Traditional attempts to explain Christian origins have had to rely on hypotheses about oral traditions (and more recently memory theory), on hypothetical constructions of long lost Christian-like communities. The letters of Paul have been read by and large at face value, ignoring the scholarship that should warn us that such a reading needs to be justified, not assumed. The gospels have been assumed, through circular reasoning, to be based on historical events. The explanation for Christianity I am proposing (having rediscovered the main conclusions of Roger Parvus via my own route with some prodding by Nina Livesey — though NL limits her case to the letters of Paul) has the advantage of being based on evidence we can see before us in the record. We can point to individuals, specific teachings and a historical context with strong explanatory power.
An immediate objection that comes to mind is that followers of various of these “gnostic” Christianities reinterpreted the same gospels we know in our Bibles. Surely these gospels came first, one might reasonably conclude. As an answer, I turn again to Nina Livesey’s point that the writings and teachings of the various schools were shared and debated among one another. We should also note that the canonical gospels pick up and re-work, re-interpret, teachings of the “gnostic” Christians that came before them. Just one instance of this is John 1:5
The light shone in the darkness and the darkness did not grasp it.
Saturninus taught that the unknown father god shone down on the creator angels (including the demiurge creator of Genesis) and those angels attempted but failed to grasp that light. So they decided to create a physical image of what they saw in that light — the first man. I owe that example of John 1:5 being related to the teaching of Saturninus to Simon Pétrement’s A Separate God but SP is assuming that the canonical gospel preceded Saturninus. Another example would be one pointed out by Matthias Klinghardt and Markus Vinzent: Marcion introduced John the Baptist in his gospel to epitomize the ultimate and final prophet of the Old Testament for whom Jesus was the antithesis; the Gospel of Mark and later canonical gospels re-interpreted Marcion’s Baptist to predict Jesus as the fulfilment of the law and the prophets. The Gospel of Luke includes a rather pointless scene of Pilate sending Jesus to Herod, only for Herod to return him again to Pilate. I cannot help but wonder if the evangelist is attempting to “answer” other narratives we know about that said it was Herod who crucified Jesus (Justin Martyr, Gospel of Peter). Hence the dialogue went both ways: each school reinterpreting what the others were saying.
Those who taught that the god who created the world was a lesser deity than the “Unknown Father” also taught, understandably, that it is better to live an ascetic lifestyle to avoid as much as possible contamination with the inferior creation. If marriage was an ordinance of the lower creator god, it followed that it was better to avoid marriage if possible. Similarly, the lesser god was responsible for killing, it was better to avoid eating what had been killed.
If ascetic practices went hand in hand with some of the anti-Jewish teachers of the early second century, the rejection of asceticism may be understood as a logical corollary of the opposing teaching that defended the physical creation as the work of the only God.
The author of 1 Timothy 4, on the other hand, defended the Creator God of Genesis as the supreme God, attacking those who, like Saturninus and Marcion, taught the necessity for an ascetic life:
The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. 2 Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron. 3 They forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth. 4 For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, 5 because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer.
My point is that the teaching to avoid marriage and eating meat was part of the package that taught the Jewish Scriptures were the teachings of the “Jewish god” who was responsible for the law, suffering and injustice. The author of 1 Timothy stresses that the physical creation is good, not evil or the work of a lesser deity.
Most scholars deny that 1 Timothy was written by Paul. It was written by a “proto-orthodox” teacher who depicted Paul more in line with his image in Acts than the main letters. If the other letters of Paul were published by the school of Marcion (as per Nina Livesey’s new book) we find pointers to the same teachings, although muted by lines that appeared to contradict them. Opponents of Marcion accused him of deleting these passages but we are entitled to wonder if they had been added. See 1 Corinthians 7 for the discussion of marriage and Romans 14 for abstinance from meat.
It was not only Marcion and Saturninus who are said to have devalued the created world and advocated sexual and dietary asceticism. I hope to discuss others in upcoming posts because of the strong links they appear to have with our New Testament writings. One of these, Elchasai, has been discussed in depth as the founder of the “heresy” attacked in the epistles to the Galatians and Colossians — see the translation of Hermann Detering’s works.
By “independent evidence” I mean sources that refer to the letters other than the letters themselves, such as the Church Fathers Irenaeus and Tertullian of the late second century. If we rely on the letters themselves we might choose to date them by their reference to a ruler of Damascus of uncertain date, most likely first century, and to Paul’s contacts with the original apostles of Jesus. The NT Acts of the Apostles (dated anywhere between the later part of the first century and first half of the second) contains a narrative of Paul’s life but provides no explicit indication that Paul wrote any letters. Scholars have remarked that Acts and the Letters present contradictory impressions of Paul’s beliefs.
We have the New Testament letters of Paul and other apostles. But there is no independent confirmation that these letters existed before the middle of the second century. All the independent evidence points to them being first known among a group of Christians (followers of Marcion) around the 130s or 140s CE. There is no independent evidence that places them any earlier. I recently reviewed and discussed the contents of a new book by Professor Nina Livesey arguing that Paul’s letters originated in a “school of Marcion” around the 130s/140s CE.
We have the four canonical gospels, but again, independent witnesses do not offer us any reason to believe that these existed before the middle of the second century of our era. There are references to Christians in works of historians Josephus and Tacitus but they are either of debatable authenticity or can tell us no more than what was being said in the second century.
We also have what has long been the unfortunately bypassed elephant in the room: How on earth did so many Christian groups arise declaring that Jesus had never been human, some saying he was never even crucified, some proclaiming that his own disciples remained ignorant of what he taught and preached falsehoods, some saying that Jesus came to abolish the law and others saying he came to keep the law more completely, some even saying he called the God of the Jews some kind of devil. None of that makes any sense if Jesus had gathered and inspired followers to proclaim his teachings after his death as the New Testament claims. I can understand modifications to his teachings arising as new situations arose, but not the wholesale divergence of whether he was even human, or whether he worshiped or denounced the God who created the world and gave the law, or whether his immediate disciples spoke truth or lies.
How could such wildly divergent ideas about Jesus have arisen from one of supposedly a number of teachers and prophets attracting followers in first century Palestine?
But what if it all happened the other way around?
What if there first appeared on the scene teachers denouncing the god of the Jews and proclaiming a new and higher god who offered salvation for those who had been led to death and destruction by the God of the Jewish Bible?
Could such a teaching be understood to have arisen in historical times either among Jews themselves or among their would-be friends who happened to be well informed about the Jewish Scriptures?
There shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been . . .
I think it can. Indications are that teachers of this kind (declaring the creator God of Genesis and the lawgiver God of Moses to be inferior deities to a higher, hitherto unknown, God who saves rather than kills) arose in the early decades of the second century. That was a time of
some of the most horrific destructions wreaked by Jews (or Judeans of the time) on pagan temples and on Roman armies
some of the most horrific mass slaughters of Jews, along with non-Jews, under the emperors Trajan and Hadrian
For some details of the uprisings of the Jews and their consequences in the time of Trajan, see
Why did a transnational revolt, with the Jews at its centre, erupt in 116, capable of seriously challenging the Roman empire, which at that very moment had reached the phase of its greatest expansion? . . . What events, in 115 and then 116 CE, first led to Greek-Jewish clashes in Mediterranean cities, and then caused the Jews to take up arms to destroy every element of pagan culture and religion they encountered in their path? — Livia Capponi: Il Mistero Del Tempio p.18 — translation
Thus nearly the whole of Judaea was made desolate . . . Many Romans, moreover, perished in this war. Therefore Hadrian in writing to the senate did not employ the opening phrase commonly affected by the emperors, “If you and your children are in health, it is well; I and the legions are in health.” — Cassius Dio, 69,14)
The bloodshed of these times was on a scale that the war of 66-70 CE never approached. The destruction of the temple primarily involved the destruction of a city. The uprisings and their genocidal consequences in the second century were on a totally different scale.
Such times help to explain the emergence of the devaluation of the defining markers of Jewishness. As Nina Livesey writes,
Events leading up to and following the Bar Kokhba revolt can be understood as influential to the development of Pauline letters. For, the Bar Kokhba period saw not only massive destruction, death, and the removal of the Jewish population from Judaea but also the call for a ban on circumcision and the destruction of Hebrew scriptures? Rulings against the Jewish practice of circumcision and Jewish writings redound in discussions of these themes in texts dated in and around this period. In addition, treatments of Jewish law and circumcision in biblical and non-biblical texts dated to this period reveal a dramatic downward shift in their value. Comparably dismissive and/or derogatory assessments of circumcision and Jewish law do not surface in texts dated prior to the end of the first century. Discussions of the rite of circumcision dated at or after the Bar Kokhba revolt parallel those found in Pauline letters. (Livesey, 202f)
I think we can extend the point beyond the Bar Kochba war and the letters of Paul. The troubles began in the 110s and earliest indicators of teachers denouncing the Jewish Scriptures and their creator-lawgiver deity come from the same period.
The Dialogue, which was probably written shortly before the death of Justin (around 165 CE) (Lohr, 433) Some historians believe that Book 2 was written during a persecution, that is, under Marcus Aurelius (161-80), because in 2.22.2 Irenaeus writes of persecutions of the just as if they are then going on. Books 1 and 2, then, may have been written before 180. (Unger/Dillon, 4)
Our information is scarce, vague and late, so we can only attempt a bare outline. Justin Martyr, apparently writing shortly before his death in 165 CE mentions several early “heretics”, among them Saturninus, whose followers called themselves Christians:
These men call themselves Christians in much the same way as some Gentiles engrave the name of God upon their statues, and then indulge in every kind of wicked and atheistic rite. Some of these heretics are called Marcionites, some Valentinians, some Basilidians, and some Saturnilians, and others by still other names, each designated by the name of the founder of the system, just as each person who deems himself a philosopher, as I stated at the beginning of this discussion, claims that he must bear the name of the philosophy he favors from the founder of that particular school of philosophy. (Trypho, 35.6)
The bishop Irenaeus was writing “before 180 CE” about leaders he understood to be early teachers of “heretical” views around and prior to the 130s CE and also speaks of Saturninus and prefers to arrange the names in a sequential genealogy of teachings.
And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch. — Acts 11:26
The successor of Simon [Magus] was Menander, a Samaritan by birth. . . . . Saturninus, who was of Antioch near Daphne, and Basilides got their start from these heretics. Still they taught different doctrines, the one in Syria, the other in Alexandria. Saturninus, following Menander . . . . (Against Heresies, 1.23.5-24.1)
Saturninus/Satornilus/Satorneilos/Satornil
I will use the Latin rendering of the name, Saturninus, but will return shortly to a possible significance of the Greek form. (Irenaeus originally wrote in Greek and would have used one of the other forms of the name.) What is of significance here is the teaching on god and the Jewish law attributed to Saturninus, a figure estimated to have been active in Antioch, Syria, in the 120s CE. Since we have been talking about the establishment of “schools”, with “Christian” teachers following the ways of philosophical schools of the time, M. David Litwa’s comment is of interest:
Eusebius dated Saturninus to the reign of the emperor Hadrian (117–138 CE). In the same context, the church historian said that Saturninus set up a “school” (didaskaleion), depicting him more as a philosopher than as a religious leader. Nonetheless, we should not exclude the idea that Saturninus’s “school” did double duty as a small, ecclesial formation within a larger network of Christian assemblies in Antioch (among them the networks of Menander and Ignatius, for instance). (Litwa, 77)
If, as seems likely, Saturninus was active at a time of widespread and extreme hostility towards Jews in the eastern part of the Roman empire, the following characterization of his teaching should not be surprising:
Saturninus’s theology . . . expresses a strongly anti-Judaic stance insofar as it openly sought to discredit the Judean deity. . . .
Despite Saturninus’s seeming antagonism toward the Judean deity, he was deeply familiar with Judean scriptures and traditions . . . .
The theological seeds sown by Saturninus bore much fruit. Along with Johannine Christians, Saturninians were among the first to create a strong ideological boundary between their group and competing Jewish (and Christian) circles who worshiped the Jewish deity. Saturninus is the first known Antiochene theologian whose theology derives largely from the exegesis of scriptural texts (with a healthy dose of Jewish tradition). He was determined to revise the book of Genesis. In this revision, Saturninus was the first Christian clearly to identify the Judean god as an angel, one of seven wicked creators. This was a fateful move, proving influential for Marcion . . . . (Litwa, 77f, 82)
The link between Saturninus’s anti-Judaic theology and his historical situation was noted long ago by Robert Grant:
The historical environment of Saturninus was not purely theological. . . It included at least one Jewish revolt against the Romans, in the years 115-117, and perhaps another, in 132—135. Both revolts were disastrous for those who took part in them. Both revolts, as we have already pointed out (see Chapter 1), led radical dualist Jews and Christians to move from apocalyptic toward gnosis, and to reinterpret the Old Testament in a new way. Examining the Heilsgeschichte of Saturninus we shall find that such a reinterpretation is what he is trying to provide. (Grant, 99f — Grant is assuming the traditional first century dates for much of the New Testament literature. I am suggesting that possibly all of the New Testament literature is from the second century.)
Saturninus taught that the world and humankind were created by seven angels, one of whom was the god identified as the creator in Genesis. A higher god had created these angels, including one who was known as Yahweh.
But one of these angels is “the God of the Jews,” and the latter seems to be more important than the others, since Christ came into the world “for the destruction of the God of the Jews and for the salvation of those who believe in him [Jesus Christ].” This is what we read in the Latin translation of Irenaeus summarizing Saturnilus’s doctrine (Adv. haer. I, 24, 2), and also in the Greek text of Hippolytus (Ref. VII, 28, 5). . . . It is almost beyond doubt that for Saturnilus . . . the God of the Jews is the head of the creator angels (d. Irenaeus, I, 24, 4). He can therefore be spoken of as the principal creator.
