THE 400 YEARS BETWEEN THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS

At the close of the book of Malachi in the Old Testament, the nation of Israel is back again in the land of Palestine after the Babylonian captivity, but they are under the domination of the great world power of that day, Persia and the Medio-Persian empire. In Jerusalem, the temple had been restored, although it was a much smaller building than the one that Solomon had built and decorated in such marvelous glory.

Within the temple the line of Aaronic priests was still worshipping and carrying on the sacred rites as they had been ordered to do by the law of Moses. There was a direct line of descendancy in the priesthood that could be traced back to Aaron.

But the royal line of David had fallen on evil days. The people knew who the rightful successor to David was, and in the book of Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, his name is given to us. It was Zerubbabel, the royal prince, yet there was no king on the throne of Israel, they were a puppet nation, under the domination of Persia. Nevertheless, although they were beset with weakness and formalism as the prophets have shown us, the people were united. There were no political schisms or factions among them, nor were they divided into groups or parties.

Now when you open the New Testament to the book of Matthew, you discover an entirely different atmosphere -- almost a different world. Rome is now the dominant power of the earth. The Roman legions have spread throughout the length and breadth of the civilized world. The center of power has shifted from the East to the West, to Rome. Palestine is still a puppet state -- the Jews never did regain their own sovereignty -- but now there is a king on the throne. But this king is the descendant of Esau instead of Jacob, and his name is Herod the Great. Furthermore, the high priests who now sit in the seat of religious authority in the nation are no longer from the line of Aaron. They cannot trace their descendancy back, rather, they are hired priests to whom the office is sold as political patronage.

The temple is still the center of Jewish worship, although the building has been partially destroyed and rebuilt about a half-dozen times since the close of the Old Testament. But now the synagogues that have sprung up in every Jewish city seem to be the center of Jewish life even more than the temple.

At this time the people of Israel were split into three major parties. Two of them, the Pharisees and Sadducees, were much more prominent than the third. The smaller group, the Essenes, could hardly be designated as a party. Not long ago, however, they came into great prominence in our time and took on new significance because they had stowed away some documents in caves overlooking the Dead Sea -- documents which were brought to light again by the accidental discovery of an Arab shepherd boy and are known as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Now, what happened in these four hundred so-called "silent" years after the last of the inspired prophets spoke and the first of the New Testament writers began to write? You remember there is a word in Paul's letter to the Galatians that says, "When the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law." (Galatians 4:4) In other words, the time of our Lord's birth was God's appointed hour, the moment for which God had been long preparing. Some of the exciting preparations took place during that time of "silence," however, and you will understand your New Testament much better if you understand something of the historic events during the time between the Testaments.

After Malachi had ceased his prophesying and the canon of the Old Testament closed -- that is, the number of the books in the Old Testament was fulfilled and the inspired prophets ceased to speak -- God allowed a period of time for the teachings of the Old Testament to penetrate throughout the world. During this time, he rearranged the scenes of history, much as a stage crew will rearrange the stage sets after the curtain has fallen, and when the curtain rises again there is an entirely new setting.

In about 435 B.C., when the prophet Malachi ceased his writing, the center of world power began to shift from the East to the West. Up to this time, Babylon had been the major world power, but this was soon succeeded by the Medio-Persian empire, as you remember from ancient history. This shift had been predicted by the prophet Daniel, who said that there would rise up a bear who was higher on one side than the other, signifying the division between Media and Persia, with the Persians the predominant ones (Daniel 7:5).

At the height of the Persian power there arose in the country of Macedonia (which we now know as Greece), north of the Black Sea, a man by the name of Philip of Macedon, who became a leader in his own country. He united the islands of Greece and became their ruler. His son was destined to become one of the great world leaders of all time, Alexander the Great. In 330 B.C. a tremendous battle between the Persians and the Greeks entirely altered the course of history. In that battle, Alexander, as a young man only twenty years old, led the armies of Greece in victory over the Persians and completely demolished the power of Persia. The center of world power then shifted farther west into Greece, and the Grecian empire was born.

