James Tabor recently wrote two guest posts on Bart Ehrman’s blog in preparation for an academic conference on the historical Paul. One is better than the other, but both are illustrative of everything right and wrong about biblical studies as a field—primarily because what he presents is indeed reflective of the mainstream consensus, and thus (almost) avoids his infamous tendency to farfetched speculation. The articles are well worth reading (The Quest for the Historical Paul (Part 1) and The Quest for the Historical Paul (Part 2)), with the caveat that you need to also read what I have to say about them here, so you aren’t misled by his over-confident declarations and can tell the difference between points he makes that are well-founded, and those that are not.
Tabor does not do so good a job of that himself, which is the first failure-mode of the entire field I want to highlight: not making clear the distinction between weak conclusions and strong (or even defying the need to). He almost gets this right, when he offers warnings in Part 1 that, basically, you shouldn’t trust the book of Acts (and he’s right: see How We Know Acts Is a Fake History). Even at best, Tabor says, we should “consider the independent data Acts provides of interest but not of interpretive historical use” (emphasis mine). But then he forgets he said this in Part 2 and makes a bunch of assertions about how you have no reason to doubt that such independent data in Acts is historical.
He’s also wrong (there are reasons to doubt that data), which is the second failure-mode of the field: not actually checking claims like this before asserting them (I’ll give examples below; though for this being a field-wide problem, see Things Fall Apart Only When You Check). But the first failure-mode remains: his reasons for “trusting” such data are just bad reasons. And this reflects a poverty of reliable methodology in biblical studies. No one taught him (or nearly any historian—much less theologian, as many biblical historians actually are by doctoral degree) inductive logic (which is not the same thing as deductive logic) or any formal method of thinking things through—like distinguishing hypothesis from evidence, possible from plausible, and plausible from probable; always evaluating one hypothesis in comparison to the best competing hypothesis; earnestly trying to disprove a claim before asserting it; understanding the logical relations that make a fact “evidence” and that derive a probability from it; and so on. Like every scholar in this field, he writes on instinct, emotion—gut feelings—about what is true or false. He cannot articulate any logically sound reason to trust these instincts. Consequently, he trips into several fallacies.
Again, none of this is a peculiarity of James Tabor. It typifies nearly all academics in our field (see, for example, Things Fall Apart Only When You Check and How to Successfully Argue Jesus Existed). It’s a problem with the field.
General Overview
Tabor presumes the historicity of Paul. I think that’s a mistake, but not because Paul’s historicity is dubious. We need the reasons for trusting it to be articulated so they can be evaluated. I do think Paul survives that test (see The Historicity of Paul the Apostle and How Do We Know the Apostle Paul Wrote His Epistles in the 50s A.D.?). But it is dangerous to not burn-test this as an assumption. It is necessary to work out why we trust this conclusion, so we are on our guard against having been misled by thousands of years of Christian propaganda, and so we are on our guard against over-trusting ancient sources. Tabor is articulating a healthy skepticism that defines mainstream biblical scholarship now; but even that took over a century to claw things back from apologists and dogmatists controlling the narrative, and it never finished its project. We need to clean that closet of any remaining junk. We need to know why we trust some letters are authentic, so that we know how to read them. We need to know why we don’t trust Acts, so that we know how to read it.
And, above all, we need to know why we don’t trust any other legends of Paul beyond that. Because once you admit that’s all fake (and that therefore, in fact, the overwhelming majority of ancient Christian literature consists of lies—that, in fact, lying was the standard mode of discourse for early Christians) you will realize you should not be trusting the canonical texts all that much more than noncanonical. There has been no better validation of their contents over the others, and as lying is what early Christians did—routinely, abundantly, and as a matter of course (as articulated recently by Markus Vinzent; I provide some of my own examples in How To Fabricate History)—we should not be so gullible as to assume the canonical texts are somehow unusually honest. Even so, skepticism should not be carried to extremes. Because not everyone is a liar, and even the most ardent liar often tells the truth. In fact liars are often constrained by context as to what they can lie about.