Thus, according to Saturnilus, the God of the Old Testament is in reality an angel; that is, he is not the true God. As for the reasons that led to the devaluation of this figure, we find them without difficulty in an anti-Judaism and an anticosmic attitude that go much further than those of John. [Unlike the Gospel of John, Saturnilus taught that] Christ came into the world to destroy the God of the prophets and the old Law. . . .
We also learn from Irenaeus’s account that, according to Saturnilus, up to the coming of Christ the demons helped the wickedest human beings, and that this is why Christ came, in order to help the good and destroy the evil and the demons. This seems to mean that the persons in the Old Testament who are depicted as having been prosperous, happy and victorious were in general the most evil, which is to say that the Old Testament depicts men and judges history contrary to the truth; it is to open the door to those Gnostics who declared themselves in favor of the reprobate in the Old Testament. . . . All this manifests an anti-Judaism, or more precisely an antinomianism, a criticism of the Old Testament, that is not found in John . . . (Pétrement, 329f — my bolding)
Roger Parvus proposed the possibility that the Ascension of Isaiah lies behind some passages in our letters of Paul, and that the figure of Paul may be related in some way to Saturninus (compare the Greek form of the name, Sartornilus, with Saulos, the first name of Paul according to Acts):
I suspect the 120s are a little late for the revival of interest in a historical prophet crucified by Pilate. The more likely scenario is that a second Joshua (Greek: Jesus; see also the posts on the name of Jesus from a classicist’s perspective) was chosen to overthrow the cult and teachings of Moses. This Jesus came to earth to trick the wicked powers into crucifying him so that the good could be released from the power of death. There was no heavenly crucifixion as some have attempted to argue. The Saviour figure took on the forms of the angels in the respective heavens on his way down to earth in order not to be recognized as he passed by. In the same way he took on the form of a human in order to hide his true identity while on earth.
But if Saturninus was one of the first to expound teachings that came to have a close relationship to our idea of Christianity, they were in time supplanted by a more positive and appealing narrative: a story in which the Jewish Scriptures were not only superseded but fulfilled, or given a radically new meaning. Instead of coming to destroy the law Jesus was said to have fulfilled it, and even have bound up in himself a spiritual Moses, a spiritual Elijah, a spiritual David. This was a time of “the Second Sophistic” in literature, and a time of applying allegorical insights to bring out new meanings in old myths and narratives. A new narrative biography, like those of the philosophers, was composed in our gospels. This new narrative, better than other narratives like the Ascension of Isaiah or tales of demonic creators, could be read as a key to discovering new and “higher” meanings in Scriptures. That narrative thereby acquired the added depth that came from those Scriptures while supplanting the “Jewishness” that those Scriptures had long upheld, but that had proved a failure and a loathing to the world by the apocalyptic events in the times of Trajan and Hadrian. But the story of that new narrative would likely transfer us from Antioch to Rome.
Grant, Robert M. Gnosticism and Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1959.
Litwa, M. David. Found Christianities: Remaking the World of the Second Century CE. London ; New York: T&T Clark, 2022.
Livesey, Nina E. The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Lohr, Winrich. “Justin Martyr.” In From Thomas to Tertullian: Christian Literary Receptions of Jesus in the Second and Third Centuries CE, edited by Chris Keith, Helen K. Bond, Christine Jacobi, and Jens Schröter, 433–48. The Reception of Jesus in the First Three Centuries. T&T Clark, 2020.
It is the orthodox view that Jesus came in order to fulfil the Jewish Scriptures, but he did so in a manner that defied the expectation that the messiah would conquer the enemies of the Judeans. I have suggested that this view of Jesus arose in a wider context of ideas whereby a Jesus or Saviour figure came to overthrow the works of the Old Testament creator and lawgiver god.
My view is built on Nina Livesey’s argument for Paul’s letters being produced by one of the several “Christian schools” that existed in Rome in the second century. As I pointed out in my previous post, I have found it difficult to understand how the kinds of teachings we associate with “gnosticism” — arguing that Jesus did not have a flesh and blood body, that the Jewish god was evil, that creation itself was evil — arose from what we know of our gospels and letters of Paul. But as per my previous post, I think that the relationship between those “gnostic” ideas and the ideas of orthodox Christianity makes sense if we set orthodoxy as the latecomer.
As Livesey points out, Paul’s letters, arguably critical of “Judaism”, arose at a time when Jews or Judeans were seen as having caused horrific losses to Roman military power in the Bar Kochba war of 132-135 CE and were themselves being severely punished. I would extend the time when Jews (and Jewishness) were widely abhored to the decades before when under the emperor Trajan there were widespread Judean revolts and massacres throughout the eastern part of the empire. (One might compare the widespread loathing of the “troublous” Palestinians – and Muslims – in Israel and the West today.) This was also the time when we see the emergence of “gnostic” or similar types of teachings arguing that the Jewish Scriptures testified to an ignorant (or even evil) god whose rule only promised death.
But there is an argument that “gnosticism” emerged after Christianity. This argument denies that there was any kind of Jewish gnosticism before the gospels and letters of Paul. Edwin Yamauchi pointed out…
A major difficulty in accepting a Jewish origin for Gnosticism is to account for the anti-Jewish use which most Gnostics seem to have made of these elements. The anticosmic attitude of the Gnostics contradicts the Jewish belief that God created the world and declared it good. . . .
Many scholars therefore believe that it was probably through the mediation of Christianity that these Jewish elements came to be used in such an antithetical way. (Yamauchi, Pre-Christian Gnosticism: A Survey of the Evidences, 2nd ed, p. 242f)
Then a few pages later,
Gnosticism with a fully articulated theology, cosmology, anthropology, and soteriology cannot be discerned clearly until the post-Christian era. According to Wilson, were we to adopt the programmatic definition of Jonas ‘then we must probably wait for the second century’. Hengel would concur: ‘Gnosticism is first visible as a spiritual movement at the end of the first century AD at the earliest and only develops fully in the second century.’ (p. 245)
Both of these objections fall by the wayside if we place the whole game in the second century. Anti-Jewish ideas are readily understandable in a world that saw Jews as hostile to humanity “and the gods” and deserving of the bloodshed they were suffering. That is, in the times of Trajan (110s) and Hadrian (130s).
The second objection cited above expresses the point I am making: that yes, we are looking at second century developments.
It is not altogether coincidental that scholars who assume a Gnostic background for New Testament documents in some cases also adopt very late dates for these books, because late dates for these documents would make a stronger case for affinities with Gnosticism. Thus Rudolph dates Colossians to AD 80, Ephesians to the end of the first century, and both the Pastoral and the Johannine Epistles to the beginning of the second century. Koester dates the Pastorals to as late as between AD 120 and AD 160. (pp. 192f)
And why does Koester date the Pastorals to the middle of the second century? In large part because it is believed that it would have taken decades for Paul’s first century church assemblies to have evolved into the authoritarian episcopal structures that those letters indicate. But as Livesey has pointed out in her recent book, the “home gathering” situations of the letters is a rhetorical device aimed at building a sense of community among readers. They are not documenting a historical situation.
There is no independent evidence that dates any of our New Testament writings earlier than the middle of the second century. Yamauchi acknowledges that a second century date for the gospels and letters would make the possibility of a “pre-Christian” gnosticism more likely. I think the argument goes beyond mere chronological ordering of sources, though. That returns me to the point I was making in my previous post.
In coming posts I may (as much for my own benefit as anyone else’s) post notes on various teachers who appear to me to have preceded (proto-)orthodox Christianity and whose followers appear to have engaged with the new gospels and Pauline writings.
I think I have been searching in the wrong places for the origin of the Jesus figure in our New Testament writings. Of course it would be easiest to assume that there is some truth to the gospel narratives and that there was a historical preacher by that name who was crucified and whose followers believed he rose from the dead and went to heaven. But then I would be unable to explain why the earliest uncontested and independent evidence we have for that person does not appear until a full hundred years after his time and without a hint about how that life, so rich in allusions to mythical acts and persons, came to be known. Or I could conjure up an explanation that involved ordinary (generally illiterate) persons passing on ever more imaginative “oral reports” about the person but that would be letting my imagination fly in the face of studies that tell us that’s not how fabulous tales about historical persons originate. (They are composed from the creative imaginations of the literati.)
I used to fuss fruitlessly over trying to understand what might have led to the first gospel, widely believed to have been the Gospel of Mark. I liked the idea that that gospel portrayed a Jesus who could readily be interpreted as a personification of an ideal Israel, one who died with his nation in the catastrophe of 70 CE (the destruction of the Jewish Temple by Titus along with myriads of crucifixions of Jewish victims) and rose again to establish a new “spiritual” Israel in the “church”. But that idea did not explain the kinds of Christianities (there were many types) that swelled and plopped like bubbles in a vast Mediterranean hot mud spring. Not even if we moved the gospel to a later time so that it had the Bar Kochba war (132-135 CE) in mind.
An old door reopened
An important work to be read in conjunction with Nina Livesey’s The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context
Nina Livesey (re)opened a door to a room for me that maybe I should have investigated more thoroughly before. In the book I recently discussed, Livesey speaks of a multiplicity of “Christian” schools comparable with the many philosophical schools in Rome. They usually centred around a prominent teacher, attracted an inner circle of disciples while also holding open public sessions, and would not be averse to publishing both trial and final versions of tracts illustrating some point of their teachings. Livesey revives the idea that the letters attributed to an apostle named Paul were published by one such school, one led by Marcion. Marcion was also reputed to have produced “a gospel”, one that many in later antiquity and since have considered to be an early form of our Gospel of Luke.
Let’s pause there and collect our thoughts for a moment.
Marcion was not the only “Christian” teacher in Rome around the middle of the second century. Other teachers or school heads (not all in Rome) around the same period include Apelles, Basilides, Cerdo, Heracleon, Justin, Marcion, Saturninus/Satornilos, Tatian, Valentinus . . . You get the idea. There were many competing teachings. Some of them came to be dismissed as a consequence of being labelled as “gnostic”. But they were there from the beginning — at least if by “the beginning” we insist on appealing only to independently verifiable sources.
Now when Marcion published “Paul’s letters” some other schools picked them up and used them as foils through which to teach their own doctrines. Multiple interpretations and textual variants were the result. That’s how the schools worked: they would be open to engaging with each others’ teachings, either with modifications, elaborations, or outright rejections. So it is difficult from our perspective to always know what the original teachings of some of these schools were: they were capable of changing over time.
Back to the gospels. When Marcion wrote up a life of Jesus, he was using that figure of Jesus as a means of promoting his (Marcion’s) view that “Christianity” was an antithesis of the Jewish religion. Marcion’s Jesus was not even real flesh and blood but a spirit being in the appearance of flesh and blood: the antithesis even in this respect to the physical ordinances of Moses.
Schools opposing the biblical narrative
But other schools had other ideas about Jesus. More than that, they had ideas about the origins of the Jewish religion and even of humanity itself that we today would find quite bizarre. There were multiple ideas about god and creation. Many of these ideas were borrowed from Greek philosophy, some from Greek literature and myths, as well as from the Jewish Scriptures. Some said that the god who created this world was a god lower than, and ignorant of, the ultimate “Good God”; some said the serpent in the Garden of Eden was actually a benefactor of humankind and the god who punished him (according to the Book of Genesis) was the wicked god; some said that the line of Cain (depicted in Genesis as the first murderer) was the righteous genealogy; some said Jesus first appeared in the form of Adam’s third son, Seth. Indeed, Jesus held different positions among these various schools. He might be seen as one of a number of spirit beings who were “born” in the earliest moments of time. Or he was a human, fathered by Joseph, who was possessed by a spirit being called Christ. Some saw him as hating the laws of the god of Moses and promising deliverance to all whom the Jewish god had condemned.
I suspect it is impossible to ever find a way to reconcile all of these teachings. They span events from time before creation right through to the present and beyond. One thing they all seem to have in common, though: they are all opposed to the orthodox understanding we have of the Jewish Scriptures, or the Old Testament. Not all of them, as far as we are aware, include a place for Jesus. But of those that do, Jesus has a role that is opposed to the Mosaic Law and traditional Jewish Temple. (Not unreasonably, given that Jesus is derived from the name Joshua who was originally understood as the successor to Moses.)
In other words, what I am imagining here is a situation that we can with reasonable assurance place as early as the opening decades and middle of the second century — a time when a find a multiplicity of schools with various notions proposing narratives that contradicted those we read in Genesis and those of the “orthodox” interpretation of the Jewish bible more generally.
Where did those ideas come from?
An Anti-Jewish/Judean time
I am tempted to begin with the beginning of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) as proposed by Niels Peter Lemche and in some depth by Russell Gmirkin. This takes us back to the beginning of the Hellenistic era (from the time of Alexander the Great’s conquests) when Samaritans and Judeans, with the aid of Greek writings, collaborated to construct a narrative of origins that we read today in the books from Genesis to Deuteronomy or Joshua. Genesis in particular has retained hints that its authors were trying to incorporate multiple gods whom later readers would equate with Yahweh. Most scholars have seen multiple hands and schools of thought going into the final product of the Pentateuch. It is not difficult to imagine some intellects associated with the production of the first bible continuing to raise alternative ideas that were infused with Greek philosophy and myth or to imagine that some of this kind of divergent thinking continued through to the Roman era. What are surely critical turning points, however, are the calamities that befell the Jews (or Judeans) first under Vespasian and Titus (the first Jewish war of 66-70 CE), the uprisings and widespread massacres of Jews a few decades later under Trajan and then the “final solution” by 135 CE under Hadrian when the Jews were forbidden even to set foot in Jerusalem.
The bloody times coincided with the emergence of “Christian schools” in Rome. Let’s take a step beyond Nina Livesey’s specific focus on the letters of Paul appearing at this time. Let’s suggest that it is these times that witness the emergence of schools teaching the “end” of the Jewish laws. These times further witness teachings declaring the falsehood of the narrative of creation by the Jewish god, or at least teaching that this creation was evil or less than “good”. Imagine that this is the time when we see the namesake of Moses’ successor, Joshua/Jesus, promising deliverance from the judgment of that lesser god of the Jews.
