To many of my readers, my work on Sha’ul of Tarsos feels like an attack. I have been accused of hating him, of practicing a form of theological vendetta, of harboring some personal animus against a man who died two millennia ago. I understand why it feels that way. To those for whom Sha’ul is the architect of their faith, my assertion that his path constituted an apostasy from the Yahwist covenant is a hard pill to swallow.
But I want to be clear: This is not personal animus.
I do not hate Sha’ul.
What I hate is what his writings produced. I hate that the institutional assemblies that claim his legacy refuse to reckon with the centuries of harm, the erasures, the violence, and the systemic exclusions done in his name. I hate how his vocabulary has been so thoroughly wrapped around the figure of Xristos that his own interpolations have become indistinguishable from the Divine for many.
And I grieve, deeply, for the ally to the Ebyonim he could have become.
My relationship with Sha’ul is not one of anger or rage. It is something far more complicated. Call it a pity that manifests as love. Call it the ache of watching someone almost grasp the thing that could have transformed them, only to watch their hand reach for the reigns of Empire at the last moment.
The number of times he almost ‘got it’ is a tragedy for humanity as much as him.
The Reckoning of the Always-Already
Recently, Lutheran Pastor Paul Drees shared a concept that resonates deeply with my own view of justice. It is the idea that we, all of us (Sha’ul included) are currently and constantly being drawn toward a reckoning with every harm we have ever caused. There is no distant courtroom waiting at the “end of time.” The reckoning is happening now, has always been happening, will always be happening.
This is what I call the Always-Already.
In the Always-Already, judgment is not a future event but an ever-present state. We are confronted with the weight of our actions whether we remember them, understand them, or even agreed with them at the time. The liturgy of accountability does not wait for death. It operates continuously, threading through every moment of existence.
When I write about Sha’ul, I am not trying to “cancel” a historical figure; I am participating in the necessary work of holding a teacher accountable for the fruit of his teachings. The Golden Thread of Tzedek demands this; it demands that we look at the immeasurable harm caused across history by the rejection of Torah and the emergence of a theology that has often been weaponized against the very people it claimed to include.
This is not abstract. This is not theoretical. The harm is documented. It is historical. It is ongoing. We are experiencing the manifold fruits of his apostasies even now.
The Scholarly Reckoning (for the Theology Nerds like me)
What gives my critique of Sha’ul its teeth is not merely theological preference. A century and a half of rigorous scholarship has traced the fracture lines between Sha’ul’s teachings and the Torah-observant movement led by Ya’akov in Jerusalem. The conflict was not a later invention. It was present from the beginning.
Ferdinand Christian Baur established the foundational scholarly framework for understanding the early Commonwealth as marked by fundamental conflict. Using Hegelian dialectic, Baur proposed that the Torah-observant Yahwism of Kefa, Ya’akov, and Yohanan stood in thesis-antithesis relation to Sha’ul’s Torah-free, Gentile-oriented assemblies. In his work Paulus, der Apostel Jesu Christi (1845), he argued that Acts represents a late harmonization designed to smooth over irreconcilable division. Though later scholars rejected elements of Baur’s chronology, the “modified Baurian position” remains valid: there was a genuine schism, and the texts themselves bear witness to it.
James Tabor argues in Paul and Jesus (2012) that Sha’ul should be understood as the founder of what became institutionalized religion rather than Yehoshua and his original emissaries. Tabor distinguishes the “Jesus Movement” (Torah-observant, led by Ya’akov in Jerusalem) from the “Christ Movement” (Sha’ul’s Torah-free Goyim-centric Noahide assemblies), arguing Sha’ul made “a decisive bitter break” with the original emissaries, promoting views they found “utterly reprehensible.”
The Ebyonim (from Hebrew ebyonim, “Dispossessed Ones”) represent a Torah-observant Yahwist community that explicitly rejected Sha’ul as a false emissary. Irenaeus wrote around 185 CE that these communities “use the Gospel according to Matthew only, and repudiate the Apostle Paul, maintaining that he was an apostate from the [Torah].”
The critical scholarly question is whether the Ebyonim represent authentic continuation of the Jerusalem assembly or a later schismatic “sect”.
