Luke Ford

Hyam Maccoby (1924–2004) worked as a British Jewish scholar, dramatist, and polemicist who built his career around a provocative reinterpretation of early Christianity. He argued that Jesus stood firmly within first-century Judaism, while Paul invented Christianity as a separate religion.
He grew up in London in a traditional Jewish family, then read classics at Balliol College, Oxford. The classical training shaped his method. He approached religious texts as historical documents embedded in language and culture, not as sacred authorities beyond critique.
Maccoby spent most of his working life as a librarian at Leo Baeck College, the center for progressive Jewish scholarship in London. He never held a conventional academic chair. The post gave him room to work outside departmental consensus, and his arguments often pushed against mainstream New Testament scholarship. At Leo Baeck he read deeply in rabbinic literature and the history of Second Temple Judaism. His scholarship reads Christian origins through a Jewish lens he believed earlier Christian historians had distorted or ignored.
His central claim runs as follows. Jesus was a Pharisaic or near-Pharisaic Jewish teacher, fully embedded in the arguments of first-century Judaism. He fought no war against his own tradition. He participated in its internal debates. Paul, by contrast, founded Christianity as a separate religion. In The Mythmaker (1986) and Paul and Hellenism (1991), Maccoby argued that Paul reshaped Jewish law, imported elements from Hellenistic mystery religions, and turned a Jewish messianic movement into a universal salvation cult. Three central doctrines came from Paul, not Jesus: the dying-and-rising savior, the salvific death of Jesus on the cross, and the break with Torah observance. That claim amounted to a reallocation of authorship for Christianity.
Maccoby wrote with force and clarity. He aimed at general readers as much as at scholars. He combined textual analysis of the New Testament, comparison with rabbinic literature, historical reconstruction of Second Temple Judaism, and bold conjecture about motives. He read the Gospels against the grain. He treated them as layered texts shaped by later theological agendas. He pushed back hard on hostile portraits of Pharisees, arguing these reflected later Christian polemic rather than the historical record.
He also wrote plays and essays. His drama explored Jewish identity, persecution, and religious conflict. The literary side sharpened his sense of narrative and character, and that fed back into how he reconstructed Jesus and Paul. His portraits carry psychological and cultural texture rather than pure academic detachment.
A few of his more concrete arguments deserve mention. On Jesus and Barabbas, Maccoby suggested that “Barabbas,” from the Aramaic Bar Abba (son of the father), was an honorific for Jesus. In his reading, the crowd at the trial called for the release of Jesus Bar Abba. The Gospel writers later split one figure into two to obscure the political and revolutionary character of Jesus’s messianic claim.
On Paul’s training, Maccoby moved beyond broad historical claims to technical linguistic critique. He argued that Paul quoted the Greek Septuagint in ways that betrayed unfamiliarity with the Hebrew originals, errors no trained Pharisee might make. He found Paul’s use of the qal wahomer argument structurally flawed and closer to Hellenistic rhetoric than to the strict rabbinic application in the Mishnah. He proposed that Paul was a Gentile convert or an employee of the High Priest’s temple police rather than a trained Pharisee.
Late in life, Maccoby turned to the patterns of reasoning inside Jewish texts. In A Philosophy of the Talmud (2002), he argued that Talmudic logic runs on analogy, not on the Greek logic of classification. He linked this to a Jewish philosophy of revolution rooted in the memory of slavery. The legal system stresses justice in this world and human autonomy rather than otherworldly piety. In Ritual and Morality (1999), he argued that ritual purity categories such as corpse-impurity carried no moral weight. They marked technical disqualifications for Temple entry, not sin or filth, and the system carried symbolic sophistication rather than primitive taboo.
Reception ran heated. John Gager of Princeton called parts of the thesis in The Mythmaker a perverse misreading and bad history. Critics charged that Maccoby overstated the gap between Jesus and Paul, leaned on selective readings of Hellenistic influence, and underweighted evidence that Paul remained Jewish. Maccoby also fought the Gaston-Gager-Stendahl thesis, which holds that Paul never broke from Judaism but built a parallel track for Gentiles. He found that view self-contradictory and held to his picture of Paul as a conscious innovator of a new religion.
Even critics granted him real ground. He pressed the Jewishness of Jesus back onto the table. He pushed back against caricatures of the Pharisees. He drew renewed attention to the diversity of early Christianity. Working scholars now reckon with first-century Pharisaism more carefully, even when they reject his specific conclusions about Paul’s origins.
Maccoby fits within a broader twentieth-century effort to rethink Judaism and Christianity after the Holocaust. Many scholars dropped the older Christian narrative that cast Judaism as legalistic or obsolete. Maccoby took the harder line. He sharpened the divide rather than smoothed it. He insisted that what became Christianity carried a profound reinterpretation, even distortion, of Jewish categories.
His central claims have not won scholarly consensus. His work still circulates because it offers a clear, dramatic thesis about the origins of a major religion and forces a question that won’t go away. Did Christianity grow naturally out of the teaching of Jesus, or did a later figure transform it into something else? Maccoby’s answer leaves no room for hedge. Even those who reject it often find they have to argue with him to do so.

Alliance Theory

Maccoby spent his career as a librarian at Leo Baeck College rather than as a chaired professor at Oxford, Cambridge, or a major divinity school. That post mattered. A New Testament chair at a Christian theological faculty carries coalition obligations. The chair holder draws status, income, and protection from a network of Christian scholars, denominational bodies, university administrators, and publishers tied to mainstream Christian readerships. To hold such a post and argue that Paul invented Christianity by misunderstanding or distorting Judaism is to attack the coalition that pays you. Few do it. Maccoby did not face that constraint. His paycheck came from a progressive Jewish institution. His readers came from Jewish and Jewish-curious circles and from secular skeptics of Christian narratives. The four diagnostic questions:
What coalition did Maccoby depend on for status and income? Leo Baeck College in London, where he served as librarian and lecturer from 1975, supplied the institutional base and salary for two decades. The Centre for Jewish Studies at Leeds gave him a research professorship from 1998 onward. The Jewish Quarterly gave him an editorial platform. Mainstream British and American trade publishing (Harper and Row, Thames and Hudson, Macmillan, Routledge, Littman Library, Taplinger) put his books in front of general readers. The BBC and Channel 4 broadcast his play The Disputation. The Anglo-Jewish reading public, the Reform and Liberal British Jewish establishment, and the broader academic field of Jewish-Christian relations supplied the ongoing readership.
Who did he risk angering if he spoke plainly? Christian biblical scholars whose field he was overturning. Mainstream Pauline scholarship, which treated his books as outside the discipline (John Gager of Princeton called The Mythmaker “perverse misreading” and “not good history, not even history at all”). British Christian institutions whose interfaith partners at Leo Baeck preferred a less combative Jewish counterpart. He did not risk angering his actual coalition by writing what he wrote. He wrote what his coalition wanted written.
Who benefited if his framing won? Post-Holocaust Anglo-Jewish self-understanding, which gained a sophisticated argument that Christian antisemitism was structural to Christianity rather than incidental. Reform and Liberal British Judaism, which gained an argument for Jewish authenticity against Christian supersessionism. The general Jewish reading public, which gained a Pharisaic Jesus they could claim as theirs and a Pauline Christianity they could disclaim as foreign. Maccoby’s books gave his coalition exactly the framework his coalition was already inclined to want.
What truths would have cost him his position? Almost none. The framework’s prediction of a low-cost public stance turns out to be exactly right here. Maccoby’s positions cost him standing only in fields whose opinion did not pay his bills. They paid him in standing, attention, sales, broadcast deals, and an academic post that lasted to his death. The decades-long career he built on those positions is itself the strongest evidence that the coalition rewarded rather than punished what he wrote.
Now look at his thesis through the same lens. The claim that Jesus stood inside Pharisaic Judaism while Paul invented a new religion does specific coalition work. It defends the Jewish tradition against the charge that Jesus represented its true fulfillment and the rabbis its degenerate residue. It locates the rupture not in Judaism’s failure to recognize its messiah but in a single Hellenized figure who broke from the parent tradition. It puts Paul, not the rabbis, in the dock. For a post-Holocaust Jewish scholar writing in Britain, that thesis lands as a coalition-defending move whatever its truth value. Alliance Theory does not say Maccoby was wrong because his coalition benefited from his argument. It says the social pressure on him to reach that conclusion ran in one direction, and the social pressure to reach the opposite conclusion ran toward almost no one he cared about.
The reception pattern fits the same logic. Mainstream New Testament scholarship rejected the central claim. Why? Look at the coalition map on the other side. Mainstream New Testament studies in the late twentieth century had built a partial peace with Jewish scholarship through the New Perspective on Paul and the Gaston-Gager-Stendahl line, which held that Paul never broke from Judaism but built a parallel Gentile track. That settlement let Christian scholars treat Judaism with respect, keep Paul as a continuous figure, and avoid charging the founder of their tradition with distortion. Maccoby’s thesis blew that settlement up. It told Christian scholars that their reconciliation move was self-contradictory and that Paul really did break from Judaism, was responsible for the rupture, and got Jewish categories wrong on technical grounds Maccoby could demonstrate. No coalition welcomes a critic who tells it that its hard-won internal peace rests on a fudge. The intensity of the rejection tracks the threat to the settlement, not just the merits of the argument.
The Gaston-Gager-Stendahl fight shows the coalition logic running in reverse. Maccoby attacked the very position that let Christian scholars stay friendly with Jewish scholars without surrendering Paul. From inside Christian New Testament studies, GGS performs coalition maintenance. From inside Maccoby’s coalition, GGS lets Christianity off the hook. He had every social reason to reject it and almost no social reason to accept it. He rejected it.
Look at his technical arguments through the same frame. The Septuagint quotation argument, the qal wahomer argument, the suggestion that Paul served as temple police rather than as a trained Pharisee, all do coalition work beyond their philological force. They strip Paul of insider Jewish credentials. A Paul who cannot read Hebrew and who botches rabbinic logic cannot claim to speak as a Pharisee correcting his tradition. He becomes an outsider mistaking the tradition he claims to fulfill. That conclusion serves Maccoby’s coalition by closing off any reading in which Paul speaks with authentic Jewish authority. Whether the textual arguments hold up on the merits is a separate question. The point Alliance Theory presses is that the conclusion they support fits the coalition Maccoby served.
His late-career turn to A Philosophy of the Talmud and Ritual and Morality extends the pattern. Both books defend Jewish intellectual and ritual life against Christian and secular caricature. The Talmud, in his telling, runs on analogical logic suited to a people that began as escaped slaves, with justice in this world and human autonomy at its core. Ritual purity carries no moral weight, only technical Temple disqualification, and the symbolic structure shows sophistication rather than primitive taboo. These claims target older Christian narratives that cast Jewish law as legalistic and Jewish ritual as superstition. They build positive coalition content rather than just attacking the rival.
A chaired Christian scholar who shifted toward Maccoby’s view would face a long internal cost: alienated colleagues, lost invitations, suspicious students, denominational pressure. A Jewish librarian at Leo Baeck who held Maccoby’s view faced a long internal benefit: invitations, lectures, sympathetic reviewers in Jewish journals, a general readership eager for the argument. Same thesis, opposite social weather. Alliance Theory predicts that ideas with that asymmetry will be defended hard inside the coalition that benefits and rejected hard inside the coalition that loses, regardless of the textual evidence. That is what happened.

