After 13 hours of driving, an epiphany came to me and I understood Paul.
In a world where there is no written gospel and the earthly Jesus is a collection of various oral stories, Paul decided to write a universal product for all sects, congregations and itinerant preachers. In it he referred to his own revelation and avoided making any declarations about the historical Jesus. Why? Because it would limit the market of recipients of his product. Declaring himself on the side of one myth or another, who supposedly Jesus Christ was (god, angel, human, messiah, son of man, sofia, rabbi, cynic philosopher, rebel, apocaliptic prophet) would cause problems for himself, and he only wanted to sell a book called Pauline Corpus. Sell to all willing buyers without unnecessary and irritating discussions.
I had previously come across another explanation by Bart Ehrman as to why the historical Jesus is not present in Paul’s letters. Bart compared Paul’s letters to the results of the MBL games printed in the press for baseball fans. They do not need to print rules and regulations every time because they know them perfectly well. They only want to know the latest results.
The problem is that in the first century there are no written rules and regulations of baseball nor written story of the life of Christ. The situation is exactly the opposite.
Selling his teaching, Paul derives it from the vision of the resurrected Jesus and has full control over the product. Sometimes women teach and prophesy and sometimes they listen to their husbands, sometimes we eat meat and sometimes we are vegetarians, parousia? – few proposals. Paul can be quoted or you can use his invaluable wisdom and present as your own. Why not – your customers are illiterates. An excellent universal content product
Unfortunately I don’t have a link. I used to listen to Bart a lot on audible, on youtube. I don’t know how I know it, whether from a lecture or from QandA on the occasion of some debate, Great Courses, … Unfortunately, I don’t remember.
It is not possible to determine the goals pursued by the author on the basis of the text. An external determinant is required. And there is no such thing here.
I wondered why he ignored the stories of the earthly Jesus, what his motivation was. He just created something independent of these stories and complementary to all of them. Epic.
Robert, despite the conflicting conclusions, we are both in the same situation. You postulate, without proof, the honesty and sincerity of the letter writer. You are looking for arguments in the content of letters. I postulate, without proof, that he uses a literary construct. I am led to this conclusion by the reconstruction of the presence of letters on the market. “It’s not so hard to reasonably ascertain the goals of a text, especially correspondence.” It is very difficult to do this without an external factor. They wrote letters intended for public circulation, which after the text everyone would classify as private. They wrote philosophical dialogues where they presented conflicting views at the highest level, imitating both sides themselves. Everything can be written.
Such Marta Przyszychowska would not have made such radical conclusions about Makryna the Younger (an invented saint) if not for the gigantic literary legacy of Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Basil the Great. Only the cross-comparison resulted in a well-documented thesis of a literary construct later exalted by the Church as Saint Macrina. Gregory of Nyssa’s “Letter to a Certain John” would be considered part of a private correspondence if not for the title, because it is so well written. Personal, intimate, written in a slight rush, and yet it is a work for general circulation.
Everything can be written when you work in a team of reviewers and editors.
In contrast, a collection of previously sent scattered original letters and redaction into a uniform Pauline Corpus – the same everywhere is much less likely than my model.
And this one assumes that all this editing took place before the letters were published.
The volume of the letters and their creative arrangement in time and space are no indications because it can also be an expected effect by the recipients deliberately introduced by the author.
Paul’s letters are containers of religious content, as is a work of similar length, The Shepherd of Hermas, which was authoritative and very popular for 300 years.
In the case of Pauline Corpus and Shepherd, it can be seen that these are universal products, independent of the reconstruction of the earthly Jesus
You’re coin-toss methodology equalizes the choice between a long-standing scholarly consensus with any outlandish presupposition whatsoever (see here). We cannot prove that aliens did not construct the pyramids so it is equally likely that they did.
This is not my methodology but the true nature of this problem of authenticity and textual dating of a document without any external determinant. The question of authenticity and dating is unanswered and both versions of the answer are equally plausible. And it has been so from the very beginning, from the first public appearance of Pauline Corpus. And nothing can be done about it.
There are no aliens here, just another man with blank pages and a pen and his own idea for a literary product. We do not know the truth, so it is reasonable to develop both scenarios. One of them, based on the historical consistency of the text, is developed. The second is based on the editorial history and compilation of an anthology of the work of Paul and his colleagues. Because it was ghost writers who wrote most of the books of the NT and most of the early Christian literature. Paul is supposed to be the notable exception as the identified original author. Wishful thinking that there is one real character among this group of alleged invented authors. There are only heroes of an invented tradition.
