Robert said
Jarek said
Robert, my friend, you have a subtle technique for twisting my statements.Certainly not intentional!
I know. Just kidding…
I don’t take any dating by biblical scholars seriously because it’s beyond their expertise. … You see, Christianity left us nothing from the first century.
Yet you take your own dating seriously. Why?
It is not my own. Klinghardt and Trobisch proposed wide range dating before me. For them NT was written between 40-140CE.
It’s your problem that you’re choosing answers where there aren’t any.
Not answers but well informed opinions supported by a very wide-ranging consensus of critical scholars. If you want to try and overturn the consensus, be my guest!
Consensus is result of voting. There is nothing to be overturn.
1 Clem is dated by biblical scholars from 60 CE to 140 CE. So, it could be an early-dated inauthentic one, a middle-dated one, or a late-dated inauthentic one. All of these theses have relevant research reviewed by eminent scholars. How many beautifully contradictory books can be written on this?
Recall what I said above about a consensus of critical scholars. Strange that you don’t even mention this as one of the possibilities.
Wide range dating is the only answer.
I look primarily at the date of the first confirmation of the existence of a given text.
Not an adequate methodology for a small movement in its infancy.
We are currently trying to determine when the birth took place, because the description of childhood in Christianity seems to be largely, if not entirely, false. Still wide range dating.
Christianity began at the end of the 1st century, several decades after the events described in the Testimonium Flavianum. The first artifacts appeared in the form of papyrus scraps, graffiti, symbols, intaglios, oil lamps, and pottery.
When do you date the first evidence for any texts of Josephus?
The external evidence is probably Porphyry. Then Origen, Eusebius. The Greek manuscripts we have are probably from the Middle Ages. The Latin ones are from the 6th century. No one has been able to prove that manuscripts existed without the Testimonium.
How do we know this? Consider Mormonism, Scientology, and Marian apparitions.
First, consider Josephus and use the same methodology for the texts of Paul and Mark.
There might not have been a Josephus. He could be a fictional character. The unknown author first wrote for the Flavians and then, capitalizing on his newfound fame, continued publishing under a false name. It’s possible.
First, a miracle, and then its content development. Once a project begins, it must have its own dynamics to survive. A miracle is the spark, but content fuel must be provided immediately to keep the flame burning. Out of 100 Marian apparitions, only 10 are successful. A church is formed. Out of 100 such churches, only one apparition is officially recognized by Rome.
You have information about a miracle that justifies your project. After all, this is the content of the Testimonium Flavianum. The same is true for other Sign Prophets from Josephus’s works, whose projects were brutally interrupted by the Romans at the behest of the Jewish elite, who considered them a threat to order. Marian apparitions most often initiate the construction of churches and chapels. Mormonism and Scientology, as religious projects, are based on miracles. And now we look at the results. Some succeeded, others did not.
What did the disciples of Jesus, witnesses of his death, achieve?
In my opinion, they did not achieve any lasting or concrete success. The only witness to their activity is Josephus. Josephus’s readers, the authors of early Christian writings, were not so fortunate. They never met anyone who came from this group of disciples. Therefore, they had to invent everything. We have no evidence of the existence of anything between 30 CE and the end of the first century. Christianity is a successful cover-up of an idea that was not a success 60 years earlier.
I don’t understand what you’re writing about. Who cared about the personal motives of ghostwriters in the past, do they care about them now, or will care about them in the future? There’s a commission to be filled. Write a text. Show what you can do, and maybe you’ll get it. Interested? If not you, then someone else will. A ghostwriter doesn’t decide anything. A ghostwriter only writes. They write on commission based on a more or less detailed brief. And the nature of the text is such that it can be edited and interpolated by others. Did anyone take into account the opinion of the author of the texts included in 2 Cor? Not really, in my humble opinion. Was the opinion of the ghostwriters considered, who would revise their texts and how? Which ones would be used and which ones rejected?
A ghostwriter has no influence on anything beyond the fact of writing a text. Decisions about the future of the written text rest with the client.
