James D. Tabor

This is a fascinating book. Very impressive scholarship. In fact, I wonder how and why people like James Tabor serve as academics in religion. Do they really believe this stuff or are they objective historians who just happen to have chosen the subject of religion as their field of study but are not committed in any way to the religion itself. Well, this question is not answered in the book. But, I get the impression that if you approach the history of religion from the perspective of a believer, then you are bound to be delivering something that is not objective. Anyway, I did not detect any sign of partisanship with Tabor's account of Paul and his mission.
I'd long considered that it was pretty clearly Paul who moulded the current version of Christianity so some of this was not surprising. And I've recently read "Lost Christianities" By Bart D Ehrman, where he draws attention to the massive number of Christian sects, with wildly varying beliefs and a huge number of sacred books that were in circulation for the first 300-400 years after Christ was born. But Tabor, really makes clear the fundamental role of Paul in determining the version of Christianity that became the "Accepted" version ....followed by the catholic church and, with variations, by most of the other Christian denominations that abound today.
Tabor claims, (quite convincingly as far as I can determine) that the true inheritors of the Christian teaching were centred in Jerusalem and Jesus's brother James was the leader of the group. He had been nominated by Jesus himself, he was totally familiar with Jesus teaching at first hand. And this initial group of Christians were, quite clearly, just another Jewish sect. (Josephus made the point that to identify someone as the Messiah was not uncommon in first-century Jewish-Roman Palestine. Josephus, the Jewish historian of that period, names half a dozen others, before and after Jesus.....And "recently an exciting new text was published.......Experts date it to the end of the first century B.C., so it is definitely pre-Christian.........the final section of the text focuses on the death and resurrection of a messianic leader, most likely Simon of Perea, who led a revolt in Judea in 4 B.C. following the death of Herod the Great. Josephus reports that Simon’s followers crowned him, a tall and handsome figure, as king of the Jews. He ravaged the countryside for a time, burning down the royal palace at Jericho. Gratus, Herod's military commander, pursued Simon and caught up with him in Transjordan and beheaded him. ...The slain leader, is nonetheless addressed by the angel Gabriel: “I command you, prince of princes in three days you shall live!”.......Since the text is pre-Christian, the parallels with Jesus are all the more amazing. Not only do we have reference here to a “slain” Messiah, an idea many have argued originated only with the unexpected crucifixion of Jesus, but also the reference to Simon being raised from the dead after three days.......Simon apparently had no “Peter” or “Paul” to carry on his messianic mission, but nonetheless the faith his followers had in his death and resurrection after three days was written down in a text".
What is especially interesting about Paul, is that he never actually met Jesus in the flesh but had various visions in which he was instructed by Jesus...and his version of Christianity (including the involvement of the Gentiles and the transformation of bread and wine in the eucharist into the body and blood of Christ, are apparently the invention of Paul.. In fact, he disparages the original leadership of the church...partricularly James and Peter , on the grounds that he (Paul) is getting his instructions direct from Jesus whilst they were only going on what they had learned direct from Jesus's mouth.
One of the interesting and insightful claims made by Tabor, related to the chronology of the various sacred books (including those that that made it into the current bible and some that did not). It was apparently something like the following:
30 AD the death of Christ
37 AD Paul receives his apparition of Christ raised from the dead
37-~40 AD Paul goes into seclusion in Arabia and has other visions involving Christ
~40 AD Paul first meets Peter and James (in Jerusalem) but none of the other disciples
37-50 AD a document called Q was produced that apparently contained the sayings of Jesus but is now lost. It has nothing of Paul's doctrines
50 AD Paul meets James and Peter in Jerusalem plus the other apostles for the first time.
50-60 AD...authentic letters from Paul: 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, Philippians, and Philemon.
~62-64 AD Death of Paul
80-100 AD Disputed letters by Paul: 2 Thessalonians, Ephesians, Colossians.
80-100 AD Pseudo Paul: 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus
80 AD plus Book of Mark written...no account of Jesus' birth; no post resurrection appearances of Jesus to disciples (in original version).
~90 AD Book of Matthew ....used Mark as main reference. (incorporates 90% of Mark but edits and embellishes....and comes up with virgin birth and resurrection.)
90-130 AD Book of Luke and Acts (Both apparently written by same person and Luke draws heavily on Acts and very "pro-Paul")
90-100 AD Book of John... Last of the gospels to be written and the most embellished....especially with the resurrection.
