Cinemorphosis

Tag: christianity

  • The Theology of Winter: Genius, Power, and the Will to Prevail

    The Theology of Winter: Genius, Power, and the Will to Prevail

    I can admire the intellect of Augustine of Hippo and John Calvin without signing on to their theology. Their vision—infants consigned to damnation, humanity stamped at birth with moral rot—feels less like illumination and more like a spiritual winter that never thaws. It is rigorous, yes. It is also airless.

    Set against that severity, Pelagius reads like a man arguing for oxygen. He offered a more generous account of human possibility, one that trusted effort and moral agency. History did not reward him for it. Augustine prevailed, sanctified and institutionalized, while Pelagius was exiled to the margins, labeled a heretic for his trouble. The verdict tells you as much about power as it does about truth.

    I don’t doubt the sincerity of Augustine or Calvin. But sincerity is not the same as innocence. The unconscious has its own ambitions, and theirs often read like combat. These were not only theologians; they were fighters—relentless, articulate, and unwilling to yield an inch of doctrinal territory. They argued to persuade, but also to dominate. They didn’t just defend a vision of faith; they enforced it.

    You can see the lineage in Paul the Apostle himself. At his best—Philippians, luminous and humane—he sounds like a poet of grace. At his worst, he is a man sharpening his pen against rivals, guarding authority with the ferocity of someone who feels it slipping. The contrast is jarring, but revealing.

    Augustine, Calvin, Paul—each too large to be reduced to a single impulse, each capable of brilliance and depth. But running through their work, like a low electrical current, is something harder: the instinct of the embattled mind, the need to be right, to prevail, to settle accounts. It is the scent of the theological pugilist—the man who doesn’t just seek truth, but victory.

  • The Cruel Question Every Writer Must Answer

    The Cruel Question Every Writer Must Answer

    When you pitch a book, the publisher asks a question that feels less like business and more like interrogation: Why must this exist? Why this book, now, and not another? What justifies its presence in a world already swollen with print? The question has teeth. It strips away the soft fog of aspiration and leaves you standing with nothing but purpose—or the absence of it.

    A book is not a monument to your desire to “be published.” It is not your name in lights, your moment on the marquee. That impulse—vanity dressed as vocation—is the surest path to creative mediocrity. Purpose is the only defense. Without it, the work collapses under its own self-importance.

    The same cross-examination applies to everything else we produce. A blog post, a video, a channel—why does it exist? To collect attention? To be applauded by a tribe? To monetize a persona? To assemble the vague scaffolding of a “brand”? These are not answers; they are evasions.

    What, then, is my brand? Nothing coherent. I wander. I collect. I react. I move through the culture like a flâneur with a notebook, jotting down whatever strikes the nerves—ideas, trends, obsessions—and trying to distill some fragment of meaning from the debris. This is not a brand. It is a habit of attention. It resists consolidation. It refuses to become a product.

    I did write a book recently—a real one, nearly seventy thousand words. But even that resisted form. It wasn’t a narrative or an argument so much as a catalog of compulsions about watch enthusiasts: short, sharp definitions of obsessive behavior. A lexicon of affliction. Did it need to exist? I can argue that it did. The market delivered a quieter verdict. A few dozen copies moved. Meanwhile, a fifteen-minute video built from the same material drew thousands. The idea survived in video form. The book format did not.

    This is the final insult: even if you can construct an airtight case for a book’s existence, the audience may still decline to care. You can formulate the perfect product—nutrient-rich, elegantly packaged—but if no one consumes it, it sits on the shelf like expensive dog food no dog will eat. And its silence asks the only question that matters, the one you thought you had already answered:

    Why does this exist?

  • The Frogman Fidelity Oath

    The Frogman Fidelity Oath

    Dear God, hear the humble prayer of a watch addict who is trying—heroically, if imperfectly—to stay faithful to his G-Shock Frogman. Grant me the strength to appreciate the magnificent amphibious creature already on my wrist and to resist coveting other G-Shocks, especially the cheaper ones that whisper seductive promises of practicality and convenience. Protect me from the restless itch that sends me wandering through YouTube at midnight, where cheerful reviewers with macro lenses and enthusiastic voices assure me that the next watch will transform my life, my character, and possibly my posture.

