{"id":5999,"date":"2026-04-24T11:12:02","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T15:12:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionqanda\/?p=5999"},"modified":"2026-04-27T10:18:40","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T14:18:40","slug":"did-paul-write-the-13-biblical-letters-did-he-even-exist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionqanda\/2026\/04\/did-paul-write-the-13-biblical-letters-did-he-even-exist\/","title":{"rendered":"Did Paul Write the 13 Biblical Letters? Did He Even Exist?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"St.<\/a>
Vatican statue of the Apostle Paul atop St. Peter\u2019s Basilica \/ Tim Mus @ unsplash.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

THE RELIGION GUY\u2019S ANSWER:<\/p>\n

These questions will strike most people as absurd, but they\u2019re taken seriously in a heterodox assessment of the great Christian Apostle by staff writer Adam Gopnik in the April 20 New Yorker<\/em> magazine. In amusing asides, Gopnik likens Paul\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s worth notice for displaying how far modern Bible scholars can go when they totally disregard\u00a0 church tradition.<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s deceptively anodyne title is \u201cThe Letters of Paul in their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship.\u201d <\/a>Author Nina Livesey is a credentialed scholar (Ph.D., Southern Methodist) and professor emerita at the University of Oklahoma. The publisher is Britain\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Dutch Debunking<\/h4>\n

The attempted debunking of the Paul known to Christians for 20 centuries echoes past hubbub over the \u201cJesus Seminar,\u201d 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<\/em> 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 \u201cthe first scholar to present the revolutionary idea that Paul may not be a historical figure.\u201d (Actually, a 19th<\/sup> Century group centered at Holland\u2019s University of Leiden tried the same.)<\/p>\n

With Jesus, the Seminar\u2019s assumptions produced conclusions in 1993 that dismissed most of the Nazarene\u2019s sayings. In the Sermon on the Mount, for example, the only fully reliable words were said to be calling God our \u201cFather\u201d and telling followers not to answer evil with evil. Satirists cited Yogi Berra\u2019s \u201cI really didn\u2019t say everything I said.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s authorship of 1st<\/sup> Thessalonians, 1st<\/sup> and 2nd<\/sup> Corinthians, Philippians, Galatians, Romans, and Philemon. The Jesus Seminar skeptics thought Paul wrote 1st<\/sup> Thessalonians, Galatians, Philemon, and most of Romans, 1st<\/sup> and 2nd<\/sup> Corinthians, and Philippians.<\/p>\n

Pseudonyms and Authenticity<\/h4>\n

Among others, the late Father Raymond Brown, an influential Catholic exegete, thought six were \u201cperhaps or probably not\u201d by Paul:<\/strong> 2nd<\/sup> Thessalonians, Ephesians, Colossians, 1st<\/sup> and 2nd<\/sup> 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 \u201cPaul\u201d pseudonym (common practice in ancient times) but convey Paul\u2019s beliefs, authenticity and authority remain.<\/p>\n

Livesey\u2019s book, by contrast, states that \u201cthere is no evidence of the historical Paul,\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s cataclysmic destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in that year.<\/p>\n

Livesey, however, insists \u201cPaul\u201d was a fictional character devised in the 2nd<\/sup> 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.<\/p>\n

After the Revolt?<\/h4>\n

In Livesey\u2019s view, the Paul material fits better with the context of the second Jewish revolt than the 1st<\/sup> Century Christian movement it purports to address. Her special contribution is a claim of \u00a0resemblance between the Paul texts and fictional letter-writing by Seneca in the 1st<\/sup> Century and numerous school exercises in the 2nd<\/sup> Century. Richard Carrier, a secularist and freelance historian, is interesting here. Since he questions the existence of Jesus, he\u2019d be expected to favor Livesey\u2019s disappearing Paul. Instead, he finds it \u201cplausible\u201d but \u201cI just don\u2019t think it holds up as probable<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nor is he convinced by her literary analysis. To Carrier, \u201cPaul\u2019s letters repeatedly do not<\/em>\u00a0look like Seneca\u2019s and indeed deviate in precisely the ways that contradict her thesis.\u201d As for the school exercises, though 2nd<\/sup> Century examples survived there\u2019s no proof the same styles and practices did not occur in the 1st<\/sup> Century, so no comparative writings disprove Paul\u2019s authorship. Further, Carrier judges Livesey\u2019s comparisons \u201cmoot or inept\u201d because Paul\u2019s writings are different, not just letter-writing but combined with religious oration.<\/p>\n

If all this rouses interest in whether there\u2019s evidence\u00a0 Jesus existed, even apart from the Bible, there\u2019s this Religion Q&A column: www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionqanda\/2022\/04\/did-jesus-exist\/<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THE RELIGION GUY\u2019S ANSWER: These questions will strike most people as absurd, but they\u2019re 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\u2019s style to that of Leon Trotsky, the Communist founder assassinated by order […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1275,"featured_media":6005,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[998,1004,1001],"class_list":["post-5999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-apostle-pau","tag-new-testament-criticism","tag-st-pauls-epistles"],"yoast_head":"\nDid Paul Write the 13 Biblical Letters? Did He Even Exist?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Most churchgoers assume Paul wrote all 13 letters. 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