I’ve been asked this question enough that it warrants its own article to bookmark: why are we so sure Paul’s Epistles were written in the 50s A.D.? Because his letters rarely mention any datable fact, could fit many different periods of history, and have had what would have been their original dates stripped out of them (probably when they were edited together by cutting and pasting numerous segments of various letters into the seven real ones we know; see On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 280 n. 50 and 510-11 with n. 4). So how are we so sure when they were written? The short answer is “we aren’t,” but rather, there is inadequate evidence to argue for any other date than the 50s A.D. The preponderance of evidence weighs only for that decade. And possibiliter fallacies are not valid reasoning; so you can’t argue, “Maybe he wrote some other time; therefore he wrote some other time.” Logic leaves you with only one option: he wrote when most likely he wrote. And that’s that.
The longer answer is more complicated.
The General Case
We are here of course only referring to what mainstream consensus considers the “seven authentic” letters of Paul: 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Philippians, Romans, and maybe Philemon, which have been shown stylistically to probably have been all written by the same author, whereas all other letters attributed to him have been shown to have other authors—see the relevant entries in the New Interpreter’s Bible: New Testament Survey and the Blackwell Companion of the New Testament, and for one of the best modern stylometric studies, see Katarina Laken’s 2018 thesis, An Authorship Study on the Letters of Saint Paul. So we are asking only about those letters. The most basic reason we take the 50s as these Epistles’ most likely date is twofold:
The first prong of reasoning is that the authentic Epistles were written in blatant ignorance of the coming catastrophic Jewish War of 66-70 A.D. and its disturbing lack of any ensuing apocalypse, yet convenient termination of Judaism’s temple cult and occupation of Jerusalem. Even a forger would have employed all manner of prescient predictions and assumptions and retrodicted cautions and explanations regarding that outcome; they wouldn’t write a bunch of letters whose entire point (that the end we must prepare for is coming “any day now”; and that elaborate reasons must be given for Jews to be Christians instead of the more obvious “there’s soon to be no temple, so you have to”; and so on) is deeply undermined by that event. Writers don’t shoot themselves in the foot. They seize opportunity; they don’t blunder over it. There are several other reasons why a post-War forgery of these Epistles simply isn’t plausible and falls to the bottom of the probability matrix of available options (see The Historicity of Paul the Apostle). So the “seven authentic” Epistles most probably predate the year 66.
The second prong of reasoning is that the letters date themselves to roughly twenty years after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus (and whether these correspond to merely believed or actual events is not relevant to the point, e.g. Galatians 1-2:1; cf. 1 Corinthians 15, which says the resurrection happened three days after the crucifixion and was the “firstfruits” of the general end-times resurrection and therefore an event of Paul’s lifetime that can’t have preceded his conversion by very many years); and all pertinent external texts over the next three centuries place that event in the 30s A.D. (whereas the only time we ever hear of it being placed in the 70s B.C. is in the Middle Ages; I’ll get to that shortly). And all external sources that date Paul place his mission in the 30s-60s A.D., from the book of Acts (most likely a post-War treatise: OHJ, Ch. 7.5 & 9.1) and 1 Clement (most likely a pre-War treatise: OHJ, Ch. 7.6; though it could conceivably date much earlier) to every second, third, and fourth century Christian author who mentions the matter (although they may all be relying on Acts).
Even, really, the Gospel of Mark assumes Paul wrote just prior to the Jewish War, as it relies heavily on reifying the Epistles of Paul (see Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles), yet Mark’s text makes little sense being written much more than a decade or two after that War, and cannot have been written more than a lifetime after Paul. Because some of Mark’s content is written as a pressing apologetic reaction to that War and its consequences (e.g. Mark’s fig-tree narrative entails knowledge of, and a desperate need to explain and accommodate, the unexpected destruction of the temple cult without any ensuing apocalypse: see On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 433-36), and it presumes to solve the resulting apocalyptic timetable problem by extending the predicted end-date to the death of the last person on Earth to have been alive in the 30s A.D. (Mark 13), which entails the “problem” Mark has to solve is that it was supposed to have come within or shortly after Paul’s lifetime and didn’t. Had Paul written, say, a hundred years earlier, then that would not be a problem Mark had to solve; that ship would have sailed (and thus been addressed already) two lifetimes before Mark even wrote.
Yes, we have reason to distrust literally every Christian text ever written (see OHJ, Element 44, Ch. 5). For example, the book of Acts so routinely lies about history (see OHJ, Ch. 9) that we can’t really be “confident” that it is telling us the truth about when Paul lived. Likewise anything else. For example, from the Babylonian Talmud, written in the Middle Ages, we learn that at that time in history at least, there were Christians outside the Roman Empire who were placing the death of Jesus in the 70s B.C. (which would entail from internal evidence Paul’s letters had to have been written in the 50s B.C.), a fact alluded to around the very same time in the Medieval Christian Epiphanius’s entry on the Eastern sect of Torah-observant Christianity the Talmud appears also to be talking about (on both points see OHJ, Ch. 8.1). Which means someone fabricated what century to put Jesus in (and thus Paul), either those Medieval Eastern Christians, or the far more abundantly and earlier attested Western Christians. But, alas, the Western chronology is far more abundantly and earlier attested, which is improbable unless it was indeed the earlier dating. The Eastern chronology is barely attested at all, and comes from very late sources of even less reliability, and is peculiarly never attested for hundreds of years. So, the preponderance of evidence falls well toward the Western chronology. Possibiliter fallacies can’t get you out of that ditch.
For other decades, there is zero evidence, so they don’t even get on the matrix (e.g. see Lena Einhorn on the Claudian Christ Theory, whose chronology is pure speculation, and worse, would leave no room for the Pauline internal Epistle chronology to play out before the War). Thus we have a very low probability of a post-War date, a low probability of a 50s B.C. date, and a modest-to-good probability of a 50s A.D. date. Ergo, 50s A.D. wins.
The Aretas Problem
Aligning with this outcome is the only specific datable detail mentioned in Paul’s authentic Epistles: “In Damascus the governor under King Aretas had the city of the Damascenes guarded in order to arrest me” (2 Corinthians 11:32). The Epistles also contain general datable details: their arguments all assume the temple cult is still standing and Jerusalem still populated; that Judea is not in a war (Roman, Hasmonean, or Maccabean); that there is open travel between Judea and the Jewish Diaspora communities in the Greco-Roman world; that Corinth is a thriving city and thus not the ruin the Romans left it as in the 2nd century B.C.; etc. But those are compatible with both a 50s B.C. and a 50s A.D. date. And notably, so is this mention of Aretas.
The question we want to answer here is which Aretas is this? There are only two possibilities that fit any other historical facts to what Paul describes: Aretas the IV (ruler of Nabataea from 9 B.C. to 40 A.D.); or Aretas III (likewise, from 87 to 62 B.C.). The latter would be the easiest fit, as we know for a fact that Aretas III ruled over Damascus at the time Paul would be referring to (the beginning of Paul’s ministry, which would in that case be the late 70s B.C., if he is writing about it in the 50s B.C.). Which incidentally also means if you insist on a second century forgery thesis, you are saddling yourself with the conclusion that that forger thought Paul lived in the 50s B.C., and therefore they also cannot have known or believed Jesus died under Pilate. By contrast, Aretas IV is a more awkward fit, as we don’t have any definite record of Nabataeans governing Damascus at the relevant time (the 30s A.D.). So how could “Aretas” be appointing governors there capable of cordoning the city? There are two theories in the peer reviewed literature (each with its own variant, for four theories in all), and all are plausible enough to leave the matter undecidable.
The first theory is that Aretas IV briefly held Damascus in the 30s A.D. (see “An Anchor for Pauline Chronology: Paul’s Flight from ‘The Ethnarch of King Aretas’ (2 Corinthians 11:32-33)” by Douglas Campbell in the Journal of Biblical Literature 121.2 (Summer 2002), pp. 279-302). Because Josephus reports that he invaded Judeo-Roman territory exactly then, “ostensibly” to avenge a trivial slight by Herod Antipas, though one can doubt that story; it sounds more likely a pretext for an attempt to recapture ancestral Nabataean territory, which included Damascus (and Josephus does mention as an aside that the war also involved a border dispute near the Decapolis, a region including Damascus). Indeed, Aretas was so successful at this he nearly captured Antipas at Gamala. Josephus does not explain why Antipas was so far north (just fifty miles or so from Damascus in fact), and this odd detail lends credence to the pretext theory. In any event Aretas was chased back into Nabataea by the Roman legions of Syria in or around 37 A.D. It is conceivable during these events Aretas briefly had troops in or around Damascus and maybe even controlled it for a year or two. It is, after all, an unusual coincidence that 35-37 A.D. coincides exactly with the Epistles’ internal chronology: that is indeed when Paul says in Galatians 1 he would have been a recently converted Christian missionary in Damascus (if we assume he wrote in the 50s A.D. and his conversion twenty years earlier occurred no more than a few years after the sect began, which is what Paul implies in his account in 1 Cor. 15). The math works out unusually well, and that is less probable by coincidence than by conjunction. So it’s reasonable to conclude Paul is referring to this brief war of annexation under Aretas IV and thus placing his conversion in the 30s A.D. and therefore his letters in the 50s A.D.
This is not a slam-dunk though. And when we consider there should perhaps be some other evidence of this annexation plan and occupation of Damascus, the probability drops; though not enough to rule this scenario out. Because, at the time, the Decapolis, “The Region of Ten Cities,” of which Damascus was one, does not appear to have been an administrative district of Roman Syria, but was an autonomous region of self-governing city-states in allegiance to Rome, some of which at one time or another lost their autonomy and were assigned by Rome to various client kings rather than being annexed to Syria, as Judea eventually would be in A.D. 6 (see “The Decapolis Reviewed” by S. Thomas Parker in the Journal of Biblical Literature 94.3 (September 1975), pp. 437-441). Thus seizing Damascus might not have constituted capturing Roman territory but merely a dispute among border kingdoms. Rome’s interest in such things would be more pragmatic than a matter of honor. This means the capture of Damascus (shifting its governance from one Roman client to another) is not as likely to find mention in Roman sources as is sometimes presumed, nor as certain to raise unappeasable outrage from Rome. It might have done. But the situation is foggy—particularly as all this unfolded precisely as an unpopular emperor, Tiberius, died, and a newly popular one, Caligula, took the reigns with an interest in improving imperial border policy. And the fact is we have very little source material for that region then. So it is not a conclusive point that mention of the event doesn’t survive, making this is a weaker argument from silence than usually insisted.
A variant of this first theory is that in appeasement to the slight Aretas received from Herod, and in reward for his support of the Emperor in recent affairs, and to shore up Roman policy to discourage border kingdoms from allying with the Parthian Empire (then Rome’s greatest Eastern threat), at his accession in 37 A.D. Caligula granted Damascus to Aretas (as other Decapolis cities had been granted at one time or another to other kings), which would make sense on two accounts: it would have maintained a balance of power in the region precisely by maintaining a check on the Herods and securing Nabataean loyalty to Rome; and would bring in every benefit from established Nabataean mastery of trade routes, and their related commercial and diplomatic relations, East of the Empire. Romans frequently traded border cities and territories around to client kingdoms for just these reasons; and as they were more interested in revenue than physical control, if Nabataean governance promised to increase the former without risking the latter, such a move would make political sense. Still, this possibility is again unattested, and though it is perhaps less likely to be attested, it is still is less likely than a siege or occupation during a known war action in the region by none other than Aretas himself. But it does roughly coincide to the same date, and thus benefits from that conjunction, which again would otherwise be an unusual coincidence.
The second theory is that Paul does not mean Aretas appointed a governor over Damascus but what the Greek words Paul chose actually say: an ethnarch in Damascus (see “The Ethnarch of King Aretas at Damascus: A Note on 2 Cor 11, 32-33” by Justin Taylor in Revue Biblique 99.4 (October 1992), pp. 719-728). This is actually a more plausible theory, as it is more accurate to the Greek vocabulary and syntax, and is less likely to have been otherwise attested, so its not being so does not weigh against it. Because we have no sources that would inform us as to such minute details of the exact administrative politics of Damascus (so our not having them is already expected), whereas the general idea involved is demonstrably plausible in context. Damascus had once been Nabataean (until Pompey seized it), and Nabataea was an ally, indeed even a formally recognized client border kingdom, of Rome (ever since they sided with the opponents of Pompey in the Roman Civil War). The Romans typically rewarded submissive client states with diplomatic boons, and allowing Aretas to appoint the ethnarch over the Nabataean quarter in Damascus would be just the sort of “safe” grant of soft power the Romans would use for that purpose: not giving Aretas the whole city, but a power-share within it, coupled with more direct power over Nabataean citizens and trade. In turn, this would facilitate Roman control of what would have been an extensive Nabataean community within Damascus (who might tender more respect to Aretas than Rome). Which was precisely the reasoning behind Rome’s granting of ethnarchies to the Herods in Palestine.
