Jacob Taubes and the Apostle Paul

Christianity became a creed in considerable measure thanks to how the Apostle Paul framed the teachings of Jesus. Otherwise, the Jesus movement might well have remained a sect within Judaism. Paul worked the Jesus story to fashion a monotheism accessible to the Gentiles, thus offering the possibility of universal salvation before the end of days, which he believed was imminent.

Along the way, Paul's anti-Jewish tropes shaped centuries of Church-inspired contempt for Judaism.

What if Paul's intentions vis-à-vis the Jews were more nuanced? That he did not intend to demonize them for ignoring the Jesus movement; what he really wanted was to make them envious so that they’d see the light.

If you're looking for grounds to wrestle with these perennial subjects, the centenary of the birth of Pauline scholar Jacob Taubes (1923-1987) and the publication of Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes by Jerry Muller offers an apt pretext.

I saw Muller's book on the coffee table of an erudite journalist friend who told me to read it because I would enjoy it. He was right. A few weeks after finishing the book, I stumbled into an academic workshop on June 22, 2023, of mostly Taubes' specialists at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies devoted to parsing the master's understanding of Paul. Some had known him, were related to him, or had otherwise fallen under his spell.

Taubes' theories about Paul are not straightforward. Muller explains, "Taubes was fundamentally uninterested in Paul's theological claims. 'I do not think theologically,' he announced. 'I work with theological materials, but I think of them in terms of intellectual and actual history. I inquire into the political potential of theological metaphors.’"

Taubes was an intellectual shapeshifter. His arguments grabbed you, but they were not always coherent. Or, as Muller gracefully puts it, Taubes engaged in a "combination of radical assertion with ambiguity and even opacity of expression."

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The New Testament tells us that Jesus and his followers were Jewish. After his crucifixion in 33 CE, it being plain that most Jews did not see him as the Messiah, Paul repackaged the Jesus narrative for non-Jews. Crucially, Paul was not one of the Apostles and never met Jesus except in his visions. That said, the earliest writings of the New Testament are nevertheless attributed to Paul. He wrote the First Epistle to the Thessalonians (people of Thessaloníki in Greece) around 50 CE. He also wrote First Epistle to the Corinthians and the Epistle to the Romans. In contrast, the first Gospel, the Book of Mark, written in Greek in Rome, did not appear until 70 CE. So Paul was the top Christianity influencer.

Paul was born Saul in the Greek-speaking city of Tarsus in today's Turkey. Joel Carmichael writes in The Birth of Christianity, "Through his command of Greek, Paul was naturally familiar with concepts like spirit, savior, reason, soul, conscience." According to Christian sacred history, he traveled to Jerusalem to learn Torah. An artisan and tent maker, he was initially incensed by the beliefs of Jesus' followers. So much so that he sought to be commissioned to battle the followers of the Nazarene. Around 33–36 CE, when he was aged 28–31, Paul neared Damascus, and a light from heaven flashed around him. This was his "Epiphany on the way to Damascus." He fell to the ground and heard a voice say, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" Saul asked: "Who are you, Lord?" The reply came: "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting." Jesus said, "Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do." (Acts 9:6)

What he did was universalize Christianity contrary to the inclinations of the Jewish followers of Jesus (the Jerusalem Church). He taught that God chose the Jews and gave them the Torah. Now through Jesus, the Messiah, monotheism was to be made universal. Affirmation of faith alone was the path to salvation. Therefore, Shabbat, kashrut, circumcision, and other Jewish dogma were passé not necessarily for the Jews who already practiced them but for those new to the faith.

Paul identified Jesus as the son of God, born in human likeness. Those who had faith in his divinity and were baptized into Christ became one with him and would be saved from hell, for he had died for the sins of humanity.

Ultimately, Paul was taken to Rome as a prisoner and eventually executed. He left behind an elaborate theology with the Trinity at its core.

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From the Taubes workshop at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, I took away the idea that Taubes' Paul was not the apolitical and anti-Jewish missionary portrayed in the New Testament. Instead, the apostle was recapitulating the role of Moses, loyal to the Jewish people despite the error of their ways while extending the covenant to the Gentiles.