    Please quiet the anxious machinery in my brain that insists on researching watches I do not need. Help me understand that the Frogman already fulfills every rational requirement a man could have for a digital timepiece: it is solar, atomic, indestructible, and built like a submarine designed by an engineer with trust issues. Remind me that my obsessive excursions into the G-Shock ecosystem are not noble acts of research but rather neurotic pilgrimages through a desert of comparison charts and unboxing videos.

    And please, dear God, intervene quickly, because the temptation is growing stronger by the hour. I can feel myself drifting toward the purchase of a GW-7900—not because I need it, but because my mind has begun whispering the most dangerous phrase in the collector’s vocabulary: “backup watch.” I tell myself the 7900 would merely protect my Frogman from harsh conditions, as though the Frogman were a delicate orchid rather than an armored amphibian designed to survive the Mariana Trench.

    If this prayer sounds familiar, you already understand the Frogman Fidelity Oath: the solemn pledge made by the watch enthusiast who believes he has finally found the perfect G-Shock and now begs for the strength not to betray it. The oath is heartfelt, sincere, and deeply moving—and it usually lasts right up until the moment the addict watches two enthusiastic YouTube reviews and convinces himself that buying a second watch is not an act of infidelity but an act of responsible stewardship.

  • Losing My Religion and Moving to G-Shock Avenue

    Losing My Religion and Moving to G-Shock Avenue

    The watch obsessive is not built for moderation. He does not dabble; he converts. Every new habit arrives like a revelation. Kettlebells are not exercise—they are a doctrine. Veganism is not a diet—it is a moral awakening. Yoga is not stretching—it is a portal. Watch collecting is not a hobby—it is a worldview. For this personality, change is never incremental. It is seismic. Each new pursuit feels like joining a movement, crossing a border, renouncing a former life in favor of a larger, more meaningful order.

    Eric Hoffer, in The True Believer, understood this temperament long before the first unboxing video. The True Believer is drawn to total transformation, fueled by a chronic dissatisfaction with stagnation and the quiet suspicion that life, as currently configured, is insufficient. The appeal of any new system—fitness, philosophy, or timepieces—is its promise of renewal, structure, and identity. The danger, of course, is intensity without insulation. When the believer commits, he commits completely. Nuance is weakness. Doubt is betrayal.

    I remember the moment my own conversion instinct detonated. It was 2005. I had been faithfully attending gyms since the Nixon administration, but there I was at forty-three, trapped on a stair-stepper, surrounded by blaring pop music, multiple televisions tuned to courtroom melodrama, and a crowd of spandex philosophers discussing their protein strategies. The revelation hit me like a heavyweight uppercut: I had to get out. Not tomorrow. Now.

    In the pre-social-media wilderness, I found my escape route—home training through yoga DVDs by Bryan Kest and Rodney Yee. What they offered was intoxicating: rigor without noise, intensity without spectacle, effort in solitude. No parking lots. No smoothie counters. No communal cold-virus dispensers disguised as cardio machines. I trained in silence, in sweat, in control. It felt less like exercise and more like discovering the operating manual for my own nervous system. Naturally, I became an evangelist. True Believers don’t quietly improve their lives; they recruit.

    That same year delivered another conversion event: my first serious watch, a Citizen Ecozilla. What followed was a twenty-year descent into horological theology. Eventually I became known as a Seiko man, a defender of the mechanical diver, a parishioner in the Church of Spring Drive and Hardlex. Seiko was not merely a brand. It was an identity system. It explained who I was.

    Which raises the uncomfortable question: is it still?

    Recently, a G-Shock Frogman took up permanent residence on my wrist. The Seikos remain in their box, silent and increasingly irrelevant. Worse, they no longer evoke romance. They remind me of anxiety—tracking accuracy, managing rotations, maintaining the machinery of enthusiasm. The Frogman, by contrast, feels like the day I left the gym for my quiet yoga cave: simple, dependable, frictionless. Not excitement. Relief.