100-120 AD(or earlier) Didache ...A handbook for Christian converts. Nothing here that corresponds with Paul's doctrines: no divinity of Christ, no atonement through his body and blood, no reference to his resurrection from the dead
~200 AD plus...Gospel of Thomas but contains fragments of text written about the earliest followers of Jesus, led by James.
So there are a few interesting things emerge from this. Especially that James and Peter were basically running a Jewish sect based on their direct experience of Jesus and Paul was running a mission to the Gentiles based on his own visions and direct revelations from Jesus. Paul seemed to be making it up as he went along. But both groups were essentially apocalyptic....expecting the kingdom of Jesus (end of world etc) to be coming very soon......certainly within their lifetime. Paul's letters to his various churches are actually the oldest of the books of the New Testament and, presumably were also available to the later writers of the Gospels.....though Mark (the first of the gospels) seems rather free of Paul's doctrines. As Tabor says....the history of the early church is really about how Paul's writings trumped the meagre writings and verbal traditions of James, Peter and the rest of the disciples. And Paul's revelations ended up trumping the actual first-hand teachings of Jesus as preached by those that actually spent time with him.
So "the fundamental doctrinal tenets of Christianity, namely that Christ is God “born in the flesh,” that his sacrificial death atones for the sins of humankind, and that his resurrection from the dead guarantees eternal life to all who believe, can be traced back to Paul, not Jesus......Indeed, the spiritual union with Christ through baptism, as well as the “communion” with his body and blood through the sacred meal of bread and wine, also traces back to Paul. This is the Christianity familiar to us, the Christianity of the creeds and confessions that separated it from Judaism and put it on the road to becoming a new religion."
Tabor says: "Not only do I believe Paul should be seen as the “founder” of the Christianity that we know today, rather than Jesus and his original apostles, but I argue he made a decisive bitter break with those first apostles, promoting and preaching views they found to be utterly reprehensible......Conversely, I think the evidence shows that James, the brother of Jesus and leader of the Jerusalem church, as well as Peter and the other apostles, held to a Jewish version of the Christian faith that faded away and was forgotten due to the total triumph of Paul’s version of Christianity"......He also says: "Paul’s literary victory rested upon three pillars: 1) the gospel of Mark, our earliest narrative of the career and death of Jesus, is heavily Pauline in its theological content; 2) the two-volume work Luke-Acts vastly expanded Mark’s story to culminate with a final scene of Paul preaching his gospel in Rome; and, 3) the six later letters written in Paul’s name, but after Paul’s lifetime." [I'm a bit confused here because elsewhere Tabor says that the Gospel of Mark has no account of Jesus' birth or post resurrection appearances....yet he also says that Mark is "heavily Pauline".......though I guess the two are not directly incompatible].
Tabor writes: "There are six major elements in Paul’s Christianity
1. A New Spiritual Body.....Paul understood Jesus’ resurrection as “putting off” the body like clothing, but not being left “naked,” as in Greek thought, but “putting on” a new spiritual body with the old one left behind.....What is often overlooked is that Paul is our earliest witness, chronologically speaking, to claim to have “seen” Jesus after his death....And his is the only first-person claim we have........His letters were written decades earlier than Mark, the first written gospel.
2. A Cosmic Family and a Heavenly Kingdom.....According to Paul this new genus of Spirit-beings of which Jesus was the “firstborn” is part of an expanded cosmic family....God, as Creator, has inaugurated a process through which he is reproducing himself—literally bringing to birth a “God-Family.” Jesus, now transformed into the heavenly glorified Christ/ Messiah, is the firstborn brother of an expanded group of divine offspring....In Paul’s view the kingdom of God would have nothing to do with the righteous reign of a human Messiah on earth,......Paul understood the kingdom as a “cosmic takeover” of the entire universe by the newly born heavenly family—
3. A Mystical Union with Christ....Baptism brought about a mystical union with what Paul called the “spiritual body” of Christ, and was the act through which one received the impregnating Holy Spirit.....These writers [see reference at end of sentence] based their accounts of Jesus’ final meal on Paul, directly quoting what he had written in his letters almost word for word (Mark 14: 22–25; Matthew 26: 26–29; Luke 22: 15–20; John 6: 52–56; 1 Corinthians 11: 23–26). This is one of the strongest indications that the New Testament gospels are essentially Pauline documents, with underlying elements of the earlier Jesus tradition......As a Jew living in a Jewish culture, Jesus would have considered this sort of language about eating flesh and drinking blood, even taken symbolically, as utterly reprehensible, akin to magic or ritual cannibalism.....Despite what Paul asserts, it is extremely improbable that Jesus ever said these words. They are Paul’s own interpretation of the meaning and significance of the Eucharist ceremony that he claims he received from the heavenly Christ by a revelation.
