A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither.

Thomas Jefferson

How Paul Invented Christianity 2

The Jerusalem Church
Paul and the Essenes
Paul’s Eschatological Theories
Paul’s Hellenistic Syncretism

Abstract

Paul made the Jewish leader, Jesus, who expected God’s visitation to save the Jews from foreign oppression, into the saviour of an Hellenistic mystery cult. Paul was the cult leader. He transferred the divine title of God to the messiah, and substituted effort of will by faith. Faith is a cop out. It is empty without works, as James wrote, even in the New Testament. All modern Christians prefer faith because works means doing something—doing God’s will, actually measuring up to the law, or measuring up to the criterion of loving your enemy. Paul’s rejection of will undercut Jesus, Judaism and Zoroastrianism, because it is the effort involved in trying to do God’s will that is salvific. Trying to fulfil the law, and trying to love others is what takes people closer to God, not any self-indulgent faith. Paul distorted the value of the law, and he taught in opposition to Jesus. Jews stepped away and ignored him. The Christianity of Christ himself was destroyed.

The Jerusalem Church

Scholars have disputed for most of the twentieth century about the presence or absence of a pre-Pauline church. There is no question about there being a church at Jerusalem before Paul. It was led by James, the so-called brother of the Lord. The doubt is about what it was precisely. There were Christians in Rome before Paul got there. There were churches everywhere before Paul. From the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, there was a church even before Christ! For those interested in history and truth, the pre-Christian church was that of the Essenes, but it was not a Pauline church, though Paul took a lot from it. We only know about the Qumran Essenes, yet they existed elsewhere in Palestine, and apparently in Egypt where they seemed related in outlook to the Therapeutae. Perhaps they also existed in the diaspora. It seems unlikely that they did not, so they would have been another direct element in Paul’s mix of early Christian ingredients.

The Jerusalem church is presented always as the spontaneously generated church of the followers of Jesus—the church of the Nazarenes, set up after his death. But was it, or did it already exist because it was an organisation of the Essenes in Jerusalem? Was it set up and adminstered by the Essenes for Nazarene converts, who had been also recruited in previous apocalyptic frenzies and become what Josephus called the village Essenes? Careful honest study might clarify such issues, but Christians are incapable of it. They have to have a uniquely revealed religion.

Certainly Paul attended one or more apostolic councils in Jerusalem, evidently organized by the Nazarenes. The meeting Paul describes (Gal 2:1-10) seems to have been the one in Acts 15:6-30. (Another apparent meeting in Acts 11:27ff is not mentioned by Paul, and is probably a confusion of the one Paul does mention.) The author of Acts has tried to show it as an innocuous and harmonious meeting, but Paul did not see it that way himself, if his letter to the Galatians is to be believed. In it Paul calls Peter a liar! The chosen representative of Christ, upon whom Jesus allegedly said he would build his church, plainly disagreed profoundly with Paul. The disputes were about the requirements made by the law on gentiles converts.

Jesus had declared that not a jot or tittle of the law would pass away before the End, but had been ready to teach that the law could be abrogated temporarily in extremis, something quite acceptable to orthodox Judaism as laid down in the decree of Lydda, explicated in the Talmud (Sanh 74; Jer Sanh 2:6-21b; Arakhin 21). In times of religious persecution and stress such as warfare, the law could be transgressed in all but its main requirements. There were no justifications ever for incest, idolatry or gratuitous murder. On the grounds that the End was nigh, and the world was in a dire battle against sin, Christians, following Paul claimed much of the law was irrelevant for gentile converts. But Judaism had the Noahide (or Noachide) law, a minimal law of Moses meant for Godfearers as a step to full proselyte status. Circumcision was not necessary, but the Godfearer was not a proselyte and so not a Jew, and the emissaries from the Jerusalem church took this line. The gentile church claimed the Noahide requirements still held for Godfearers, and to become full Christians, they had to accept the full requirments of the law. The argument was therefore about whether circumcision was needed to make a Godfearer a full member of the church. It was about whether the law applied to Christian converts. Titus was circumcized Paul admits (Gal 2:3), having bowed to the seniority of the chosen apostles and the Jerusalem Church, but it is not something that the later Pauline church wanted in Acts, so it does not appear there.