But how do you know the conspirators didn’t write the texts themselves? The idea of “ghostwriters” is oddly anachronistic. And you’re still assuming some sort of motivation on the part of either the conspirators or the ghostwriters or both, without a shred of evidence. You still miss my real point. If you deny Pauline authorship of at least the original seven letters the most you can then claim is that you don’t know how or why they were written. If you’re skeptical be skeptical. Don’t deny the simplest explanation and then construct some sort of ad hoc labyrinthine conspiracy. Or if you’re going to do it at least admit it.
You’re questioning these texts yourselves.
Of course. But just because we don’t have all the right answers doesn’t mean there aren’t wrong answers. And just because we can’t know everything doesn’t mean we can’t know anything.
Bart himself stated that all manuscripts are based on the Pauline Corpus from 100 CE. Therefore, given the current state of knowledge, this is the original. Because anyone claiming there were any Pauline letters without interpolation and editing is merely speculating. How does this differ from Carrier’s speculation that the original letters contained nothing about the historical Jesus?
The actual view is that the surviving Pauline corpus was collected at the end of the century, not that they were written at the end of the century.
Who is claiming that there is no editing or interpolating in the Pauline letters? Scholars of Paul can fairly well demonstrate examples of both. But it’s precisely because they can demonstrate a consistent style and viewpoint among the original seven letters that allows them to do so.
The Church knew how to commission and always knew what it wanted.
And you know this how? If anything can be demonstrated pretty obviously it’s that the doctrines and viewpoints of the church developed over time.
Even Michelangelo was treated solely as an executor of other people’s ideas.
And Shakespeare lifted all his plots from historical chronicles. So what? Neither of these folks can accurately be described as ghostwriters.
A ghostwriter is someone you can commission to write a work in the style of Plato, Josephus, Galen, or you name it. Fiction or History?
But to imitate you first have to have something to imitate, right? And you still haven’t answered my question. Did Plato exist? Josephus? Homer? How do you know they weren’t conspiratorial fakes as well?
Stephen said
Another way to see through the sola fide interpretations of Paul…
There is a distinction to be made between the Paul of history and the Paul of faith. We get a glimpse (but only a glimpse) of the Paul of history from his authentic letters. But how much more influential have been the views of the forgeries and the account in Acts! (The authentic letters have traditionally been interpreted though that lens.) One of the reasons to hope for an afterlife would be for the opportunity to be present at Paul’s interviews with his later interpreters! But that’s not what I meant, you moron!
And further, the “Paul of faith” evolved over time, split into multiple Pauls of faith, some of the multiple Pauls of faith were selected against (and we see the selection in process in works against heresies, so there is clearly a healthy dose of artificial selection in this), and then the Paul or Pauls of faith that survived continues to evolve.
And the evidence that we have that Paul’s letters are actually Paul’s letters is their internal consistency, so an original set of Paul’s letters which were later edited as a collection or as a part of a collection by a single editor would present the same evidence of being “Paul’s original letters”.
Every time we say, “so and so knows Paul”, we may be using an heavily edited version of Paul’s “original letters” to judge whether an author knew Paul where the author may have been too early to know the edited Paul that we have on hand but late enough to know the Paul that was used as by the original editor.
We have indirect manuscript evidence of 2nd century author’s accusing Marcion of omitting all of Paul’s appeals to scriptural authority in his New Testament, and they appear to be the earliest evidence we have for the existence of those appeals to scriptural authority, making it entirely ambiguous whether Marcion edited those out or whether anti-Marcionites wrote those in to render Paul more compatible with other strands of the early church.
It may well be that the two Pauls of faith of Marcion and of the anti-Marcionites is the earliest Paul that we can get reasonably clear evidence about, and the Paul of history is completely obscured by the muddying of the waters that occurred in the second century fight between Marcion and his followers and Marcion’s opponents.
Stephen said
I don’t understand what you’re writing about. Who cared about the personal motives of ghostwriters in the past, do they care about them now, or will care about them in the future? There’s a commission to be filled. Write a text. Show what you can do, and maybe you’ll get it. Interested? If not you, then someone else will. A ghostwriter doesn’t decide anything. A ghostwriter only writes. They write on commission based on a more or less detailed brief. And the nature of the text is such that it can be edited and interpolated by others. Did anyone take into account the opinion of the author of the texts included in 2 Cor? Not really, in my humble opinion. Was the opinion of the ghostwriters considered, who would revise their texts and how? Which ones would be used and which ones rejected?