The Tacit

Stephen Turner’s work on tacit knowledge presses a hard question against any account of expertise. What does the expert actually know that lets him judge a case, and how did he come to know it? Turner argues that much of what passes for expert judgment rests on tacit formation acquired through long apprenticeship inside a working community. The expert cannot fully articulate what he knows. He absorbed it by sitting next to other experts, watching them work, and being corrected over years. Turner also argues that tacit knowledge claims often serve as boundary markers. They let a community say who counts as a real practitioner and who does not. The line between genuine apprenticeship and credentialed pretense matters because the tacit claim cannot be checked from outside. Apply this to Maccoby and his picture of Paul, and the argument cuts in two directions at once.
Start with what Maccoby is doing when he says Paul was not a real Pharisee. The charge rests on tacit-knowledge grounds. Paul quotes the Septuagint where a Pharisee might quote the Hebrew. Paul handles qal wahomer arguments in ways a trained Pharisee might not handle them. Paul’s reasoning runs closer to Hellenistic rhetoric than to Mishnaic logic. Each claim turns on what an insider to first-century Pharisaic practice should sound like. Maccoby is saying that he can hear the difference between someone formed inside the tradition and someone working from outside it, and Paul sounds like the latter. That is a tacit-knowledge argument in Turner’s sense. The expert claims to recognize formation by ear because formation leaves traces that the formed practitioner cannot fully suppress and the unformed practitioner cannot fully fake. Paul’s Greek bible, his argumentative shortcuts, his categorical confusions all read, to Maccoby, as signs of someone who picked up Pharisaic vocabulary without sitting under Pharisaic teachers long enough to absorb the underlying habits.
The argument has force because tacit formation does leave traces. Anyone who has watched a non-native speaker work in a second language, or watched a self-taught lawyer argue against a trained one, knows the texture Maccoby is pointing to. The trained insider produces fluent moves the outsider cannot quite produce, and the outsider produces awkward moves the insider would not produce. If Pharisaic training carried that kind of tacit content, and if Paul’s letters reveal him missing it, Maccoby has hit on something real.
Turner’s framework also presses back. The tacit-knowledge claim is hard to verify from outside the tradition, and that opacity gives it polemical power. Maccoby positions himself as the man who can hear what real Pharisaic formation sounds like and judge Paul against that standard. Where did he acquire the ear? Not from sitting in a first-century Pharisaic academy. Nobody alive has done that. He acquired it from rabbinic literature, from later Talmudic argument, and from his own immersion in a living rabbinic tradition that he treats as continuous with the first-century one. The continuity assumption does a lot of work. It lets Maccoby project later rabbinic norms backward and use them as the standard against which Paul falls short. Turner would ask whether the apprenticeship Maccoby underwent gave him access to first-century Pharisaic practice or to a much later tradition that descended from it through centuries of development. The two are not the same. The tacit knowledge of a twentieth-century rabbinic reader is the tacit knowledge of his tradition as it now exists, not the tacit knowledge of a first-century Pharisee.
This bears on the whole technical case against Paul. If first-century Pharisaism stood at some distance from later Mishnaic and Talmudic practice, then the tests Maccoby applies might fail Paul for the wrong reasons. Paul might sound un-Pharisaic by Mishnaic standards while sounding entirely Pharisaic by the standards of his actual moment. Turner’s caution about tacit knowledge is precisely that the apprenticed insider has access to his own tradition’s current practice, not to its earlier states, and that the projection of present tacit norms onto past practice is one of the standard failures of expert judgment. Maccoby’s ear was trained on rabbinic texts shaped over centuries after the destruction of the Temple. Paul wrote before that destruction, inside a Pharisaism that had not yet become rabbinic Judaism in the form Maccoby knew it.
The boundary-marking function shows up clearly. Maccoby uses the tacit-knowledge claim to draw a line that puts Paul on the outside of the Jewish tradition and locates the founding of Christianity in that outside position. The line is not just a historical claim. It is a credentialing move. Paul fails the insider test, so Paul cannot speak for the tradition he claims to interpret, so Christianity rests on an outsider’s misreading rather than an insider’s reform. The whole architecture of Maccoby’s thesis depends on that credentialing move holding up. Turner’s framework points out that credentialing moves built on tacit knowledge are the hardest to challenge from outside the credentialing community and the most likely to serve the community’s boundary needs whether or not they track the historical record.
Turner’s distinction between genuine tacit formation and its rhetorical use also illuminates Maccoby’s own position. Maccoby was a librarian, not a chaired scholar. He worked outside the formal apprenticeship structures of British New Testament studies. He acquired his expertise through reading, through Leo Baeck College’s intellectual environment, and through his own classical training at Oxford. He was, in his way, an outsider to the New Testament guild making a tacit-knowledge claim against another outsider, Paul, on behalf of a third tradition, rabbinic Judaism, that he himself knew through study rather than through full-scale rabbinic training. The layered character of his position does not invalidate the argument, but it complicates the picture of the formed insider catching the unformed pretender. Maccoby’s ear was a particular kind of ear, formed in a particular setting, with particular gaps. Turner would ask what gaps and to what effect.
The convenient-belief side of Turner’s work cuts the same way. If a scholar’s tacit claims happen to support conclusions his coalition needs, the convenience does not refute the claims, but it does raise the bar for accepting them. Maccoby’s tacit reading of Paul as a non-Pharisee maps onto the conclusion his coalition most wants to reach. That overlap should make a Turnerian reader slow down. The strength of the philological evidence has to carry weight independent of the conclusion it serves. Some of Maccoby’s arguments do carry that weight. Paul’s reliance on the Septuagint is real, his rhetorical training shows Hellenistic features, and his arguments do not always run along Mishnaic lines. Whether those facts add up to Paul-was-not-a-Pharisee, or only to Paul-was-a-Diaspora-Pharisee-shaped-by-Greek-education, is a different question. Maccoby reads them maximally. A Turnerian critic would ask whether the maximal reading reflects the texts or the coalition need.
There is one more turn. Turner notes that traditions sometimes need to claim more tacit content than they actually possess in order to maintain authority. The community asserts that real practitioners share an unspoken understanding the outsider cannot grasp, and the assertion does work even when the unspoken understanding is thinner than claimed. Maccoby’s whole construction of first-century Pharisaism leans on the assumption that the tradition possessed a tightly bounded tacit content, recognizable across cases, sufficient to mark insider from outsider on the evidence of a few epistles. That assumption may flatter rabbinic Judaism’s later self-image more than it describes the diverse, contested, pre-rabbinic Pharisaism Paul might have entered. The first-century evidence shows multiple Pharisaic schools, intra-Pharisaic disputes, and significant variation. A tradition with that internal range may not have the sharp tacit boundary Maccoby’s argument needs.
None of this overturns Maccoby’s case. It locates the case more precisely. He runs a tacit-knowledge argument of the kind Turner takes seriously, with the strengths and the weaknesses such arguments carry. Where Paul’s letters show genuine philological awkwardness against any plausible reconstruction of first-century Jewish practice, Maccoby has hit something real. Where the awkwardness might dissolve once we let go of the projection of later rabbinic norms onto earlier Pharisaic ones, Maccoby has run ahead of his evidence. Turner’s framework gives a way to hold both possibilities at once. Tacit knowledge claims can track real formation, and they can serve coalition boundaries, and they often do both at the same time. Maccoby’s reading of Paul is one of those cases.

Watergate as Democratic Ritual & Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity

Maccoby writes in the wake of the Holocaust as part of a broader effort by Jewish scholars and theologians to rework the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. The trauma here is not just the Holocaust as event. It is the long Christian tradition of supersessionism, anti-Jewish polemic, and the theological framing of Judaism as a legalistic husk that Jesus broke open. Alexander’s framework asks how that long history gets named, framed, and pressed into a usable narrative. Maccoby is one of the carriers. He takes a diffuse history of Christian misrepresentation and gives it a sharp shape. Christianity did not grow naturally from Jesus. A specific figure, Paul, broke from Judaism, misread it, and built a new religion on the misreading. The hostile picture of Pharisees in the Gospels is not history but later Christian polemic. The whole structure of Christian self-understanding rests on a distortion of the parent tradition.

That move performs the four elements Alexander says trauma narrative requires. The pain is real and specific: centuries of Christian misrepresentation of Judaism, culminating in the cultural conditions that allowed the Holocaust. The victim is the Jewish tradition, presented as coherent, ethically serious, and consistently misread. The relation between victim and collective is direct: Maccoby writes for Jewish readers and for the broader public, framing the misreading as a wound to Judaism’s standing in Western culture. The attribution of responsibility is where Maccoby goes furthest. He names Paul as the figure who originated the distortion, and he names mainstream Christian scholarship as the apparatus that maintained it.