For example, when Paul says he never learned the gospel from any human, we can suspect he is lying. In Galatians 1 he needs to argue that, and does so so excessively as to suggest guilt; plus, the natural laws of physics require his account to be in at least some part false. It wouldn’t even make sense for Paul to have “persecuted” (or as Tabor rightly suggests, “harassed”) Christian congregations before that if he didn’t even know what they were preaching. But when Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 that the first appearance of the risen Lord was to Peter, it is not plausible that he could lie about that—as doing so would tank his argument; and he is arguing something there (about an unrelated matter of theological metaphysics). Even a liar needs to not be caught lying, as then they will fail at their purpose. So there are many things Paul can’t lie about when attempting to persuade his congregations of something; including this, as Paul also mentions Peter or his agents traveled about among his congregations, so the truth would have been out eventually, and Paul would lose not only his argument, but his power and authority.
Which means sometimes Paul has to fib within carefully constrained lines. For example, there are an inordinate number of passages across his letters when Paul is defending himself against accusations of graft—it happens so often that one can rightly suspect he’s guilty (and in the very same way that has long typified Christian ministries ever since and to this day). But how he chooses to defend himself, even if stretching the truth, tells us a lot of what was really going on. We can extract true information even from lies. For example, 1 Thessalonians 1–2 is an extended defense of himself against such an accusation. And he lists arguments (when he visited them he did chores and wasn’t lazy; he behaved in an upright way; and so on), which are non sequiturs, but reflect what he could and could not say. He must actually have “done chores and wasn’t lazy” and “behaved in an upright way” and so on, because otherwise his argument would fail (as the Thessalonians would immediately know if these were true or not). The fib resides in how these facts don’t logically operate as a defense (a thief could well have behaved exactly so for exactly that purpose). But that means Paul couldn’t “invent” better arguments. He was constrained by facts known to the Thessalonians (or indeed anyone Paul might fear would inform to them). Which gives us access to some true information. So even when Paul is lying he is “telling the truth” in certain respects. It simply takes careful methodology to distinguish truths from lies, and extract the usable information from Paul’s discourses and arguments (including from what he doesn’t say, not just from what he does).
But notice even this requires assuming that the seven letters usually identified as authentic actually were written when and to whom and by whom they allege. If even those seven Epistles are second century forgeries (as several recent mainstream studies have alleged, as I discuss in Was the Entire New Testament Forged in the Second Century?), then that assumption no longer operates. So we need to have a firm grasp of why we reject that possibility. Because whatever those reasons are, they will affect how we interpret these letters. For example, one reason I have noted is that many of these letters are pastiches of a larger collection of letters: someone cut-and-pasted sections out of letters now lost, and assembled them into the long letters we now have. This is not explicable if they were forged. The edit we have must have been using an existing collection of letters; and it would be wheels-within-wheels, epicycles-within-epicycles, to propose that that collection was also a forgery. A forger would just forge the letters they needed; and in any case, the letters, even ripped up as we have them, make no sense coming from the second century.
These facts constrain how we interpret those letters. Now we have to admit that 1 Corinthians consists of several letters sent on different occasions, possibly all to Corinth, though not necessarily. The transition from 1 Cor. 8 to 9 thus illustrates a different set of information than if we mistook that harsh break to be the natural condition of a single letter: the two arguments relate to food, but to completely different arguments, and the argument addressed in chapter nine has been left out by this editorial process. Paul’s response to whatever that argument was was simply cut out and the rest mashed up at the end of what is now chapter eight because both responses vaguely relate to the subject of “food” (the process suggests someone was compiling a thematic reference manual for church leadership—and it may even have been Paul who did this, using the collection as a cue sheet for how he resolved issues in one church whenever they came up in another; or it may have been his successors who did it). Likewise, attending to how those letters were written without any of the widely available knowledge of the second century affects how we understand what their author meant or understood. Before the end of Jerusalem, for example, Judaizers were a leading problem for his Gentile movement; but no longer in the second century, when far more apt arguments against it were available, and the effort was already functionally dead.
That said, Tabor skips this step and jumps right into asking the next question, which is: how much of what we have from and about Paul can we use as historical data? In Part 1, he takes up the general point (to which the conclusion is, in a nutshell, “not much”). Then in Part 2, he tries to claw back some floating data with an overly gullible reading of Acts (and one late, unsourced legend related by Jerome). Tabor otherwise rightly trashes all other sources as useless—except he never mentions 1 Clement, which is odd, as I think that counts as our only extrabiblical source about Paul that is authentic and thus contains usable data (see Interpreting 1 Clement’s Supposed Descriptions of Fabulous Murders and How We Can Know 1 Clement Was Actually Written in the 60s AD). Tabor also doesn’t say which parts of the scattered “traditions” of Paul’s death he thinks are “true” or “legendary.” But we’ll get to all that.
