Hugh J. Schonfield,
Proclaiming the Messiah: The Life and Letters of Paul of
Tarsus, Envoy to the Nations.
London: Open Gate Press, 1997.
Reviewed by Robert M. Price.
Hugh
J. Schonfield died in 1988, leaving behind him a great many books, most
published, some as yet unpublished. Every one of his books was well
worth reading, even when one found one could not quite accept
Schonfield's conclusions in every respect. Schonfield was a remarkable
man with remarkable convictions, and his unique perspective enabled him
to cast a revealing light on whatever subject he treated. Whether he was
studying the gospels, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Toledoth Jeschu,
the Kabbalah, you could be sure going in that you would be shown how to
view something familiar in an altogether unfamiliar way. And this was
nowhere more true than in his New Testament translation The Authentic
New Testament (second edition: The Original New Testament).
Schonfield's particular array of convictions and sympathies were, I say,
unique in the ranks of New Testament scholarship. For one thing, he was
a survivor of the generation of such fresh-thinking trail-blazers as
Robert Eisler and Rendell Harris. This meant he was willing to widen the
scope of relevant sources for early Christian history to include many
recondite and apocryphal texts that others too quickly dismissed as
fool's gold. For another, Schonfield retained a good measure of the
Rationalism of an earlier generation of critics. This is evident
particularly in his notorious book The Passover Plot, a book
surprisingly conservative in many ways, not least in its belief in the
literal accuracy of the gospel stories and sayings, despite the error of
their supernaturalism. Schonfield reasoned that Jesus was, as the
gospels depict, sure of his messianic mission and that this destiny
included crucifixion and subsequent reappearance. But it had nothing to
do with divine providence or miracle; it was instead a program
masterminded by one who saw his blueprint set forth in prophetic
scripture and applied every ounce of energy and imagination to bring
God's will to its fulfillment. If, or rather since, he was the Messiah,
he ought to be able to accomplish this, the work of the Messiah. And in
Schonfield's personal opinion, Jesus was indeed the Jewish Messiah, a
conviction Schonfield held as a Jew, not as a Christian.
One often hears it said, by those who did not read The Passover Plot,
that Schonfield advocated the Scheintod ("seeming death") theory
of Venturini, Bahrdt, and Schleiermacher, but this is wrong. Schonfield
thought that Jesus planned an escape from the cross, but that the
unanticipated lance-thrust killed him. Schonfield nonetheless did
continue in a Rationalist vein, similar to Kirsopp Lake, suggesting that
the resurrection appearances of a "Jesus" who was at first not
"recognized" were actually cases of mistaken identity. And despite the
scorn of apologists, the only thing implausible about such speculations
is that they are based on too literal a reading of the gospels! Like the
old time Rationalists refuted so expertly by D.F. Strauss, Schonfield
gives the gospels too much credit!
Those critics of The Passover Plot who pegged Schonfield as an
unbeliever did not read him carefully. He was no unbeliever. He was just
a heretic. And there was more heresy! Schonfield was also a
Spiritualist. He believed in parapsychology and mediumism, what is today
called "channeling." Spiritualism seemed to those who espoused it a
scientific, empirical approach to something like the miraculous. Indeed,
it is almost surprising that Schonfield did not interpret the
resurrection of Jesus as Leslie D. Weatherhead did (The Resurrection
of Christ in the Light of Modern Science and Psychical Research,
1959), as an ectoplasmic apparition. At any rate, Schonfield's interest
in parapsychology enabled him to take very seriously the charismatic
phenomena of early Christianity, including the mystical experiences of
Paul. And this brings us to the posthumously published Proclaiming the
Messiah.
Hugh Schonfield had a number of distinctive views on Paul, his life and
his doctrine, and they are set forth here. It must be admitted that
these fascinating notions are set forth in more detail in Schonfield's
earlier works, but then most of these are no longer readily available.