Now bring in the Watergate frame. Alexander shows how a society performs a scandal by pulling a polluted figure to the center, displaying his offenses through ritual, and expelling him so the community can renew itself. Maccoby runs an analogous performance against Paul, though he does it through scholarship rather than through hearings. The Mythmaker and Paul and Hellenism function as ritual indictments. They put Paul on the stand. They display his philological errors with the Septuagint. They display his flawed qal wahomer arguments. They display the Hellenistic mystery-religion borrowings. They suggest he served as temple police rather than as a trained Pharisee. Each charge plays the role of evidence in a public proceeding. The cumulative effect is to mark Paul as the polluted figure who carried Hellenistic distortion into a Jewish movement and turned it into something else.

The ritual work matters more than any single charge. Alexander’s point about Watergate is that no single fact made the scandal. The aggregation of facts, performed in public and interpreted through a binary of sacred and profane, did the work. Maccoby’s case against Paul has the same structure. Critics can pick at any individual argument — the Barabbas etymology, the Septuagint claim, the temple-police hypothesis — and find it overstated. The case does not depend on any one of them. It depends on the cumulative ritual performance. Once the reader has been walked through enough charges, Paul reads as the polluted founder. The expulsion is the point. Christianity belongs to him, not to Jesus, and Jesus can be returned to the Jewish tradition where Maccoby thinks he belongs.

The Watergate framework also clarifies why Maccoby insisted so hard against the Gaston-Gager-Stendahl line. GGS performs a different ritual. It absorbs Paul back into Judaism by saying he never broke from it but built a parallel Gentile track. That move closes the case without expelling anyone. From Alexander’s angle, GGS is a ritual of reconciliation rather than purification. It tries to clean the wound without naming a wrongdoer. Maccoby could not accept it because the trauma narrative he was building required a clear attribution of responsibility. Without Paul as the figure who broke from Judaism, the centuries of Christian distortion have no origin point and the carrier group has no figure to expel. The whole architecture of the narrative collapses. Maccoby’s anger at GGS reads, through Alexander, as the response of a trauma carrier to a reconciliation move that disarms the narrative.

The cultural-trauma essay also illuminates the reception side. Alexander argues that trauma narratives succeed only when they find institutional carriers willing to press them into wider culture. Maccoby’s narrative did not succeed in mainstream New Testament studies because the institutional carriers there had already settled on a different narrative — the New Perspective, GGS, and the broader project of post-Holocaust Christian-Jewish reconciliation. That project performed a different cultural-trauma work. It accepted the wound, accepted some Christian responsibility, and built a path forward that kept Paul intact. Maccoby’s narrative threatened to undo the settlement. Mainstream scholars rejected it not only on textual grounds but because accepting it would have forced them to redo the trauma work their guild had already completed.

Yet Maccoby’s narrative did succeed in another carrier community. Jewish readers, secular skeptics of Christian narratives, and a broader popular audience took up the books. Within those circles the trauma narrative worked exactly as Alexander predicts. It named the wound, identified the wrongdoer, and gave the carrier group a reference point for understanding its own history. Maccoby became a figure people read precisely because the narrative he offered did the cultural work that more cautious accounts did not do. The clean attribution to Paul gave readers a frame to make sense of the long Christian-Jewish encounter.

The Watergate essay’s emphasis on binary coding also helps read Maccoby’s prose. Alexander notes that ritual processes rely on sharp moral binaries: sacred versus profane, civic virtue versus corruption, transparency versus deceit. Maccoby’s writing leans on parallel binaries throughout. Jesus is fully Jewish, Paul is Hellenized. Pharisaic logic is rigorous, Pauline logic is sloppy. Jewish ritual is symbolic and sophisticated, the Christian reading of it is moralizing caricature. Talmudic reasoning is analogical and grounded, Greek classification is abstract and otherworldly. The binaries do polemical work, and they also do ritual work. They keep the moral landscape sharp enough for the reader to feel which side is being defended and which side is being expelled.

The dramatic side of Maccoby’s career fits the same pattern. He wrote plays alongside his scholarship. Alexander’s framework treats public scandal and trauma as performance, and Maccoby was a man with a feel for performance. His scholarly books read as dramas with characters: Jesus the embedded Pharisee, Paul the alienated outsider, the Gospel writers as later editors covering the tracks. The dramatic structure is part of why the work circulates. Mainstream New Testament scholarship often reads as case-building inside a guild. Maccoby’s books read as moral theatre with a clear villain. That theatrical quality is what made the cultural-trauma work effective for general readers and what made guild scholars suspicious. Alexander’s frame predicts both responses. The same theatrical features that make a trauma narrative travel make professional scholars distrust it.

Hero System

Ernest Becker’s frame holds that every culture builds a hero system, a structure of meaning that tells its members how to earn cosmic significance and beat back the terror of death. The hero system answers the question of what a life must look like to count as meaningful. Becker’s point is that intellectuals build hero systems too, sometimes more elaborate ones than the cultures they study, and the shape of a thinker’s hero system shows up in what he honors, what he attacks, and what he cannot let go of.
Maccoby’s hero system has a clear architecture once you look for it.
The hero in his world is the embedded Jewish teacher who argues inside a tradition rather than breaking from it. Jesus is the central figure here. Maccoby’s Jesus is not a revolutionary against Judaism, not a universal savior, not a man who burst the bounds of his tradition. He is a Pharisaic or near-Pharisaic teacher fully inside the arguments of his moment, wrestling with the law on the law’s own terms. The heroism is the heroism of fidelity. You do not earn significance by leaving the tradition behind. You earn it by going deeper into it, by mastering its categories, by extending its arguments, by suffering for it if necessary. Jesus suffers for a Jewish messianic claim, not for a cosmic salvation drama. The cross marks political loyalty to a Jewish hope, not the rupture of a new religion.
The Pharisees occupy the same heroic register. Maccoby spent decades defending them against the hostile portraits in the Gospels and in centuries of Christian polemic. His Pharisees are rigorous, ethically serious, intellectually alive, building the analogical logic that becomes the Talmud. They are heroes of textual fidelity and moral seriousness. They argue with each other inside a shared frame. They do not seek to escape their tradition. They make it deeper. The Talmud, in A Philosophy of the Talmud, runs on analogical reasoning rooted in the memory of slavery, with justice in this world and human autonomy at the center. That is the heroic Jewish achievement Maccoby honors. A people that began as slaves built a legal and intellectual tradition that prizes this-worldly justice over otherworldly piety. The hero is the rabbi working inside that tradition, drawing analogies, refusing the lure of escape.
The villain in this hero system is the figure who claims insider authority but works from outside the tradition’s actual formation. Paul carries the whole weight here. Maccoby’s Paul is not just wrong. He is the polluting outsider who pretends to insider standing. He quotes the Septuagint where the trained Pharisee quotes the Hebrew. He fumbles qal wahomer where the trained rabbi runs it cleanly. He may have served as temple police rather than as a Pharisaic student. He smuggles Hellenistic mystery-religion content into a Jewish messianic movement and walks out with a new religion under his arm. The villainy is not theological error. It is the masquerade of formation, the claim to speak as an insider while operating from outside the apprenticeship that would make the claim valid.
That structure tells you what Maccoby’s hero system rewards and what it punishes. It rewards the long apprenticeship inside a textual tradition. It rewards fidelity that does not bend toward escape. It rewards the intellectual who masters his tradition’s logic deeply enough to extend it. It punishes the figure who shortcuts the formation, picks up the vocabulary without the underlying habits, and uses partial mastery to break from the parent tradition rather than to deepen it.
Maccoby himself fits the hero side of his own scheme, and the fit is part of why the system has such grip on him. He worked as a librarian at Leo Baeck College rather than as a chaired professor. He read classics at Oxford, then immersed himself in rabbinic literature, Second Temple Judaism, and the philological detail of New Testament Greek. He stayed inside the Jewish tradition rather than leaving it. He spent his life inside the textual apprenticeship his hero system honors. When he attacks Paul for failing the insider test, he is also defending the test itself, and the test is the one his own life passes. That is not a flaw in his work. It is the shape of his project. A man writes the hero system he can live inside.
The hero system explains why certain things in his work carry such heat. The defense of the Pharisees against the Gospel polemic is not just historical correction. It is the rescue of his heroes from their slanderers. The Barabbas argument, where Jesus and Bar Abba turn out to be one figure split by the Gospel writers, is a rescue too. It pulls Jesus back from the Christian frame and returns him to the Jewish revolutionary moment where Maccoby thinks he belongs. The fight against the Gaston-Gager-Stendahl line, which lets Paul stay inside Judaism by saying he built a parallel Gentile track, makes sense the same way. GGS lets the villain off. Maccoby cannot accept that because the villain has to remain the villain for the hero system to hold. If Paul is just an inside reformer, then the rupture has no clear author, the parent tradition has no clear violator, and the heroes have no clear opponent. The whole moral architecture flattens.
The system also explains the late-career turn. A Philosophy of the Talmud and Ritual and Morality are not departures from his earlier work. They are the positive face of the same hero system. Where the New Testament books prosecute the villain, the Talmud books honor the heroes. They show what Jewish intellectual life looks like at its best: analogical, this-worldly, sophisticated, oriented to justice, free of the morbid otherworldliness Maccoby reads in the Pauline tradition. The two projects are one project. The takedown of Paul and the elevation of rabbinic logic are the negative and positive moments of the same work of meaning-making.
Becker’s frame asks what the hero system protects the thinker from, and the answer in Maccoby’s case carries weight. The hero system protects against the older Christian narrative that cast Judaism as a legalistic husk superseded by a higher religion. That narrative did not stay in books. It fed centuries of contempt and culminated in a catastrophe within Maccoby’s own lifetime. A Jewish scholar writing in London after the Holocaust faces a choice about how to defend his tradition against the cultural materials that helped destroy a third of his people. Maccoby’s hero system answers the question. Defend the tradition by showing that its central insider was a hero of Jewish fidelity, that its supposed Christian fulfillment was an outsider’s distortion, and that the rabbinic tradition that descends from it is intellectually sophisticated rather than ethically narrow. The hero system does the work of meaning that Becker says hero systems do. It makes a life inside the tradition feel cosmically significant in the face of forces that tried to erase the tradition entirely.
What the hero system costs is also visible. It pushes Maccoby toward maximal readings where moderate ones might serve. It makes him hear Paul’s awkwardness as proof of outsider status when it might prove only diaspora formation. It makes the Gospel writers conspirators where they might be later editors with mixed motives. It makes the binary between Jewish authenticity and Hellenistic distortion sharper than the historical record supports. The hero system needs the binary to do its work. The binary cannot accommodate the messier picture in which Pharisaism itself was diverse, Hellenism was already inside Palestinian Judaism, and Paul might have been one variant of Jewish thought rather than its outside violator. The cost of the hero system is that it forecloses on that complexity for the sake of the clean moral structure it requires.
Maccoby’s hero system, then, runs like this. The hero is the embedded Jewish teacher, faithful to his tradition, mastering its logic, extending its arguments, suffering for it without leaving it. The villain is the half-formed outsider who masquerades as insider and uses partial mastery to break from the tradition and build a rival on its ruins. The cosmic stakes are the survival and dignity of the Jewish intellectual tradition against centuries of Christian distortion. The man who works inside the tradition with full philological seriousness wins meaning by doing so. Maccoby’s life passes the test his work imposes, and the work prosecutes the figure he holds responsible for the long catastrophe his tradition has had to endure.