Part 1: Where Tabor Doesn’t Believe Most of It
In Part 1, Tabor starts with a credible mainstream breakdown of the evidence. I would only update his continuing inclusion of Philemon as confidently authentic; I think that is now more doubtable. And I would qualify his sentence that “the Pastorals (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) are not included in our earliest extant collection of Paul’s letters.” That is literally true, but in context might lead a lay reader to think he is arguing that the Pastorals are inauthentic because they are not in that codex. Such an argument would be invalid for two reasons: (1) the Chester Beaty codex he is referring to is incomplete, so we cannot actually say what was not in it (there are arguments either way, but all are problematic); (2) the codex in question was likely part of a three-volume set, since the complete New Testament was already a circulating edition at that time (see Three Things to Know about New Testament Manuscripts and Was the Entire New Testament Forged in the Second Century?). One volume would contain the Gospels and Acts (such as this, but not necessarily exactly that). And another would contain the minor literature: the so-called Catholic Epistles (which combined the Pastorals with James, Jude, and the Johannines) and Revelation (such as this, but not necessarily exactly that). So no argument from the Chester Beatty papyrus can argue against “authenticity” for the Pastorals; their inauthenticity has been far better established on stylistic grounds, as Tabor already mentions.
Tabor then lists a bunch of things we can conclude about Paul from what he says, all of which is reasonable (there are no good reasons to doubt Paul or his data on those points), except when Tabor says we can discern from the letters of Paul a “third” visit to Jerusalem when “he was apparently arrested and sent under guard to Rome around A.D. 56.” None of that is true. Tabor cites Romans 15:25-29, but that mentions nothing about an arrest or being “sent under guard,” but rather has Paul voluntarily heading to Rome on his way to Spain (where 1 Clement reports Paul actually died, contrary to later legend), after he visits Jerusalem. Obviously Paul could not mention being arrested in Jerusalem in a letter written before he even went there.
Tabor seems to be again falling victim to faith-based dogma pervading his field, unaware that this isn’t likely to be true, and worse, isn’t even in the text he cited. Paul only references being under guard in Philippians, and there gives no indication of where he then was, when that was, where he was going, or where he was arrested (or for what: see my discussion in Did Paul Write Philemon?). Tabor’s confident “around 56 A.D.” is not actually supported by anything, even for the date of that passage in Romans, much less the writing of Philippians (which Tabor falsely cites as saying Paul was jailed “probably in Rome, in the early 60s A.D.,” neither of which is evinced there).
The most we can say is that the already-planned tour Paul mentions in Romans 15 must have been close to the end of his ministry, given that 1 Clement knew he died after indeed reaching Spain. But that doesn’t help us situate his custody in Philippians—a letter variously dated from 50 A.D. to 62 A.D.! And that’s even assuming it, too, is a single letter and not a pastiche of excised bits of letters written over months or years, which is not a safe assumption (nor also for Romans). In 1 Corinthians 11:23 Paul says he had “been in prison more frequently” than his competitors, which means he was in custody several times over his career—and before writing that passage (which was either in some letter to the Corinthians, or who knows what letter this section came from, as 1 Corinthians is also a pastiche of letters). So the imprisonment he reported to the Philippians could have occurred at any time in Paul’s ministry.
Tabor warns of not trusting data in Acts, but he has fallen victim to that here, unaware that field-wide “facts” like this derive from Acts, and not from Paul’s letters as Tabor thinks. This is why scholars like Tabor need to question every assumption in this field, because so much of what they assume they “know” is actually just a melange of faith beliefs, “things they were told” in graduate school or read in this or that monograph, and not anything that actually survives the very methodology Tabor recommends. But this melange also includes random things unrelated to faith doctrine, “ideas” that somehow got “telephone gamed” into “facts,” like that Paul is referring to himself as the man who visited the Garden in the Third Heaven (in 2 Corinthians 12:1-4). That was a popular modern conjecture that somehow became dogma. It might be true (Paul denies it), but the evidence for it is shaky. Paul may well mean someone else (like, say, Peter; or even Jesus, on a suitable theory of his historicity).