A ghostwriter has no influence on anything beyond the fact of writing a text. Decisions about the future of the written text rest with the client.
But how do you know the conspirators didn’t write the texts themselves? The idea of “ghostwriters” is oddly anachronistic. And you’re still assuming some sort of motivation on the part of either the conspirators or the ghostwriters or both, without a shred of evidence. You still miss my real point. If you deny Pauline authorship of at least the original seven letters the most you can then claim is that you don’t know how or why they were written. If you’re skeptical be skeptical. Don’t deny the simplest explanation and then construct some sort of ad hoc labyrinthine conspiracy. Or if you’re going to do it at least admit it.
You’re questioning these texts yourselves.
Of course. But just because we don’t have all the right answers doesn’t mean there aren’t wrong answers. And just because we can’t know everything doesn’t mean we can’t know anything.
Bart himself stated that all manuscripts are based on the Pauline Corpus from 100 CE. Therefore, given the current state of knowledge, this is the original. Because anyone claiming there were any Pauline letters without interpolation and editing is merely speculating. How does this differ from Carrier’s speculation that the original letters contained nothing about the historical Jesus?
The actual view is that the surviving Pauline corpus was collected at the end of the century, not that they were written at the end of the century.
Who is claiming that there is no editing or interpolating in the Pauline letters? Scholars of Paul can fairly well demonstrate examples of both. But it’s precisely because they can demonstrate a consistent style and viewpoint among the original seven letters that allows them to do so.
The Church knew how to commission and always knew what it wanted.
And you know this how? If anything can be demonstrated pretty obviously it’s that the doctrines and viewpoints of the church developed over time.
Even Michelangelo was treated solely as an executor of other people’s ideas.
And Shakespeare lifted all his plots from historical chronicles. So what? Neither of these folks can accurately be described as ghostwriters.
A ghostwriter is someone you can commission to write a work in the style of Plato, Josephus, Galen, or you name it. Fiction or History?
But to imitate you first have to have something to imitate, right? And you still haven’t answered my question. Did Plato exist? Josephus? Homer? How do you know they weren’t conspiratorial fakes as well?
You’re asking illegitimate questions. No one will ever know how Paul’s letters or the Gospels were written. Even the client probably didn’t know that. He simply appointed someone to acquire content. He provided them with the appropriate resources. Sometimes he was satisfied with the material delivered, sometimes he wasn’t, but undeterred, he continued investing in content. Because he needed a whole lot of it to maintain the acquired faithful. Because that’s what the whole content business was about. Acquisition and retention. Whether the content was created in-house or out-house didn’t matter.
You need in-house production when the supply of external content is too low. You buy out-house content if it’s better than what your people have produced.
And that’s what all the significant competitors did.
Thus, a market of producers and consumers of invented traditions was created. A market in which some pretended to have found old testimonies and texts, while others pretended to believe them.
And the acquired customers guaranteed steady revenue until death.
In such a structured content enterprise, there’s no time for heroes to be born and, what’s more, for them to write something. It’s better to create them yourself because you can’t wait. If there’s demand for something, the first to supply the desired product wins. This principle determined this entire production of invented tradition.
This is precisely the simplest scenario, one that doesn’t require heroes who pop out like a rabbit from a hat at the right moment. Because it’s easier to describe Paul’s fictional life than to live it. Herodians, Seneca, the Emperor, and the beautiful, virtuous Theckla. Over time, most of this was discarded, but it was all useful at some point.
Of course, this scenario will collapse as soon as someone finds anything Christian from the first century. I wish that would happen.
I’m just claiming that the texts were edited and interpolated before they were published. That there have never been other texts without these interpolations and edits.
Stephen said
You’re asking illegitimate questions.
Of course!
I also violated my own pledge not to argue with mythicists anymore.
Shame! I repent in sackcloth and ashes.
Stephen, I sincerely apologize for this stupid statement, which is the result of my communication problems and poor choice of words. I need to take a break and get back in shape to avoid such unnecessary blunders.
Again, I apologize.
