Saint Saul: A Skeleton Key to the Historical Jesus

If the popularity of the World Wrestling Federation is evidence of the audience for a well-orchestrated brawl, Saint Saul should have no trouble finding readers. Akenson leaps into the ring with a bravado that could obscure the academic virtuosity he shares with his primary targets-particularly Morton Smith and Dominic Crossan; but little doubt remains that participants in this battle have chosen to enter a public arena where entertainment and scholarship mix. Akenson argues that any quest for Jesus as an historical figure should begin with the earliest available documents-not the synoptic Gospels, but the authentic letters of Paul. Akenson counters 2000 years of Christianizing by consistently avoiding Hellenized forms when naming the show more objects of his inquiry: Saul, not Paul; Yacov, not James; Yeshua, not Jesus. Saul's letters constitute the one source of information about Yeshua that survived the destruction of the temple in 70 C.E. (which, in Akenson's understated simile, had the impact of a nuclear explosion) more or less intact. As a result, those letters may contain information that is unfiltered by the two forms of Judahism (Christianity and rabbinic Judaism) that devised successful strategies for temple worship without a temple. Readers will be both entertained and informed. Whether they are convinced that Saul is a "skeleton key" or not, they will come away with a deeper understanding of the modern quest for the historical Jesus and of the pre-70 worlds inhabited by Yeshua and Saul. show less

The writer seeks - through an analysis of everything known about Paul - to "create a skeleton key to unlock the historical Jesus." But the author forgets or ignores one thing that undermines his thesis from the start - "Paul knows not Jesus." This lack of recognition led Alvin Boyd Kuhn to title one the chapters of his work "Who is this King of Glory," "'The Shout of Paul's Silence." If Paul were speaking about an historical Jesus Christ, his descriptions of his visits to Jerusalem would have been entirely different and completely reverential; something like, "...and the very brother of our Lord Jesus, James himself told me how our Lord cleansed..." There is nothing remotely like this in any of Paul's actual writings and he has no show more respect at all for Peter and is ambivalent towards the group in Jerusalem that identified itself as "the family of the Lord." This alone should make it clear that Paul's Christ is something other than a literal incorporated God named Jesus. Finally, no matter how you do the math, if one compares Paul's most probable date of birth with the likely dates for the "birth" of Jesus, they must have been alive at the same time - at least long enough for Paul to have heard something about Jesus while Jesus was still alive. This creates all sorts of problems doesn't it? In short, Mr. Akenson's knowledge is exceptional. However, its quality and his insights are marred by his assumption that there was a living Jesus who was the one Christ and God incorporate as a literal misinterpretation of the Gospels may imply. This blinds him to the implications of Paul's own writings - that the Jesus story is a form of a Hebrew "dying and resurrecting god-man allegory" in which it is believed that everyone may have a "Christ" within. Like it or not, Paul's actual writings (minus the later "modifications," corrections," insertions, and outright forgeries) show that he was indeed a, or the first, gnostic . Therefore one cannot take his writings and try to reverse engineer a Jesus from them. That is something that would be beyond even the brightest minds of area 51. show less