Saint Paul.
by Michael Grant.
Scribner’s. 250 pp. $14.95.

At the beginning of Christianity stand two figures: Jesus and Paul. What was the relation between the two? Orthodox Christian doctrine is that Paul was the humble follower and faithful explicator of Jesus. Michael Grant’s opinion is: “What the two men preached was quite different, and the Christianity that we have today is largely Paul’s creation.” Many would agree with this, but not necessarily with the same degree of admiration for Paul’s “religious genius” and originality.

Even the opinion that Paul falsified and perverted Jesus’s message can be held in very different ways. Nineteenth-century liberals, such as the French historian Ernest Renan, regarded Paul as an oversubtle rabbinical thinker who had overlaid the simple beauty of Jesus’s ethical teaching and personal example with a hair-splitting and hair-raising system of theology. In this view, Jesus was the reformer who had cut the Gordian knot of Jewish super-subtlety, and Paul was the Jewish rabbi who had tied everything into rabbinical knots once more. The claim made in the New Testament that Paul was at first a Pharisee who had studied in the school of Rabban Gamaliel was taken at its face value and made the basis of a characterization of him as villain. The fact that all Paul’s theology is directed against rabbinical notions of rationality and moral responsibility was somehow overlooked.

An entirely different way of regarding Paul as the villain is that which has been held by most Jewish students of Christianity ever since medieval scholars, such as Profiat Duran, began to study the New Testament instead of accepting at face value the Christian Church’s account of what Jesus stood for. On this model, it is Jesus who is the Jewish rabbi, who never had any intention of setting himself up as a deity or of founding a new religion, while Paul is the perverter who turned the crucified Jesus into a god, declaring that the Law had come to an end and that the Jewish people had been rejected by God. Instead of an un-Jewish Jesus and a Jewish Paul, we have a Jewish Jesus and an un-Jewish Paul. But the end result is the same: Paul as villain.

Twentieth-century research produced some ironical developments, which, on the whole, have much improved Paul’s image. First, Christian scholars moved away from Renan’s “Jewish” Paul and developed a Hellenistic Paul. And more recently, Paul has reverted to being typically Jewish, but now in a way which is very much to his credit. Jewish scholars however, have gone on thinking that Paul was un-Jewish, but nowadays are prepared to be more tolerant about it.

Reitzenstein, Bousset, and other writers of the “History of Religion” school saw Paul as chiefly influenced by the “salvation” doctrines of the mystery-religions and the gnostic sects. This neutral, scientific approach was uncontaminated by any opinion on whether Paul had “spoiled” Christianity by getting it mixed up with Hellenistic spirituality. For Rudolf Bultmann, however, the Hellenistic Paul was also a theological necessity. For Bultmann, the permanent appeal of Christianity lay in its Hellenistic, not in its Jewish, affinities. Jesus himself (considered as a historical personage) faded into an insignificant figure, a simple, provincial Jew. It was Paul’s Jesus who was the cornerstone of Christianity, not the actual Jewish Jesus who had taught and acted and proclaimed the kingdom-of-God-on-earth in Judea, but the cosmic savior-Jesus who descended from heaven, suffered voluntary crucifixion, and rose again, defeating the powers of darkness and delivering mankind from sin and the yoke of the Law. It was the mythological Jesus who interested Bultmann (since his famous “demythologizing” process required a myth to begin from); the historical Jesus, about whom he declared that very little could be known, was a relatively boring figure.

Not everyone set such a high value on Hellenistic mystical religiosity. Gilbert Murray popularized the idea that it represented a “failure of nerve.” Its deep pessimism about this world, its abandonment of politics to the power of tyranny, its dualistic melodrama of Good and Evil, could seem both faint-hearted and vulgar. Christian theologians, after Bultmann’s swing of the pendulum toward a Marcionite rejection of the Jewish heritage of Christianity, began to feel homesick for the Old Testament and Jewish rootedness in earth and sanity. After a period in which Paul was unashamedly called “the greatest of the gnostics,” it began to be felt that Paul was not a gnostic at all, and should even be reckoned as a great opponent of gnosticism. He was, after all, a “Hebrew of the Hebrews,” and his wildest flights had a Jewish provenance. It was unnecessary, it began to be argued, to have recourse to Hellenistic sources for anything in Paul; it could all be explained from the Apocrypha, the Midrash, and the Talmud. W. D. Davies, in his Paul and Rabbinic Judaism (1947), undertook to derive all Paul’s innovations—predestination, vicarious sacrifice, original sin, salvation by grace—from his rabbinical background. And the subsequent discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls, with their dualism and apocalypticism, seemed to make the task of re-Judaizing Paul all the easier.