It is to be hoped that the new Proclaiming the Messiah will
attract new readers to Schonfield and that they will find their interest
sufficiently kindled to search out his previous works.
Surely the most striking of Schonfield's hypotheses is that Saul of
Tarsus first considered himself to be God's Messiah, destined to bring
the Light of Judaism to the Gentiles, and that his persecuting fury was
ignited by the belief that the apostolic preaching of Jesus was a lie
sent to deceive the unwary in the Last Days. Saul had arrived at his
messianic consciousness through his precocious studies of the
kabbalistic Lore of Creation (which was later to shape his Christology
of Jesus as the cosmos-spanning heavenly Adam--see Schonfield's Those
Incredible Christians, 1968). Like later kabbalists Abraham Abulafia
and Sabbatai Sevi, whose studies had led them to the belief in their own
messiahship, Saul decided he was the one. And like Sabbatai Sevi's
enlightenment, this revelation was accompanied by a dose of mental
aberration (and genuine psychic experience, according to Schonfield).
Saul's literally insane fury against the young Jesus sect abated only
when he had a second epiphany on the road to Damascus. He had to admit
now that Jesus was the Messiah, not he, but then Saul adopted the next
best role. He viewed himself as the living image of Christ on earth even
as Christ had been the image of God. Specifically, Saul believed that he
often acted as "channeler" for the voice and persona of the exalted
Christ ("I say to you, not I, but the Lord..."). All this is only hinted
at in Proclaiming the Messiah. One may pursue the matter in
Schonfield's fascinating The Jew of Tarsus (An Unorthodox Portrait of
Paul) (1946).
To suggest a comparison that Schonfield himself did not think to use,
though I think it is appropriate, Schonfield's Saul might be
compared with Hong Xiuquan, the Taipeng Messiah and Heavenly King who
believed himself to be the earthly incarnation of the Younger Son of
God, whose Heavenly Elder Brother was Jesus. One might even compare him
to the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, self-proclaimed Lord of the Second
Advent who, as such, is not Jesus Christ himself returned to earth but
rather an earthly representative bearing his spirit to carry forward his
task. Again, Schonfield's Saul corresponds to Montanus as the Paraclete
incarnate. In other words, Schonfield's Saul/Paul still had a messianic
consciousness; he had only had to redefine it.
Such a picture of Paul certainly comports with the virtually messianic
colors in which Paul and his fans painted him, e.g., as tantamount to a
second Moses (2 Corinthians 3:12-13), as completing the remainder of
Christ's atonement (Colossians 1:24), of having been crucified for his
disciples (1 Corinthians 1:13), even rising from the dead (in the Acts
of Paul). Luke, too, is careful to parallel Paul's passion narrative
with that of Jesus. Schonfield's picture of Paul as a runner-up messiah
is not without history-of-religions parallels, such as the relationship
of Jesus and John the Baptist, Simon Magus and Peter, the Bab and
Baha'u’llah. I think especially of the case of Dr. David C. Kim, first
president of the Unification Theological Seminary, who had first
believed himself to be the Messiah until he met Sun Myung Moon and
deferred to the latter's messiahship instead.
Schonfield's quasi-messianic Paul also brings to mind Walter
Schmithals's sketch of the Gnostic apostolate appropriated by Paul and
other early Christian missioners. Schmithals shows (The Office of
Apostle in the Early Church) how the earliest apostles were Gnostic
redeemer-mystagogues who preached the gospel of the Cosmic Christ whose
light-sparks were scattered among the souls of the elect, to whom they
preached. This Christ/Primal Man had never before been incarnated on
earth--until now, in the form of the awakened apostolos and his
converts, as they together realized their true identity. Schmithals
suggested that Paul and others had taken over pretty much the same
notion, only on behalf of Jesus of Nazareth, a recent historical figure.
On Schonfield's reading, Paul's conception of his mission as an earthly
manifestation of a heavenly Christ (albeit one who had lived on earth
and returned to heaven) would provide a missing link helping to explain
how Paul came to appropriate the Gnostic apostolate.
