Michael Prescott's Blog

The drunk at the bar

Not too long ago I wrote a post about how the Internet may be subtly changing our brain function and creating anxiety in the process. Recently, however, it occurred to me that there’s another, much more obvious factor at work in producing the edginess and unease that characterize modern society – an unease that makes little sense when you consider the unprecedented safety, affluence, and comfort that most people in developed nations enjoy.

When the Internet made its debut, it was hailed as a revolutionary communications technology that would allow us to get in touch with people from all parts of the world and to be exposed to all points of view, thus leading to greater international understanding. This was a wonderfully idealistic way of looking at things, and like so many idealistic dreams, it has foundered on the sharp rocks of reality. While undoubtedly the Internet has fostered some degree of global understanding, it has probably done more to introduce us to points of view that we would be better off not encountering. The egalitarian nature of the Internet, where anybody’s comment counts as much as anyone else’s, has led to a peculiar situation in which all too often we find ourselves hemmed in by idiocy.

Think of it as the “drunk in the bar” syndrome. Everyone is familiar with the movie trope of a drunken bar patron spouting off a bunch of nonsense while the guy on the barstool next to him listens uncomfortably. In real life, nobody takes the drunk at the bar seriously, for two reasons. First, since we are up close and personal with him, we can see that he is just an inebriated slosh whose slurred ramblings can be safely disregarded. Second, we encounter him in a social context, surrounded by other bar patrons who are presumably better grounded than the drunk and able to see him for what he is. Our own skepticism is thus reinforced by the healthy skepticism of those around us.

But on the Internet, everything is different. The crank, the loon, the angry drunk, the mentally disturbed loner is not always immediately identifiable as such. He can seem pretty rational. All we have to go on is his typewritten words and his avatar. We are seeing only what he wants us to see. We aren’t seeing the whole person. We aren’t reading body language. We aren’t hearing tone of voice. One set of typewritten words is very much like another. As long as the errors of grammar, spelling, punctuation are not too egregious, we are inclined to assume that whoever produced them is a basically reasonable person – by which we mean, of course, a person like us.

In addition, we read this Internet comments alone. Though there may be other participants in the online discussion, they are distant from us. We don’t have the advantage of a crowd of essentially rational bystanders who are able to instantly back up our own intuitive assessment. Each other person is at just as much of a loss as we are, and each one is dealing with the drunk at the bar in isolation.

None of this would matter if there weren’t so damn many drunks at the bar. One of the unsettling things about the Internet is that it has exposed just how many disturbed people there are. They were probably always out there, but in the pre-Internet age, we rarely noticed them. Most of them were never very social; their letters to the editor were probably not printed; their tirades against the TV news or the Illuminati probably went unheard. They existed apart from the rest of society, largely unknown, without a voice.

The Internet has given them their voice. That may be good for them, but it’s not so good for the rest of us.

It’s not so good, in part, because encounters with these people on a daily basis can become extremely trying. Dealing with craziness is hard. Just ask any psychiatrist. The rate of burnout in those parts of the medical profession that deal primarily with the mentally ill is extremely high. Not only is it frustrating, even exasperating, to try to handle crazy people, but it can also be mentally and emotionally destabilizing. The well-known “gaslighting” phenomenon comes to mind. If enough people try to convince you that your perceptions are wrong and your grasp of reality is shaky, you may start to believe them. Paradoxically, the crazy people can make you question your own sanity. Trained professionals at least have some idea of how to deal with this problem. The ordinary layman does not.

But there’s a larger reason why it’s not so good to give the drunk at the bar a megaphone. As more extreme and bizarre ideas flood our intellectual space, they tend to crowd out more sane and rational positions. In economics, there’s a rule called Gresham’s Law, which holds that bad money drives out good. On the Internet, it seems that bad ideas drive out the good ones, at least in many cases.