If we can imagine all of that, we are, I think, confining ourselves to what the evidence in our second century sources allows.
But how does any of that explain the Christianity we recognize today?
It doesn’t. If that’s all we had, no doubt those negative teachings of Marcion, of Valentinus and others would have fallen by the wayside in time.
From antipathy to antithesis to … fulfilment
But something happened after Marcion released his story of Jesus, a Jesus who was an “antithesis” of the best that the god of the Jews could offer.
Another school, perhaps one associated with the “church father” Justin, or with Basilides in Alexandria (I don’t know and can only surmise), responded with an opposing narrative about a Jesus who was less an “antithesis” of the Jewish god than a “fulfilment” of all that the Jewish god had hoped for but had failed to achieve hitherto.
If that happened, we have a revolutionary moment. We no longer have a negative response to “the Jewish religion and scriptures”; rather, we have a way of capturing and finding new and enriched meaning in that old religion and its hoary sacred writings.
What if Jesus could be transformed from an anti-Moses or anti-Yahweh figure into a ‘higher than Moses’ figure, a fulfilment of the higher ethics of god who was henceforth to appear as a newly discovered deity, or as the old deity whose true character was only being seen clearly now for the first time — or as the “one sent to reveal” that newly understood deity?
Such a Jesus had the power to enrich and so preserve with new meaning texts that had long been revered (even among non-Jews). Allegorical reading could infuse them with new meanings. The old was discarded, yes, but it was also retained and revivified as throwing the “new” into 3D relief by its shadows: Joseph and Moses and David and Elijah (and so on) of the Old Testament prefigured the Jesus of the New — at least if read with a little imagination. A gospel could depict Jesus as a personification of an ideal Israel, healing others but suffering unjustly only to be raised up and bring all humanity to salvation. Another gospel could present Jesus as a new Moses delivering a “higher law” in the Sermon on the Mount. And so on.
I suggest that once one or some of those schools (probably in Rome but not necessarily confined to there) discovered a way to both reject and embrace with new meaning the old Mosaic order of things, they were on a winner, as we might say today.
Such a Jesus, just like the other original Jewish writings and again like the writings of “proto-Christian” (including “gnostic”) schools, drew upon the inspiration of Greek myths and philosophy to flesh out their teachings. The Jesus with us today drew upon one additional source — the Jewish Scriptures — and found as a result a longer-lasting heritage. Various “schools” may have competed for the most outstanding way to oppose and supplant the religion of the Jews who from 70 to 135 CE were suffering the calamities of Vespasian, Titus, Trajan and Hadrian. The form of Christianity that became a religion that could boast of a “higher fulfilment” and stronger appeal to literati and hoi polloi alike was the one that learned how to infuse venerable texts and the experiences of their advocates with new meaning and build on their foundation. Rejection of the Old, in way, yes, like the teachings of other schools … but with one important twist.
Masalha’s sources: primarily the official archives (e.g. the Central Zionist Archives, Israeli State Archives, the London Public Record Office) and diaries and other writings of leading Zionist pioneers (e.g. of David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann).
Here I continue a series I began in July 2010 — a history of the Zionist movement as documented from official archives and personal diaries by the Palestinian historian Nur Masalha.
I have long held off from completing that task, most especially since recent events in Gaza and now the West Bank and Lebanon left me feeling that the current traumas are too suffocating to allow anyone to think of the past. But the past is important for understanding what is happening today.
The following account makes it clear why current events did not begin with the Hamas attack on October 7 2024. It will all sound so horrifyingly familiar that you that you may find yourself wondering if you are reading history or today’s news stories.
“What did the world do to prevent the genocide of the Jews? Why now should there be such excitement about the plight of the Arab refugees?“
The “Miracle” of the “Arab Exodus”
We may have heard that Arabs fled wholesale of their own free will when the state of Israel was declared in May 1948.
The plight of these Arab refugees and the problem they posed deserve attention . . . A huge and pitiful multitude, uprooted, exploited and helpless, they numbered at their height approximately 750,000. . . .
Superstitious and uneducated, the Arab masses succumbed to the panic and fled. . . .
Weizmann (left) and US ambassador MacDonald
Certainly, [the big three — Weizmann, Ben-Gurion or Sharett] had been quite unprepared for the Arab exodus; no responsible Zionist leader had anticipated such a “miraculous” clearing of the land. Dr. Weizmann, despite his ingrained rationalism, spoke to me emotionally of this “miraculous simplification of Israel’s tasks,” and cited the vaster tragedy of six million Jews murdered during World War II. He would ask, “What did the world do to prevent this genocide? Why now should there be such excitement in the UN and the Western capitals about the plight of the Arab refugees?” — First United States Ambassador to Israel, James G. McDonald, p. 174ff
Such a carefully worded narrative positions the Arab “exodus” of 1948 as a sadly inferior foil to the biblical Jewish exodus, even a matter of divinely ordained compensation for one party at the “tragic” expense of “pitiful, superstitious, cowardly masses”. MacDonald does elsewhere express some pity for the Arabs along with regret that the Israeli approach was not “more humane”. But the purpose of these posts is to cite what the Israeli leadership were in fact thinking and planning — how the Zionist program planned for and enforced the Arab evacuations.
Events leading to the 1948 Exodus
Let’s back up a few months and into the year before Israel declared its actual birth.
2 November 1947: A vote by the United Nations General Assembly was imminent. The UN was scheduled to declare that Palestine should be partitioned between Jews and Arabs and that the Jewish state would contain a large Arab population (42%). The leading Zionist organization, the Jewish Agency Executive, met and agreed that citizenship should not be granted to the Arabs in the soon-to-be-established Jewish state. The reason was stated by Ben-Gurion:
In the event of war between the two Palestine states, said Ben-Gurion, the Arab minority in the Jewish State would be ‘“‘a Fifth Column.”’ Hence, it was best that they be citizens of the Palestine Arab State so that, if hostile, they “‘could be expelled”’ to the Palestine Arab State. But if they were citizens of the Jewish State, “‘it would only be possible to imprison them, and it would be better to expel them than to imprison them.”’ (Benny Morris, 28, citing the minutes of the Jewish Agency Executive meeting)
29 November 1947: The United Nations General Assembly passed resolution 181 endorsing the partition of Palestine into 2 states: Arab and Jewish, with Jerusalem and Bethlehem forming an international zone. The boundaries drawn up meant the Jewish state would consist of a 42% Arab population.
Ben-Gurion
30 December 1947: Ben Gurion addressed the Histadrut and declared that the Zionist settlers of Palestine would need to learn to think “like a state”:
There can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60 percent.
This, Ben-Gurion added, made necessary the adoption of “a new approach…new habits of mind to suit our new future. We must think like a state.” (Masalha, 176; Morris, 28)
But what kind of state should Israel “think like”?
The kind of state in Ben-Gurion’s mind was Turkey which had ethnically cleansed (or “transferred”) their Greek population. Eleven years earlier he had made it clear that there was “nothing morally wrong in the idea” but that it was the kind of thing only a state should carry out.
Two non-Zionists — Senator (left) and Hexter — vehemently opposed the transfer idea: ’there are Arabs in this country. The more we take them in consideration, the more we will succeed . . . .’ — but were overruled by the Zionists
[Two non-Zionists, Senator and Hexter] vehemently opposed the transfer idea: ’there are Arabs in this country. The more we take them in consideration, the more we will succeed . . . .’ Senator considered transfer as fraught with danger: ‘We can’t say that we want to live with the Arabs and at the same time transfer them to Transjordan.’ In summing up the debate, Ben-Gurion stated that . . . the population exchange between Greece and Turkey could not serve as a precedent since it was a pursuant to voluntary agreement between two states: ‘We are not a state and Britain will not do it for us . . In Ben-Gurion’s view, the proposal would alienate public opinion, including Jewish public opinion, but there is nothing morally wrong in the idea’. (Flapan, 261)
Conflict Begins Before Israel’s Foundation in May 1948:
Within weeks of the UN partition resolution, the country was plunged into what soon became a full-scale civil war. By mid-December, “spontaneous and unorganized” Palestinian outbreaks of violence were being met by the full weight of the Yishuv’s armed forces, the Haganah, in what the British high commissioner called “indiscriminate action against the Arabs,”3 coupled with measures aimed at economic strangulation. Ben-Gurion advised on 19 December that “we adopt the system of aggressive defense; with every Arab attack we must respond with a decisive blow: the destruction of the place or the expulsion of the residents along with the seizure of the place.”4 On 30 December, a British intelligence observer reported that the Haganah was moving fast to exploit Palestinian weaknesses and disorganization, especially in Haifa and Jaffa, and to render them “completely powerless” so as to force them into flight.
The Palestinians were completely unprepared for war, their leadership still in disarray and largely unarmed as a result of the 1936-39 rebellion. The Yishuv’s defense force, the Haganah (to say nothing of the dissident Irgun Tzvai Leumi and Lehi groups), was fully armed and on the offensive. As early as February 1945, before World War II had even ended, the first of a series of master military plans adopted by the Haganah (which in turn was under the jurisdiction of the Jewish Agency) was in place in anticipation of the war for statehood. (Masalha, 176f. Note 3 = Middle East Centre, St. Antony’s College Archives, Oxford, Cunningham Papers, 1/3/147, “Weekly intelligence Appreciation.” A three-day general strike started on 2 December in protest of the United Nations resolution. Note 4, see quote from Flapan p 90 following…)
Flapan was an Israeli historian and, despite his searingly critical account, himself remained a supporter of the Zionist project, albeit “more humane and liberal”. This kind of support for Zionism has been common among Israeli historians despite their acknowledgement of Zionist history. Another example is Benny Morris.
I flip over from Nur Masalha’s account to that of Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities, beginning from page 88 (with my highlighting and formatting):
Records are available from archives and diaries, however, and while not revealing a specific plan or precise orders for expulsion, they provide overwhelming circumstantial evidence to show that a design was being implemented by the Haganah, and later by the IDF, to reduce the number of Arabs in the Jewish state to a minimum, and to make use of most of their lands, properties, and habitats to absorb the masses of Jewish immigrants.
89
It is true, of course, that many Palestinians left of their own accord. Tens of thousands of community leaders, businessmen, landowners, and members of the intellectual elite who had the means for removing their families from the scene of fighting did so. Thousands of others — government officials, professionals, and skilled workers chose to immigrate to Arab areas rather than live in a Jewish state, where they feared unemployment and discrimination. Nearly half the Arab population of Haifa moved to Nazareth, Acre, Nablus, and Jenin before their city was captured by the Haganah on April 23, 1948. The Arab quarters of Wadi Nisnas and Karmel were almost completely emptied out. . . .
But hundreds of thousands of others, intimidated and terrorized, fled in panic, and still others were driven out by the Jewish army, which, under the leadership of Ben-Gurion, planned and executed the expulsion in the wake of the UN Partition Resolution.
The balance is clear in IDF intelligence estimates. As of June 1, 1948, 370,000 Arabs had left the country, from both the Jewish parts and the Arab parts conquered by the Jews.
Jewish attacks on Arab centers, particularly large villages, townlets, or cities, accounted for about 55 percent of those who left;
terrorist acts of the Irgun and LEHI, 15 percent;
whispering campaigns (psychological warfare), about 2 percent;
evacuation ordered by the IDF, another 2 percent;
and general fear, about 10 percent.
Therefore, 84 percent left in direct response to Israeli actions, while only 5 percent left on orders from Arab bands. The remaining 11 percent are not accounted for in this estimate and may refer to those who left voluntarily. (The total reflects only about 50 percent of the entire exodus since a similar number were to leave the country within the next six months.)
Again, it is obvious that no specific orders for expulsion could have been issued. All of the Zionist movements’ official pronouncements as well as those of the provisional government and, after January 1949, the Israeli government — and Ben-Gurion was prominent in these bodies — promised, as noted, fair treatment for the Arab minority. Moreover, in the face of the often brutal destruction and evacuation of villages, Ben-Gurion — along with other cabinet ministers — publicly criticized the brutality, looting, rape, and indiscriminate killing.
90
In private, however, Ben-Gurion was not averse to making his real views clear. Thus, on December 19, 1947, he demanded that “we adopt the system of aggressive defense; with every Arab attack we must respond with a decisive blow: the destruction of the place or the expulsion of the residents along with the seizure of the place.” He declared: “When in action we . . . must fight strongly and cruelly, letting nothing stop us.’’ Even without direct orders, the goal and spirit of real policy were understood and accepted by the army. That Ben-Gurions’ ultimate aim was to evacuate as much of the Arab population as possible from the Jewish state can hardly be doubted, if only from the variety of means he employed to achieve this purpose:
an economic war aimed at destroying Arab transport, commerce, and the supply of foods and raw materials to the urban population;
psychological warfare, ranging from “friendly warnings” to outright intimidation and exploitation of panic caused by dissident underground terrorism;
and finally, and most decisively, the destruction of whole villages and the eviction of their inhabitants by the army.
Ben-Gurion took note of the combined effects of economic, military, and psychological warfare in a diary entry from December 11, 1947:
Arabs are fleeing from Jaffa and Haifa. Bedouin are fleeing from the Sharon. Most are seeking refuge with members of their family. Villagers are returning to their villages. Leaders are also in flight, most of them are taking their families to Nablus, Nazareth. The Bedouin are moving to Arab areas. According to our “friends” [advisers], every response to our dealing a hard blow at the Arabs with many casualties is a blessing. This will increase the Arabs’ fear and external help for the Arabs will be ineffective. . . . Josh Palmon [an adviser to Ben-Gurion on Arab affairs] thinks that Haifa and Jaffa will be evacuated [by the Arabs] because of hunger. There was almost famine in Jaffa during the disturbances of 1936-1939.