Critical scholars including Tabor, Hyam Maccoby, Petri Luomanen, and Gerd Lüdemann suggest ha-Ebyonim may preserve the earliest Yahwist perspective on Sha’ul: that he was, in fact, exactly what I have called him.
An apostate.
The “Paul and Empire” school, emerging from the SBL Paul and Politics Group, has examined how Sha’ul’s gospel engaged Roman imperial ideology. Richard Horsley argues that Sha’ul’s key terms (”gospel,” “faith,” “righteousness,” “peace,” “savior”) deliberately countered Roman imperial propaganda, and that his assemblies (ekklesia) were “not religious cults” but an “alternative anti-imperial commonwealth based in local egalitarian assemblies.”
This reading of Sha’ul is more generous than mine; I do not dismiss it entirely. The tragedy of Sha’ul is precisely that he understood the imperial problem while constructing a solution that would eventually become imperialism’s most effective instrument.
His letter to the assemblies in Rome (13:1-7, “submit to governing authorities”) has been weaponized regularly throughout history. Southern slaveholders quoted it to claim divine sanction for bondage. German collaborators invoked it to justify compliance with Nazism. The Dutch Reformed movement used it to maintain apartheid.
These are not aberrations; they are his predictable and unmistakable fruits.
The prosbul accommodation illuminates the broader pattern. Hillel the Elder’s legal mechanism allowed private loans to continue despite sabbatical year debt cancellation mandated in Deuteronomy 15:1-3. As Michael Hudson has documented, this innovation allowed borrowers to sign away their rights under Torah’s economic protections. Sha’ul’s theological innovations represent the logical extension of this accommodationist trajectory: disaggregating the Divine Name from Temple, from calendar, from economic praxis, creating a portable spirituality compatible with Roman order.
Daniel Boyarin reads Sha’ul in A Radical Jew (1994) as a first-century Yahwist cultural critic, arguing Sha’ul was not “anti-Semitic but was supersessionist in some sense.” Boyarin’s most devastating critique comes from his analysis of Sha’ul’s universalism, which threatens to “coerce universality” and erase cultural-ethnic difference.
“The genius of [Yahwism*] is its validation of genealogy and cultural, ethnic difference. But the evils of these two thought systems are the obverse of their geniuses: the post-Pauline tradition has threatened to coerce universality.”
Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew [*substituted for anachronistic use of “Judaism”]
The distinction between historical and canonical Sha’ul matters here. Extensive interpolations and pseudepigrapha shape the received corpus. The Pastoral Epistles contain over three hundred words absent from undisputed letters and describe assembly offices incompatible with first-century practice. William O. Walker Jr. developed systematic interpolation methodology, arguing the burden of proof rests with claims the corpus contains no interpolations, given how common such additions were in antiquity. The “Sha’ul” known to subsequent tradition may significantly differ from the historical figure. This is not exculpation. It is complication. The harm done in his name was done in his name, whether or not he authored every word attributed to him.
Repentance as Repair
The point of teshuvah (repentance) is not to “feel good” or to engage in performative self-righteousness. The central requirement in teshuvah is a demand self-accountability and to pair that demand with actual repair, truth, and reconciliation.
If we believe in a living faith, we must believe that the teachers of the past are still accountable for the shadows their legacies cast today. Sha’ul is being made to reckon with the harm of his letters.
Torah’s requirements for a man who has shed innocent blood and wishes to return to the community of Israel are explicit: public confession before the assembly, restitution to the families of those harmed, submission to the judgment of elders who will determine what repair is possible and what consequences must be borne. The Covenant does not recognize private transformation as sufficient. It does not accept interior conviction as a substitute for public accountability. The man who has killed must face those he has harmed. The man who has destroyed must rebuild what he tore down. The man who has scattered must gather.
Sha’ul did none of this.
Poor Yosef bar-Nabba. He achieved da’as only too late what he had un/done.
In the same breath, I expect and demand that others hold me to that same standard.
I am not exempt from the Always-Already. Neither are you.
I hold Sha’ul accountable because he holds me accountable, in all the ways we have failed, abandoned, betrayed, and thrown stumbling blocks onto the Way. This is not a one-directional judgment I render from a position of superiority. This is mutual accountability across time, the living texture of covenantal relationship.