The exponents of crazy theories are not restricted by logic, facts, moderation, common sense, or consideration of other people’s feelings. They are not restricted by anything. This makes them annoying, but it can also make them effective. They simply shout down any objection, sweeping aside factual criticisms with wild inventions, and deflecting logical objections with personal attacks. Internet arguers are much like the people in Yeats’ famous poem “The Second Coming.” 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

The unrestrained, ruthless proponents of nutty ideas have a built-in advantage over anyone pleading for sanity. Sanity is boring. Sanity speaks with a quiet voice. Sanity is polite, self-effacing, willing to admit to self-doubt, open to criticism, and aware that its judgments may be wrong. In online debate, all of this comes across as weakness, while the ranting bluster of the drunk at the bar comes across – at least to many people – as strength. And so the crazy positions gain adherents, while the sane positions, humdrum and uninspiring as they are, slowly retreat.

The foregoing is not, of course, an original observation. It’s just something I probably should have included in my earlier discussion of Internet. The sheer power of this new technology to shape our culture and our national discussions is actually rather frightening and very poorly understood.

By the way, I don’t exempt myself entirely from the above criticism. I’m sure I’ve had my own “drunk at the bar” moments, both here and on social media. The very nature of posting opinions online seems to encourage shoot-from-the-hip punditry, which can often backfire. Blogs and social media mean that none of our thoughts, no matter how fleeting, need to go unexpressed. But many thoughts are probably better off unexpressed. And unfortunately, those with the self-restraint to stay quiet are probably the more reasonable and rational ones, while those who pop off at any opportunity are the more excitable and crazy ones. This is another way in which they dominate the conversation and seize more territory in our intellectual space.

I don’t see a way out of this situation. Barring some massive solar flare that wipes out electromagnetic communications for the next generation, the Internet is here to stay. And truly, I wouldn’t want to be without it. But there are times when I almost wish that it would go away.

Or at least that the drunk at the bar would finally shut up.

Cutting remarks

As a follow-up to my last post, I thought I'd take a look at one of the authentic letters of Paul, the one he sent to the Galatians. Unlike the Gospels and Acts, which were written decades after the events described, Paul's letters were written in the heat of the moment and give a more realistic sense of what was happening "on the ground."

What's clear, above all, from this and other letters is that Paul's missionary activities proceeded in an atmosphere of intense personal controversy, and that his opponents were emissaries of the Jerusalem church – representatives of the core group of apostles who actually knew Jesus in the flesh and had a very different idea of Jesus' teaching than did Paul. Since their authority could hardly be questioned, Paul was naturally put on the defensive and had to fight a constant rearguard battle to prevent his own converts from being swayed to the "Jewish Christian" version of the faith.

In Galatians, after a few boilerplate introductory remarks, he immediately jumps into the fray. (All quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. My analysis is largely dependent on S.G.F. Brandon's The Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Church., pp 136—139.)

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel – not that there is another gospel, but there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed! (1:6,7)

Pretty strong stuff right out of the gate. He is saying that his opponents – who, as it will become clear, represent the Jerusalem apostles – should be placed under a curse. Clearly he has learned that his converts in Galatia, who previously were faithful to his own idiosyncratic interpretation of Christianity, are now changing their minds and aligning themselves with the Jerusalem party. Since he is not in Galatia, he can defend himself only with a strongly worded letter. Very strongly worded, as we'll see.

Knowing that his standing as an apostle is inherently insecure, since he never actually knew Jesus, he takes the bull by the horns and boldly proclaims that what appears to be a defect in his position is actually an asset.

The gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ ... But when God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me [or "in me"], so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with any human being, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before me, but I went away at once into Arabia, and afterwards I returned to Damascus. (1:11 – 17)

In other words, he had no need of human contact with Jesus or those who'd known him, because he had direct supernatural contact with the risen Christ. In this way he tries to put himself on an at least equal (if not superior) footing with his opponents.