91
In a letter to Sharett a few days later, Ben-Gurion focused on economic issues, observing that “the important difference with [the riots of] 1937 is the increased vulnerability of the Arab urban economy. Haifa and Jaffa are at our mercy. We can ‘starve them out.’ Motorized transport, which has also become an important factor in their life, is to a large extent at our mercy.”
The destruction of the Palestinian urban bases, along with the conquest and evacuation (willing or unwilling) of nearby villages, undermined the whole structure of Palestinian life in many parts of the country, especially in the towns. Ben-Gurion’s advisers urged closing stores, barring raw materials from factories, and various other measures.
Yadin, the army’s head of operations, advised that “we must paralyze Arab transportation and commerce, and harass them in country and town. This is the way to lower their morale.”
And Sasson proposed “damaging Arab commerce — even if Jewish commerce will be damaged. We can tolerate it, they cannot. . . we must not hit here and there, but at all transportation at once, all commerce and so on.”
Ezra Danin spoke of “a crushing blow” to be dealt by destroying “transportation (buses, trucks transporting agricultural produce, and private cars) . . . [and] economic facilities — Jaffa port (boats to be sunk); the closing down of stores; cutting off their contact with neighboring countries; the closing down of Arab factories through blockage of raw materials and cement.” Later, he added that “Jaffa must be put under a state of siege.” . . . .
Yigal Allon, commander in chief of the Haganah’s Palmach shock troops, also advised economic measures: “It is not always possible to discern between opponents and nonopponents. . . . It is impossible to refrain from injuring children — because it is impossible to separate them from the others when one has to enter every house. The Arabs are defending themselves now, and there are weapons in every house. Now only extreme punitive measures are possible. The call for peace will appear as a sign of weakness. Only after inflicting a major blow can calls to peace work. We must strike at their economy.”
Clearly, significant numbers of Arabs without food, work, or the most elementary security would choose to leave, especially given that almost all of their official leadership had left even before the fighting began.
92
On January 5, 1948, Ben-Gurion was able to review in his diary some of the effects of economic warfare on the Arabs of Haifa: “[Their] commerce has for the most part been destroyed, many stores are closed . . . prices are rising among the Arabs.” He noted that up to twenty thousand Arabs had left, including many of the wealthier people, whose businesses were no doubt among those destroyed.
Ben-Gurion’s belief in the efficacy of the policy of destroying the Arab economy led him to monitor its results constantly. Thus, on January 11, 1948, he noted in his diary a telephone conversation between Hussein al-Khalidi, secretary of the Arab Higher Committee and former mayor of Jerusalem, and the banker Farid Bey, in Haifa. Farid Bey told Khalidi of the desperate situation in Jerusalem and Haifa. “You have no idea how hard it is outside,” Khalidi replied, referring to the Arab leadership abroad. Farid Bey responded, “And here [Arabs] are dying day by day.” “It is even worse in Jaffa,” said Khalidi. “Everyone is leaving.”
That same day, Sasson reported to King Abdallah that the Palestinians in Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem were facing “hunger, poverty, unemployment, fear, terror.” Two days later, on January 13, Khalidi informed the mufti of the crisis: “The position here is very difficult,” he reported from Jerusalem. “There are no people, no discipline, no arms, and no ammunition. Over and above this, there is no tinned food and no foodstuffs. The black market is flourishing. The economy is destroyed. . . . This is the real situation, there is no flour, no food. . . . Jerusalem is emptying out.”
The urban disintegration of the Palestinian Arabs was a fait accompli. Ben-Gurion’s tactics had succeeded. As he explained it:
The strategic objective [of the Jewish forces] was to destroy the urban communities, which were the most organized and politically conscious sections of the Palestinian people. This was not done by house-to-house fighting inside the cities and towns, but by the conquest and destruction of the rural areas surrounding most of the towns. This technique led to the collapse and surrender of Haifa, Jaffa, Tiberias, Safed, Acre, Beit-Shan, Lydda, Ramleh, Majdal, and Beersheba. Deprived of transportation, food, and raw materials, the urban communities underwent a process of disintegration, chaos, and hunger, which forced them to surrender.
93
The military campaign against the Arabs, including the “conquest and destruction of the rural areas,” was set forth in the Haganah’s Plan Dalet [which I will outline in my next post]. Plan D, formulated and put into operation in March 1948, went into effect “officially” only on May 14, when the state was declared. The tenets of the plan were clear and unequivocal: The Haganah must carry out “activities against enemy settlements which are situated within or near to our Haganah installations, with the aim of preventing their use by active [Arab] armed forces.” These activities included the destruction of villages, the destruction of the armed enemy, and, in case of opposition during searches, the expulsion of the population to points outside the borders of the state.
Also targeted were transport and communication routes that might be used by the Arab forces. According to an interview with Yadin some twenty-five years later, “The plan intended to secure the territory of the state as far as the Palestinian Arabs were concerned, communication routes, and the strongholds required.” Yadin and his assistants outlined nine courses of operation that included “blocking the access roads of the enemy from their bases to targets inside the Jewish state,” and the “domination of the main arteries of transportation that are vital to the Jews, and destruction of the Arab villages near them, so that they shall not serve as bases for attacks on the traffic.”
The plan also referred to the “temporary” conquest of Arab bases outside Israeli borders. It included detailed guidelines for taking over Arab neighborhoods in mixed towns, particularly those overlooking transport routes, and the expulsion of their populations to the nearest urban center.
The psychological aspect of warfare was not neglected either. The day after the plan went into effect, the Lebanese paper Al-Hayat quoted a leaflet that was dropped from the air and signed by the Haganah command in Galilee:
We have no wish to fight ordinary people who want to live in peace, but only the army and forces which are preparing to invade Palestine. Therefore . . . all people who do not want this war must leave together with their women and children in order to be safe. This is going to be a cruel war, with no mercy or compassion. There is no reason why you should endanger yourselves.
Exactly how cruel and merciless was already clear from the example of the Dir Yassin massacre. The village of Dir Yassin was located in a largely Jewish area in the vicinity of Jerusalem and, as already noted, had signed a nonaggression pact with its Jewish neighbors as early as 1942. As a result, its inhabitants had not asked the Arab Higher Committee for protection when the fighting broke out. Yet for the entire day of April 9, 1948, Irgun and LEHI soldiers carried out the slaughter in a cold and premeditated fashion. In a 1979 article dealing with the later forced evacuation of Lydda and Ramleh, New York Times reporter David Shipler cites Red Cross and British documents to the effect that the attackers “lined men, women and children up against walls and shot them,” so that Dir Yassin “remains a name of infamy in the world.” When they had finished, they looted the village and fled.
The ruthlessness of the attack on Dir Yassin shocked Jewish and world public opinion alike, drove fear and panic into the Arab population, and led to the flight of unarmed civilians from their homes all over the country.
I have jumped ahead a little. I need to backtrack to clarify a little more in the next post what the Zionist Plan D (Dalet) was all about.
Flapan, Simha. The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities. New York: Pantheon Books, 1987.
Flapan, Simha. Zionism and the Palestinians. London: Harper & Row, 1979.
Masalha, Nur. Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948. Washington, D.C: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992.
Morris, Benny. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. https://archive.org/details/birthofpalestini00morr/mode/2up
McDonald, James G. My Mission In Israel 1948-1951. Simon And Schuster, 1951. http://archive.org/details/mymissioninisrae002443mbp
Abstract: Bayesian decision theory is a mathematical framework that models reasoning and decision-making under uncertain conditions. The Bayesian paradigm originated as a theory of how people should operate, not a theory of how they actually operate. Nevertheless, cognitive scientists increasingly use it to describe the actual workings of the human mind. Over the past few decades, cognitive science has produced impressive Bayesian models of mental activity. The models postulate that certain mental processes conform, or approximately conform, to Bayesian norms. Bayesian models offered within cognitive science have illuminated numerous mental phenomena, such as perception, motor control, and navigation. This Element provides a self-contained introduction to the foundations of Bayesian cognitive science. It then explores what we can learn about the mind from Bayesian models offered by cognitive scientists.
Abstract: This Element surveys contemporary philosophical and psychological work on various forms of irrationality: akrasia, strange beliefs, and implicit bias. It takes up several questions in an effort to better illuminate these more maligned aspects of human behaviour and cognition: what is rationality? Why is it irrational to act against one’s better judgement? Could it ever be rational to do so? What’s going wrong with beliefs in conspiracy theories, those arising from self-deception, or those which are classed as delusional? Might some of them in fact be appropriate responses to evidence? Are implicit biases irrational when they conflict with our avowed beliefs? Or might they be rational insofar as they track social realities?
What’s astonishing is the gulf between what we expect to find and what we find when we actually look.
A friend of mine, the philosopher and magician David Abram, used to be the house magician at Alice’ s Restaurant in Massachusetts (made famous by the Arlo Guthrie song). Every night he passed around the tables; coins walked through his fingers, reappeared exactly where they shouldn’t, disappeared again, divided in two, vanished into nothing. One evening, two customers returned to the restaurant shortly after leaving and pulled David aside, looking troubled. When they left the restaurant, they said, the sky had appeared shockingly blue and the clouds large and vivid. Had he put something in their drinks? As the weeks went by, it continued to happen — customers returned to say the traffic had seemed louder than it was before, the streetlights brighter, the patterns on the sidewalk more fascinating, the rain more refreshing. The magic tricks were changing the way people experienced the world.
David explained to me why he thought this happened. Our perceptions work in large part by expectation. It takes less cognitive effort to make sense of the world using preconceived images updated with a small amount of new sensory information than to constantly form entirely new perceptions from scratch. It is our preconceptions that create the blind spots in which magicians do their work. By attrition, coin tricks loosen the grip of our expectations about the way hands and coins work. Eventually, they loosen the grip of our expectations on our perceptions more generally. On leaving the restaurant, the sky looked different because the diners saw the sky as it was there and then, rather than as they expected it to be. Tricked out of our expectations, we fall back on our senses. What’s astonishing is the gulf between what we expect to find and what we find when we actually look.
This post is the final in my series discussing Nina Livesey’s The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship.
Portrayals of Plato’s and Aristotle’s Schools (Wikimedia images)
Nina Livesey (NL) sees the letters of Paul being composed and published in a philosophical school setting in Rome in the second century CE. There were many schools of this type in Rome at this time. We are to imagine a teacher, a philosopher, who attracted student followers. The teacher-philosopher would often hold public meetings to read work they had put in writing; discussion and new ideas would follow; and a final written work then submitted to contracted sponsors who would make copies for distribution to interested persons.
It sounds strange to our ears that Christian teachings should be categorized as a “philosophy” but Christian teachers were described in the same way: teachers of certain doctrines and heads of schools. The physician Galen referred to a “school of Moses and Christ”; the “church father” Justin spoke of one such Christian teacher facing the death penalty (as some philosophers experienced because of indiscreet public pronouncements – discussed by Secord). Many such Christian teachers are found in our sources: Saturninus, Cerdo, Marcion, Tatian, Justin, Valentinus. . . The Latin word translated as “heresy” might be as well understood as a “school” (NL, further citing Vinzent).
We have evidence of mutual exchanges among these various schools. Some would denounce other teachers; others would engage in less heated debate; the surviving writings also demonstrate various means of persuasion, such as listening respectfully to challenging questions and addressing hearers as close friends or even family.
Comparing Paul with the philosopher Justin
One of these teachers or Christian philosophers was Justin, known as Justin Martyr – mid second century – who identified himself as a philosopher. Justin taught that his understanding of the prophecies in the Jewish Scriptures came from an encounter with “an old man” who inspired him to turn his back on all his previous knowledge. The pattern echoes the callings we read about in the gospels and Acts of the twelve disciples and Paul who come to understand the Scriptures through listening to Christ or his servants. NL reminds us of an article by Andrew Hofer, “The Old Man as Christ in Justin’s ‘Dialogue with Trypho'”. NL in fact refers to a host of earlier work discussing the nature and workings of these “Christian” philosophical schools (interested readers might like to follow up some of these in the insert box).
Dillon, John. “Philosophy as a Profession in Late Antiquity.” In Approaching Late Antiquity: The Transformation from Early to Late Empire, edited by Simon Swain and Mark Edwards, 401–18. Oxford University Press, 2003.
Georges, Tobias. “Justin’s School in Rome–Reflections on Early Christian ‘Schools.’” Zeitschrift Für Antikes Christentum / Journal of Ancient Christianity 16, no. 1 (May 15, 2012): 75–87.
Lieu, Judith. Marcion and the Making of a Heretic: God and Scripture in the Second Century. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Schott, Jeremy M. “General Introduction.” In The History of the Church: A New Translation / Eusebius of Caesarea, translated by Jeremy M. Schott. University of California Press, 2019.
Dillon, John. “Philosophy as a Profession in Late Antiquity.” In Approaching Late Antiquity: The Transformation from Early to Late Empire, edited by Simon Swain and Mark Edwards, 401–18. Oxford University Press UK, 2003.
Eshleman, Kendra. The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Nasrallah, Laura. “Mapping the World: Justin, Tatian, Lucian, and the Second Sophistic.” The Harvard Theological Review 98, no. 3 (2005): 283–314.
Rubenson, Samuel. “Early Monasticism and the Concept of a ‘School.’” In Monastic Education in Late Antiquity: The Transformation of Classical Paideia, edited by Lillian I. Larsen, 13–32. Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Secord, Jared. Christian Intellectuals and the Roman Empire: From Justin Martyr to Origen. Penn State University Press, 2020.
Snyder, Harlow Gregory. “‘Above the Bath of Myrtinus’: Justin Martyr’s ‘School’ in the City of Rome.” Harvard Theological Review 100, no. 3 (July 2007): 335–62.
Snyder, Gregory H. Christian Teachers in Second-Century Rome Schools and Students in the Ancient City. Brill, 2020.