Merry Christmas
ClaudeTee said
In the most recent Misquoting Jesus podcast, Dr. Ehrman rejects the suggestion that any of the gospel writers were familiar with any of Paul’s epistles. I have to believe, though, that Mark must, at the very least, have had a copy of 1 Corinthians in hand when he was writing his gospel. Specifically, his account of the Last Supper in 14:22-25 tracks almost verbatim Paul’s account in 1 Cor 11:23-26. Unless a later redactor altered the Mark Gospel to incorporate the Pauline language, doesn’t it seem likely that Mark was drawing from the First Corinthian letter when he was composing his Gospel? How else can one explain how the language Mark uses so closely hews to Paul’s?
I actually believe that Mark is Pauline in nature, and there is some scholarship demonstrating this. I also believe that it is possible that Mark was accompanied by some letters of Paul, which explains the abrupt, and original, ending to Mark and that Pauls letters would pick up after that. This kind of makes sense since Marcions canon did just this, though we can only suspect what Marcions gospel actually said.
Robert said
BruceRMcF said
It’s not an argument about the agenda of the author of Acts, but the agenda of those who propagated Acts of the Apostles, since that is the Acts which became entrenched as “our traditional readings” at enough churches to become canonized.Originally your argument was about the time when Acts was being written:
Setting aside the issue of this as testimony about the middle of the 1st century, this seems like circumstantial evidence that at the time that Acts was written, there were faith congregations of Christian gentiles who traced their founding to Paul and those who traced their founding to Peter …
Exactly … it was the agenda of those propagating Acts at the time of the autograph and the immediately following decades when the agenda of those doing the propagating most matters to it becoming entrenched as an established authority in Church communities. The two big bottlenecks to the survival of a text would be the period following the production of the text and the period of establishing a state-sanctioned Church hierarchy and state-sanctioned canon.
And you were even willing to consider Acts as a reliable witness:
If Acts is a reliable narrator insofar as the church in Jerusalem writing to Gentile converts to clarify that conversion to Judaism was optional for Gentiles becoming Christians …
Yes, I was and am willing to consider that it is possible that Acts is a reliable witness regarding specific claims being made. Of course, admitting that specific individual claims might be true (“insofar as”, above) is evidently a far cry from treating Acts as a whole as a reliable witness. I am not even confident that the Acts that we have is a reliable witness to the autograph of the original Acts.
And when considering the alternative that Acts was not a reliable witness, you’re argument was indeed about the intent of the author of Acts:
And if Acts is an unreliable narrator, then it would seem to be composing a reconciliation between different gentile faith communities in conflict on these questions, and putting the argument that carries the decision on the lips of Peter suggests that the Law of Noah reconciliation was the one that at least some of the faith communities who traced their founding back to Peter had arrived at.
Where did I make an argument about the intent of the author of Acts? I specifically said it “seems to be” to avoid doing so.
If I wanted to make an argument about the intent of the author of Acts, I would have done so.
I am not aware of enough evidence about the author’s role in the dissemination of work in the late first through to early second centuries to know how important the author’s actual intent was in the process, but the simple fact is that there is one author available to make copies, in one place, and there are multiple possible readers available to make copies, in multiple places, so it is not immediately obvious to me that the specifics of the intent of the author matters once we know that he shared it for whatever reasons (and if he hadn’t shared it, there wouldn’t be later copies at all).
To be sure, the intent of the author is one clear issue in textual criticism … in the effort to work out as well as we can the contents of the autograph from the various later copies that we have available … but if we are talking about preservation through enough copies being made by enough different people at enough different places that it survives in use long enough to become an accepted authority in a variety of different faith communities, my first inclination is that audience reception is more critical than author intent.
I don’t object to moving the goal posts, just want to make sure that we’re both aware of where they are being moved to.
Now you seem to be reaching ever more tenuously for a possibly reliable tradition that may have developed sometime prior to mid–third century.
I am reaching, however tenuously, where I was reaching in the first post, for the circumstances under which the Acts of the Apostles that became established as an authority among enough different faith communities to later become the sole canonized church history, has a stronger positive reception among its audience than the other competing Acts in circulation.
I’ve pointed instead to evidence of our first known readers of Acts: Justin & Irenaeus
Yes, Justin and Irenaeus offer tantalizing glimpses into their milieus, but they are both more spotlights on specific strands in those milieus than overviews … oh, if we had letters similar to Justin Martyr from those he was disputing with! But of course, that gets into the second bottleneck.