    This is the part Hoffer understood that enthusiasts often ignore. The True Believer doesn’t just convert. He also deconverts. Sometimes the system that once promised liberation begins to feel like confinement. When that happens, the exit feels less like betrayal and more like a jailbreak.

    Have I left Seiko for good? I don’t know. Ask me in a year. True Believers are notoriously unreliable narrators of their own permanence.

    But lately, there’s a soundtrack playing in the background—R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion.” And the song isn’t really about religion. It’s about release.

    What it describes is something we might call Deconversion Relief: the quiet exhale that comes when a former passion stops demanding emotional tribute and loosens its grip. There is no dramatic announcement. The forums simply grow quieter in your mind. The old grails lose their authority. What once felt urgent now feels optional, like a city you once lived in but no longer feel compelled to visit. The change arrives not with adrenaline but with space—lighter mornings, fewer mental tabs open, less internal negotiation.

    It’s a strange realization. The new high isn’t excitement.

    It’s peace.

    And for the former True Believer, that may be the most radical conversion of all.

  • Evil With a Vacant Face: The Turpin Case and the Myth That Mental Illness Explains Everything

    Evil With a Vacant Face: The Turpin Case and the Myth That Mental Illness Explains Everything

    I remembered the Turpin case the way most people do: as a headline too grotesque to metabolize. Thirteen siblings chained, starved, beaten, and imprisoned by their parents until one of them finally escaped in 2018 and called the police. I hadn’t revisited the story until I saw an update, The Turpins: A New House of Horrors. In it, Diane Sawyer interviews three of the children who survived their parents’ private dungeon—only to be handed over by social services to another household that abused them all over again. The people who adopted them have since been convicted. The rescue, it turns out, was only a handoff to a new nightmare.

    What struck me immediately was how eerily gothic the parents appear, as if the story had summoned its own visual shorthand for evil. The mother, Louise Turpin, radiates menace—her face tight with cruelty and mental fracture. The father, David Turpin, looks equally arrested, a sixty-year-old man wearing the shaggy hair and slack affect of a disturbed adolescent. Both faces are blank, glum, almost vacant. And yet once you hear what they did—years of systematic starvation, torture, and control—you understand that the vacancy is not emptiness but concealment. Behind those dead expressions worked a tireless, inventive cruelty.

    They are plainly evil people. They also appear mentally ill. Those two facts do not cancel each other out. Narcissism, for instance, is a recognized pathology, but it often carries a moral charge—a pleasure in domination, a delight in harm. Watching the Turpin parents, I was reminded of M. Scott Peck’s The People of the Lie, a book I read decades ago that argued precisely this point: that evil can wear the mask of sickness, and sickness can provide cover for evil. Louise and David Turpin fit that category with chilling precision—malignant narcissists cloaked in religious piety, manipulating their children while feeding off their suffering.

    What makes Sawyer’s interview watchable, even bearable, is what comes after. The children speak about therapy, recovery, work, and the slow construction of a life that does not revolve around fear. Sawyer notes that they “won the hearts of the country,” and it’s true. They are lucid, self-possessed, and deeply sympathetic. You don’t pity them so much as root for them.

    The clearest light in the story is their sanity—and how visibly it flows from their love for one another. These siblings endured the same menace together. They shared it. They protected one another where they could, and afterward, that bond became ballast. They are not just survivors; they are witnesses for one another. Watching them, you come away with a rare conviction that sounds sentimental until you see it embodied: that love, stubborn and mutual, can outlast even prolonged, institutionalized evil. In this case, it appears to have done exactly that.