Ulrich, Jörg. “What Do We Know about Justin’s ‘School’ in Rome?” Zeitschrift Für Antikes Christentum / Journal of Ancient Christianity 16, no. 1 (May 15, 2012): 62–74.
Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture. Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Wendt, Heidi. At the Temple Gates: The Religion of Freelance Experts in the Roman Empire. Oxford University Press, 2016.
Wendt, Heidi. “Marcion the Shipmaster: Unlikely Religious Experts of the Roman World?” In Marcion of Sinope as Religious Entrepreneur, 55–74. Studia Patristica., Vol. XCIX. Peeters, 2018.
Vinzent, M. Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels. Peeters, 2014.
Vinzent, Markus. “Orthodoxy and Heresy: Misnomers and Misnamers.” Forum: Foundations and Facets. Third Series 10, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 91–108.
Watts, Edward J. City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria. University of California Press, 2006.
Such schools evidently had access to many writings such as the Jewish Scriptures and commentaries on them.
Our reading of Justin’s work, NL points out, alerts us to similar approaches and aims in Paul’s letters:
The assessment of the [Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho] as protreptic teachings redolent of a school setting allows for additional parallels with the letters. Like Justin, the Apostle Paul’s call to “Christian” teachings arrives through other worldly means (Gal 1:13-16). Both Justin and the Apostle Paul are seen to depart from former philosophies (Justin) or a former way of life (Apostle Paul) to embrace the new teachings (Gal 1:13-2:2; Phil 3:4-11).160 As indicated in Chapter 3, the Pauline letters contain numerous instances of the language of friendship and posit community members as family (“brothers”). In the letters, issues of theological import are made applicable to communities, as are community members cautioned against the influence of others.
Furthermore, like the Dialogue, Pauline letters also make extensive use of the LXX161 in support of “Christian” principles. . . Like the Dialogue, Pauline letters contain verses cited verbatim but also those that are strategically amended. This use of scripture, is an indication of their ready availability . . . and thus provides an additional indication of a school like setting. (NL, 235f)
The School of Marcion
NL argues that the letters attributed to Paul were most plausibly produced by the school of Marcion.
Marcion is associated with an influential school in Rome and is known as having advanced “Christian” doctrines, and as having produced and published various compositions. In addition, among the second-century school heads (writer/intellectuals) in Rome, Marcion is regarded as having a nearly exclusive interest in Paul as being the one true Apostle from among all other “Christian” apostles and figures. Marcion’s ten-letter collection of Pauline letters (the Apostolikon) is our earliest evidence of Pauline letters.
Among the “Christian” intellectuals and heads of schools in second-century Rome, Marcion is arguably the most well-known. . . . According to [Judith Lieu], Marcion may have been the first among the “Christian” school heads operating in Rome . . . It has likewise been suggested that the codex form may have derived from Marcion. Vinzent notes that “no other teacher in the history of the Church until Martin Luther received during his lifetime (and continuing after his death) a comparable literary response.” (NL 236f)
All indications are that Marcion moved to Rome shortly after the Bar Kochba war. NL cites David Balás and I’ll quote a little more from Balás than NL specifically mentions (bolded highlighting and formatting is mine):
Marcion’s doctrines are marked by a certain simplicity, not to say single- and simple-mindedness that distinguish them from the elaborate speculations of other Gnostics or the metaphysical analyses of leading philosophers. John G. Gager has recently shown, however, the similarity of some of Marcion’s arguments, as reported by Tertullian, to certain philosophical (notably Epicurean) proofs against providence.19 The difference is that, whereas for Epicure the (especially physical) evils of this world excluded divine providence (the gods dwelled unconcerned in the intermundia) and lead, according to the Skeptics, to doubt of the existence of god(s), Marcion accepted (with the Old Testament!) the existence of a Creator, but concluded from the popular-philosophical arguments that the Creator was neither omniscient nor truly good.
19The evidence considered above indicates that Marcion was also familiar with philosophical issues of his time and that Epicurean philosophy in particular provided an argument which Marcion used to support the key element of his thought. (Gager, “Marcion and Philosophy”, p. 59)
Of course, Marcion’s opposition to matter, body, and passions was also close to contemporary philosophy (Stoic and Neo-Pythagorean). . . .
What seems constant in all the above instances was Marcion’s tendency to provide a simple solution, without much concern for either the complexities of the data or the consistency of the system, a tendency which may explain the popular success and enduring strength of Marcionism.
Besides the Gnostic and popular-philosophical sources, I believe Marcion’s “point of departure” was deeply influenced by his and his fellow Christians’ relationship to Judaism in the middle of the second century. Marcion came to Rome around 136-140 and was expelled from the Roman Church in 144. These dates coincide with the period of the bloody suppression of the great Jewish revolt in 135. R. M. Grant has argued that the disillusionment of Jewish sects with the seemingly powerless and deceptive God of the Old Testament was one of the reasons for the Gnostic reduction of Yahweh to an imperfect or even hostile deity.
Whether this is wholely or partially correct or not, Grant’s similar hypothesis concerning Marcion seems quite possible. Grant said that Marcion “…wanted to dissociate Christianity not only from apocalyptic Judaism, but also from Judaism in general.” Politically and socially, the Christians, especially hellenistic Christians with no national or cultural roots in Judaism, found at this time their association with Jewish history an embarrassing and dangerous liability. Marcion may have found a way to effect this desirable separation by using Jewish self-interpretation at several main points. For instance,
— by accepting the anti-Christian contention of some Jews that Jesus Christ was not the Messiah promised by the Old Testament, a Messiah the Jews rightly expected to be political and warlike, Marcion made a counter claim that Christ was in fact the self-revelation of a previously entirely unknown, all-good God.
— Secondly, the Jewish rejection of Christian typological or spiritual exegesis of the Old Testament, which seemed to threaten Christianity’s claims to historical legitimacy, was now seen as a liberating insight.
— Finally, the shaken confidence of many Jews in the confirmed goodness, omniscience, and all-powerfulness of Yahweh (incompatible as it seemed with the historical realities of the time) was taken as an admission that the God of the Old Testament was inferior to the all-good and perfect God revealed in Jesus Christ.
Paradoxically, it was precisely by having accepted Jewish scriptures and history, at least to a large extent, in their contemporary Jewish interpretation that Marcion arrived at his radical dissociation of the [Old and New] Testaments! (Balás, 98f)
If, as has been argued, Marcion came from a proselyte Jewish family we can scarcely avoid wondering about the impact on him of the total destruction of Jerusalem to the extent of the emperor Hadrian banning Jews even from entering the city and the widespread massacres of Jews that had been carried out under both Trajan and Hadrian. Though Marcion reduced the god of the Old Testament to an inferior deity beneath the higher and more merciful Good God of Jesus and the New Testament, he nonetheless retained key Jewish foundations:
Vinzent comments, “Marcion’s message … built on the Jewish foundations, on the Jewish Scriptures, the messianic hope, Jewish ethics, rituals and the Jewish people.”191 That his was a “book-religion” likewise owes to Jewish influence.192 (NL, 240. Note 191 = “Marcion the Jew”; 192 = Marcion and the Dating)
I’ll quote a little more from Vinzent:
Marcion did not want Christianity to disinherit the Jews and incorporate their Holy Scriptures into its own canon, but saw only one heritage, namely that given by God in his revelation to Paul. Christianity was simply incomparable to anything that the creator had made, be it the universe, its history, the Law or the prophecies of Judaism. And yet, Marcion could not free himself from his Jewish and Greco-Roman roots. That Christianity would be a book-religion in its own right was one of Marcion’s Jewish ideas and objectives, and one that he achieved. And that Christianity would be a thoroughly Hellenized religion without being lost in this world of the creator, in the sphere of apocalyptic religious politics and prophetic cults, Marcion secured by rooting the sayings of a faintly remembered Jewish messianic rabbi into Greco-Roman history. Jesus, who had come down from heaven as an angel-like human being under Emperor Tiberius and procurator Pontius Pilate, delivered his message through a new literary form, a combination of startling sayings and surprising deeds, through unexpected aphorisms and mind-blowing miracles, performed on Jesus’ journey towards the shame of the cross and the unbelievable resurrection. Marcion created a powerful narrative of a transcendent, pre-existing figure who appeared on this alien earth, in the midst of history, to liberate human beings from these physical chains of ignorance, greed, law, sin, judgement and the need for repentance, to rescue humanity through buying men back by paying the price of death on the cross, through his descent to the utmost depths of hell, in order to save all who wanted to accept this helping hand, and to let them be where and what the Risen is. In the same way that this cosmic creation was a despicable horror without end, unfolding as a tragic history, in the eyes of creatures, even of the elect and chosen disciples, the Saviour was regarded as a tragic hero. The only exception was Paul, who understood because he was granted the grace of divine insight. He followed Christ and developed the good news. Marcion’s Gospel, therefore, describes this tragic history of Jesus’ life, the failure of calling and the rejection of the elect. In contrast, among those who follow Jesus are people nobody would have dared to admit, and like the paralytic, these become co-sufferers and equally co-hated with Christ.
. . . . Before Marcion was made the ‘arch-heretic’, he seems to have been the arch-theologian, ‘the founder of a religion’ and of a new cult, Christianity. . . . (Vinzent, Marcion and the Dating, 134f)
Key points noted in this context by NL:
Marcion was a publisher
He published the first New Testament (a gospel similar to our Gospel of Luke and the ten letter collection of Paul)
He published Antitheses, apparently an explanation of his philosophical principles and commentary on his gospel, a list of oppositions between the Law and Prophets on the one hand and the gospel on the other.
Our surviving witnesses to Marcion, coming from the writings preserved by the orthodox church, opposed Marcion as “a heretic”. But in the middle of the second century there was no authoritative judgment seat from which to distinguish truth from error. It is unlikely that in his own day Marcion could be “banished as a heretic” in the sense we imagine such a process of later times. The Marcionite and “Catholic-to-be” communities surely overlapped one another, as NL notes.
Rivals of Marcion produced alternative texts, presumably revising what Marcion himself had written. See, for example, the series of posts discussing Joseph Tyson’s grounds for believing that our version of the Gospel of Luke is an anti-Marcionite revision of Marcion’s gospel.
When we read in the early Church Fathers apparent quotations from the gospels and letters we find that they very often vary in some way from the canonical versions we read in our Bibles. This is especially so in the works that are critical of Marcion’s texts. NL outlines the various theses to account for these differences:
Marcion used and edited an existing copy of the Gospel of Luke (the opponents of Marcion adhered more closely to the original gospel)
Catholic writers and Marcion each revised independently an early form of the Gospel of Luke
Marcion edited an earlier shorter version of the Gospel of Luke and Catholic revisers expanded Marcion’s version to produce the Gospel we recognize today
Noting the lack of evidence of any gospel text prior to the second century, and further suggesting that the first gospels emerged in post Bar Kochba school settings, Vinzent takes the next logical step and proposes that Marcion produced the first gospel.
Vinzent maps the production of the gospel onto what is known of the way the schools functioned. A text was composed, read publicly and discussed and argued among close associates and student followers, revised with a final version being published more generally. The gospel and letters were written in an environment of free exchange of ideas and underwent a number of revisions. In this way the variant early versions of gospels and letters can be explained.
In other words, the explanation for the absence of evidence for any gospel or epistle prior to the middle of the second century is that they did not exist prior to the time of Marcion. Opponents of Marcion claimed he “discovered” or “found” Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. If that motif sounds familiar, it may be because we have come across it in the story of King Josiah discovering the Book of Deuteronomy: see my post showing that this claim was not at all unusual when one sought to introduce a new authoritative text as if it had the authority of antiquity.
According to modern epistolary theorists, the suggestion of finding a letter is what one would expect of an editor of a pseudonymous letter collection who wanted to provide a sense of the letter’s authenticity. If, as argued, Marcion created a gospel, a new literary genre, he – with the help of those in his school – could certainly have crafted and overseen the composition of mock letters in the name of the Apostle Paul, deploying a known and popular literary genre. (NL, 248)
For Marcion, Paul was the only apostle who truly understood the gospel of the Christ who had come from the “unknown god” who was higher than the creator god of the Law and the Prophets. That Marcion published his Gospel and Letters of Paul side by side might be seen as an indicator that he saw his “New Testament” as an “antithesis” of the Law and the Prophets of the “Old Testament”. NL indicates that such factors strongly suggest that Paul’s letters were, like the gospel, originally composed by Marcion himself. If so, then it is also likely that the letters of Paul were written with a clear knowledge of the gospel narrative. They did not precede a written gospel, in other words, but were produced alongside the gospel.
The Marcionite authors were active in the years following the calamity of the Bar Kochba war. NL finds appropriate Jason BuDuhn’s observation:
Whatever the internal developments within Christianity that prepared the way for the creation of a New Testament . . . it is simply impossible to dismiss the coincidence in time of Hadrian’s anti-Torah campaign and Marcion’s call for the establishment of a distinct and separate Christian sacred scripture. (NL, 251, quoting BeDuhn’s The First New Testament)
Letters were a popular means of teaching new philosophies; philosophical schools in Rome were common and responsible for the publications of and readings of rival teachings; the social and psychological dislocations that resulted from the Bar Kochba war provide a plausible background to the “Jewish but not Jewish” religious ideas of Marcion; and Paul, the only apostle said to have understood the gospel of an all-loving and non-judgmental god, was Marcion’s ideal alter-ego.
NL’s argument thus removes the Pauline letters from being in many ways unique in the ancient world, as many biblical scholars have thought, and places them in a social and ideological setting that seems to make them emerge quite “naturally”.
In an appendix NL explores in depth the educational background required to compose the letters. The production of texts that were persuasive, that could be emotionally gripping, that were instructional at the same time, was the work of highly educated persons. They did not emanate from the typical wandering preacher or tent-maker as Paul is supposed to be according to Acts of the Apostles.
With thanks to Cambridge University Press for an inspection copy.