For Paul’s gentile and Hellenized Jewish supporters, the original apostles were Judaizers, and so they have remained. These Judaizers were the actual followers of Christ in life and knew what he had taught and said. Paul knew none of this, and if he did, he did not care. For him, Jesus was a cosmic figure—effectively divine already—and his lifetime teachings were irrelevant to Paul’s own objective—to confirm his eschatological theories as right. The messiah had appeared and the End was imminent. People had to turn to Paul’s concept of the cosmic Christ to be saved. Whatever Christ himself had taught as a man had been superseded now that he was a god. Today, the End has still not come, so Paul’s theories have been proved hopelessly wrong. If Jesus was God, what was Paul?

Acts is a deliberately harmonizing work meant to minimize the divisions between the two factions and tone down the strife. But divisions and strife there were just a few years after the crucifixion. The outcome was to be that the foundation church of Christianity at Jerusalem, led by James and the chosen apostles, was sidelined and its members declared heretics by the church of Paul centered on Rome. Christians ought to find this disturbing, but naturally they do not. They have been taught by Paul not to doubt, to have absolute faith, but their faith is in a theory disproved 20 centuries ago. Their faith prevents them considering that the devil cut across God’s plans by setting up a false belief that negated the divine message God had brought in person. Luke’s Acts of the Apostles successfully hid the divisions, transforming Paul into an apostle of light, though he had succeeded in destroying God’s plan. Paul is the true Lucifer!

Paul and the Essenes

Paul knew of some of the customs of the primitive Jerusalem church including the sacred meal and the initiation by baptism, both taken from Essenic customs, the messianic meal and the purification of the body that accompanied the purification of the soul by repentance. Paul blatantly gave them Hellenized interpretations to suit the Hellenized Jews of the diaspora and godfearing gentiles. Baptism became a ritual dying with Christ and rebirth, and the messianic meal became an Hellenistic communion with the god, a step in the deification of Christ.

These early customs were the customs of the Essenes, of which Jesus was one. Baptism had been institutionalised from the outset as an initiatiation rite, because Paul assumes the Christians in his churches are baptized (Rom 6:3; 1 Cor 12:13). Moreover, the rite of breaking bread in a communal meal is attested in Jerusalem before Paul came on to the scene (Acts 2:42-47)—if we accept it is not a retrojection. Jesus broke bread in a ritualistic way, just as the Essenes did. The customs cherished by the primitive Christianity of Jerusalem were used by Paul, but misinterpreted. The Essenic belief of Jesus was undoubtedly apocalyptic, and Paul had the same eschatological outlook. Paul knew the doctrines of the Essenes. Indeed the best explanation of his three years in Arabia (Arabah) is that he had been an Essene novice, but one who apparently failed the novitiate and had to do a runner. His upbringing in a metropolis of the Hellenized east gave him a thoroughly Hellenized base for thinking, and between him and Jesus stood the Jerusalem Church and the chosen apostles. By comingling these various elements, Paul produced Christianity.

Paul made use of the Jewish scriptures in Greek called the Septuagint, to judge by the four main letters unreservedly assigned to him. The popularity of quotations from Isaiah in Paul's epistles reflects its importance to the Essenes, judging from the Dead Sea Scrolls. What is even more Essenic is Paul’s idiosyncratic exegesis, closely paralleled in peculiarity in the scrolls. Not only that, but the way Paul uses typological indicators and proofs is like the scrolls:

It consists in showing how past events disclose the pattern of events to come.
J Danilou (1950)

The Essenes searched the texts looking for words which typified their current interest and extracted a reading from the different contexts in which they were found using divers means including puns. The reading they wanted was a prophesy of the present or future events. The Holy Spirit revealed the “truths” underlying the obvious textual meaning:

The distinction between an apparent meaning which the casual reader does not get beyond, and a deep meaning accessible only to the learned, is the exact definition of allegory whatever be the context in which it is used.
J Pepin, Myth and Allegory (1958)

It is the method often used by Paul, and it is still used by rogues after an easy buck today. Those who claim to be able to see or read what is not there are always crooked and dangerous men. Leo Strauss, guru of the neocons, has even built up a dangerously reactionary philosophy on this sort of “interpretation”.