He goes on to say that after three years he finally went to Jerusalem to visit Peter for just two weeks but saw no one else except James — that is, Jesus' brother, who had assumed control of the movement after Jesus' death. (As Brandon points out, the fact that leadership of the early Jewish Christian movement was handled in dynastic fashion is yet another indication that Jesus was regarded as king in a political sense. After James was martyred, leadership passed to yet another relative, a cousin named Simon.)

Fourteen years later, Paul says, he went to Jerusalem again, apparently summoned there to answer for his unorthodox teachings. Though he does his best to whitewash his account and put the outcome in a favorable light, it is clear that the encounter was acrimonious in the extreme. His defensiveness and excitement are raised to a fever pitch, to the point that he becomes incoherent, leaving his thoughts unfinished and fragmented.

But because of false believers secretly brought in, who slipped in to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus, so that they might enslave us – we did not submit to them even for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might always remain with you. And from those who were supposed to be acknowledged leaders (what they actually were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality) – those leaders contributed nothing to me. (2:4-6)

Note also his defensiveness in downplaying the status of the leaders of the Jerusalem church, insisting that their leadership position was a matter of indifference to him and to God. Clearly, however, this was not the case; after all, he had meekly consented to travel to Jerusalem and defend himself before James and the others, thus implicitly acknowledging their authority.

In any event, he claims that they worked out an amicable agreement, but this dubious assertion is immediately undercut by the next event in his timeline:

But when Cephas [= Peter] it came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood self-condemned; for until certain people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction. And the other Jews joined him in this hypocrisy, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. (2:11 – 12)

If we unpack this, we can see that whatever arrangement Paul arrived at with the Jerusalem church didn't last long. Paul and Peter were immediately at odds; James had sent word that Paul's policy of open admission of Gentiles was unacceptable; and even Barnabas – Paul's faithful companion in missionary work – ended up siding with "the circumcision faction," as Paul calls it. Of course, the issues involved ranged beyond circumcision. The disagreement was over whether or not one had to be an observant Jew in order to follow Jesus. Paul insisted that simple faith in Jesus was enough, and there was no need to be circumcised or to obey Jewish rituals, observe Jewish holidays, and follow the Law as laid down in Deuteronomy. The Jerusalem church, on the other hand, saw their movement as a subset of Judaism and, as such, required full commitment to Jewish practices, including circumcision, observance of rituals and holidays, and obedience to the Mosaic Law.

After some paragraphs arguing in favor of justification by faith, as opposed to following the Law, Paul returns to the sense of personal betrayal he feels from his own converts.

You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? ... Are you so foolish? Having started with the Spirit, are you now ending with the flesh? Do you experience so much for nothing? ... For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse. (3:1-10)

Since Jews "rely on the works of the law," evidently they are "under a curse." Remember that he is talking, ultimately, about James and Peter and the other Jerusalem apostles.

Paul resumes making various not entirely lucid arguments against the Law, but quickly comes back to his converts' backsliding: 

Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to beings that by nature are not gods. Now, however, that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits? How can you want to be enslaved to them again? You are observing special days, and months, and seasons, and years. I am afraid that my work for you may have been wasted. (4:8 – 11)

Evidently Paul believes that pagans are enslaved by "beggarly elemental spirits," presumably demonic beings masquerading as the pantheon of polytheistic deities. There may also be an element of Gnosticism here, since the Gnostics held that the world was in the grip of low-level supernatural forces called the archons (a term Paul himself uses elsewhere, though in an ambiguous sense). Rather shockingly, he equates pagan belief to Jewish belief, saying that if the converts follow Jewish practices by "observing special days" and obeying the Law, they will again be enslaved by demons. No wonder he says that the emissaries from the Jerusalem church should be cursed – in his view, they are tempting the souls he has saved into an unholy communion with devils. The depth and intensity of the conflict splitting the early Christian movement is obvious.

