Ben C. Smith wrote:outhouse wrote:To support a mythical Paul is to claim anachronisms in the letters, do you ignore this?
Can you give an example of what you mean?
Carrier does a better job, it is where I plagiarized it.
Is Paul the Persecutor an Anachronism?
Another argument attempted to support a mythical Paul is to claim anachronisms in the letters, such as that Paul couldn’t have been allowed under the Roman Empire to prosecute Christians as the letters claim Paul had done. But that is not an anachronism. Until the 60s A.D., by imperial decree the Jews were allowed their own laws (in fact even Romans had to obey some of them in Judea; otherwise, only Jews were subject to them). This was because they allied themselves with the winning side in the civil war (supporting Julius Caesar and then Augustus, in the 50s to 30s B.C.). That was only no longer the case after the Jewish War (66-70 A.D.). I discuss this in some detail, with references, in my chapter on burial law in The Empty Tomb.
There is some dispute whether this agreement was already being altered before the war. For example, the Talmud and the Gospel of John both claim the Jews had lost the right to execute without Roman permission 40 years before the war, but that number, coming only from the Talmud, is suspiciously theological, and the evidence of Jewish trials and executions in the 30s and 40s is more than extensive enough to disprove such a legend; although they may have gotten the date wrong (or Roman permission may have been so easy to get it never even got mentioned). Crucially, Josephus, far closer to the events and the data than the compilers of the Talmud, makes no mention of this development, which is a significant strike against it. He may have been inclined to conceal this. But it doesn’t look so. Even his story of Ananus getting into trouble for executing James refers only to his assembling the court without imperial permission, and it’s unclear which step in that process was a violation, e.g. Josephus may mean that Ananus had not yet received the endorsement of the Roman authorities to be high priest or chair of the Sanhedrin, and in any event the implication is that a court assembled with imperial permission would be, even then, authorized in issuing death sentences.
But that only relates to death sentences, not other sanctions. And Paul does not say he executed anyone. Roman law certainly once allowed Jewish authorities to arrest, try, and execute blasphemers, and limits on specifically executing them were either merely procedural or would have simply defaulted such trials to meeting out lesser sentences. Roman citizens would have been exempt, of course, and also citizens of other non-Jewish polities, and probably any Gentiles (except in certain cases, such as defiling sacred objects). For instance, a Gentile could probably appeal to any court (maybe even a Jewish court) with the defense that they are not even a Jew.
Moreover, Paul actually implies his base of operations was Damascus (Gal. 1:17; 2 Cor. 11:32), which was not always part of the Roman Empire. Paul is otherwise vague as to where he persecuted (he was never in Judea when he was a persecutor, according to Gal. 1:22). Citizens of Damascus may have had the power to appeal to the Damascene authorities and Damascene law to exempt themselves from Jewish arrest warrants, although (a) Jewish inhabitants, like many others, in Damascus, did not necessarily have Damascene citizenship (you did not have it merely by living there), and so would be subject to Jewish law unless the Damascenes banned that and there is no evidence they did; and (b) any Jew who used that tactic to escape would likely be shunned as an apostate, betraying Jewish law, and could no longer associate with fellow Jews—unless their fellows agreed the warrant was unjust. So in Damascus what Paul could or couldn’t do would be a complex political question, and not a cut-and-dried matter of law. Paul implies he was hunted by the Damascene authorities once he converted, which suggests the Damascenes were actually endorsing the enforcement of Jewish law there (against, as they would see it, troublemaking Jews), and thus annoyed when Paul switched sides. The Romans, meanwhile, wouldn’t care, as long as Roman citizens weren’t being arrested, and the Jewish court didn’t overstep its bounds.
So, in general, in this case and others, I find nothing in Paul’s letters to be anachronistic. It is either too vague to be claimed such. Or it is perfectly consistent with the conditions of the 50s A.D.