What becomes of Paul? If the Gospels and Acts are mythical, then Paul, our earliest literary witness to Christianity, stands virtually without a historical point of reference. Indeed, the one rock in the Pauline literature that offers any help, the mention of the Nabatean king Aretas having a governor in Damascus, better supports a date around 85 B.C. than a chronology that places Paul’s ministry in the 40s A.D. – when the Romans were in complete control of the area. It might also offer a point of contact with a breakaway movement within Essenism around that time, as evidenced in the Scrolls, and the sect’s sojourn in Damascus, similarly authenticated. However this may be, the placing of Jesus in the time of Pontius Pilate is readily enough explained in Scrolls chronology by the reference to the death of the Teacher being “forty years” before the collapse of an armed revolt. The Christian storytellers would then have taken this latter point as the fall of Masada to the Romans in A.D. 73, and found the death of their second “Teacher” at thirty-three, during the procuratorship of the luckless Pilate (26-36 A.D.). There are obviously many problems raised by this new appraisal of Christian traditions. Nevertheless the point to be remembered is that all future work must be based first on the literary conclusions of our comparison with the Scrolls. The New Testament records after all are our only worthwhile sources for the Christian story. If they can no longer be taken at their face value, we must determine just what is their import, how they were produced and for what purpose. All other considerations are secondary. We stand at the beginning of a long and exciting road. Not all our conclusions are going to be palatable. Not only is the historicity of the New Testament stories being called into question but the very nature of the underlying material must give occasion for pained surprise. Enough has already been resolved for us to realize that we are dealing with an extreme form of Essenism which is not only on the fringes of Judaism but even of any strictly religious philosophy at all. We are in the world of dark magic, and in particular that kind which deals with the calling up of the spirits of the dead for the purposes of necromancy. Beneath the surface of innocuous tales of giving life to little girls and older men lie incantations and even detailed rites of flesh-cutting and ventriloquism.
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 04:49:33 +0000
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