What You Do To Peter You Must Do To Paul: the forgery question

[dewitness]

As Jay responds, "I think the only evidence for the existence of Paul is the ................ letters attributed to him."

A letter under the name Paul is not evidence at all of the existence of a real Paul when it has already been established that there were multiple authors who used the name Paul.

We have hundreds of examples of forgeries or false attribution in the Canon and other non-Canonised writings.

For example, it cannot be argued successfully that Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, James, Peter, and Jude existed merely because their names are found in the Canon as authors of Epistles or the Gospels.

[Eric]

What evidence is there that we actually have "authentic" or "genuine" epistles of Paul?

What evidence is there that the NT figure of Paul was a real flesh and blood figure?

Surely, that is the first step in this investigation? It is only when that issue is established that the question arises about whether or not such a figure wrote the epistles, or were the epistles attributed to him. Answering these secondary questions leading to further questions on dating the epistles. Seems to me that the cart is being put before the horse in this sort of debate - leading to no forward movement whatsoever regarding early christian origins. A standstill arguing over assumptions...

The NT is a story. It is an origin story about early christian beginnings. It is not a history about early christian origins. Cherry-picking that story, taking any part of that Christian origin story as history, and one is taking the search for early Christian origins into a cul-de-sac. There is a nice sandpit in that cul-de-sac in which all assumption holders can build sandcastles. Yes, sandcastle assumptions can be knocked down by a kick or two - but more sandcastles spring up ad-infinitum. Playing with the shifting sand of assumptions is, in the search for early christian origins, child's play. Serious players in the search for early christian origins have to leave the safety, and comfort, of that NT sandpit behind them. The NT stories are for meaning, for ideas, not for history.

Nice input Mary!

[Duvduv]

I think this issue can be summarized as follows:

1) There is no empirical evidence for the existence of someone named Paul as described in Christian lore.
2) There is no evidence that the epistles were written by a person named Paul in the 1st or 2nd centuries.
3) There is no evidence that the letters were actually received by the communities who were addressed in the letters.
4) There is no evidence that "Christian" communities existed in those places in the 1st or 2nd centuries.
5) There is no evidence that they were assembled from such alleged communities by the orthodox or any other 1st or 2nd century sect such as Marcion or the Marcionites.
6) There is no evidence that the letters were ever distributed or accepted as anything other than a SET together.
Anything proposed by historians is based merely upon variations on biased Church doctrines and upon speculation.

As Jay responds, "I think the only evidence for the existence of Paul is the ................ letters attributed to him."

A letter under the name Paul is not evidence at all of the existence of a real Paul when it has already been established that there were multiple authors who used the name Paul.

We have hundreds of examples of forgeries or false attribution in the Canon and other non-Canonised writings.

For example, it cannot be argued successfully that Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, James, Peter, and Jude existed merely because their names are found in the Canon as authors of Epistles or the Gospels.

[maryhelena]

What evidence is there that we actually have "authentic" or "genuine" epistles of Paul?

What evidence is there that the NT figure of Paul was a real flesh and blood figure?

Surely, that is the first step in this investigation? It is only when that issue is established that the question arises about whether or not such a figure wrote the epistles, or were the epistles attributed to him.

As Jay responds, "I think the only evidence for the existence of Paul is the ................ letters attributed to him."

To me, the first question is whether the epistles are "authentic," whether they are the correspondence addressing real situations written occasionally to real recipients.

Wishful thinking here - based on nothing more than the NT story.

If they are, then "Paul," meaning the writer of such actual letters, existed. We don't need to establish any level of similarity between the writer and some "flesh and blood figure" because the writer of these letters to churches, if they are indeed genuine in their epistolary form, is immediately understood as "Paul," and people who can pick up a writing instrument to send a letter tend to have some flesh and some blood.

Peter, someone, or some people, wrote these epistles. They exist - or at least copies of copies exist. Flesh and blood, real people, are involved in writing these epistles. To name one of the epistles writers as the NT Paul is an assumption without any way to support it. One can't mix reality, someone wrote an epistle, to that someone being the figure of Paul in the NT story.

If they are not authentic or genuine, or cannot be established to be, and if they are only attributed to a person named Paul but are not actually being written in the heat of the situations implied and not actually written to the churches described, then the second question becomes whether Paul existed at all, given that the letters attributed to a Paul are pseudepigraphical.

Peter, that is the first question - Was the figure of Paul in the NT story a flesh and blood person?

The answer to that question can either open up a road forward in the search for early Christian origins - or it can allow research into early Christian origins to become stagnant.

[Peter Kirby]

We're talking at cross purposes, apparently because what I actually said above is misunderstood. That's fine. I don't see that we actually disagree on anything important, so I don't see the point of arguing further.