Tabor knows this—he wrote his dissertation on it. But he defended this assumption there with arguments far weaker than he states. The chronological note in v.2 does not entail self-reference; the first-person in v.7 refers to “revelations” generically, returning to v.1, not necessarily the one he describes in vv.2–6; and that Paul would refer to someone unknown to us, but clearly known to the Corinthians, makes far more sense than Tabor asserts: Paul, after all, doesn’t know we exist; he isn’t writing for us, but the Corinthians. He is referencing a context we don’t have access to. So we don’t know what the weight or significance of this high-context cue was to his Corinthian audience. Even so, to be clear, I am not saying Tabor is wrong. The hypothesis is intriguing. But it is just a hypothesis, resting on weaker evidence than he lets on, and so it should be stated that way, not misleadingly “rounded up” to an established fact (you may be reminded of how historicists keep insisting mythicists are the ones doing this sort of thing; alas, historicists keep doing it too). Tabor’s dissertation is a valuable study, and you might want to read his case for this hypothesis yourself. So he is to be commended for making it available at a reasonable price as Paul’s Ascent to Paradise (his argument for this hypothesis is summarized in note 1 of chapter 1 and built out more in chapter 4).
Similarly, Tabor says, as if it were a known fact, that the “thorn” in Paul’s side that he credits as a “messenger of Satan” is “some type of physical disability,” but that’s not so clear, either. In the immediate context (of the previous chapter, 2 Cor. 11), one might suspect he means a stutter, or some other kind of speech impediment, something that prevents him coming across as eloquently as his competitors. But “messenger” suggests something psychological—that Paul means an evil voice he hears in his head, a sign of schizophrenia. This would be a mental, not a physical, disability; and one that could still have impaired his charisma or eloquence, given how people might react to Paul rebuking an invisible messenger of Satan at random moments, for example (or in any other way detracting from his ability to come across well). Some scholars have speculated it refers to sexual or other sinful urges Paul combatted (in a fashion presaging Augustine), which Paul might have simply blamed for his rhetorical failures. We really don’t know. The Corinthians evidently knew, from prior letters or conversations with Paul. But we don’t have access to that. So Tabor may be right. Or he may be wrong.
Finally, there are two more examples of Part 1 error in his endnotes.
In one (note 6), Tabor adds that, despite Paul implying at one point that he isn’t married (1 Cor. 7:8), “it is possible that Paul was once married since he says he advanced within Judaism beyond his peers” and “Jewish men his age would normally marry,” which is all true, and as Tabor correctly notes, this is only an argument from prior probability, not evidence (Paul might have been one of the possible outliers), and even if Paul had been married, Tabor correctly notes that this does not mean his wife was still living or had not left him by then. Widows and divorcees were a thing, after all; and as Tabor notes, Paul himself mentions situations when a wife or husband just leaves without a formal divorce, and that, too, could describe Paul’s own situation, though there is no way to really know.
Here Tabor correctly reasons that Paul talks about the “loss of all things” and has advice about marriage that he might (emphasis on might) be drawing from (or using to justify) his own situation. Tabor agrees that’s speculative. But in discussing those points he still includes two typical errors: Tabor assumes that Paul says we “should not feel obligated to heed Jesus’ teaching that there can be no divorce for any cause,” when in fact Paul never says “divorce” is acceptable. Rather, he only approves separation, not divorce, after banning all divorce; and then Paul says no one should change the state they were in when called, even to the point of remaining celibate, which seems to say the opposite of what Tabor thinks. In other words, Paul means that if a spouse leaves a believer, the believer should let them go—as in, be separated; not formally divorce them, but remain celibate. Tabor also seems to think Paul is diverging from “a teaching of Jesus” here when the opposite is the case: Paul says he has no pertinent teaching from Jesus. Thus no such teaching existed. Tabor is conflating the later invention of such a teaching for Jesus in the Gospels, which actually was placing this very teaching of Paul in the mouth of Jesus (see Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles). In other words, the command to stay married and never divorce is not from Jesus but from Paul. Tabor has been misled by field-wide dogmas to completely misread (or indeed, not even read) this section of Paul’s argument!
