This Pathless Hour | 259Jewish heretic (“an apostle from the Jews to the nations”), and second by explicitly
identifying with the Pauline position in a way that Scholem would not.^47
In a 1963 essay, Taubes portrayed Buber’s anti-Hegelian conception of histo-
ry—particularly his refusal to accept the “verdicts” issued by historical events—
as fundamentally anti-Pauline.^48 Taubes sees Paul as the source of such Hegelian
tropes as the cunning of history (when human efforts unwittingly produce the
opposite of desired outcomes) and the revelation, at history’s end, of the prede-
termined meaning of all past events (the way that the end of any story gives shape
to what has gone before). Paul’s God uses ruses: the Law is given to Israel for its
redemption, but in the meantime it multiplies transgression, only to allow grace
to abound later; the messiah is crucified, but then resurrected. To be sure, Hegel
replaces God with Reason as Spirit, but the dialectic remains, by which evil se-
cretly births good, and good unexpectedly transforms into evil, and all this adds
up to a grand story of providential salvation.^49 Pauline gnosis also underlies the
philosophy of Hegel’s rebellious disciple, Karl Marx, for whom the despised class,
the proletariat, takes on the messianic function of universal redeemer.^50
Taubes, however, thinks that Buber fails to completely sever this gnostic-
apocalyptic constellation from the prophetic stance he supports. Taubes focuses
on the tension in The Prophetic Faith between the continuity of the prophetic al-
ternative even amid increasing despair, culminating in Jeremiah, and the disso-
lution of that alternative in the prophets of the Exile: “But what crucial exception
does Deutero-Isaiah present! What use is a typology concerning the prophetic
and apocalyptic experience of history if Deutero-Isaiah, whom Buber rightly
calls ‘the originator of a theology of world history,’ has to be exempt from the
rule?”^51 Paul, in contrast, makes great use of Deutero-Isaiah’s notion of atone-
ment through the suffering of God’s servant. If Buber had been willing, Taubes
says, to hold fast to his dichotomy, clearly placing Deutero-Isaiah among the
apocalyptics, then perhaps his interpretation “could have... struck at the heart of
Paul’s theology of history, thus meeting his great antagonist face to face.” Instead,
Buber puts Deutero-Isaiah in a liminal category, where he may retain his “open”
messianic interpretation of the suffering servant who appears repeatedly through
time.^52 For Taubes, Buber displays “a messianic inspiration without employing in
general the form of eschatological actuality. Paradoxically expressed: it is a mes-
sianism of continuity.” Quoting Hegel’s passage from Phenomenology of Spirit on
the “beautiful soul,” so pure that he refuses to act in the world, Taubes criticizes
Buber’s messianism as incapable of self-actualization. Buber’s “romantic nostal-
gia” for the moments of immediate encounter in history, whether the direct rule
of YHVH, the early Christian community, or the early Hasidim, does not recog-
nize the necessity of being embodied in institutions.^53 Moreover, Taubes argues,
Buber ignores the alternative that is present within apocalypticism: “The apoca-
lyptic seer confronts us with the alternative whether we perceive the change, the
new beginning in history, or whether we are blind to the new day that is actually