Nor does he grant the Jewish Christian apostles even the dignity of a benevolent motive. He claims they are driven by petty self-interest:

They make much of you, but for no good purpose; they want to exclude you, so that you may make much of them. (4:16)

And he suggests that they are cowards fearful of persecution:

It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh to try to compel you to be circumcised – only that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. (6:12)

The idea here is that the Jerusalem faction wishes to avoid conflict with other Jews by downplaying the crucifixion (which was a "stumbling block" to Jewish acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah) and by requiring all converts to be circumcised, thus negating any criticism that they are selling out to the Gentiles.

Paul's opinion, in short, is that the emissaries of the Jerusalem church – and no doubt the apostles in Jerusalem themselves – are seeking only to build themselves up, protect themselves from the criticism of their fellow Jews, and play it safe. They are phonies and cowards, he thinks. Worse still, they are demonic tempters who are accursed, and who compromise the souls that Paul has saved, leading them to perdition. 

These are the people who actually walked and talked with Jesus, including Jesus' own brother. The fact that Paul could dismiss them in such harshly derogatory terms shows how fully he had divorced himself from the roots of the Christian movement in Judea. But we aren't done yet. 

After still more angry arguments against the Law, Paul reaches the climax of his sputtering rage.

Listen! I, Paul, am telling you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you. Once again I testify to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obliged to obey the entire law. You who want to be justified by the law have cut yourselves off from Christ; you have fallen away from grace ... Whoever it is that is confusing you will pay the penalty.… I wish those who unsettle you would castrate themselves! (5:2 – 12)

Yes, you read that right. Paul, who would later be canonized as a saint, actually suggests that the emissaries from Jerusalem ought to "castrate themselves." The sense of his remark is something like this: if those damned Jews are so enamored of circumcision, why don't they just chop off their penises entirely?

If this is what he wrote in a letter, we can only imagine how he must have carried on in face-to-face encounters with his enemies. I wonder how many Sunday school teachers have informed their students that St. Paul once told Peter and James to cut off their genitals.

In a last rhetorical flourish, Paul equates the Jerusalem faction to those who would scorn God himself:

Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow. (6:7)

Other authentic letters of Paul recapitulate the attitudes seen here.  In 2 Corinthians 11:13 – 15, he fulminates against those he has identified sarcastically as "super-apostles," saying,

For such boasters are false apostles, deceitful workers, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder! Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is not strange if his ministers also disguise themselves as ministers of righteousness. Their end will match their deeds.

In other words, his enemies, the Jerusalem party of Peter and James, are Satan's minions.

There can be no doubt that the early history of the Christian church was marked by savage infighting and vicious schisms, as is true of many religious movements. The version of Christianity that has come down to us was written by the winners in these battles – and the winners were decidedly not "the circumcision faction," as evidenced by the fact that circumcision (along with other distinctively Jewish practices) is not required of Christians today.

Jesus as man and myth

Lately I’ve been reading books of New Testament scholarship, something I haven’t done in quite a while. I plowed through two books by renegade scholar Hyam Maccoby, Jesus the Pharisee and The Mythmaker. I also read S.G.F. Brandon’s Jesus and the Zealots and am halfway through his Fall of Jerusalem. Since both of these writers are out of the mainstream, I tried to obtain some balance by reading Jesus the Jew, by Geza Vermes.

I find this whole subject very interesting, and I’ve come to certain tentative conclusions about it. But before I go on, I should point out that Jesus, as a historical figure, is someone who can be interpreted in almost any imaginable way. People tend to see in Jesus what they want to see. Marxists see him as a proto-Marxist, ecologists see him as a proto-ecologist, feminists see him as a proto-feminist, and college professors see him as a hip dude who enjoyed rapping with his disciples in the best tradition of student-friendly academics. It’s unlikely that any of these interpretations is correct.

