ReViews: The Real Founder of Christianity?

Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity

By James D. Tabor (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012) xxi + 291 pp. $26 (hardcover)

This is the latest version of an old story—that Paul is the real founder of Christianity—by the author of The Jesus Dynasty. Like his predecessors, Tabor maintains that “the fundamental doctrinal tenets of Christianity,” namely that Christ is God “born in the flesh,” that his sacrificial death atones for the sins of humankind, and that his resurrection from the dead guarantees eternal life to all who believe, can be traced back to Paul, not Jesus (pp. xv–xvi). “Christianity before Paul” was a Jewish version, neither worshiping Jesus nor practicing baptism into Christ (p. 25). We are told that James, its leading figure, has been systematically and deliberately suppressed from the record, though “the lost Christianity of Jesus” is still evident in Q [the supposed text behind Matthew and Luke] and still reflected in the Letter of James and the early Christian treatise called the Didache, the Teachings of the Twelve Apostles.