‘Arguing is BS‘

Hyam Maccoby Through Pinsof on Arguing as Bullshit

David Pinsof’s argument runs that most arguing is not truth-seeking. It is status-seeking, coalition signaling, and self-flattery dressed in the costume of reason. People do not change their minds because their interlocutor produced better evidence. They mostly do not change their minds at all. What looks like argument is largely the performance of argument, a way to mark loyalty, demonstrate cleverness, embarrass rivals, and secure one’s standing inside a community that rewards the right conclusions. Pinsof presses the point hard. The arguer typically believes he is doing something other than what he is doing, and the gap between the self-presentation and the actual function is where the bullshit lives.

Apply this to Maccoby and the picture is uncomfortable in productive ways.

Maccoby presents himself as a truth-seeker working against the grain. He is the man who reads against the consensus, who corrects centuries of Christian misrepresentation, who follows the evidence where it leads even when the conclusions outrage the guild. The self-presentation runs through every page. He is doing history. He is reading texts carefully. He is restoring the record. The tone is the tone of someone who believes he has the goods and is being ignored or maligned because the goods are inconvenient.

Pinsof would ask what the arguing is actually for. Look at the social function and the picture shifts. Maccoby’s case against Paul performs almost no truth-seeking work that requires Paul actually to have been the figure Maccoby describes. The case performs other work very effectively. It rescues Jesus from Christian theology and returns him to the Jewish tradition. It defends the Pharisees against centuries of slander. It locates the rupture between Judaism and Christianity in a single named figure who can be charged with responsibility. It gives Jewish readers a frame for understanding the long Christian-Jewish encounter that places dignity on the Jewish side and distortion on the Christian side. Each of these functions runs whether the historical Paul actually fits Maccoby’s description or not. The arguing produces the social goods regardless of the truth of its conclusions.

That gap between the apparent function and the actual function is where Pinsof’s argument bites. If Maccoby were doing pure historical reconstruction, the strength of the conclusions should track the strength of the evidence. Instead the conclusions run far ahead of the evidence at multiple points. The Barabbas etymology is a striking conjecture, not a finding. The temple police hypothesis for Paul is a guess. The reading of qal wahomer in Paul as failed Pharisaic reasoning depends on projecting later rabbinic norms onto an earlier moment. The Hellenistic mystery-religion borrowings have been disputed by scholars with at least equal access to the materials. The case is built of speculative moves stacked on each other, each one needing the others to bear weight, none of them strong enough alone. A truth-seeker faced with that evidence base writes a much more cautious book. Maccoby wrote a confident one. The confidence is the tell. Confidence ahead of evidence, in Pinsof’s frame, is one of the standard signatures of arguing-as-performance rather than arguing-as-inquiry.

The intensity of his fight against the Gaston-Gager-Stendahl line shows the same pattern. GGS is a sober, evidence-based effort to read Paul as a Jew who built a parallel Gentile track without breaking from his tradition. It has serious philological and historical support. A truth-seeker engaging GGS would treat it as a live competitor that has to be argued with on the merits, with the recognition that it might be right. Maccoby treats it as self-contradictory, almost obtuse, a position no honest reader could hold. The vehemence is not proportionate to the textual case against GGS. It is proportionate to the threat GGS poses to Maccoby’s larger project. If GGS is right, Maccoby’s villain disappears. The arguing intensifies because the social stakes intensify, not because the evidence has shifted.

Pinsof’s frame also explains why Maccoby could not be moved by his critics. John Gager called parts of The Mythmaker a perverse misreading. Mainstream New Testament scholars rejected the central thesis. Maccoby did not adjust the thesis. He restated it, sharpened it, and extended it. From the truth-seeker’s self-presentation, the persistence reads as integrity in the face of guild pressure. From Pinsof’s angle, the persistence reads as the standard behavior of an arguer whose conclusions are doing social work he cannot afford to give up. Backing down would not just mean losing an argument. It would mean dismantling the structure of meaning his work was built to provide. Truth-seekers update. Performers double down. Maccoby doubled down.

The audience pattern fits the same reading. Maccoby’s books did not persuade the New Testament guild. They circulated among Jewish readers, secular skeptics of Christianity, and a popular audience that was already disposed to find the central claim attractive. The success metric was not change of mind. It was applause from a coalition that already agreed with the conclusion before the arguments were made. Pinsof’s argument predicts exactly this distribution. Argument-as-bullshit succeeds in inverse proportion to its capacity to change minds. It thrives where it confirms what its readers want confirmed. Maccoby’s reception map traces that pattern cleanly.

The dramatic side of his career is another tell. Maccoby wrote plays. His scholarship reads like drama, with named characters, sharp moral binaries, villains and heroes, reversals and revelations. Pinsof argues that the performance quality of arguing is one of its giveaways. Argument that is doing real epistemic work tends to be drier than argument that is doing social work, because the social work needs the audience to feel the moral stakes and the epistemic work needs only the evidence. Maccoby’s prose makes the reader feel the stakes. The reader is invited to root for Jesus, distrust Paul, admire the Pharisees, and dismiss the Gospel writers as cover-up artists. That is a structure of feeling, not a structure of evidence. The structure of feeling is what made the books succeed. Pinsof’s frame says the structure of feeling is also what shows the arguing is largely not what it claims to be.

There is a harder turn. Pinsof’s argument applies to the critic as easily as to the argued-against. Mainstream New Testament scholarship’s rejection of Maccoby was not pure truth-seeking either. It served the guild’s settled trauma narrative, protected its institutional peace with Jewish scholarship, and defended the figures and methods the guild had built its careers around. The critics had as much social stake in their rejection as Maccoby had in his thesis. Pinsof’s frame does not let either side claim the high ground. Both are doing argument-as-coalition-work while presenting themselves as truth-seekers. The fight between Maccoby and his critics is a fight between two coalitions performing argument at each other, with the texts of Paul as the contested ground but not the actual subject.

This raises the question Pinsof’s argument always raises. If most arguing is bullshit, what is left of Maccoby’s work? The answer is not nothing. Some of his observations track real features of the texts. Paul did rely on the Septuagint. Paul’s argumentative habits do show Hellenistic features. The Gospel portraits of Pharisees do reflect later polemic. These observations would still be worth making in a more cautious book. The bullshit is not in the observations. It is in the architecture that turns the observations into a confident, dramatic, villain-naming narrative that the evidence does not support but the coalition needs. Strip the architecture and useful philological notes remain. Keep the architecture and the project becomes mostly performance. Maccoby kept the architecture because the architecture was the point. The philological notes were the costume.

Pinsof’s deepest move is to ask what the arguer would have to give up to admit he was wrong. For Maccoby, the answer was almost everything. He had built a career, a public identity, a set of relationships with readers, a frame for understanding his own tradition, and a moral structure that placed the catastrophe of the Holocaust inside a long history with a named author of distortion. To accept that Paul might have been a diverse first-century Jew working out a Gentile mission within Judaism rather than against it would have collapsed all of that at once. No serious arguer in that position updates. The cost of updating is too high and the rewards of doubling down are too steady. Pinsof’s frame predicts that the arguer will not update, and Maccoby did not.

What this leaves is a more precise reading of Maccoby. He was not a fraud. He was not making things up. He worked hard with real materials and produced real observations. He also ran a structure of arguing that did social and existential work for him and for his readers, and that structure required conclusions stronger than the evidence and more dramatic than the materials warranted. The arguing was partly inquiry and largely something else. The something else is what Pinsof calls bullshit, not in the sense of lying but in the sense of speech whose actual function is decoupled from its stated function. Maccoby’s books are partly history and largely the performance of history in service of a coalition’s needs and a thinker’s hero system. The performance was effective. The history is mixed. Both descriptions are true at the same time.

