Gerd Lüdemann has authored a number of fascinating and (in
some circles) quite controversial books on the major New Testament writers, as
well as their setting in early Christianity, inside and outside the official
canon.This time around, Lüdemann's main goal is to explain Paul, to account for
his origins and influences, and to summarize his message from the available
sources. His judgment is keen, and he is wonderfully adept at isolating the
issue at the heart of complex historical and theological situations in the
text, where the biblical writer either assumed or obfuscated what was going on.
His title
announces in advance the conclusion of the book: that it was Paul, not Jesus,
who really started the Christian religion. (As Lüdemann himself notes, this is
an old debate.) I must confess that he has left me unconvinced that Paul
deserves either the blame or the honor. Agreed that Jesus is more a figurehead
than a founder, but Paul seems a surfer on the wave of a Hellenistic Christ
cult that had started before he tested the waters. Of course, Lüdemann
acknowledges that there were Hellenistic Christians before Paul, from whom he
learned of Christianity, and who bequeathed the sacraments of baptism and the
eucharist. But he makes Paul the founder of Christianity by virtue of a single
incident: the dispute between Cephas (Peter) and Paul at Antioch (Galatians
2:11-14), where Paul insisted that Jewish Christians had no right to force
Gentile converts to keep kosher, implying the utter uselessness of the Torah in
the Christian dispensation. Lüdemann infers that the mass of Antiochene
Christians, who were Greek-speaking Hellenists, sided with Christian-Jewish
Torah piety, against Paul, whose view however marked the historical way forward
for Christianity. This was the turning point, the moment when Christianity
parted ways with Judaism. I cannot accept so neat a cut. One cannot simply make
Paul's fair-weather friends in a single congregation, on a single occasion,
equivalent to the whole of pre-Pauline Hellenistic Christianity.
One of
Lüdemann's greatest contributions to Pauline studies is to have rejected the
chronological sequence for Paul's activities narrated in the Acts of the
Apostles in favor of one induced solely from references in the Pauline letters
themselves. He salutes F.C. Baur for demonstrating in the nineteenth century
that Acts is sheer fiction, heavily propagandistic in nature. Lüdemann's own Early
Christianity according to the Traditions in Acts (1989) only reinforces the
same judgment, though he is willing to grant a historical kernel here and there
in Acts, mainly when some Lukan episode finds a parallel in the Pauline
epistles. Given that, it is astonishing the extent to which in the present work
Lüdemann accepts the narrative of Acts at almost face value. He refers
throughout to Paul's decisive "Damascus Road experience" from which
he derived the germ of his whole theology. Yet in the epistles, Paul never
speaks of such an incident. Acts provides three (contradictory) stories of Paul
getting stopped in his unbelieving tracks on the roads to Damascus to go
a-Christian hunting, then recruited against his will to the new faith by divine
intervention. While the Pauline epistles do refer to a calling of Paul to be an
apostle, a revelation of God's son to him, this is never dated or described.
Luke's account seems to me plainly to derive from both Euripides' play The Bacchae
(where the persecutor Pentheus is ironically converted despite himself to the
faith of Dionysus by an unwelcome personal epiphany of that god) and 2
Maccabees 3 (where Heliodorus, agent of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, is prevented
from robbing the Jerusalem temple by a vision of angels, whereupon he is
blinded, miraculously cured, and converts to the true faith).
Lüdemann,
strangely, tries to delineate some cusp of overlap between Paul and Jesus,
surprising given both his ascription of founder status to Paul and the scant
amount of evidence used to build that crumbling bridge. Lüdemann quotes a
couple of 1 Corinthians passages in which Paul says he has a "word from
the Lord" to which his readers must defer (1 Corinthians 7:10; 9:14), as
if this meant Paul carried with him a prototype Q document, a list of dominical
sayings, though Lüdemann admits there is no reference to "Jesus"
here, and that even if they are intended as sayings of Jesus Christ, they are
nonetheless secondary inventions by Christians! All other Pauline passages that
scholars have occasionally suggested might be possible (uncredited) Pauline
allusions to Jesus' sayings, Lüdemann rejects as unconvincing. On what basis
then can he say the earthly ministry of Jesus was important in any way to
Paul's gospel? He invokes Paul's use of the eucharistic words of institution
"on the night he was delivered up" (1 Corinthians 11:23-25) as evidence
that Paul knew the rudiments of the gospel Passion Narrative, but in the same
context Paul claims to have received this knowledge (i.e., of the supper and
the words said over the bread and cup) directly from the Lord, not by way of
tradition from people who were there at the time. I think we must recognize
that this eucharistic etiology is new in this very passage, provided as a
replacement pedigree (such as we often find in the Old Testament) for a
hitherto-pagan observance, namely Christian participation in Mystery Cult
sacraments (discussed explicitly in 1 Corinthians 10:20-22). The table of
demons has become the table of the Lord, just as Brumalia, the Nativity of
Mithras (December 25), would later become the Nativity of Jesus.
