Some years ago I described Rabbi Jesus, as a work of historicized fiction written by someone who had let his heart rule his head. With Rabbi Paul, this has not changed.
Rabbi Paul evades the blasphemous errors of Rabbi Jesus if only because Paul is not a divine being that Chilton can arbitrarily devalue. Still, we get the same treatment otherwise: reading "behind the texts" and thereby finding grounds to treat the NT as a buffet from which Chilton can pick and choose what he finds to be historical according to his preconceived theory; dismissing episodes from Acts on little or no evidence, or for simply not fitting into the paradigm; objectionable or pointless reinterpretations; many questionable assertions, and yes, Paul becomes a mystic, though this time, not a politically correct one, but one who doesn't know when to cease speaking, and offends everyone else in the church in the process.
Familiar errors abound, such as the claimed rivalry between Peter and Paul and James and Paul, failure to recognize passages like 1 Cor. 14:33-35 as Paul quoting opponents [215], and the dating of the Acts 15 council after rather than before Galatians 2 (as well as numerous other errors covered in the same article).
More prevalent though are Chilton's baseless creative readings in which he reads "between the lines" of the texts, even to the point of claiming the text covers up the truth that he has discovered between the lines that aren't there (even as he hypocritically criticizes another scholar, Becker, for "invent[ing] readings of Paul in order to contradict Acts" [32]).
It is to this end that Chilton makes Paul a virtual outcast from the circle of Peter and James, and supposes that Barnabas and Silas were sent along with Paul to try to keep him in line, but failed. Silence in Acts again and again is taken as evidence of a coverup, silence which Chilton obligingly fills in with whatever suits his premise. For example, Paul is an Athens without Timothy and Silas, according to Chilton [158], because Silas and Timothy decided "they could not work in the same town with [Paul]" and so they "shipped him out". How odd that Chilton's Paul, so stubborn and unmoved by others in most cases, here goes without a whimper to Athens just because Silas and Timothy (a younger man, at that) say so.
Rabbi Paul is thus like its predecessor, a work of speculative fiction and psychological pseudo-history at best, and it is little wonder it comes from a popular press like Doubleday rather than a credentialed, scholarly press like Fortress or Eerdmans. We can only hope that by the time Chilton's next subject is set (Peter? John?) he has adopted a more realistic view of matters.
-JPH