A year after that historic battle, Alexander the Great led his armies down into the Syrian world toward Egypt. On the way, he planned to lay siege to the city of Jerusalem. As the victorious armies of the Greeks approached the city, word was brought to the Jews in Jerusalem that the armies were on their way. The high priest at that time, who was a godly old man by the name of Jaddua (who, by the way, is mentioned in the Bible in the book of Nehemiah) took the sacred writings of Daniel the prophet and, accompanied by a host of other priests dressed in white garments, went forth and met Alexander some distance outside the city.

All this is from the report of Josephus, the Jewish historian, who tells us that Alexander left his army and hurried to meet this body of priests. When he met them, he told the high priest that he had had a vision the night before in which God had shown him an old man, robed in a white garment, who would show him something of great significance to himself, according to the account, the high priest then opened the prophecies of Daniel and read them to Alexander.

In the prophecies Alexander was able to see the predictions that he would become that notable goat with the horn in his forehead, who would come from the West and smash the power of Medio-Persia and conquer the world. He was so overwhelmed by the accuracy of this prophecy and, of course, by the fact that it spoke about him, that he promised that he would save Jerusalem from siege, and sent the high priest back with honors. How true that account is, is very difficult at this distance in time to say; that, at any event, is the story.

Alexander died in 323 B.C. when he was only about thirty-three years old. He had drunk himself to death in the prime of his life, grieved because he had no more worlds to conquer. After his death, his empire was torn with dissension, because he had left no heir. His son had been murdered earlier, so there was no one to inherit the empire of Alexander.

After some time, however, the four generals that had led Alexander's armies divided his empire between them. Two of them are particularly noteworthy to us. One was Ptolemy, who gained Egypt and the northern African countries; the other was Seleucus, who gained Syria, to the north of Palestine. During this time Palestine was annexed by Egypt, and suffered greatly at the hands of Ptolemy. In fact, for the next one hundred years, Palestine was caught in the meat-grinder of the unending conflicts between Syria on the north and Egypt on the south.

Now if you have read the prophecies of Daniel, you will recall that Daniel was able, by inspiration, to give a very accurate and detailed account of the highlights of these years of conflict between the king of the North (Syria) and the king of the South (Egypt). The eleventh chapter of Daniel gives us a most amazingly accurate account of that which has long since been fulfilled. If you want to see just how accurate the prophecy is, I suggest you compare that chapter of Daniel with the historical record of what actually occurred during that time. H. A. Ironside's little book, The 400 Silent Years, gathers that up in some detail.

During this time Grecian influence was becoming strong in Palestine. A party arose among the Jews called the Hellenists, who were very eager to bring Grecian culture and thought into the nation and to liberalize some of the Jewish laws. This forced a split into two major parties. There were those who were strong Hebrew nationalist, who wanted to preserve everything according to the Mosaic order. They resisted all the foreign influences that were coming in to disrupt the old Jewish ways. This party became known as the Pharisees, which means "to separate." They were the separationists who insisted on preserving traditions. They grew stronger and stronger, becoming more legalistic and rigid in their requirements, until they became the target for some of the most scorching words our Lord ever spoke. They had become religious hypocrites, keeping the outward form of the law, but completely violating its spirit.

On the other hand, the Hellenists -- the Greek lovers -- became more and more influential in the politics of the land. They formed the party that was known in New Testament days as the Sadducees, the liberals. They turned away from the strict interpretation of the law and became the rationalists of their day, ceasing to believe in the supernatural in any way. We are told in the New Testament that they came again and again to the Lord with questions about the supernatural, like "What will happen to a woman who has been married to seven different men? In the resurrection, whose wife will she be?" (Matthew 22:23-33) They did not believe in a resurrection, but in these questions they were trying to put Jesus on the spot.

Now there was also a young rebel Jewish priest who married a Samaritan, went down to Samaria, and in rebellion against the Jewish laws, built a temple on Mount Gerizim that became a rival of the temple in Jerusalem. This caused intense, fanatical rivalry between the Jews and the Samaritans, and this rivalry is also reflected in the New Testament.

