Two hundred years ago Jeremy Bentham wrote a tract which purported to demonstrate that the Christian religion was in effect manufactured by St Paul and not by Jesus. This was actually quite a common ploy at the time: a means by which freethinkers could assail Christian tenets without being prosecuted. And because St Paul’s writings occupy such prominence in the New Testament, and are plainly a major authority for so much Christian theology and understanding, there was reason well in excess of mere subterfuge to justify the procedure. In his restrained and in many ways compelling Introduction to his translations of the New Testament Rabbi Brichto (who died last year) adds a distinctive voice to what is therefore a fairly established debate about the place of Pauline theology. He brings to it resonances of interpretation and trajectories of judgment which many will find illuminating.
On the primary subject of Christian origins he is firmly on the side of Bentham. Jesus, he affirms, though ‘the central figure of Christianity’, was ‘not its founder.’ Again: ‘the fact of the matter is that Jesus was not the first Christian; Paul was!’ The argument is planted centrally in the disputes among the earliest Christians about the nature of the faith to be extended to the gentile world — and indeed to the Jews of the Diaspora who were distributed across cities of the Mediterranean rim. St Peter is identified as the leader of the majority party among the believers in Judea and Galilee, who adhered to Judaic principles, and St Paul as the innovator who ‘decided to reject the authority of the Apostles.’ Much is made of ‘the confusion on Jesus’s status due to the divinity ascribed to him by Paul.’ Brichto saw Christ as ‘on the path of self-discovery’ during his ministry, not actually claiming divine status and ‘not a divinely commissioned human messiah.’
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