  • No Backup World: Martin Hägglund, C.S. Lewis, and the Moral Urgency of Now

    No Backup World: Martin Hägglund, C.S. Lewis, and the Moral Urgency of Now

    Philosopher Martin Hägglund, in This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, advances a stark and unsettling claim: genuine goodness is impossible unless we accept that death is final. There is no afterlife to balance the books, no celestial extension cord supplying meaning from beyond the grave. This life—finite, fragile, irrevocable—is all we have. Faith in eternity, Hägglund argues, is not a comfort but a distraction, a metaphysical detour that siphons urgency away from the hard, unglamorous work of building justice here and now. To make his case, he turns to an unlikely witness: C.S. Lewis. In A Grief Observed, written after the death of his wife Joy Davidman, Lewis—Christian apologist, defender of heaven—finds his theology torn open by loss. Scripture offers no shelter. Promises of eternal reunion ring thin. Lewis admits to “bitter resentment,” to madness, to a grief so absolute that it flattens piety on contact. What he wants is not God, not eternity, not consolation—but Joy. Her absence exposes a truth Lewis cannot escape: the intensity of love is inseparable from its fragility. Love hurts because it can be lost. Its power comes from time running out. Hägglund presses the implication Lewis cannot fully accept: even if eternity existed, love could not survive there. With no stakes, no risk, no irreversibility, existence would congeal into something inert—an endless, consequence-free duration. Heaven, in this view, is not fulfillment but sedation. To imagine God as a valet who merely returns our loved ones to us is, for both Lewis and Hägglund, a form of idolatry. But where Lewis is torn—desperate to hold faith and grief in the same trembling hands—Hägglund feels no such strain. For him, religion does not deepen love; it dilutes it. It shifts responsibility elsewhere. It turns this world into a waiting room and this life into a rehearsal. Secular living, by contrast, is an act of commitment without backup plans. There is no “later” to fix what we neglect now. That is precisely why what we do here matters so much.

    If you are a political-sapien, this conclusion feels not bleak but bracing. History—not heaven—is where salvation must be worked out. There is no eternal kingdom hovering offstage, no divine reset button waiting beyond the clouds. This world is the only stage, and its outcomes depend on the quality of the institutions we build and maintain. Moral authority does not descend from above; it emerges from human reason struggling, imperfectly but persistently, toward fairness. People, in this view, are not saints or sinners by nature so much as products of systems—capable of decency when the scaffolding is sound, capable of cruelty when it is not. Politics therefore becomes the highest moral labor: not a sideshow to spiritual life but the arena in which justice either materializes or fails. AI machines enter this worldview as probationary instruments. They are not saviors and not demons. They earn trust only insofar as they distribute power downward, widen access, and reduce structural inequity. If AI flattens hierarchies and democratizes opportunity, it is a tool worth refining. If it concentrates wealth, authority, and decision-making into fewer hands, it ceases to be innovation and becomes a threat—something to regulate, constrain, or dismantle in defense of the only life that counts.

  • That One Last Reservation Before the World Ends

    That One Last Reservation Before the World Ends

    Last night I dreamed I lived in a buried Eden—an immense underground forest strung with posh restaurants and spa resorts like jewels on a necklace. Rumors crept through the crowd that thunder was coming, that the floodgates of heaven were warming up their rotator cuffs. No one cared. They feasted, drank, and posed for selfies beneath glowing lanterns as if the apocalypse were a pretentious wine critic whose opinion they could safely ignore.

    Their denial infected me. I booked a table at a celebrated outdoor tiki restaurant where fire torches hissed and thatched huts leaned like gossiping debutantes. The maître d’ was Ari Melber, no longer the news anchor who dissected politics but a hospitality messiah who now curated flaming cocktails. He remembered me with a kind, almost pastoral smile. We bantered as if I hadn’t abandoned his television show months ago, when the news began to feel like surgery performed by angry interns armed with steak knives.

    On my way back into the mob, I spotted Werner Herzog: prophet of bleakness, birder of human despair, now loitering like an omniscient owl. His gaze locked on the bright orange watch strapped to my wrist. He coveted it with a seriousness usually reserved for glacier panoramas. I handed it over without hesitation—it was cheap costume jewelry, a gift I had held onto only out of politeness. Now I’d at least have a noble story: “Herzog wanted it.” Who could argue with that?