Both Paul and the Essenes thought they could read the Jewish scriptures as prophecy, not simply as history or doctrine. The accounts of the events in the Jewish bible told more than the obvious. They foreshadowed the messianic age. Allegory was their method of exegesis, the aim of which was to prophesy the the coming of the messiah, and the eschaton. It is all interesting if lunatic stuff, but is subject to a simple test of truth. Does it work? Answer, No! It does not work, and we know it because the prophecies did not come true. The Essenes were used to their prophesies not working and disconsolately, no doubt, returned to their scriptural studies and looked for what they had missed. They realized they had been wrong. Paul would not accept that he was wrong, except in some minor way that required a little fine tuning, which he did on the hoof, so that his theories were always found to be right, with hindsight. The parousia was plainly late and not showing signs of happening, so he claimed it had been somewhat delayed. He found excuses, and his successors continued to find excuses and Christians believed them:

The Christians gave themselves up to a passion for reinterpretation and substitution—a process that cannot possibly have been compatible with a good conscience.
F Nietzsche

Paul’s Eschatological Theories

From the time of the apocalypse of Daniel, written under the impact of Antiochus Epiphanes’ desecration of the temple (168-164 BC) up to the collapse of the messianic movement under Bar Kochba (135 AD), there was a period of uninterrupted eschatological tension.
H J Schoeps

Albert Schweitzer thought Paul took his ideas from Baruch and IV Ezra. Cosmic events were happening. Two æons were crunching together with the new one gradually over riding the old. With the resurrection, the new age had already begun and its supernatural properties could already be drawn upon through faith. The End began with the death of the messiah, and his resurrection heralded the final week of years before the old æon passed with the general resurrection. The model of the whole period from the birth of the messiah to new age was the life of king David. For about thirty years the son of David was more or less anonymous, then the kingdom would come over a period of forty years, of which a week of years was transitional. The precise nature of these periods had not been elucidated.

Jesus, it seems, had lived about thirty years and had started his mission fitting the beginning of the schema. He seems to have captured Jerusalem from the Romans, albeit only briefly before the Romans recaptured it and he was killed. The declaration of UDI in Jerusalem had seemed of eschatological significance to the Nazarenes. The Jews having rejected the strangers from the city, they expected God to send the archangel Michael and the hosts of heaven to bring about the kingdom of God. Jesus knew his fate was sealed and expected the eschatological miracle in the garden of Gethsemane, and the kingdom to begin then, because the report in the gospels was that he expected to eat the messianic meal with his supporters that very night. Presumably, this then was thought to have been the end of a period of forty years of struggle. It was a shock that Michael never came and the messiah was crucified. Then the disappearance of the corpse of Jesus made the disciples think he had been resurrected according to Hosea 6:3, and so the kingdom had started to arrive after all. Now they believed Jesus himself would return as the archangel Michael, but the dating had to be reset to another forty years hence, and the first Christians expected the parousia soon!—within forty years, anyway. The Jews of the Jerusalem church were happy simply to wait for the event while trying to persuade as many Jews as they could to repent before the End. Meanwhile, they believed the law of Moses still applied, and they continued to live accordingly. This was the situation as Paul found it.

He began teaching this very belief but all the time struggled with his own problems with it. he was not willing to simply watch and wait but instead began to formulate his own theories. After about twenty years or so, it was getting obvious that there was no parousia in the offing, and he had to find excuses for all the Hellenized Jews and gentile Godfearers he had infected with the certainty of it. He was still preaching but he was in crisis.