The Unpaid Blood Debt
When Lucius of Cyrene (“Luke the Evangelist”) introduces Sha’ul at the stoning of Stephanos, he appears as a man holding the cloaks of those who throw the stones. Later tradition has softened this detail into something almost incidental, an assistant at the edge of the circle, a boy too junior to participate. But in the legal culture of the time, the man who receives the cloaks is not a coat-rack.
Paul is the overseer.
The executioners hand their outer garments to the one who is in charge, who guarantees the procedure, who can be trusted to keep their property safe while they perform the work. Sha’ul does not stand at the edge of this murder. He stands at its center, managing it on behalf of the Jerusalem elite.
And this violence does not stop with Stephanos; his own letters describe what came next: he moved through house-assemblies as an authorized agent of a Sanhedrin already hollowed out by Roman patronage and Hillelite accommodation. He dragged men and women into prison. He scattered networks the Twelve had built by hand. He “persecuted the ekklesia beyond measure” as he later boasts to the Galatians, “destroying it” wherever he could find it.
Then comes Damascus, and with it the move that defines the rest of his career. Something happens on that road. Light. Voice. Collapse. We do not need to deny the experience to recognize what he does with it. He emerges from the episode with a story that only he can interpret, and he builds a new authorization line that runs from vision to pen without passing through a single Ebyonim court.
He does not seek out those he harmed and submit to their discipline. He does not place his past at the feet of Ya’akov ha-Tzaddik for judgment and repair. He does not find the widows of Stephanos and those of Yacob bar-Zavdai [“James, son of Zebedee”] and offer himself to their households for whatever justice they might require.
Instead of doing any of those things, Paul ran for his own life.
He retreats to Arabia, away from Jerusalem, away from the Twelve, away from the communities whose members he had dragged into prison. Then he returns to the field as a self-certified apostle to the nations, carrying an authority that derives entirely from his own reported experience, an experience no one else witnessed in a form that could be examined, tested, or confirmed by the community’s established procedures for discerning prophetic claims.
This is not repentance in any sense the Torah would recognize.
It does not even rise to the minimum expectations of teshuvah in the prophetic sense of turning, a turning that requires the one who has wronged to face the wronged and seek their forgiveness. It is the appropriation of a new authorization source to replace the one his persecution had served. The vertical line shifts from Sanhedrin to private vision, but the autonomy remains. The instinct to bypass communal judgment remains.
The confidence that he alone can discern what the Covenant now requires remains.
Torah as Accuser: Why He Campaigned Against ‘the Law’
We must contend soberly with a central tension in this story. It is entirely possible, and our project treats it as highly probable, that one of the reasons Sha’ul campaigned so vigorously against Torah is because Torah held him accountable for murder.
Under the Mosaic constitution, Sha’ul stood convicted.
He had participated in the extrajudicial killing of Stephanos. He had “breathed threats and murder” against the disciples of the Way. He had scattered households, destroyed livelihoods, and left widows and orphans in his wake. The Torah demands his accountability: public confession, restitution, submission to the judgment of elders. Torah demanded teshuvah in its fullest, most embodied sense.
Instead of facing that demand, Sha’ul declared Torah itself to be the problem.
In his letters, the Law becomes “a ministry of death, carved in letters on stone.” In his rhetoric, Sinai is allegorized into Hagar, into slavery, into a condition to be escaped rather than honored. The commandments that would have required him to make restitution to Stephanos’ kin, that would have demanded he stand before the Twelve and account for every door kicked in at dawn, become “the curse of the Torah” from which his Xristos [“Christus”] has redeemed them. For those trained in the hermeneutic of suspicion, this theological move reads as something more than abstract doctrine.
It reads as self-exoneration performed at the level of first principles.
He left Yehud because the Covenant demanded his accountability. He appealed to Rome and his citizenship under the laws of Caesar because the Covenant demanded his repentance. His Roman citizenship, which Lucius’ Acts of the Apostles emphasizes at key moments, provided him a jurisdictional escape hatch: when the Yehudan authorities in Jerusalem finally had him in custody, he invoked his status as civis Romanus and demanded trial before Caesar. He presents himself to Roman authorities not as revolutionary but as citizen, not as sectarian ringleader but as misunderstood participant in internal dispute. The appeal to Caesar functions not merely as legal right but as rhetorical alignment, positioning Paul within the empire’s juridical framework rather than within the covenantal framework that would have judged him by Torah’s standards.