Also during this time, in Egypt, under the reign of one of the Ptolemies, the Hebrew scriptures were translated for the first time into another language, in about 284 B.C. A group of 70 scholars was called together by the Egyptian king to make a translation of the Hebrew scriptures. Book by book they translated the Old Testament into Greek. When they had finished, it was given the name of the Septuagint, which means 70, because of the number of translators. This became the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible. From it many of the quotations in the New Testament are derived. That is why New Testament quotations of Old Testament verses are sometimes in different words -- because they come from the Greek translation. The Septuagint is still in existence today, and is widely used in various parts of the world. It is still a very important document.

A little later on, about 203 B.C., a king named Antiochus the Great came into power in Syria, to the north of Palestine. He captured Jerusalem from the Egyptians and began the reign of Syrian power over Palestine. He had two sons, one of whom succeeded him and reigned only a few years. When he died, his brother took the throne. This man, named Antiochus Epiphanes, became one of the most vicious and violent persecutors of the Jews ever known. In fact, he is often called the Antichrist of the Old Testament, since he fulfills some of the predictions of Daniel concerning the coming of one who would be "a contemptible person" and "a vile king." His name (which he modestly bestowed upon himself) means "Antiochus the Illustrious." Nevertheless, some of his own courtiers evidently agreed more with the prophecies of Daniel, and they changed two letters in his title. from Epiphanes to Epipames, which means "the mad man."

His first act was to depose the high priest in Jerusalem. thus ending the long line of succession, beginning with Aaron and his sons through the many centuries of Jewish life. Onias the Third was the last of the hereditary line of priests. Antiochus Epiphanes sold the priesthood to Jason, who was not of the priestly line. Jason, in turn, was tricked by his younger brother Menelaus, who purchased the priesthood and then sold the golden vessels of the temple in order to make up the tribute money. Epiphanes overthrew the God-authorized line of priests. Then, and under his reign, the city of Jerusalem and all the religious rites of the Jews began to deteriorate as they came fully under the power of the Syrian king.

In 171 B.C. Antiochus invaded Egypt and once again Palestine was caught in the nutcracker of rivalry. Palestine is the most fought-over country in the world, and Jerusalem is the most captured city in all history. It has been pillaged, ravished, burned and destroyed more than 27 times in its history.

While Antiochus was in Egypt, it was reported that he had been killed in battle, and Jerusalem rejoiced. The people organized a revolt and overthrew Menelaus, the pseudo-priest. When report reached Antiochus (who was very much alive in Egypt) that Jerusalem was delighted at the report of his death, he organized his armies and swept like a fury back across the land, falling upon Jerusalem with terrible vengeance.

He overturned the city, regained his power, and guided by the treacherous Menelaus, intruded into the very Holy of Holies in the temple itself. Some 40,000 people were slain in three days of fighting during this terrible time. When he forced his way into the Holy of Holies, he destroyed the scrolls of the law and, to the absolute horror of the Jews, took a sow and offered it upon the sacred altar. Then with a broth made from the flesh of this unclean animal, he sprinkled everything in the temple, thus completely defiling and violating the sanctuary. It is impossible for us to grasp how horrifying this was to the Jews. They were simply appalled that anything like this could ever happen to their sacred temple.

It was that act of defiling the temple which is referred to by the Lord Jesus as the "desolating sacrilege" which Daniel had predicted (Matthew. 24:15), and which also became a sign of the coming desolation of the temple when Antichrist himself will enter the temple, call himself God, and thus defile the temple in that time. As we know from the New Testament, that still lies in the future.

Daniel the prophet had said the sanctuary would be polluted for 2300 days. (Daniel 8:14) In exact accordance with that prophecy, it was exactly 2300 days -- six and a half years -- before the temple was cleansed. It was cleansed under the leadership of a man now famous in Jewish history, Judas Maccabaeus. He was one of the priestly line who, with his father and four brothers, rose up in revolt against the Syrian king. They captured the attention of the Israelites, summoned them to follow them into battle, and in a series of pitched battles in which they were always an overwhelming minority, overthrew the power of the Syrian kings, captured Jerusalem, and cleansed the temple. The day they cleansed the temple was named the Day of Dedication, and it occurred on the 25th day of December. On that date Jews still celebrate the Feast of Dedication each year.