    Then the heavens decided to audition for God’s wrath. Thunder cracked, lightning flared, and rain attacked with the ferocity of a SWAT raid. The revelers lost their composure and scattered. Higher ground. We needed higher ground. We sprinted into an all-girls parochial school. The hallways smelled like chalk, fear, and cafeteria cheese. Teenage girls sobbed as some faceless authority commanded them to abandon their duffel bags and place them in a nursery filled with empty cribs. They laid their bags into those cribs like mothers relinquishing newborns. The sound of their crying was medieval.

    Water kept hammering the roof. The underground city was a sinking ship without a captain. My pulse was quiet—too quiet. Some part of me had already accepted the ending. That’s when Herzog returned. I glanced at my wrist and discovered a new watch there—brown, joyless, like a UPS truck. I offered it to him the way a man gives tribute to an impatient god. He accepted, now wearing orange and brown on a single limb, comforted by trinkets in the face of annihilation.

    If doom was coming for us all, then let it. I’d shaken hands with Ari Melber. He’d greeted me with the authenticity of a priest who still believes the liturgy. If anyone deserved restaurant success in a drowned world, it was him. A flood could wash away our bodies, but the memory of an affable maître d’ was buoyant enough to float.

  • Sam Harris Has Tea with a Christian Nationalist

    Sam Harris Has Tea with a Christian Nationalist

    Sam Harris has always been a curious kind of mystic—one who believes in meditation, not miracles; consciousness, not creeds. He seeks transcendence without theology, a spiritual depth unburdened by institutional clutter. Religion, he concedes, sometimes gestures toward the same inner world he explores, but it arrives dragging a freight train of dogma, myth, and moral detritus.

    That distaste for organized faith didn’t stop Harris from sitting down with one of its most unyielding champions: Doug Wilson, a self-described “Christian nationalist” pastor out of Moscow, Idaho. Wilson is the sort of man who makes the Bible sound less like scripture and more like federal law. He calls himself a scriptural absolutist, affirms the Apostles’ Creed word for word, believes the earth is 6,000 years old, defends the Old Testament’s death penalties for Sabbath violators, and dreams of a Reformed Presbyterian theocracy—America governed by divine fiat and fossilized certainty.

    When Wilson argued that moral relativism was America’s undoing, Harris did not interrupt. The pastor warned that tolerance would rot the nation from within—imagining a slippery slope from pluralism to polygamy, from open borders to moral anarchy. Harris listened quietly, allowing Wilson to build his own cathedral of logic brick by brittle brick.

    Throughout the conversation, Harris stayed composed, probing only occasionally—asking about the justice of eternal damnation, or how exactly divine law handles marriage beyond the traditional mold. His restraint was surgical. He wasn’t there to score points; he was there to let the argument reveal itself.

    At one point, Wilson lamented that secular institutions had failed us. Oddly, Harris seemed to nod—at least internally. They shared a disappointment in modernity’s moral anemia, though their prescriptions could not be more opposed. Harris seeks meaning through reason and mindfulness; Wilson seeks it through submission and authority.

    By the end, no one converted anyone. Harris didn’t embrace theocracy, and Wilson didn’t abandon it. But something subtler occurred: civility. Wilson, almost startled, thanked Harris for his respect and good manners—an acknowledgment that such conversations usually end in shouting.

    So what did Harris accomplish? He held a mirror to theocratic ambition without breaking it. By letting Wilson speak freely, he illuminated the growing movement that longs for a Christianized state—a homegrown version of moral authoritarianism dressed as righteousness. Harris didn’t win an argument; he revealed the landscape of the battlefield.

  • The Trilemma, the Mythmaker, and the Mad Apostle

    The Trilemma, the Mythmaker, and the Mad Apostle

    C.S. Lewis is famous for the “trilemma” he poses to frame the true nature of Jesus. He argues you have three choices: Jesus is claiming to be God because he is insane. Jesus is claiming to be God but knows this claim to be untrue but says so with malevolent intent because he is devilishly dishonest. Or Jesus’ claim to be God is true. Lewis argues that the common fourth scenario is not permitted in this trilemma: You can’t say Jesus is a nice guy with wisdom that encourages all to be wise and to love each other. I call this the “Hippy Jesus” scenario. 