The non-appearance of the parousia in the first post-Christian century implies a fact which makes it impossible even for the most orthodox Christian dogmatist to take seriously… true Paulinism.
K Barth and A Schweitzer (1924)

The continued delay in the parousia ought to have aborted the Christian foetus in the first century of its conception, indeed in its first forty years. Yet twenty centuries later, Christians are still waiting with the hope on their lips, “Jesus is coming… soon!”

It is undeniable that Paul with the whole of primitive Christianity erred about the imminently expected parousia.
H J Schoeps (1959)

Pace A Schweitzer, Paul was not an ancient logician. He was a fibberty gibbet who picked up ideas here and there in the Hellenistic environment and put them together in real time, on the hoof, so to speak. Gnostic influence is unquestionable, and so too is the influence of the Hellenistic mysteries. He claimed to have been a Pharisee, but many Jewish critics cannot see it, and the Pharisees were rather more committed to their rabbinic necessities like the law than Paul was. His three years in “Arabia” can be explained if he was an Essene novice in the “Arabah” at Qumran, whence he had to flee. His biblical exegesis is often wild and eclectic, and his thoughts and justifications, especially when he is addressing Greeks, unashamedly draw on Hellenistic concepts. This is the fount of Christianity.

A deliverance of Christianity from its Pauline elements has become for ever impossible. This was decided by the defeat and elimination of the Ebionites.
H J Schoeps, Paul (1959)

Schoeps says Paul’s thinking is dialectic. It is not dialectic in any Socratean sense. What it is is dualistic. When he thinks of death, he thinks of not-death—life! When he thinks of flesh, he thinks of not-flesh—spirit! It is a type of thought that springs from the Persian religion and entered Orphism and Hellenistic Judaism, as shown by the Essenes. Paul is excitable, moody and passionate, and his thinking is discontinuous, reflecting the quick passing of his moods as he thinks. He is a man possessed or at least obsessed, pursuing his ambitions but paranoid that his distracters were pursuing him. He feels he is suffering as an apostle of Christ but is suffering from his own neuroses. He admitted he had a thorn in his side but no one is sure what he meant. Some think he was epileptic. Some think he was a closet homosexual. Perhaps he realised he hovered on the edge of madness.

In any event, Martin Dibelius thought he lacked “any sort of humanism” because his personality lacked organic unity, harmony and integration. He wrote opaquely and using concepts that no one now understands anyway. He was diametrically opposite to the Christian god, Christ, whom he contradicts incessantly, and Christians now accept his views not those of Jesus whom they supposedly follow. Perhaps it is because Paul suits the people of western societies more than does Jesus. Paul was a towny, he was worldly, he had little knowledge of Nature but understood the political affairs concerning the empire, and chatted amicably to Roman governors and their puppet Jewish kings. Jesus was a parochial countryman whose images were of Nature and farming, and whom the authorities pursued as a rebel. Christians seem utterly unable to see the plain contrradictions between the two, or indeed any contradictions in their beliefs at all, though they are shot through with them. They are incapable of criticizing them or of self-criticism, and they approach their study of Paul like all their other studies of Christianity, from fear. They fear that any doubt they admit will mean they have lost their post mortem rewards, and so they refuse to consider anything other than what they have been taught by rogues and leeches. So, what they read is acceptable views, Christian views, and they read their modern opinions into Paul even though it is impossible that he thought like them.