The Great Delusion

John Mearsheimer’s social-tribal anthropology holds that humans are social animals to the bone. We are not buffered selves who reason our way to convictions and then attach to groups that share them. We are tribal animals who acquire convictions from the groups we belong to and reason about those convictions to defend the belonging. Tribe precedes thought. Loyalty precedes argument. The individual who imagines himself as an autonomous reasoner choosing his beliefs from a menu is a cultural fiction. The real human is shaped by his tribe, formed in its categories, defended by its protections, and dependent on its standing for his own. If Mearsheimer is right about that, the implications for Maccoby cut hard.
Start with the figure of Paul as Maccoby constructs him. Maccoby presents Paul as a man who broke from his tradition through a combination of partial training, Hellenistic absorption, and personal innovation. The picture treats Paul as a free agent capable of choosing his theological direction, picking up mystery-religion content, and constructing a new religion out of his own intellectual resources. That is a buffered-self portrait. It assumes Paul could stand outside his formation, survey the available materials, and assemble a religion the way a man assembles a meal from a market. If Mearsheimer is right, no such Paul exists. Paul could not have stood outside his tribal formations any more than any other human can. He was inside whatever Jewish, Hellenistic, and Roman provincial formations he was inside, and his theological output emerged from those formations rather than from a free space above them.
The question shifts. The question is not what Paul chose to do with the materials available to him. The question is what tribes Paul actually belonged to, what those tribes pressed him toward, and what coalition needs his theology served. The diaspora Pharisaism of a Hellenized provincial city, the Jewish-Christian movement after the death of Jesus, the Gentile Godfearer communities who hovered at the edge of synagogue life, the Roman administrative world Paul moved through as a citizen, the apocalyptic Jewish current that expected imminent intervention: all of these were tribal formations with their own pressures, and Paul lived inside several of them at once. His theology emerges from the intersection of those pressures rather than from his individual decision to import mystery religion into a Jewish movement. Mearsheimer’s frame would say Maccoby has misread the level on which Paul operated. Paul was not a religious entrepreneur picking and choosing. He was a node in overlapping tribal pressures producing the theology those pressures pressed toward.
This rereading does not absolve Paul of responsibility for the rupture. It relocates the rupture. The rupture was not an act of individual misreading. It was the working out of tribal forces operating on a man who had no buffered space from which to resist them. The Jewish-Christian movement was already under pressure to define itself against the synagogue. The Gentile Godfearer constituency was already pressing for a path into the movement that did not require full Torah observance. The apocalyptic moment was already shifting under Paul as the predicted intervention failed to arrive on schedule. Paul’s theology took the shape it took because those pressures pushed in that direction. A different man in Paul’s position might have produced a similar theology. The tribal logic was running through whoever stood at that intersection. Maccoby’s villain shrinks. The forces that produced the rupture grow.
The same logic applies to Maccoby’s heroes. Jesus as Pharisaic teacher, the Pharisees as rigorous insider arguers, the rabbis as builders of analogical Talmudic logic: each of these portraits leans on the buffered-self picture. Each treats the figures as if their intellectual achievements emerged from their individual choice to stay inside the tradition and deepen it. Mearsheimer would say the same correction applies. Jesus was inside whatever Galilean Jewish formation he was inside. His teaching emerged from those formations rather than from his individual fidelity to a tradition he might have left. The Pharisees were inside their own coalition pressures, defending their interpretive authority against Sadducean rivals and apocalyptic enthusiasts and Hellenizing accommodationists. Their rigor was not a heroic individual choice. It was the working out of coalitional pressures on a group fighting for its standing. The rabbis after the Temple’s destruction built the Talmud out of necessity, with a community that had lost its ritual center and needed to rebuild authority on textual ground. The analogical logic Maccoby praises emerges from that situation rather than from the rabbis’ individual decision to honor analogy over classification.
Strip the buffered self from Maccoby’s heroes and the heroism flattens. They become tribal animals doing tribal work under tribal pressure, the same as Paul. The asymmetry between hero and villain dissolves. Both sides emerge as nodes in formations that produced the theology and practice the formations pressed toward. The moral binary Maccoby’s whole project requires loses its grounding.
This bears on his philological arguments. Maccoby reads Paul’s Septuagint use, his qal wahomer awkwardness, and his Hellenistic categories as failures of insider formation. The reading depends on a sharp tribal boundary between authentic Pharisaic formation and outsider pretense. If Mearsheimer is right about how tribal formation works, the boundary will not be that sharp. Tribal formation in a multilingual, polycentric, diasporic Judaism running across Greek and Aramaic and Hebrew, across Palestinian and Alexandrian and Antiochene communities, across multiple Pharisaic schools and competing teachers, will not produce a single insider register against which Paul can be measured. It will produce many insider registers, each shaped by the particular tribal pressures of its location. Paul’s register was the register of one of those formations. It sounds wrong to Maccoby because Maccoby’s ear was trained on a different formation that won the long historical contest and became normative rabbinic Judaism. The reading of Paul as outsider depends on a buffered-self picture in which there was a real Pharisaism that Paul failed to belong to. Mearsheimer’s frame says there was no such free-standing Pharisaism. There were Pharisaisms in the plural, each tribally specific, and Paul belonged to one of them as authentically as any other practitioner belonged to his.
The fight against Gaston-Gager-Stendahl reads differently in this light. Maccoby attacked GGS because he needed Paul as the named author of the rupture. GGS proposes that Paul never broke from Judaism but built a parallel Gentile track within it. From a Mearsheimer perspective, GGS is closer to the truth of how tribal formations work. Paul was inside Jewish tribal formations producing a path for Gentiles whose tribal needs the synagogue had not been able to absorb. The path he produced eventually became something separate not because Paul chose to break but because the tribal forces working on the resulting communities pulled them apart over the next century. Paul was not the author of the rupture. Paul was an early node in a process whose later working out produced the rupture. Maccoby’s insistence on a named author assumes a buffered-self level of agency that human beings do not possess. GGS, without using Mearsheimer’s vocabulary, was reading the situation more accurately.
The hardest implication runs back at Maccoby himself. If humans are tribal animals all the way down, Maccoby’s own work is the product of his tribal formations rather than the product of his free intellectual judgment. He was a post-Holocaust British Jewish scholar in a progressive Anglo-Jewish institution, writing for Jewish readers and for secular skeptics of Christianity, defending his tradition against the cultural materials that had helped to destroy a third of his people. The thesis he produced is the thesis those formations pressed him toward. He could not have stood above his formations and reached a different conclusion through pure inquiry. The buffered-self picture of the scholar choosing his views from the menu of evidence does not describe him any better than it describes Paul. Maccoby was a tribal animal doing tribal work, just as Paul was. The arguments he made were the arguments his formations required.
This does not invalidate his observations. Some of what he saw was there. Paul did rely on the Septuagint. The Gospel writers did construct hostile portraits of Pharisees that need historical correction. The relationship between Judaism and what became Christianity does require careful Jewish scholarship after centuries of Christian framing. These observations stand. What does not stand is the buffered-self architecture that turns the observations into a confident villain-naming narrative. The architecture assumed Paul was free in a way no human is free. It assumed Maccoby was free in a way no human is free. It assumed that argument operating on free intellects could resolve questions that are actually being worked out at the tribal level. Mearsheimer says none of these assumptions hold.
The deeper point is that Maccoby’s project was running on the wrong anthropology. He treated Paul as a man who could have done otherwise and held him morally responsible for the choice. He treated Jesus as a man who chose fidelity over rupture and praised him for the choice. He treated himself as a scholar who could see through coalition pressure to the real history. None of these assume the tribal animal Mearsheimer describes. All of them assume the buffered self the modern West constructed out of its own particular tribal formations. The buffered self lets us hold individuals responsible for theology, praise heroes for choosing fidelity, and trust scholarship to rise above coalition. Strip the buffered self and these moves become harder to make. Paul, Jesus, the Pharisees, the rabbis, and Maccoby himself emerge as differently positioned tribal animals producing the work their positions pressed them toward.
What survives Maccoby’s project under Mearsheimer’s correction is the philological observation, the textual care, and the historical attention to first-century diversity. What does not survive is the moral architecture that named Paul as the villain and elevated his rabbinic opponents as heroes. The moral architecture required a kind of human Mearsheimer says does not exist. The work has to be redone with humans as they are: tribal, formed, defending their belonging, producing the theology their tribes press them toward. The result is less dramatic than Maccoby’s case. It is also probably closer to what happened.
The further implication runs to the Jewish-Christian relationship Maccoby was trying to address. If both traditions are products of tribal formation working on humans who could not have stood outside their formations, then the long history of Christian misrepresentation of Judaism is not the result of Christian individuals choosing to misread the parent tradition. It is the result of tribal pressures inside Christian communities producing the pictures of Judaism that those communities needed for their own coherence. The same applies in reverse. Jewish pictures of Christianity have been shaped by Jewish tribal pressures. Neither side has been operating with a buffered self standing above its tradition. The reconciliation work that needs to happen between the traditions is not work that argument can accomplish, because the misreadings are not held at the level argument operates on. They are held at the level where tribal pressure operates, and the work of unwinding them is closer to the slow renegotiation of tribal pressures than to the winning of debates. Maccoby thought he was doing the latter. Mearsheimer would say the work has to be done at the former level, and Maccoby’s books, however effective they were as performances, did not reach that level because no books can.
That is the cost of Mearsheimer’s correction applied to Maccoby. The villain shrinks. The heroes flatten. The scholar himself loses his elevated standing. The whole moral architecture has to come down and be rebuilt on a different anthropology. What replaces it is more accurate but less satisfying. Tribal animals doing tribal work, producing theologies their formations require, including the theology that named Paul the villain. Maccoby’s project was one more instance of the process he could not see himself inside.