The Maccabees, who were of the Asmonean family, began a line of high priests known as the Asmonean Dynasty. Their sons, for about the next three or four generations, ruled as priests in Jerusalem, all the time having to defend themselves against the constant assaults of the Syrian army who tried to recapture the city and the temple. During the days of the Maccabbees there was a temporary overthrow of foreign domination, which is why the Jews look back to this time and regard it with such tremendous veneration.

During this time, one of the Asmonean priests made a league with the rising power in the West, Rome. He signed a treaty with the Senate of Rome, providing for help in the event of Syrian attack. Though the treaty was made in all earnestness and sincerity, it was this pact which introduced Rome into the picture and history of Israel.

As the battles between the two opposing forces waged hotter and hotter, Rome was watchful. Finally, the Governor of Idumea, a man named Antipater and a descendant of Esau, made a pact with two other neighboring kings and attacked Jerusalem to try to overthrow the authority of the Asmonean high priest. This battle raged so fiercely that finally Pompey, the Roman general, who happened to have an army in Damascus at the time, was besought by both parties to come and intervene. One side had a little more money than the other, and persuaded by that logical argument, Pompey came down from Damascus, entered the city of Jerusalem -- again with terrible slaughter -- overthrew the city and captured it for Rome. That was in 63 B.C. From that time on, Palestine was under the authority and power of Rome.

Now Pompey and the Roman Senate appointed Antipater as the Procurator of Judea, and he in turn made his two sons kings of Galilee and Judea. The son who became king of Judea is known to us a Herod the Great. ("Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem saying, 'Where is he who has been born king of the Jews?'" (Matthew 2:1, 2)

Meanwhile, the pagan empires around had been deteriorating and disintegrating. Their religions had fallen upon evil days. The people were sick of the polytheism and emptiness of their pagan faiths. The Jews had gone through times of pressure and had failed in their efforts to re-establish themselves, and had given up all hope. There was a growing air of expectancy that the only hope they had left was the coming at last of the promised Messiah. In the East, the oriental empires had come to the place where the wisdom and knowledge of the past had disintegrated and they too were looking for something. When the moment came when the star arose over Bethlehem, the wise men of the East who were looking for an answer to their problems saw it immediately and came out to seek the One it pointed to. Thus, "when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son."

It is amazing how God utilizes history to work out his purposes. Though we are living in the days that might be termed "the silence of God," when for almost 2,000 years there has been no inspired voice from God, we must look back -- even as they did during those 400 silent years -- upon the inspired record and realize that God has already said all that needs to be said, through the Old and New Testaments. God's purposes have not ended, for sure. He is working them out as fully now as he did in those days. Just as the world had come to a place of hopelessness then, and the One who would fulfill all their hopes came into their midst, so the world again is facing a time when despair is spreading widely across the earth. Hopelessness is rampant everywhere and in this time God is moving to bring to fulfillment all the prophetic words concerning the coming of his Son again into the world to establish his kingdom. How long? How close? Who knows? But what God has done in history, he will do again as we approach the end of "the silence of God."

Prayer:

Title: The 400 Years between the Old and New Testaments
By: Ray C. Stedman
Series: Adventuring through the Bible
Scripture: None
Message No: 40
Catalog No: 240
Date: October 2, 1966

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Meeting Up with the Mythmaker

Or, This is Not Your Father's Maccabee
James Patrick Holding

Between the Old and the New Testaments, perhaps the greatest heroes in all of Judaism were the Maccabee family - the brave fellows who stood up to the desecrator of the Temple and all-around jerk Antiochus Epiphanes. We remember the result of their deeds at this season along with those of our Savior. Today there is another "Maccoby" and he is neither warrior nor priest. He is a Talmudic scholar and a leading nuisance-writer against Christianity. Such is one way in which the family has gone downhill.

