This Pathless Hour | 261need to talk about that. But regarding this point, which to me is all important, he
misses completely, and with such sureness that we can only be amazed. This is
what we can learn from Gershom Scholem, implicitly, in this eighth chapter on
Sabbatianism.”
Taubes’s polemic against Buber envisions a Paul who was a revolutionary in
his own time and can be appropriated in ours. Contending against both the Ro-
man Empire and the Jewish establishment that tolerated it (which Taubes anach-
ronistically condemns as “liberal”), Paul indicts the whole ideology of nomos
(law) that ruled the Hellenistic world. Paul’s apocalyptics turns this ideology on
its head, proclaiming the one crucified in the name of nomos as the true emperor.
Taubes presents two parallel theses with respect to this revolutionary Paul. First,
that Paul sees himself as “outbidding Moses,” justifying the founding of a new
people of God from within the perspective of the original people: “The apostle
takes the election of Israel seriously. This is embarrassing for modern Christian-
ity, but that’s the way it is.... Better to live with embarrassments than to transfig-
ure the text.”^63 His second thesis is that Paul’s gnostic-apocalyptic stand finds par-
allels in modernity, especially in interwar Germany. Rosenzweig, Barth, Buber,
Schmitt, and Benjamin are all cited as participants in a modern Pauline mood to
some degree and in their respective fields: Barth in theology, Schmitt in law, and
so on. Not all of these, of course, are revolutionary figures. Barth, for example,
holds that theology can legitimate neither the political order nor the revolution
against it, and Schmitt responds to the apocalyptic mood by taking on the role
of katechon, the one who seeks to hold back the messianic culmination by main-
taining the status quo.^64 But for Taubes it is Walter Benjamin who most directly
represents the Pauline position.^65 He describes Benjamin’s “Theological-Political
Fragment” as “dialectical theology outside the church,” a lay version of Barth.^66
Taubes’s Paul is a Zealot, but unlike the Jerusalem Zealots in Josephus’s ac-
count of the Jewish rebellion against Rome, Paul does not counsel armed upris-
ing: “Under this time pressure, if tomorrow the whole palaver, the entire swin-
dle were going to be over—in that case there’s no point in any revolution!”^67 In
Taubes’s view, the opening paragraph of Benjamin’s “Theological-Political Frag-
ment” recapitulates this position:
Only the Messiah himself completes all history, in the sense that he alone re-
deems, completes, creates its relation to the messianic. For this reason, noth-
ing that is historical can relate itself, from its own ground, to anything messi-
anic. Therefore, the Kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical dynamic;
it cannot be established as a goal. From the standpoint of history, it is not the
goal but the terminus. Therefore, the secular order cannot be built on the idea
of the Divine Kingdom, and theocracy has no political but only a religious
meaning.^68Benjamin’s fragment impresses Taubes by its straightforward reference to “the
Messiah,” rather than any of the modern euphemisms. But Taubes hastens to