    While I see Lewis’ insight and honesty in not having a patronizing view of Jesus and the high-stakes claims he makes about salvation and living an abundant life, I’m not so sure the trilemma is that unique or groundbreaking. The trilemma applies to all competing religions, which make their claims to being different from their competition and the “best” of all of them. Either these religions and their advocates are crazy, cynical, or telling the truth. 

    The same goes for St. Paul. Either he was a madman, a lying cynic, or a truth-teller. 

    Reading Hyam Maccoby’s The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, it’s clear that Maccoby sees Paul as both mad and cynical, a conniving narcissist with grand ambitions to head a religious movement regardless of how many people he has to step on. Much of Maccoby’s book is speculation and personal interpretation: Paul was not really a Pharisee. Paul remade Jesus from a champion for political liberation to an otherworldly figure. Jesus, a Pharisee himself, would have been offended by Paul’s notion of a divine Christ title when Jesus saw the Christ title to be a royal title, a “god-king,” that defined his Jewishness. Paul absolved the Romans from all blame for Jesus’ execution and placed it all on the Jews. The Pharisees had sympathy for Jesus and the Nazarenes in general and would not have persecuted them. This is an antisemitic myth in the New Testament designed to create a new religion based on misrepresentation. Paul’s rhetoric is so flawed that he is a hack whose epistles lack the trademark style of Pharisee training.

    The unity between Paul and the early Jerusalem church portrayed in Acts is a “sham.” The New Testament is made by authors who have given up on the Jews and are writing for a new audience–gentiles–therefore, the writings are aimed at “the anathematization of the Jews.” He argues that there is solid evidence of a competing Christianity in the first few centuries, that of the Ebionites, a theology free from the poison of Paul. 

    Maccoby’s critics have pointed out that much of the book is speculation and lacks conventional scholarly credibility. Additionally, they observe that Maccoby, ironically writing in a Pauline persona, has acrimony for Paul, builds a villain-like character, and then contorts and cherry-picks evidence and speculation to put flesh and bone on his character, who is more of a literary creation than a historical figure. In Maccoby’s view, Paul is not a truth-teller. In the context of the trilemma, Paul is a mix of a madman and conniving liar and mythmaker. 

    I have mixed feelings about Maccoby’s book. Part of me sees the speculation free of scholarly evidence and fictive elements in Maccoby’s writing, but one thing remains convincing: Christianity as a supercessionist religion. By replacing Judaism, Christianity must be looked at in terms of the trilemma: Either its writers are sincere albeit mad, they are fibbing and fabricating with a grand ambition in mind, or they are telling the truth. 

    To examine Paul in the context of the trilemma becomes most compelling in Maccoby’s final chapter, “The Mythmaker.” Maccoby writes that Paul is not so much a thinker whose writings give us definitive notions of free will, predestination, original sin, and the trinity; rather, Paul “had a religious imagination of the highest order” and is less a theologian and more of a “mythologist.” Consumed by his religious imagination, Paul was surely sincere in many of his writings. But of course the unconscious can play games on all of us. The unconscious has its own agenda to unfold wish fulfillment and satisfy deeply rooted needs for validation, love, and even power. 

    Whereas Maccoby sees Jesus as someone who wanted to fulfill his role in the Jewish religion, Paul saw Jesus differently: someone who conformed to the new religion that spun from Paul’s frenzied, often brilliant imagination. Just as Hamlet is a creation of Shakespeare, Jesus is a creation of Paul.  

    Paul has written a new story that the world has never seen in the form of a Pauline myth that is “the descent of the divine saviour.” Maccoby writes: “Everything in the so-called theology stems from this: for since salvation or rescue comes from above, no efficacy can be ascribed to the action or initiative of man.” We must abandon all other hope for the salvation of mankind and look only to the saviour who has descended to rescue us. 

    The Descending Saviour myth contains “narrative elements.” We live in a binary world of Above and Below, Light and Darkness. We live in a dark hellscape and must be rescued. The human condition is depraved. We are prisoners to sin and darkness and must be saved from the powers of Evil. We cannot, like Sam Harris, meditate and live a life of contemplation because such contemplation will cause us to surrender more to the evil inside of us. Harris’ solitary meditations may be a road to divinity for him, but for Paul, they pave a road to hell. 