Few scholars take the works of Hyam Maccoby seriously; you will not often see him quoted as an authority, and his books (like the one evaluated here, The Mythmaker - Harper and Row, 1986) belong on the same shelf as items like Holy Blood, Holy Grail and James the Brother of Jesus. In other words, Maccoby is a conspiracy theorist, and has all of the associated practices. The NT is a good source of information, when it suits his case; otherwise it is full of bunk (and it has also been reworked by "Paulinist editors" [4] who made Maccoby's detective work even more difficult). The Mishnah is a 100% reliable source and it's rules were in effect fully at the time of Jesus. Scholars would recognize the truth of Maccoby's case if only they weren't so biased and tendentious. There are "strong" reasons for believing what Maccoby says...according to Hyam Maccoby; and all of what his opponents say is "weak"...according to Hyam Maccoby...and various things that would be perfectly clear to anyone willing to do a little thinking and source-work are "puzzling". He uses the prejudicial adjectives quite well, does this fellow.

And of course, like most writers of this sort, Maccoby is bad with the sources. How so? In this book under consideration, Maccoby argues, among other things, that Jesus was actually a Pharisee, and that Paul was a major distorter of Jesus who was not a very serious Jew, but a charlatan who mixed paganism, Gnosticism, and Judaism to create Christianity as we know it.

But wait! What of the work done by the likes of W. D. Davies, E. P . Sanders, and Joseph Klausner, placing Paul firmly in the traditions and methods of rabbinic Judaism? Maccoby deals with Davies and Sanders by the simple expedient of mostly ignoring them or broadly dismissing them (their work is cited only seven times in 230 pages, and never in relation to evidence); Klausner he puts off by simply calling his arguments names ("unconvincing" - [61]). Don't let Maccoby's extensive source list impress you - he's simply packed the deck to make it look like he's done the work. How scholarly he actually is, is revealed in that most chapters have fewer than a dozen footnotes, and in that he feels he can debunk the likes of Davies, Sanders and Klausner with a single chapter of only 10 to 12 pages. Most of the book turns out not be scholarly at all, but mostly fantastic reconstruction of what Maccoby thinks actually happened in the first century.

What is really happening here is revealed in part by the tribute Maccoby offers to those who funded his work - The Centre for the Study of Anti-Semitism. Maccoby accuses the Apostle Paul of creating "a new religion" in which the Jews "were the villains, instead of the heroes, of sacred history" [50] - and in service of allegedly destroying anti-semitism, he wishes to prove that Paul was the real villain. Thus, like Haim Cohn in The Trial of Jesus, where it was supposed that the high priests actually loved Jesus and were trying to get him to shut up and stay out of trouble, Maccoby is a historical revisionist on behalf of the elimination of bigotry. May I say as I have before on regards to Cohn and others that revisionism of this sort is as outrageous as that used by anti-Semites to justify their own perversions. Maccoby has merely replaced the bigotry of those who willfully misinterpreted the writings of Paul for their own purposes with a staid and absurd bigotry of his own - directed solely against Paul. This is wrong however we look at it: Bigotry is bigotry whether directed against a class of people or against only one. Let us see now exactly how Maccoby manipulates the data to suit his own purposes. |

Pauline Premises

Conveniently, Maccoby does summarize in advance what he hopes to prove in The Mythmaker; let's look at that first.

Paul, who is painted as a Pharisee in Acts and claims to be a Pharisee in his letters, "never was one." [xi] He lied about his qualifications and was poorly trained as a rabbinic scholar. [15ff]
Jesus was a Pharisee whose teachings Paul distorted. True Christianity, represented by the Jerusalem church led by Peter and James, never believed that Jesus was divine, though they did believe he was the Messiah and had been resurrected. They observed the Jewish law faithfully and disdained Paul, who created what we call Christianity out of a mix of hellenism, Gnosticism, paganism, and Judaism.
The similar description of Paul written by the Ebionites in the middle of the second century is a much more reliable source about Paul than the NT, and scholars have neglected this fact for "quite inadequate and tendentious reasons" [xii].

Jesus and Paul - Card-Carrying Pharisees?

