THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:
These questions will strike most people as absurd, but they’re taken seriously in a heterodox assessment of the great Christian Apostle by staff writer Adam Gopnik in the April 20 New Yorker magazine. In amusing asides, Gopnik likens Paul’s style to that of Leon Trotsky, the Communist founder assassinated by order of Stalin. And since Frank Capra mused about a movie with Frank Sinatra playing St. Paul, Gopnik nominates rakish Dean Martin as St. Peter.
The article publicizes a book of radical Paul skepticism that to date has won attention on Websites like Myth Vision, Secular Frontier and Gnostic Archive but not major religious periodicals. Still, it’s worth notice for displaying how far modern Bible scholars can go when they totally disregard church tradition.
The book’s deceptively anodyne title is “The Letters of Paul in their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship.” Author Nina Livesey is a credentialed scholar (Ph.D., Southern Methodist) and professor emerita at the University of Oklahoma. The publisher is Britain’s respectable Cambridge University Press. The Guy has not read the book (which costs $110), but the contents are available in thorough articles posted by left-wing New Testament critics.
Dutch Debunking
The attempted debunking of the Paul known to Christians for 20 centuries echoes past hubbub over the “Jesus Seminar,” only one of whose 73 participants contended that Jesus never existed. The Seminar balloted on which words of Jesus in the Gospels were deemed authentic (as this writer covered in a 1988 Time magazine cover story). In the current Seminar follow-up, Livesey leads a panel on the rest of the New Testament. Seminar sponsors promoted her book with an online discussion and called her “the first scholar to present the revolutionary idea that Paul may not be a historical figure.” (Actually, a 19th Century group centered at Holland’s University of Leiden tried the same.)
With Jesus, the Seminar’s assumptions produced conclusions in 1993 that dismissed most of the Nazarene’s sayings. In the Sermon on the Mount, for example, the only fully reliable words were said to be calling God our “Father” and telling followers not to answer evil with evil. Satirists cited Yogi Berra’s “I really didn’t say everything I said.”
Christian tradition believes that Paul wrote the 13 biblical letters that name him as the author (though in some cases with co-authors Timothy, Silvanus, or Sosthenes, or the scribe Tertius). Churchgoers may be unaware that the current consensus at secular universities and liberal seminaries affirms only Paul’s authorship of 1st Thessalonians, 1st and 2nd Corinthians, Philippians, Galatians, Romans, and Philemon. The Jesus Seminar skeptics thought Paul wrote 1st Thessalonians, Galatians, Philemon, and most of Romans, 1st and 2nd Corinthians, and Philippians.
Pseudonyms and Authenticity
Among others, the late Father Raymond Brown, an influential Catholic exegete, thought six were “perhaps or probably not” by Paul: 2nd Thessalonians, Ephesians, Colossians, 1st and 2nd Timothy, and Titus. An evangelical expert, Donald Hagner, also questions the last three because of different style and depiction of a maturing church. The one-volume New Testament introductions by Brown and Hagner [each recommended by The Guy] say if letters used a “Paul” pseudonym (common practice in ancient times) but convey Paul’s beliefs, authenticity and authority remain.
Livesey’s book, by contrast, states that “there is no evidence of the historical Paul,” thus entirely rejecting all material in the letters and the Book of Acts. (Such a working assumption, of course, would eliminate most everything we know about other ancient history.) The Bible aside, Paul’s authorship is corroborated by the references to his life and letters in Clement of Rome (conventionally dated at A.D. 96) and Ignatius of Antioch (before 108). Traditionalists say we know all 13 letters must have originated before A.D. 70 because they lack any hint of Rome’s cataclysmic destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in that year.
Livesey, however, insists “Paul” was a fictional character devised in the 2nd Century sometime after the second Jewish revolt against Roman rule in 132-135, which makes all the letters fraudulent. She proposes that their author was Marcion of Pontus, a prominent heretic the church expelled in 144 because he spurned Jews and (unlike the biblical Paul) rejected the entire Old Testament.
After the Revolt?
In Livesey’s view, the Paul material fits better with the context of the second Jewish revolt than the 1st Century Christian movement it purports to address. Her special contribution is a claim of resemblance between the Paul texts and fictional letter-writing by Seneca in the 1st Century and numerous school exercises in the 2nd Century. Richard Carrier, a secularist and freelance historian, is interesting here. Since he questions the existence of Jesus, he’d be expected to favor Livesey’s disappearing Paul. Instead, he finds it “plausible” but “I just don’t think it holds up as probable.”
Nor is he convinced by her literary analysis. To Carrier, “Paul’s letters repeatedly do not look like Seneca’s and indeed deviate in precisely the ways that contradict her thesis.” As for the school exercises, though 2nd Century examples survived there’s no proof the same styles and practices did not occur in the 1st Century, so no comparative writings disprove Paul’s authorship. Further, Carrier judges Livesey’s comparisons “moot or inept” because Paul’s writings are different, not just letter-writing but combined with religious oration.
If all this rouses interest in whether there’s evidence Jesus existed, even apart from the Bible, there’s this Religion Q&A column: www.patheos.com/blogs/religionqanda/2022/04/did-jesus-exist/
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