That he denounced the Torah openly and regularly must be reconciled with the fact that, under Torah, Paul stood convicted of a myriad of harms and infractions for which none of his letters, none of the harmonizing “chronicles” like Acts, and none of his institutional successors accept accountability.
Bearing False Witness
Moreover, Paul regularly misrepresents events in order to deflect accountability. In covenantal terms, he “bears false witness” to avoid justice.
Consider his account of the Jerusalem Council in Galatians. Paul reports the meeting as though the elders asked only that he “remember the poor” a phrase he presents as personal inclination rather than as binding institutional requirement, abstracted entirely from the covenantal structures that make remembrance real. The Apostolic Decree itself, which Acts 15 records in explicit detail (abstention from idol-meat, from blood, from what is strangled, from sexual immorality), largely disappears in Paul’s telling. Later, when James reiterates these requirements on Paul’s final visit to Jerusalem, Paul’s own correspondence shows him actively teaching the opposite: “Eat whatever is sold in the marketplace without raising any question on the ground of conscience.”
His letters never mention Stephanos by name. They never acknowledge specific victims. They offer gestures toward his past, half-lit sentences in which he calls himself “unworthy” but even then he denigrates the “other apostles” (read: the Twelve) in the same breath. There is no public act of restitution in the form Torah demanded, no narrative of seeking out the surviving kin, returning what was taken, submitting himself to the discipline of those he had wronged.
The closest he comes to self-critique arrives wrapped in competitive rhetoric:
“As such I am the lowest of the Ambassadors [apostoloi], not even worthy to be called an ambassador [apostolos] at all, because I oppressed the [ekklesia d’Theos].
But by the grace of Theos, I am what I am.”
First Epistle of Paul to the Cohort at Korinth | chapter XV.9-10 | Shuva B’rit translation
Even here, the structure of the sentence performs exemption. The crime is named. The grace is claimed. The transition from one to the other occurs entirely within Paul’s own narration, verified by no community, submitted to no court, accountable to no widow.
The Barnabas Rupture: Evidence the Twelve Disagreed
The fact that Yosef bar-Nabba (Barnabas) and Yohanan Markos (John Mark) broke company with Paul, no matter what he or his apologists claim is the reasoning, stands as evidence that the Twelve did not agree with Paul. Otherwise, why would he complain about it so routinely in his letters?
Acts 15:36-41 records the rupture with clinical brevity: a “sharp disagreement” (paroxysmos) arose between Paul and Barnabas over whether to bring John Mark on the second missionary journey. The official narrative blames John Mark’s earlier departure from the mission in Pamphylia. But this explanation strains credulity. Barnabas was no minor figure. He was the Levite [priestly lineage] from the island of Cyprus who had sold his field and laid the proceeds at the Apostles’ feet. He was the patron who had retrieved Sha’ul from Tarsus and vouched for him to the Jerusalem leadership. He was one of the five “prophets and teachers” who led and stewarded the Antioch assemblies.
A man of this stature does not sever a partnership over personnel scheduling.
Our reconstruction reads John Mark’s earlier departure from Pamphylia not as desertion but as report-bearing: he returned to Jerusalem to inform the Twelve about what Paul was actually teaching in the field. When Barnabas later sides with John Mark over Paul, he is aligning himself with the Jerusalem oversight structure. The “sharp disagreement” is not about travel companions. It is about accountability, about whether Paul’s Gentile mission will remain tethered to Jerusalem’s authority or float free into autonomy.
Barnabas chose the Torah. He chose the Twelve and Yehoshua ha-Masch’yah.
He chose the covenantal framework that Paul was intentionally dissolving.
Paul’s letters preserve the wound. In Galatians 2:13, recounting the Antioch confrontation, he notes with evident bitterness that “even Barnabas was carried away by their hypocrisy.” The word “even” reveals how deeply the betrayal cut. His closest ally, his sponsor, his partner in the Gentile mission, sided with “the men from James [Ya’akov]” when the crisis came. The later epistles continue to rehearse grievances against those who have abandoned him, challenged his authority, or aligned with rival teachers.
The defensive posture is unmistakable: Paul is not writing from a position of uncontested authority but from a position of ongoing factional struggle.
