Borrowing extensively from the work of Hans Jonas [in Occidental Eschatology], Taubes explores Gnosticism. “The world stands in opposition to God, and God in opposition to the world. God is an unknown stranger to this world,” Taubes writes, summarizing Jonas’s argument. According to Taubes, the sustained alienation expressed in Gnosticism is closely related to apocalypticism, the expectation that the current world— fallen, dark, and evil— will give way to a new world of goodness and light. Apocalypticism typically has a passive attitude toward the world, of waiting for the right time to arrive. “Marx too sees in history higher powers at work that cannot be influenced by the individual, clothed in the mythological garb of his age as ‘forces of production,’ ” Taubes notes. Taubes characterizes Gnostic and apocalyptic thought as based on a dialectical technique that emphasizes “the power of the negative,” a critical mode of thought that remained subterranean in medieval Aristotelian and Scholastic thought, only to reemerge with Hegel and Marx.

Taubes sees reflections of this Gnostic sensibility in the Apostle Paul, a historical personage who played a minor role in Occidental Eschatology, but who would loom ever larger in Taubes’s subsequent development. Taubes notes that “for Paul, just as in Gnostic literature, demonic powers are ‘the rulers of this world’ and the ‘Prince of this world’ is Satan.”

This view of Paul as either a Gnostic, as influenced by Gnosticism, or as a proto-Gnostic was a recurrent theme of interwar scholarship on Gnosticism.

Then Taubes turned to the history of apocalypticism. Its origins in the West were traced to the apocalyptic chapters of the Book of Daniel, which, drawing upon modern critical scholarship of the Bible, Taubes attributed to the Maccabean period of the second century BC. Then, again making use of critical Biblical scholarship, he contends that Jesus must be understood contextually, as part of a larger messianic wave in Israel, which itself was part of an apocalyptic wave in the broader Aramaic-Syrian world of his time. Jesus’s message of a world turned upside down, in which the last  were to be first, presented a challenge to the Roman Empire.

Taubes portrays Christianity as an offshoot of Judaism that responded to the growth of individualism and self-consciousness in late antiquity and to the spiritual emptiness of the Roman Empire, with a new promise of community and otherworldly salvation. For the community created by Paul, Christ is a sort of anti- Caesar, the ultimate abnegation of the ethos of Rome. […] The founder of Christianity is not Jesus—who, together with his small group of Jewish followers expected the imminent coming of the messiah, the Son of Man—but Paul, who makes not the life and teachings of Jesus, but the death of Jesus into the center of the new faith. While the original circle around Jesus awaits his immanent return (Parousia), Paul preaches that as a result of Christ’s sacrifice, the new era has already dawned, and the old world is passing away. He thus marks a point of transition between apocalyptic expectations of the end of the world, and a new Gnostic knowledge of the transformative turn of history, the kairos. It is Paul who takes a Jewish messianic figure, Jesus, and interprets his death as of universal import.