About the Pauline letters and whether they are authentic, I have posted something relevant in my blog:

http://peterkirby.com/dialogue-concerni ... stems.html

[MrMacSon]

That passage by Origen fits with Michael Hoffman's summary of

The Fabricated Paul: Early Christianity in the Twilight

Hermann Detering (1995)

The Catholic church didn't create the NT books, but redacted them strategically to unite the Petrine Jewish-Christians camp with the Pauline Marcionites (Gentile Christian) camp, resulting in a durable church system. Paul was a reworked Simon the Magician. Simon/Paul had leprosy. Simon/Paul taught gnostic-type anti-cosmos transcendence of and freedom from 'the law' through grace -- such transcendence being 'lawlessness'.

Initially, the Petrine Jewish-Christian camp, or the Petrine Jewish-Christian Catholic Church, tried ways of disparaging Simon/Paul, the proto-Paulines, Marcion, and the Marcionites; Jewish apocalypses so disparage Simon and his anti-law, anti-creator gospel of freedom. But ultimately, the Jewish-Christian camp, or the Catholic Church which forced together the Petrine Jewish-Christian and Pauline gnostic (Gentile Christian) camps, redacted 'Simon' into the Roman-named 'Paul', making the Paul figure compatible with Jewish-Christian faith.

John the Baptist's best follower was the historical Simon of Samaria. Cerdo (in Rome) was a follower of Simon, then Marcion was a follower of Simon after Cerdo. Marcion (from Pontus) doesn't write of Simon (from Samaria), but of Paul. The Roman name 'Paul' means 'small' which the Simonians and later Marcionites mapped to the idea of election by grace rather than law (p. 146). Simon was the "standing, stable, stationary one" (alluding to the timeless unchanging divine realm).

The work involved not invention, so much as redaction of two large groups to hide the fighting between them and pull them all together. Imagine having to join together into an effective congregation the large, popular camps of both Peter and Simon -- redaction of Simon into the NT Paul was needed, to enable this merging of two popular opposed camps. Like the Roman empire, the strategy of the Catholic Church was to forcefully integrate and coercively assimilate those who are opposed, not to annihilate them.

The previous part of Hoffmans summary said

On page 50, Detering summarizes Loman's proposal in 1881:

"Christianity in its origin was nothing else than a Jewish-Messianic movement ... the figure of Jesus had never existed, but represented a symbolization and personification of thoughts that could only make full headway in the second century. A gnostic messianic community later appeared alongside the Jewish-Christian messianic community. In the period between 70 and 135 CE the two groups opposed one another with bitter animosity.

"Only in the middle of the second century did they achieve a reconciliation, in which the gnostic community had Paul as its representative and the Jewish-Christian community had Peter. The result of this process of reconciliation was the formation of the Roman Catholic Church. ... the letters of Paul are all inauthentic and represent the product of the newly-believing, gnostic-messianic community."

[MrMacSon]

The Fabricated Paul: Early Christianity in the Twilight

Hermann Detering (1995)

• Chapter 1
  
  Chapter 2

Links to the rest are here

[arnoldo]

The Fabricated Paul: Early Christianity in the Twilight

Hermann Detering (1995)

• Chapter 1
  
  Chapter 2

Links to the rest are here

Here a review of Detering's views on Paul by JPH.

. . His case against Pauline authenticity is a failure, and shall remain so.
Hermann Detering's Falsified Paul: A Critique

[Peter Kirby]

Here a review of Detering's views on Paul by JPH.

. . His case against Pauline authenticity is a failure, and shall remain so.
Hermann Detering's Falsified Paul: A Critique

"Now even the worst of 'liberal' critics like Crossan and Mack do not even go this far." - JPH

Without double negatives like these, how would we properly evaluate Detering's work?

"To operate against a strong consensus position -- in this case, one which sees Paul as at least the author of seven of 13 letters in the NT, if not more -- requires a great deal of work. Detering has come nowhere near meeting this burden."

He's at least done more to support pseudepigraphy (i.e., something) than JPH has done to promote authenticity (i.e., nothing).

"Most of his objections are pedantic or involve serious conntextualizations."

Heaven forbid that a scholar should take a pedantic approach or seriously wrestle with the contextualization of his subject.

This is a hack job. While there may be something useful in it, by way of criticism of a subset of the arguments used by Detering in that particular JHC article, that's as far as it goes. It does not amount to a careful "review of Detering's views on Paul," nor does it attempt to establish the opposite opinion, that Paul wrote "at least ... seven of 13 letters in the NT," which remains an article of faith.

[dewitness]

The Fabricated Paul: Early Christianity in the Twilight

Hermann Detering (1995)

• Chapter 1
  
  Chapter 2

Links to the rest are here

Here a review of Detering's views on Paul by JPH.

. . His case against Pauline authenticity is a failure, and shall remain so.
Hermann Detering's Falsified Paul: A Critique

You have not presented any evidence from antiquity for early Pauline writings. It is already known that Christians do not accept that their Bible is a compilation of forgeries and false attribution.

J P Holding is a Christian apologist and is not expected to expose that the NT Canon is riddled with fake authors.