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.
In case certain details were not reported on your local news media…..
The freed Palestinians included 69 women and 21 teenage boys – some as young as 12 – from the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem. — Among them was Khalida Jarrar, 62, a leading member of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who had been held for six months in solitary confinement under “administrative detention”, which allows Israeli authorities to jail suspects indefinitely without charge or court verdict.
You can read their names and other biographhical details here.
Per the custom on hearing good news handing out sweets, Brisbane, Sunday 19th January ….
One of the Palestinian speakers at Sunday’s rally, Remah Naji, will be the first Palestinian elected to Federal Parliament if she wins the seat of Moreton. The right wing Advance Australia party has set aside ten million dollars in an effort to remove the only voices standing up for Palestine from the Australian Parliament.
In a future post I will address a relatively recent paper that discusses the origin of the name of Paul in Acts. Since that paper will refer to an older publication that is not readily accessible I am posting a translation of that earlier work here, along with another note making a revision in the light of a subsequent archaeological find. This post is background preparation for another soon to come.
The translated article below discusses Sergius Paulus of Acts 13. Readers will be interested to learn that…
The family of the Sergii Paulli is attested as senatorial in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. . . . Close ties linked them to the Roman colony of Antioch Caesarea in Pisidia: monuments have been found there that were dedicated to members of this family. – Groag (trans)
Original text:
Title: Der Name des Apostels Paulus Author(s): H. Dessau Source: Hermes, 45. Bd., H. 3 (1910), pp. 347-368 Published by: Franz Steiner Verlag Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4473239
347
The Name of the Apostle Paul
This inscription honouring Sergius Paulus is said to date to the latter half of the first century. The family name is prominent through to the time of the latter half of the second century. (Sacred Destinations)
Many of the Orientals mentioned in the New Testament bore a second name in addition to their original one, often to distinguish themselves from others with the same name. Sometimes this second name was adopted for interactions with the “Hellenes” or the government, to avoid the difficulty of their foreign and hard-to-pronounce names. Additionally, it occasionally occurred that individuals, at a turning point in their lives, adopted a new name to outwardly signify this change.
In practice, the usage of the two names varied widely in individual cases. Sometimes the new name entirely replaced the old one, while at other times the old name eventually prevailed. In some cases, both names were regularly used side by side, and this fluctuating usage is also reflected in the writings of the New Testament.
The Apostle Thomas is simply called Thomas, although the Gospel of John consistently notes at each new mention (11:16, 20:24, 21:2) that he was also called Didymus. Regarding Barnabas, Acts 4:36 reports that this name was given to him by the original apostles, while his real name was Joseph; thereafter, the text exclusively uses his new name. In the case of John, the cousin of Barnabas, the same text repeatedly (12:12, 12:25, 15:37) adds the clarification, “who was also called Mark” (ὁ ἐπικαλούμενος Μᾶρκος). During one narrative (15:39), he is referred to once simply as Marcus, and in two other instances (13:5, 13), this clarification is omitted altogether.
Simon, who was named Cephas or Peter by Jesus himself, is referred to as Simon in the Gospels of Mark and Luke until the point where the conferring of the new name is mentioned (Mark 3:16; Luke 6:14). From then on, he is called Peter, except that Luke once places both names side by side (5:8). Both Luke and Mark subsequently allow the acting persons, particularly Jesus himself, to use the old name.
Matthew, who does not narrate the conferral of the name by Jesus, initially presents the two names in a way that makes Peter appear as the surname (4:18; 10:2 Σίμων ὁ λεγόμενος Πέτρος), or simply juxtaposes them (16:16 Σίμων Πέτρος). However, from 8:14 onward, and consistently from 14:29, 15:15, and 16:22, he uses the name Peter alone, except for one instance where Jesus himself addresses the disciple as Simon (17:25).
The Gospel of John, by contrast, uses the double name Simon Peter from the very beginning, at every new mention. This clearly reflects a deliberate intention. Among the other evangelists, one notices a tension and overlap between their striving for accuracy—avoiding the use of the new name prematurely—and their desire to orient the reader as quickly as possible about the individual, alongside their habitual use of the younger name.
348
The Apostle Paul’s name usage is quite peculiar. In his epistles, he consistently refers to himself as Paul, not only in the introductory greetings and closing notes (e.g., 1 Cor. 16:21) but also within the text itself (e.g., Eph. 3:1; 1 Cor. 3:4 ff.; Col. 1:23). However, in the Acts of the Apostles, he is initially called Saulos (9:4, 17; in the vocative Saoul). Suddenly, during a dramatic encounter with the proconsul of Cyprus, Sergius Paulus, which reportedly made a strong impression on the proconsul, the text states that Saulos was also called Paulos (13:9, Σαῦλος δὲ καὶ Παῦλος). From that point onward, only the name Paulos is used, except in the literal retelling of earlier events, where Saoul reappears in direct speech (22:7, 13).
Any perceptive reader must conclude that the narrator believed a name change occurred here. It would have seemed obvious to speculate that the adoption of the new name was connected to the proconsul’s name, as the apostle reportedly converted him to the faith. This assumption was first explicitly made, to my knowledge, by Jerome.¹ Augustine later adopted it in one of his later writings, whereas Rufinus, Jerome’s old adversary, refuted it with arguments that remain compelling today.²
Jerome, at the beginning of his commentary on the Epistle to Philemon (Commentarius in Philemonem, 7, p. 746 Vall., 7, p. 640 Migne), wrote:
“Just as Scipio, after subduing Africa, took the name Africanus for himself, and Metellus, having conquered Crete, brought the title Creticus to his family, and just as Roman generals even now receive names like Adiabenicus, Parthicus, or Sarmaticus from the peoples they conquer, so too Saulus, sent to preach to the Gentiles, bore the trophies of his victory from his first conquest, the proconsul Sergius Paulus, and raised his banner to be called Paulus instead of Saulus.”