There are, of course, the scholars of the Marcionite corpus who argue that Irenaeus either is or is working in a group that created the canonized Pauline corpus, including interpolations in the original Pauline and the deutero-paulines and reordering them and creation of the psuedo-paulines, so the extent to which Iranaeus’ witness of Acts is a witness to the same Acts that Justin Martyr is reading is one of those open questions entailing a range of different plausible scenarios which you so dislike.
If the agenda was to create an origin story and mission for believers that would prefer to believe that Peter and Paul and the other apostles were on the same page, the one which had them land on the page created or elaborated in the Acts of the Apostles turned out to be the most popular one, which seems like it might tell us something about those among whom it was the most popular one.
Though the Peter in Paul’s account does not do what Peter does in his final speech in Acts of the Apostles … rather than convincing those Jewish Christians who criticized him for eating with Gentiles, in Paul’s account he stopped eating with Gentiles.
What textual criticism attempts, using later manuscripts which we have as evidence regarding the contents of early manuscripts which we do not have.
No, I’m thinking that this is the type of scribal error which occurs in scriptorums, and by the time the manuscript is being copied in a scriptorum, it seems to me that it’s position as a favored reading has probably already become entrenched.
Yes, by the time that the manuscript is being produced in a scriptorum, the process of becoming entrenched as “this is one of the readings that we use” seems to be played out, so the “natural selection” phase of this work being preferentially copied and then retained rather than the ink scraped off to use the papyrus for something else relative to other competing Acts is already over.
… it is not outlandish to suppose that earlier faith communities also had traditions regarding being founded by an apostle.Indeed you’re free to make whatever suppositions you like. But I don’t really see an argument of embarrassment for circumstantial evidence for Peter originating the quasi-Noahide laws among gentile Christian communities that Peter or other apostles founded. Suppositions are not evidence.
I cannot parse “an argument of embarrassment for circumstantial evidence”. An argument of embarrassment regarding circumstantial evidence? An argument of embarrassment to be seen in the circumstantial evidence?
The strength of the argument of embarrassment in textual criticism is that introducing an embarrassing attestation seems less likely than an embarrassing attestation being passed on from an earlier source. If that is accepted, when turning from the textual criticism of the work to the evidence that the work provides regarding the milieu in which it is reproduced and disseminated, being relatively non-embarrassing to a broad range of faith communities would be a selective advantage for a text.
The evidence at hand is the establishment of this version of an Acts text as an authority in enough faith communities that it is canonized when others are not. That evidence points in the direction of broad propagation and dissemination of this particular text.
In the period before there was an entrenched church leadership of the proliferating faith communities, there would have been a proliferation of the different positions taken on a wide variety of issues facing early believers, because that’s what happens when there is a spreading faith and there is no system in place to keep that proliferation of positions under control. Indeed, it even happens in the face of such systems, but we observe it happening even more when there is not a hierarchical system with a final arbiter with the authority to enforce their decisions.
And I am supposing that we are all familiar with the various kinds of fracturing and agglomerations that can happen in that kind of milieu.
If the autograph of one of the various Acts is composed in a milieu of a number of competing strands, we do have to be careful in arguing that contradictions between the seven less commonly contested letters of Paul and later manuscripts of that work is evidence that the author of the autograph was not aware of Paul, especially when, as in Luke/Acts, Paul is the hero of the second and third act of the version of “Acts” presented, as the contradiction may well be a compromise between the Paul that is the hero of one strand and some other strand.
After all, one possible reason for one among various competing Acts to emerge as the most widely entrenched on is that it becomes one of the works adopted by multiple strands, and then can become the basis of those strands agglomerating, so that it becomes a work adopted by “influential” churches.I do not assume the author of Acts was unaware of Paul or any of his letters. That is a disputed point and therefore an open question among those who argue for an early or later dating of Acts. Personally, I tend to think that the author of Acts may very well have been aware of something like the letter to the Galatians and constructed his narrative in near polar opposition to that account. But even if we assume this to be the case, the narrative in Acts need not reflect an early or later reliable tradition that Peter or other apostles originated proto-Noahide laws among gentile Christian communities that they founded. Suppositions are not evidence. A later reader of both Galatians and Acts need only suppose that whatever happened in Antioch, eventually Peter and James and Paul eventually came to agreement later on.
