As many scholars (e.g., E.P. Sanders, Burton Mack) are now doing, Maccoby demonstrates how the gospel portrait of the Pharisees as legalistic opponents of Jesus is a later distortion drawn by Christians who no longer had the remotest idea of what the Pharisees had actually stood for. When one compares the positions attributed to Jesus with those held by contemporary Pharisees, one is tempted to number Jesus among their ranks (see in the same vein Harvey Falk, Jesus the Pharisee and Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew).
If we admit this, Maccoby asks, how can we hold onto the New Testament story that Paul had persecuted the followers of Jesus because he was a good Pharisee? If the portrait of Paul is seen to be based on an anachronistic apologetical distortion, then we cannot be seeing the real Paul. Maccoby concludes that Paul cannot have been a Pharisee, that his claims are fabrications. (This problem would vanish if we removed both Acts and Philippians as spurious where the historical Paul is concerned: then he would have made no such claims).
Maccoby points out that even in Acts there is a tension between the Pharisees who, like Gamaliel, seem fairly well-disposed toward the apostles, and the High Priest who, along with his obedient minion Paul, is out for Christian blood. If Paul is a Pharisee, he is on the wrong side in this scenario! Maccoby makes him a member of the Temple police, an operative of the High Priest, no Pharisee at all. Neither does Paul in his letters, Maccoby continues, in fact practice Pharisaic/Rabbinic techniques of exegesis, despite the oft-repeated claims of W.D. Davies and others whose search for authentic Rabbinism in Paul comes up with such meagre results. Maccoby shows how such Christian scholars and apologists do not seem to get the point, for instance, of the "qal wahomer" argument and confuse it instead with a generally similar lesser-to-greater argument familiar from popular Hellenistic rhetoric. It is the latter, not the former which Paul can be shown to practice. And alleged bits of rabbinic scribal lore, such as the rolling stone that provided water in the wilderness, can be shown to be the common property of popular Hellenistic Judaism (**Pseudo-Philo). Paul does not argue like a Pharisee.