4. Already but Not Yet. Paul operated with a strongly apocalyptic perspective that influenced all he said or did. He was quite sure that he and his followers would live to see the return of Christ from heaven.....Paul states emphatically that the “appointed time has grown very short,” and he advised his followers not to marry, begin a new business, or worry if they were slaves, since everything in the world was about to be turned upside down and all social relations were terminal. Right up until the end of his life he expected to live to see the great event.
5. Under the Torah of Christ. As a Jew Paul decisively turned his back on the Torah revelation given to Moses on Mount Sinai, with all of its laws, customs, and traditions. ..He also believed that the new revelations he was receiving as the Thirteenth Apostle made anything that had gone before pale by contrast (2 Corinthians 3: 7–9)....Paul put his own “life in the Spirit” forward as the model for his followers to imitate and was often disappointed in their seeming inability to “walk in the Spirit,” since they failed to exhibit even the minimum standards of righteous behaviour.
6. The Battle of the Apostles......As Paul puts it: God chose to “reveal his Son to me” (Galatians 1: 16). This places him in a rather extraordinary position with reference to the original apostles, since he understood that his singular position as the “Thirteenth Apostle” was to take the message about Christ to the non-Jewish world. Paul, as a kind of “second Christ,” was commissioned to go to the entire world.....Paul’s relationship with the original apostles was sporadic and minimal......Paul spoke of the Jerusalem leadership sarcastically, referring to James, Peter, and John as the “so-called pillars,” and “those reputed to be somebody,” but adds, “what they are means nothing to me” (Galatians 2: 6, 9).....His work, which was almost exclusively with non-Jews, would not interfere with their own preaching to Jews......Sometime in the mid to late 50s A.D., Paul made a clear and decisive break with the Jerusalem establishment.
After all, the entire New Testament canon is largely a post-Paul and pro-Paul production.
Paul proved too radical, too apocalyptic, and too controversial even for the emerging Church in the second through the fourth centuries. He was domesticated, first by the author of Acts, as I have noted, but subsequently by letters written in his name, purporting to be from his hand, that are found in the New Testament.
What Paul most expected to happen never came about and his grand vision of the imminent transformation of the world, and his pivotal role therein, utterly failed.
The thirteen letters attributed to Paul in the New Testament make up nearly one-quarter of the New Testament and they are the primary documents that have shaped the course of Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Protestant Christianity. 10.......The “Jesus” who most influenced history was the “Jesus Christ” of Paul, not the historical figure of Jesus".
All in all, I found Tabor's views very persuasive. Although he says very little about the role of Augustine around the late 300's AD in cementing these theological views and in stamping out any contrary or dissenting views....leading eventually to the inquisition and other measures to stamp out heresy (which was anything that went contrary to the Pauline view of Christianity).
An easy five stars from me.… (more)

Tabor's perspective in this book is truly unique, as someone who both studies religions academically, and a negotiator during the actual crisis. However, this book fell a little flatter compared to what I was hoping for it. Tabor brings his ability to deeply analyze hermeneutics and religious convictions, but doesn't really discuss the validity of them. I understand that that may have lay outside the scope of the book, but it would have been a great opportunity.

This is not just my criticism, but one from the book itself. Tabor posits that what makes cults "dangerous" to American society beyond the harm to a few insiders is that it compels outsiders to have to examine their own convictions and lives, and determine whether or not it is as meaningful or fulfilling as they think they are, concluding that it is easier to denounce the messenger, rather than confront the message. Tabor, ironically, does just that. He talks about Koresh's history and describes his sincere convictions, but stays his hand at quantifying their actual validity, which he could have certainly done given his academic prowess and other works.… (more)

I first read this book a year ago in its first published incarnation, Things Unutterable: Paul’s Ascent to Paradise in its Greco-Roman, Judaic, and Early Christian Contexts (University Press of America, 1986). Now the author, James Tabor, has used the COVID-19 lockdown to reissue it. There are slight revisions and some new footnotes that refer to recent research.
