommunicated.
In 2 Corinthians 11:32, Paul says the guards at the gates were those of the governor of Harith, the Arab king, which sounds plausible if Harith had occupied or surrounded Qumran. Of course the guards would not have been set specifically for Paul but to control the access and egress of everyone in the place.
Paul says Arabia was governed by Aretas (Harith) of Petra, but on the face of it neither the Damascus in Syria nor Qumran, if that was meant, could have been governed by Aretas. We have it only from Paul, unconfirmed by other historians, that Aretas ever ruled the Syrian city of Damascus. Syria was a major Roman centre and the base of several Roman legions. It could never have been ruled, at this time, by Aretas.
The Arabia ruled by Aretas was not Syria, north east of Judaea, but Nabataea whose capital was Petra, the Rose Red City, south of the Dead Sea. The area west of the Dead Sea, extending to the plain of Jericho, was called Arabah even in Deuteronomy 1:7. Aretas possibly laid claim to this land. Nabataea was a Roman client state, and since Arabah was mainly wilderness, the Romans probably did not care whether it was formally part of Judaea or Nabataea.
We know that Aretas had a dispute with Herod Antipas over borders to the east of the Dead Sea and, when he attacked Peraea in 36 AD to punish Antipas, Aretas might have occupied most of the Dead Sea area. Vitellius, who had been sent to punish Aretas for attacking Herod Antipas, withdrew his army when Tiberius died just as Aretas had expected. Thereafter, the Romans would have been more likely to mollify Aretas than to sympathize with Antipas. Both were Roman puppets but Aretas was the more important as a buffer with Parthia, and controlling important trade routes through Petra to the east—the supply of perfumes, spices and drugs from the Arabian peninsula. Paul was converted sometime in the thirties. Paul’s Damascus must have been Qumran, and it must have been briefly under the jurisdiction of Aretas, king of Petra.
He had spent three years in Qumran as a novice, but failed to complete the novitiate because he lacked Essene humility. Having evaded Harith’s soldiers, Paul returned to Jerusalem knowing a great deal more about Essene philosophy, and therefore of the basis of Jesus’s teaching, than did the apostles who were not trained Essenes but converted Jews. After only 15 days there, according to Paul himself, he saw only two apostles (Gal 1:19), James and Peter, but no others, implying that the Nazarenes were hard to find and therefore not very prominent because there were not many of them, most having been Hellenists who had now been dispersed. In Acts 11:29, the church at Antioch has no trouble in supporting the church in Jerusalem, suggesting that membership of the Jerusalem church was small. The impression given in Acts is of a much longer stay—propaganda intended to give Paul the kudos of acceptance by the chosen apostles. He left and did not return for another 14 years (Gal 2:1). The true apostles really wanted nothing to do with him.
If our picture is correct, the year was about 36 AD, the year of Pilate’s withdrawal, leaving Judaea temporarily without a Roman governor. Harith took his chance to wage war on the Jewish king of Galilee and Peraea, Antipas, and quite probably occupied the Arabah, including Qumran.
Paul uses many Essene expressions including the word “Belial”, the Essene word for the devil, which is used nowhere in the New Testament except in 2 Corinthians 6:14-15, a purely Essene passage:
What fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial?
Paul writes of a mystery and hidden wisdom in 1 Corinthians 2:7:
But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory,
language we can see precisely in the Scrolls. Nevertheless, Paul wanted to be known as a Pharisee because they were better known as the philosophers of Judaism, and not as an Essene who, if known at all were considered terrorists or, at the least, mad.
According to Acts 9:29, which says he “disputed against the Grecians”, Paul began as an Hebraic Nazarene after his admission into the sect and began disputing with the Hellenists. Luke even tells us that Paul was despatched to Tarsus to escape the murderous attentions of the Hellenists, but the Hellenists had been persecuted out of Jerusalem after the death of Stephen. Had they returned in such strength that they could now threaten the life of one of the faction of Hebrews?
In fact, Paul allied with the Hellenists led originally by Stephen and Philip. He appeared to switch from being ultra-orthodox to being ultra-radical. Paul’s idea now was to let all those who believed in Jesus to become full members of the Church and blow the Mosaic Law. The author of Acts makes it appear that Paul upheld Jesus’s idea that there was now a superior Law while the Jerusalem Church of Jesus’s original followers were too stupid to understand this and upheld the old Law. Of course, Jesus was as orthodox as his brethren and he is depicted thus in the gospels. But Paul wanted to substitute the new Law of the redemption of mankind from original sin through the sacrifice of the quasi-divine being. To this the Law of Moses was a hindrance.