“Poor Yosef bar-Nabba”
There is something tragic in Barnabas’ story. He achieved da’as (knowledge, understanding) only too late to undo what he had helped create.
Barnabas was a Levite, a man whose ancestral vocation was the service of the Temple and the teaching of Torah. When he sold his field and laid the proceeds at the apostles” feet, he was enacting Levitical theology: Levites had no land inheritance in Israel, so Barnabas relinquished land to rejoin that ancient pattern of trust in YHWH’s provision through communal redistribution.
He was, in those early days, a model of Jubilee economics in action.
Then he retrieved Paul from Tarsus. Then he vouched for him to the Jerusalem assembly. Then he traveled with him across Cyprus and into Asia Minor, watching the brilliant Cilician reframe the Covenant in ways that Barnabas, as a Levite, must have found increasingly troubling. At some point, the Levite who had given everything to the Commonwealth realized that he had helped launch a movement that was dissolving the very Torah he had been ordained to teach.
The break with Paul, in this light, is not merely strategic disagreement.
It is teshuvah. Barnabas re|turned to the Covenant and to the Teacher.
He returned to the Jerusalem assembly, to John Mark (who would become Peter’s interpreter and the author of the earliest Gospel), to the covenantal framework he had nearly helped destroy.
Our project suspects Barnabas as the probable author of the anonymous Epistle to the Hebrews, a text whose Levitical preoccupations, sophisticated Greek, and careful argument for the superiority of the Melchizedekian priesthood align remarkably with his profile. Tertullian, writing around 200 CE, attributed the letter to Barnabas. The internal evidence supports the identification: the author knows the Temple liturgy intimately, writes with pastoral urgency to communities tempted to abandon their confession, and deploys a christological argument that remains anchored in Torah categories even as it develops them. This is not the voice of Paul, who dismissed Torah as slavery. This is the voice of a Levite who has seen the danger of antinomian drift and is laboring to call diaspora communities back to covenantal fidelity.
If Barnabas wrote the anonymous Epistle to the Hebrews, then we have a remarkable document: the teshuvah of a man who helped launch the Pauline mission and then spent the rest of his life trying to repair the damage. The letter’s famous warning against “falling away” and its insistence that “without holiness no one will see the Lord”; read differently when attributed to someone who had witnessed, from the inside, how easily the Gospel could be detached from the practices that gave it meaning.
The so-called Epistle of Barnabas, a late first- or early second-century Greek treatise, was misattributed to this Barnabas by later tradition. Modern scholarship is nearly unanimous that the historical Barnabas did not write it. The treatise advances an extreme hermeneutic, declaring that Bnei Yisra’el “never understood” the Covenant, that Torah’s instructions were “never” about food but were always encoded moral allegories. This is radically supersessionist, the very opposite of what a Torah-loyal Levite would produce. The misattribution itself is instructive: later Goyim Christianity, shaped by Pauline categories, could not imagine that the historical Barnabas had broken with Paul and returned to Torah. So they attached his name to a document that served their theological purposes rather than his.
The Cumulative Evidence of Disagreement
The empire-canonized “New Testament” itself, even in its harmonized canonical form, preserves abundant evidence that the Twelve did not agree with Paul:
The Antioch Confrontation: Paul publicly rebukes Shimon ha-Kefa for “compelling ha-Goyim to Judaize” after men “from James” arrive. Even Barnabas is “swept into the separation.” Paul narrates this as his vindication, but the very fact that Peter, Barnabas, and the other Yahwistic believers all sided against him suggests he was the outlier, not the arbiter of orthodoxy.
The Jerusalem Decree vs. Corinthian Practice: James’ Torah-required idol-meat prohibition (Acts 15; Acts 21) conflicts directly with Paul’s “eat what is sold in the market” guidance. When James reiterates the decree on Paul’s final visit, he is not affirming Paul’s mission. He is correcting it.
The “Super-Apostles”: In II Corinthians X, XI, XII, and XIII, Paul defends his authority against rival emissaries he sarcastically labels “super-apostles,” likely Jerusalem-credentialed opponents. His extended defensive posture in these chapters reveals that his authority was not universally accepted, even in assemblies he had founded.
