It is understandable that he was the originator of Christian anti- Semitism. He belonged to the fringes surrounding Judaism, of people who were impressed and attracted by Judaism, but had to fight against their upbringing and emotional make-up when they attempted a closer approach. Often such people would succeed in overcoming all difficulties and would become fully attached to Judaism either as “God-fearers” or as proselytes; such people, as the Talmud says, became the best Jews of all. But occasionally the influence of childhood culture was too strong; they might fall back into paganism or, alternatively, they might concoct weird religious fantasies, partly derived from Judaism and partly from Hellenism, in which the Jews tended to figure as the villains, rather than as the heroes. A certain ,feeling of failure or rejection lies behind these fantasies.
Paul was the greatest dreamer of all. He created the Christian myth by deifying Jesus, a Jewish Messiah figure whose real aims were on the plane of Jewish political Utopianism. Paul transformed Jesus’ 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 ironically turned to good because this death is the very thing needed for the salvation of sinful mankind. The combination of malice and blindness described here is the exact analogue of several of the myths from pagan mystery religions from which Paul borrows his ideas.
Paul took the cosmic drama of good and evil from Gnosticism, and so took over also the dramatization of the Jews as the representatives of cosmic evil. But, by combining the myth of Gnosticism with the myth of the mystery cults (which were not themselves anti-Semitic), Paul sharpened and intensified the anti-Semitism already present in Gnosticism. The Jews became not just the opponents of the figure descended from the world of light, but the performers of the cosmic sacrifice by which the heavenly visitant brings salvation. The Jews thus become identified as the, dark figure which in myths of the deaths of gods brings about the saving death – Set, Mot, Loki; and the stage is prepared for the long career of the Jews in the Christian imagination as the people of the Devil. The elements which Paul took over from Judaism to embellish his myth – the religio-historical element which set the death of Jesus in a panorama of world history – only intensified the resultant anti-Semitism, because there was now an aspect of usurpation in the Pauline myth, an incentive to blacken the Jewish record in order to justify the Christian take-over of the Abrahamic “promises.” The career of the Jews in history began to be seen as a prefiguring of their central role, the murder of the divine sacrifice; they were separated from their prophets, now regarded as proto-Christs, hounded, like Jesus, by the Jews.
Paul’s religious ideology did not end with him as you well know but it served as the background for the later writing of the Gospels which we today also know came from non-Jewish hands. The religious synthesis or myth foreshadowed by Paul was then brought into full imaginative life in the Gospels, which were written under the influence of Paul’s ideas and for the use of the Pauline Christian Church. A fully well-developed account of mythological dimensions is now elaborated on the basis of historical materials, which are adapted to provide a melodrama of good and evil. The powerful image of Judas Iscariot is created: a person fated and even designated by his victim, Jesus, to perform the evil deed, possessed by Satan and carrying out his evil role by compulsion, yet suffering the fate of the accursed – a perfect embodiment of the role of the sacred executioner, deputed to perform the deed of blood, yet execrated for performing it. While Judas performs the role on the personal level, the Jewish people, in the Gospel myth, perform it on the communal level: actuated by blindness and malice in alternation, calling for Jesus’ crucifixion in the climactic Barabbas scene and accepting responsibility for the sacrifice by saying, “His blood be on us and on our children” (Matthew 27: 25).
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