He expressed a similar idea in De viris illustribus 5 and hinted at it in his commentary on Isaiah (Book 7, ch. 17, 1; 4, p. 278 Vall., 4, p. 2481 Migne). Augustine, in Confessiones 8:4, said:
“When the proconsul Paulus was brought under Christ’s yoke through his (Paul’s) ministry… Paul also chose to be called Paulus instead of Saulus, as a mark of his great victory.”²
Rufinus countered this in an appendix to the preface of Origen’s commentary on Romans (Origen, p. 460 de la Rue, Patrologia Graeca XIV, p. 836):
“Some believe that the Apostle adopted the name of the proconsul Paulus, whom he converted to Christ on Cyprus, just as kings are named Parthicus or Gothicus after their victories over the Parthians or Goths. Thus, they claim the Apostle, having brought Paulus into submission, was named Paulus himself. While this interpretation cannot be entirely dismissed, it lacks precedent in the divine scriptures. It is better to seek understanding from examples provided in them.”
¹ It is a common misconception, shared by figures like Mommsen (Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 434), that Origen referred to this hypothesis, which first appears in Jerome. The relevant passage in the preface to Origen’s commentary on Romans is from the Latin editor. Jerome explicitly claimed the theory as his own (In Philem.):
“No scripture records why Saul was called Paul. Therefore, I will boldly, but perhaps truthfully, assert my suspicion based on Acts of the Apostles.”
¹ See below, p. 364.
² Originally, Augustine held a different view (De spiritu et littera 7:12, 10, p. 207 Migne): “The Apostle Paul, formerly called Saulus, seems to have chosen this name to show his humility, as though he were the least of the apostles,” a theme he repeated often in sermons. Nonetheless, Augustine always believed a name change had occurred.
349 – from bottom of page: “Er bringt dann…”
He then presents several examples of dual names from the Old and New Testaments and concludes:
“According to this custom, it seems to us that Paul also used two names. While he ministered to his own people, he was called Saulus, as this name appeared more native to his homeland. However, he was called Paulus when he wrote laws and instructions to the Greeks and Gentiles. For even the scripture that says, ‘Saulus, who is also called Paulus,’ does not indicate that the name Paulus was newly given to him at that time, but rather shows that it was an older appellation.”
Recently, this question has been revisited. For a long time, the prevailing opinion was that the Apostle had changed his name—an idea often linked, without sufficient basis, not precisely to his conversion but at least to events surrounding it.¹ However, leading scholars today—including Deißmann,² Ramsay,³ and Mommsen⁴—believe that the Apostle carried both names from his youth.⁵
The main reason for this view is that it seems unusual for a provincial to adopt the cognomen of a prominent Roman, such as the proconsul in this case. Such an event was as rare as the frequent adoption of a Roman gentilicium, which usually occurred upon obtaining Roman citizenship. Paul, however, apparently already possessed Roman citizenship when he arrived in Cyprus.¹ It demonstrates a significant misunderstanding of Roman customs when proponents of the older view² refer to the example of the historian Josephus, who received the name Flavius from his patron Vespasian.
In my opinion, Jerome was essentially correct: Paul adopted this name in Cyprus, following his acquaintance with the proconsul Sergius Paulus.
¹ For example, John Chrysostom in a sermon (vol. III, p. 122, 133, ed. Montfaucon; Patrologia Graeca LI, p. 137, 148). While the preacher spoke for three full days on the Apostle’s name (see the second cited passage), I find no clear explanation of the name’s origin, only a rejection of false etymologies (Σαῦλος from σαλεύειν, Παῦλος from παύσασθαι, etc.; see p. 110 Montf., p. 126 Migne).
² Bibelstudien (1895), p. 181.
³ St. Paul the Traveller and the Roman Citizen (3rd ed., 1897), p. 30 ff.
⁴ “Die Rechtsverhältnisse des Apostels Paulus,” Zeitschrift für neutestamentliche Wissenschaft II (1901), p. 81 ff.; reprinted in Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 431 ff., on which the following citations are based.
⁵ Schwartz, Charakterköpfe aus der antiken Literatur, 2nd ed., p. 117, also considers, albeit cautiously, the Apostle’s dual name as one of the common Jewish practices of the time. Advocates of the perspective discussed on p. 355 regarding the Acts of the Apostles would need to ask why Acts refers to Paul as Saulus at the beginning of his ministry. They might answer that the author erroneously identified Paul with a Saul involved in Stephen’s stoning.
¹ See below, p. 356.
² Max Krenkel, Beiträge zur Aufhellung der Geschichte des Apostels Paulus (1890), p. 18.
351
First, it must be emphasized that it would have been an extraordinary coincidence if the first prominent man, the first representative of the Roman state with whom the Apostle came into contact during his travels, had borne the same name as he did. Such a coincidence would undoubtedly have struck the proconsul himself. While it might not have been surprising for him to meet someone named Paulus in Corinth, Carthage, Syracuse, or even Ephesus, hearing his own name in Cyprus from a Jewish sage or miracle worker must have seemed unusual.
