Hyam Maccoby
A Jewish scholar challenging Christian myths
Lawrence Joffe
Fri 30 Jul 2004 19.42 EDT First published on Fri 30 Jul 2004 19.42 EDT
In his book Revolution In Judea: Jesus And The Jewish Resistance (1980), Hyam Maccoby, who has died aged 80, responded to Christian denigration of the Pharisees by depicting Jesus Christ as a progressive, Torah-observant Pharisee. An Orthodox Jew, he argued that Jesus opposed not Judaism but the Roman oppressors and their Saducee quislings. For him, Jesus lived, preached and died wholly within the Jewish tradition - a view that discomfited many Jews and Christians.
Traditional Christianity also posits Judas Iscariot as an arch-villain, but Maccoby viewed him as a caricatured concoction, symbolising the eternal guilt that Jews supposedly bore for killing Christ. In Judas Iscariot And The Myth Of Jewish Evil (1992), Maccoby traced a thread linking the New Testament to Auschwitz.
The central thesis of another work, The Mythmaker: Paul And The Invention Of Christianity (1986), was that St Paul, not Jesus, created Christianity, being an adventurer who undermined the disciples who had actually known the living Jesus. It was Paul, said Maccoby, who turned Jesus into God and transformed the early Jewish Christian sect into a Gnostic mystery cult imbued with "Hellenistic schizophrenia".
In Paul And Hellenism (1991), Maccoby wrote that a politically savvy Paul deliberately recast the gospels to exculpate Rome from the charge of deicide. Then, "by stigmatising the Jews as the rejecters of Jesus, [Paul] planted the seeds to anti-semitism in the Christian tradition".
Maccoby made ancient history and theology come alive. He wrote and lectured on rabbinical literature and Jewish humour, and loved to draw parallels between cultures. In Sacred Executioner: Human Sacrifice And The Legacy Of Guilt (1983), he compared the Greek legend of Iphigenia, Aztec rituals and the Levantine myth of the murdered and resurrected god Attis to the sacrifice of Isaac and Jesus's execution.
Maccoby argued that the Christian veneration of the crucifixion marked its regression to primitive human sacrifice. Witness his description of the communion, the symbolic eating of Christ's flesh and blood: "Jesus would have been appalled to know of the pagan interpretation later put on the simple kiddush, or blessing over wine and bread, with which he began the Last Supper."
Some rabbis were equally distressed to see the Torah apparently reduced to a series of myths, shorn of divine authorship, and Maccoby certainly refused to gloss over the schisms that divide the sister faiths. Judaism On Trial: Jewish-Christian Disputations In The Middle Ages (1981) studied those bizarre mock-trials, which pitted Jewish scholars against Christian theologians. Yet it would be crass to call Maccoby an anti-Christian firebrand. His play, The Disputation (1996), commissioned by Channel 4 and expanded for the London stage, showed James, King Of Aragon, insisting that the learned rabbi, Nachmanides, have his say.
Maccoby was born in Sunderland, the son of a mathematics tutor, who taught him biblical Hebrew and talmudic Aramaic from the age of four. He may have inherited his rhetorical prowess from his grandfather, who had arrived in Britain in 1890 having been the maggid (or itinerant religious preacher) of Kamenets, his home village in Poland.
Maccoby was educated at Bede grammar school, and read classics, and then English, at Balliol College, Oxford. From 1942 and 1946, he served in the Royal Signals, based at the decoding centre at Bletchley Park. He was then, for some 20 years, an English master at Chiswick school, west London.
In 1975, he was appointed librarian and tutor at Leo Baeck College, London, where Reform and Liberal rabbis train. A stream of books followed, including The Day God Laughed: Sayings, Fables And Entertainments Of The Jewish Sages (with Wolf Mankowitz, 1978), Judaism In The First Century (1989), A Pariah People: Anthropology Of Anti-Semitism (1996), Ritual And Morality (1999), The Philosophy Of The Talmud (2002), Jesus The Pharisee (2003) and, earlier this year, Anti-Semitism And Modernity.
In 1998, Maccoby joined the Centre for Jewish Studies at Leeds University, as visiting, and then research, professor. His numerous television appearances included one on Howard Jacobson's audacious documentary, Sorry, Judas (1993).
He is survived by his wife Cynthia, two daughters and a son. Colleagues and friends cherished his prodigious scholarship and kindness.