    According to Maccoby, Paul’s myth causes the story about Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Paradise to be an extreme, binary view of sin that deviates from “its traditional Jewish exegesis.”  

    Paul’s extreme views cause him to see sex as a morbid affliction and he is incapable of celebrating sex as part of a fulfilling and healthy life and can only see sex through a prism of pinch-faced hostility and skepticism.  

    In Paul’s myth, Paul himself is a conduit for divine messages and visions and his writings are presented to us with the imprimatur of God. In contrast, the Old Testament is a downgrade: not written by God but curated by angels. In this comparison, Paul is superior to Judaism. In Maccoby’s view, Paul’s self-aggrandizement amounts “to wholesale usurpation of the Jewish religio-historical scheme.” 

    The Jewish way to salvation was for all of humanity to work on expunging “the evil inclination” discussed by the prophet Ezekiel. In the Pauline way, only a rescuer from above can remove this evil inclination. But Maccoby writes that the solution to sin and evil is more sophisticated and subtle than Paul can understand, perhaps because he is so absorbed by his own religious imagination. What Paul cannot understand is this: The rabbis say in the Mishnah: “Better is one hour of repentance and good works in this world than the whole life of the world to come; and better is one hour of repentance and good works in this world than the whole life of the world to come; and better is one hour of bliss in this world to come than the whole life of this world.” Such a view requires a balanced view of the human condition, but Paul, in Maccoby’s eyes, is too consumed by “adolescent despair and impatience for perfection” (Paul sounds an awful lot like me in this regard). Rabbis argue that the point of life is to struggle, and this struggle is more important than the reward. But Paul is not in this camp: “For Paul, the reward has become the indispensable substitute for the struggle, which he regards as hopeless and, therefore, pointless.”

    Maccoby rejects Paul’s salvation by faith model. You don’t just become a believer and enjoy instant salvation like Tang mixed with water. Maccoby writes: “People who are supposed to be ‘saved’ behave, unaccountably, just as badly as before they were saved, so that law has to be reintroduced to restrain them. Also, there are always logically minded people to say that if they are ‘saved,’ all behaviour that happens to appeal to them (such as sexual orgies or murder) in the confidence that nothing they do can be wrong. In other words, by being ‘saved,’ people may behave worse instead of better.” 

    According to Maccoby, Pauline’s mythmaking was born from “adolescent despair and impatience.” In his scramble to come up with a religion to satisfy his psychological needs, Paul combined Gnosticism, mystery religions of human sacrifice known as blood cults, and Judaism. These were the three major tools in Paul’s religious toolbox that he jerryrigged a new religion that would dominate the world. In borrowing from Judaism, Paul took the idea of the promises to a chosen people by making it so the Jews were no longer chosen but the gentiles. This brilliant maneuver made Christianity more appealing and marketable. 

    The most damning criticism Maccoby has of Paul’s new religion is the accusation that Paul is the chief author of antisemitism, “which eventually produced the medieval diabolization of the Jews, evinced in the stories of the ‘blood libel’ and the alleged desecration of the Host.” Paul referred to the Jews as the “sacred executioner.” He also writes that the Jews “are treated as enemies for your sake.” 

    Antisemitism is integral to the Paul’s greatest “fantasist” element of mythmaking: deifying Jesus and making his death “into a cosmic sacrifice in which the powers of evil sought to overwhelm the power of good, but, against their will, only succeeded in bringing about a salvific event. This also transforms the Jews, as Paul’s writings indicate, into the unwitting agents of salvation, whose malice in bringing about the death of Jesus is turned to good because this death is the very thing needed for the salvation of sinful mankind.” In Paul’s new religion, he showed that his mythmaking contained “an incentive to blacken the Jewish record in order to justify the Christian take-over of the Abrahamic ‘promises.’”

    Maccoby argues that Paul’s new religion has been a mixed bag: “The myth created by Paul was thus launched on its career in the world: a story that has brought mankind comfort in its despair, but has also produced plentiful evil.” 