Dessau thinks it strange that it should have occurred to Paul’s parents, living so far in the East, to give him a Latin name. But when one considers that they lived in Tarsus, a busy metropolis of a Roman province often visited by prominent Romans after the middle of the first century B.C., e.g. Cicero, Caesar, Mark Antony, that they were themselves Roman citizens and that several Jewish associates of Paul had Roman names, to say nothing of the fact that Paullus was a Roman name already widely known in the Roman Empire in both Greek and Latin form, and that, as we have shown, Romanized foreigners very often gave their sons Roman names, Dessau’s objection has little weight. Dessau again states that the assumption of the name Paul was really a change of cognomen, and that this is not unheard of even though not common. It is in fact extremely uncommon. Moreover, if the name Paul was assumed in Cyprus, it would be more in accordance with the custom in the Greek East to consider it an added name, a signum. Dessau’s study here suffers from a lack of information which Lambertz’ later work would have given him. The ὁ καὶ connecting the Saul and Paul surely has been shown by this study to be a practical proof of the association of the signum with part of the formal tria nomina. (Harrer, 28f)
And how could Paul, before his acquaintance with the proconsul, or how could his parents, if they had indeed given him this name, have chosen it? It is true that in the circles Paul came from, it was not uncommon to adopt a second name suitable for interaction with the “Hellenes” and the authorities. However, Greek names were the obvious and most abundant choice for this purpose. The adoption of a Latin name at that time, while not unheard of, was much rarer and, unless it involved certain common names of generally transparent meaning (see below, p. 367), must have had a specific rationale in each case. The name Paulus, while not exceedingly rare, was not very common either and held an air of the highest distinction.
352 from top: “‘Weil dein Vater etwas mehr war als der eines deiner Collegen….”
“Because your father was somewhat more than that of one of your colleagues (namely, a freedman and not one who died as a slave): hoc tibi Paulus et Messala videris?” says Horace (Satires I 6, 41), addressing the son of a freedman who had attained public office—though this was two generations before the period with which we are concerned. Even two generations later, in Juvenal (8, 21), Paulus remained a distinguished name. While there were always individuals in Italy who bore the name in humble positions, the influx from rural areas and from circles unfamiliar with urban customs prevented the aristocracy from monopolizing this otherwise unassuming name.
In the East, however, the prestige of the name remained unblemished after it became widely known through the conqueror of Macedonia. A few Roman governors who later bore the name did not vulgarize it. The name remained rare in the East until the triumph of Christianity.¹
It is often assumed that the similarity to the Hebrew name influenced the choice of the Latin name, but this assumption is based on the spelling of the names, and in reality, no such similarity exists. The Hebrew name appears to be reasonably accurately rendered by Σαούλ—the Greek form of the name of the king of Israel, whose tribe Paul claimed as his own. However, Σαῦλος is also Hellenized, aside from the ending. As for the other name, it was certainly pronounced Póllos rather than Paúlos. The Greek simply followed the Roman spelling, which, as is well known, did not reflect pronunciation.²
If a similar-sounding name were chosen, it would depend on the pronunciation, not on how the two names, imperfectly transcribed into Greek, appeared side by side.¹
¹ For example, aside from Roman governors, the name does not appear in the third volume of Cagnat’s Inscriptiones Graecae ad res Romanas pertinentes, which includes Greek inscriptions from Roman times covering much of Asia Minor, Cilicia, Syria, and Arabia. In the West, it was somewhat different. A noble Batavian in Roman service could call himself Julius Paulus (Tacitus, Histories 4, 12), but for him, Greek names were irrelevant, unlike for the Jew from Tarsus, for whom they were the most natural choice.
² The corresponding female name, found in fewer inscriptions, is almost always written as Polla in Latin and Πώλλα in Greek (see Eckinger, Die Orthographie lateinischer Wörter in griechischen Inschriften, p. 14).
¹ Franz Delitzsch, in his Hebrew translation of the New Testament, rightly gave the two names a completely different appearance. The meticulous care with which the distinguished scholar, in this work he regarded as sacred, considered the Hebrew transcription of Παῦλος can be seen in the introduction and notes to his translation of the Epistle to the Romans (Leipzig, 1870, p. 73) and in Zeitschrift für lutherische Theologie 38 (1877), p. 12.
353
Now, even if we set aside the difficulties of assuming that Paul bore this name from a young age, the question remains as to why the Acts of the Apostles only begins to use the name from his encounter with the proconsul Sergius Paulus onward. Some have tried to attribute the change in name usage to a change in source material or to different traditions. The passages with Saulus are thought to stem from a Jewish-Christian tradition, while those with Paulus are believed to come from a Pauline tradition.²
But how oblivious would the author of Acts have had to be to the reports before him if he failed to substitute the name familiar to him and his readers consistently—or at least to introduce the name at the beginning of the narrative to orient the reader? If, as is quite possible, the author drew his knowledge of Paul’s earlier years from oral reports in the Aramaic language, then he should naturally have replaced the Hebrew name with the Greek equivalent when writing his account in Greek.
The hypothesis of different traditions or sources completely fails here, as it is implausible to suggest that the author switched sources in the middle of the account of Paul’s stay in Cyprus. We would expect to see the second name used as early as Acts 13:2 (at the commissioning from Antioch) or at least in 13:7.
A widely held opinion is that the author of Acts aligned the name change of his protagonist with Paul’s own practice: that while Paul had the name Paulus from the beginning, he only began to use it more frequently or consistently as the Apostle to the Gentiles. Put simply, Paul was called Paulus from the start but only began using the name regularly from his incidental encounter with the proconsul Paulus onward.
