Revisiting The Kingdom, I’m struck once again by how Carrère dives into Maccoby’s The Mythmaker and finds himself, as usual, both stimulated and somewhat convinced. Maccoby’s portrait of Paul is a scathing one: a man whose letters reveal a wannabe Pharisee who never quite had the intellectual chops to measure up to the great Gamaliel’s rigorous logic. Instead, Paul, the ultimate malcontent, resents his way to the top by any means necessary. He’s a Pharisee reject, a man in need of a new ladder to climb. Enter the Sadducees, Paul’s new benefactors. Maccoby gleefully paints him as a “mercenary” and a “hatchet man” for the Sadducees—a hired thug for the enemies of the Pharisees.
In Paul’s self-serving retelling of his story, he demonizes Judaism and aggrandizes himself, projecting all the worst qualities of the Sadducees (and himself) onto the Pharisees, making them the convenient scapegoat. Naturally, the New Testament follows suit, reworking history with reckless abandon, making the Pharisees the Big Bad while carefully crafting a narrative that the Romans—those kindly, civilized overlords—might find palatable. No one, apparently, worried about the minor detail of two millennia of anti-Semitism that would follow. The idea of Christian love and kindness? Well, that got lost somewhere between rewriting history and needing Rome’s approval.
Paul’s stint as a Sadducee’s henchman ends at Damascus, where he’s allegedly compelled by his vision to stop tormenting the Jesus followers and instead join them. But of course, Paul being Paul, even his conversion manages to be another way to torment the original Jesus-followers by hijacking their Torah-based teachings and replacing them with his mystical mishmash of mystery cults. Suddenly, Paul’s version of Jesus requires no Torah and offers a much more user-friendly religion for the gentiles. And in this religious battle for supremacy, as Carrère grimly notes, “it’s Paul who wins out, because, as we’ll soon see, the Temple is destroyed, Israel as a nation is annihilated, and the church of Jerusalem dispersed.”
Maccoby, never one to hold back, sees all of this as a colossal fraud—a case of the victors rewriting history to suit themselves. He argues that Christianity is “nothing more than history written by the victors, the result of a huge falsification aimed at having people believe that Paul and his new religion are the inheritors of Judaism and not its detractors.”
Paul didn’t just invent a religion—he gave Jesus a full makeover, complete with a brand-new mission statement. Suddenly, this Jesus wasn’t keen on the Pharisees anymore, despite the fact they were practically swapping parables like trading cards. Paul’s freshly-minted Christ had no interest in leading a political uprising like the Pharisees might have hoped. Paul’s Jesus had moved on to loftier things—”a nebulous identification with God,” or, as Paul might say, a VIP pass to the divine without the hassle of earthly concerns.
In Paul’s revisionist masterstroke, he conveniently positions himself as the only guy who really gets Jesus, surpassing the original apostles because, let’s face it, who wouldn’t trust a man who only met Jesus in a blinding light show? Paul’s newfound authority becomes so overwhelming that he practically files the Old Testament under “Miscellaneous”—a dusty collection of angelic telegrams leading up to the Jesus Show. And for anyone who dared to question his creative liberties? Let’s just say, there was no room for constructive criticism when your Yelp review could end in a good old-fashioned burning at the stake.
Fast-forward two thousand years, and enter Maccoby—the intrepid Talmudic scholar—swinging a wrecking ball at the Pauline edifice. In The Mythmaker, Maccoby takes it upon himself to do what no one else apparently could: drag humanity out of two millennia of theological fog and into the light. In a move that rivals Paul’s own grandiosity, Maccoby essentially declares, “Don’t worry, folks. I’ll handle this.” And with that, he positions himself as the savior of our two-thousand years of confusion.
Carrère, ever the skeptic, makes it clear that while Maccoby’s arguments are compelling, he doesn’t buy them hook, line, and sinker. “Passing off two thousand years of Church history as complete revisionism strikes me as the height of revisionism.” He points out that Jesus may have clashed with the Pharisees not out of sheer opposition, but because they were wise—and, like all wise people, they probably questioned the company Jesus kept. Carrère also acknowledges that, while anti-Semitism runs rampant through Christian history, we don’t have to deny that the Jews clashed with Jesus in a way that resulted in his death. His personality likely clashed with both the Jews and the Romans, so there’s no need to twist the historical narrative into an anti-Jewish screed.
Then, of course, there’s Paul. To portray him “as a goy informer to the secret police” is to reduce his complexity to a cartoonish level. Carrère insists we don’t deny the “Dostoyevskian” depth in Paul’s letters, with all their contradictions, spiritual torment, and raw humanity. Paul may have been maddening, but he wasn’t a mere caricature.
And in rereading Carrère’s analysis, I’m jolted by a moment of almost tragic comedy: Luke, the starry-eyed biographer, grappling with the same unflattering caricatures of Paul that Maccoby gleefully tears into. Luke had heard these damning whispers circulating about his golden boy—rumors painting Paul as something far less glorious than the saintly hero Luke immortalized in his breathless chronicle. It clearly rattled him to the core, probably like finding out your idolized childhood superhero moonlights as a mall Santa.
Maybe, just maybe, there’s more to Paul than the hatchet-wielding mercenary we love to despise. He’s a complicated man, a genius even—capable of crafting words so achingly beautiful they could make angels weep, and other times spewing rants so unhinged you’d think he was a madman scribbling manifestos in his lonely, dimly-lit cave. Paul, the poetic prophet of human frailty one minute, and the rabid, impoverished soul screaming into the void the next.
Cinemorphosis 
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