Paul’s Hellenistic Syncretism

No one has understood Paul, if he thinks he can agree with him. The opponents of this assertion involuntarily confirm it in the way they distort his words to wrest from them a satisfactory meaning.
Franz Overbeck (1919)

When Overbeck speaks of Paul’s supporters, Christians, “distorting his words”, he means they are lying about what he actually said. Not only can Christians not stop it, they have to do it to maintain their beliefs in the unbelievable. Among the things they have to lie about is that Paul has blatantly amalgamated concepts of the mystery religions with Jewish concepts. Paul Reitzenstein in 1927 showed that Paul was replete with gnostic dualism—sarx, pneuma, psyche, pistis, erga were all popular gnostic concepts. Combining phos with gnosis is another Pauline characteristic (“the light of the knowledge of God’s glory”, 2 Cor 4:6). It comes directly from the doctrines of Hermes Trismegistus and the mystery religions which parallel the growth of knowledge with illumination as stages of “enlightenment”! Once fully illuminated or enlightened, the mystery initiate was “renatus in æternum”—born again forever. Inevitably, the Christian will protest that Paul’s mystery of resurrection is not the Hermetic mystery of rebirth. It is like saying an oak table is not the same as a teak one. We have to concur, but their purpose is the same.

Nor should anyone be surprised that Paul was thus influenced. He was born in Tarsus in Asia Minor, a large and busy commercial city with a strongly Persian influence and consequently a wide spread of eastern cultures among its cosmopolitan citizens. Particularly significant were the incluence of Persian dualism and the mystery religions. Dio Chrysostom says that the city God was Herakles, albeit called Sandan, whose image was burned annually at a seasonal solar festival. The symbolism of it was the burning up of the vegetation in the hot season to be reborn again when the rains came. So Sandan was a type of Osiris, Tammuz, Attis and Adonis, the dying and rising vegetation deities of the ANE. Inscriptions to the theoi soteres show that these celebrations were considered to be salvific, and it is impossible to believe that Paul, growing up with all this, was not aware of its power to engage and impress people, even if he wanted to remain faithful to his own Jewish upbringing. Besides this, Augustus had started the imperial cult in which the Divus Augustus had the titles of kyrios (Lord) and soter (Saviour). Indeed, Paul effectively described Christ as the emperor awaited by the Christians (Phil 3:20), politeuma having nothing to do with “conversation”, but meaning “government”, an analogy with the imperial government—they were in the Roman empire.

Wilhem Bousset, the prominent scholar, made no bones about Christianity being a syncretistic religion. The Jewish leader who expected God’s visitation to save the Jews from foreign oppression was made into the saviour of an Hellenistic mystery cult. Paul was the cult leader. He transferred the divine title of God to His chosen and anointed one, the messiah. The only “divine Lord” of the Jews was God, so to call a man “Lord” (kyrios), in any context other than a plainly profane one, was to deify him. Paul did this and rationalized it with the theology of the divine man as a son of God, a thoroughly Hellenistic idea, while the notion of the rising god of the mystery religions gave him the idea of the risen Christ. Critics say there is no evidence of any kyrios cult. Christianity is the evidence. What there is no, or little, evidence for is a kyrios cult in Judaism before Paul. Yet the Jews had been subject to Greek influences for almost 400 years before Paul and the cultural climate it created was saturated with the ideas incorporated in the mysteries, the legacy of the mixing of civilizations under the Persian empire and its sudden collapse. The sacramental participation in the death and revivification of a god was well established, and even Judaism might have had a variety of it in the hypothetical cult of Joshua for which there is circumstantial evidence.

What is indisputable is that Pauline religion, historically considered, shows the “type” of a mystery religion.
H Windisch

Paul pandered to…

…the need of mystery felt by the religiously awakened masses. He seeks a sacrifice, a bloody phantasmagoria which sustains the struggle by means of images drawn from secret cults—God on the cross, the drinking of blood, the unio mystica with the sacrifical victim.
F Nietzsche

As usual we have apologetic attempts to distinguish Christianity from the mysteries. The mysteries, the apologists say, were timeless but the death of Christ was an event in history. 2000 years on, the difference is hard to discern. Christ’s death and vaunted resurrection is as timelessly remembered as those of Attis were, and who can say for certain there was no historical man behind the myth of Attis? The Egyptians believed that their dying and rising god, Osiris, had been an Egyptian king in primitive times, and who can prove that the gospel stories are not themselves merely stories, inventions to uphold the cult of the god. Critics of Christianity would say it is obvious they are because men do not return from death. If they seem to, then the appearance was a fake—a staged trick such as were popular at the time. Either way, nothing now distinguishes the Christian belief from the earlier ones called mythical by Christians.