It may be reasonable to assume that the Apostle used his Roman name more frequently after the start of his major missionary journeys. However, there can hardly be any doubt that Paul would still have found himself in situations after his time in Cyprus where it would have been fitting to use his Hebrew name—for example, during his later visits to Jerusalem. If Paul himself merely began using his Roman name more frequently from Cyprus onward and the narrator simply reflected this reality, we would still expect the name Saulus to appear occasionally in the second half of the narrative.
One cannot argue that stylistic reasons required avoiding frequent name changes; after all, no one objects to reading in the Gospel of Mark (14:37): λέγει (Ἰησοῦς) τῷ Πέτρῳ· Σίμων, καθεύδεις (“Jesus said to Peter, ‘Simon, are you sleeping?'”). Cicero, in his speech on behalf of the poet Archias, skillfully alternates between the names A. Licinius and Archias depending on whether he is discussing his client’s claims to Roman citizenship or his claims to poetic fame.
The opinion that the “compiler of Acts” somehow “misused the otherwise unobjectionable encounter with the proconsul of the same name in an inappropriate way” (Mommsen, Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 435) seems entirely dismissible. For what purpose would this have been done? Presumably to create the impression that Paul’s name was linked to the encounter with the proconsul, as Jerome suggested (see above, p. 349). However, Jerome may have been justified in forming such an opinion based on the report available to him, and he presented it as a hypothesis. By contrast, the author of Acts supposedly left his unfounded and erroneous assumption unspoken but hinted at it through the arbitrary removal of one name from earlier sections and the other from later sections of the narrative—an equally peculiar, crafty, and high-handed method.
² C. Weizsäcker, Das apostolische Zeitalter, p. 67.
354 from bottom: Nun soll zwar, nach…..
Now, according to many scholars, the author of the Acts of the Apostles is said to have allowed himself considerable liberties and is accused of having committed numerous peculiarities. However, none of these liberties could compare to the one supposed here. According to many,¹ the author belonged to a later period and lacked a proper understanding of the events he narrates. He is said to have expressed his own views, reflecting the outlook of his time, in the book, which naturally resulted in some peculiarities. Given the abundance of material, he sometimes became confused and, for instance, treated different accounts of the same event as though they referred to different events, resorting to forced interpretations during his compilation.
He is also accused of indulging his biases, allegedly softening or obscuring conflicts between his various protagonists to an improper degree. And there are other such accusations.
But what could this author—or indeed anyone at any time—have intended by removing the name Paulus from earlier reports of the Apostle’s activity and, from the time of the proconsul Sergius Paulus, replacing it with Saulus? Did he believe he was elevating or making his protagonist more intriguing by leading his readers to think that the Apostle owed his well-known name to a Roman proconsul?
Moreover, how skillfully and consistently must this author, otherwise prone to arbitrary treatment of his material, have proceeded! He is said to have made many errors, such as leaving traces of other interpretations intact. No, everything points to the conclusion that the author of Acts found the transition from one name to the other already indicated in the sources available to him, precisely at the point where he notes it. According to his understanding, even if he does not explicitly state it, the Apostle arrived in Cyprus as Saul and left the island as Paul.
¹ For a characterization of this view of the Acts of the Apostles, see now Harnack, Die Apostelgeschichte> (1908), pp. 19 ff.
355
Now, this is by no means as unbelievable or entirely without analogy as is often assumed today. It should naturally be considered—and modern scholars have consistently taken this into account—that according to a statement made by the Apostle during a remarkable conversation with the Roman garrison commander in Jerusalem, the cohort tribune Claudius Lysias,¹ he was a Roman citizen by birth (Acts 22:28). In any case, he arrived in Cyprus as a Roman citizen.
As a Roman citizen, he was entitled to bear a Roman gentilicium (family name)—though whether he ever did so remains an open question.² His common name, since the praenomen had lost its significance, followed the gentilicium according to the prevailing custom and functioned as a cognomen.³ Thus, adopting the name Paulus involved changing the cognomen.
Now, while it was by no means common, it was not unheard of for an adult Roman citizen to change their cognomen. We happen to know of an upstart from the Caesarian period who, when preparing to run for public office, abandoned his previous cognomen, Quintio, and adopted a more distinguished-sounding one, Sabinus.
¹ Paul not only, as earlier in Philippi (Acts 16:22, 37), allowed himself to be arrested in Jerusalem without revealing his Roman citizenship but only invoked it later. This prompted Renan (Saint Paul, 1869, p. 526, note 1) to doubt his Roman citizenship. Furthermore, in the second case, when the arresting commander asked about his identity, Paul identified himself as a Jew and a citizen of Tarsus in Cilicia (Acts 21:39), thus deliberately concealing his Roman citizenship. Various explanations could be offered for this. The most curious aspect, however, is that the commander, without any provocation, confesses to his prisoner that he purchased his own Roman citizenship. This seems more objectionable than many issues Schwartz criticized in Göttinger Nachrichten (1907, pp. 288 ff.). Yet, this does not indicate interpolation or a late addition but rather reflects how the narrator envisioned the situation. (The scenario itself is plausible; Lysias may have been among those who purchased citizenship and officer posts during Messalina’s time.)
² In the Delphic proxeny list from the first half of the 2nd century BCE (see the following note), there is mention of a Νίκανδρος Μενεχράτεος Ῥωμαῖος (Nicander, son of Menecrates, a Roman), who apparently did not exercise his right to bear a Roman gentilicium.