Paul never "converted" to Christianity, for there was no such thing. With the end of days approaching he could have proffered monotheism without turning against the Jews. So Taubes raised the theory that he wanted to make the Jews feel they would miss out on the new Torah if they didn't embrace Jesus. His condemnations should be read as prophecy in the spirit of "this hurts me more than it hurts you." Just as Moses had to address the Jews' rejection of God in the Golden Calf affair, Paul wanted to save the Jewish people from God's wrath for failing to embrace Jesus.

Taubes, intent on reclaiming Paul for the Jews, read Romans 11:11 as saying that while the Jewish rejection of Jesus opened the way for pagans it did not preclude their own "return" to Jesus.

As for the pagans, Paul intuited that they would not embrace the 613 mitzvot commanded of the Jews; they indeed would not circumcise – mutilate to their way of thinking the genitals of their boys and men. He wanted to offer them a way in which they could accept.

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As Taubes' biographer Muller points out, "Paul's statements about the Jews were varied, ambivalent, and sometimes contradictory." He says Taubes was "ahead of the scholarly curve" in emphasizing Paul's Jewishness. Taubes' Political Theology of Paul (published in English in 2004) may be influential, but it's no page-turner. Muller says, "For Taubes, Paul is 'an apostle from the Jews to the nations." As Taubes understood Paul, "The Jewish synagogue refuses Jesus as the Christ, but this refusal is essential to universal redemption."

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A less-than-flattering hypothesis about Paul comes from Hyam Maccoby in The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, who argues that Paul might have been a convert to Judaism but was never a Pharisee. His knowledge of the Judaism of the Pharisees was sketchy, and his ideas were mainly adapted from a little known Gnostic movement. Maccoby agrees that Paul was indeed motivated by the desire to spread monotheism beyond the Jews.

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Muller's Professor of Apocalypse takes an obscure intellectual figure and shows him to be an intriguing personality whose path intersected with a Who's Who of 20^th-century intellectuals. Taubes lectured a coterie of young thinkers, scholars, and campaigners who would later become the Commentary crowd and founders of neoconservatism. He rubbed shoulders with the luminaries of the Jewish Theological Seminary in its heyday, including Saul Liberman. He contended with Hebrew University giants Martin Buber and Gershom Shalom. Muller's intellectual sketches alone are worth the price of the book. If Taubes interacted with them intellectually, personally, or sexually, we are given a sense of who they were and what they represented, from Susan Sontag to Maimonides to Leo Strauss. From Strauss, incidentally, Taubes learned that intellectuals write between the lines if they fear being explicit. Perhaps this is how Taubes understood Paul’s modus operandi and adopted it himself.

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Taubes had rabbinic and family yichus. His parents moved from Vienna, where he was born in 1923, to Zurich in 1936 so that his father, a modern Orthodox (Mizrachi) Zionist rabbi, could take up a pulpit. That is where Taubes spent the WWII-Holocaust years. Although he did not talk much about the Shoah, his son Ethan Taubes believes it profoundly influenced his psyche.

Jacob's father, Zvi tried to mobilize Christian clergy in Switzerland to help Europe's Jews during the Holocaust. So young Taubes felt comfortable around Christian theologians. Zvi wrote his own dissertation about Jesus and Halacha.

The son studied in secular schools and Orthodox academies, achieving rabbinic ordination (1943) and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Zurich (1947) writing a dissertation on Western eschatology.

A difficult brilliant personality, Jacob Taubes was often promoted up and out. He had more ideas than patience to execute them; hence he did not leave a long trail of publications. However, he was a charismatic, spellbinding, theatrical lecturer. Grateful to be in his aura – he had many enablers.

Taubes was a tormented soul. His personal life and sexual compulsions (he practiced and taught antinomianism) left a trail of hurt. He simultaneously straddled many worlds – Christian, Jewish, Hassidic, academic, and Marxist. As an intellectual provocateur, he was equally not at home in New York City, Berlin, and Jerusalem.

Whether Jacob Taubes was admirable, I leave it to those who know his story better than I do to decide. But after reading Muller and finding myself surrounded by Taube's groupies at the Paul workshop, I can confidently say he is worth knowing about.

If you are interested in the Jewish intellectual history of the 20^th century or how the Jesus movement became Christianity, Paul, Gnosticism (esoteric magic realism), or antinomianism (finding salvation in decadence), you'll probably want to know more about Jacob Taubes.