A direct analogy exists in Paul’s own story: the only reason he could “prosecute” breakers of Jewish law outside Judea is that Rome had granted, by treaty, their allied client state of Judea the right to enforce their own laws on their own people, necessitating the appointing of Jewish ethnarchs or the equivalent in diaspora cities like Damascus (Acts may be inventing tales, but it gets the political situation in this respect correct; and though Damascus was not then explicitly Roman, as a client state it could be subject to Roman treaty obligations). The Nabataeans may have won the same rights with respect to their citizens within otherwise-Roman-subservient cities. The exact legalities and politics of that ethnarch serving a warrant on Paul are nowhere detailed, so we can’t speculate beyond this. Acts’ claim that Paul was a Roman citizen may or may not be true; while Rome’s treaty with Nabataea might have granted them the right to try Roman citizens for certain offenses committed in Nabataea; or they might have been forcing their hand by attempting it anyway—just as Acts depicts the Jews doing to Paul in Judea (from which Acts claims Paul is rescued not by a basket but a whole cohort of Roman cavalry).
A variant of this second theory is that “ethnarch” means a tribal leader tasked with hunting Paul down. In other words, Aretas had in effect sent marshals after Paul into Roman territory to serve a warrant on him, and finding him at Damascus, arranged with city officials to post guards at the city gates to collect their bounty. In this event Paul’s Greek should be parsed to read, “At Damascus, King Aretas’s marshal was guarding the city of the Damascenes to arrest me,” which even indeed suggests Damascene self-governance (cities under Rome generally formed their own municipal governments, much like most cities do within nations today). This theory, as with the second, no longer anchors this incident to any date, as an ethnarch of Aretas could be holding office in or serving a warrant at Damascus anytime before Aretas’s death in A.D. 40. But that would at least concur with the external Western chronology and the internal chronology of the letters; and there’s no evidence Paul could likely have been writing, say, a few decades earlier, for example. So the only plausible times are still the 50s B.C. or A.D. And the latter is where the preponderance of evidence leans.
It’s important to note that Paul never does tell us why Aretas or his ethnarch were hunting him. And whether Paul is writing in the 50s B.C. or A.D. we still can’t reconstruct why that would be. It would make more sense for the Judean ethnarch to be hunting him, as a turncoat previously assigned to prosecute Christian heretics as Paul himself claims he was doing—if, that is, Paul would have ended up on the other end of the very legal mission he had originally been sent to carry out. But Paul writes elsewhere about his trips to Judea and Jerusalem specifically as if the Jewish elite had no legal claim on him, and never says he had ever been on a mission from them as Acts imagines, and imagines by falsifying history: Paul himself tells us he had never even been to Judea until long after his conversion, so in his persecuting days he can’t have been on a mission from Judean authorities. It’s thus more consistent with what Paul says to conclude his persecution of Christians was a personal vendetta of harassment and not an assignment; unless he had been working for the Jewish ethnarch of Damascus. But then it makes even less sense that Nabataeans would have any more interest in him than the Jewish authorities would. If we knew more about that, we might be able to have a better read on which Aretas Paul is referring to.
Alas, Paul writes as if the Corinthians already know well the story, and likely indeed he would have told them that story before in person, so here he just alludes to it, leaving us in the dark. Paul implies it had something to do with his commitment to Christianity (he includes it in his list of sufferings for the faith proving his sincerity), so it wouldn’t have been some unrelated matter. But why Aretas or the Nabataeans would care about Paul switching allegiance from one Jewish sect to another is not presently explicable. Acts rewrites this story as being about the actions of the Damascene Jewish authorities; no mention of Nabataeans or Aretas. Either because the author of Acts didn’t know the real story and couldn’t come up with anything plausible other than to replace who the perpetrators were (to suit the running agenda of Acts against the Jewish elite), or because the truth was too embarrassing to relate. Maybe (?) the Jewish elite influenced the Nabataean community to do their dirty work for them by seizing on some opportunity that presented itself to push an unrelated charge against Paul, some crime of interest to the Nabataeans, which Paul then interprets as suffering for the faith, via convoluted political machination. But that’s pure speculation and thus of little use to resolving the historical question.
The only clue we have is that Paul tells us he went to Arabia and then “back” to Damascus (entailing Damascus was his base of operations; possibly in fact his actual home, since Acts cannot be trusted in its claim that that was instead Tarsus). Getting to Arabia (the nation) would have required him to travel through Nabataea; in fact, Nabataea was sometimes regarded as a kingdom of Arabia (the region), and thus may in fact be where Paul meant he went. That he got up to something in Arabia or Nabataea that led to agents of the Nabataean king hunting him down, even into Roman territory at Damascus, starts to sound more plausible in this context. We still don’t know what outrage that might have been (other than that it probably involved some religious offense stemming from his Christian mission). But these coincidences are hard to dismiss. Paul relates having gone to Arabia immediately after his conversion and then returning to Damascus; and elsewhere relates having to then escape Damascus from officials who happen to hail from “Arabia”? Two and two starts to make four here.
Scholars like Justin Taylor have supposed the “ethnarch” (which Taylor establishes did commonly mean sheik or emir, i.e. a tribal leader under the Nabataean king) guarding the city gates cannot have been an extralegal foreign mission, but I am not so sure. Just as today a country will sometimes allow foreign police, under local police escort, to enter and apprehend a suspect of theirs, such diplomatic arrangements would be even more likely in antiquity (particularly if payoffs or exchanges of favors are involved). In short, Aretas may simply have made arrangements with the leaders of Damascus to let his people “get their man.” Likewise if there was an ethnarch of Aretas already in Damascus serving a diplomatic appointment under Roman treaty. Either way, this would make the most sense of the evidence on a Western chronology, particularly if Paul means by “then after three years” he left Damascus for Jerusalem three years after his conversion, not three years after returning to Damascus (both readings are possible on the Greek). His escaping Nabataean bounty hunters by fleeing Damascus would then be the occasion of his going to Jerusalem and never returning to Damascus (as afterward he went generically to “Syria and Cilicia” for fourteen years before even returning to Jerusalem; he never mentions Damascus again). The occasion of his upsetting Aretas would then have occurred in the three years after his conversion during his attempted mission outside the Roman Empire (a mission that appears to have completely failed—we never again hear Paul speak of any congregations there—which does match the theory that something disastrous chased him out).
So for Aretas in the Western chronology, on theory one (whether an unattested occupation or an unattested imperial grant of power) we have an apposite coincidence between when Aretas IV would have dominion over Damascus and the internal and external chronological evidence regarding Paul—it all fits unusually well—which leans probability toward just that conjunction; and on theory two (whether a diplomatic ethnarch stationed in Damascus or sent there to the purpose of seizing Paul), we lack that conjunction, but do have it nearly (Aretas IV died in A.D. 40 so the timeline still fits), and either way this theory possesses even greater contextual plausibility than an unattested siege, occupation, or power-transfer. The combined probability that one of those four theories is true is well high enough that we can’t rule out the Western chronology from this reference to Aretas, and can even argue slightly for that chronology from it. Because a 50s A.D. date fits any one of those theories quite well.
Conclusion
I don’t consider this matter as settled as mainstream scholars do. Paul’s Epistles do fit remarkably well the 50s B.C. “Eastern” chronology. But all the best and earliest evidence, as compromised as it is, weighs considerably toward the 50s A.D. “Western” chronology. Maybe not as decisively as I’d like. But I can only work with what’s most probable. Speculation is idle. It simply isn’t valid historical reasoning to pick as a premise the less probable fact and build elaborate theories from there. Any such enterprise always suffers from that initial epistemic improbability, and there is no point in arguing for what is, in fact, the less probable. There is also no real use in speculating a 70s BC origin for Christianity. It changes very little with regard to, for example, the historicity of Jesus. Whether the tale be that he was crucified by Pilate in Jerusalem under the Romans or stoned by the Sanhedrin in Joppa under the Hasmoneans, it’s still a historical man, or the Euhemerization of a celestial one. Our Gospels and Acts are still so mythical as to be useless as history. And so on. Since currently the preponderance of evidence weighs for a 30s A.D. origin instead, we may as well just stick with that until someone can prove it’s incorrect. And no one yet has.
Thank you for addressing this question. I have studied this issue for years and will briefly comment.
First, I take issue with giving weight to the 50’s AD timeline simply because that has traditionally been the accepted dating. Using a date for a possible historical Jesus as an argument for a post 30’s dating is as tenuous as the likelihood of that historicity; an event which you find to have little plausibility. I don’t want to readdress the reasons to doubt that historicity, since you have already done so far more effectively than anyone else.
Now moving on to historical markers for dating Paul, you went into great detail on his mention of King Aretas and acknowledge that it could have been either Aretas III or Aretas IV. As you noted, the only Aretas for which there is historical attestation for any kind of control over Damascus was in the time of Aretas III who lost his sovereignty in 63 BC when Pompey took it for Rome. The arguments for Aretas IV are all based on conjecture of that which might have happened but for which there is no evidence whatsoever. Given the choice between clear historical data and conjecture, I would disagree with giving the nod to Aretas IV. It seems that it would be arguing from a prior conclusion in order to make him fit. I would maintain that with the only evidence for control of Damascus by an Aretas occurring during the time of Aretas III, it should be given the preference for identification.
Why would Aretas III be after Paul, if that were actually the case? I will address this in brief here. It wouldn’t require the issue to be over Christianity or religion. Politics moves events at least as effectively as religious contention. In the period leading up to the Roman conquest of Damascus, there were two royal brothers vying for the crown of Judea, Hyrcanus and Aristobulus. There was actually a civil war over the issue. One of the factions supporting Hyrcanus for kingship was the Pharisee party (a religio-political party). They provided thousands of soldiers in his army. Aretas III allied himself with Hyrcanus and the Pharisees. After a defeat, the Pharisees found asylum with Aretas III before continuing their fight against the forces of Aristobulus. Aretas joined the fight. During this turmoil, there was a constant shift of fighters from one side to the other, making for political instability which threatened not only Hyrcanus and Aristobulus, but also Aretas III. Negotiations between the parties were taking place in Damascus. When the Romans came into Damascus, both brothers sent delegations to get Roman backing for kingship. Aristobulus won. Aretas lost control of Damascus for the last time. What does this have to do with Paul? Paul self identifies as a Pharisee in Phil 3:5. We shouldn’t simply assume that this indicates that he was a member of the group caricatured in the gospels. Remember, this was a political party in the 1st century BC which fielded soldiers. Paul indicates a three year stay in Arabia (Aretas domain). There is no reason to assume that Aretas, either III or IV, would have been chasing a Jewish preacher in Damascus, but there is every reason to do so for political reasons if Paul had been involved with the Pharisees allied with Aretas III and had been involved in intrigue (changing sides) during the civil war and the negotiations between Hyrcaus and Aristobulus.
Here is an example of the apologetic defense for Aretas IV and its problems:
Christian scholars have always seized on the identity of Paul’s Aretas as Aretas IV and have used that internal historical marker in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians to give him a certain timeline. As such it is the only clear historical marker within Paul’s writings to a specific person known to secular history.
Representative of the need and usage of this historical link for Paul is the following statement:
There are several important characteristics of the ubiquitous apologetic approach detectable in the above quotation:
An assumption is guiding the argument. That is, that Aretas IV must be the person in question since the others lived before Paul’s timeline as well as that of Jesus.
The assumption must be defended because the reign of Aretas is the only chronological link between Paul and a known historical figure.
This chronological anchor is “desperately needed” for the purpose of building Paul’s “entire biographical framework.” No other historical tags exist within the Pauline corpus, and his chronology is otherwise entirely dependent upon a single secondary source, the Acts of the Apostles.
The basic assumption, though, is undercut by an inconvenient fact of history. That is, there was no time when Damascus was known to be under the control of the Nabateans subsequent to the Roman conquest of Syria in 63-62 BC during the reign of Aretas III. From that point forward, Damascus was under the control of Rome and was a part of the region known as the Decapolis.
This fact has not gone unnoticed by apologists. The lengths to which they will go to maintain the validity of the basic assumption is characterized by the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge under the article “Aretas”.
The theory that he doesn’t entertain is that he has the wrong Aretas; that only Aretas III is known to have had control over Damascus, and that ended in 62 BC.
At least he recognizes the conundrum facing his preconception. He lists the most popular conjectures offered to solve the problem, but these various trial balloons are drawn from imagination rather from any historical evidence. The historian is left with the fact that there is no data of any kind which would indicate that Aretas IV had control over Damascus in the first century CE, nor why the king of Arabia would be trying to kill Paul. Christianity in the 30’s CE, if it existed at all, could not have been deemed a threat to the Kingdom of Arabia, enough to cause Aretas to put out a warrant for the arrest of a simple preacher in Damascus. When all else fails, the objective historian must release his invalid preconceptions and examine other possibilities, no matter how distasteful.