³ The earliest documented example of this usage appears in the Delphic proxeny list from the first half of the 2nd century BCE, with the entry from 190/189 BCE: Μᾶρκος Ὀαλέριος Ὁμοπτῶνης. This refers to the Numidian Muttines, who was granted Roman citizenship by the consul M. Valerius Laevinus (see my Inscriptiones selectae 8764, line 84, annotation 7).
¹ Catalect. Vergil. 10 (8) v. 8 (Baehrens Poetae Lat. min. II p. 171); Cic. ep. 15, 20, 1. Vgl. Buecheler Rhein. Museum XXXVIII 1883 S. 518., Mommsen in dies. Ztschr. XXVIII 1893 S. 605 (= Ges. Sehr. IV S. 175).
357 from 3rd line, Von einem gewissenlosen Ehrgeizigen einer….
Cicero (Pro Cluentio 26, 72) recounts the case of an unscrupulous social climber from an earlier period, a certain Staienus, who selected one of the cognomina of the noble gens Aelia. However, this case was different insofar as Staienus appears to have entered the Aelian family through a fictitious adoption (Cic. Brutus 68, 240). Nevertheless, it seems that changing one’s cognomen was not so rare among individuals of lower status aiming to ascend socially.
At the beginning of Augustus’ reign, such ambitions were likely shared by the freedman L. Crassicius of Tarentum. After humble beginnings on public stages, he transitioned to scholarly writing and replaced his cognomen Pasicles with the more distinguished-sounding Pansa (cognomine Pasicles, mox Pansam se transnominavit, Suet. De gramm. 12). Whether the choice of this name was influenced by its similarity in sound—evidenced by the spelling Pasa on reliable inscriptions of that era²—or by connections to a noble Pansa remains unknown.
A different motive prompted a freedman of Emperor Vespasian, named Cerylus (likely Flavius Cerylus), to replace his cognomen with the no more distinguished-sounding Laches (Suet. Vesp. 23). He sought to obscure his origins and reduce his patron’s claims to his inheritance. Such fraudulent name changes could be punished.³ However, a name change that did not infringe on anyone’s rights was explicitly permitted.⁴
In the case of the Apostle, it was not a simple name change, nor the adoption of a random noble cognomen, but rather the adoption of the cognomen of a specific prominent man—a sitting proconsul—with whom the Apostle had either a temporary or newly established relationship. Yet even the names of the most prominent individuals did not enjoy legal protection against such appropriations, with one significant exception: freedmen.
Freedmen, who upon their emancipation and acquisition of Roman citizenship typically adopted the gentilicium of their patron (and, from the early imperial period, also their praenomen¹), were prohibited from adopting noble cognomina, particularly those of their patrons. This restriction extended, to some extent, to the sons of freedmen. It was entirely unacceptable for a freedman to give his son the cognomen of his former master, as this would make the offspring of the slave indistinguishable from the noble master.
Had this been permissible, we would frequently encounter the ancient, illustrious Roman names—the patrician gentilicia with their associated cognomina—which, as we know, nearly all disappeared.² For instance, a freedman of the highly aristocratic M. Aurelius Cotta, a consul in AD 20, named M. Aurelius Zosimus, named his son Cottanus, presumably in grateful remembrance of his former master.³ Calling him Cotta, however, would have been a laughable presumption.
² For example, the tomb inscription of the consul from 43 BCE uses Pasa (Notizie degli Scavi 1899, p. 435). ³ Paulus (Sententiae 5, 25, 11): <Qui sibi falsum nomen imposuerit, genus parentesve finxerit, quo quid alienum interciperet possideret, poena legis Corneliae de falsis coercetur. ⁴ Codex Iustinianus 9, 25, 1.
¹ Mommsen, Staatsrecht III, p. 427.
² The Cornelii Scipiones, Cornelii Dolabellae, Caecilii Metelli, and other noble families, some of which survived into Augustus’ reign only through adoptions, disappeared during or by the end of the 1st century. It never occurred to freedmen of these families to propagate the noble names by giving them to their offspring. Conversely, a certain M. Tullius from (likely) Paestum, who had no connection with Cicero of Arpinum (as evidenced by his tribus), amusingly adopted the cognomen Cicero, naming himself M. Tullius M. f. Cicero, like the orator (CIL X 482, 483; Inscriptiones selectae 6448, 6449). The Fabii Maximi reappear in the 4th century, likely without any connection to the patrician house of the same name. ³ See this journal, p. 25.
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—— A similar restraint may also have been imposed on provincials who were granted Roman citizenship. For example, when a man from Gades (modern Cádiz), who later played an extremely influential role in Rome under the name L. Cornelius Balbus during Caesar’s time, was granted Roman citizenship by Pompey in 72 BCE, he took the name L. Cornelius—likely in honor of the young L. Cornelius Lentulus, whom we later see as a supporter of Pompey, or another distinguished L. Cornelius to whom he owed his recommendation to Pompey. As a cognomen, he chose Balbus, since he did not wish to use his (unknown) native name—likely Punic—which would have constantly reminded the Romans of his foreign origin.