Then (in note 7) Tabor says two lazy things about the letters of James, Jude, and Peter. He incorrectly assumes (again just repeating a field-wide dogma as if fact) that the letters of James and Jude are credited to the brothers of Jesus. They are not. In fact the letters avoid ever mentioning such a relationship (James claims only to be a “servant” of Jesus; while Jude claims to be a servant of Jesus and the brother of only James). Any objective historian would thus conclude these cannot be the brothers of Jesus (neither actually, nor in the mind of anyone who might have originally forged these letters, though there is no good reason to believe they were forged). Tabor then says 1 Peter “is surprisingly ‘Pauline’ in tone and content and fits nothing we know of Peter based on more reliable sources—including Paul’s genuine letters,” but he gives no examples of what he means; and I am unaware of any such evidence. 2 Peter is certainly a late forgery; but 1 Peter stands a good chance of being actually by Peter (see my paragraph on a recent study by Elizabeth Myers).
Part 2: Where Tabor Gullibly Believes Some of It
In Part 2, Tabor throws all caution to the wind, forgets he said not to trust anything in Acts as history, and makes a bunch of wild claims about Paul not supported by the evidence (according to Tabor’s own methodology as explained in Part 1!), based solely on Acts, plus one even more dubious legend from Jerome, which Tabor didn’t even list or discuss as a source for Paul at all in Part 1.
- Tabor says “that Paul’s Hebrew name was Saul we have no reason to doubt.” Except we do. The name deliberately evokes King Saul in the author’s storyline. Ironically, Tabor doesn’t realize his own argument (that “Paul says he is of the tribe of Benjamin, and Saul, the first king of Israel, was also a Benjaminite,” per 1 Samuel 9:21), is also an argument for the author of Acts to invent this convenient allusion. Plus, again, we know Acts makes stuff up all the time; so why would we trust random information any more than things we just happen to have a letter from Paul contradicting?
- Tabor says we have no reason to doubt “that [Paul] was from Tarsus in Cilicia.” Except we do. Tabor himself later says “putting his birth in a Roman Senatorial province like Cilicia, serves the author’s purposes.” And in his own narrative there is no reason for Paul to say he “returned” to Damascus after his conversion unless that was in fact where he was from; that would also explain how the Arabian marshals of Aretas knew where to find him, and why Damascus comes up twice in Paul as a place he lived, but never Tarsus (note that Damascus was then an autonomous client state within a Roman province, not administratively Roman). Whereas the fact that Paul escaped his real home “in a basket” (spyris in Acts / sarganê in Paul) might explain why Luke chose his home to be “the basket” (Tarsos).
- Tabor says “it is possible [Paul] was trained as a leather-worker.” True, but only if you take seriously the word “possibly.” Tabor’s reasoning that Paul (as every Rabbi) would certainly have plied a manual trade is entirely correct (I discuss this in chapter 2 of Not the Impossible Faith, with even more evidence and examples). But we can’t really know which trade. Paul never says, and Acts saying it was “tentmaker” (skên-opios) is too suspicious to believe. “Tent” was a common Judeo-Christian codeword for “body,” and making tents would thus be code for “giving people bodies” in the resurrection, a reference to Paul’s entire mission—just as Jesus said he would destroy the “temple” and raise it in three days, meaning the temple of his body—there even based on the epistle of Paul, riffing on the metaphor of 2 Cor 5, twice using there, indeed, skênos, “tent.” A cognate appears in the same sense in 2 Peter 1, and in that case as a double entendre referring to the tabernacles, i.e. field tents, of the legendary wandering Jews of Exodus—yet another literary reason to have Paul (a Jew wandering in “the wilderness” of his mission) be a tentmaker. But the connection to Jesus and the Epistles of Paul is an even stronger motive: because Acts often recapitulates the story of Jesus in the story of Paul (see chapter 9 in On the Historicity of Jesus).
- Tabor says “whether Paul was born,” as opposed to (I guess?) lived, “in Tarsus one must doubt since Jerome, the fourth century Christian writer, knew a different tradition,” having him born in Gischala of Galilee (a center of the militant revolt after Paul) and fleeing to Tarsus as a child (Jerome, On Famous Men 5). But what a 4th-5th century Christian “heard” about events hundreds of years earlier from no stated (much less credible) source, that no one else ever heard of for hundreds of years until then, is hardly something to commend as factual. What is Tabor doing here?