To get closer to the historical reality, we need to look at the context in which Jesus operated. Judea in his day was under enemy occupation. Haunted by memories of past greatness as an independent theocratic kingdom, Judea had been crushed under the Roman boot. The Romans appointed the high priests who carried out the Temple sacrifices in Jerusalem, the central cultic practice of Judaism at the time. The Romans imposed high taxes collected by the hated “publicans,” who were free to use any form of extortion and violence to wring as much money as possible from their victims. The fact that Rome was a pagan state with a deified emperor only heightened Jewish resentment. The Jews had always regarded themselves as the special people of the one and only God, Yahweh; to be subordinated to a ruthless imperial power that celebrated a mere mortal as a deity and required taxes in tribute to him was intolerable.

As a result, revolutionary movements thrived throughout the first century A.D., leading up to the disastrous revolt of AD 66 – 70, when the population of Judea tried to overthrow their Roman masters, only to be decisively defeated. In the aftermath, the Jerusalem Temple was profaned and destroyed, thousands of Jews were crucified, and many more were forcibly deported, scattered throughout the Empire so that they could no longer band together and cause trouble. Now that Temple sacrifice was no longer possible, the religion itself had to be reinvented; it became a movement based on intensive study of the Torah under the guidance of learned rabbis, in which animal sacrifice no longer played a role.

Prior to all this, numerous would-be messiahs sprang up in Judea, promising deliverance from the hated Romans. The word “messiah” is Hebrew for “anointed,” and because the anointment was the key feature of the coronation of Jewish kings, the term became synonymous with “king.” Naturally, anyone who declared himself the Messiah – i.e., the King of the Jews – was setting himself in direct opposition to Caesar, and was therefore seen by the Romans as guilty of sedition. Some of these self-proclaimed messiahs tried to organize military action against the Romans, while others depended on a divine miracle that they expected momentarily. Whatever the specifics of their program, they were invariably hunted down by Roman authorities, to be killed or (rarely) driven into exile.

Besides declaring himself the rightful King of the Jewish people, a Messiah might also demonstrate his bona fides through prophecy and miracles. Though the Messiah was understood to be a mortal man, he was seen as having been specially appointed by God with a divine mission, so it was not surprising that he might possess unusual powers of healing, exorcism, and prophecy. The Jewish historian Josephus, a turncoat who ended up as a client of the Roman emperor Vespasian, despised these rebels as “wonder-workers” – charlatans, magicians – who got ordinary people all worked up over nothing and helped bring about Judea’s humiliating defeat in A.D. 70.

These would-be messiahs did not operate in a vacuum, of course. Rumblings of discontent were increasingly widespread throughout Judea, especially – it would seem – in Galilee, where they took the form of clandestine popular resistance. The Zealots, whom Josephus denigrated as “bandits,” were the best known revolutionary party. Fiercely nationalistic, the Zealots recruited followers who aimed at the overthrow of Rome, while harassing and murdering Jews who were seen as collaborationists with the regime. In some cases, Zealots committed public assassinations at crowded festivals, using small daggers concealed in their clothing. For this reason, the Romans came to know them as sicarii, or “dagger-men.”

In short, the situation in Judea was a hotbed of unrest that periodically flared up into open rebellion, only to be ruthlessly stamped out by Roman troops.

Where does Jesus fit into this picture? Both Maccoby and Brandon argue that he probably matched the general pattern of other messianic pretenders of the period. Most likely, he gained popularity by assuring people that the end of Roman rule was at hand, that a new day was soon to dawn, and that Israel would be restored to its former glory, with the hereditary Throne of David once again occupied by one of God’s chosen kings. His immediate inspiration appears to have been John the Baptizer, who preached the message that the Kingdom of God was at hand and that the Jewish people should repent – that is, should purify themselves so as to be worthy of God’s favor. Though the expression “Kingdom of God” has been much debated, it probably referred to an earthly kingdom, a theocracy along the lines of the semi-legendary kingdom of David and Solomon. The concern of John – and almost certainly of Jesus also – was not individual salvation in an afterlife, but the salvation of the holy Davidic kingdom on earth. John apparently did not claim to be the Messiah himself, but only the prophet announcing the imminent appearance of the Messiah. It is possible that Jesus’ ministry began the same way, but that at some later point he became convinced that he actually was the Messiah. Or perhaps he never did believe this, and the role of Messiah was assigned to him only by his more ardent followers. (A certain reluctance on the part of Jesus to accept Messiah-hood is indicated by a story of how the people wished to crown him King but he refused, and also by his repeated requests for secrecy on the part of his inner circle.)