Similarly, other Punic individuals, as well as Iberians, Gauls, and members of non-Hellenized peoples of the East, when granted Roman citizenship and wishing to be regarded as Romans—not merely using or abusing their citizenship occasionally—might have adopted some Roman cognomen. However, they typically chose neutral and non-distinguished names rather than the names of their noble patrons.¹
By contrast, Greeks and Hellenized Asians, upon receiving Roman citizenship, and even with ongoing connections to Romans, rarely felt the need to adopt a Latin cognomen. Their Greek names were generally sufficient for Roman interactions.² It is more likely, one might think, that such fully Romanized Greeks or Asians would give their children Roman names, occasionally even those of Roman statesmen to whom they owed their citizenship, directly or indirectly. However, this was certainly uncommon. Otherwise, names like Scaevola, Sulla, or Lucullus would frequently appear among inhabitants of the province of Asia, while in fact they are rare or entirely unheard of.³
(The adoption of Roman names was hindered not only by lingering patriotism, which clung to such symbolic expressions, but also by linguistic sensibilities.) Even in the imperial era, when Roman gentilicia and cognomina began to spread among Greeks and Asians alongside Roman citizenship, the names of prominent governors² were by no means the most popular. Generally, people opted for names of neutral sound and meaning, such as Quadratus, Rufus, or Severus.
It is possible, for example, that a Pergamene named Ti. Claudius Vetus³ owed his cognomen to one of the two proconsuls of Asia named Antistius Vetus. This might have been because the cognomen was bestowed on him or an ancestor in admiration of the proconsul, or because an ancestor adopted the cognomen upon receiving Roman citizenship during the Claudian dynasty. However, such conjectures are often entirely speculative, particularly since in almost all such cases we cannot be sure whether we are dealing with native citizens of Hellenic cities or rather with Romans or Italians who had settled in Asia and obtained local citizenship in those cities.
¹ In most cases, especially when the new citizens did not plan to relocate to Rome but remained in their original communities, they likely used their native names as Roman cognomina. For example, the Haeduan C. Iulius Vercondaridubnus, the first priest of the altar of Augustus in Lugdunum in 12 BCE (Livy, Periochae139). ² Conversely, Romans and Italians who moved to Greece often had their names Hellenized or allowed them to be rendered in Greek form (e.g., omission of the gentilicium and identification solely by their first name and their father’s name in the genitive case; later, even omitting terms like νίός or ἀπελεύθερος). See Mommsen, Eph. epigr. VII, p. 452 ff. ³ See Ath. Mitt. 1896, p. 117, regarding a Σμίρνας Σμύρνας, Asiarch and “most admirable orator” from Philadelphia in Lydia. Plutarch’s friend Sulla came from the Latin half of the empire, specifically from Carthage (Prosopography of the Roman Empire III, pp. 239 and 4961).
² King Herod notably named his grandson, born in 10 BCE, Agrippa after the recently deceased imperial administrator. This Agrippa later named one of his sons the same, while also naming two other children after members of the imperial household: Drusus and Drusilla. The latter, Iulia Drusilla, born in 38 CE (Schürer, Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes, 13, p. 573), bore the same name as Emperor Caligula’s recently deceased favorite sister. Through the Herodian dynasty, the name Agrippa spread further in the East. If the name Drusilla in Tac. <Hist. 5, 9 is accurate, another royal house of that time also borrowed cognomina from the imperial family. ³ Fränkel, Inschriften von Pergamon 466.
361 from 5th line.. Vollends seit Vespasian, seit dem häufiger werden…
Especially since the time of Vespasian, with the increasing entry of Asians into the state career and the Senate¹ and the inevitable intermarriages between the local aristocracy of Asia and the Roman imperial aristocracy, Roman cognomina became increasingly common in the East. Attempting to trace their origin or the circumstances of their adoption is generally futile.
I will only mention that Apollonius of Tyana² lamented the frequent adoption of Roman names by the Greeks of Asia. By contrast, Plutarch, despite his Roman citizenship and his close ties to many distinguished Romans, did not give any of his children a Latin given name. Even the gentilicium adopted by new Roman citizens from Greece and the East was usually not that of the governor or patron who secured their Roman citizenship but rather that of the emperor, who was the sole authority granting it, though the former practice still occurred occasionally.³
However, it was particularly rare for a subject to adopt or introduce all three Roman names (praenomen, gentilicium, cognomen) of a governor into their family. Yet this did happen, and it occurred in the same location where, in my opinion, Paul adopted the name of the governor: in Cyprus, at Paphos, shortly before Paul’s presence there.
One of Sergius Paulus’ immediate predecessors as proconsul of Cyprus, and the last whose name we know, was C. Ummidius Quadratus, who later became governor of Syria.¹ This name appears in a prominent Paphian family of the 1st century. According to two inscriptions,² seemingly from the temple of the Paphian Aphrodite, a certain C. Ummidius Quadratus and his wife Claudia Rhodoclea, a high priestess, dedicated a statue of their son C. Ummidius Pantauchus Quadratianus to the goddess. Another inscription records the dedication of a statue of C. Ummidius Quadratus himself, who also bore the additional surname Pantauchianus. The statue was dedicated by his grandmother Claudia Appharion, a high priestess of Demeter for all Cyprus.
The exact relationship between the individuals mentioned in these two inscriptions is unclear; in particular, it is uncertain whether we are dealing with one or two men named C. Ummidius Quadratus. The most likely scenario is that a man named Pantauchus, who received Roman citizenship through the mediation of the proconsul C. Ummidius Quadratus, named himself C. Ummidius Pantauchus and his son C. Ummidius Quadratus. The latter was occasionally referred to as ὁ καὶ Παντανχεανός (Pantauchianus).