Other indicators in Paul’s epistles for a BC dating:
Erastus of Corinth. Corinth was completely destroyed and depopulated by Rome in 146 BC. It lay in ruins for a century. In 44 BC, Julius Caesar ordered it to rebuilt as a Roman colony and a military garrison city housing several legions. The first phase of rebuilding entailed laying streets. A treasurer of the new city of Corinth was a Roman named Erastus. He was very proud of his accomplishments and made certain that everyone knew that he put his own money into the project. A monument to himself has been found, now known as the Erastus Stone. On it is inscribed “Erastus pro aedilitate sua pecunia stravit.” The English translation of the inscription is, “Erastus in return for his aedileship laid (the pavement) at his own expense.”

In his epistle to the Romans, Paul wrote “Gaius, who is host to me and to the whole ekklesia, greets you. Erastus, the city treasurer, and our brother Quartus, greet you.” (Romans 16:23). Paul, in contrast to his portrayal in Acts as the companion of the lower classes, is close to the Roman treasurer of Corinth who also sends greetings to the same acquaintances of Paul in Rome. But does this Erastus differ from the treasurer who paid for the pavement with his own money ca 43 BC? Is it likely that in the 50’s AD there was another treasurer of Corinth named Erastus? It isn’t a particularly common name. Does this suggest that Paul’s friend Erastus was the treasurer in the 40’s BC? The date of this Erastus is inconclusive, but which is more likely, that the street was built during the initial reconstruction of Corinth, or a century later?
The Trip to Illyricum: Illyricum was the name of a Roman province surrounding the northern end of the Adriatic sea. It stretched along the coast roughly from just west of modern Trieste, Italy down the length of modern day Croatia to Dyrrachium in modern Northern Albania (Durres). It encompassed the Istrian peninsula, the coastal islands, and stretched inland to the north into present day Croatia and Slovenia as far as Lubljana and Zagreb) and stretched east into modern Serbia and Bosnia bordering the Danuvius river (Danube). In 59 BCE, the Lex Vatinia assigned this province, or zone, to Julius Caesar as part of his domain of responsibility in the first triumvirate. It attained full provincial status in the mid 30’s BCE as an outcome of the wars of Octavian.
In the letter to the Romans, chapter 15 verse 19 Paul writes
To begin with, it must be noted that the author of Acts is not aware of this journey to Illyricum, just as he was not aware of the three year sojourn to Arabia. It has been exceedingly difficult for scholars to even reconcile a trip there with the journeys claimed by Acts.
The terminology “as far around as Illyricum” hits the ear as a sea voyage. The “around” indicates a navigational context wherein a ship would sail around the tip of Greece or across the Corinthian isthmus, travel up the Eastern coast through the Ionian Sea to the Adriatic, and terminate somewhere along the coast of modern Croatia, perhaps the capitol of Illyricum which was located at Solona (modern Split) or Pola.
The problem with this short travelogue is that Illyricum no longer existed in the mid first century CE at which time Paul’s life and travels is traditionally assigned. There was a bloody 3 year revolt against Rome between 9 and 6 BCE when the tribes of the Daesitiates and the Pannonians attempted to overthrow Roman provincial rule. At the conclusion of the war, Rome split the province of Illyricum into two new provinces, Pannonia to the north and Dalmatia along the coast south and east. The dissolution of the old Illyricum caused that name to pass out of usage. The dividing line was at the head of the Adriatic where the Istrian peninsula joins the mainland to the east, roughly at present-day Rijeka. If Paul were traveling into that region after Julius Caesar took control in 59 BCE and before 6 BCE when the province was split into two, his reference to being in Illyricum would make sense. There was such a place. But if Paul, as dated traditionally, traveled to that region, the use of Illyricum would have been 60 years out of date and non-sensical. He could have said that he traveled as far around as Dalmatia or even as far around as Pannonia if his trip had taken him to one of the Istrian ports, but his use of Illyricum would have been the equivalent of a modern traveler citing a trip to The Soviet Union rather than Russia or Latvia or Estonia.
Is this decisive? No, but along with other direct and indirect historical tags, it helps in constructing a timeline which is consistent with the internal Pauline evidence. Would it better fit a timeline when Illyricum was a Roman province, before 6 BC or is it more likely simply an anachronism?
“Consistent with” is not “evidence for.” That’s a possibiliter fallacy (“Possibly this, therefore probably this”). That’s not legitimate historical reasoning. Legitimate historical reasoning follows the preponderance of evidence; not just whatever you can make fit it.
This is why one cannot argue “it can’t be Aretas IV,” because there are several reasons it could be, and no evidence rules it out, and even some coincidences supporting it (there are no good arguments from silence here, as I point out). And since you can’t rule that out, you can’t “rule in” Aretas III. The preponderance of evidence beyond this point carries.
Whereas to fabricate an entire elaborate narrative for which there is no evidence, is simply not history at all. That’s mythmaking. I do history. Not mythmaking.
It’s only the worse that you are basing conclusions on false facts. Illyricum was established as a Roman province in 27 B.C. as a public (i.e. Senatorial) province then reorganized around 11 A.D. as an imperial (i.e. consular) province, and continued as such beyond the Jewish War. The Oxford Classical Dictionary entry even lists a papyrus military diploma we’ve recovered declaring a soldier’s appointment to “Illyricum” in 60 A.D. And the region was so-called long before and after even that. I have no idea who told you otherwise. The actual borders of the official province changed over time, but it wasn’t until much later it lost that official provincial name. But even after that, as also before the region was made into a formal province, the region continued to be so called. The OCD lists abundant evidence of all these facts. So that datum gives us no information about when Paul wrote.
Likewise the paving stone of Erastus. Even if we assume these are the same person, the job of aediles was principally to maintain roads and facilities, not just build them. Roads had to continuously be repaved. We therefore cannot reliably date any pavement stone to the “founding” of a city. To the contrary, statistically, most surviving pavement stones will be the result of later maintenance (re-paving), not the original laying of the road (this is distinct from milestones, which don’t need to be continually replaced and more commonly date to the laying of the road).
Have you considered the possibility that the fugue from Aretas was a midrash from Joshua 2:15: So she [=Rahab] let them down by a rope through the window, for the house she lived in was part of the city wall.
Note that as the fugue of the two explorers prefigured the coming Joshua in Jericho, so the fugue of the ‘explorer’ from Damascus Paul prefigures the coming of Jesus/Joshua.
The evidence of a historical connection Paul/Aretas would disappear.
Giuseppe
It’s more the other way around: Paul is himself making that comparison. That was common in ancient rhetoric. Many a real event is described with allusion to a comparable mythological event in a shared literature. That’s indeed even how writers like Paul would have been taught to write in school. Consequently, nothing can be inferred from that about historicity. The only detail that doesn’t derive from the allusion is the detail that connects with actual history: that the ethnarch of Aretas was after him. That he doesn’t say why is actually evidence that that really happened; a forger inventing a story would elaborate. Only a real person would leave out all the key details assuming his readers knew the rest. Which means his readers had to be the Corinthians. There isn’t anyone else who could know the story. Not even readers of Acts would (as it doesn’t mention this detail). So there must have been a real story.
When considering the two dates for Jesus’ death, I think you have to contemplate the reasoning for why someone would change the setting for Jesus. If he was born in the B.C. era, it would make sense to rewrite a story for the first century A.D. to help provide context for the fallen Jerusalem temple by associating its destruction with Jesus’ death. Fictional characters usually move forward with the times to become more relevant, not backward. If Jesus was born in the A.D. era, there is really no reasonable explanation for why he would be dated earlier and yet still associated with the supposedly Matthean invention of the trip to Egypt or why Judas’ garden would be “elaborated” on while ignoring the overall plot and setting of the Greek gospels.
If you asked not a Jew but a random Christian on the street if they were aware that Judas was associated with a garden, would they know about it? Probably not. So why does the earliest versions of the Toledot Yeshu know that minute detail but absolutely nothing about Jesus being executed by the Romans? If the Jewish tradition was really derivative of the canonical gospels, then the elaborations would be built on the same content that the canonical narrative focused on. The identification of Judas with a garden serves no narrative purpose in Matthew and Luke other than to invent contradicting explanations to redirect the reader away from an association that already existed. In cases like this, they are such a minute detail in what is a sea of information in the gospels that no one producing a summary of the gospel narrative would bother to include it if they even remembered it. Everything everyone knows about the Apocalyptic warnings of the Son of Man and the discourses between Jesus and his disciples, everything important that the canonical gospels have to say about Jesus is missing or associated with a later apostle.
Which brings me to my next point: modern skeptical critical scholars have posited that Peter and James were never literal followers of Jesus but were only apostles who saw Jesus in visions, just like Paul did, and that they were only symbolically transformed into disciples in the fictional gospel world. But the modern skeptic model of Peter and James both being Christian leaders who only became famous after Jesus died and never knew him in life is actually the exact same model provided to us by the Toledot Yeshu tradition. Is it really a coincidence that the earliest Jewish interpretation of the chronological relationship between Jesus and the apostles is identical to the modern skeptical interpretation despite the actual dating, setting, etc. of Jesus to be inconsistent? It seems more likely they were not aware that the Greek gospels turned the 12 Apostles into the 12 Disciples.
Here are some other reasons I think can be added towards the evidence towards a B.C. dating:
Mara Bar Serapion dates the execution of the Wise King by the Jewish authorities — not the Romans — to just before the fall of the Jewish kingdom. This matches not only the Talmud/Toledot but also references in 1 Thes. 2:14-16 and Gal. 3:13 which posit Jesus being executed by Jews according to Jewish law. Although most scholars appear to have interpreted this as being the fall of the Temple, three warring rebel factions that were put down within a few years would in no way be understood as a “kingdom”, which means he can only be referring to the Hasmonean kingdom.
Matthew 28:12 seeks to explain how a known story was devised claiming Jesus’ disciples stealing his body, a story Justin is aware of in the mid-second century (Trypho 108). Tertullian then refers to the same story as well and adds that he is aware of a variation of the story in which the gardener stole the body. This gardener reference proves that he is talking about the Toledot narratives, which likewise include a massive library of variant material comparable to the gospels, including late versions that have anachronistic gospel elements added in.
Biblical scholar Delbert Burkett, in his groundbreaking work, From “Proto-Mark to Mark”, posits the idea that the Synoptic gospels and Stephen’s trial in Acts of the Apostles used a “Sanhedrin Trial Source”. Burkett points out that this lost source tradition portrayed Jesus as being executed by fellow Jews without Roman assistance and could possibly be related to Jesus in the Talmud. Separating the “Sanhedrin Trial Source” from the gospel context also solves the problem of how the Sanhedrin could have been expected to be assembled at night since the Toledot context has Jesus being captured and tried during the daytime.
Thomas 52 says that there were 24 prophets, not 12 disciples, who spoke about Jesus. A suggestion made by Jesus Seminar scholar Robert Funk is that this refers to the 24 books of the Old Testament, but the books are not divided by one prophet per book. More likely it refers to the 12 apostles mentioned in the New Testament plus 12 earlier apostles from the first century BCE mentioned in the Toledot as “bad offspring of foul ravens”, who came and taught after Jesus’ 5 disciples were killed.
In Mark 8:19-21, Jesus asks the disciples the exact numbers involved when he broke 5 loaves for 5,000 people, leaving behind 12 baskets, and then broke 7 loaves for 4,000 people, leaving behind 7 baskets. By asking his disciples to focus on the exact numbers, the gospel author presents his readers with a specific numerological puzzle. The number 12 presumably refers to the 12 apostles. The number 7 more than likely refers to the 7 Grecian Jewish “table waiters” downplayed in Acts 6:5. This would leave another group of 5 who would have needed to appear before the 12 apostles, which can only be the 5 disciples of Jesus from the Talmud and Toledot. The 5 original disciples taught 5,000 people and were broken (martyred), but they left behind 12 Apostles. The 7 Grecian Jews taught 4,000 people and were broken, but 7 more will rise where they fell.
I agree with Price that Corinthian creed interrupts the continuation of thought from verses 15:2 to 12, but even with the creed in place, Alvar Ellegard noted in “Jesus: One Hundred Years Before Christ” that the revelations do not need to be connected in time with the resurrection (16), and I think G.R.S. Mead made a good point in “Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.?” that a sudden outbreak of persecution immediately after the crucifixion seems out of keeping with Paul’s references to an extended “persecuting” and “wasting” of the Church of God in Galatians (119n1). The “firstfruits” likewise seem connected to the revelation. I’m not aware of anyone making the argument that Paul lived or was made to live in the B.C. era, although strangely enough, I have been looking into the Aretas problem because Aretas III did look like a better fit to me and I was wondering if this might be related to Paul inheriting story elements from Simon Magus, who according to the 14th century Arab historian Aboulfatah also lived in the first century B.C. along with Dositheus (Mead 363).
