Excellent. Thank you for the notice. I’ll amend the article to include that.

Also looking at the book, it appears that Hanson does actually argue that the apostle Luke may not have existed, but was a literary figure who was concocted in the second century CE. Looks like she was already anticipating this possibility.

Eventually, yes.

But in the meantime you can already explore what might be wrong with their arguments by reading my rebuttals to those arguments in the last half of chapter six in On the Historicity of Jesus (because I am psychic and anticipated their arguments ten years in advance).

Correct.

This isn’t a major question, of course, since even if Paul knew a Luke, that Luke still wasn’t a doctor and didn’t write Luke-Acts (see How We Know Acts Is a Fake History). But it is also true that if Philemon is forged, we lose any evidence Paul ever even knew anyone named Luke.

The New Testament mentions Luke in only three epistles: Colossians, 2 Timothy, and Philemon. The first two are widely believed to be forgeries. If Philemon can’t be trusted either, then we got nothin’, unless there’s some attestation that I don’t know about.

Yes. It is so different from Paul’s stylometrics (idioms, vocabulary, grammatical tendencies) that it cannot be by him. It is far closer to Ephesians (in fact they might be different versions of the same letter, possibly even composed by the same person).

These letters are not, however, as divergent stylometrically as the Pastorals, which are even further away from Pauline style on every metric. The latter are closer in style to Luke-Acts, which (among other data) suggests they date to the second century. The deutero-Paulines (Col. & Eph.) are likely earlier, perhaps dating to the late first century (it has been noted that they might not have existed yet when Mark wrote: in Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles I propose Mark knew Colossians, but it could be the other way around, because there is only one overlap between Mark and Col.).

It’s probably “true” insofar as Paul did something against the church. But we don’t actually know what that was. He was certainly an “opponent” in some sense. But in what sense?

Acts is fiction (it has Paul attending a stoning in Jerusalem and being given assignments from Jerusalem to hunt Christians abroad, but for no clear purpose and under no identified law, and Paul himself confirms he was never in Jerusalem at that time).

And Paul never says. He doesn’t say, for example, if he actually was arresting Christians (and if so, for what crime, or under whose authority), or just harassing them (heckling congregations, openly debating missionaries, or stirring crowds to vigilante action with rabble-rousing public speeches or something). His own language can describe either scenario.

Paul came up in your 3 hr dismantling of Bart Ehrman and it got me to wondering how reliable Paul’s Christian persecution is.

Is it true or just an early version of “I used to be an atheist and then I found Jesus” in order to get free meals?

Tha