From this, we see that it was not unheard of in Cyprus at that time for provincials to adopt even the cognomen of a Roman governor. Thus, there is no reason to doubt that the Apostle, if he wished to adopt a new name around that time for any reason, could have taken the cognomen of the sitting governor.
¹ See this journal, p. 16 f. ² Epigraphica 71, 72 (I, p. 365, ed. Kayser, 1870). ³ Plutarch, as is well known, received his Roman family name from his friend, the later proconsul of Asia, L. Mestrius Florus. The fact that a number of distinguished Lycians in the 2nd century CE bore the name Q. Veranius (Cagnat, Inscr. Graec. ad res Rom. pert. III, nos. 589, 628, 704; I, 739, ch. 63) clearly stems from the fact that their ancestors obtained Roman citizenship under Claudius through the mediation of the imperial governor Q. Veranius (cf. Prosopography of the Roman Empire III, p. 399, no. 266).
¹ On this man, see Prosopography of the Roman Empire III, p. 468, no. 600 (his primary inscription, the sole evidence of his proconsulship in Cyprus, is also Inscr. sel. 972). His full nomenclature also included a second gentilicium (Durmius), though this was usually omitted. ² Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum2637 = Waddington 2801 (= Cagnat, Inscr. Graec. ad res Rom. pert. III, 950; also no. 951).
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The sequence of events may be imagined roughly as follows: Saul, who had managed perfectly well with this one name in Tarsus, Antioch, Damascus, and Jerusalem,¹ likely made little to no use of the Roman gentilicium he was entitled to bear as a Roman citizen.³ During his first major missionary journey, upon arriving in the capital of Cyprus and already considering further travel to Pamphylia and Pisidia, he felt the need for a name more familiar to Greeks and Romans.
His Roman citizenship did not hinder this choice, any more than it did for Quintio during the Caesarian era, Pasicles in the Augustan period, or Cerylus in Vespasian’s time when adopting new cognomina. The proconsul’s name, given that Saul had been introduced to him and treated in an especially cordial manner, naturally presented itself. Any other Greek or Latin name could have served the same purpose.
It was not the similarity between Paulus and Saul—which did not exist—nor the original meaning of the Latin name, which was probably unknown to him and to most of those he initially interacted with, that influenced his choice.² However, he surely chose the name willingly, as it reminded him of his first successful engagement with a representative of the wider world. In this limited sense, Jerome’s hypothesis (see p. 349) seems entirely accurate.
It should not be thought, though, that Paul chose the name to remind others of his acquaintance with the proconsul—nor should we draw inappropriate comparisons to Roman victory titles. If the Apostle sought the proconsul’s permission to adopt his cognomen, this permission would have been granted without hesitation; after all, not long before, a predecessor of Sergius Paulus, C. Ummidius Quadratus, had permitted Cypriots to adopt his full Roman name.
¹ See p. 356. ² Later, the original meaning of the name played a significant role among the Latins, as seen in Augustine’s writings before he encountered Jerome’s explanation (see above, p. 349). Augustine states in Sermon 168, §7 (5, p. 914, Migne): quid est Paulus? minimus (“What does Paul mean? Small, for paullum in Latin means little”). He connects this to 1 Cor. 15:9 (Ἐγώ γάρ εἰμι ὁ ἐλάχιστος τῶν ἀποστόλων, “For I am the least of the apostles”), as in Sermon 101, §1 (5, p. 605, Migne) and elsewhere. ³ His Roman citizenship neither required him to adopt a Roman cognomen (see this journal, p. 17, note A) nor obligated his parents to give him one.
364 from top … Vielleicht hat aber….
It is possible, however, that the Apostle did not seek such permission at all. What was considered permissible in Cyprus in this regard could have been conveyed to him either by his friend Barnabas, a native Cypriot who had brought him to the island and was now at his side, or by other acquaintances he undoubtedly made among the Cypriots. In another provincial capital, such as Ephesus, the adoption of the cognomen of the sitting proconsul by a provincial might have been considered inappropriate by some of the many Romans residing there or might have been ridiculed by both Greeks and Romans.
In Cyprus, however, neither the proconsul, who would soon leave the island never to return, nor the Romans conducting business there, nor the locals cared in the slightest if a Saul adopted the cognomen of the patrician Aemilii or Sergii families. Paul, of course, did not abandon or deny his original name. He likely continued to use it where he spoke Aramaic or Hebrew, for example, during his subsequent visits to Jerusalem. However, our narrator consistently and appropriately uses the new name from the moment in the story when it became relevant, except when quoting earlier direct addresses to the Apostle (22:7, 13), where exact wording was crucial.
One might criticize the narrator for not explicitly recounting the Apostle’s adoption of his new name, as this indeed was not done. The words Σαῦλος ὁ καὶ Παῦλος² merely serve as a necessary link between the sections using Saul and those using Paul. The narrator contented himself with briefly highlighting the identity of the person during the transition from one name to the other. Why he proceeded in this way is unclear; perhaps he did not consider the matter important, or perhaps he was not fully aware of the motives and circumstances. During Paul’s long sea voyages and his time in captivity, he had more pressing matters to teach his companions than how he came by his second name.