But the problem I always had with equating Paul with Simon Magus was that Simon Magus’ character seemed to be more in line with first century B.C. Jesus who learned magic in Egypt than with the itinerant preacher-sailor writing letters of evangelization to different ports of entry. That character seems to be far more in line with Peregrinus, who shares a lot of story elements in common with Paul:
According to Lucian, Peregrinus had a woman bribe her way into spending the night in his jail cell just as Thecla did in the Acts of Paul and Thecla. Peregrinus was originally from Parium in Mysia, which the spirit of Jesus strangely demands Paul not to visit for no explained reason (Acts 16:7). Like Paul, Peregrinus was violent (1 Tim. 1:13), having killed his father. Like Paul, his conversion was in Syria (Acts 9). Like Paul, he collected money from Christians (2 Cor. 11:8) but got in trouble with those Christians after eating forbidden (non-kosher) food (Gal. 2:12). Like Marcion, there was a question as to whether he would get money donated to the Church after he was kicked out, with Tertullian saying the money was refunded but Lucian saying it wasn’t. Peregrinus is said to have bought his citizenship while Acts makes it a point to say that Paul did not (22:28). Peregrinus was stoned in Olympia, forcing him to take sanctuary in the Temple of Zeus, similar to how in Lystra Paul is honored by a priest from the Temple of Zeus before being stoned by Jews from Antioch and Iconium (Acts 14:12-19). Peregrinus was referred to as the New Socartes (12), while Acts implies Paul is the new Socrates by having him debate the Epicureans and Stoics before being paraded to the Aeropagus just as Socrates was when he was put on trial (17:16-34). Peregrinus got sick from the winds while Paul is said to have suffered through a storm near Cyprus (27:4). Paul is shipwrecked, which might be based on the story of Valentinus being shipwrecked on Cyprus (Epiphanius 2.7.1). In Acts 19:24, part of the “we” section where “Luke” speaks in first person, there is a riot against Paul and Luke started by one Demetrius the silversmith, whose idols were dedicated to Artemis, but in 2 Tim. 4:14, it is a man named Alexander the Metalworker who does Paul and Luke harm. Alexander of Abonoteichus, the follower of the famous Apollonius (as the Apollos of 1 Cor. is referred to in an alternate text), is reported by Lucian to have received many bronze and silver idols and that he shook his unkempt hair like the devotees of Magna Mater, who was equated with Artemis of Ephesus. Alexander’s followers were said to have shouted “Out with the Christians!” just as Demetrius the silversmith’s crowd shouted “Great is Artemis of Ephesus!” to get the Christians out the city. And as Price points out, an alternate reading of 1 Cor. 13:3 reads, “If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing,” (ESV) which Price concurs is a reference to the fiery suicide of Peregrinus (Pre-Nicene 357), although he sees Simon Magus as the stronger link to Paul. Stephan Huller has made similar connections between Peregrinus and Polycarp while Neil Godfrey has written about the parallels between Peregrinus and Ignatius, which has led me to believe that much of the epistle forgery of the second century and beyond was originally connected to Peregrinus.
Indeed, I discuss that in Ch. 8.1 of On the Historicity of Jesus. The simpler reason is just political milieu: Eastern Christianity was not under the Roman Empire; Western Christianity was. Each moved Jesus to the most politically relevant timeline (Eastern, in the wake of the Seleucids; Western, under the Romans). But your proposal can fit that just as well too.
Note that if Jesus didn’t exist, he was dated independently. It is not that Eastern Christians moved the date from the 30s AD; they simply created the date that resonated for their mission, while Western Christians did the same on the other side of the border.
But even if Jesus did exist, there would be as much reason to relocate him chronologically in the East as in the West, because a Roman provenance had no political relevance to them, and thus would not be a relevant myth. They were dealing with a Rabbinate under Hellenized Parthian urban environment; so their myth was directed more to a Rabbinical pre-Roman milieu. We even have a fragment of their reasoning inserted by Epiphanius into his section on the Nazorians (the original Torah-observant sect, the same sect the Babylonian Rabbis would be talking about).
Obviously it isn’t. They’ve never heard of it. This is because the Babylonian Talmud was not composed in the Roman Empire. It was composed in the Neo-Persian Empire (and its content on this point may originate under the preceding Parthian Empire). Nothing of a Roman milieu had any relevance to Christians there. Western church authorities started dominating there by the time that Talmud was being written up, and might have brought with them and started enforcing the Western chronology, but evidently the authors of the Talmud there were either uninterested in this newfangled mythology or had yet to come into contact with it.
I don’t see anything significant about coinciding a Judas with a garden. I think you are drawing a lot of non sequiturs there.
I have no idea what you are talking about here. The “earliest” Jewish interpretation can only be reliably dated to maybe the 4th century. That’s hardly “early.” And it contains no references to Jesus being met only in visions. And if differs on disciples by only mentioning five or seven of them instead of twelve, which can be for any number of actual reasons unknowable to us (e.g. these may simply be the apostles that really existed and thus actually had a relevant impact to record, as opposed to a “mythical” twelve, or any council of twelve which might not have been all that important at the time; or they may be reacting to an Eastern Gospel that only gives mythic activities and thus any “history” to a subset of the twelve, just as the Western Gospels do; and so on).
Note this could simply be an Eastern document responding to an Easternm myth. It therefore affords no evidence of that myth being true. Even if we granted all your arguments, which is already a stretch. Even Western Christians routinely blamed the Jews for killing Jesus, not the Romans (just see the interpolation in 1 Thess. 2 for a prominent example, which can only be a Western post-70 statement; though Gal. 3:13 does not say the Jews did the killing, it rather says the death satisfied a scripture, which could be believed on any account, so this passage cannot distinguish between either). So the author of this document is not guaranteed to have understood such nuances. He’d just repeat what Christians were going on about; not meticulously research the minutiae of their Gospel narratives. And that’s even assuming he’s even referring to Jesus. The text nowhere says it is. This has long been pointed out: we can’t even establish this document is even referring to Christianity at all.
Because he is using Matthew. That it first appears in Matthew means it did not exist when Mark composed. So it’s a late legend. Therefore of no use here.
Note the Toledoth is late medieval. It therefore incporporates myths and legends abundantly from several traditions. It does not represent anything claimed or supposed when the Talmud was written.
There is no basis whatever for saying “most likely” here. Speculation in, speculation out. GIGO.
The rest of your comment repeats that same fallacy over and over and over. This is invalid historical reasoning.
Although the Toledot and the Gospel are obviously radically different stories from one another, they do share common story elements that cannot just be dismissed as coincidence. The Flight to Egypt, magical healings, a traitor who identifies Jesus to his enemies, and the theme of the gardener moving the body, which is what Mary Magdalene expected happened in John, and the “Field of Blood” that is associated with Judas in Matthew and Luke so as to tell the reader, no, it was not Judas who hid Jesus’ body in that bloody field, it was Judas who died there, or maybe he bought it using his blood money. Likewise, the Flight to Egypt, which is also in the Talmud, is more central to the plot in the Toledot as that is how he acquires his magic. By instead having Jesus go there as a baby instead, Matthew has implicitly denied he could possibly have learned anything while he was there.
You are definitely wrong to say that the Toledot only refers to five or seven disciples instead of the Twelve or that the more famous apostles (Cephas and James, not just Paul) appear only after Jesus has died and thus only see him in visions. There are Twelve Nazarenes who appear 30 years after his death (Life of Christ 4.4, Zindler 401; Life of Jesus 9, Zindler 443). Cephas then appears after them (Christ 4.14, Z 402), sometimes claiming to have “heard a voice from heaven” (a.k.a. a vision) (Jesus 12, Z 447). Either before or after, an Elijahu (4.46, Z 406; Jesus 10, Z 444) appears, who is sometimes identified with Paul, and sometimes there is also “Nestorius”, who is responsible for the “Not one iota will pass from the law” (Jesus 11, Z 446) quote from Matt. 5:18, which makes it appear that he is meant to be the third of the famous gospel trio, James.
You also say “That it first appears in Matthew means it did not exist when Mark composed” when I did in fact explain to you how Mark did refer to the 5 disciples from the Jewish tradition of Jesus. You always demand that anyone who ever talks to you read your 700-page book first so it would be nice if you actually made it to the end of this relatively short post before falsely accusing me of “repeating the same fallacy over and over and over” when it is clear you actually didn’t bother reading past that point in order to have the information to make that false accusation. Otherwise you would have amended your statement to say I was wrong about Mark rather than act like I never made an argument for the story being referenced by Mark. You likewise dismiss the idea that Paul in the second century A.D. without addressing any of the comparisons linking him to Peregrinus, which should not be too radical if Neil Godfrey, who I know you respect, has made similar comparisons between Peregrinus and Ignatius. You really are no different than anti-mythicists in the way you make armchair dismissals without even bothering to read what you are dismissing, or you know, check the sources before accusing me of being wrong about something I clearly have far more knowledge of than you do.
Do you think you could spare us your constant shoulder-patting that you are the only person doing history? Like Bart, I was originally going to thank you for being one of the few people to actually bring up the question of B.C. Christianity for a serious discussion, but at this point I have to wonder why you bothered writing this article in the first place as it should have been immediately obvious that you were not going to like any responses from anyone interested enough in the article to write a substantive reply. I was fully expecting to be completely disappointed in your predictably contemptuous response to my comments. Were you expecting better from us? You using the term “mythmaker” really brings it home. I would have thought you had put up with enough bad “mythicism mythmaker” puns from anti-mythicists throughout the years to go with that label.
Um. Coincidence? The Toledot is a medieval construct. It’s informed by multiple influences, including Western Gospel stories diffusing East, and the Babylonian Talmud diffusing West. This is literally hundreds and hundreds of years of time. We cannot imagine it was isolated in context to only the Nazorian Gospels. This is why you cannot act like the Toledot is what the Talmudic Rabbis are talking about. It is not. It is essentially useless for reconstructing any Christianity of antiquity.
I am talking about the Talmud. Which long predates the Toledot and was produced outside the Roman Empire. You are the one incorrectly confusing the two.
No, I expect people to be informed. If they want to be informed, they have to read the pertinent peer reviewed literature.
I write things so I don’t have to repeat myself a thousand times. Like all scholars do. Stop expecting scholars to repeat themselves for your convenience. If they have already covered a subject, you are obligated go read what they already wrote. That’s why they wrote it. Unless you expect to pay me my hourly rate for a consult.
Your then desecending into a bunch of childish complaining does not bode well. You are not here acting like a scholar who actually cares about learning or understanding anything, rather than blindly pushing your pet theory.
I said that Matthew references the Toledot story of Jesus’ body being stolen in relation to the resurrection claim and that Mark references the five disciples from both the Talmud and the Toledot using the numerological riddle 5->12;7->7. You responded that because Matthew references it and not Mark, the story could not be from Mark’s time, which itself is an argument from silence. I accused you of not reading my post completely because just a few lines down from the Matthew reference, I made the argument for Mark knowing the Talmud/Toledot tradition, and that responding so negatively without reading the full comment is hypocritical for someone who demands their readers read your book before talking to you. And your response to that is you don’t want to repeat yourself, ignoring the important part about Mark’s gospel for the second time. Obviously the point was not you should stop telling people to read your book first. The point is to expect of yourself what you ask of others. Assuming you didn’t skim over the sentence immediately preceding the one you quoted, I would take that as an implicit admission that you are criticizing arguments you didn’t bother reading.
So let me ask it a third time: If you don’t think Mark knew the Talmudic tradition, then do you have a better interpretation for what the numerological puzzle in 8:29 of 5 loaves with 12 left over and 7 loaves with 7 left over?
Then there is your ridiculous comment that I was the one confusing the Talmud with the Toledot. Who do you think brought up the Talmud and the Toledot in the first place? You? My original post said “But the modern skeptic model of Peter and James both being Christian leaders who only became famous after Jesus died and never knew him in life is actually the exact same model provided to us by the Toledot Yeshu tradition. Is it really a coincidence that the earliest Jewish interpretation of the chronological relationship between Jesus and the apostles is identical to the modern skeptical interpretation?” Not “the earliest Jewish reference to Jesus”. The earliest Jewish interpretation of the chronological relationship between Jesus and the apostles in the Toledot, the document I was talking about in the sentence and in the paragraph immediately preceding the one you quoted. You are the one with a reading comprehension problem.
