The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity | Hyam Maccoby

The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity | Hyam Maccoby | Pungent Profile of Self-Promotion

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The Mythmaker: Pau...

	The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity Hyam Maccoby HarperCollins, 1987 average customer review:based on 52 reviews
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highly recommended

Better than the DaVinci Code, and True

The DaVinci Code was a clever, fast-paced detective story. Maccoby's "The Mythmaker" is a better mystery. It presents expert literary analysis of scripture by a scholar of Jewish law and practice, who is also learned in the pre-Christiam mystery religions. Maccoby's analysis is well-informed and surprising. It will disturb people who are not ready to see and questions discrepancies in sacred text. He does offer some of his own hypotheses to settle certain problems. You don't have to accept these, there are plenty more dots connected with ineluctable logic. It made a lot of sense to me, and I have studied and taught comparative religion for many years.

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Pungent Profile of Self-Promotion

Maccoby paints Christianity, not as an authentic expression of God's love, but a contrivance fabricated by St. Paul, a man of Jewish and Hellenist and Mystery Cult background, who, unable to rise in the Jewish heirarchy, felt compelled to promote himself by creating a new religion, Christianity. Scapegoating the Jews as the necessary evil force that rejects Christ, Paul misportrays Christ as a savior figure modelled after Mystery Cults. Maccoby argues that Jesus saw himself differently, as Jewish Messiah with political intentions to create a Utopia, a common type of Messiah during his time.

Paul comes across as a back-stabbing misanthrope who will do anything to make himself the most prominent religious figure of all time, in part by creating myth, in part by claiming divine visions, and in part by parasiting the Jewish tradition for his own aims.

The book achieves much in showing the connection between Paul's Christianity and anti-semitimism.

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NT Contradictions abound, and here is a great source

I grew up in the Christian Church, and I've worked professionally in Christian denominations for a combined 17 years. How I wish I had had this scholarly resource long ago.

Maccoby's book identifies many legitimate NT difficulties concerning Paul and other issues too. This book provides an insight you won't get at church. It is honest, well researched, and does not shy away from the serious problems of the biblical documents.

You will not be able to read the NT the same way after reading Maccoby's book, and that will be a good thing for you!

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Why Not?

After reading this book I simply asked myself: why not? Why is it so hard to believe that Paul was the real motivating force behind the creation of Christianity. Jesus wrote nothing himself. He never said anything about what anyone else should write. And the single verse referring to Peter as a rock can hardly be read as his wish to start a new religion. Jesus believed in Judaism, not Christianity. He came to fulfill the law not to destroy it. This does not sound like the inventor of a new religion.

Paul, on the other hand, was a megalomaniac that changed teams after he "had a vision." He never even met Jesus unless you believe Paul's vision! We have people today that are still having visions. One woman saw Jesus or his mom in her grilled cheese sandwich which she later sold for $70.000.

And to the reviewer below that gave this book one star, you would have been more convincing if you had shared even one of the elevn pages of notes you composed listing all the authors flaws, mistakes, etc.

Great job, Dr. Maccoby

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Myths obscuring Myths

This book is a mixed bag. On the one hand, it points out some of the many inconsistancies about the Apostle Paul, arguing (Pretty much beyond any reasonable hope of refutation) that Paul was never a Pharisee, as he claims in one of his letters. Paul is a very problematic character in the New Testament, made moreso by how pivotal he is. The more one studies the scriptures, the more one becomes aware that Paul is perhaps dissembling, or perhaps is out of his mind. When the author sticks to debunking Paul's claimis about himself, it really sings and dances, and it's worth reading and refering to just for that purpose.

The very serious problem with the book, however, is that the author does not stick to this, but rather attempts to fit this new, non-Pharasaic version of Paul into his larger theory about Pharaseeism and Judaism and the author's previous book about how Jesus WAS a Pharisee. Were there any hard and fast facts to accompany this, it'd be fine, but it's essentially speculation wherin the author introduces significant episodes created out of whole cloth without any explanation for doing so.

The problem seems to be that the author is very much convinced that the Pharisees were the dominant Jewish group at the time, and popular as well. There's not a lot of evidence to support this, and all of it is biased, stemming from Pharasaic sources. Yes, they were the wealthiest and most educated group, but that doesn't mean everyone wanted to be one, and there's some circumstantial evidence from the Jewish War that suggests otherwise. As a result, I feel that the author's own attachment to some of the unprovable assumptions of his own religious heritage is hampering his attempts to de-mythologize the origins of Christianity. In short, since he's not terribly objective, he's merely substituting one myth for another one.

As a lesser quibble, this book is rather old, and hence the author hasn't had access to the work in this field by person such as Eisenman and others. He also seems unaware of a lot of the finer points of the evolution of the scriptures themselves, or simply unwilling to mention it. When Jesus speaks like a Pharisee, the author is all over it, but when Jesus speaks like a Sadducee, the author conveniently looks the other way.

This is an interesting, useful, but fundamentally flawed book.

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