_____________

Paul has thus progressed, through several permutations, from being Jewish and bad (Renan) to being Jewish and good. Michael Grant, in Saint Paul, takes the current view, that Paul is Jewish and good. He assumes, with a minimum of argument, that attempts to explain Paul in terms of Hellenistic influences (absorbed in his youth at Tarsus) have failed. The root question of his book thus becomes, “How does a nice Jewish boy get to become a Paul?,” and the upshot of his inquiries is, “By his radical rejection of the Law, Paul took a step which, as time went on, came to exercise an almost uniquely decisive effect on the course of history, religious and secular alike.” Paul was “completely Jewish in education and outlook,” and his story thus is of one who, in overcoming Judaism, overcame the world. This is to attribute a great dynamism to Judaism, if recoiling from it can produce such an effect; but one of the defects of Grant’s book is that he does not explore this aspect, or explain why the overcoming of Judaism is a matter of such reverberating importance.

If Paul really were the rabbinical expert that recent modern theory postulates, he certainly would be a very interesting figure. But if one imagines, say, Elisha ben Avuyah, the great apostate rabbi of talmudic times, taking up his pen to attack the Jewish Law, the result would be something very different from Paul’s Epistles. There is no solid evidence that Paul even knew the Hebrew Bible, since his quotations are all from the Greek translation, the Septuagint. An interesting example is the famous quotation (I Corinthians 15:55), “O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?,” which comes from the Septuagint of Hosea 13:14, where the Masoretic text has a different reading of almost opposite meaning. A more important example is Paul’s use of the text, “He that is hanged is accursed of God” (Deuteronomy 21:23). Paul argues (Galatians 3) that Jesus voluntarily took upon himself this curse by undergoing crucifixion. An over-literal reading of the Septuagint could lead to such a view; but the rabbis read the text to mean, not that a curse fell upon a man who was hanged, but that it was an offense against God, in whose image man was made, to leave a dead body hanging overnight. The rabbis regarded judicial hanging as an atonement for the criminal’s sin, not as bringing a curse (in hell?) upon him. Paul, so far from being a rabbinical expert, read the Septuagint in the manner of a highly intelligent but unscholarly Protestant fundamentalist, poring over Scripture and arriving at bizarre interpretations of his own. Nothing could be further from rabbinical thinking than to suppose that all the brave martyrs who suffered from the Roman policy of crucifixion thereby incurred a curse.

Grant’s whole argument, however, is based on the fashionable (or once-more-fashionable) idea that Paul thinks like a rabbi. W. D. Davies wrote a whole book to prove this—and Samuel Sandmel, the American Bible scholar, wrote of it: “Davies’s book is an admirable book, indeed, a great one—and one with which I disagree almost 100 per cent.” Such wide disagreement among scholars, on what would appear a relatively easy matter to decide, suggests that deeper issues are at stake. Scholars cannot even agree about whether Paul’s Greek style is that of a native Greek-speaker or not. For example, when Paul uses the unidiomatic plural “ouranoi” for “heaven,” is this because he is thinking in Hebrew (shamayim), or because he is quoting from the Septuagint of the Psalms? Such arguments can go on happily forever among scholars. More likely to come to a conclusion are considerations based on Paul’s thought and style of reasoning. For example, Paul’s use of the a fortiori argument, in Romans 5, has been adduced to show his familiarity with the rabbinical kal vahomer. To my mind, it proves the opposite; Paul’s a fortiori arguments are loose, rhetorical analogies, very different from the exact reasoning of the kal vahomer.

Grant, however, works in much broader terms than these. He is somewhat handicapped in his attempts to fill in Paul’s Jewish background by having to rely on secondary sources. For example, he says that the Eucharist resembled “meals at Qumran [the Dead Sea community], accompanied by pronouncements that ‘this bread is the Messiah of Israel.’” Though no note is given, the reference is clearly to the “Messianic Rule.” It would be an epoch-making event if a Dead Sea scroll were found to anticipate the eucharistic idea of eating the Messiah. But no such expression as “this bread is the Messiah of Israel” exists in that or any other scroll. Grant has misunderstood something he has read. Paul’s description of the eucharistic rite (I Corinthians 10:14-17 and 11:23-6) is the earliest in the New Testament writings. The idea of eating a sacrificed god can be found in many contemporary pagan sources; yet it is typical of the approach of the school to which Grant belongs that even this idea, which is utterly alien to Judaism, has to be attributed to Judaism. Grant quotes J. G. Davies: “The Jew, unlike the Greek, was not interested in things in themselves, but only in things as they are called to be. . . . Hence Jesus could say of a piece of bread: ‘This is my body.’” Accordingly, the eucharist is not only Jewish, but especially Jewish! This is mere nonsense.