Now, as we come to recognize that these were, in addition to whatever else they were, literary works, we do need to take on board the cautions necessary when analyzing literary works, including the distinction between author intentions and audience reception. It goes without saying that the popularity among the original potential audiences was not necessarily due to the contents, so any argument regarding what the contents of the Acts of the Apostles suggests regarding the milieu in which it became broadly disseminated can only be a likelihood argument. And even if the contents played a role in its initial popularity, that is not to say that the author deliberately included the elements that made it popular with an eye to achieving popularity. Surprise hits are sometimes a surprise to the author as well, after all.
That is, after all, what that “That’s only circumstantial evidence!” exclamation is about regarding circumstantial evidence … to arrive at a conclusion beyond a shadow of a doubt normally requires more than circumstantial evidence.But, again, suppositions are not evidence, not even circumstantial evidence.
Again, the evidence is the material reproduction and dissemination of the text. If you are arguing that the range of scenarios which that evidence may point toward being more or less likely includes infeasible scenarios or scenarios highly unlikely for other reasons, or is missing substantial scenarios, that is surely possible.
The principle premise is the naturalist one, that we are talking about normal processes of social evolution with a (literal) deus ex machina intervention. I don’t see any help for that one … if the outcome was guided by some form of non-human intervention, then how could we possible sort out which rules of evidence are relevant and which are not?
Of course, we also have to be careful with the issue of whether the letters of Paul that would have been available to the gospel authors, including the author of Luke/Acts, but the question of whether the “Paul” that the author of Luke/Acts might have known was the Paul of the canonical Pauline and Deutero-Pauline epistles or of the Apostolos as reconstructed by those who think that such reconstructions are possible would be a different line of inquiry.
Absolutely. Whatever suppositions one makes regarding the version Paul known by the author of Acts, these too are suppositions, not evidence, not even circumstantial evidence. We cannot even agree on a reconstruction of the Apostolikon of Marcion.
I don’t see how ruling out setting up scenarios to consider the meaning of evidence at hand can be ruled out by calling them “suppositions”.
The fact that different scholars disagree on the criteria to be used in the reconstruction of the Apostolikon of Marcion doesn’t forbid me as a social scientist from looking at the different criteria and determining which I find to be most persuasive.
A cautious answer is: there’s no good evidence the evangelists directly used Paul’s letters as written sources, but there are places where Gospel tradition reflects Pauline language already circulating in Christian mission contexts.
A good example is Jesus sending out the Twelve. The Matthean–Lukan version of this pericope is not simply Mark’s. While Mark 6:7–13 is the base narrative, both Matthew and Luke inherit an expanded version from a shared source already reworking Mark. This inherited version adds proclamation of the kingdom, pairs healing directly with proclamation, tightens travel restrictions, and intensifies judgment language — features absent from Mark but shared by Matthew and Luke.
Within that inherited version appears Matthew 10:10: “for the laborer deserves his food.” The phrasing closely tracks Paul’s repeated formulation, “the laborer deserves his wages” (1 Corinthians 9:7–14; Romans 4:4; later preserved verbatim in 1 Timothy 5:18). Crucially, this saying does not appear in Mark, Thomas, or any independent sayings tradition, and in Paul it functions as a rhetorical principle about apostolic support, not as a dominical saying.
What’s striking is Matthew’s handling of it. By substituting “food” for “wages”, Matthew appears to recognize the saying as mission rhetoric rather than a Jesus logion, reshaping it so it can function plausibly on Jesus’ lips. That suggests the line entered the tradition already marked as Pauline in character, not as remembered speech of the historical Jesus, and was adapted rather than simply copied.
More broadly, Matthew often resists Pauline theology outright, making direct literary dependence on Paul unlikely. Luke is more sympathetic to Gentile mission, but even Luke does not reproduce Paul’s distinctive argumentative style.
