Toto

The NT guild thinks of Maccoby as an amateur.

There are several old threads that spin has started on the question of dating Paul's epistles. The latest is here

Sheshbazzar

Would you care to tell us how you know what "Paul" was entirely unaware of?
Do you possess some secret access to the contents of "his" mind beyond what is recorded in those heavily doctored books?
Perhaps it has never occurred to you, that even if "Paul" was fully aware of the Temple being destroyed, that it might better serve "his" purposes to carefully conceal that knowledge to make "his" production appear to have been composed at an earlier date?

Or that "he" might just be making a literary "claim" to knowing James?
So creating a claim of a familial relationship with a well known real historical figure, to link up with, and to flesh-out and give an appearance of reality and substance, a body to that phantasm that was "his" invisible god figure.

The whole thing is just too totally contrived, IE, If "he" can get you to accept "this" detail, then it follows that you will also be gullible enought to accept "that", and on and on.

Doug Shaver

Others have siad most of what I'm going to say, but I'll throw it into the pot anyway.

Paul is our only identifiable contemporary source for anything related to Christianity during the middle of the first century.

There is none, but somebody had to write those letters, and they were almost certainly written before the destruction of Jerusalem during the First Jewish War.

The scholarly consensus is that Paul did not write all the letters that have his name on them, but most experts are pretty sure he wrote Romans, I and II Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, I Thessalonians, and Philemon.

If you mean the Pauline story as told in the Acts of the Apostles, no, there isn't, and there is good reason to think Acts is mostly if not entirely a work of fiction. The only parts of the "Pauline story" that you should consider reliable are the parts that Paul himself includes in his letters. And those are very little. He admits to having persecuted Christians at one time, but he gives no specific details at all, and he also says not a word about how he was converted.

schilling.klaus

Rod Green sees some hints within the epistles, especially the reference to Gallio which seems to be copnfirmed by a recent archeological find.

But any forger familiar with first century history may have used this detail any time later in order to add credibility, so what.

Klaus Schilling

juergen

Wow, I didn't know that.

Thanks!

Solitary Man

Hyam Maccoby is a published scholar with papers in several respectable refereed journals and within those same journals are scholarly reviews of his works. He is, however, seen as a populist (which he is), and he lacks scholarly rigour and currency. His work, however, is engaging enough to even require responses, such as Jacob Milgrom's "Impurity Is Miasma: A Response to Hyam Maccoby," in JBL 119.4 (2000): 729-733. (Milgrom is one of several scholars with whom Maccoby had tried to refute on certain topics.) There are some very good things to be said about him, such as what Christine Hayes says in her review of Ritual and Morality: The Ritual Purity System and Its Place in Judaism, in JQR 93.1 (2002): 286-292.

Solitary Man

I'll finish with an excellent quote from a review of Maccoby's Mythmaker:

Gager, John G. "Maccoby's "The Mythmaker", book review of The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity by Hyam Maccoby. JQR, 79.2 (1988/1989): 248-250.

aa5874

There is no information in the "Pauline" Epistles to make anyone certain about the date of their writing. The Epistles, as written, appear that they may have been manipulated.

But, it should be noted that none of the early church fathers ever claimed the Epistles were were written before the Gospels. And, if by deduction, it is found that the gospels were written much later than the church fathers would have us believe then by deduction, it is reasonable to postulate that the "Pauline" espitles are much later than the church fathers claimed and after the date of writing of the gospels.

Once, the Acts of the Apostles is regarded as fiction then "Paul" is then an unknown or fictionalised character and in addition Acts is also thought to be a late writing.

And further, if "Paul" had written his epistles, first before the Gospels, then "Paul" would have had no eye-witness account for his audience as the Epistles are devoid of any personal direct knowledge of Jesus. There is even virtually nothing on "Paul's" conversion or any specific details of "Paul's" life at all in the Epistles.

Justin Martyr, writing circa 150 CE, although he made reference to "Peter", made no mention at all of "Paul" in "First and Second Apology", "Dialogue with Trypho", "Discourse to the Greeks", "On the Resurrection", "On the sole Goverment of God" or "Horatory Adress to the Greeks".

How could Justin have forgotten to mention "Paul", possible the most renowned Christian missionary and founder of at least seven Christian Churches outside Judaea?

It seems logical to me that some other document of the alledged "history" of Jesus should preceed "Paul", since his epistles had none. And, I think the Gospels provided that "alledged history". It is unthinkable that "Paul" could have received the "history" of Jesus by revelation, it was probably from a written document.

gurugeorge

There's another possibility - that "brothers of the Lord" was a term of art or a jargon term for fellow-believers in a revisionist Messiah concept thought to be "hidden" in scripture (and possibly also seen in visions) - in which case "brother of the Lord" was merely the singular.

It's only later (with the passing of time, mutation of the tradition and "Chinese Whispers") that this was thought to be an actual brother. Or it may be that the misunderstanding was a deliberate "exaptation" by proto-orthodoxy - a kind of "holy lie" to flesh out a novel notion of "Apostolic Succession", the idea that the Jerusalem people had personally known this Christ, and that the proto-orthodox bishops were lineally descended from such personal contact.

As I've said here before, my feeling is that this "tail" (the requirement for a concept of Apostolic succession to a living Christ in preference to Paul's - perhaps actually a Samaritan "Simon Magus'" - merely spiritual connection to a vaguer, more mythological Christ) wagged the "dog" of the strongly historicized Jesus. (i.e. the Jesus that's got the more specific historical "detail" of the later material, as opposed to the only vaguely "historical" Joshua Messiah of the earliest material). (On the podcast recently linked to on this board, of Acharya S and Robert Price, it was mentioned that Joshua was a popular figure with Samaritans and there were earlier "Jesus" - i.e. Joshua - cults.)

storytime

"..Paul, possible the most renowned Christian missionary and founder of at least seven Christian churches outside Judaea?"

Wasn't Jewish synagogues(churches) already in existence before the days of Jesus, the Jesus story and the Christ followers? So, instead of Paul founding any church, I see him as attending and writing to these Jewish synagogues in order to persuade the Jews that his gospel was valid concerning the Gentiles (no required circumcision or observance of Jewish laws). And the only point Paul could make that he could use in legitimizing the Gentiles would be as "God fearers" in his story about Melchizedek, where "faith alone" provided, as the Jews would say, "a place in the world to come", but not inheritors of their Jewish held land.