Schonfield learned valuable lessons from the Tübingen School, and he
does not underestimate the gulf separating Paul from the Jerusalem
Pillars and the Caliphate of James. But Schonfield also learned (I
gather, from Eisler's The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist)
that the original Nazorean "Christianity" must have been a nationalistic
movement related to the Zealots (see his The Pentecost Revolution:
The Story of the Jesus Party in Israel, A.D. 36-66, 1974).
Schonfield combines the two perspectives, casting light both on the
differences between Paul and his Jerusalem rivals and on the reasons for
Paul's missionary tribulations. Schonfield reasons that the issue was
not simply one of Jewish Torah-piety ("legalism") and whether it should
be required of Gentile converts. No, that would be myopic. Schonfield
sees Paul's origins as a Diaspora Jew, and those of the Nazorean Pillars
as Palestinian Jews, as the crux of the matter. Paul's gospel was
abstractly spiritual, that of the Nazoreans avowedly political. Paul had
seen Roman power protect and guarantee Jewish rights in Cilicia; James
and Peter chafed under the rule of Pilate and resented, on general
principle, outlanders ruling the Holy Land. The Pax Romana
facilitated Paul's evangelism; it necessitated that of the Nazoreans.
For Paul, Jesus Christ was a heavenly being with whom one might be
mystically united; for the Pillars, Jesus was the soon-coming king. For
both Paul and his rivals, the Torah regulations formed the sancta of the
Jewish people; by one and the same token, the Pillars hoisted the Torah
as a battle standard for messianic Jewish nationalism, while Paul
dispensed with it for the sake of Christian internationalism. Paul's
kingdom was not of this world, whereas that of James definitely was. But
both kingdoms had their evangelistic heralds, itinerant missioners
making their way throughout the Diaspora, spreading the word of the
Messiah Jesus, his recent appearance, and his imminent return. Luke
shows Paul getting confused with the Egyptian messiah/prophet, i.e.,
mistaken for a violent revolutionary. But he also has Paul accused of
being a Nazorean agitator. Luke does not try to disabuse us of the
notion that these Nazoreans were revolutionaries, advocating customs
illegal for Romans, urging Jews to acclaim Jesus king instead of Caesar.
No, he means only to tell us that Paul was not one of these Nazoreans.
The Romans did not make fine distinctions, but the Christians did. And
Paul was constantly getting in trouble because of the reputation of his
rivals!
Of course the forgoing scenario only makes sense if one supposes, as
Schonfield does, that Acts is correct in depicting Paul always going
first to Diaspora synagogues, something his epithet "Apostle to the
Gentiles" would not lead us to expect. As Schonfield points out, his
pagan converts could have had no interest whatever in the notion of a
Jewish national deliverer. So, to be taken for a messianic agitator
among Jews, Paul would have had to be preaching his messiah in the
synagogues. Schonfield is ambivalent with regard to the historical value
of Acts. On the one hand, he considers the tradition likely that the
author was Paul's personal physician Luke. On the other, he admits the
narrative is largely fictional, especially the speeches, and even calls
the author of Acts a "novelist." In practice, Schonfield is willing to
accept Acts (as well as the apocryphal Acts of Paul) by default when he
has no better information, and in the last chapters of his biographical
section he simply reproduces sections of his translation of Acts!
As for Paul's ministry to pagans, Schonfield is unashamed to maintain
the now much-despised (but still quite plausible) idea of Paul as the
second founder of Christianity. Schonfield sees Paul as having found
himself facing such a wide communication gap that he decided he'd best
borrow equivalent mythemes from Hellenistic religions in order to
communicate his Christ-mysticism. In the end he had created a new
religion, the Christian religion. But he had not meant to, any more than
Martin Luther had intended to split the Catholic Church.