My Concluding Thoughts
I have raised a number of open questions along the way of my re-reading and writing these notes on Nina Livesey’s book, but now I’ll offer something more conclusive. I think Livesey’s explanation of the evidence we have for the earliest New Testament writings has two major advantages over many others: Occam’s Razor and Explanatory Power. One does not need to hypothesize earlier versions of the texts for which we have no evidence. What we see at the beginning — gospel and Pauline letters in the hands of Marcionites — was the beginning of the gospels and New Testament letters. The evidence likewise informs us that the first “Christian schools” and teachers arose from among migrations to Rome in the wake of the Bar Kochba war and of Hadrian’s “final solution” punitive measures against Jews and their ideological base of Jerusalem. Such timing opens up a very plausible explanation for both the form (letters) and the content (presented as a “higher antithesis” of “Judaism”) of teachings that we find among the earliest Christians.
(As has further been discussed in other posts relating to Jesus and the Rank-Raglan hero class, mythical narratives do not evolve from illiterates telling stories around campfires over a generation or two: they are born from the minds and pens of the literate. That is one more point that is consistent with NL’s proposal of a school origin of the gospel story.)
Balás, David L. “Marcion Revisited: A ‘Post-Harnack’ Perspective.” In Texts and Testaments: Critical Essays on the Bible and Early Church Fathers, edited by W. Eugene March, 95–108. Trinity University Press, 1980.
Gager, John G. “Marcion and Philosophy.” Vigiliae Christianae 26, no. 1 (March 1972): 53–59.
Livesey, Nina E. The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship. Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Vinzent, Markus. “Marcion the Jew.” Judaïsme Ancien – Ancient Judaism 1 (2013): 159–201.
—- Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels. Peeters, 2014.
I concluded the last post with reference to a presumed ban on circumcision by Hadrian. I paused there in order to check the sources. The evidence for a ban on circumcision by Hadrian is hazy and Nina Livesey (NL) is careful not to be dogmatic about it. NL’s point is to find a social and political background that best explains what she sees as the hostile denunciation of circumcision and the Jewish law in the letters of Paul:
To identify too closely as a Jew was likely not politically expedient in a Roman context after Bar Kokhba and thus provides a rationale for positing the rejection of gentile identity as Jewish (with circumcision being its primary ethnic marker) and the devaluation of Jewish law.
Again, it appears likely that the Bar Kokhba revolt of the third decade of the second century – one that had significant sociopolitical ramifications for Jews and Romans – best accounts for the devaluation of Jewish law and circumcision. As indicated, Justin explicitly links his evaluation of circumcision as a sign of suffering to events that ensued after the revolt. For his part, the Galatian’s [sic] author likens the condition of circumcision to a state of slavery, a social status that corresponds to a known situation of many Jews after Bar Kokhba. (NL, 228f)
Some readers might want to weigh the evidence of Justin (highlighted by NL above) against Justin also pointing out that Jesus was circumcised on the eighth day and acknowledging that some Christians did practice circumcision (see paras 46 & 47 of Justin’s Trypho). There are questions arising here, I think. After all, the epistle to the Galatians surely acknowledges that there is a significant faction that are not ashamed to boast in the Jewish law. Nor have all modern interpreters understood Paul to have been as hostile towards Jewish laws as NL indicates, although NL, we must note, explains their interpretation of Paul as the product of ecumenical pressures — that is, to undermine the grounds on which many Christians have looked down upon Judaism.
A significant shift away from the Augustinian-Lutheran perspective occurred in the period after Ha Shoah (the twentieth-century Jewish holocaust), when anti-Jewish interpretations of Pauline letters were recognized as contributing to the Jewish genocide. . . . .
Like many Pauline interpreters, myself included in my own earlier work, these scholars likewise rely in large part on the letters themselves for the assessment of “Paul’s” social situation. The method is circular: The Apostle’s rhetoric is deployed to “reconstruct the rhetorical situation to which he then responds.” Their interpretations are thus weakened by a lack of crucial external evidence: they are overconfident without sufficient warrant. (NL, 224, 227 – my highlighting in all quotations)
Perhaps so. Yet might not some suggest that NL is tendentiously interpreting Paul’s letters to make them fit a post Bar Kochba war scenario in which aftermath of the way led to Jewish identity markers becoming a social embarrassment? We simply don’t have enough evidence to know what the situation was with respect to war-engendered attitudes towards circumcision (nor were Jews the only ones to observe the ritual). But whatever the reasons were, we do know Christians were divided over circumcision in the middle of the second century (see the reference to Justin above).
If we agree with Markus Vinzent’s view of Marcion’s attitude towards the Jewish religion, while accepting NL’s proposal that Marcion’s school was responsible for producing the letters of Paul, then we can well imagine an interpretation of a second century, post Bar Kochba Paul that is less damning towards the law. Vinzent has argued that Marcion considered the Christian law . . .
. . . as an alter-Judaism, not an anti-Judaism, modelled on its antithesis encompassing a strong monotheism, a Scripture-based revelation, a Messiah, a strict emphasis on ethics, food rules and regulations of relations; it was an institutional religion with rituals and an eschatological, universal hope for a “kingdom of God, with an eternal heavenly inheritance.” Interestingly, by arguing against Marcion, Tertullian turns this alter-Judaism into an anti-Judaism, taking for granted a number of elements that subconsciously he had adopted from Marcion, while changing the appearance of the Jew Marcion in a detrimental way and the essential nature of what it meant to be Christian and destructing Marcion’s antithesis. (MV, 189).
I have wondered if the “new perspective on Paul” inches our understanding of Paul a smidgen closer to the notion that Marcion viewed the Jewish law as irrelevant for those who lived in its “antithesis” in Christ.
NL is well aware of Vinzent’s work, citing it often, but evidently sees Marcion’s Paul as more hostile towards the Jewish law than Vinzent’s Marcion may have been. There is another option, too: might we not wonder if the “proto-orthodox” themselves were responsible for the more hostile passages against the Jewish law?
With thanks to Cambridge University Press for an inspection copy.
Having said all of that, I can well agree with NL that what was a genocidal war against the Jews in Palestine, a war that took a massive toll on the Romans as well as the Jews, surely led to physical and intellectual migrations of survivors and others impacted, all seeking new answers with their old world having so traumatically vanished.
I continue to be intrigued by the question raised over when the Acts of the Apostles was written. As I noted earlier, there is a view that Acts was something of an “innocent bystander” in the midst of a neighbourhood of “riotous diversity”. Or was it written as an attempt to negate the Paul of the letters? Or did Marcion seek out letters he heard had been penned by a historical Paul (Vinzent). Or do we consider further NL’s suggestion that Acts was a rejoinder to Marcion’s Gospel, with the Paul figure being invented for that purpose — and Marcion answering that biography with the letters? And how do we even interpret Paul’s letters — and how can we know what they looked like before being settled in versions safe for “orthodoxy”?
In other words, I see scope for thinking afresh many old questions raised in NL’s argument.
Next, Paul’s letters as the products of “a school”.
Livesey, Nina E. The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Vinzent, Markus. “Marcion the Jew.” Judaïsme Ancien – Ancient Judaism 1 (2013): 159–201.
Nina Livesey’s [NL] fourth chapter of The Letters of Paul in their Roman Literary Context makes the case for Paul’s letters being composed around the middle of the second century CE.
NL refers to the earlier work of the Dutch Radical Willem Christiaan van Manen [you can read the cited section on archive.org’s Encyclopedia Biblica of 1899-1903, columns 3625ff] who concluded that all of the NT Pauline letters were pseudepigraphical and composed either in the later years of the first century or early in the second. For van Manen, the event that initiated the circumstances that led to their composition was the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 CE. Van Manen wrote:
They are not letters originally intended for definite persons, despatched to these, and afterwards by publication made the common property of all. On the contrary, they were, from the first, books; treatises for instruction, and especially for edification, written in the form of letters in a tone of authority as from the pen of Paul and other men of note who belonged to his entourage : 1 Cor. by Paul and Sosthenes, 2 Cor. by Paul and Timothy, Gal. (at least in the exordium) by Paul and all the brethren who were with him ; so also Phil., Col. and Philem., by Paul and Timothy, 1 and 2 Thess. by Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy. ‘The object is to make it appear as if these persons were still living at the time of composition of the writings, though in point of fact they belonged to an earlier generation. Their ‘epistles’ accordingly, even in the circle of their first readers, gave themselves out as voices from the past. They were from the outset intended to exert an influence in as wide a circle as possible ; more particularly, to be read aloud at the religious meetings for the edification of the church, or to serve as a standard for doctrine and morals. [col 3626 – my bolding in all quotations]
But as Hermann Detering pointed out, and as NL concurs, there is no evidence for a “school” that could have been responsible for producing the letters between 70 CE and the early decades of the second century.
While there is evidence of Pauline letters associated with Marcion’s mid-second-century school in Rome, there is no similar evidence of the letters at an earlier period nor associated with a school of “Paul.” (NL, 200)
NL goes further and stresses that there is no other literature prior to the middle of the second century expressing comparable critical attitudes towards the Jewish law. If the Pauline letters came from that period they were anomalous. All other literature that speaks of the Jewish law up to the middle of the second century viewed it positively.
The Hebrew Bible — the law was given as a blessing and assurance of a close bond between God and his people
Jubilees — the sabbath was so wonderful a blessing that it was even observed in heaven; even before Moses holy persons observed the law.
Dead Sea Scrolls — positive towards the law
The Jewish philosopher Philo (20 BCE – 50 CE) — praised the law for containing deeper allegorical meanings
Josephus (37 – 100 CE) — proclaimed the distinctiveness of the law in positive tones
Circumcision was likewise understood in all the canonical and extra-canonical writings most favourably. I have listed them in note form here but NL discusses them all in depth.
The change came after the Bar Kochba war that ended in 135 CE. I have written about this war several times. Two of the more detailed posts (one is a continuation of the other) are:
“Christian” teachers and schools emerge in Rome around the mid-second century CE, after the Bar Kokhba revolt, and as a consequence of it.
The Bar Kokhba revolt and events that transpired in its wake greatly affected Judaea and Rome, both socially and politically. The revolt witnesses to a massive number of Roman and Jewish deaths (described as a Jewish genocide), the destruction of the Jewish temple, and the renaming of Judaea to Aelia Capitolina (Syria Palestina). The conquest of Judaea was likewise seen as a significant Roman victory and was greatly celebrated. According to the Roman historian Cassius Dio (c. 155-235 ce), over the approximately four-year war, Romans captured fifty Jewish strongholds, destroyed 985 villages, and killed 580,000 Jews (Dio 69.12.1-14.13). After the revolt, many Jewish captives were sold as slaves. Lester Grabbe summarizes,
. . . . Judging from the comments of Dio, however, the Roman casualties were also very high, such that Hadrian in his report to the Senate dropped the customary formula “I and the legions are well.” Aelia Capitolina became a reality, and Jews were long excluded at least officially, even from entry into the city. Only in the fourth century were Jews again formally allowed access to the temple site, and then only once a year on the ninth of Ab, the traditional date of its destruction.
Werner Eck convincingly argues that Rome considered the Jewish revolt a sizable threat and its suppression a great victory. The revolt affected territories not just in and around Judaea, but also the neighboring regions of Syria and Arabia. In response to it, Rome transferred many of its military regiments along with its best generals to the region. One such general was lulius Servus, whom Hadrian had transferred from Britain to Judaea. With Britain recognized as one of the most significant military outposts of the Empire, the relocation of Servus to Judaea is an indication of the seriousness with which Rome regarded the revolt. There is likewise the suggestion that Rome may have called up as many as twelve or thirteen legions to assist in the revolt’s suppression.
Rome greatly celebrated its conquest of Judaea. In recognition of the victory, Hadrian was named imperator. With this new honorary designation, he bestowed the highest military award (ornamenta triumphalia) on three generals charged with the suppression of Jews and the destruction of Judaea. The Roman Senate likewise dedicated a monument to Hadrian in the Galilee near Tel Shalem equal in prestige and size to the Arch of Titus in Rome. Moreover, the change in name from Provincia Judaea to Provincia Syria Palestina was a unique event in Roman history. Judaea no longer existed for Rome after the Bar Kokhba revolt. Never before or after had a nation’s name been expunged as a consequence of rebellion. Eck remarks, “It is not because the Jewish population was much reduced as a result of losses suffered during the war that the name of the province was changed. … The change of name was part of the punishment inflicted on the Jews; they were punished with the loss of a name.” (NL 200ff — though not mentioned by NL, it may be of interest to note that the area of Galilee has yielded no archaeological evidence of having been involved in the Bar Kochba revolt; Galilee was also the region to which Jewish life gravitated after Hadrian’s genocidal suppression in Judea and Jerusalem.)
* For posts addressing the evidence for the messianic character of the widespread Jewish uprisings under Trajan see
Another scholar who has viewed this same war as pivotal in relation to another book of the New Testament is Thomas Witulski’s research on the Book of Revelation. (Witulski further finds significance in the Jewish uprisings under Trajan that preceded the Bar Kochba war, uprisings that another scholar has argued were messianic in nature and anticipating a rebuilding of the Temple*.)
NL writes:
Events leading up to and following the Bar Kokhba revolt can be understood as influential to the development of Pauline letters. For, the Bar Kokhba period saw not only massive destruction, death, and the removal of the Jewish population from Judaea but also the call for a ban on circumcision and the destruction of Hebrew scriptures.20 Rulings against the Jewish practice of circumcision and Jewish writings redound in discussions of these themes in texts dated in and around this period. In addition, treatments of Jewish law and circumcision in biblical and non-biblical texts dated to this period reveal a dramatic downward shift in their value. Comparably dismissive and/or derogatory assessments of circumcision and Jewish law do not surface in texts dated prior to the end of the first century. Discussions of the rite of circumcision dated at or after the Bar Kokhba revolt parallel those found in Pauline letters. (NL, 202f — on footnote 20, a reference to Jason BeDuhn’s The First New Testament: Marcion’s Scriptural Canon, I have been unable so far to locate the source for the “destruction of Hebrew scriptures”, though I suspect it will be found in the rabbinical references in Peter Schafer’s Der Bar-Kokhba-Aufstand.)