Rumors of Torah-Abandonment: Acts 21:20-26 depicts James’ circle navigating mass suspicion that Paul teaches diaspora Yahwists to “forsake Moses.” James requires Paul to undergo Temple purification specifically to dispel these rumors. The very existence of these rumors, and James’ careful management of them, demonstrates that Paul’s teaching was regarded as problematic by the Jerusalem leadership.
The Johannine Silence: Papias, writing in the early second century, certifies Mark and Matthew as authoritative but shows no interest in Paul’s letters as foundational. The Johannine community does not attempt to correct Paul publicly. It does something more severe: it ignores him. Its silence is boundary enforcement.
The Ebionite Verdict: Irenaeus reports that Ebionite heirs repudiated Paul as an apostate from Torah. Eusebius repeats similar memories. The Pseudo-Clementine Homilies and Recognitions, through the conflict between Peter and ‘Simon Magus’, dramatize an accusation that many readers have long treated as anti-Pauline polemic in narrative dress. These sources testify to a remembered dispossession: Torah-faithful heirs narrated their own marginalization not as a debate about abstract doctrine but as a betrayal of covenantal practice.
Mutual Accountability Across Time
If we believe in a living faith, we must believe that the teachers of the past are still accountable for the shadows their legacies cast today. Sha’ul is being made to reckon with the harm of his letters. And in the same breath, I expect and demand that others hold me to that same standard.
I am not exempt from the Always-Already. Neither are any of you.
I hold Sha’ul accountable because he holds me accountable, in all the ways we have failed, abandoned, betrayed, and thrown stumbling blocks onto the Way. This is not a one-directional judgment I render from a position of superiority. This is mutual accountability across time, the living texture of covenantal relationship. The Golden Thread of Tzedek binds us together precisely because it demands that we face each other honestly, that we name harm where we find it, and that we commit to repair rather than evasion.
Paul never offered that repair. He never named his victims. He never submitted to the courts that would have judged him. He never faced the widows.
The blood debt remains unpaid. The dead have not been honored. The survivors were never heard. And the man whose hands were red wrote letters that would shape empires, while the communities he scattered fell into silence.
Why I Can’t “Shut Up About Paul”
I do not critique Sha’ul because I think he was simply “theologically wrong.” I critique him because his actions and writings have had tangible, devastating consequences for human beings over two millennia.
By demanding accountability for Sha’ul, I am not engaging in hate. I am engaging in the highest form of spiritual integrity: the belief that truth must be unmasked, and that repair is only possible when we stop hiding behind “divine inspiration” to excuse human harm.
Sha’ul is going to get a big hug from me when I see him in the Always-Already. I know he knows. I know he knows that I know. It may have been the split-second that the Empire’s sword vibrated against the first hair on the back of his neck on the fatal downward stroke, but I know he understood his apostasy by the end.
All is always-already forgiven. He can sit next to me at the Table for any meal.
This is not contradiction. This is the fullness of Tzedek.
The Golden Thread does not demand that we pretend harm did not happen. It demands that we name it, that we grieve it, that we repair what can be repaired, and that we hold one another, across time and death and the boundaries of embodiment, in the embrace of accountability that is also, always, the embrace of love.
In the Always-Already, the truth is already known.
My work here is simply to bring our “Ever-Present” into coherent alignment.
Much of this essay was born from fruitful and necessary critical engagement between myself and a few others over the last several weeks.
Acknowledging the value of their writings in this process is paramount to intellectual rigor, honesty, and integrity. It’s also a necessary function of my gratitude for their contributions and the warmth of their (critical, even oppositional) discourse.
For readers who wish to investigate the historical and textual foundations of these arguments, the following selection of secondary scholarship provides a rigorous entry point. These works explore the tension between the Jerusalem Assembly and the Pauline mission, the identity of the Ebionites, and the socio-political impact of Pauline theology.
The Great Divergence: Paul vs. Jerusalem
Ferdinand Christian Baur, Paul the Apostle of Jesus Christ (1845) Baur remains the primary architect of the “conflict model.” He argues that the early Commonwealth was defined by a fundamental struggle between the Petrine (Jewish) and Pauline (Gentile) factions. While his Hegelian framework is debated, his identification of the deep structural rifts in the New Testament remains a cornerstone of critical study.
