Bibliographical Information
Wilson, Barrie, PhD. Paul vs. James: The Battle that Shaped
Christianity and Changed the World (an historical reconstruction). N.p.:
CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2018. 191 pp.
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Recently, I've been consumed by this book
by York University (Toronto) Professor-Emeritus Barrie Wilson because it reads
like a thrilling, page-turning detective novel but is filled with top-notch
historical research, a fruit of Wilson's many years of New Testament
scholarship. I finished reading it
promptly. This is a book I highly recommend not only to fellow academics
interested in the New Testament, early Christianity, and, specifically, Pauline
Studies, but also to everyone interested in a very possible (even probable)
imaginative reconstruction of how the early Christians interacted with each
other and zeroes in on a crucial conflict between the followers of James' ("the
Lord's brother") and those of Paul and his"Christ-worshiping"
followers.
This present historical-fictional work has
to be read in tandem with Wilson’s more academic work How Jesus Became
Christian (Random House Canada, 2008) where he fleshes out more in detailed
prose the fine points of the argument about the origins of Christianity which
he presents here in a historical-fictionalized form.
I've already known earlier, largely
through my reading of British New Testament scholar Michael Goulder, that there
were "two missions" in the early church (See his A Tale of Two
Missions, SCM, 1994 – one of my all-time favourite books of New Testament
history!). To put it simply: The dominant one tracing its lineage to the
historical Jesus was led by apostolic giants such as James, the Lord’s brother
and Jesus’s close companions—Peter and John. It was largely geared toward Jews.
It saw itself as a form of Judaism in the style of Yeshua (Jesus) and continued
to practice all the Jewish customs in the spirit of Yeshua. The other one was
that headed by Paul which, of course, was directed primarily to the gentiles
and stood on the revelations that Paul claimed to have had from the Christ
himself and was viewed oftentimes as maverick or rogue by some disciples who
knew Jesus in the flesh because of its spirit of downplaying Torah and Jewish
practices and emphasizing faith in Christ. These two missions did not agree on
many things—prominently, about what the continuing significance or irrelevance
of “Israel” and Jewish matters were in the light of Jesus, the Christ.
But this novelized biblical history by
Wilson really puts the matter more starkly and more clearly in front of me:
There was, he claims, an irreconcilable difference between the "Community
of the Way" of James and his followers (among whom the protagonist
"Mattai" was included) with the "Christ worshipers"
of Paul and his followers (the leaders of whom were Evodius and
Ignatius -yes, THE famous apostolic father Ignatius of Antioch).
What Paul was trying to do was to claim
that he and his movement were somehow a legitimate "development" of
the religion of Israel which, after all, had a pedigree (already then) of at
least over a thousand years. This was useful within the Roman Empire where
"antiquity" was much respected. Besides, Paul drew converts largely
from among the "God-fearers" who were associated with various Jewish
synagogues in the Jewish Diaspora.
The book is noteworthy because it is an
elaborate fleshing out of what the position of James and his followers could
have been at the start of the Christian movement. According to Wilson, the
followers of Yeshua in the tradition of James ("the Lord's brother")
did not want to be associated with Paul's movement and that they sought to
clarify at the famous "Council of Jerusalem" (circa 49 CE), that
Paul's movement was an altogether different religion from the style of Judaism
that Yeshua himself started and was continued by James and all the earliest
disciples of Jesus who knew the "flesh and blood" rabbi from Nazareth.
In short, Paul was an interloper from the
point of view of all the disciples who knew Yeshua because they could not see
in Paul's "Christ-worshiping" movement any significant continuity
with the style of Judaism advocated by Yeshua. Instead, they thought that
Paul's insistence on worshiping Christ as a kind of deity who seeks to achieve
an other-worldly kind of salvation through his death and resurrection while
dispensing with Torah (the Law) and on everything being mediated directly
through the mystical experiences of Paul/Saul himself, was NOT part of the
Yeshua movement at all.
Wow! I'm just being forced to seriously
reconsider the earliest history of Christianity in a major way through this
work! Kudos, Dr. Wilson for making New Testament studies this intriguing and interesting!
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