For other in depth studies arguing for the second century relevance of the Pauline epistles, see the translations of Hermann Detering’s Staged Forgeries and Rudolf Steck’s study of Galatians. (The latter is cited by Nina Livesey.)
It is in the context of a widespread hostility to Jewish national markers (especially circumcision) most notably in the aftermath of the horrific carnage of the Bar Kochba war, that NL finds a place for the Pauline letters with their hostility towards the same Jewish law, most notably circumcision.
The assessment of Jewish law found in Galatians finds no parallels in primary sources dated up through Josephus (c. 100 CE). . . .
A rather dramatic shift in the assessment of circumcision occurs in “Christian” writings dated after Bar Kokhba. The Epistle of Barnabas (c. mid-second century CE) and Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho (c. 160 CE) roundly and at times pejoratively debase the practice of circumcision. These writings alter the signification of Abraham’s circumcision and diminish its association with the covenant. The Dialogue with Trypho, disassociates circumcision from a state of righteousness/justification, and removes its association with the covenant. These writings likewise variously interpret the practice of circumcision as inessential, or worse, as wrong/inappropriate. In addition, Justin ties circumcision to the negative social situation of Jews in the period after the Bar Kokhba revolt, and thus provides an indication of the revolt’s influence on at least a portion of his assessment of the rite.
These second-century texts reduce in value and alter in signification the circumcision of Abraham, the patriarch with whom the rite was constituted. (NL, 208, 215f)
NL is addressing a major subfield within the scholarship of the Pauline letters:
Pauline scholars have worked tirelessly in attempts to account for the devaluation of Jewish law in the Pauline corpus.” Indeed, the scholarship in this area is recognized with its own subfield, “Paul and the Law,” with various “perspectives” offered. (NL, 223)
With thanks to Cambridge University Press for an inspection copy.
Over half a dozen pages NL traces the attempts of scholars to understand Paul’s view of the circumcision question and the Jewish law. The answer, NL believes, is to be found in the controversies generated by Hadrian’s ban on the practice as part of his program to eliminate Jewish identity.
Continuing…..
Livesey, Nina E. The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Fictional or literary letters – our interest here – grew in popularity from approximately 100 BCE – 250 CE, a period marked by the presence of sophists, rhetors, and professional teachers. (NL 138)
Seneca was Nero’s tutor up to the time he became emperor. Seneca also wrote plays and letters. The letters were addressed to a certain Lucilius. Through these letters Seneca taught his principles of Stoic philosophy. It is widely understood today that Lucilius was a fictional figure, a foil that enabled Seneca to teach his philosophy in a manner that appealed to readers: the term used is “soft persuasion” — where the real audience sense they are looking in on correspondence intended for others, and thus feel that they are privy to a personal communication. Result? They listen all the more attentively to what, they believe, was not originally intended for their ears.
Letters allow for all kinds of scenarios to prompt this or that particular teaching. Personal circumstances on the side of either the sender or the receiver can be raised in a casual or direct manner with the ability to happily allow for the introduction of a new teaching on this or that.
The education undertaken prepared the literate class in a way that made them skilled at creating characters that enabled them to introduce advice that fortuitously happened to fit the right occasion. Always those to whom the letters were addressed were in some kind of cordial or friendly relationship with the author of the letters, or if they had strayed from the ideals on which the relationship had been established, were at least still amenable to being brought back to the correct path.
So when we read in the Corinthian or Thessalonian correspondence of persons who had fallen into various kinds of misbehaviour (sexual, ritual) or erroneous beliefs (the second coming), we may well be reading an author’s skilled construction of a circumstance that opened a way to introduce another particular teaching.
But not all letters managed to sustain the occasional and personal nature that many deployed. Some became more like lengthy treatises. The skills and patience of the various authors varied — as did Seneca’s style as readers can see by perusing the different letters in the collection “to Lucilius” that he arranged for publication.
I don’t recall if I earlier used the term “anxiety of fiction”, but that is the expression used by a number of scholars to characterize tell-tale indicators that the author is making an extra effort to make his or her composition look real. One obvious example is where Paul appears to have written something “in his own hand”. Of course we may assume that such details are indicators of a genuinely artless author, but we need to keep in mind that such devices were all part of the educational curricula designed to effect verisimilitude.
What makes Paul’s letters read as works “so real” to us are the same devices that were explicitly taught to the well off members of society. Again, recall my earlier post on Patricia Rosenmeyer’s book — and NL does regularly cite this work also.
There is something about “listening in” on a conversation we were not meant to hear that makes us all the more attentive to what is said. We are especially partial to an author who writes of his trials, and even of his high status, if those words were not directed specifically to us.
With thanks to Cambridge University Press for an inspection copy.
The New Testament letters of Paul are not necessarily what they seem. With awareness of the nature of Seneca’s letters that were crafted to teach Stoic philosophy more generally, but to do so were cleverly crafted to a certain “Lucilius”, we have a right to be cautious before assuming they are what a naive reading would suggest.
In the next chapter we look at chapter 4 (the final chapter, though followed by an Epilogue and an Appendix) where NL zeroes in on the case for Paul’s letters being products of the second century.
Livesey, Nina E. The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Continuing reading Nina Livesey’s [NL] The Letters of Paul in their Roman Literary Context, we now come to the question of the stark differences between the Paul of the letters against the Paul of the Acts of the Apostles. In Acts Paul is submissive to the Jerusalem authorities and sympathetic to law-keepers; in the letters Paul is dismissive of the Jerusalem authorities and expresses hostility towards those insisting on circumcision and the law. What’s going on here?
NL revisits what we know of many letter collections from antiquity. It was common practice for authors to compose letters in the names of well-known “historical or or supposedly historical figures”:
Alongside those already discussed [Cicero, Pliny, …], there also survive from antiquity sets of letters attributed to a whole series of historical or supposedly historical figures dating from between the sixth century B.C. and the second century A.D. The full list of the texts printed in Rudolf Hercher’s monumental Epistologmphi graeci of 1873 embraces the letters of Aeschines, Anacharsis, Apollonius of Tyana, Aristotle, Artaxerxes, Brutus, Chion of Heraclea, Crates, Demosthenes, Dio, Diogenes, Euripides, Heraclitus, Hippocrates, Isocrates, Periander, Phalaris, Plato, Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, Socrates and the Socratics, Solon, Thales, Themistocles and Xenophon. . . . It has been generally (and rightly) accepted that the vast majority are not what they claim to be, but instead the work of later authors impersonating these great figures of the past (hence ‘pseudepigraphic’, involving a false or lying attribution). (Trapp, 27)
For NL, the New Testament letters of Paul fall in the same category. A biography of a famous person would present a life of action, adventure, while a later author would take such a figure and present them in a more contemplative manner through letters in their name:
[P]seudonymous letter collections customarily follow on what is known of ancient figures either from the individual’s own works, or from the character’s creative biography. Whereas the biography of a figure tends to depict the character as active, the letters written in the character’s name depict the figure by contrast as not only a letter writer but as reflective. Letters extend the life of an ancient figure and take that life into new and different directions. In the Introduction, I outlined various important conceptual differences between Acts and Pauline letters, but one of the main distinctions concerns the characterization of Paul. Acts stresses Paul’s continued adherence to Jewish beliefs and practices, whereas the letters, especially Galatians, has the Apostle Paul rejecting the requirements of the Jewish law and circumcision for gentiles.
Again, rather than a historical Paul, we have instead “Christian” epistolographers who – deploying a common and contemporary genre – adopted and extended the characterization of Paul from its creation in Acts into new directions for the promotion of theological/philosophical teachings. (Livesey, 90)
So in NL’s view, Marcion drew upon the figure of Paul — who was evidently a prominent name otherwise known in some early version of Acts — to promote his version of Christian teachings. This perspective is the reverse of one I have held. I have thought of Acts as being added to a revised, anti-Marcionite version of Luke, as part of an attack on Marcionism. I have been most influenced by a study by Joseph Tyson. NL would have me reconsidering an alternative view of Shelley Matthews that Luke-Acts belongs to a world prior to the extreme split between “orthodoxy” and “gnosticism” and rather belongs to “a more variegated context of early Christian pluralism.” (Matthews) Though Earl Doherty also would not have liked moving much of our earliest evidence to the second century he would certainly have been partial to the notion of Christianity emerging from a seedbed of “riotous diversity”.
Areas of overlap between the letters and Acts listed by NL, indicators of borrowing, but not necessarily in the direction you thought:
Paul is presented as a Jew: Acts 21:39; 22:3; cf. Phil 3:5; 2 Cor 11:22
Paul changed from persecutor to a convert: Acts 9:3-19; 22:3-16; 26:12-18; cf. Gal 1:13-15, Phil 3:5-16
Paul addresses circumcision: Acts 15:1-35; cf. Gal 5:1-6, Rom 2:25-29, 1 Cor 7:18-19
Paul reports to an authoritative body of church leaders in Jerusalem: Acts 15:2-25; cf. Gal 2:1-9
Paul experiences prison and being bound: Acts 16:16-40; 21:27-28:30; cf. Rom 16:7; 2 Cor 11:23; Phil 1:7, 13-14, 17; Phlm 1, 9, 10, 13, 23
Paul suffers various adversities, including lashings: Acts 16:22-23; 2 Cor 11:23-25
Paul is threatened by other Jews: Acts 9:23-24; 29; 14:1-7; 20:2-3; 21:27-31; 22:22; 23:12-15; cf. 2 Cor 11:24-27).
All of the above alerts us to intertextuality (NL 109).
But are there not clear historical references in both the letters and Acts? NL examines each of them.
2 Cor 11:32-33
In Damascus the governor under Aretas the king kept the city of the damascenes with a garrison, desirous to apprehend me: and through a window in a basket was I let down by the wall, and escaped his hands.
In context it reads like an afterthought. Being lowered down a wall or through a window is a trope known well in Scripture (Joshua’s spies, David) and other writings. Some scholars have considered the passage to be an interpolation. It functions to link Paul with scriptural (and perhaps even other) heroes. NL, after discussing what the sources inform us about Aretas, believes the author was motivated by a similar escape story of Saul/Paul in Acts.
Acts 18:12
While Gallio was proconsul of Achaia, the Jews of Corinth made a united attack on Paul and brought him to the place of judgment.
NL discusses problems around the archaeological evidence for determining a date for Paul.
Acts 18:1-3
. . . Claudius had commanded all the Jews to depart from Rome . . .
NL demonstrates that the sources are far from clear that Claudius ever did expel the Jews from Rome. The Roman historian Suetonius wrote of a Jewish disturbance in Rome involving a certain “Chrestus”, but Chrestus was a common Greco-Roman name and Suetonius’s account reads much like other standard anti-Jewish tropes.
NL discusses the above passages in some depth, concluding that they are consistent with what we find in other fictional narratives to lend them a touch of realism. The practice blending historical persons with fictional tales is also found in the gospels of Matthew and Mark.
In my view, the absence of independent evidence to support the historicity of the claims in the letters (and Acts) along with known practices of drawing on historical knowledge to infuse fresh life into fictions, and not forgetting the rhetorical (persuasive) impact of the touches of verisimilutude, leaves the balance of probability on the side that the letters are indeed fictions. In other words, I am siding with NL’s interpretations.
Church Communities?
NL next takes aim at the historicity of the communities assumed by scholars to have been the real recipients of the letters.
And once again I find it reassuring to see more references to books and articles I have discussed here over the years. With respect to the questionable historicity of the kinds of church communities many scholars have posited as the recipients of the letters, as well as communities as hubs of shared oral traditions about Jesus that eventually found their way into the gospels, NL refers to “The Concept of ‘Community’ and the History of Early Christianity” by Stanley Stowers. I quoted a key passage from that article here, and addressed the relatedview of Stowers arguing that earliest Christianity more likely resembled philosophical schools of the day than the kinds of communities as understood in much of New Testament studies. Recall also the recently quoted remark of Lord Raglan that according to the fields of anthropology and sociology mythical tales of the kind we are addressing originate among the literate classes, not from campfire tales shared among the illiterate.
Yet, as indicated in recent scholarship, group composition of ancient literature, as envisioned in that scholarship, has no ancient parallels. Astutely argued in her book, The Origins of Early Christian Literature, Robyn Walsh notes that theories that posit communities as communal authors are based on romantic understandings of Christian origins and a misapprehension that oral storytelling lies at the heart of early Christianity. (NL, 101)
As for the references to “house churches” in both Acts and the epistles, apart from the absence of independent evidence for such communities, it is worth taking note of the literary functions of the image of household communities:
There are, however, alternate interpretations for references to the home or house in ancient literature. In her Feeling Home: House and Ideology in the Attic Orators, Hilary Lehmann explains how ancient authors deployed the notion of home for its ability to elicit feelings of comfort and order. According to her, ancient authors were aware of the many positive connotations the notion of home provided and exploited them in support of their arguments. (NL, 105 – link is to the PhD thesis online)
NL cites the work of Paola Ceccarelli and others, Letters and Communities Studies in the Socio-Political Dimensions of Ancient Epistolography that illustrates the ways letters were used to both promote a particular ideology and build community following. What might at first glance be assumed to be the writing of an artless innocent in surviving letter collections can be shown to be the works of high literary sophistication.
NL concludes this second chapter with accounts of the various witnesses to the letters of Paul — 1 Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, 2 Peter — and the findings of scholars such as Markus Vinzent and Jason BeDuhn to demonstrate that there are good reasons for dating these other sources no earlier than the middle or later second century.
So the argument at this point is that an early form of Acts was in existence prior to Marcion, that this Acts introduced the figure of Paul to explain the spread of Christianity to non-Jews, and that Marcion produced letters in the name of that Paul.
