Vorkosigan

Akenson, Donald H. 2000. St. Saul: A Skeleton Key to the Historical Jesus. New York: Oxford, 346 pages.


Akenson's work on Paul is everything a scholarly text needs to be: brash, witty, fresh, erudite, amusing, and informative. Unfortunately, it is none of these when discussing Paul and his works. In short, this is a terrible book that might have been a useful 15 page publication in a respectable but not too high quality academic journal.

Although the book ostensibly focuses on the life and work of Paul and the apostle's usefulness in ferreting out facts about Jesus, in the first hundred and fifty or so pages Akenson devotes himself largely to sketching out the historical background of the times, and then to enumerating the shortcomings of other scholars engaged in the historical Jesus Quest. While this section is highly amusing ("anyone who could not spot [Secret Mark] as a forgery from the height of 3,000 feet should not be allowed to make authoritative pronoucements on the authenticity of texts that relate to Yeshua of Nazareth") and once in a while, even insightful, it has little application to the matter at hand. Worse, Akenson's own critical judgments are dubious; he accepts the interpolated passages in Josephus that relate to Jesus as genuine (though the longer one is tainted), and thinks John Meier's work is of rigor exceptional in HJ research. Liberal scholarship he dismisses entirely, while he patronizes conservatives. One wonders who he drinks with at conferences.

The next group of fifty-sixty pages is devoted to sketching the life of Paul. Following Knox and later Ludemann, Akenson wisely rejects Acts as a source of history for Paul (but maddeningly, relies on it for other historical "facts"). Instead, he sketches Paul's life as contained in his letters, and offers the chronology of Ludemman that sets Jesus' Crucifixion in the 27-30 period, and Saul's conversion between 30 and 33. Akenson accepts everything that Paul claims in the authentic epistles, believing that Paul was actually a Pharisee, and that he persecuted the Church before converting. He is suspicious about the accounts of the disputes between Paul and the Jerusalem caliphate, but on the whole Akenson, so nasty toward his fellow scholars, shows an astonishing credulity toward the words of Paul. Scholars with alternative Paul theories are dismissed as peddling conspiracy theories and sent packing with a footnote (that says that Hyam Maccoby's is perhaps the only tolerable one of them). Thus we see the key to Akenson's rejection of Acts: it supports theories that are more complex than his own. By getting rid of Acts and regarding Saul's account as trustworthy, he absolves himself of the need to face some of the more complex interpretations of Paul, while elevating Paul's apparent trustworthiness. Akenson also takes on its face the mainstream scholarship about Paul (minus Acts), thus placing him in the fundamentally contradictory position of dismissing scholarship when it discusses the HJ but accepting it when it discusses the historical Paul. Akenson would have done better to spend less time hacking on his colleagues, and more exploring the controversies surrounding Paul's life and career. While Akenson passes himself off as an intrepid mind ranging through the world of Paul to bring us new nuggets of insight, the reality is that there is almost nothing there that cannot be found in any modest conservative commentary on Paul's letters.

Not until chapter 8, 171 pages in, do we finally arrive at some discussion of how the information in Paul's letters relates to the HJ. The opening chapter of this section covers the "four basic facts" about Jesus. These seem to be -- for Akenson does not actually set them up in neat order and then explain them -- that Jesus did not call himself messiah, that he was born of the flesh (not a virgin birth), that the resurrection was spiritual not physical, and that he was not "an extremely profound student of the Torah." Akenson views these facts as Paul trying to swat away the emergent mythologization trend, a neat approach to the lack of historical data in Paul. "Saul has his own way of understanding the life of the historical Yeshua, but it does not involve mythologising its earthly character," he explains. None of them are very interesting and all have been mentioned by other scholars (whose work Akenson does not interact with in useful and informative ways).

On page 184 we finally reach "Melding Saul and the Gospels: A Beginning." One would think that we would see an exposition of Paul and the Gospels, but Akenson once again reverts to Big Game Hunter and goes out to collect scalps among the criteria-based methodologies in HJ research. While the book purports to be aimed at the lay reader, I doubt anyone who has not done some serious reading in the HJ research field could really get a handle on what he is talking about. Some 15 pages of this go by and then we find ourselves confronting Saul again.

Here, where Akenson is trying to connect Paul and the Gospels, he really begins to run into trouble. There is no way around the fact that Paul's letters are basically silent on the historical Jesus. While Akenson is clever at arguing....

• "[Paul] is a skilful, if sometimes free-swinging, rhetorician and he knows the difference between saying that Yehusa was put to death at Passover and that his death was iconically similar to the events of Pessah. He endorses the latter and implicitly rejects the former" (p203).

....there is simply no way around the Pauline silence. Similarly, he argues: "Although arguments from silence are always dicey, I think it is worth repeating that in none of the letters that are incontestably by Paul, is the concept of Son of Man employed" (p199). We slogged through 200 pages for that?

Here and there in this prolix nothingness are a couple of amusing moments. Akenson strings together the gospel passages where Jesus is said to have had trouble with the kinfolk, and the stern pronouncement against divorce, and then says:

• "Were we dealing with any historical figure other than Yeshua of Nazareth, one of the most obvious hypotheses that one would derive from the three diagnostic markers that I have discussed, when combined with even Matthew and Luke's admitting that from a purely biological point of view Miram's pregnancy was beyond explanation, is: that Yeshua was the product of a woman who, while betrothed to a man named Joseph, became pregnant by another man" (209).

. Yes, folks, Jesus was so tough about marriage-breaking because he was just a poor mamzer. Not only is there nothing really new in it, but none of the information Akenson builds his case on is contained in a Pauline letter. What is it doing in the book?

The text ends on page 255, and 80 pages of notes and indexes follow, along with the (inevitable) hack on the Jesus Seminar's voting methodology in an appendix. The relevant portion of this tome, devoted to Paul, is about seventy pages, and with revisions, could easily be reduced to a smart little paper for submission to a journal in the second tier. Two parties are at fault here: Akenson for writing this volume, and his editor for not slashing out the padding and sending it back with a note to focus the work more tightly on Paul.

To sum up: avoid this book. Spend the money on a commentary or Norton Critical Edition; it will contain the same point of view and information, and as a bonus, all of the text will actually be about Paul.

Vorkosigan