- That legend isn’t even logical: it confuses when Gischala “was taken” (Jerome literally says “captured,” capto) “by the Romans,” which was not until after the Jewish War. Galilee remained outside the Roman Empire until then, and was only “taken” by Romans in the war a decade after Paul was dead, not when he was a child. Tabor strangely says “Paul and his parents were rounded up and sent to Tarsus in Cilicia as part of a massive exile of the Jewish population by the Romans to rid the area of further potential trouble,” but I do not know where he gets any of this. It’s not in Jerome. And no source records any such Roman program then (only Sepphoris was sacked in the Judas revolt, as that was where Judas holed up). By contrast, inventing a legend that Paul, like Jesus, hailed from Galilee—and, like Jesus, was born in the Holy Land and fled to a foreign country as a child—is an obviously motivated contrivance. One might also note it is a convenient irony to have Paul, an ambassador for peace, hail from the same town as the infamous militant John of Gischala.
- Tabor tries to defend this by arguing that “since Jerome certainly knew Paul’s claim, according to the book of Acts, to have been born in Tarsus, it is very unlikely” that Jerome “would have contradicted that source without good evidence.” But that’s not valid reasoning. Christians fabricated contradictory legends of their heroes all the time—and never with “good evidence.” Their idea of “good” evidence was altogether catastrophically inept. Not even the great Jerome exhibits any kind of modern, much less reliable, “historical method” across his works, least of all in this one: its every entry gullibly repeats ridiculous legends, from believing the Gospel of Matthew originated in Hebrew (it did not) to believing the author of Luke was a physician (he wasn’t), and from believing Peter battled Simon the Mage in Rome, a.k.a. the absurdist fiction of the Acts of Peter, to believing James was thrown off the pinnacle of the temple, a.k.a. the absurdist fiction of the Hegesippus Apocryphon on James. Jerome even states the Epistles of Seneca and Paul are authentic. That’s how gullible he is. And for this weird story about Paul he offers no source at all, so we can’t even vet it. Likely it comes from some fictional apocryphal Acts of Paul (much like all that other nonsense). Jerome is not even remotely a reliable source here, and Tabor has no business treating this as a credible fact.
Which all leads to one more strange error…
A Sidebar on the Citizenship of Paul
Tabor doubles down on the ridiculous by then citing that same unsourced legend in Jerome we just mentioned to argue that it “casts serious doubt on the claim in Acts that Paul was born a Roman citizen.” Since it has near zero probability of even being true, it cannot cast doubt on any claim, much less that one (it’s also not impossible for Roman citizens to have resided in a Galilean city, but set that aside). Paul’s name is all over his authentic letters, and it is a distinctly Roman name (indeed it is Latin, not Greek); in fact Paulus is one of three dozen or so standard praenomina of a citizen’s trinomen. That is evidence that Paul was, indeed, a citizen; as is the fact that, by his own report, he received a citizen’s treatment when in custody (I’ll get to Tabor’s erroneous take on this point next). Though whether Paul was specifically born a citizen is unknowable. As Tabor correctly said in Part 1, Acts cannot be trusted on things like this, and Paul himself never discusses it.
Tabor really doesn’t want Paul to be a citizen, though. So he cites Paul’s report that he often endured administrative punishments, which Tabor claims were “forbidden to one who had citizenship,” and so that argues against his being a citizen. This argument is wrong in so many ways I have to make another list…
- First, it isn’t true. Tabor cites the Digest 48.6–7 (he means 48.6.7), but he evidently didn’t read it. He must have simply trusted someone (or some monograph?) that claimed this and gave that citation (which would explain why he typed it wrong), without checking if it was true. There’s that ubiquitous failure-mode I mentioned before. It plagues this field a lot. You can actually read that legal text yourself and see that citizens could be sentenced to physical punishments. The law only states they have a right to appeal first (§48.6.7), which is not the same thing as immunity (a distinction Americans in the current political moment should definitely understand by now).
- Second, that means Paul would have had to assert the privilege to obtain it; and since we don’t know the circumstances of these incidents, he may have preferred taking the licks. There are a number of reasons why he might do that. For example, an appeal could remove Paul from the city or province, which may in fact have been his enemies’ goal, thwarting which Paul would have to not appeal. Or more obviously, if it was evident he’d get the punishment anyway even on appeal, Paul would certainly not waste the months of travel and expense of attempting it. Or even more obviously, as Paul mentions this in a boast of how he suffers more for the cause than his competitors (read his entire list in context: 2 Corinthians 11:23-27), he would probably not appeal anything but a death sentence, as otherwise he’d lose the competitive race for enduring the most—in other words, he’d look like a wimp and a copout, and his competitors would have one over on him, precisely the subtext of his remark. Paul needed to be flogged and stoned; his mission and authority depended on it. And it was legal to flog and stone a citizen who accedes to it. I should also add that Paul might be fibbing a bit, exaggerating “how many times” he got lashed or beaten, precisely to outdo his competitors in these martyrdom olympics. But even taking him fully at his word doesn’t get us to Tabor’s conclusion, because Paul would have good reasons to endure all of it.