Jerek, I don’t think it is a coin toss because there is evidence that militates against the late ghostwriter hypothesis. If we look at Paul’s authentic letters we find that he seems to have been confused about the timing of Jesus’ return and was forced to reevaluate. Wouldn’t a forger, trying to co-opt Paul’s apostolic authority as one who received revelation directly and regularly from the risen Christ, have written letters that show Paul not being mistaken about something so important?
We also find that he was principally concerned with issues that seems naturally to have been central to the earlier decades of Christianity (like Judaizing Christians) and totally unaware or largely unconcerned with issues that became important in the late first and early second century (like gnosticism or episcopal authority), which are–I’d hazard not coincidentally–just the sorts of things that do show up in the disputed letters.
We also find that some of his letters are, as they survive, a jumble that seem to be pieced together from fragments–that makes perfect sense if a later amateur is assembling a collection and trying to piece things together as best he can. It makes a lot less sense if someone is writing the Pauline corpus from scratch. I think you previously tried to account for this by suggesting that the ghostwriter was recycling material that he hadn’t been able to sell previously; but that seems to create even bigger improbabilities; If an antiquities dealer comes peddling you some important letter, and you reject it as forged, then he returns with a “new” letter, that contains entire chapters of text that are identical to the letter you already rejected as forged, are you going to suddenly accepted it as authentic?
So I don’t it is sound to view it as a 50-50 possibility, because we do have considerations that render one possibility not impossible but unlikely.
Robert–that proposal might be plausible on the conditions that
1) the forger was both very good and sophisticated and also ambivalent about theology, or at most had very narrow theological interests.
2) Jarke abandons the theory that the appearance some letters have, of being patched together from fragments, is not a result of recycling material but a deliberate effort to make the letters look old and pieced together.
I think an important consideration is which sort of behavior is more common and better attested historically. We have lots of instances of people forging documents to advance a theological agenda. We have plenty of examples of nut jobs who believe crazy stuff and try to convince other people to believe the same crazy stuff–sometimes they even lie to persuade people of what they really think is true. We have examples of con men who make stuff up to gain money or power. How many examples do we have before the invention of copyright of people making up elaborate forgeries in order to sell manuscripts?
I do think authors in the ancient world were motivated to have their texts copied–they seem to have seen authoring something that spread and endured as a sort of immortality or legacy, sometimes even when the work was published anonymously; this desire to produce texts that would be copied, aside from any other motive resulted in some really bizarre texts surviving (not entirely unlike those viral email messages today–for each contact you forward this message to, Bill Gates will send you a check for $50). But for every one of those (that seems to have been written simply for the sake of spreading), we seem to have scores of forgeries where the author was transparently trying to achieve something more usual through the text, like cementing authority or advancing a theological idea.
CEJ, I don’t know why you don’t like Freke since even Bart prefers to refer to his books than argue with Detering, Zwierlein. His choice as well as mine. I cited Freke because Detering’s works on Jewish-Buddhist exegesis are very interesting. The cult of Moses, the cult of Joshua, Basilides’ gnosis based on Buddhism. The transition from figurative worship to literal. It’s not just Freke, it’s also Detering. Interesting, inspiring ideas.
Since all the gods had to be presented to the society in the form of myths because “no one is born a philosopher” and even today the Marian apparitions are an inspiration for the masses of the faithful.
Porphyry,A “coin toss” is a description of a research situation in which the factor determining whether to choose Yes or No to go further is missing. You are faced with an unsolvable alternative. Of course, you can try to replace such a factor with something else, but it will turn out that it is not an effective method. You just have to develop both propositions in parallel in the hope that something can be denied or confirmed. And this is a normal research activity in many fields. Only not in biblical studies… Apocalyptic visions have their pluses and minuses. It’s a good gimmick to attract the audience, because something unusual is about to happen, and then you have to find a way out when nothing like that happened. Something that is used to acquire a customer interferes with keeping it. Well, you have some suggestions from Paul how to escape from a dead end as well as conflicting suggestions on how to treat meat and women. Textual analysis is no substitute for the external factor of dating and authenticity. Everything can be written. Personally, I don’t see any literary activity in the first century, only an invented tradition written down later. You find a collection of writings from the past so inspiring that you want to publish it. You don’t know how many copies of this collection exist on the market. So you don’t edit and redact these letters, because if it turns out that others will publish them, you will look like a forger. Paul’s letters were compiled, edited before they appeared. Because the publisher had full control over the source material written by the ghost writer working for him.
Robert, “brain in a vat” – great. Stephen King Tommyknockers.
Jarek, “You find a collection of writings from the past so inspiring that you want to publish it. You don’t know how many copies of this collection exist on the market. So you don’t edit and redact these letters, because if it turns out that others will publish them, you will look like a forger. Paul’s letters were compiled, edited before they appeared. Because the publisher had full control over the source material written by the ghost writer working for him.”