The original was the published version of Tabor’s dissertation, accepted by the University of Chicago. His doctoral advisor was not a New Testament scholar, but Jonathan Zane Smith, a leading expert in the broader field of ancient religion. This choice of advisor is reflected in the wide context of ancient texts Tabor brings to bear on the subject of his inquiry, three verses in 2 Corinthians in which Paul recounts his ascent to heaven. There were many such accounts in antiquity, but this one is notable in that it is the only first-person account.
Although Tabor has made some concessions to the non-specialist reader (Greek and Hebrew terms are either transliterated or translated, sometimes both), it remains a scholarly work. Readers seeking a more accessible introduction to Tabor’s thinking on the apostle to the nations are advised to begin with his Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity (Simon and Schuster, 2012).
The book’s subtitle expresses Tabor’s central point: both Paul’s self-understanding as an apostle to the nations and his message are intimately connected with his ascent experience.
The book is divided into four chapters, with the middle two chapters forming the bulk of the text. The first chapter, appropriately for a dissertation, situates Tabor’s project in the context of previous research. For some readers, this might be a first introduction to the history of religions school, which flourished more than a century ago, primarily in the German-speaking area. While many of its results are seen today as one-sided and outdated, Tabor shows how the questions scholars of this school raised remain relevant. Perhaps the most enduring is the insight that the Jewish faith, and the Christian movement that sprung from its womb, were not isolated phenomena, but must be seen in the broader context of oriental and Hellenistic belief.
Chapter Two is devoted to Paul’s mission and message. For centuries, Paul has been seen in the context of debates over law versus grace, faith versus works. Today this is sometimes dismissed as the Lutheran Paul. However, Paul’s contribution to this question was crucial. In the centuries since, in addition to Martin Luther, seekers ranging from the Latin Catholic Augustine, the founder of Methodism Wesley, and the Reformed theologian Karl Barth have experienced decisive breakthroughs through their reading of Paul’s treatment of this question, primarily in his letter to the Romans.
Tabor argues, however, that Paul’s teaching of justification through faith was preliminary to the main thrust of his message, salvation, consisting of nothing less than divine rebirth at the resurrection, This, too, may be new to some readers. However, it is an essential point in Tabor’s main argument of linking Paul’s message to his ascent experience.
In Chapter Three, Tabor presents an overview of texts recounting heavenly journeys in antiquity. He begins the chapter with a catalog of criteria according to which these texts can be classified, although he stresses that such schemes are aids; the traits of the texts themselves are often more complex.
One of the key differentiations between the texts is the cosmology it reflects. Following the work of Martin Nilsson, Tabor distinguishes between two cosmologies, an archaic and a new. The archaic cosmology imagined a three-tiered world, with the earth situated between heaven and the netherworld. Corresponding to this cosmology was the feeling that humans are at home, in their proper place, on earth, though a person may be accorded short visits above or below.
In contrast, the “new” cosmology, which, according to Nilsson, arose in the wake of Alexander’s conquests, posits many levels of heaven. Humans are no longer at the center of creation but displaced from their true home in the heavens. The transition is neither sudden nor absolute; the older view can survive alongside the newer.
Although not central to Tabor’s thesis, I missed any discussion of how to account for this radically new cosmology. How did people come to believe they were no longer in their place?
Tabor’s concluding chapter offers a brief exegesis of the text central to his inquiry, 2 Corinthians 12:2–4. His treatment is guided by questions such as whether Paul’s reference to the third heaven and to paradise refers to the same place or two places. If these are alternate terms for one place, how does one account for the two-fold, strongly parallel structure of the text?
My reading of the original book was hurried, since I had borrowed an acquaintance’s copy overnight. I’m grateful now to have been able to read it more slowly, and place it on my shelf alongside some of my favorite books on Paul, who remains one of the most fascinating figures of antiquity. Like the best of scholarship, by focusing on one narrow and oft-neglected passage and analyzing it in light of the broader context of mystical experience in the ancient world, Tabor has made a valuable contribution to New Testament studies.
In a way, it’s not surprising that many scholars have downplayed Paul’s account of his heavenly ascent. With its assertion of the centrality of that experience, this book is a healthy reminder that, no matter how we approach Paul, we’re never going to tame him and turn him into a comfortable contemporary. We must view him on his own terms, as a product of his culture—a world very different from ours—before applying his legacy to any questions facing us today.… (more)