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.

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