Even a cursory glance at the Gospels suggests that Jesus and some Pharisees (not all, of course!) had disagreements. Now we know that there were (as with any human group) variations within Pharisaism - the schools of Hillel and Shammai were major players, and no doubt there were individual levels of commitment that found varying means of expression. For Maccoby, though, the Pharisees are all cut from the same cardboard; it is assumed that what is true for one Pharisee is true for all, and hence he is able to place Jesus in their ranks.

He does this in one instance by noting the story of Jesus healing on the Sabbath. He claims that a Pharisee source shows that they had no problem with healing on the Sabbath, but he does not name this source or quote it, not even in a footnote! (One suspects that healing was permitted for lifesaving medical treatment; but that was not what Jesus was up to; the man in the story was not in deadly peril.) Later Maccoby reworks the story of the disciples picking grain in the field [41] to suppose that Jesus was actually in flight from Herod and the Romans and justified the picking of corn on an emergency basis - this, done to make Jesus in perfect agreement with Pharisee law. I think we hardly need to comment on such blatant and unwarranted revisionism.

As for Paul, Maccoby devotes 11 pages to proving that the Apostle was a liar when he claimed to be a Pharisee. Paul, he tells us, created this religion in which Jews were "enemies of God" (Maccoby needs to read Romans carefully; Paul says that ALL men are enemies of God in their unredeemed state, not just the Jews). Here also Maccoby selects from Acts that which suits his case, and discards the rest: Gamaliel's speech is mostly reliable (except for the old alleged Judas/Theudas error), but that Paul received endorsement for his persecution parade is not reliable at all, for Maccoby tells us that there is nothing in Christian belief that any Pharisee, whether liberal or conservative, would object to...because Christianity did not actually believe Jesus to be divine...which was a belief invented by Paul...so that there was no belief for Paul to persecute if he were really a Pharisee...and around the circle goes! In fact, much of what Maccoby argues in this book works upon the presumption that true Christianity never believed in a divine Jesus, and upon the sort of circular argument we have described above. Logical thinking is decidedly not one of Maccoby's strong points. |

Paul, Student of the Rabbis?

Maccoby's most important point for our purposes, however, is his attempt to prove that Paul was no Jewish intellectual as has been argued by the likes of Davies and Klausner. This view, he tells us, is "entirely wrong, being based on ignorance or misunderstanding of rabbinical exegesis and logic." [61] And so, in a tour de force of nine pages with 12 mostly-irrelevant footnotes, Maccoby goes on to prove that Paul was not the rabbinic scholar that Davies, etc. have supposed. Klausner, who said, "It would be difficult to find more typically Talmudic expressions of scripture than those in the Epistles of Paul," is disposed of by reference to the "six unconvincing examples" he provides (though we are only privileged to have one explained to us in Maccoby's text) and the polemical claim that "rabbinical arguments are never guilty of logical confusions" like Paul's arguments contained. Also cited is the fact that Paul bases some of his arguments on the LXX, which Maccoby claims that a Palestinian scholar of Judaism would never do, although not so much as a footnote is offered in proof - and one wonders what works from the first century Maccoby can provide as proof; if he cites Talmudic literature, then that is too late to use as proof, for it is beyond that century and into the time when Jewish scholars would indeed have disliked using the LXX, because of consistent Christian use of it.

The acid test for proving that Paul was a fakir of rabbinical teaching, however, would be to show that he shows none of the signs of having a rabbinical education, which is the whole point of what Klausner, Davies and others wrote about. Maccoby dismisses Klausner and another scholar, Schoeps, by remarking that "it is quite startling to see how unconvincing they are" [64] and accusing them of bias, which is always handy. We do get to some specifics, however. One evidence of Paul's rabbinic background is that he uses a typical rabbinic exegetical method called qal va-homer - or "light and heavy". It is a sort of principle of analogy used to prove one point based on a given fact. Maccoby cites four examples of this method from Paul; let's look at them, all from Romans:

5:10 For if, when we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!

5:17 For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God's abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.

11:15 For if their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead?

11:24 After all, if you were cut out of an olive tree that is wild by nature, and contrary to nature were grafted into a cultivated olive tree, how much more readily will these, the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree!