    In this view, how do we assess the trilemma in evaluating Paul? Maccoby says Paul produced his religion out of “despair and agony,” which is to say from the torment of his inner being, a contrast to the Christian belief that Paul was animated by divine messages and visions. Paul’s “character was much more colourful than Christian piety portrays it; his real life was more like a picaresque novel than the conventional life of a saint. But out of the religious influences that jostled in his mind, he created an imaginative synthesis that, for good or ill, became the basis of Western culture.” Therefore, Paul is partly mad, a man consumed by his religious despair, and partly power-hungry, a man who seeks to create a new religion to assuage his torment and to universalize his sense of despair and salvation so the rest of the world can share in it. 

    Is Maccoby’s portrait of Paul convincing? Currently, my take is this: We have to take some of Maccoby’s judgments more seriously than others. Some narratives and psychological portrayals of Paul seem like mythmaking on Maccoby’s part. Perhaps Christianity is more complex and mysterious and less conspiratorial than Maccoby wants us to believe. But perhaps there are conflicting agendas in the making of Christianity and the Jews were unfairly portrayed. Perhaps in this regard, Maccoby is on to something and has contributed much in the way we see how religions are made and how antisemitism was born. 

  • Against Mythmaking 

    Against Mythmaking 

    In The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, Hyam Maccoby doesn’t treat Paul as a saintly architect of faith. Instead, he brands him a slick opportunist — a theological con artist who sidelined Jesus’ Jewish disciples and reinvented the movement to glorify himself. In Maccoby’s telling, Paul isn’t the earnest apostle of Sunday school murals; he’s a résumé-padding religious entrepreneur with a flair for self-promotion.

    Luke, author of Acts, doesn’t escape scrutiny either. To Maccoby, Luke plays the role of breathless publicist, polishing Paul into a heroic Hollywood lead — all charisma, no contradictions, halo firmly secured with narrative glue.

    Yet as I reread Maccoby, I can’t ignore the irony: in exposing Paul’s myth-making, Maccoby may be engaged in his own. If Luke sculpted Paul into a glowing protagonist, Maccoby chisels him into a grand villain — less apostle, more Bond antagonist with holy stationery.

    My relationship with Paul is messier than either portrait. At times he reads like a puffed-up moralist enthralled by his own authority; at other moments, he achieves startling spiritual clarity — like his definition of God as self-emptying love in Philippians. Myth-making, whether heroic or malicious, flattens figures like Paul into cardboard cutouts, sanding down the contradictions that make real people aggravating, compelling, and occasionally profound.

    So while Maccoby offers a seductive, neatly packaged explanation for Christianity’s break from Judaism — Paul scheming his way to divine stardom — it feels too tidy. Real history rarely sticks to clean villain-hero binaries. 

    My life would be defined by resolution and an ability to move on if I could see Paul that way Maccoby does, but before I can toss Paul into the narcissist bin and slam the lid, I have to admit that Maccoby — like Luke — might be seduced by narrative neatness. Paul’s letters show someone less like a cartoon schemer and more like a man painfully aware of his own weakness, insecurity, and failure. If he were a megalomaniac mastermind, he was spectacularly bad at the role: beaten, jailed, mocked, shipwrecked, chronically ill, and constantly sparring with congregations who treated him not like a guru but like the world’s most irritating substitute teacher. His theology isn’t the product of a slick PR machine; it reads like a bruised mystic wrestling with power, ego, and surrender. 

    You can see it in Paul’s grudging boasts, his trembling confessions, and his moments of ecstatic humility — that strange mix of cosmic ambition and self-annihilation that marks someone grappling with God, not angling for a corner office. 

    It may be comforting to imagine Paul as either saint or sociopath, but the textual record points to something far more inconvenient: a brilliant, exasperating, self-contradicting human being who stumbled toward transcendence while dragging his flaws behind him like rattling tin cans tied to a wedding bumper.

    In any event, I shall continue rereading Maccoby. His strident reaction to Paul continues to fascinate me.