After some time preaching in Galilee (a center of revolutionary activity, where anti-Roman agitators could count on local support), Jesus and his core disciples risked entering the more dangerous territory of Jerusalem, where the Romans, in conjunction with their collaborators among the Jewish priesthood, maintained much firmer control. Maccoby believes they arrived in the autumn for the Feast of Tabernacles, while Brandon is content to accept the biblical version that they arrived in the spring, just prior to the Passover. In any event, Jerusalem was apparently meant to be the scene of Jesus’ ultimate triumph. Here, in the heart of Judea, where stood the Temple itself, Jesus hoped to help bring about the miraculous overthrow of the Romans and the restoration of the Davidic kingdom.

His attack on the money-changers in the Temple courtyard appears to have been a key step in his campaign to purify the Temple and set the stage for divine intervention. Brandon argues convincingly that Jesus did far more than simply overturn a few tables, an action that would have been quickly stopped by the Temple police; instead, Jesus probably entered the Temple with a large group of followers and incited a melee that the police were unable to control. He may have intended to actually seize control of the Temple and use it as his base of operations. Seizure of the Temple would have greatly magnified his status and electrified the population of Jerusalem, who would remember that the successful revolt of the Maccabees against the Seleucid Empire climaxed with the rededication of the Temple. In any event, the dramatic effort apparently failed, and Jesus and his supporters were driven out of the Temple and into the hills, where they hid from the authorities. By this point, both the Temple priesthood and the Roman governor would have been committed to the arrest and execution of Jesus and his inner circle.

Maccoby and Brandon differ on exactly what happened next. Maccoby believes that Jesus intended to bring about divine intervention in a night of intensive prayer on the Mount of Olives outside Jerusalem, in fulfillment of biblical prophecy. This is Maccoby’s interpretation of the famous Agony of Gethsemane account in the Gospels, where Jesus is pictured as praying so intensely that sweat drips from his forehead like blood. Brandon thinks that Jesus and his followers were simply hiding and trying to regroup, perhaps in preparation for leaving the area altogether and retreating into the desert. In any case, they were discovered by Roman troops. The Gospel accounts indicate, in a muted fashion, that the apostles attempted to put up resistance. How much of a struggle ensued is impossible to say, but, in the end, Jesus was arrested, while apparently most or all of his close followers managed to escape.

Neither Maccoby nor Brandon gives any credence to the famous story of Jesus’ trial before Pilate. It was certainly not the custom of Roman governors to conduct public trials; such a practice would have only invited mob violence. Nor was it their practice to give the crowd an opportunity to vote on the release of a particular prisoner during a religious festival. Nor is there any reason to believe that Pilate ever had the least interest in Jesus’ psychology, theology, or even his basic guilt or innocence. By all other accounts, Pilate was an extremely ruthless procurator with little or no regard for the lives of his Jewish subjects. Most likely, he condemned Jesus to death without so much as a hearing. Jesus was just one more nuisance the governor had to deal with in his busy schedule, and the execution of yet another rebellious Jew would not have cost him a moment’s thought.

One detail of the Pilate story that may well be correct, however, is that the titulus (inscription) on Jesus’ cross read “King of the Jews.” This was almost certainly the crime of which he was convicted and for which he was executed. Again, styling oneself as king was tantamount to declaring direct opposition to Caesar, and was therefore a capital offense.