Was Paul
a Roman citizen? Acts, and only Acts (16:37-38; 22:25-29), says so, but
Lüdemann accepts it. Worse yet, as Haenchen and others note, the two scenes in
which Paul makes this claim are poorly written fiction, since Paul mentions his
citizenship only at the last moment to get out of a flogging, or after one is
over. Why wouldn't he have said anything before? And how could he have proven
it? With such flies stinking up the ointment, Lüdemann should be reluctant to
use it to perfume his portrait of Paul.
Was Paul
the recipient of a Jewish, even Pharisaic education? Acts says so, and Lüdemann
believes him, despite Hyam Maccoby's demonstration (Paul and Hellenism)
that Paul's bizarre scriptural exegesis everywhere reeks of Gentile gnosticism,
nowhere of rabbinical lore, except for common traditions shared by all
Hellenistic Jews. It is this entire non-Jewish color of the Pauline texts that
must make us wonder why Lüdemann so quickly dismisses the ancient anti-Pauline
claim that the Apostle to the Gentiles was himself a Gentile who had grown
disillusioned with an initial attempt to convert to Judaism. The truth
underlying this polemic is that, whatever the case with the historical Paul,
the texts that compose the "Paul" we know, the epistles ascribed to
Paul, are not the work of a Jewish author! From the ubiquitous Gentile
estimate of the Torah as a "law" that must be shouldered like
Sisyphus' burden (only Gentile outsiders would see Jewish culture this way, as
would any outsider contemplating the alienness to himself of any foreign
culture) to the Jew-hating anathema of 1 Thessalonians 2:15, these documents
just do not sound Jewish, a fact of which the universal use of the Greek
Septuagint in "Paul" ought to have alerted us long ago.
But if
Lüdemann were to embrace more radical positions, I suggest he would find many
headaches alleviated. For instance, as to whether Paul dispensed with the Torah
as a criterion for salvation (Romans 4:20) or upheld it (Romans 2:13), both
views appearing in Romans 1-3, we need attribute no such schizophrenic zigzag
to a single writer, when it seems beyond argument that Romans 1:18-2:29 is a
Hellenistic Jewish synagogue sermon interpolated into Romans (see William O.
Walker, Jr., Interpolations in the Pauline Letters, Sheffield/Continuum,
2002). He finds the author of Romans 9-11 winging it as he veers from one
solution to the problem of Jewish unbelief to another, to still another. Why
not admit the obvious: later Paulinists did not like what they read and
corrected the text, one after the other? Lüdemann can see that a final judgment
on unbelieving Jews is mentioned in 1 Thessalonians 2:16, "God's wrath has
come upon them at last!" This and similar references in Romans 11 surely
refer to the events of CE 70 or even of 136, but then they are anachronisms for
Paul.
Lüdemann
is trying to make Paul the founder of Christianity in the same sense some would
make Ezra, not Moses, the founder of Judaism as we know it. But I am not
convinced. I will admit the propriety of the designation in one sense, however:
Paul is a second Jesus in that he presents us with precisely the same
historical challenge as Jesus does. We can never be sure we know anything about
him. We are reduced to scrutinizing ancient composite scraps by unknown
authors, sayings from anonymous holy men, and trying to pin some of it, any of
it, convincingly on Paul. We used to think we had a haven safe from historical
agnosticism in Paul, but we do not. It is time to put away such childish
things.