James D. Tabor, Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity (2012) Tabor provides a modern, accessible analysis of how Paul essentially founded a new religion distinct from the teachings of Yehoshua. He details the “bitter break” between Paul and the original emissaries in Jerusalem.
Gerd Lüdemann, Opposition to Paul in Early Christianity (1989) Lüdemann catalogues the specific groups and individuals who resisted Paul during his lifetime and in the centuries following. This work provides the “teeth” for the argument that Paul was viewed by many contemporaries as a problematic figure.
The Ebionite Perspective and Torah Fidelity
Hyam Maccoby, The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity (1986) Maccoby offers one of the most provocative critiques of Paul from a Jewish perspective. He argues that Paul’s “Christ” was a Hellenistic invention that would have been unrecognizable to the historical Yehoshua.
Petri Luomanen, Recovering Jewish-Christian Sects and Gospels (2012) For those interested in the “Dispossessed Ones,” Luomanen examines the fragments of Ebionite and Nazarene writings. This scholarship helps reconstruct the worldview of those who “repudiated the Apostle Paul” as an apostate.
Robert Eisenman, James the Brother of Jesus (1997) This massive volume reconstructs the “Jerusalem party” led by Ya’akov ha-Tzaddik. Eisenman uses Dead Sea Scrolls parallels to argue that the early movement was militantly Torah-observant and that Paul represented a “compromise” with Roman power.
Power, Empire, and Universalism
Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (1994) Boyarin analyzes how Paul’s drive toward a “universal” identity (where there is “neither Jew nor Greek”) necessitated the erasure of ethnic and cultural particularity. He explores the “coercive” nature of this universalism.
Richard Horsley (Editor), Paul and Empire: Religion and Eighteen-Century Imperialism (1997) This collection explores how Paul’s vocabulary mirrored Roman imperial claims. It provides a nuanced view of how a movement that began as a “counter-kingdom” eventually provided the tools for imperial consolidation.
Textual Integrity and Statistics
William O. Walker Jr., Interpolations in the Pauline Letters (2001) Walker establishes the methodology for identifying later additions to Paul’s writings. This is essential for understanding the “canonical Paul” versus the historical one.
The necessity for such critical inquiry is highlighted by the linguistic and statistical data regarding the Pauline corpus. Of the 13 letters traditionally attributed to Paul, modern scholarship generally agrees on the following:
7 Undisputed Letters: Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon.
6 Disputed or Pseudepigraphal Letters: Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 & 2 Timothy, and Titus.
The statistical “vocabulary gap” is particularly stark in the Pastoral Epistles (1 & 2 Timothy and Titus). These three short letters contain 306 words that do not appear in any of the undisputed Pauline letters. Furthermore, 175 of these words are not found anywhere else in the New Testament. Such data supports the argument that the “Paul” of the later Church was a composite figure constructed to serve institutional needs.
I'm just now discovering this work. Thanks for this analysis of Paul. Of all the "anti-Paul" essays I have read your piece is the most intelligent. Sometimes I wonder if Paul is sometimes writing in a code only the members of an oppressed community would get. Any of these letters could have been intercepted by the police. Maybe he included things like is Romans 13 to defuse suspicion. Kind of like the way an enslaved person might communicate to another a reminder always to respect and obey the master (wink, wink). Just a thought. Thanks again.
I love how you challenge my understanding of Torah. I find myself polemically aligned with Paul against the weaponization of doctrine, which is how I've always understood "the law." I do agree fundamentally that trust in the divine voice provides a deeper righteousness than we can receive from scrupulously following rules.
But I do think that Paul turned a movement rooted energetically in real relationship and embodied community into an argument about words. Once it became about words on a page, it was lost. The ebyonim didn't need a book of words; they had the embodied mercy.
One thing that's interesting though about Paul is he prophesies about "the despised ones who bring to nothing the things that are" in 1 Corinthians 1:28. That's been a core prophecy for me. So it's interesting to me that ebyonim and exouthenemona (the word Paul uses) have almost identical meanings.
I presume that Jesus is most present with the pueblo crucificado and I am called to sit at the feet of the despised ones and let them be my judges (Paul says that too in a verse that gets garbled in English translation).
I very much resonate with your judgment of Paul's legacy even though there are aspects of his perspective that have been very important to my journey. And I think I can say with confidence that he will not rest until the harm of his legacy has been healed.