ClaudeTee said
In the most recent Misquoting Jesus podcast, Dr. Ehrman rejects the suggestion that any of the gospel writers were familiar with any of Paul’s epistles. I have to believe, though, that Mark must, at the very least, have had a copy of 1 Corinthians in hand when he was writing his gospel. Specifically, his account of the Last Supper in 14:22-25 tracks almost verbatim Paul’s account in 1 Cor 11:23-26. Unless a later redactor altered the Mark Gospel to incorporate the Pauline language, doesn’t it seem likely that Mark was drawing from the First Corinthian letter when he was composing his Gospel? How else can one explain how the language Mark uses so closely hews to Paul’s?
The gospel of Luke is thought to have been written at least by 90 CE (some will put it several decades earlier, but I doubt that is Dr. Ehrman’s position). 90 CE is forty years after Paul had penned most of his letters; that is a forty-year period for the letters to circulate. The Church universal at this point was still very small, consisting of urban clusters here and there. We know from Paul’s letters that communication was maintained between some of these clusters. It seems to me that by 90 CE the Corinthian community still has sole ownership of the two extant letters addressed to them; those will have been preserved (i.e., copied) and disseminated.
As far as I know Dr. Ehrman identifies the author of Acts with that of Luke, and Acts devotes, what, 40% of its space to Paul’s missionary career? Dr. Ehrman’s thesis thus requires me to hold that the author of Acts either did not know that his star character wrote letters to some of the very communities whose origins Acts narrates (see especially Paul’s stay with the Corinthians); or the author knew Paul had written letters but had no interest in acquiring them for his project. This is hard to swallow.
And if Acts was indeed written by the same author as Luke, then then the author of Luke was probably aware of at least some of Paul’s letters.
And if Acts was indeed written by the same author as Luke, then then the author of Luke was probably aware of at least some of Paul’s letters.
But then how to explain the contradictions between the personal timelines and doctrines recorded in Acts and Paul’s own testimony in his letters?
Stephen said
And if Acts was indeed written by the same author as Luke, then then the author of Luke was probably aware of at least some of Paul’s letters.
But then how to explain the contradictions between the personal timelines and doctrines recorded in Acts and Paul’s own testimony in his letters?
It depends in part on what time it is placed at.
If the compilation of canonical Luke and the compilation/composition of Acts of the Apostles are circa 130-150 CE, then one explanation is that Acts of the Apostles are supposed to be in front of the catholic epistles and give you “what you need to know” about Paul. “Here’s the story of the very first Apostles, including the main dude Peter, then here’s the story of that famous Paul you heard about – let me assure you, the Marcionites are totally misrepresenting him — here’s a letter from the first Bishop of Jerusalem, some from that same Peter dude, here’s some from John, here’s one from the brother of the first Bishop of Jerusalem.”
Then when both are entrenched, someone discovers that putting Acts of the Apostles in front of the Epistles of Paul is a way of framing the Epistles of Paul that reduce the tendency of inconvenient interpretations. The veneer of authority due to antiquity that both have accumulated make that a much easier move to pull off than trying to do a cleaned up version of the Pauline epistles in the 3rd century CE.
Let’s establish at least some facts. At some point, perhaps in the mid 50’s, only the Corinthian community possessed 1 and 2 Corinthians, and no other Christian community outside their own were aware of their existence (these facts apply to each letter in the corpus).
At some later point, the Corinthian community decided the letters were worthy of preservation (i.e. copying) and sharing.
Some of the other communities that received these letters also thought them worthy of preservation (i.e. copying) and sharing.
At some later point, about when the canon was being decided upon, nearly all Christian communities possessed a copy of 1 and 2 Corinthians or at least knew of them.
The question is, when?
If Mark was written circa 70 AD, and 1 Corinthians circa 55 AD, that is almost twenty years. Did the first copy of 1 Corinthians sit in some home in Corinth gathering dust for twenty years, still remaining unknown to the Christian communities in Ephesus or Thessalonica or Rome? Or is it more likely that within the these twenty or so years the letters of Paul were deemed authoritative and worthy of disseminating?
The next question to ask would be this: by 70AD, how large was the population of Christians? IF it was relatively small, still only a cluster of small communities in urban centers like Ephesus, Corinth and Rome, then we should assume each knew of the other: minorities cannot afford to isolate themselves from one another. This is corroborated by Paul’s letter to Rome, where he is intimately familiar with persons there, despite that he himself had never been. People traveled. Without a centralized postal service, that is how information spread. A Christian from Corinth who had business dealings in Ephesus is going to make a point of exchanging news with the Christian community there (we see this happening in 1 Corinthians 1:11).