It’s funny that you’ve defended using profanity in a scholarly article in the name of keeping it real but me criticizing your open hostility to anyone who tries to make a case for the B.C. dating that you yourself brought up as an arguable possibility in your article is what you deem to be unprofessional. Well, that’s hardly surprising. “Blindly pushing your pet theory” is a laugh riot coming from you. What was that you were saying earlier? “Come out of the closet! Because there isn’t a closet any more! But only if you agree with me on everything! If you have any ‘pet theories’ or original ideas, then I don’t have to even read them to know they’re garbage. You’re not doing real history, but all those dismissive historicists are wrong when they say the same thing about me!”
If you actually cared about questions in regards to dating the earliest stories involving Jesus or Paul, you would be responding to the details of the arguments, like why you don’t agree with the correlations between Paul and Peregrinus, not finding new ways to insult your commentators. My original post is still up there if you want to prove me wrong.
This is not a correct account of our argument. You keep mistaking things I said of the Talmud as things I said (but did not say) of the Toledot.
The Toledot is Medieval and influenced by both traditions and thus cannot be treated as independent of even all four canonical Gospels, much less Mark or Matthew. And the material you are arguing from is not in the Talmud, apart from the number of disciples being five, which is (yet that does not come from Matthew, as it names them “Matthai, Naqqai, Netzer, Buni, and Todah” and otherwise bears no resemblance at all to Matthew’s narrative you are referring to). So you have no evidence that can place it any earlier than the late medieval Toledot parody. This is my point and you keep ignoring it.
This is a non sequitur. There is no ancient evidence of what he intends; and you cannot use late medieval legends from polemicists against Christianity as evidence of what a Christian meant many hundreds of years earlier. The numbers 12, 5 and 7 had all manner of symbolical meanings then, particularly in Judaism, and none of the examples of Christian exegesis on them actually from antiquity evince anything you are talking about.
The rest of your comment is simply ignoring everything I actually said and instead complaining about my reaction to your ignoring or getting wrong everything I said. Which tells me you have no actual argument here. Just specious pattern matching that disregards the chronology and context of different texts and symbolisms, and that grasps no concept of how to falsify a theory or test it against alternatives, indeed that exhibits no effort whatever to even find out what the competing theories in ancient (or even medieval) Christian exegesis or contemporary peer reviewed literature even are (e.g. as to the possible numerology intended in Mark).
Lazy scholarship is not scholarship. Non sequiturs are not logic. And the late Middle Ages is not Christian antiquity.
You claim I gave an incorrect account yet you failed to respond to my very specific explanation pointing to where you got confused, nor did you provide a quote in which I supposedly confused the Talmud for the Toledot, so your first paragraph really just amounts to the words “nu-uh”.
Yes, I acknowledge that you believe every detail of the Toledot not taken from the gospels is Medieval. You can stop saying that now. I still think it is a satire of a lost Jewish gospel, which explains why many details do in fact predate the canonical gospels. Price and Zindler have made the same claim. Price writes in “The Pre-Nicene New Testament” that “the huge amount of ‘testimonia’ or proof texts from the Old Testament marshaled to prove Jesus was the Messiah would be off in a work that began as a lampoon of Christian messianism, all the more since none of these proof texts is ever refuted… Finally, Matthew ends with a comical counter-satire about the fate of Jesus’ corpse being stolen, just as we find in the Toledot. Thus, the Generations of Jesus belongs in the Matthean cycle as a close cousin” (239-240). And Zindler writes in “The Jesus the Jews Never Knew” that the “accounts in the synoptic gospels of Judas’ betrayal of Jesus have never made much sense. Why would the authorities need to have the sign of a traitor’s kiss to identify a man who supposedly had been haranguing crowds and was known to all — especially when he was in a small group of thirteen men? If, however, he was in a group of hundreds (as frequently is alleged in various Toledot versions) and all were dressed alike, a special sign would indeed be needed. Is is very likely that this version more authentically preservers the pre-gospel story…” (390n). As I pointed out in the first post, Price also links the alternate reading of Paul delivering his body to be burned in 1 Cor. 13:3 to Peregrinus (Pre-Nicene 357), although he sees the Simon Magus link as the stronger.
Thanks to the recent realignment of interests, you’re even walking back your attacks against Freke, so I doubt you are going to try to use the same insults against Price and Zindler as you do against me. Thus if you actually do address this (a big if), I predict you will forego your previous loud declarations that anyone and everyone who attempts an early dating of the Toledot elements is not doing real history and instead try use very generic language to split those hairs and somehow say Price and Zindler are wrong but still doing real historical scholarship while my very similar arguments towards the same conclusion are lazy non-historical non-scholarship — without explaining why of course.
You said the Talmud is independent of the gospels but they both have the Flight to Egypt. In the Toledot, Jesus learns magic in Egypt but in the gospels he is only taken as a child to show that he was too young to learn anything. Just as with Zindler’s reference to the traitor’s sign, the Toledot reason for the Flight to Egypt appears to be the more original version. Like the Flight to Egypt, the story element of the body being stolen to prove the resurrection mentioned in Matt. 28:13 is more central to the overall plot of the Toledot. Justin and Tertullian corroborate the story and Tertullian adds the related alternative version of the story found in the Toledot in which the betrayer/gardener is the one to move the body. Tertullian could not just be basing this off of John 20:15 because he is using the reference in an attack on Jews in particular and there is no reason to assume Jews would have read John 20:15 that way or be interested in that particular verse all together. Rather, both John 20:15 and the references to the “Field of Blood” in Matthew and Luke are instead making a reference to the story of betrayer/gardener also being the owner of the Jesus’ gravesite. As I said in my first post, it would be very strange for Jewish writers to latch onto tiny story elements like the Flight to Egypt or the Gardener Moving the Body while ignoring the vast majority of the gospel’s story structure.
It is hard to decipher what you mean by “…apart from the number of disciples being five, which is (yet that does not come from Matthew…” but the names of the five disciples are given in Sanhedrin 43a (Zindler 440n; Schafer, Peter, Jesus in the Talmud, 75-76) and even if they weren’t, “five disciples B.C.” is all one needs to use it to answer the numerological riddle in Mark. Whether you agree with my interpretation of the riddle or not, it doesn’t make sense to call it a “non-sequitur” if it attempts to show evidence that the Gospel of Mark is actually a sequel to an earlier lost narrative about the B.C. Jesus. I didn’t say the five disciples were related to Matthew, but I did say the Toledot having Cephas only know the risen Jesus sure seems like some remarkable Medieval higher criticism if it was based on nothing but an interpretation of the full New Testament.
It’s funny that you say I put “no effort whatever to even find out what the competing theories in ancient (or even medieval) Christian exegesis or contemporary peer reviewed literature even are” because that’s what I thought I was doing by asking you. I of course have looked into the question using sources other than you. I have written a reply criticizing L.W.M. Countryman’s attempt at answering the puzzle in terms of Jesus’ power levels in “How Many Baskets Full? Mark 8:14-21 and The Value of Miracles in Mark.” and would be happy to send that to you, but I somehow doubt you’re actually interested.
I’ve also read the 400-page scholar’s edition of the Toledot edited by Michael Meerson and Peter Schafer and worked at trying to get English translations from the untranslated Toledots in the database that comes with it. I won’t bother asking if you’ve read it because the answer to that is already obvious. You say I’m the one doing lazy scholarship, but I’ve been the one referencing scholars and you’ve been the one ignoring them.
You are just stacking speculation on speculation. Your endless resort to these petulant wordwalls is not scholarship. I already explained this, and why, and you simply ignored me and tried picking a pointless fight over something I didn’t say. This is a waste of our time.
I will try one more time, with an example, of my point from comment one, relating to your last:
The Talmud does not have Matthew’s flight to Egypt; it contains a completely different story, set in a completely different historical context. We therefore cannot show any connection between them other than a common impetus, found in all Gospels, to parallel Jesus to Moses. Anything beyond that is speculation and not fact.
As for what is in the Toledot, that can tell us nothing whatever. Because it is too late, polemically engineered, spans both West and East, and none of its sources are known. And you can’t “invent” a version of the Toledot in the centuries-earlier Babylonian Talmud to bootstrap its content to an earlier century and Eastern provenance, because invention is not fact. The Toledot uses the Talmud as one of its sources; not the other way around. And the Talmud is already early Medieval and thus of minimal use at best for reconstructing first century Christianity, as I correctly explained under peer review in On the Historicity of Jesus chapter 8.1.
If you think you can make a sound case for something more than that, get it published under peer review. Then send me the offprint. Until, then, I am not interested in pointless speculations.
Although I do sympathize with scholars who view 1 Thes. 2:14-16 as an interpolation, tradition holds Paul dying in 64 or 67, so it is hard to understand what a forger taking the role of the canonical Paul would have been thinking to give himself away so obviously. It’s possible the forger did not happen to know any legends of Paul’s death but I think a better explanation is that the original author of the epistle was not following the traditional concept of Paul. Paul is supposedly a former Pharisee but I agree with Hyam Maccoby’s “The Mythmaker” that the interpretations found in the epistles do not reflect traditional Jewish thinking (Maccoby 62-71). Valentinus claims to have been a disciple of Theudas, who personally received secret teachings from Paul, but how could that story possibly have been believable if Paul had lived a century before Valentinus? Irenaeus pulled off a similar claim of being taught by a disciple of John by pushing Jesus’ crucifixion to the 50s, making John a young man at the time of Jesus’ death, then claiming John taught Polycarp as a child, who likewise grew to an old man to teach Ireaneus as a child. Did Valentinus use similar rhetorical tricks to make this chronology plausible?
It seems more likely to me that the author was originally believed to have been a Hellenist who lived in the second century, like Peregrinus or Elijah ben Abuyah, a Hellenist heretic who is identified with Paul in some versions of the Toledot. Thus, he could make a reference to Hadrian conquering Jerusalem being God’s wrath against the Jews without it being an anachronism or a incongruity to later revisions of the Pauline corpus showing acceptance of Torah values. Elijah ben Abuyah was said to have helped Hadrian’s repression of the Torah by helping the Romans force enslaved Jews to violate the Sabbath laws (Jerusalem Talmud Hagigah 2:1). Scholars who argue for a single interpolation limited to 1 Thessalonians, saying that other Pauline epistles do not show similar anti-Jewish sentiments, ignore Galatians 5:1-12, where the author, identifying himself rather suspiciously as “I, Paul…”, says that Christ does no good to the circumcised and that he wished Torah-observant Jews would go all the way and castrate themselves. He even appears to be aware of a tradition of another Paul who is preaching circumcision to mitigate the complaints of James’ Jewish Christians (Gal. 5:11; cf. Acts 26:3; Price, Amazing 430). Later harmonizing editors then decided to make their own sect more acceptable to Jewish Christians by giving Paul the more pro-Israel attitude found in Romans 11. I think these editors belong to the same Church of Peter in Antioch who supplied the Antioch Source that starts at Acts 13 and was known for trying to take the middle path between Paul’s Marcionites and James’ Ebionites (Gal. 2:12-14). The conflict between Paul and the Ebioinites, epitomized by the story of a seeming attack on James by Paul found in Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions 1.70-71 (Eisenman 529, 588-589) was then relegated to Paul’s pre-conversion past as that of a Pharisee repressing all Christians (Price, Amazing 415). His reference to Jews being the ones to execute Jesus in my estimation is not a glossing over of Roman responsibility because of a later interpolated gospel tradition of Pontius Pilate washing his hands but rather an older tradition of Jesus being executed under Jewish law in the first century B.C. By setting Paul so far in the past and forging different epistles going to different locations across the Mediterranean Sea allowed for a narrative that the church held older traditions than their competitors and quickly spread across the empire in the first century.
That is based on no information, though. So it has no use as history. Even the connection of Paul with Nero appears to be a legendary fabrication; and even that does not date his death. Whereas 1 Clement says Paul died in Spain, and Clement is the earliest source, and a contemporary of Paul.
This is based on assuming forgers even knew this. The idea of Paul dying under Nero was a late fabrication, post-dating the interpolation. We also have many chronological errors in Christian literature (such as Irenaeus thinking Pilate served under Claudius), so we cannot trust the interpolators even understood the relevant chronology here.
This is only legend, however. We have no evidence it’s true. We have these details not even from these men themselves, but even if we did, they could easily have simply made this up, just as everyone else invented fake pedigrees to the other “disciples.” It can also be a telephone game error (e.g. “follower of Paul” meaning his writings not the man, becoming in confused transmission, “disciple who actually met Paul”). I discuss the frequency of these kinds of things in my article on similar bogus claims surrounding Polycarp.
If Valentinus studied under Theudas at age 20, that would be circa 120 AD. It Theudas was then 80 (the oldest plausible), he would have been 20 in 40 AD. He could even have been a traveling companion of Paul’s. If Theudas was then 60 (a more common age to survive to), he would have been 20 in 60 AD. Ample time to have studied under Paul. I am skeptical any of this happened. But we can’t argue against it on this ground.
He well could have. But we can’t really say we “know” that he did.
By no possible means could anyone have ever believed Paul was alive in 140 AD, so this seems to be directly contrary to your point.