- Third, Paul had another very particular reason not to appeal his way out of such sentences: at that time Jews had by treaty the respect of their own laws, as Josephus reports (and likely had the same privilege under the rulers of Arabia—a point that will become more salient in a moment). They could sentence physical punishments to anyone claiming the rights of a Jew. Probably a Jew who was also a Roman citizen could “get out of that” by an appeal (essentially fleeing to Rome, or the nearest provincial assize city, and becoming a de facto exile); but most likely they would not want to. Refusing to follow Torah law and submit to their own court’s rulings would not be a very pious or diplomatic choice; it certainly would not do wonders for their rep. If convicted of a sin in a Sanhedrin court, the punishment (along with confession) was required to have atoned. In his letters Paul traded on his rep as an upstanding Jew, a lot; so he wouldn’t likely have used heathen law to escape his “five times receiving from the Jews the forty lashes minus one” (a reference to Torah and Mishnah law).
- Fourth, Paul does not say he was sentenced to all these punishments (only the “forty lashes minus one” entails a legal sentencing); and extralegal mob action was not an uncommon fate for Christians. People can just throw stones at you. People can just kick your ass in the street. You can get fucked up in a lawless riot. Even sheriffs and officials can corruptly flout the law, particularly in remote districts far from any authorities to check them. Paul himself mentions being in danger from “bandits” and “false believers” and even things like “shipwrecks,” and he implies angry mobs as well, a context in which getting his ass kicked outside the context of a law-abiding court is more than plausible. Rights only really exist on paper, after all. That it was illegal to beat a Roman without allowing them to appeal was not a magical forcefield preventing criminals and thugs, or rogue authorities and mobs, beating them anyway—a distinction Americans aware of their own culture of unchecked criminal and police violence should definitely comprehend; and the Roman Empire was a far more violent and corrupt place than 21s century America.
- Fifth, and finally, Paul was often not in Roman jurisdiction anyway—where Roman citizen rights could mean literally nothing. Remember his initial evangelical years in Arabia? We don’t know the particulars, but we do know it landed him on the wrong side of the law—Arabian marshals even hunted him down and chased him out of Damascus. How many of his reported beatings, stonings, or lashings happened in courts there? We don’t know the details of Arabia’s treaty with Rome and thus what it covered as far as Roman appellate law (or Rome’s treaty terms with Damascus or the Galilean tetrarchy for that matter). And how many other excursions did Paul make across Roman borders? Parthia was right there. Pliny names several autonomous client states in and around Syria. And we do not, after all, have any complete lifetime itinerary from Paul (while Acts completely erased his cross-border mission; so that author evidently did not want to discuss it). So we can’t actually say how often Paul was outside a governing Roman treaty jurisdiction.
So Tabor’s reasoning here is just really bad. And astonishingly so. Why wouldn’t he have thought of these five points himself? This casual (and often fatal) shallowness of reasoning is not uncommon among his peers. So I can’t blame just him. But this means we can’t trust biblical historians; they are bad reasoners, so we have to take pains now to vet literally everything they argue.
To be fair, I am only focusing here on failures. The rest of what Tabor says about Paul in Part 2 is suitably skeptical and requires no correction. So biblical historians do know how to do this right. They just, a lot of the time, forget to bother. For some reason.
Conclusion
Tabor’s two-part series is a useful way to get a sense of how mainstream reasoning about Paul works (and where it currently lands) in biblical studies today—both the good and the bad. All his errors, all his disregarding of his own stated methodological principles, all his repeating of dogmas as if facts (evidently not checking hardly anything first), all his atrocious logic, is typical of this field. Even competent mainstream scholars make all these mistakes, all too often. So you still needed to read this article to get an abundance of necessary corrections. His two articles needed a hell of a lot of asterisks (though mostly in Part 2). But on the flip side, Tabor adopts a lot of appropriate skepticism and caution about the data we have on Paul, and does cast down a lot of myths and legends and dogmas as well. And that is also reflective of the growing mainstream consensus about Paul. It’s not Tabor’s own fringe positioning. So it’s a mixed bag. But hopefully this article will have helped you navigate it.
