Again continuing the famous points of Scholem re messianism:
Acute Paradoxical
Going deeper into theory of messianism, Scholem analyzes the Sabbatian movement specifically, and draws a focal point where:
the messianic adherents choose to continue to believe despite the apostasy of the messiah himself, converting to Islam.
For Scholem, the great messianic phenomenon was the Sabbatian movement. It was also very much a mystical kabbalistic messianic movement at that.
[Remember, Scholem does not consider early Christianity as part of the history of Judaism. So, he disregards early Christianity. He died before Chabad messianism peaked in the early 90’s, which we are still following and observing.]
He calls this “acute messianism”, and he finds an intriguing paradox in the behavior of those Sabbatian adherents after the messianic failure - for the believers it was not failure.
Their faith was so strong, their religious experience was so intense, and in addition to that - they had a worldview that happened to prepare the way for them to accept the failure as an inverted or mysterious mystical achievement.
For the remnant of Shabbtai Zvi’s followers, his apostasy to Islam at the courts of the Sultan of the Ottoman empire was, in terms Lurianic kabbalah, the greatest messianic mission, deep into husks of evil where divine sparks were entrapped.
What appeared as apostasy and failure to the masses was for the few actually the holiest deed of a true messiah.
What followed became even more interesting, as many theological ideas were written by different believers, taking this inverted logic in creative directions. Some ideas quite reminiscent of New Testament principles, as we will see later on in this blog on Sabbatianism.
Back to Paul the Apostle
There are critics to all of Scholem’s ideas. Including a renegade pupil of his named Jacob Taubes, who first simply rejected the whole dichotomy between internal and external messianism, between Christianity and Judaism. He said over history you see both kinds of expressions in both religions.
Secondly, Taubes said that this acute paradoxical messianism of Sabbatianism is exactly what we find in early Christianity, particularly with Paul. He would then research Paul - noting all the political theology, further proving the idea that early Christian messianism is political as well.
Taubes finds within Paul’s thinking the paradoxical understanding of Christ, and theorizes that internalizing the messianic faith is the natural step, after the failure, while the paradoxical theology and such leads you to internalization and spiritualization of your Messiah and messianism - this is what happened with Christianity and Sabbatianism, including Hasidism. It is spiritualized messianism.
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And now we should shift gears. We should leave this stuff for later. We will get back to theory of messianism. First, we should pursue some alignment with the evolution of messianism in religious texts history. We will get back to Paul and all...
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