James the Just and the Palestinian followers of Jesus would hear nothing of it! Saul was probably sent to Tarsus by the Jerusalem church to get rid of him. The disciples were afraid of him and…
…believed not that he was a disciple.Acts 9:26
They did not believe him or trust him. They will have thought he was a Roman agent provocateur and, since he was also a Greek speaker, they will have been relieved, if puzzled, that he was happy to leave Jerusalem to convert gentiles abroad.
It is really at about this point that Nazarene tradition ends and the tradition of Paul takes up the story.
Paul
Since the Nazarenes were still a part of Judaism, the original apostles did not trust Paul, and eventually he incensed orthodox Jews of the Diaspora so much that the they threatened to kill him and he had to be sent to Tarsus. Thankful to be rid of him the leaders of the Jerusalem Church allowed him to go on his self appointed mission to convert gentiles. The Nazarenes were still expecting Jesus to return on a cloud, and if Paul could be gotten rid of converting gentiles in foreign parts then fine. But he returned in 49 AD again to seek to persuade the Apostolic Council of Jerusalem to abrogate the Mosaic Law for gentiles.
According to Acts, Paul succeeded, but Paul’s own letters make no reference to this victory even though it would plainly have been a triumph for him. In fact, the opposite is true—James reasserted the status quo—”godfearers” could only be associates of the Church, circumcision was necessary for conversion. The Nazarene authorities, who had known Barabbas during his lifetime, were adamant that the Elect would consist of Jews or full converts to Judaism. Paul proves it himself, for off he went writing letters illustrating his contempt for the associates of Jesus. (Gal 2:6, 16, Phil 3:9). He writes of “false apostles” and “reputed” pillars sent to counter his teaching, confirming that the apostles opposed him. He berates the Galatians for accepting this “different gospel”, he refers to “another Christ whom I have not preached” showing clearly that there were two quite different and antagonistic interpretations of Jesus’s purpose. Paul acknowledged to the gentile proselytes that the Jesus of the Jerusalem Church was “another Jesus” (2 Cor 11: 3-4). Later, representatives from Jerusalem visit him in Antioch apparently to accuse Paul of backsliding in his adherence to the Law. Paul and Barnabas are ordered back to Jerusalem. The first schism in the Church had been recognised.
If the New Testament is to be believed in respect of Peter, he is unsure which of the two factions, Paul’s or James’s, to follow. Paul writes that he opposed Peter’s orthodox view at Antioch but persuades Peter of the correctness of the liberal interpretation and Peter then eats with gentiles. Faced with members of the Jerusalem Church, Peter reverts to the orthodox view. The Recognitions of Clementine speaks of a tradition that Peter tells followers at Tripolis to believe only those who bring the testimonial of Jesus’s brother, James, from Jerusalem. He warns of “false prophets, and false apostles and false teachers, who indeed speak in the name of Christ but do the work of the devil”. Peter was therefore opposed to Paul and Paul’s influence on him sounds like more Pauline fantasy aimed at boosting his prestige.
Paul left no stone unturned in deriding the true apostles. He boasts of his superiority to the apostles (2 Cor 11:5). They were merely Nazarenes, mostly converts of the simple of Ephraim, whereas he had been trained as an Essene. He denigrates them as false apostles (2 Cor 11:12-23), discredited them (Gal 2:6), ran down their speaking in tongues (1 Cor 14:4;9;11;14;18-19;21-23;33) and curses them (Gal 1:8-9). He declares the only authentic gospel is not of human origin and had not been taught him by anyone—the dead Jesus had himself supernaturally revealed it to Paul (Gal 1:11-12).