Theories like Dr. Ehrman’s envision the early church as something static and insular: a series of disconnected communities isolated from each other. This goes against common sense and the data. Already by 50AD as evidenced by Paul’s letters we see established networks of communication between urban centers.
The gospels are no different; they were not written by hermits. The authors of each had their own network and would have been familiar with other networks. I do not know if Mark was aware of Paul’s letters; I do know that no one knows he wasn’t.
Stephen said
And if Acts was indeed written by the same author as Luke, then then the author of Luke was probably aware of at least some of Paul’s letters.
But then how to explain the contradictions between the personal timelines and doctrines recorded in Acts and Paul’s own testimony in his letters?
First, I am not saying it is probable that Luke would have possessed ALL of the letters; he may not have known of all of them or may have known some he could not acquire.
Second, the plural of contradictions is a bit misleading, no? The most autobiographical Paul gets is in the early chapters of Galatians and it is there that most critics see discrepancies. I at least cannot recall anything in the other texts that create tension, but I may be wrong. And I should note that whereas Acts gives considerable space to Paul’s time in Corinth, when it comes to Galatia, mentioned twice, Paul merely “passes through”. Galatia was apparently not on Luke’s radar; perhaps the author did not have or was not aware of the letter to the Galatians.
Or perhaps the author was not writing modern historiography. A fun exercise for serious students of the bible is to rewrite sections the way you think the author should’ve/would’ve but didn’t, and see if the final product itself tells you why he didn’t. Perhaps it would’ve distracted from a central theme.
brown.connor4 said
The question is, when?
If Mark was written circa 70 AD, and 1 Corinthians circa 55 AD, that is almost twenty years. Did the first copy of 1 Corinthians sit in some home in Corinth gathering dust for twenty years, still remaining unknown to the Christian communities in Ephesus or Thessalonica or Rome? Or is it more likely that within the these twenty or so years the letters of Paul were deemed authoritative and worthy of disseminating? …
These are two extreme ends of a spectrum of possibilities, not two distinct alternatives, either one true or the other.
If your argument rests on the extreme ends being the only alternatives considered and all of the intermediate possibilities being treated as impossibilities, this would be the logical fallacy of false dichotomy, sometimes know as “the excluded middle”.
First, we don’t have evidence regarding how close the version of 1 Corinthians that we have is to any letter or letters written by Paul to an early community in Corinth. Assuming that the autograph is “reasonably close” to the canonical epistles is every bit as much of a speculative assumption as assuming that two original collections of epistles were faithfully copied into Marcion’s New Testament, and that proto-orthodox believers dramatically elaborated upon them in the middle of the 2nd century to create scriptures with authority that would be more resistant to Marcionite views, or that what we have received as two long letters to Corinth are in fact two surviving letter archives where multiple letters are copied into a scroll and the intermediate openings and closing omitted to save paper, representing perhaps 5-10 letters among perhaps 20 letters or more that Paul might have written to Corinth over the years.
Second, if the numbers of believers grew from something on the order of 1,000 believers circa 40 CE to over a million by circa 250 CE, a 40% per decade growth rate, optimistically 5%-10% of believers are literate, 1%-2% can write, 0.1%-0.5% can compose original works that can attract the attention of copyists, then by 120 CE there’s about 3,800 believers, 190-380 readers, 38-76 scribes, 4-20 authors … in 250 CE 50,000-100,000 readers, 10,000-20,000 scribes, and 1,000-5,000 authors.
So, yes, some steadfast scribe in Corinth, copying 1st and 2nd Corinthians for those interested in them over two or three decades, similar to other letters of Paul maintained by other faith communities … and, of course, likely a majority of letters of Paul lost to time … and then collected 80-90 CE into a collection of seven letters of Paul which rescues each of those letters from oblivion because now the scribes in all faith communities tracing their Apostolic founding to Paul have an incentive to copy the collection … there’s nothing any less plausible about that than all of the letters of Paul that have survived being in wide circulation in 70 CE and none of the ones that failed to survive, so that the author of the Evangelion eventually attributed to Luke was familiar with exactly those letters of Paul that survived into the third century CE.
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