Are you instead proposing the line was a scribal marginal note that became accidentally incorporated? That would be more plausible, i.e. someone adding the note, not intending it to be the voice of Paul, and a later scribe accidentally mistaking it as omitted text and “reinserting” it, thus inadvertently creating a false statement from Paul.
That’s still not something we can claim to “know” happened. It’s one of many ways the interpolation could arise. All we can prove is that it was an interpolation; not specifically how, or who added it, or why, or what they knew about any of this.
Incorrect. There Paul says “if you let yourselves be circumcised,” i.e. he is dissuading Gentiles from converting to Judaism. He is not talking about anyone already a Jew. There were reasons of internal politics for this (converts were effectively declaring allegiance to the factions against Paul, and in result he would lose financial and political support within his churches).
Paul’s only point there is if you convert, Christ then cannot help you in the way Paul’s mission claims, because you have to then obey the Torah law to be saved. This does not mean Paul taught Jews were not saved; rather, he is saying here, that Jews to be saved had to both keep Torah and accept Jesus, whereas Gentiles have it easier, as they only have to do the latter. This is Paul’s argument to the Galatian Gentiles to not convert to Judaism (it is clear some Torah-faction Christian missionary had come to try and convert them; this is the internal politics of the church Paul is contending with). This affords no parallel to the interpolated remark in 1 Thess. 2.
Incorrect. Gal. 5:11 is saying he doesn’t preach circumcision. His argument is “How can I be preaching that? If I were, I wouldn’t be persecuted; I’m being persecuted, ergo I can’t have been preaching that,” all in apparent response to those missionaries who must have told the Galatians Paul was okay with their mission to convert Christians to Jewish Christianity; Paul is here refuting that fib.
Acts is revisionist history; nothing it says is credible (see OHJ, Ch. 9).
The rest of your comment is just a litany of increasingly improbable speculations, given that there is no evidence for any of it. The more elaborate your theory, when the elements are all unevidenced, the more improbable it is, not the other way around.
As I should have assumed, you refused again to explain why you reserve your over-the-top insults for me and not Price or Zindler. Instead you just cowardly implied that they’re cranks by saying that the arguments that we share are not worthy of consideration.
If I told you that your book wasn’t scholarly because it’s nothing but speculation, you wouldn’t consider that a very informative criticism, would you? Then why do you think giving such generic criticisms yourself is any different?
And you are so against associating Matthew’s Flight to Egypt to the Talmud’s that you deny it can even be referred to as a “Flight to Egypt”. Well, Peter Schafer sees the obvious relationship (Jesus in the Talmud, 20), not that you would know since you don’t bother checking the scholarly literature on the subject while simultaneously falsely accusing me of the same thing. Are you going to try to tell me (or rather, imply) that the top scholar on the Talmudic and Toledot Jesus isn’t a real scholar and doesn’t understand historical chronology?
I guarantee if I did get my theory peer reviewed, it wouldn’t matter a fig to you, although it is really cute to see you trying to pretend the peer review process is authoritative when reading a peer reviewed article that you disagree with. You obviously wouldn’t care about peer review if it wasn’t your major selling point for why people should buy your book instead of other mythicist books. You adopted Doherty’s hypothesis even though it wasn’t peer reviewed but was only in Price’s Journal of Higher Criticism, and my theory has also been published there.
The story about how you originally thought mythicism was a crank theory is obviously taylored in Pauline fashion to put historicists on your side the same way an anti-Christian turning Christian proves how good that belief system is once you give it a chance, but it certainly strikes me as typical of your current know-it-all dismissive attitude that’s very similar to the anti-mythicists I talk to. When I first started reading and writing on higher criticism 20 years ago, I saw the dying-and-rising gods as highly relevant yet ignored, and I certiainly understood that relationship to increase the chance of Jesus not existing, but I still ultimately believed that there was no solid proof that “mythicism” (what I would call Docetism) was older or more authentic than Adoptionism. Nevertheless, before I adopted this similiarly unpopular theory in early 2005, I had always respected mythcism and never considered it a crank theory. But the fact that your first response to an alternative dating for Jesus is to assume it to be proof of a nonexistence displays an obvious case of begging the question. Although I ultimately disagree with his conclusion, I think Zindler’s approach to taking the Talmud and Toledot traditions seriously (even more seriously than the Biblical tradition) and working to disprove the first century B.C. Jesus using specific arguments is a far more scholarly approach.
From reading your article, it looks like you sent your Historicity book to four Biblical scholars of your own choosing and only needed two to sign off on it, is that right? I was under the impression that you don’t get to pick your reviewers in “peer review”. I certainly didn’t get to pick my reviewers when my Masters thesis on the development of Biblical mythology was looked over. If that is the case, two Biblical scholars of your choosing giving a thumbs up is not that big a deal. I would much rather see you find one expert with a PhD in Mathematics to say you are using Bayes Theorm correctly and that the numerical conclusion of 1 in 12,500 for Jesus being mythical is definitively not a case of GIGO. Is that really the chance you think of there being a historical Jesus? Although I personally do not think that any Jesus relveant to Christianity was crucified in the first century A.D., I would still say those kinds of off-the-chart odds disproves the relevancy of your number crunching rather than backs you up. I think that’s why you tried to slip in the crisp secondary percentage of 33% to make it seem more reasonable, but if you had to massage the data to give it the best chance for historicity possible, then that number is also worthless.
Both your conclusion and the reaction to your book disproves your obsession over peer review authority. If the vast majority of peer reviewed literature in Biblical scholarship has been assuming a falsehood that only has a chance of 1 in 12,500 being true, then the peer review process by Biblical scholars can’t also be assumed to be a good method to regulate quality information. And it should be obvious that if most Biblical scholars think your theory is garbage, then the 2-4 Biblical scholars who reviewed your book must not be representative of the Biblical scholarship community.
This is just childish behavior at this point, Jeff. I’ve explained myself more than adequately. And you continue to act like this. Grow up.
Okay, Richard. Of course you haven’t explained why the same exact arguments that supposedly make me an unscholarly hack who doesn’t understand historical chronology do not elicit the same response when used by Price, Zindler, or Schafer, despite me asking three or four times now. You’re obviously evading. You could have just admitted you overstepped in the confidence of your opinions but instead you doubled down and continued to use that language, basically acting like your opinion is the only one that qualifies as scholarly. You thought you knew something about the Talmud and the Toledot but you never bothered reading the scholarship on it so you just assumed I hadn’t either because you didn’t like my opinions and now that you know I’m far more well-read on the subject than you, you’re clamming up.
If anything is childish, it’s wading into a very long historical argument that has an extreme deficiency in sources allowing for certainty, causing most scholars to submit multiple probable conclusions, and pronounce your particular answer to the problem to have a 99.99% chance of being correct despite you originally believing that same answer to be so unlikely that it could be safely ignored. I think Atkins is the only other person assuming that kind of certainty. I would place Allegro’s Mushroom Jesus as having better odds than 1 out of 12,500.
Yes, I have explained this. I have explained it to you now more than once. I have explained what you are doing wrong and how it is fallacious. And that has nothing to do with what anyone “else” does. You are just not paying attention to anything I said, and instead acting like a crank (“But I’m doing the same thing Galileo did! So are you now criticizing Galileo!?” and other emotional rhetoric rather than anything actually logically pertinent). If that is the choice you make, I can’t help you. You have selected yourself out of any real scholarly discussion.
If you want to get back to something real, get something published under peer review and send me the offprint. Otherwise stop wasting my time and take your crankery, childish ad hominems, and specious rhetoric elsewhere.
That’s an interesting form of DoubeThink. You claim to have an answered a question multiple times about why you think that positing a lost Jewish gospel influenced the Talmud and Toeldot is not crankish when Price or Zindler suggested it but it is crankish when I refer to it, or why its crankish to refer to Schafer, a highly respected scholar on the Talmud and the Toledot that the Talmud is aware of common element of the Flight to Egypt, something you never bothered mentioning when you made the claim that the Talmud has no knowledge of any elements from the gospels. And you managed to answer that question without having to refer to people the question was about or even mentioning their names. Just like I predicted, which I told you, and then you did it anyway.
As to your repeated suggestion that I get peer reviewed, my answer is: You first. Give me one citation of a mathematical expert who says your use of Bayesian statistics is legitimate. I looked and I haven’t found one so far. Funny how all the people who have actual degrees regarding the mathematical formula you are using are either “cranks” or for some mysterious reason have sided with the “cranks” over you. Sure seems like everyone is a crank but you. Funny that.
My Bayesian methods passed peer review twice (and no, we are not allowed to know by whom; peer review is typically in the blind, although the editors who also signed off on it are known persons with relevant qualifications), including a professor of mathematics as well as a professor of biblical history (as I required by contract for Proving History), and multiple professors and PhDs in biblical studies (in the process of developing and publishing On the Historicity of Jesus). It has also passed peer review multiple other times as used by other scholars (I cite several examples in PH and OHJ; and discuss another in A Test of Bayesian History: Efraim Wallach on Old Testament Studies).
So, nice try.
Worse, this is a non sequitur. This has nothing whatever to do with whether you have a viable theory that would pass peer review. As that in no way requires any such method. And I never criticized it here using that method. So you pulled a stunt here, to try and denigrate my work childishly and irrelevantly, as if that somehow made any pertinent point here. It does not.
I have told you the simple fact is that you are confusing different texts produced in different periods and contexts and attempting to deploy that confusion to advance a theory for which you have no evidence but just stacks and stacks of unproven speculations. If that were not true—if you had real evidence, using any real method accepted in the field—you could get this published under peer review in a legitimate academic journal. So, go do that.
Until then, stop wasting everyone’s time here.
If you are so concerned about scholarly peers, maybe we should poll a large number of Biblical scholars and ask them what they believe is more crankish: the belief that Jesus lived during a time some late Jewish sources placed him, or that you correctly used a mathematical formula to prove with with 99.99% certainty that Jesus did not exist.
Um. Now you are proving yourself an ignoramus. I did not prove “with 99.99% certainty that Jesus did not exist.” I found that probability to be as low as 67%. That you don’t know this, confirms you are just a crank who doesn’t know anything whatever about my peer reviewed work—and chooses instead to dishonestly pretend to.
As to whether scholars who actually have reviewed the evidence will think it more likely Christianity indeed began in the 30s AD under the Roman Empire with revelations of Jesus, based on multiple peer reviewed works on the point, or was some completely different guy in a different century and empire, based on crank amateur speculations from late medieval polemics, I can assure you, if that’s their choice, their choice is going to be obvious.
Of course you can’t really poll someone as to their opinion on this who has never even properly read the latest peer reviewed literature on this subject—which is my On the Historicity of Jesus and Lataster’s Questioning the Historicity of Jesus. For if they have not read it, they cannot have an informed opinion of the case. But this is even more true for a theory that you can’t even get published under peer review, much less multiple times by multiple scholars.
Apologies for the repeated double posts, but there’s one more point I think I need to make. If you did not know the peers who reviewed your book, and if these peers were random and not purposely chosen by your editor for being more likely to be sympathetic to your work, and if you do agree with me that the majority of Biblical scholars have an entirely irrational negative response towards the Christ Myth Theory, then do you also agree that you were incredibly lucky for your book to get through peer review?
The point of blinding peer review (and requiring peer reviewers to give clear and accepted reasons for rejection or requirements for acceptance) is precisely to minimize such biasing. So no, it’s not luck. The peer-review system is designed to reward solid peer-satisfying work, even of a controversial nature. This is very different from the public face of a field, which is governed by wanton biases and peer pressure. The peer review system was invented for precisely that reason. So go. Get your theory peer reviewed. Act like a real scholar.
There is more than that.
“Aretas” in Hebrew is the exact anagram of “Esther”.
Esther is compared often to “moon”.
Now, Jericho means “city of the moon”.
Mere coincidence?
That’s just a bunch of random trivia. It connects to nothing. So, yes, it’s just a coincidence. Like any random jumble of words.
Of course I know about the alternate 67% probability because I wrote about it in the comment just before the last one. The fact that you don’t know that I already mentioned it proves once again you are not really reading my comments, which is why you have been misunderstanding my arguments about the Talmud and Toledot from the very beginning. As I already told you in that post, you have been very clear that the 99.99% figure is the “realistic” one, the one “closer to what [you] honestly think those probabilities are”. The second formula is “the most favorable to historicity as [you] can reasonably be”, with the emphasis on you being the person who decides what is “reasonable”, so you can basically massage the data any way you want without actually having to be responsible for defending any of the decisions you make in doing so. You thus end up with two formulas, one with a dataset you approve of but the conclusion is preposterous, and one with a dataset that you admit is not realistic but with a conclusion that looks a lot more acceptable (if not suspiciously rounded out), which you can quickly substitute whenever you feel like you can’t actually defend the first one, like now.