Knowing nothing about Jesus, Paul can say nothing about him, and confesses (2 Cor 12:1-4) what he does know comes from his visions. He confirms that Jesus was a descendant of David and was human (Rom 1:3) but he does not mention Jesus’s father, nor does he name Jesus’s mother in the only place he mentions her (Gal 4:4). Since Paul’s epistles are the earliest surviving Christian writings, Paul’s attestation (1 Cor 15:3-8) to the death, the resurrection and the appearances are the earliest we have. The only teaching of Jesus that Paul speaks of is that of the Eucharist (1 Cor 11:23-25), so this too is the earliest we have. Though Paul claims to be a Jew and Jews have one God only, he virtually deifies Jesus (Col 1:15-22) and he blames the Jews for Jesus Christ’s death (Thess 2:14-15), if this epistle is Paul’s. In other disputed epistles, he describes the teachings of the true apostles about Jesus as fables (1 Tim 1:4;4:7; Tit 1:14) which are unimportant because faith is all that matters. The Jerusalem Church’s answer to Paul’s teaching might have been the Epistle of James as it was addressed to the twelve tribes of the dispersion—all Jews in the wider empire.
So in 58 AD, Paul was summoned to Jerusalem by James and the Elders for propagating views contrary to the Church. Paul’s friends asked him not to go, but he determined to do so. James and the other ”Zealots of the Law” accused Paul of abrogating the Law of Moses. No reply was recorded, but Paul agreed to undergo a solemn purification proving that the Nazarene Church again imposed its will upon Paul, and that it had not abrogated the Law. James might have arranged this knowing that Paul had been teaching false doctrine, and that he could not refuse a request to undergo purification without damning himself.
Paul was known by some orthodox Jews of the diaspora and hated by them as an apostate. This is illustrated in Acts when a furious mob gave chase to Paul. They felt Paul had violated the Temple by undergoing ritual purification, as James had ordered, though he was a hypocrite who deliberately and habitually preached violation of the Law. Only the Roman soldiers saved him and escorted him to safety in the Antonia fortress. The Romans intended to give Paul a whipping, presumably for causing a public disturbance, but Paul pulled another rabbit out of the bag. He revealed that he was a Roman by birth, and could not be punished without trial. Some forty Jews then plotted to kill him, but the Roman commander found out, supposedly from Paul’s young nephew, and Paul was taken to Caesarea protected by a substantial body of troops! From Caesarea he is, after some time, taken to Rome for trial, on what charges nobody knows, and there he disappears from history after apparently living under house arrest for two years. The narrative ends suddenly.
There is much in this that is odd. Paul:
- turns out unexpectedly to be a Roman
- has apparent wealth
- began on good terms with the Temple officials
- finished on good terms with the Roman officials.
In his Epistle to the Romans 16:11, he has a companion called “Herodion” and in Acts 13:1 a member of the Antioch Church is the foster brother of Herod the Tetrarch. The Herods were the family of the puppet kings of Palestine and the Herodians were the party of supporters of the Herods. Paul seemed well in with the Romans and the Jewish collaborators. Was Paul a Roman spy or agent provocateur? Was his mission to infiltrate the messianic movement in Judaea to undermine and betray it? We do not know what became of Paul—as we noted, Acts ends suddenly—although tradition has it that he was martyred. What though of another tradition that he went to Spain? Was he pensioned off by the Emperor in a Spanish villa?
There is one independent source about Paul. The Ebionites or poor men, were suppressed by the Church as heretical but fragments of their beliefs remain in Heresies by Epiphanius. They say that Paul was not a Pharisee, his parents were gentile converts to Judaism, he went to Jerusalem as an adult, became a henchman of the High Priest and eventually sought fame by creating a new religion. Ebionites did not accept Paul’s view that Jesus was a divine sacrifice, but saw him as a human sent to begin the new era, as prophesied. They accepted the Torah, obeyed the Law of Moses and regarded themselves still as Jews. They were the remnants of the Jerusalem Church! J L Teicher of Cambridge University, who identified the Qumran Community with the Ebionites, goes further—he believes the Teacher of Righteousness was Jesus and the Liar of the Qumran Scrolls was Paul.
There are signs in the New Testament that Paul was disliked by the Nazarenes too:
I know the blasphemy of those who say they are Jews and are not, but the synagogue of Satan.Revelation 2:9
The author possibly means Paul specificly, but certainly means those like him who had altered Jewish beliefs to suit pagans. Elsewhere, in Revelation 13:1, the heads of the great beast which is Rome, have the name of blasphemy written on them. Revelation has been compiled from writings of different times. The implication here is that one of the earlier works was actually directed at the Hellenizers who were paganizing Nazarene beliefs.