Convenient Beliefs

Look first at the institutional convenience. Maccoby worked at Leo Baeck College, a center of progressive Jewish scholarship in London. His thesis that Paul invented Christianity by misreading Judaism is exactly the thesis his institution exists to support, in a softer or harder form. Leo Baeck College trains rabbis and educators for a Jewish community that needs intellectual resources for its own self-understanding after the Holocaust. A scholar at that institution producing the thesis Maccoby produced does not face the friction a scholar at a Christian theological faculty would face producing the same thesis. The institution rewards the work. Colleagues read it sympathetically. The institutional library carries it. The intellectual milieu treats the conclusion as plausible before the arguments are weighed. Turner’s framework says this is the situation in which convenient beliefs flourish. The believer cannot separate his attachment to the belief from his attachment to the institutional setting that makes the belief comfortable. The belief might be true. Inside that setting, no procedure exists to tell.
The personal convenience runs alongside the institutional. Maccoby’s career was built on the thesis. The Mythmaker made his name. Paul and Hellenism extended it. The plays, the essays, the public appearances all drew on the central claim. To revise the thesis significantly would have meant unwinding the work product of decades. Turner’s argument predicts what will happen in this situation. The scholar will defend the thesis past the point where the evidence warrants because the cost of revision is too high. He will find the counter-evidence less compelling than uninvested observers find it. He will find his own evidence more compelling than uninvested observers find it. He will not be lying. He will be inhabiting the asymmetric epistemic posture that convenience produces. Maccoby’s persistence against critics like John Gager fits this pattern. The persistence is not necessarily a sign that he was right. It is also consistent with the prediction that the convenience of the belief insulated it from the corrections it would otherwise have absorbed.
The coalition convenience runs deeper than either of these. Maccoby’s thesis serves a coalition of post-Holocaust Jewish readers, secular skeptics of Christianity, and a popular audience disposed to find the central claim attractive. Each of these constituencies has independent reasons to want the thesis to be true. For Jewish readers, it defends the parent tradition against centuries of Christian distortion. For secular skeptics, it confirms a suspicion that Christianity rests on a constructed rather than a discovered foundation. For the popular audience, it offers a dramatic story with a clear villain. The coalition pressure on Maccoby ran toward the conclusion he reached. Turner’s framework points out that pressure of this kind operates whether the believer notices it or not. Maccoby could believe he was following the evidence and still be following the coalition gradient, because the gradient ran along the same path the evidence appeared to run. Distinguishing the two from inside is the very thing convenience makes hard.
The technical claims show the same asymmetry. Maccoby read Paul’s reliance on the Septuagint as evidence of non-Pharisaic formation. The reading rests on the assumption that a real Pharisee would have used Hebrew. The assumption is plausible for some kinds of Pharisaic formation and weaker for others. A diaspora Pharisee in a Greek-speaking city might well have used the Septuagint without that telling against his Pharisaic credentials. Maccoby chose the maximal reading. Turner’s framework asks why the maximal reading was chosen, and the answer involves the convenience of its implications. The maximal reading delivers the conclusion the larger project needs. The minimal reading does not. A scholar facing a choice between maximal and minimal interpretations of the same evidence will, under convenience pressure, drift toward the maximal one when the maximal one supports his thesis. Maccoby drifted that way consistently across the philological case. Each individual move is defensible. The pattern of always drifting toward the conclusion the project needs is what Turner’s framework asks about.
The qal wahomer argument runs the same way. Maccoby read Paul’s a fortiori arguments as structurally flawed by Mishnaic standards. The reading depends on projecting later Mishnaic norms onto the earlier moment in which Paul wrote. There is a less convenient reading available. Paul’s a fortiori arguments might have been entirely competent by the standards of his own time, with the awkwardness only appearing when later rabbinic conventions were imposed retroactively. Maccoby did not pursue the less convenient reading. The convenient reading produced the conclusion he needed. Turner’s frame would say this is exactly where convenience does its work. The scholar does not consider the less flattering interpretation with the seriousness he would give an interpretation that supported his case.
The Barabbas etymology shows the same pattern at the level of speculation. Maccoby suggested that Bar Abba was an honorific for Jesus and that the Gospel writers split a single figure into two. The suggestion has no direct evidence. It rests entirely on the inference that the Gospel writers had a motive for the splitting. The motive Maccoby supplies is exactly the motive his larger project requires. Turner’s frame asks how often a scholar produces speculative etymologies whose conclusions happen to confirm his prior thesis, and how often he produces speculative etymologies that complicate or challenge it. Maccoby’s etymological speculation runs in only one direction. The asymmetry is the tell.
The fight against Gaston-Gager-Stendahl is the cleanest case of the convenient belief in action. GGS offers the inconvenient reading of Paul. It says Paul stayed inside Judaism and built a parallel Gentile track within it. Accepting GGS would have collapsed Maccoby’s whole architecture. Maccoby could not accept it. His treatment of GGS reads, under Turner’s frame, as exactly what convenience pressure produces in a scholar whose career depends on a contrary thesis. He calls GGS self-contradictory. He treats it as obtuse. He gives it less serious engagement than its actual scholarly weight warrants. None of this proves GGS is right. It does show that Maccoby’s response to GGS does not have the disinterested character a serious scholarly engagement would have. The convenience of the belief he was defending shaped the heat of the response.
Turner’s framework also asks what the scholar would have to give up to abandon the convenient belief. For Maccoby, the answer was almost everything. His institutional standing, his public reputation, his readership, his career-defining books, his sense of having served his tradition against its long misrepresentation. Convenient beliefs that carry costs that high almost never get abandoned by the people holding them. Turner’s point is that this is not a moral failing of the scholar. It is a structural feature of how minds work under those pressures. The scholar in Maccoby’s position cannot give up the belief without giving up the architecture his life is built on. He continues holding the belief past the point where uninvested observers would have updated, and he produces increasingly elaborate defenses of it as the counter-evidence accumulates. Maccoby’s late-career work on the Talmud and on ritual and morality fits this pattern. The Talmudic and ritual books extend the larger architecture rather than testing its load-bearing claim about Paul. They produce the positive content the architecture needs without revisiting the negative claim that anchors it.
The deepest application of Turner’s frame runs to the question of what would have counted as evidence against Maccoby’s thesis. A non-convenient belief is one that the believer can specify defeating conditions for. Maccoby’s thesis appears to lack such conditions. What would Paul have had to write for Maccoby to conclude that he was a real Pharisee? What would the textual evidence have to look like for Maccoby to revise his account of the Hellenistic borrowings? The answers are unclear, and the unclarity is itself evidence that the belief operates outside the procedures of inquiry that would normally test it. Turner’s framework treats this as a defining mark of convenient belief. The belief is not held tentatively in the way a hypothesis is held. It is held in the way a position is held, defended at all margins, with the threshold for revision pushed high enough that no realistic evidence reaches it.
The harder turn, as always with Turner, is that the same frame applies to Maccoby’s critics. The mainstream New Testament scholars who rejected him were also operating under convenience pressure. Their institutional settings rewarded the GGS-friendly reading that kept Paul inside Judaism and preserved the post-Holocaust scholarly peace. Their careers were also built on positions they could not easily revise. Their dismissal of Maccoby was also asymmetric. They demanded high evidence standards from him while accepting their own positions on lower standards. Turner’s framework does not produce a winner in such a fight. It produces a diagnosis of both sides as operating under convenience pressure that distorts the inquiry. The fight between Maccoby and his critics was a fight between two convenient beliefs supported by two institutional structures. The texts of Paul were the contested ground. Neither side was operating with the disinterest that would let the contest reach a stable resolution.
What survives Maccoby’s project under Turner’s correction is not nothing. Some of his observations track real features of the texts. The Septuagint reliance is real. The hostile Gospel portraits of Pharisees do reflect later polemic. These observations are worth preserving. What does not survive is the confident architecture that turns the observations into a unified, dramatic, villain-naming narrative. The architecture is the convenient part. The architecture delivered Maccoby his career, his coalition, his institutional standing, and his sense of having defended his tradition. The architecture also insulated the central claim from the procedures that would have tested it. A scholar working without those convenience pressures would have produced a more cautious book. The cautious book would have been less successful with Maccoby’s actual readership, less satisfying to his coalition, and less central to his career. The book Maccoby wrote was the book his convenience produced. Turner’s frame does not say the book is therefore wrong. It says the conditions under which the book was produced are not the conditions under which we can confidently call it right.