Grant does reject the legend, found in Acts but not in Paul’s own writings, that Paul was a pupil of Rabban Gamaliel. Grant considers, on the contrary, that Paul learned his Pharisaism in Tarsus, and never visited Jerusalem until some time after his conversion to Christianity. But Grant never considers the possibility that Paul was never a Pharisee at all; that he assumed a Pharisaic background in order to impress his half-educated audience with his credentials as a critic of the Law. It is significant that Paul himself never mentions in his Epistles that he came from Tarsus. Instead, he describes himself in terms which, by false inference, imply a Judean background: “. . . of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews. . . .” (Philippians 3:5). That Paul had at least a touch of the charlatan is something that Grant never allows to seep into consciousness. But unless one sees him as the spiritual ancestor of all those breast-beating hot-gospelers, arrogant and mock-humble in turn, cunning and flexible, but often carried away by their own surging eloquence into genuine belief, one has not understood at least one side of Paul.

Grant’s study is altogether too respectful. For example, he suppresses the evidence of the anti-Pauline literature which somehow survived the censorship of the Church: the Ebionite denunciations quoted by Epiphanius and Irenaeus, the scarcely-disguised attack contained in the Clementine Homilies, and the Judeo-Christian anti-Pauline polemics revealed in the important document discovered by Shlomo Pines in 1966.¹ Any book on Paul should at least consider these texts; the time for dismissing them as “scurrilities” has passed. They reveal a very different Paul: one who was consumed by ambition and envy, and who constructed a post-crucifixion divine Jesus as a rival to the historical Jesus, whom he never knew, because this was the only way to assert his own authority against the apostles James and Peter, who were Jesus’s lifetime companions. The Jewish Christians, who were faithful to the Law, regarded Jesus as a human prophet or messiah, and denounced Paul as a perverter of Jesus’s message, deserve more than the passing mention that Grant gives them. He regards them as small fry compared with Paul: “It is very surprising indeed that the infant Church, with its mainly humble and uneducated adherents, should have suddenly acquired an apostle and prophet who breathed the terrific intellectual and imaginative power and exaltation of Paul.”

_____________

Paul, Grant is convinced, is the great genius whose breakthrough in thought produced vast revolutionary consequences. Yet Grant has some difficulty in explaining what exactly these consequences were, except by pointing to the success of Pauline Christianity in becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire. But may it not be that this great “success” represents the failure of Pauline Christianity to pose any threat to the values of the Roman Empire? Grant struggles with the criticism that Paul, by his removal of religion from the sphere of politics, was a reactionary; that he explicitly counseled submission of subjects to rulers and of slaves to masters. But no—he was really “deeply radical,” and what is the proof? That his brand of Christianity eventually conquered the Roman Empire! It would have been more relevant to mention the German theologians who, almost to a man, cited Paul (and that great Pauline, Luther) to justify non-resistance to the Nazi state. When one reads Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one realizes what a tremendous effort it took to shake free from Paul’s influence in this matter.

As an alternative argument, Grant tries to locate Paul’s greatness in his “universalism,” by which he broke down the barriers between Jew and Gentile. It can be doubted, however, whether a scheme which condemns all non-Christians to everlasting hell is truly universal. Judaism’s pattern of universalism, with its theory of a special role for the Jews among the nations, any member of whom may join the “nation of priests” by vocation, but may equally find justification under the less exacting Noahide laws, receives little appreciation or understanding. The considerable achievements of Jewish proselytism, on which Paul built his missionary success, receive hardly any acknowledgment. Grant’s book is a competent and readable run-through of the current state of opinion on Paul. It should be read mainly as interesting evidence of the present unsatisfactory state of Pauline studies.

¹ The Jewish Christians in the First Centuries of Christianity, According to a New Source (Hebrew), Jerusalem, 1969.