I‘ve had the same problem (Spark 1.5.1), and tried different versions.
Given
sqlContext.sql("create table my_table(id int, score int)")
The only versions that worked looked like this:
sqlContext.sql("insert into table my_table select t.* from (select 1, 10) t")
sqlContext.sql("insert into my_table select t.* from (select 2, 20) t")