Yes, it is a non-sequitur, one that you are fully responsible for since you’re the one who brought up peer review twice as a means to attack my credibility. You were even the one who first brought up GIGO as if I’m supposed to be using my information in your formulas for the argument, then replied to another commentator about using your formula towards a B.C. Jesus dating. To complain that I can’t turn the exact same questioning back on you is ridiculous and shows you have no ability to detect your own hypocrisy.
As for the peer reviewer with a PhD in Mathematics who concluded that the formulas are being used legitimately and can attest to your datasets not be a case of GIGO, I am legitimately interested in knowing more about him or her. Is there a name or maybe an article or statement from this person? So far, the only professional responses from the mathematics side I found were negative, and I’m very intereseted in reading a positive take from a Bayes expert.
As for the part of scholars thinking “it more likely Christianity indeed began in the 30s AD under the Roman Empire with revelations of Jesus”, you know full well that is not what I said. You did not invent mythicism and I did not invent the idea that Jesus lived in the previous century. I have already said that, unlike you, I fully respected the Christ Myth Theory when I first heard about it, back when I was a first century A.D. historicist (and in fact, unlike you, I was absolutely flabbergasted when I first found out it was generally considered to be a crank theory by Biblical scholars). Even without using the Talmud, the Toledot, Mara Bar Serapion, and other references that I’ve cited as evidence, Alvar Ellegard dated Jesus to the first century B.C. based on the Dead Sea Scrolls (which in my opinion is the least valuable evidence in terms of Jesus although good evidence for proto-Christianity). Ellegard was recognized for contributions to peer-reviewed New Testament journals so that should put to rest your complaints about peer review. I think you would agree that most Biblical scholars do not like either idea, but I am fairly certain the majority of them would consider Mead or Ellegard’s theory to be less radical than a mathematical formula proving Jesus’ non-existence with a 99.99% probability. And that figure is yours as much as you are trying to run away from it now.
I see not a single relevant statement here. Just another pointless, fallacious word wall, addressing nothing I actually said, ignoring everything I did say, and pretending you didn’t say what you did.
This pretty much sums you up. And it’s a waste of everyone’s time.
We’re done here. No more comments of yours will be published in this thread until you publish a peer reviewed paper establishing your thesis to cite.
What numbers would you give the relative probabilities of Paul’s letters being from the 50s BC vs AD? Eg 10 to 1 in favour of 50s AD? Or 100 or 1000 to 1?
Thanks.
I haven’t run the numbers. Anything 2 to 1 against or more isn’t worth the bother of even calculating in a case like this.
Anyone really intent on calculating that for some reason, is advised to follow the procedures I outline in On the Historicity of Jesus and Proving History for multiple hypotheses.
For example, ~h, minimal mythicism, or mm, can be split into 50s AD mm and 50s BC mm (which equate to origins in 30s AD or 70s BC, respectively), e.g. ~h1 and ~h2, since I make no distinction between those two hypotheses, because which one is correct is not relevant to historicity; then you have to apportion the prior probability space between them, and justify the apportionment with some relevant frequency evidence (unless you apply an indifferent demarcation of 50/50), and then list every item of evidence producing a differential likelihood for them, estimating an a fortiori and a judicantiori boundary for each, and completing the equation. And if you started with an indifferent prior, you have to do this with every possible item of evidence with a differential likelihood (as nothing can be left out of b or e; they have to sum to all pertinent human knowledge).
While I feel that there is no way, just using the letters alone, to prove that Paul was writing in the 1st century BCE or even the 1st century CE, I have come to the conclusion that a Paul being a participant in the civil and other wars of the 1st century BCE to at least be a workable possibility.
My reasoning goes something like the following. Say Paul, and some others like ‘Petros’,1 are members of a military outfit in some place like, Syria for instance. When Pompey is making demands of client kings in the East for auxiliary troops, Paul is sent with his outfit to Greece to fight on the side of Pompey against Caesar.2 Paul and some of his auxiliary unit like ‘Petros’, are members of a Christ cult, and, while mingling among the regular troops of Pompey and the other auxiliaries, Paul and other Christ cult members of his assembly introduce this Christ entity to some of the Roman and Greek Gentiles there. Some of these Gentiles then become followers of this novel Eastern Christ cult.
Caesar defeats Pompey and absorbs Pompey’s armies into his own while sending Paul’s auxiliary unit back to Syria, or, whatever their place of origin. Not long after, Caesar restarts the polis of Corinth as a veteran settlement colony seeding it with his own veteran troops as well as former troops of Pompey, some of which have been introduced to the Christ cult by Paul and friends. We in this way now have Roman and Greek house assembles of the Christ cult in Corinth.
Later, Brutus and Cassius, in their civil war against Octavian and Anthony, once again make troop demands of the East and Paul and his auxiliary unit are sent, this time, to Macedonia. Again, in this way, Roman and Greek Gentiles are introduced to Paul’s Christ cult. This time the retired troops are settled in the cities of Philippi and Troas after the war, with some of Paul’s Roman and Greek Christ cult followers ending up in those cities with other Gentile members of the cult possibly returning to the city of Rome.
While we know that auxiliaries were returned home by Caesar after his war with Pompey, we have no information that I know of as to the fate of auxiliary units under the Liberators. Paul and members of his auxiliary unit could have remained in Macedonia and Greece at this time. No real way to know that I am aware of though. Further information on this would be very welcome.
All that I can say however is that the above scenario allows for valid reasons for a 1st century BCE Paul to be in places like Illyricum, Macedonia, and Greece and allows for a Christ cult to become established in the Roman veteran colonies of Corinth, Troas, and Philippi as well as in the city of Rome.
A Paul in and around Thessalonika, and therefore, Gentile Christ cult followers there also, is reasonable to this theory.
Some passages in the letters that suggest the above scenario to me include:
*1: 1 Thessalonians 2:1-2 “For of our entrance in among you, brothers, you yourselves know that it has not come about in vain; Rather, having previously suffered and been insulted in Philippi (as you are aware), we were bold in our God to speak God’s good tidings to you amid a considerable struggle.”
This seems like it could be a reference to conditions surrounding the camp of Brutus when it was besieged by the forces of Anthony, with Anthony’s army shouting insults at the troops of Brutus, trying to goad them into battle before the supplies of Anthony ran out.
2: 1 Corinthians 15:6 “Thereafter he was seen by over 500 brothers at one time, of whom the majority remain till now, though some have fallen asleep”.
500 men being about the size of a normal military cohort in the late Republic.
3: Philippians 2:25 “But I deemed it necessary to send you Epaphroditus, my brother and fellow worker and fellow soldier, as well as your Apostle and attendant to my needs”.
4: Philemon 1:2 “And to Apphia, and to Archippus our fellow soldier, and to the assembly that is in your house”.
5: 2 Corinthians 1:8-10 “For I do not want you to be ignorant, brothers, regarding the affliction that came our way in Asia: that we were placed under excessive pressure, beyond our power, of such a kind that we despaired of living; But we held the sentence of death within ourselves, so that we should be trustful not of ourselves, but of God who raises the dead: Who has rescued and will rescue us from so great a death – in whom we have hoped that he will rescue even yet”.
Most modern English translations of the above passage have ‘province of Asia’ in place of the original Greek ‘Asia’. Asia being all of the territories east of Asia Minor, Syria, and the Levant. If this is a reference to the disastrous campaign of Mark Anthony against the Parthians in 37 BCE then we have another event placing Paul in the later half of the 1st century BCE.
The above examples, while perhaps suggestive, can not in any way be considered proof of a pre-CE Paul, but when one makes the paradigm shift of a mid 1st century missionary Paul to a mid to late 1st century BCE participant in the events surrounding the civil and other wars of that period, some of the perplexing language in the letters seem to make a little more sense. And while a case for an Aretas IV being in control of Damascus can be made it is still a historical fact that Aretas III was in control of that city except when Tigranes II took control of it between 72-69 BCE. Is this time interval the one mentioned by Paul as the three years following his return from Arabia until his need to escape, for whatever reason, when Aretas III regained control of that city? Numerous scholars have opined that the only dateable event in Paul’s letters is the Aretas reference, but if this is so then we as historians really need to go with the only historical reference available to us, being the Aretas III reference, as that is the only Aretas that we can say was in control of Damascus regardless of the implications for a mid 1st century Paul. Aretas IV in Damascus is speculation, Aretas III in Damascus is fact.
Now if we posit a Paul around the age of 20 (pulling a number out of my butt a la Rodney Stark) escaping Damascus in 69 BCE we have a Paul in his 30s through his 50s for the civil wars and campaign against Parthia and in his mid 40s through late 60s for letters written between 44-19 BCE (reestablishment of Corinth through the end of the Cantabrian war). Timeline wise anyway it could work.
One final observation. When Paul is writing to people in Rome, a place that he obviously has never been, asking for assistance in his plans to travel on to Spain, could this be a reference to the last BCE war effort of the Republic? The Cantabrian war of Augustus? If so then it would seem to fit in with the timeline so far proposed. According to our (imaginary) age timeline for Paul, Paul would be getting a little long in the tooth at this point but it would still be feasible for him in his late 50s to participate in that campaign.
Anyway, no way to prove any of this but it is fun and a great way to study the history of the period. Paul in the 1st century or 1st century BCE regardless, all that this illustrates is the impossibility of assigning a historical Paul (core or otherwise) to any timeline with any certainty. This is what makes it an interesting challenge historically and why attempts at a definitive timeline for Paul must be viewed with skepticism and mistrust. And we haven’t even addressed all of the possible interpolations and editing that many, including myself, feel that making interpretation of the letters somewhat problematic, even the so called authentic ones.
Here is a cheat sheet for my BCE Paul:
https://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5464&start=40
A few more thread links of conversations concerning this theory if you’re interested:
https://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5464
https://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5446
https://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=3889
1: Petros is not a proper name in Greek and as far as I know is usually a reference to a slinger in the ancient literature.
2: Paul need not be an actual combatant as he could instead be a camp follower; a tent maker perhaps.
I personally feel a Paul as combatant being the best fit however, especially with the fellow soldier references and his rather lengthy list of disciplinary punishments and marine mishaps, but anything is possible.
*Note: I am using The New Testament by David Bentley Hart for quick simplicity as the English translation of the Greek by him is very reasonable for our purposes here. If clarification is desired however I would prefer using The Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts by Philip Wesley Comfort and David P. Barrett or the actual photographs of those texts. The photographs being the final word in my opinion.
Alas, speculation is idle.
I agree, facts are preferable. Let’s, by all means, consider some facts.
Most of the letters, those considered authentic (1 and 2 Corinthians and Philippians), are to Roman veteran settlement colonies established in the mid to late 1st century BCE. Settled with veterans of the Eastern and civil wars of that century. A third, mid to late 1st century BCE, Roman veteran settlement colony, Troas, is mentioned in the letters as well. However, important mid 1st century cities like Pella, Smyrna, and Pergamon are conspicuously absent in the letters, possibly because they had no Roman troops or retired Roman veterans. Just Antioch, Athens, and Ephesus are mentioned, all, main areas of Roman troops in Greece, Asia Minor, and Syria under Anthony. Thessalonika is right next to Philippi and was the seat of Roman administration in Macedonia and an important military port for the Romans.
Pompey, Cassius and Brutus, and Mark Anthony, all did use auxiliary forces recruited from the East in their civil wars in Greece and Macedonia. This fact alone guarantees a Jewish presence in these areas in the 1st century BCE. A Jewish presence that seems to be lacking in the archaeological record of that area for that period in time.
To the best of my knowledge, no Jewish synagogues date to these areas earlier than the 3rd century CE, making the claim in Acts somewhat problematic as an historical account.
Paul refers to “Fellow soldiers” and while it is certainly possible that Paul could have been a soldier in the 1st century CE, his chances of this goes way up in the previous centuries. Especially one in Asia, Asia Minor, Greece and Macedonia, one that finds himself wanting to go through Rome to Spain.
I would point out that Paul finding himself in Illyricum during the civil wars is much more likely than just happenstance in the mid 1st century. My opinion, but there it is.
I would further point out that whoever wrote 2 Timothy was careful to use the correct name of the Provence as it was known in the 2nd century and while relying on the nomenclature of the Provence in the 1st and 2nd centuries is without doubt a dead end, it is interesting nonetheless.
Paul talks about a harrowing experience in Asia where he and others with him despaired to death. Asia in this time period were the areas comprised of Armenia and Parthia as well as further east. This would be consistent with Mark Anthony’s disastrous attempt at Parthian invasion in 37 BCE.
Not the only solution obviously, but suggestive.
Aretas III was in control of Damascus except for the three years that Tigranes II of Armenia had the city. There is no evidence of Aretas IV having any influence in Damascus and area, at any time. Further, retired veterans of Rome having fought in the East in the 1st century BCE would have no need to have an Aretas III explained to them as opposed to an Aretas IV of the mid 1st century CE, a relative nobody, especially to Greeks and Romans living in Corinth without the histories of Josephus to consult.