Another difference apologists have highlighted is that the mysteries were personal but Christianity is communal. It is another empty distinction, and one not offered often these days! So far as we understand, the mysteries involved a personal initiation in which holy secrets were revealed, but otherwise the initiates celebrated en masse as Christians do. Christians are, for their part, usually trained into their religion, and are confirmed in it or are converted to it in some personal way. Thereafter, celebration is communal, but salvation remains personal. Modern “born again” Christians particularly regard their relationship with Christ as a personal one. The subtlety of any distinction from the ancient mysteries is so fine that no one honest can claim there is one. In both Christianity and the ancient mysteries, celebration was communal but salvation was personal. Christianity was a mystery! So even if Paul thought there was some distinction when he used words like mysterion or gnosis or soteria from the practitioners of the mystery rites, the difference quickly disappeared for the Gnostics thought he was their saint. Paul unequivocally writes about æons and archons as wicked rulers of this wicked world by whom the death of Christ was brought about. These and many other technical terms of the Gnostics are used openly by Paul, and in no special way.

This gnosis, considered as irrational awareness, is close to the cultic mystic consciousness of the mystery religions.
H J Schoeps, Paul (1959)

If Paul’s cosmic redeemer in Jesus Christ did not already exist in Hellenistic thought, it must have given succour to the Gnostics who were waiting for something like it, and the later letters, thought once to have been Paul’s own, but no longer, are even more singularly Gnostic. E Käsemann says Colossians and Ephesians cannot be understood outside Gnosticism! Other notable scholars, like Kirsopp Lake and Alfred Loisy concluded that, whatever Christianity began as, it became a mystery religion under Paul’s influence, a conclusion that meant the Hellenistic thoughts of Paul outweighed his Jewish ones—unless there were indeed as yet unknown Jewish mysteries.

Another strand of Christian apologetic ignores this possibility on the basis that the Judaism of Jesus was effectively modern rabbinic Judaism, and so could have had no mysteries of its own. The question of mysteries in ancient Judaism remains moot, but it is certain that ancient Judaism was not like rabbinic Judaism, because the Rabbis deliberately pruned their religion after the Jewish war, and also because, like Christianity, it continued to evolve since. This apologetic strand is yet more absurd because it maintains Paul was never influenced by Hellenistic Paganism as his love of Hellenistic Judaism was so strong. The argument implies two utterly separate non-overlapping religious worlds such that people could choose one and never be polluted by the other. Paul chose Judaism and was never polluted by Pagan culture. Of course, the whole of Hellenistic society was Pagan, and it was quite impossible for Jews in Greek cities to avoid its influence. Paul might have been a pious Jew but he moved in that Pagan world and could not avoid it. More evidence is that Paul claimed to be both an exclusive Pharisee and a Roman citizen. If this was even possible under Roman law, it must have been extremely rare. It is impossible for anyone not brought up in a cupboard to avoid the influence of the world you are brought up in. There were far more diaspora Jews than there were Jews in Palestine clinging to a dying tradition. At the time Jews were keen on missionizing and they readily used the language the Greeks were familiar with for making converts, just as Paul did. It worked for Paul.

C G Montefiore and J W Parkes concluded that pious Jews of the diaspora did not have the same attitude as the Palestinian Rabbis, the Pharisees. In particular the messiah conceived by the Hellenized diaspora Jews had much more cosmic proportions than the supernatural warrior king of the Judaean Jews. Paul took advantage of this non-traditional notion of the messiah because it suited the thinking of the marginal Jews and gentiles he was addressing. Montefiore identifies eight doctrines unnacceptable to the Pharisees of Judaea that Paul espoused:

a divine messiah
despair over the sin in people
insuffient respect for the law of Moses
relative disdain for Jews
a mystical concept of the saviour
the equality of Jews and gentiles in salvation
opposing works with faith
opposing spirit and flesh in a spiritual and material dualism.