What we get from all this is a rather different picture of Jesus than the one promoted in the Gospels, which were written decades after the events and were aimed at a predominantly Gentile (non-Jewish) audience. The Gospels take great pains to downplay any political activity on Jesus’ part and to exculpate the Romans as much as possible for his execution, even making Pilate a conflicted and sympathetic figure. Instead they lay all the blame on the Jews, going so far as to have the Jewish crowd improbably assembled for Jesus’ public trial declare that they willingly take his blood on themselves and their children – a passage that has been used ever since to justify anti-Semitic pogroms. The polemical approach taken by the Gospels reflects their Sitz im Leben (situation in life), i.e., their historical context. By the time they were written, the Christian church had broken with the Jewish community, and relations between Christians and Jews were extremely hostile. Christianity had become an almost exclusively Gentile movement, and it would have been impolitic to lay any emphasis on the role of Rome in crucifying the Savior of mankind. It would have been equally impolitic to present Jesus as a Jewish revolutionary seeking to overthrow the Roman empire, when the Christians were eager to discourage the political persecution of their movement.

The question naturally arises, though, that if Jesus’ historical career was that of a would-be Messiah with mixed political and religious motives, who came up against the Roman state and was executed for sedition, then how did he come to be seen as the hero of a predominantly Gentile movement, celebrated as an apolitical pacifist whose purposes were far larger than the restoration of the kingdom of David?

Both Maccoby and Brandon agree that two key historical developments were responsible. First, there was the destruction of the Temple and the humiliating defeat of the Jewish people in A.D. 70, which seems to put an end to the Jerusalem church and what might be called the “Jewish Christian wing” of the movement. Second, there was the teaching of St. Paul.

Paul apparently began as a devout Jew, raised in a Hellenistic environment (reportedly the city of Tarsus), but while near Damascus, he experienced a mystical revelation in which the figure of Jesus appeared to him. This revelation changed his life and ultimately changed the entire direction of Christianity. Paul became convinced that he had been appointed to carry the message of Jesus – as he understood it through direct revelation – to the Gentiles. In his letters, which were written decades before the Gospels and represent the earliest extant Christian documents, he boasts that his knowledge did not come from knowing Jesus in the flesh or from talking with people who had known him, but rather from mystical communion with the resurrected Christ. Although Paul made efforts to tailor his brand of Christianity to Jewish Christian traditions when possible, his overall approach represented a radical departure. In his mind, Jesus was not the Messiah in the traditional Jewish sense – a mortal man appointed to restore the Israelite kingdom – but the incarnation of God himself, an aspect of God that preexisted his earthly life and may have preexisted the universe as such. The purpose of this God-man was to ensure the salvation of individual souls, much in the way that the Hellenistic mystery religions apparently promised personal immortality to those who underwent their initiation ceremony. (I say “apparently” because the details of the mystery religions’ ceremonies were kept secret and can only be inferred. But it seems likely from occasional remarks that have been preserved, for instance in the writings of Plutarch and Apuleius, that personal immortality was the focus of these rites.)

Paul, with his combined background of Jewish and Hellenistic influences and his unique personal genius, created a new and powerful religious synthesis. His work did not go unnoticed by the Jerusalem church. Though the Book of Acts, written decades later, does its best to whitewash any conflict between Paul and the core group of apostles in Jerusalem, who were led by Jesus’ own brother James, the letters written by Paul at the time make it clear that the two sides were often at odds. Paul was called to Jerusalem more than once to justify his unorthodox teaching; he often found rival apostles – presumably of the Jewish Christian type – preaching against his ideas and trying to win over his converts; and he was ultimately arrested and sent to Rome, where he may have met his death, as a result of a Jewish Christian plot hatched in Jerusalem. It seems clear, then, that Paul’s brand of Christianity met with intense resistance from the people who had actually known Jesus in real life and who were not impressed by Paul’s claims to have communed with Jesus beyond the grave. In one of his letters, Paul goes out of his way to say that he is not insane, presumably to counter an accusation being made by his enemies in the Jewish Christian movement. In another letter, he famously says he is “not ashamed of the gospel,” an odd circumlocution suggesting that his version of the gospel had a certain notoriety that he was seeking to overcome.