Maccoby gives Paul a big fat F here on 3 out of 4, accusing him of "woolly, imprecise reasoning" and going "far beyond the conclusion warranted" - the bottom line being, Paul cannot be a Pharisee or a rabbinic exegete, because he "was arguing for a doctrine of which the Pharisees would have disapproved strongly." [65-6] Now, did the reader catch that? Paul can't be a Pharisee or a rabbinic exegete, because he comes to conclusions that are false by Pharisee thinking...i.e., because he asserts that Christianity is true! All 4 of these arguments, in fact, are quite sensible if what Paul argues is based on what is true; but that is the very point at issue, and Maccoby has merely started by assuming from the get-go that Christianity as we know it is a Pauline fraud! Once again, all he does here is chase himself in circles.

As another attempt to rob Paul of his credentials, Maccoby cites this passage, Romans 7:1-6 --

Do you not know, brothers--for I am speaking to men who know the law--that the law has authority over a man only as long as he lives? For example, by law a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law of marriage. So then, if she marries another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is released from that law and is not an adulteress, even though she marries another man. So, my brothers, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit to God. For when we were controlled by the sinful nature, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our bodies, so that we bore fruit for death. But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.

Maccoby whacks Paul pretty hard here, calling him "remarkably muddle-headed" and "unable to keep clear in his mind who it is that corresponds to the wife and who to the husband - or even who is supposed to have died, the husband or the wife." [88-9] Well, only someone as muddle-headed as Maccoby would make this sort of complaint, because Paul is not drawing that sort of analogy here. He is not trying to make anyone or anything "correspond" with wife or husband; he is merely establishing a basic principle of contract, that death releases one from even the most sacred of contracts. There is no confusion here, except by Maccoby, who is reading into Paul's work an argument that he is not making at all.

And that's the basics; here are a few other Maccoby miscues to consider:

With shades of Fricke on the trial narrative, Maccoby rejects the account of Stephen's martyrdom, saying that the "Sanhedrin was a dignified body that had rules of procedure, and did not act like a lynch mob." Hmmm, tell that to James the brother of Jesus and Josephus...
Regarding the matter of 1 Cor. 11:23, and the "battle of the prepositions," Maccoby dismisses this verse as involving "a grammatical comment of little weight" then proceeds to argue that with the Last Supper, Paul has turned "an ordinary Jewish meal into a pagan sacrament" [113] - apparently oblivious to advances in scholarship that have defeated this sort of "pagan connection" for the Last Supper rituals.
The story in Acts of the conversion of Cornelius is merely a conspiracy to cover up differences between the Pauline and Petrine factions.
James the brother of Jesus was executed because of his resistance to the Romans...an assertion with support neither in Josephus nor in church historical annals.
Maccoby also follows the standard erroneous line interpreting 1 Cor. 2:18 as referring to spiritual beings, not earthly rulers.
Maccoby gives less credence to Acts and more to both the documents of the Ebionites and the Pseudo-Clemetines, a fifth-century document...basically arguing that we should take them seriously because they managed to survive.
Finally, a catalog of insults that Maccoby heaps upon Paul. He interprets Galatians 1:15-16 ("But when God, who set me apart from birth and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not consult any man...") as Paul's way of asserting that he, Paul, was "himself the incarnation of the Son of God" (!) [106] At the temple ruckus (Acts 23), Paul had previously arranged it so that the Romans would arrest him and rescue him at the Temple; he had also used the collection funds to purchase his Roman citizenship. [160, 162] This act of thievery was the cause of the split with the "true" church of Jerusalem.
And that is how Hyam Maccoby paints the portrait of Paul: With glasses, a mustache, and blacked-in teeth; with Paul as the "originator of Christian anti-Semitism" and "the greatest fantasist of all." [209] What is truly amazing is that Maccoby expects anyone to believe that he has long solved the problems of the NT with his version of history. Judas Maccabee would be powerfully ashamed at this bigot bearing his proud name and doing the work of a clumsy new Antiochus on behalf of historical revisionism.

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