Schonfield's treatment of Paul's contest with the Pillars over the role
of the Torah for Gentile converts is quite interesting, not least
because it points up an important ambiguity besetting all discussion of
this problem. The standard version has it that Paul thought that the
Gentiles had only to believe in Jesus to be saved, while his opponents
held that Gentiles must believe in Jesus and shoulder the yoke of
circumcision and the Torah, all 613 commandments. Acts 15 depicts a
compromise whereby the Gentiles are told they must keep the minimal
Noachian commandments traditionally required of the Gentile
"God-fearers," the noble pagans who attended synagogue to worship the
Hebrew God but who balked at circumcision and all the rest. The way
Schonfield sees it, the Jerusalem compromise granted to Paul's converts
the second-class status of Christian God-fearers, whereas Paul thought
they should be considered first-class, along with Torah-observant
Christian Jews.
This much seems fairly clear, but it leaves some crucial areas blurry.
For instance, are we to infer that the conservative circumcision party,
even before they believed in Messiah Jesus, had dismissed the Gentile
God-fearers as mere pagans who were sadly deluding themselves about
God's favor? For them, was it full proselyte or nothing? Had they
believed people like Cornelius the Centurion were just damned to Gehenna?
This seems to be implied, but it seems rather strange. And, once the
Jerusalem compromise was reached, what was the envisioned status of
Pauline converts who might refuse to heed James' decree and, say,
continue to order rare steaks? Would James have viewed them the same way
Paul views Corinthian Christians who visit prostitutes and eat
idol-meat--as apostates to be delivered to Satan? Is the issue "What
must I do to inherit eternal life?" Or is it more a question of table
manners in Antioch: who can eat with whom? Has Luke over-simplified the
issues to the point of confusion?
Schonfield seems to realize that we must make some distinctions Luke did
not bother to make. So Schonfield suggests that what Paul really wanted
was for the Pillars to grant recognition to his Gentiles, even without
the Torah, as Israelites. A modern parallel might be the debates between
moderate and liberal Christians over the status of believers in
non-Christian religions. Karl Rahner says certain Hindus or Buddhists
may be saved if they qualify as "anonymous Christians," i.e., they may
be accepted by God for their good intentions but despite their own
religions. Raimundo Panikkar says they may be saved by Christ by means
of their own religions. Huston Smith and Wilfred Cantwell Smith say that
non-Christians are saved through their religions, by their own
religions, and on the terms of their own religions. None of these
theologians envision non-Christians as damned to perdition; the point at
issue is how salvation works. Schonfield, it seems to me, sees Paul as
taking a position analogous to Rahner's: Gentile Christians, while not
keeping the Law, are a law unto themselves, "anonymous Israelites." But
I am not sure the Pauline texts Schonfield quotes really make this
point. It seems to me more likely that Paul's position was more like
Panikkar's: Gentile converts, even though Paul has granted them a great
number of their traditional pagan mythemes and mystery cult sacraments,
will be saved through faith in a Jewish Messiah they only dimly
understand.
Schonfield makes his case by appealing to passages selected from Romans
11 and Ephesians, and this makes his argument still more problematical.
Schonfield apparently never met a Pauline text he didn't like.
Astonishingly, he accepts every canonical Pauline Epistle as authentic,
even the Pastorals. Here I am reminded of Levi-Strauss's dictum that a
Structuralist analysis of a myth need not hesitate to include all
versions of the myth on the assumption that the deep structure of the
myth, a kind of semiotic DNA, replicates itself in every new version of
the myth. Perhaps it is the same in the proliferation of spurious
Pauline Epistles. Maybe the essential insights of whatever authentic
core there may be of Pauline Epistles recur in the Pauline
pseudepigrapha, the Paulinist megatext. After all, Käsemann praised
Ridderbos's book on Paul even though Ridderbos, too, made indiscriminate
use of Ephesians and the Pastorals.