With acknowledgment of Cambridge University Press making available an inspection copy.
If we work with this scenario, we might well accept the later claims by Church Fathers (Irenaeus, Tertullian) that Marcion did indeed revise an earlier version of the Gospel of Luke. If we accept Shelley Matthew’s view of Luke-Acts, we can imagine Marcion producing the letters of Paul to supersede the Paul of Acts. (Such a view need not preclude further anti-Marcionite additions by the “proto-orthodox” to the gospels.) These are some of the scenarios one mulls over on reading The Letters of Paul in their Roman Literary Context. We might be advised to work with a model of a beginning of Christianity from “schools” that were more structured and organized than the loosely affiliated informal house communities we have been used to imagining.
In chapter 3 NL compares Seneca’s and Paul’s letters.
Livesey, Nina E. The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Stowers, Stanley. “The Concept of ‘Community’ and the History of Early Christianity.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 23, no. 3 (2011): 238–56. https://doi.org/10.1163/157006811X608377.
Trapp, Michael, ed. Greek and Latin Letters: An Anthology with Translation. Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
ChatGPT image — don’t look too closely for sensible design
Forgive me if this is old news and I am the last to learn about it, but anyone interested in Buddhism and Bayes’ Theorem as a tool for evaluating the historical status of the Buddha in a way somewhat comparable to what Richard Carrier has done with Jesus will want to read
Kingsley, John. “A Bayesian Analysis of Early Śramaṇic Origin Stories Part I: Historicity of the Buddha.” Master of Arts, Loyola Marymount University, 2022. https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/etd/1256/.
From the Introduction:
Because of the depth and time needed to complete a full Bayesian analysis of both the Buddha and Mahāvīra, this paper will focus mostly on the historicity of the Buddha, and offer further research suggestions for that of Mahāvīra. However, the main objective of this paper is not necessarily to prove, one way or another, that these figures did or did not exist. It is to simply provide a framework for the methodology that I think is most effective at forcing historians – and theologians – to deductively and empirically analyze the questions in their respective fields.
Elymas the sorcerer is struck blind before Sergius Paulus during Paul’s visit. Painting by Raphael (Wikipedia Commons)
The second chapter of The Letters of Paul in their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship (LP) by Nina Livesey (NL) challenges the general assumption among New Testament scholars that we have seven authentic letters of Paul, all written in the first century to real communities. If there is one yardstick for any historical reconstruction that I have repeated too many times to remember it is the necessity for independent confirmation of any claim we find in the sources. So it is with happy reassurance that I read NL beginning her discussion thus:
Scholarship that seeks to establish and provide facts about Paul, such as those found in Pauline biographies and chronologies, relies on the “authentic” letters themselves and thus lacks external verification. It also uncritically assumes that autobiographical statements of the inscribed letter sender (the Apostle Paul) are historically reliable. . . .
That Paul was active in the mid-first century CE is nearly undisputed within modern Pauline scholarship. Yet other than internal sources – the letters themselves and the book of Acts – evidence of Paul’s first-century activity is entirely lacking. . . . Scholarship on Pauline communities functions to reify these groups. Without credible evidence, it simply assumes their historicity, and appears to be merely filling a historical vacuum. (73 — bolded highlighting is mine in all quotations)
The letters speak of churches meeting in homes. NL suggests that these home settings rhetorically contrast with the hostile synagogue. Nor might it be merely accidental that we are given only the vaguest accounts of these communities: their exact locations and makeup are left to the readers’ imaginations.
NL attributes the strong interest in mining Paul’s letters for biographical information to the demise of the view that the Acts of the Apostles has much value as a historical source. But when we turn to studies of Greek and Latin letters outside biblical studies, we find little reassurance that the letters can yield much reliable information. NL draws upon classicist studies to inform us in depth in an appendix of the demanding education required to prepare a person to be able to write persuasively, and the gift of persuasion was very much what the curriculum was designed to achieve. Authors were taught the skill of presenting a type of character as an author and also the skill of creating imaginary audiences. With a knowledge of how literary education of the day trained pupils it becomes naive to assume that a face-value reading of an ancient letter necessarily reflects an exchange between a “true” author and recipient.
Pauline scholars have often written about the letters as if they are in effect a form of immediate and direct communication, open and honest as if the writer were in the presence of other persons and speaking directly to them. But again, that is an uninformed view. Letters like any other literary craft are never “natural”. The composer is always creating a type of persona that suits the purpose of the letter. More detail can be found online in one of the works NL references, Michael Trapp’s Greek and Latin Letters. See in particular pages 4-10, 27, 34, 37-44. (I have already mentioned another work that helps to inform NL’s discussion – Patricia Rosenmeyer’s Ancient Epistolary Fictions.)
The latter is central to ancient rhetorical theory, which grounds ancient epistolary theory. Ancient epistolary theorists recommended/advised authors to stylize their letters in such a way that their “presence” was made known and felt. As trained rhetoricians, these epistolary theorists likewise recognized a conceptual distance between an author and an author’s work, understanding that the former was always in full control of the latter. Letters are no different from other ancient written forms: they are authorial products that seek to persuade. Letters cannot on their own stand in for personal presence.
Moreover, only a constructed self is present in a letter, not a “real self”. (82)
In other words, we have no prima facie reason to assume that the Paul of the letters is any more genuine than the Paul in The Acts of Paul and Thecla or in the Acts of the Apostles.
NL indeed argues that our Paul of the epistles is a fictional character.
We have no external evidence of Paul; no noncanonical or non-extracanonical sources refer to him. While to argue against Pauline authorship based on a lack of outside evidence of Paul could be construed as an argumentum e silentio – and proving or disproving his existence is not possible – his absence from contemporaneous Hebraic, Greek, and Roman sources is nonetheless telling. (83)
Why “Paul”?
The Roman name “Paulus” is . . .
also largely unattested as a cognoman (a nickname) in the ancient world. As a nomen gentilicium (family name), it belongs to noble patrician families inside Italy. (83)
At this point NL footnotes two essays by Professor of Classics Christine Shea [CS]: a 2008 Westar conference paper, “Names in Acts 2: Our Little Roman, Paul”; a cameo essay in Smith and Tyson’s Acts and Christian Beginnings, “Names in Acts”. The former paper in turn cites H. Dessau’s 1910 paper that I have translated and made available here. Shea notes:
Alternate names and name-play are standout features of Acts, as they often are in Greek, Roman and Hebrew traditional tales:
Stephen (=crown — the first martyr)
Damaris (=wife)
Felix (=happy)
Porcius Festus (=pork)
Theophilus (=god lover — the “ideal reader”)
Jesus acquires the name Christ
Simon is also Peter
Mark is either Mark or John
Joseph is called Barsabas and Justus
Joses was renamed Barnabas
Simeon was called Niger
Barnabas becomes Zeus and Paul Hermes (Acts 14)
Crispus is also called Sosthenes (Acts 18)
the false prophet Bar-Jesus is also called Elymas when he opposed Paul/Saul
Let’s not overlook the career of the persecutor Saul in Acts strongly echoes the Old Testament’s narrative of King Saul persecuting David – as was noted as early as the writings of Jerome and Augustine.
Name changes may be associated with a change in status such as transfer from an outgroup to an ingroup. Whatever the background, Acts certainly appears to consider names of symbolic importance.
Around 162 CE the physician Galen (who was trained not only in medicine but also in philosophy more generally) came to Rome and wrote of some of his earlier experiences. In one of them he informs us of an episode with a prominent Roman (also schooled in Aristotelian philosophy) in Asia Minor, the city prefect Sergius Paulus, except that he introduces him as Sergios te kai ho Paulos [Σέργιός τε καὶ ὁ Παῦλος — easily mistaken as speaking of “Sergius and Paul” instead of “Sergius also named Paul”]. This Sergius Paulus was amazed at Galen’s fulfilled prophecy about a friend’s course of a disease and recovery and invited Galen to meet with him. Another who also wanted to speak with Galen was one named Barabus, an uncle of the emperor. Acts 13 speaks of Sergius Paulus seeking to meet one described as “Saul also called Paul” [Σαῦλος δέ, ὁ καὶ Παῦλος] as a result of impressive news about his activity in Cyprus. CS has drawn up a chart to show how well Galen’s “cast of characters lines up with Acts 13”:
20 And unlikely to provide a translation of “Bar-Jesus” as the text apparently promises—no matter what ingenious Hebrew etymologies are proposed. What would have been the help for a Greek reader in translating a Hebrew name with a Hebrew name?
My earlier post presents a detailed case for the name of the apostle Paul (changed from Saul) being in some way “borrowed” (as an honorific) from Sergius Paulus.
CS proposes the following possibility:
12 By the way, it is by no means certain that we can place a Sergius Paulus at the court of Sergius Paulus on Cyprus in Acts. There are several inscriptions which may or may not have bearing on the historicity of Paulus’ prefecture on Cyprus: (1) IGRR 3.935=SEG 20.302 is a fragmentary imperial decree on sacrifices which appears to mention a member of the imperial family of the 1st cent. CE. For many years commentators were content to restore the lines to name Claudius the emperor and to identify the Quintus Sergius named with the Sergius Paulus of Acts. Now, however, the emperor’s name has been restored as Gaius (Caligula), and the dating no longer works. (2) IGRR 3.930 appeared to name a Paulus as prefect, but now the position has been restored as dekaprotos, an office only known since the reign of Hadrian. Thus this proconsul Paulus served on Cyprus ca. 126 CE. . . . .
14 The fifth-century uncial ms Sinai Harris App. 5 (077 in Aland) contains just Acts 13.18-29. This seems to suggest that this episode circulated separately, apart from the Cyprus episode.
Now it seems to me that all these explanations [of commentators seeking to discern history in Acts 13] suffer from a hidden agenda: the desire to find every single word of the Pauline story in Acts historically accurate and consonant with what else is known about Paul from the letters, etc. However, although we can never inarguably place the Paul of history in the court of Sergius Paulus on Cyprus, we can certainly place the text which names Paul for the first time in close conjunction with the text that mentions Sergius Paulus.12 If we stepped back a bit from a pursuit of the historical Paul and were content to propose a solution that would deal with the history of the text, I think the explanation that in fact the text is about Sergius Paulus and “Paulus” in the text refers to Sergius would have more currency.
How would such an argument go? Let’s try this: there is a tale in common circulation about a Sergius Paulus. In this tale Sergius is called “Sergios te kai ho Paulos” apparently a common formula in Greek for indicating a Roman’s gens-name (nomen gentilicium) and cognomen. Someone, perhaps not too familiar with Greek or with Roman patricians, comes along and translates this formula as “Sergius and Paul” and thinks that there are two characters in the tale and that one of them is the letter writer. Bingo! The tale becomes associated with Paul.14 What kind of text might have generated this confusion?
The kind of text, CS suggests, is Galen’s:
Also Sergius Paulus [Sergios te kai ho Paulos], who not long after was appointed as a prefect over us, and Flavius, a consular already trained in Aristotelian philosophy, just as Paulus was, came to visit Eudemus. To them, Eudemus, recounting all that he had heard from me, said that he was grieved and affected by the prediction made regarding future developments and was observing how they would unfold.
When, around the same hour, those things also happened as had been previously predicted, Eudemus himself marveled and revealed my predictions to all those who visited him. These visitors were almost all individuals who excelled in both rank and learning in Rome.
When Boethus heard that I was highly skilled in anatomical investigation, he asked me to explain something about the voice and respiration—how they occur and through what instruments. After learning my name, he even told this to Paulus, who himself, upon becoming aware of me, asked me to explain something to him as well. He said that he was in need of an understanding of what is observed during dissections.
Similarly, Barbarus, the uncle of the emperor Lucius, who governed the region of Mesopotamia, also desired instruction from Paulus. Later, Severus, who was then holding the consulship and was also versed in Aristotelian philosophy, showed interest. (Translation from pp 611f http://archive.org/details/b29339339_0014.)
The Galen passage cannot be dated earlier than 162 CE, “but pieces of literary flotsam might attach themselves to the narrative any time until the texts are presumably frozen in the 4th century (at the earliest).” (CS 13)
Paul, before his conversion and as Saul, has long been associated with King Saul who persecuted David. More recent scholars have further discerned in that persecutor Saul allusions to King Pentheus who is the persecutor of the god Dionysus in Euripides’ play, Bacchae. Some have further identified the second part of Saul’s career, the time from his conversion, with the god Dionysus who turns the tables on Pentheus and is also well known as the conquering god. The author of Acts appears to have switched role models for his Saul-Paul character: first he is based on the persecutor of Dionysus and after his conversion he is modeled on Dionysus himself. The allusions such as these and many others come to focus on this episode in Acts 13. Though NL discusses a range of them, they are too many and detailed to include in this post.
The question that comes to my mind is this: If the author of Acts had a historical figure to draw upon then why would he or she have turned to the characters of myth and fiction as guides for how to create Paul?
Such is part of a wider ranging discussion by NL.
It seems likely that the new name “Paul” signifies the character’s first act of conversion of a prominent Roman official, whose name he then inherits. The adoption of a non-Jewish name likewise mirrors his mission to the gentiles (89 — with acknowledgement for this insight to NL’s student Caroline Perkins)
In the next post I will pick up NL’s analysis of how the various characters in Acts are echoed in the epistles.
With thanks to Cambridge University Press for an inspection copy.
Galen. Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia. Edited by Karl Gottlob Kühn. Vol. XIV. Lipsiae : C. Cnobloch, 1827. http://archive.org/details/b29339339_0014.
Livesey, Nina E. The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Shea, Christine R. “Names in Acts.” In Acts and Christian Beginnings: The Acts Seminar Report, edited by Dennis Edwin Smith and Joseph B. Tyson, 22–24. Polebridge Press, 2013.
Shea, Christine R. “Names in Acts 2: Our Little Roman, Paul.” In Westar Fall 2008 Conference, 7–17. Santa Rosa, CA, 2008.