‘A Big Misunderstanding‘

Maccoby’s whole work is the misunderstanding myth applied to the origins of Christianity. Paul misunderstood Judaism. The Gospel writers misunderstood the Pharisees. Christian theology rests on a chain of misreadings stretching back to a single Hellenized figure who got Jewish categories wrong. Centuries of Christian misrepresentation of Judaism stem from this original misunderstanding and its later elaborations. Mainstream New Testament scholarship continues to misunderstand the situation by treating Paul as continuous with his Jewish formation. Maccoby arrives as the corrective. He understands what others have missed. He can clear the confusion. If readers absorb his work, the long misunderstanding can be unwound and the relationship between the two traditions can be set right.
Pinsof’s frame says this is the misunderstanding myth in pure form. It makes Maccoby the hero of his own story by casting everyone else as confused. The diagnosis of widespread cognitive error positions the diagnostician as the unique source of clarity. The grandeur of the role he assigns himself is the giveaway. No single scholar in a London librarian’s post sees through what centuries of trained theologians have missed. Something else is going on, and what is going on is the work the misunderstanding myth always does. It elevates the intellectual by lowering everyone else to the status of the confused.
Strip the myth and the picture changes at every level.
Paul did not misunderstand Judaism. Paul understood his situation well enough to do what he was doing. He had a Gentile constituency interested in attaching to a Jewish messianic movement without taking on Torah observance. He had an apocalyptic moment shifting under his feet as the predicted intervention failed to arrive. He had Roman administrative networks to move through. He had a Jewish-Christian leadership in Jerusalem he had to negotiate with. The theology he produced fits these forces with too much precision to look like the work of a confused man. Paul knew what he was doing. He was building a coalition that could expand beyond its Jewish base by removing the entry requirements that limited expansion. The “errors” Maccoby finds in his Septuagint use and his qal wahomer arguments are not errors of comprehension. They are the moves of a man writing for his audience, not for Mishnaic graders who would not exist for two centuries. Pinsof’s frame says strategic moves often look like confusion to observers who assume the actor was trying to do something else. Paul was not trying to be a Pharisee. He was trying to build a movement.
The Gospel writers did not misunderstand the Pharisees. They had reasons to portray them as they did. The Jesus movement after the destruction of the Temple was in active competition with what became rabbinic Judaism for the same religious space, the same diaspora populations, the same scriptural inheritance. Hostile portraits of the Pharisees served the coalition needs of the Jesus communities producing the Gospels. Pinsof says people understand what they have an incentive to understand. The Gospel writers had every incentive to understand the Pharisees as the rivals they were and to write them up accordingly. Maccoby reads their portraits as confusion. They are not confusion. They are rational coalition propaganda, exactly the sort of material rival groups produce about each other and have always produced. Maccoby’s outrage at the portraits assumes the writers were trying for accuracy and falling short. They were not trying for accuracy. They were producing the materials their coalition needed.
The Christian theological tradition did not misunderstand Judaism for two thousand years. Christian communities had reasons to portray Judaism as they did. The supersessionist narrative served Christian self-understanding by giving the new tradition a story of fulfillment rather than a story of late innovation. The legalism charge served the Christian distinction between law and gospel that organized internal theological work. The blindness charge gave Christian readers a frame for understanding why Jews remained Jews. Each of these portraits did coalition work for the communities that produced them. None of them was a misunderstanding waiting for a clever Jewish scholar to dispel it. Each was a rational adaptation to the needs of the producing community. Pinsof’s argument predicts that such adaptations persist as long as the needs persist. They do not yield to refutation because they were not produced by reasoning that refutation reaches.
Mainstream New Testament scholarship’s rejection of Maccoby is not misunderstanding either. The scholars rejecting him understand him perfectly well. They have reasons not to accept his thesis. Their institutional positions are built on different readings. Their post-Holocaust settlement with Jewish scholarship runs through the New Perspective and Gaston-Gager-Stendahl rather than through Maccoby’s villain-naming. Their careers, their training, their professional networks all align with positions Maccoby’s thesis threatens. They do not reject him because they cannot follow his argument. They reject him because following his argument would cost them too much and offer them too little. Pinsof’s framework treats this as the standard situation. People do not change positions when changing positions is expensive and staying is cheap. Maccoby reads the rejection as confusion. The rejection is not confusion. It is rational coalition maintenance by a guild that has no incentive to move.
Maccoby himself fits the same logic. His own thesis is not the product of his free intellectual judgment standing above the materials. He has reasons to hold it. The thesis serves his institutional setting at Leo Baeck College, his coalition of post-Holocaust Jewish readers, his sense of doing useful work for his tradition, his career identity, his hero system. He does not hold it because he has cleared away confusion that others labor under. He holds it because his situation makes it the rational thesis to hold and to defend with energy. The same Pinsof move that strips the myth from his account of Christianity strips it from his account of his own work. He is not the clear-sighted corrective to widespread misunderstanding. He is one more coalition actor producing the work his coalition rewards.
The deepest cut is on what Maccoby thought his books might accomplish. He believed his work, if absorbed, might clear the long misunderstanding between the traditions and improve the relationship. Pinsof says no. The relationship between Judaism and Christianity is what it is because both coalitions have reasons for their respective positions and those reasons are not going away. Christians believe what they believe because Christian communities have ongoing needs that their beliefs serve. Jews believe what they believe because Jewish communities have ongoing needs that their beliefs serve. The hostile materials each tradition has produced about the other are not confusions awaiting correction. They are coalition products awaiting only the disappearance of the coalitions, which will not happen. Maccoby’s books cannot fix what they aim to fix because what they aim to fix is not held at the level books can reach. The misreadings live where coalition pressure lives, and coalition pressure does not yield to argument.
Pinsof’s closing question applied to Maccoby cuts hard. What if Paul, the Gospel writers, the Christian theological tradition, the mainstream New Testament scholars, and the Jewish readers who embraced Maccoby’s thesis all understood their situations well enough to do what they were doing? What if none of them was confused? What if the long Christian-Jewish history is not a chain of misunderstandings but a chain of rational coalition behaviors producing the materials each coalition needed at each moment? Then Maccoby’s whole project loses its grounding. His diagnosis of widespread confusion looks like the standard intellectual move Pinsof identifies, the move that makes the diagnostician the hero by making everyone else the patient. The clarity Maccoby thought he was bringing is not what people lacked. They lacked nothing. They had what their situations gave them and produced the materials those situations required. Maccoby’s books cannot provide what was never missing.
This explains the asymmetric reception more precisely than any other frame. Maccoby’s books succeeded with readers who were already disposed to find Christianity suspect and Judaism vindicated. They failed with readers whose coalition position required Paul to remain inside Judaism. Both responses are rational coalition behavior, and neither has anything to do with the philological merits of the case. The misunderstanding myth predicts that good arguments win minds across coalition lines. The Pinsof frame predicts that arguments win audiences whose coalition position the conclusion already serves and lose audiences whose coalition position the conclusion threatens. Maccoby’s actual reception fits the Pinsof prediction with no remainder. The myth he ran on does not describe what happened. The frame he might have run on describes it cleanly.
What survives Maccoby under this correction is what survived him under the earlier frames. Some philological observations are real. The Septuagint reliance is real. The Pauline argumentative habits do show Hellenistic features. The Gospel portraits do reflect later polemic rather than first-century history. These are useful observations and they are worth preserving. What does not survive is the architecture that turns the observations into a story about long misunderstanding awaiting correction. The architecture was the misunderstanding myth at full strength, and the myth fails on the terms Pinsof presses. Christianity did not arise from misunderstanding. It arose from rational coalition behavior by Gentile and Jewish-Christian communities working out what they had to work out. Paul understood. The Gospel writers understood. The Christian theological tradition understood. Maccoby’s critics understood. Maccoby understood. Everyone understood. They were doing what their coalitions required them to do, and the historical product is the result of all of that doing. There is no misunderstanding to clear, no confusion to dispel, no clean story underneath waiting for the right scholar to release it. There is only what happened, which is what people in their coalitions produced for the reasons they had.

Experts and Expertise

Stephen Turner’s work on expertise asks how authority gets assigned to people who claim to know things their listeners cannot check. The question matters because expertise sits in a hard spot. The expert claims knowledge his audience cannot evaluate by inspection. The audience either grants him the authority or denies it. Granting and denying are not pure responses to the merits, because the merits are precisely what the audience cannot assess on its own. Turner’s framework treats expertise as a triangular relation between the claimant, his peer network, and his audience. Each leg of the triangle does work the other two cannot do. Strip out any leg and the structure collapses.

Turner distinguishes types of experts by how their authority gets organized. Some experts hold authority everyone grants because the procedures for testing it are public and reliable. Some experts hold authority only inside disciplines that share their conventions. Some experts hold authority only because particular audiences need them to and accept their claims on that basis. Some experts hold authority through administrative positions that grant it whether or not the underlying knowledge holds up. The types overlap, and the same claimant might occupy different positions for different audiences at the same time.

Maccoby was an expert of the third type for one audience and a contested claimant for another. His audience of Jewish readers, secular skeptics of Christianity, and a popular public granted him expert authority on Christian origins. They had reasons to trust him. He was Jewish, philologically trained, philosophically literate, willing to say what mainstream Christian scholarship would not say, and producing readable books that delivered conclusions his audience welcomed. The audience could not check his claims about Pauline use of the Septuagint or his Talmudic readings of qal wahomer arguments. They had to grant or withhold authority on other grounds. They granted it. The grant was rational on Turner’s terms. They had no other source for the kind of analysis Maccoby provided, and the analysis served their interpretive needs.

The mainstream New Testament guild withheld the same authority. The guild operates under different rules. It has internal procedures for granting and withholding expert status, including chair appointments, peer-reviewed publication, doctoral training under recognized supervisors, conference participation, and the slow accumulation of citations from other guild members. Maccoby’s path did not run through these procedures. He worked as a librarian at Leo Baeck College rather than as a chaired professor. His training was in classics rather than in New Testament. His audience came from outside the guild. The guild did not grant him expert status because nothing in its procedures produced him as an expert. Turner’s frame treats this as the standard situation. Expertise inside a discipline is constituted by the discipline’s recognition procedures, and the procedures are not designed to recognize claimants who arrive from outside.

The guild did not reject Maccoby on the simple ground that his arguments were weak. Some of his arguments were indeed weak. Others were strong. The rejection ran deeper than the merits. It ran through the question of whether someone outside the guild’s recognition network could be granted authority on the guild’s central topics. Turner’s argument holds that disciplines protect their authority precisely by withholding recognition from outsiders, because admitting outsiders would dilute the value of the recognition the guild’s own members hold. A New Testament guild that took its lead from a Leo Baeck librarian might find its chairs, its journals, and its training programs called into question. The guild had structural reasons to withhold recognition that have nothing to do with the truth of Maccoby’s claims and everything to do with the maintenance of the guild’s authority.

The procedures by which a discipline grants and withholds expert status are not procedures for assessing truth. They are procedures for maintaining the conditions under which the discipline can function as a discipline. Truth-tracking is one of the things the procedures sometimes do, but it is not what the procedures are for. The procedures are for organizing recognition in a stable pattern. A claimant who threatens the pattern gets pushed out whether his claims are true or false. A claimant who fits the pattern gets included whether his claims are weak or strong. Maccoby threatened the pattern. The guild pushed him out. Whether his claims about Paul were correct was a separate question the procedures were not designed to settle.

Turner’s analysis of “good-bad” theories applies here as well. A good-bad theory is one that performs useful functions for its holders without meeting the standards that other theories in the field have to meet. The functions might be coalitional, institutional, or pedagogical. The theory persists because the functions persist, not because the evidence supports it. Maccoby’s villain-naming thesis about Paul might be a good-bad theory of this kind for his audience. It performs the work of defending the parent tradition against centuries of Christian distortion, locating the rupture in a single named figure, and giving Jewish readers an interpretive frame for the long history. Whether it meets the standards of disciplinary New Testament scholarship is a different question. For its audience, it does not have to. The functions it performs are sufficient to keep it in circulation regardless of its standing inside the guild.

The mainstream guild has its own good-bad theories. The New Perspective on Paul and the Gaston-Gager-Stendahl line both perform functions for the guild that go beyond their evidential support. They allow Christian and Jewish scholars to work together without the older supersessionist edge. They preserve Paul as a continuous Jewish figure, which protects the foundational status of his epistles. They give post-Holocaust theology a path forward that does not require dismantling Pauline Christianity. These functions are real. They make the New Perspective and GGS hard to dislodge inside the guild even when their philological claims face challenge. Turner’s frame says good-bad theories on both sides should expect to persist because both sides have audiences that need them to persist. The fight between Maccoby and his critics is partly a fight between two good-bad theories, each defended hard by the audience that benefits from it.

Maccoby’s audience granted him expert status on grounds the guild could not accept. The guild withheld expert status on grounds Maccoby’s audience could not accept. Each side operated by the rules of its own authority structure. Each side regarded the other’s authority structure as illegitimate or beside the point. Turner’s framework predicts that no resolution comes from inside this configuration. The audience and the guild are not playing the same game. They are playing structurally similar games inside different communities of recognition, and the games do not converge.