Furthermore, it appears that the efforts of the Jerusalem church were pretty successful in the short run. Brandon argues that the desultory condition of Paul’s letters, some of which exist only in pieced-together form, indicates that Paul fell out of favor for some considerable period of time. Ultimately, of course, his teachings did win out. The explanation, according to both Brandon and Maccoby, was that the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 and the consequent destruction of the Jerusalem church left the field open for the Pauline sect to proselytize with minimal opposition. And since Pauline theology was far more congenial to Gentiles than the original Jewish Christian story, it gradually won out. When the Gospels and Acts came to be written (by Pauline Christians), the Jewish Christian origins of the movement were, to a large extent, suppressed.

In other words, what we have today is Pauline Christianity, which bears little resemblance to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, a Galilean apocalyptic preacher and revolutionary whose interests lay in the restoration of the Throne of David.

This leaves us with one other obvious question – namely, does this historical interpretation, if it is correct, invalidate Christianity as a religion?

If the historical Jesus did not teach the things that we are told he taught, if he did not see himself as the incarnation of God or the Savior of mankind, if he was not interested in reaching out to the Gentiles (as even some of the Gospel stories indicate), if he was in fact just one of many failed messianic candidates in a period of political unrest in ancient Judea … if he was, in short, not very much different from such dimly remembered figures as Theudas or Bar-Kochba (two other self-appointed messiahs who came to a bad end) … then is there any reason to regard the religion centered on him as meaningful or important?

I think there probably is. In fact, I think there may be more reason to take Christianity seriously when viewed in this light. Though Paul may have been libeled as insane by his rivals, he seems to have had an experience best described by the term “cosmic consciousness.” In one or more episodes of mystical transport, he seems to gotten in touch with some kind of higher power – whether we think of it as his own higher self, or God, or discarnate spirits, or the specific discarnate spirit of Jesus himself, or some other supranormal reality. And in this mode of transcendent insight, Paul experienced a kind of instantaneous and dizzying “data dump” that crowded his brain and haunted his thoughts for the rest of his life. His letters, read in this light, show us – not the careful logical reasoning of a trained rabbinical scholar – but the excited thought processes of someone whose understanding outstrips his language, someone who jumps from one big idea to another without filling in the necessary gaps, someone who thinks in terms of vast patterns and cosmic imagery rather than legalistic or casuistic details. In other words, we see the writings of someone whose entire life was reshaped and targeted in a new direction as the result of an overwhelming mystical revelation. Though he did his best to graft this revelatory material onto Judaism and the teachings of the Jerusalem church, he was only incidentally indebted to those sources. He was presenting something new, something that exploded the existing paradigm and offered an exciting new fusion of Judaism, Hellenism, Gnosticism, and personal mystical insight.

Seen in this way, Pauline Christianity becomes an exciting window into the higher reaches of transcendental revelation, and is arguably more interesting and more relevant to the modern world than the religious-political efforts of the historical Jesus. Paul himself seems to have felt this way, inasmuch as he showed little interest in the actual life of Jesus on earth, making few references to it in his letters. The historical Jesus did not interest him. His interest lay in the direct revelation(s) he had received.

It’s ironic to consider that what Albert Schweitzer called “the quest of the historical Jesus” – the massive, longtime, ongoing effort of New Testament scholars to determine the actual facts of Jesus of Nazareth’s life – may end in the realization that the historical Jesus is of no great importance, and that what really matters is the eternal spiritual reality accessed by a man who never knew Jesus in the flesh.