In fact, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the revelation of the beliefs of the Essenes shows this thesis is flawed, for the Essenes had some at least of these ideas in Palestine, though they did not have them in the way Paul had. It shows that Paul could have found the basis of his ideas also in Palestine as well as in the diaspora. In fact, the Essenes were in a sense more exclusive than the Pharisees, but this very exclusivity had forced them to devise acceptable ways of interacting with the unclean gentiles. With their carefully worked out rules, Essenes could mix yet remain acceptable pure in their cleanliness. Arguably, then the more pious of the diaspora Jews were Essenes rather than Pharisees. The majority, though, were unpious, and even effectively lapsed Jews with little real knowledge of Jewish doctrine. They held on to their identity in a token way salving their consciences by occasionally taking the Paschal pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and paying their dues and for charities. Paul collected for the Poor, the Ebionites who comprised the Jerusalem Church. The Essenes were decidedly apocalyptic in outlook, and marginal Jews might have been more influenced by them than the more liberal and quietist Pharisees. Certainly, many of the characteristics Montefiore sees as belonging to diaspora Jews were closer to the ideas of Palestinian Essenes than to the Rabbis. Moreover, it is precisely the apocalyptic content of Judaism that the Rabbis excluded to exclude the fanatics.

Paul also seemed to quote his scripture from the Septuagint, albeit in such a free manner that he is considered by apologists to be citing from memory. Anyone of the ability to enter Gamaliel’s school ought to have known the scriptures off by heart. T Zahn thought Paul used different Hebrew translations, but there is a simpler and more likely hypothesis. The Essenes had curious methods of exegesis, and Paul used the same typological methods. Moreover, it is now known that the Septuagint is often closer to some of the Essenic scriptural renderings than to the Jewish Masoretic, for long considered the standard. It suggests that the Essenes had a more significant role at the time than was known until their scrolls were found. Scholars mistakenly gave all the ownership credits of the scriptures to the Masoretes. Now we know Essene versions that are older and different, and they are often closer to the Septuagint. The Masoretic texts are no longer the ipsissima verba of the Hebrew scriptures at all. In fact, the Masoretic version is more often cut to favour Jewish national pride—the effect of the Hasmonaean civil war that set up the Jewish state. The Essenes were nationalistic enough, but seemed to remain more loyal to the original universalism of the Persians. It is one of the ways that Christianity is more true to pre-Rabbinic Judaism than modern Judaism. Paul either favoured non-Masoretic, probably Essene, versions of the scriptures, or he used the Septuagint written for Greek speakers and in a Greek koine that they could understand. It was an Hellenized bible.

Philo of Alexandria, often admired as a Hellenized Jew, proud of his Jewishness also illustrates the tendency. It might be true that he never forgot his Jewish law, but he was, like Paul, interested in proselytizing, and for that purpose, he did just what we have been saying—he used what Greeks could understand, the notions peculiar to the mysteries. He described the Jewish patriarchs and even Moses as did the mysteries—as examples of the ascension of the human soul towards God. Philo really believed it to be so, and perhaps that is what they were meant to be, not historical figures! Moses was a mediator between man and God, in Philo’s view. Surely, it is true. God says to Moses, “Come to me”, but that is not just a simple command to move nearer physically, it is a command to ascend spiritually to the divine level. Thus Moses was more than a man. He was of the third race—a divine man—mediating between men and God. The ascent of Moses to Sinai was a metamorphosis, a transfiguration, and Christianity recognizes it in having Moses appear when Christ has the same experience in his transfiguration. The point is that these parallels or ways of thinking were in use. They were in the ethos of the times, so it is hardly surprising that they were used. Yet that is what fundamentalist Christians deny, though it is essential to the understanding of Paul.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.