Fully half of Proclaiming the Messiah is occupied by a reprint of
Schonfield's translation of the Pauline Corpus. Personally, I am a
collector of Bible (and Koran) translations and enjoy reading them
through in an attempt to prevent the texts from becoming invisible to me
by over-familiarity. As Vladimir Schklovsky said, art must take as its
task to defamiliarize, to make the familiar appear strange and new
again. This Zennish enterprise is well served by Hugh Schonfield's
translation, more than most others, with its determined avoidance of
ecclesiastical jargon. One will find no bishops and apostles in these
epistles, but rather overseers and envoys. No churches, but communities.
Schonfield's word choices are often striking and refreshing, as when in
1 Corinthians we read that "the materialist cannot entertain the ideas
of the Divine Spirit: to him they are nonsense, and he cannot grasp
them, because they have to be discerned spiritually." Schonfield's
Spiritualism shines through in his depiction of Paul's heavenly journey:
"I know a man in Christ, who fourteen years ago - whether in the
physical or astral state, I do not know, God knows, was caught up as far
as the third heaven." He's right: the story surely presupposes a
metaphysical hierarchy of physical and not-so-physical bodies, as does
Acts' story of Peter's guardian angel who is also his spirit double
(Acts 12:15). By the way, in light of this very passage (2 Corinthians
12:1-10), it is quite surprising to read Schonfield's assertions that
Saul of Tarsus had specialized in the Jewish occult "Lore of Creation"
to the exclusion of Merkabah mysticism, the vision of the Throne Chariot
of God. As I have argued elsewhere ("Stranger in Paradise: An Exegetical
Theory on 2 Corinthians 12:1-10," JSNT 7, 1980) this passage fairly
reeks of Merkabah mysticism, which holds the neglected key to its
interpretation. In fact, according to Schonfield's own account of Saul's
psychic experiences, he has cast Paul pretty much in the role of two of
the famous Four Who Entered Paradise (a Merkabah cautionary tale) and
beheld the Throne: one went mad and the other became a heresiarch
promulgating the doctrine of Two Powers in Heaven.
In his New Testament, Schonfield has tried his best to assist the reader
to see the documents stripped of their gilt edges and India paper, as if
one were getting a first glimpse of the Dead Sea Scrolls. To this end he
has ventured his own chronological rearrangement of the letters and
parts of letters. He has separated the two Corinthians into the letter
against unequal yoking with idolaters (2 Corinthians 6:14-7:1), the
letter answering the Corinthians' questions (1 Corinthians), the severe
letter (2 Corinthians 10-13), and the conciliatory letter (the rest of 2
Corinthians). Ephesians becomes "To the Communities in Asia - The
Ephesian Copy," reflecting theories about Ephesians having first served
as an encyclical. The order of the letters is 1 Thessalonians, 2
Thessalonians, Galatians, Corinthians as above, Romans, Philippians,
Ephesians, Colossians, Philemon, Titus, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy. This
arrangement, though begging numerous debates, is helpful for the sake of
prying the documents out of their canonical casket. Of course, one can
imagine the myriad different hypothetical arrangements that would result
if other scholars tried their hand at the same task (--not a bad idea!).
Schonfield's introduction mentions that he had acquainted himself with
two major recent books on Paul, Hyam Maccoby's The Mythmaker and
E.P. Sanders's Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People. But these
books have left no trace on Schonfield's. And this is a shame. It would
have been quite illuminating to see Schonfield interacting with two of
today's leading Pauline interpreters, especially since the views of
Maccoby parallel those of Schonfield at important points, while those of
Sanders provide an instructive alternative to that of Schonfield on the
crucial point of the Torah and Jewish nationalism. Perhaps it would be
too much to expect for Schonfield, in the scholarly work of his last
years, to have subjected his theories, forged long ago, to the risk of
significant change and development. At any rate, it is an unexpected
delight to discover Proclaiming the Messiah, a precious legacy of
Hugh J. Schonfield.