Paul talks about going to Spain with just a stopover in Rome. Not much reason to do that in the mid 1st century, but for a Paul looking for work after the civil wars, very good reason at the end of the 1st BCE.
Just some food for thought. Really, without the account in Acts, Paul writing to Roman veterans of the civil and Eastern wars of the 1st century BCE just seems a better match to me than a Paul being in those areas “just because”. And while a Paul in the areas of Asia, Asia Minor, Greece, and Macedonia in the mid 1st century is absolutely possible it should not be the only considered scenario in my opinion. A Paul in the 1st century BCE opens up a very interesting line of inquiry. One that I feel could unlock some of the confusing aspects of early Christianity.
Of course, YMMV.
I think you are confusing some things here.
Paul frequently talks about his reasons for going places and the dangers he encountered. Never are they military in nature. So we can be sure war and military service never played any part in Paul’s adventures. There are many other examples establishing the same conclusion (e.g. in his argument over whether the Corinthians should feed him in 1 Cor 9, the fact that he takes a military salary never comes up, as either an argument he had to rebut, or a response he could make to bolster his point that he nevertheless didn’t take a stipend from his churches).
Corinth and Philippi and Galatia and Thessalonica (and Ephesus and Athens etc.) all long predate Roman settlement. Roman settlements were all over the place. Whereas Rome is the only distinctive Roman city Paul writes to. We also don’t have all of Paul’s letters, so we cannot say where he did not write to; nor would he endeavor to write to every community he had a congregation in (these are all occasional letters prompted by controversies sent in letters to him).
Paul wanted to preach to the whole world. So “there is no reason to do that” makes no sense of him. He went wherever he felt called. Moreover, he says he plans to go to Rome and then Spain for the gospel, but decided instead to go to Jerusalem first for religious reasons. Plainly there was no military service calling him to Spain, or anywhere else. It was just a place he planned to go someday; and we only learn that he eventually went from 1 Clement. Every point here is clear in Romans 15:20-29.
You are then confusing finding physical structures with the date of their actual appearance (we rarely find the earliest versions of things intact, much less in major cities which have been continuously occupied and thus never fully excavated), and confusing physical structures with the communities they serve (synagogue simply means “congregation,” just as church, i.e. ecclesia, simply means “assembly”; they are essentially synonyms; and most such were held in open air or temporary structures or people’s homes, thus leaving no traceable archaeology). The evidence of Diaspora communities all over the Roman and Greek world prior to the first century is vast. And wherever there was one, there had to be a synagogue in some sense, just as everywhere Christians worshiped there had to be a “church.” So no archaeological argument from silence can get a different result here.
Diaspora Judaism began in the 6th century BC. That is when the Jews scattered to other cities to make settlements, fleeing the destruction of their country (and this continued after every conquest; while trade and family ties added more every century; likewise when those enslaved were sold off everywhere). They continued to emigrate and build enclaves all over the world, long before the first century. Example: Alexandria didn’t even exist until created by Alexander in the 4th century BC, yet within a century it had one of the largest Jewish communities in the world outside Judea. The same happened in every major city. Centuries before either date we can place Paul. So nothing can be discerned here as to the date of Paul.
Finally, military analogies are a staple of Christian discourse, especially in Paul. It had no actual connection with any real military. It is rather the cooption of war dialect to a pacifist enterprise, spiritualizing it. I discuss this, with examples, in one of the chapters in Not the Impossible Faith.
Hi dr. Carrier,
what do you think about the idea that the entire “Paul” idea is contained in nuce in the same idea of Saul:
1 Samuel 9:21:
Saul answered, “But am I not a Benjamite, from the SMALLEST tribe of Israel, and is not my clan the LEAST of all the clans of the tribe of Benjamin? Why do you say such a thing to me?”
1 Samuel 15:17:
Samuel told him [=Saul] “Although you were once SMALL in your own eyes, did you not become the head of the tribes of Israel? The Lord anointed you king over Israel.
Paulus means: “the LEAST one”.
Add to this the curious coincidence that, after the biblical Joshua, the biblical Saul was the first ‘anointed’ (=messiah) of Israel. Just as the biblical king Saul put end to the period of the Judges, so the NT Paul put end to the strict observance of the Law.
Can I apply the argument of the extreme improbability of a coincidence and conclude that Paul never existed as historical figure, because he was derived midrashically from the Saul’s story ?
Thanks in advance for any answer.
Paulus is a standard and common Roman name. Saul was a standard and common Jewish name. Joshua even more so. Tons of Jews claimed Benjaminite heritage at the time (in fact all extant Jews under Roman Rule affiliated either with Benjamin or Judah, thus substantially increasing the frequency of such a claim). And rhetorical humility was a commonplace.
Indeed, it’s maybe 50% Paul would be a Benjaminite by chance alone, and may even have been a Saul as Acts claims, and thus Paul may have seen himself as such a parallel and played on it in his rhetoric. Because it is already likely a Saul who became (or was born to) a Roman citizen would assume the Roman name of Paul. Because a citizen must adopt a Roman trinomen, and these are near homonyms, and might even indeed have been thought scripturally to be conceptual cognates, for exactly the reason you note. And one need not have even been a citizen to have received the common name of one, or to have chosen one for the diplomatic purpose of communing with them.
So you need more than this to establish anything more than a coincidence between any random Paul and any random Saul. If you get to skip over the millions of others and “cherry pick” the ones that have vague coincidences between them, you are tea leaf reading, not engaging in a sound methodology. Especially when the links are largely contrived (e.g. the “era of the judges” does not mean what you are making it mean here, nor did the Biblical Saul do anything comparable to the Epistolary Paul, nor was Paul a king or “anointed,” nor did he claim sovereignty over the tribes but in fact the opposite, focusing instead on the Gentiles; etc.), because stretching “what counts” like this nullifies any claim to chance links being improbable. This is a fallacy called retrofitting. It’s most commonly used by psychics and Christian apologists attempting to prove prophecies were fulfilled. And by cranks like Joseph Atwill.
I discuss the correct methodology (as developed by several scholars in the peer reviewed literature) in Proving History, pp. 192-204.
What you need are conjunctions that have an expected base rate lower than 1 in the available population. For example, if we can calculate there would have been 10 Paul’s in the early first century with several coincidences with the Biblical Saul on chance accident alone, then finding such a Paul offers no probability the coincidence is meaningful; you need a chance accident of less than 1 person, to start increasing the probability above marginal that something more substantive is causally explaining the observation.
Certain characteristics are needed to get that improbability: much more specific connections than these; much more interpretable ones; uncommon sequences of order; etc. And even then that might only get you to plausibility, not probability. There is a difference between “it could be x” and “it is probably x,” and a large chasm between them that can only be crossed with yet more evidence. Or in other words, speculation is idle. Extremely common features coinciding in no significant order across two massive bodies of literature simply isn’t uncommon enough to signify. (Just think of the infamous Lincoln-Kenney coincidences, which I discuss as an example of why we need a more careful methodology in OHJ.)
Richard, did you catch the recent Vridar article by Neil G that came thru the fb feed? The reference to Aretas as interpolation? Thoughts?
I don’t follow that site regularly (I consult it only when my research leads me to it). Please include a link. They publish often. So there is no telling which one you mean by “the recent” one. And please also explain its relevance here (what has it to do with the subject of the article here you are commenting on).
https://vridar.org/2021/08/15/reason-to-doubt-the-only-historical-date-marker-in-pauls-letters/
Thank you!
See my comment here.
Richard, here is the link to Neil Godfrey’s Godfrey’s article touching on the veracity of the King Aretas reference in Paul.
https://vridar.org/2021/08/15/reason-to-doubt-the-only-historical-date-marker-in-pauls-letters/
Thank you.
Those appear all to be fallacies of Argument from Lack of Imagination. I can easily find entirely coherent intentions in the passage and its context. So that some guys couldn’t, is not evidence of an interpolation, but of their lack of imagination or their failure to discern Paul’s actual point.
Note you cannot understand this passage if you do not recognize how Paul is associating himself with other Biblical heroes (a context that illuminates a lot of what Paul means the Corinthians to understand here), and relying on his readers already knowing what he is talking about. The verse makes no sense as an interpolation in the latter regard, as an interpolator would have to make more sense of the insertion and its point and context (because an interpolator cannot assume his readers already know what he is talking about; even the story in Acts cannot be such, because it has no relation to Aretas or Paul’s point to the Corinthians—the author of Acts is fictionalizing and writing revisionist history from this passage in Paul, just as he does with the narrative in Galatians: cf. OHJ, Ch. 9).
Balance of probability strongly favors authenticity here. Citing a bunch of scholars who lack imagination and totally miss Paul’s point and the assumptions Paul is depending on is not going to move the needle.
Dr. Carrier I have a question about the very last sentence in the below paragraph from Wikipedia, which gives a possible explanation as to why some of Paul’s letters thought to be inauthentic by some because of a writing style differing that of Paul, might actually be authentic.
What would your response be to that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_epistles
“Most scholars agree that Paul actually wrote seven of the Pauline epistles (Galatians, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Romans, Philemon, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians), but that three of the epistles in Paul’s name are pseudepigraphic (First Timothy, Second Timothy, and Titus[2]) and that three other epistles are of questionable authorship (Second Thessalonians, Ephesians and Colossians).[2] According to some scholars, Paul wrote these letters with the help of a secretary, or amanuensis,[3] who would have influenced their style, if not their theological content.”
That is a common new apologetic but is essentially impossible. It is disproved by the fact that the presence of named secretaries on the seven authentics did not affect their stylistic consistency. So, evidently, that theory is a non starter. These are the words and thoughts of Paul; assistants only scribe. They take dictation; they don’t put words in Paul’s mouth, and certainly don’t construct elaborate rhetoric on his behalf.
On a completely separate note wouldn’t it have been cool if in the movie Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, when they went back in time to interview famous people they sought out Jesus but couldn’t locate him.
But they did encounter Paul, who was confused (if not amused) to learn that they were expecting to find Jesus here on earth. Paul them directs them to outer space, where according to Paul it is common knowledge that Jesus resides.
I think that has all the makings of a cool remake.
Dr. Carrier, to Paul you have harped on the fact that Paul claims to only came to know about Jesus through Old Testament scripture and “Revelation”. If that is the case then why should we expect Paul to have known and talked about Jesus’s life here on earth?
Could that be a plausible explanation as to why he never did in the “seven authentic” letters?
I’m not sure what you mean. I assume (?) you mean, maybe Paul somehow didn’t know and no one ever told him this was a real guy recently executed by the authorities who hand-picked his disciples and taught across Palestine. That is so improbable we can rule it out from the start (I cover the converse option and why mathematically it has no effect, at the end of OHJ, Ch. 3, and that is adaptable to the historicity argument as well; I discuss it again in my article here on Kamil Gregor).
It is simply not credibly possible this never came up in any of the hundreds of arguments Paul had with his congregations as to his authority and the actual teachings and accomplishments of Jesus, least of all as Paul started as a persecutor and not a convert—so how could he go around prosecuting Christians and never have heard a thing about their reverend Lord being a recent preacher and convict and their leaders being his hand-picked men?
I give many other specific examples in Ch. 11 of OHJ.
I’m having a hard time understanding your position then. Because on the one hand the basis or primary point of your latest book (JFOS) is that the earliest Christians believed that Jesus only existed only existed in outer spaces. And in the forward of that book you indicate that Paul’s letters are the earliest writings we have on record about Jesus. And indeed I thought that the point that you were making all along about the fact that Paul never wrote about or referenced an earthly Jesus was to underscore that very point. But you’ve now clarified that Paul must’ve known about an earthly Jesus (or at least a belief in one). And I don’t at all disagree with your reasons for coming to that conclusion. But then it begs the question what at all are we to make (after all) about the fact that Paul never mentions an earthly Jesus in his letters? It is not after all that he wasn’t aware of that concept/belief (as it turns out). So if Paul was aware of that then why did he never make reference to it? And what (if anything) can we actually make of the fact that he didn’t?
Your question was, IF Jesus existed, COULDN’T Paul have still not mentioned it, for “reasons.” I was answering your conditional. I was not asserting the condition to be correct. IF Jesus existed, THEN your scenario is effectively impossible. That is why I don’t entertain it (except to explain why no one has to) in either book.
My thesis (as outlined in both books) is that your condition is FALSE: Paul ONLY knew of a celestial Jesus because no one else knew any other, BECAUSE there was no other at that time; THEREFORE the Earthly Jesus was invented after he was dead, because it had to have been (had it been invented earlier, we’d see references to it in Paul, and indeed, to its mythic status even, just as we see in Plutarch with regard to the “historicity” of Osiris).