Turner’s work asks how a claimant gets certified as an expert when the procedures for certification are themselves contested. Maccoby presents an unusually clear case. He had no certification by the New Testament guild. He had certification of a different sort by his Jewish institutional setting and by his audience of readers. His Oxford classics training provided a kind of background certification that no one disputed. His Leo Baeck College position carried weight in Jewish academic circles. His books, once they sold, certified themselves to the popular audience. Each of these certifications was real inside the community that issued it. None of them transferred to the guild that mattered for the question Maccoby was actually addressing. The guild had its own certification, and Maccoby did not have it.

The harder question Turner’s work presses is whether certification by a guild tracks expertise in the underlying topic or only expertise in the conventions of the guild. The two might coincide, or they might not. A guild might have certification procedures that select for genuine knowledge of its topic, or it might have procedures that select for fitness to the guild’s social arrangements. Turner argues that most guilds do some of both, and that the proportion varies. The New Testament guild has procedures that select for knowledge of Greek, of textual transmission, of Second Temple background, of historical method. It also has procedures that select for fit with prevailing theological and political orientations, with the post-Holocaust scholarly settlement, and with the network of mutual citation that constitutes guild membership. Maccoby failed the second set of tests while passing parts of the first. Whether he passed the first set fully is debated. The guild’s mixed criteria allowed it to reject him on grounds that combined the substantive and the social without separating them cleanly.

Maccoby’s audience was not unsophisticated. Jewish readers came to him with their own training in rabbinic texts. Secular readers came with their own classical and philosophical literacy. Both groups could evaluate parts of his case directly. They could also recognize, by ear, what Maccoby sounded like as an interpreter of Jewish materials. He sounded right to them in a way that mainstream New Testament scholars often did not. That recognition is its own form of expertise assessment. It runs through tacit pattern matching rather than through formal procedures, but it is not nothing. Turner takes such audience judgments seriously even when they fail to align with guild verdicts. The audience knows things the guild does not know, and the guild knows things the audience does not know. Neither has access to the full picture.

Neither side held the kind of universal authority that natural science sometimes commands. Both sides held disciplinary or audience-relative authority that depended on continued recognition by particular communities. Turner’s argument is that this kind of authority is the rule rather than the exception in the human sciences. New Testament scholarship is not physics. It does not have decisive procedures for settling its central questions. Its experts hold authority that is contested at the boundaries and conventional in the middle. Maccoby was contested at the boundaries. So were his critics. The fight between them is the kind of fight Turner’s framework predicts will recur whenever a discipline’s central questions are not amenable to procedural resolution.

The guild’s confidence that it had the right answer and Maccoby was confused is, in Turner’s frame, a confidence that exceeds what the guild’s actual procedures can deliver. The guild has good methods for some things and weaker methods for others. Whether Paul was a Pharisee, what kind of Pharisee, how he related to his formation, what role Hellenistic materials played in his thought, are questions where the methods give limited traction. The guild’s verdict on Maccoby reflects its conventions more than it reflects a settled finding the methods can actually produce. Turner’s framework is not skeptical of expertise as such. It is skeptical of expertise claiming more than its procedures can deliver. The New Testament guild has often claimed more, and its rejection of Maccoby is one place the overclaim shows.

Maccoby’s own claims show a parallel overclaim. He presented his villain-naming thesis with confidence that his evidence does not support. He treated his rejections of GGS with a certainty that the philological case does not warrant. He played the expert in a register that exceeded what his materials can deliver. Turner’s framework is even-handed here. Neither side gets a free pass on the claim to authority. Both sides held authority of a recognized type within a recognizing audience, and both sides exceeded the authority their materials can underwrite. The fight ran on the strength of both excesses. Each side’s overclaim met the other side’s overclaim, and the outcome was not resolution but stable disagreement maintained by audience structure rather than by evidential settlement.

Maccoby thought he was an expert correcting the guild’s confusion. The guild thought it was the expert correcting Maccoby’s amateurism. Turner’s frame says both descriptions miss the structure. Maccoby was an expert of one type with one audience. The guild members were experts of a different type with a different audience. Neither side had the kind of authority that might have settled the dispute by application of procedure, because the procedures relevant to the dispute do not yield such settlement. The dispute remained unsettled because the structure of expertise in this domain does not produce settlement, not because one side was confused.

The reaction to Maccoby in the academy thus reads as a perfectly normal episode in the social organization of expert authority. A claimant arrives from outside the recognition network. The network’s procedures do not produce him as an expert. The network rejects him. His audience grants him expert status by other procedures. The two recognitions coexist without converging. Both audiences continue to operate by their own rules. Neither audience has the authority to compel the other.

The Set

Hyam Maccoby (1924-2004) did not preside over a circle. He fought in an arena, and the arena is the set. He spent decades as the librarian at Leo Baeck College in London before Leeds gave him a research chair late in life. He came at the New Testament guild from the side, a teacher and autodidact who read the Greek and the rabbinic sources and turned them into weapons. So the men and women around him gather less as friends than as allies, rivals, and ancestors in one long argument about three linked questions. Who was Jesus. Who made Christianity. Where does the hatred of Jews come from.

They value the Jewish Jesus first. Maccoby inherits this from Joseph Klausner (1874-1958), whose Jesus of Nazareth and From Jesus to Paul put a learned Jew back inside the Gospels, and from Claude Montefiore (1858-1938), the Liberal Anglo-Jewish patron whose The Synoptic Gospels read the texts as a sympathetic outsider. Geza Vermes (1924-2013) gives the project its respectable modern shape in Jesus the Jew. Maccoby shares the goal and pushes harder. In Revolution in Judaea he makes Jesus a Pharisee and a Jewish nationalist, and in The Mythmaker he hands the founding of the religion to Paul, whom he recasts as a Gentile adventurer in borrowed rabbinic robes. The value underneath is recovery. Other men wrote the Jew out of his own story after they took it over, and the scholar writes him back in.

They value the defense of the Pharisees against the Christian charge of dead legalism. E.P. Sanders (1937-2022) does this with the most academic force in Paul and Palestinian Judaism, where covenantal nomism dismantles the caricature of Judaism as joyless works-righteousness. Maccoby admires the conclusion and reaches it by a louder road. He clashes with Jacob Neusner (1932-2016) over the meaning of ritual purity, and he reads against the anthropology of Mary Douglas (1921-2007) and her Purity and Danger in his own Ritual and Morality. The fight here turns on essence. Is rabbinic purity a structure of taboo and fear, or a structure of ethical life? Maccoby insists on the second and treats the first as a Christian slander dressed in scholarly clothes.

They value the diagnosis of antisemitism as theology rather than mere prejudice, and this is the deepest commitment of the set. It has a British wing and a continental one. James Parkes (1896-1981), an Anglican clergyman, founds the study of Christian antisemitism in Britain and argues that the Church built the contempt into its teaching. Jules Isaac (1877-1963) makes the case in France in Jesus and Israel and The Teaching of Contempt, and his work pushes the Catholic Church toward Nostra Aetate. Rosemary Radford Ruether (1936-2022) states it from inside the faith in Faith and Fratricide, where anti-Judaism becomes the left hand of Christology. Norman Cohn (1915-2007) traces the paranoid pattern in Warrant for Genocide and The Pursuit of the Millennium, and Gavin Langmuir (1924-2005) labors to mark the point where ordinary prejudice hardens into the chimerical hatred that kills. Maccoby belongs with these men and goes further than most. In The Sacred Executioner and Judas Iscariot and the Myth of Jewish Evil he argues that Christianity needs a cursed killer to carry the guilt of the saving death, and it casts the Jew in that role. The hatred grows from the founding myth.

Here the set has a famous antagonist, and naming him sharpens the moral grammar. René Girard (1923-2015) reads the same scapegoat theme and reaches the opposite verdict. In Violence and the Sacred and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World he argues that the Gospels expose and break the scapegoat machinery, that the Cross reveals the innocence of the victim. Maccoby answers that the Gospels run the machinery one more time, with the Jew as the chosen victim. Behind both men stand James Frazer (1854-1941) and The Golden Bough, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Totem and Taboo, and the mythographer Robert Graves (1895-1985), whose King Jesus and The White Goddess gave Maccoby his taste for reading sacred story as buried sacrifice. The set drinks from this Frazerian well even as its members quarrel about what lies at the bottom.

The hero of this world is the scholar-polemicist who defends a despised people with learning instead of apology. He masters the sources of the accuser and turns them. He reverses the medieval disputation, where the rabbi was dragged before a court to lose, and now the rabbi prosecutes. Maccoby plays this part with relish, on the page and on television, and the set honors the man who argues in the open and does not flinch. Moral seriousness about the Holocaust sits at the center of the honor code. The teaching of contempt ends at Auschwitz, and the scholar who traces the line from Gospel to gas chamber does the gravest work the field allows. Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) draws Maccoby’s fire here, because the banality of evil in Eichmann in Jerusalem reads to him as a softening of a hatred he wants named as ancient and willed. Daniel Goldhagen (b. 1959) and Hitler’s Willing Executioners later carry a harder eliminationist thesis that the set debates with heat.

The status games turn on two axes. One is philological control. You win by reading the Greek and the Hebrew better than your opponent, by catching the mistranslation that built a doctrine. The other axis splits the set and wounds Maccoby. It runs between the trade book and the monograph, the televised debate and the peer-reviewed journal. Maccoby wins the public. He reaches the educated reader and the broadcaster. He does not win the guild on the same terms. Vermes earns full academic standing and keeps a careful distance from Maccoby’s boldest claims about Paul. Sanders does with footnotes and caution what Maccoby does with rhetoric and nerve, and the academy rewards the footnotes. So the maverick’s largest prize stays out of reach, and the ache of that gap shapes how he writes. He grows more combative, more certain, more willing to stake the whole case on a single reversal.

Around all this sits the Anglo-Jewish world that housed him. Leo Baeck College trained the Reform and Liberal rabbinate, and Albert Friedlander (1927-2004) and the college circle gave Maccoby his long working home. Louis Jacobs (1920-2006), broken by the Jacobs Affair, stands nearby as the other learned Anglo-Jewish man whom the establishment could not place. Nicholas de Lange (b. 1944), the Cambridge scholar of Jewish-Christian relations, works the same ground with a quieter hand. These men do not all agree with him. They form the room he argues in, the people who read his books, write the reviews, and decide whether the maverick gets a chair.