I’m not sure I’m following the scenario you are proposing; let me repeat it back to you and you tell me if I’ve understood.
Someone in the second century finds a collection of Paul’s actual writings. (So, there was an actual Paul who did leave behind a written corpus that was known to some in the 2nd century).
Because this person is inspired by them, he wants to publish them. But he also wants to change some stuff in them prior to publication (to what end? Is he motivated simply to sell copies or is he trying to advance some agenda?) But he also doesn’t want to change the real letters, because people might have copies of the unaltered versions, and realize he altered them.
So instead of publishing Paul’s actual letters that he actually has, writings that are so inspiring he wants to publish them for others to read, he writes new letters from scratch that he knows no one else has a copy of, and thus no one can detect his forgery.
Did I get that right?
“A “coin toss” is a description of a research situation in which the factor determining whether to choose Yes or No to go further is missing. You are faced with an unsolvable alternative. Of course, you can try to replace such a factor with something else, but it will turn out that it is not an effective method. You just have to develop both propositions in parallel in the hope that something can be denied or confirmed. And this is a normal research activity in many fields.. . . Everything can be written.”
I do understand what “coin toss” means in this context.
Historians deal in probabilities. We have some data from the past and we have to find the most likely explanation. Sometimes we have sufficient evidence to determine that there is only one likely explanation–of course there could be others, but those others are so remote that they aren’t worth considering. Sometimes we can say what is most likely, but we have to realize that other possibilities exist, and we really don’t know for sure. Sometimes, we just have nothing to go on, and what actually happened is anyone’s guess.
These aren’t all the same. Historians, properly, study history, which is written. Yes anything can be written, texts can be forged. But texts are what historians trade in, and part of that trade is determining which records can be reasonably taken as authentic and reliable. If you want to say, anything can be put into writing, therefore we can never arbitrate between competing reconstructions of the past and they are all equally valid, then you’ve toasted history as a field. You might as well say the Roman Empire didn’t exist and the whole literary output of that civilization was forged by the mediaevals (which some people have done).
Anyway, I do think the possibility that the whole Pauline corpus was forged should be considered; The identity and intention of the author is not an established fact; we shouldn’t naively take documents at face value. So sure, we should play both possibilities out and see what works; We should ask the question, what if this was all a forgery? But I think after we consider it and develop each thesis, we can reasonably conclude that one thesis is far more plausible than the other; one thesis just fits the data we have, both the texts themselves and external evidence about the texts and what we know about established patterns of human behavior, better than the alternative.
If you just want to ask, why are the uncontested letters uncontested? Why not suppose they were forgeries? If you just want to play out a scenario where they were also forged and soberly assess all the factors that would need to be explained if they were forged, you’d get a lot less push back. But if you just want to say, anything can be put in writing, we have no direct access to an author’s intentions, therefore, until we find direct physical evidence that Paul wrote these letters, forgery is just as likely as authenticity, you are going to get an unsympathetic response. Robert nailed it when he described it as skepticism turned inside out.
I have no clue whether Ehrman has considered or read Detering or Zwierlein, Jarek. I know I haven’t.
But Ehrman has read Freke’s “The Jesus Mysteries” and considers it nonsense. And, 10 or 15 years ago, I too read that book and came to the same conclusion.
I would never take seriously any recommendation for further reading from someone citing Freke.
What I meant was that if you have full control over the source material, you can edit, compile, supplement it without being caught and accused of forgery. There is also no risk of someone overtaking you and will be first on the market. Because no one but you has the source material – the original letters. However, with letters that were in individual circulation years ago, you must act differently. You don’t know who else has them. Even if your supplier swears that this is the only copy from the originals from 40 years ago, there is a high risk that this is not the case. You cannot alter the original material in this situation. You can add new material, new letters, but you cannot change the original ones.
Thus, the publisher Pauline Corpus was assured that no one else had the letters, and that is why I claim that their editing and compilation took place before the first publication.
Robert M. Price perfectly portrayed the ‘coin toss’ situation during a debate with Bart Ehrman. He made it clear that a discussion where the other side’s position is ridiculed makes no sense since both use different paradigms. And it is not known which of the paradigms is true. I was reading a lot of Price and Ehrman at the time and I didn’t know which one to believe. Until I saw the Ehrman-Wallace debate and first heard of Zuntz and the story of the Pauline Corpus. Really unprobable story from the content management point of view.
And so I broke away from biblical studies and started looking for a scenario for the development of early Christian literature in line with human behavior when a market with great potential suddenly opens up. How leaders behave, how creators behave. And so it goes.
The indisputable letters refer mainly to one author conclusion in terms of language, theology, and a few records that can be used to date them. Assuming that the author is the hero of the letters. What if he’s not?
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