The narrator’s treatment of Paul’s deeds was generally subjective. Incidentally, even the Gospel of Matthew does not explicitly recount the much more significant name change of Peter.¹
¹ Similarly, modern historians in analogous cases would mark the transition from Bonaparte to Napoleon or from Disraeli to Lord Beaconsfield at the point where the person adopted (or, like Napoleon, emphasized) the second name, unless specific intent or narrative structure disrupted this natural approach. ² Deißmann is correct in Bibelstudien (1895, p. 183) in observing this, but he errs when he continues (cf. Rufinus above, p. 350): “The ὁ καί allows no other conclusion than that he was already called Saulus Paulus before his arrival in Cyprus.” The phrase ὁ καί says nothing about the timing or manner of the adoption of the second name.
¹ The Gospel of Matthew similarly glosses over Simon’s renaming as Peter in 10:2 with the words Σίμων ὁ λεγόμενος Πέτρος—at the same point in the narrative where Mark and Luke explicitly report the renaming—just as Acts 13:9 does with Σαῦλος ὁ καὶ Παῦλος.
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I must not fail to point out that the foundation of both the above and all earlier investigations into the name of Paul has recently been shaken. Like all my predecessors, I assumed that the Acts of the Apostles marks the name change in chapter 13:9, at Paul’s appearance before the proconsul of Cyprus. However, a Latin version of Acts, preserved in a 13th-century manuscript, places the change slightly earlier, in chapter 12:25. Similarly, it seems that a Greek manuscript of Acts, used by a 7th-century Syrian scholar, followed this pattern.
According to Blass,¹ this and many other variations stem from the first edition of Acts, which was later replaced by a second edition by the author himself. There is no need to pass judgment here—or at all—on the attempt to reconstruct an original version from fragments of various kinds and origins, claiming it to be the original in comparison to the received text.²
However, a word should be said about Blass’s explanation of why the name Paulus appears earlier in the supposedly first edition than in the later one. Originally, according to Blass, the author introduced the name Paulus in chapter 12:25, a particularly fitting point. But in chapter 13:7, he reverted to the old name to avoid confusion with the proconsul Sergius Paulus, who is mentioned there. Only in chapter 13:9 does the new name reappear, first alongside the old one, before fully taking over.
The author, upon reviewing his work, supposedly disliked this arrangement and in a second edition definitively moved the introduction of the new name to chapter 13:9. However, it seems to me that if, for any reason, the Apostle had already been called Paul before chapter 13, the single mention of another Paul—or rather Sergius Paulus, the proconsul—could not have caused any misunderstanding. For instance, the mention of another Simon, distinct from Peter, in Luke 7:40ff, is far more prone to misunderstanding.
It is unwarranted to assume that the author, fearing such confusion, shifted the name change from one point he deemed appropriate to another. The textual variant concerning the name of the Apostle Paul² has even less claim than any other to be considered ancient.³
¹ In his edition of Acts, secundum formam quae videtur Romanam, preface, p. IX. ² Cf. Harnack, Sitzungsberichte der Berliner Akademie, 1895, p. 491; 1899, pp. 150, 316; 1900, p. 12; H. v. Soden, Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments in ihrer ältesten erreichbaren Textgestalt (1902), I, p. 12; Harnack, Theologische Literaturzeitung, 1907, p. 401. ³ See also Ramsay, Expositor, Series V, 6 (1897), p. 460.
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Finally, a few words must be said about other instances of double (or multiple) names from the circles and time of Paul, in which the second (or final) name was Latin. I know of four such cases explicitly attested in the New Testament: Jesus, who is called Justus (Col. 4:10); Joseph Barsabbas, who was surnamed Justus (Acts 1:23); John, who was also called Mark (see above, p. 347); and Symeon, who was called Niger (Acts 13:1).
It can be stated with confidence that the three Latin names appearing here (Justus twice) had a far more ordinary and modest connotation than Paulus. Each of these names also appears elsewhere among Jews of the time. For example, Justus was the name of the well-known rival of the historian Josephus,¹ Niger was one of the leaders of the revolt of 66 CE (Josephus, Bell. 2, 19, 2), and Marcus was the son of an alabarch of Alexandria (Josephus, Ant. 19, 5, 1).
Two of these names, Justus and Niger, carry self-explanatory meanings, which account for their popularity or emergence. Marcus was one of the Roman praenomina that, having nearly lost their original significance in Rome and becoming restricted to familial use, reemerged in the East as primary names. Mommsen² discussed this phenomenon in connection with the jurist Gaius. Similarly, the New Testament mentions a Gaius (Acts 20:4), a Lucius (Acts 13:1), and a Titus.
While names like Justus were popular and Niger at least not unknown among Jews of that time, both were foreign to the old Roman aristocracy. Until then, no representative of the Roman state with the name Niger or Justus had traveled to the East.³ As for Marcus, it was a common name shared by many proconsuls and legates as well as their servants and clients. These four cases clearly demonstrate that Paul’s situation was unique.
A unique situation also applied to a bearer of a double name who was particularly close to Paul, though his double name is not explicitly attested. It is generally assumed, and likely correctly, that Silas, Paul’s companion on his second major journey—who allowed himself to be arrested with Paul in Philippi and later invoked his Roman citizenship (Acts 16:37)—is identical to Silvanus, who co-signed Paul’s letters to the Thessalonians.
Like Paulus, Silvanus was not a widespread or overused name at the beginning of the imperial period. It was primarily associated with a patrician family, the Plautii, which had been represented in the Senate and among provincial governors for several generations (Prosopography of the Roman Empire III, p. 46, no. 361 ff.).¹ It is reasonable to assume that some connection to a noble Roman named Silvanus helped Paul’s companion acquire his name,² whether it was given to him in his youth or adopted as an adult.³
Nothing has been handed down about these connections. However, in Paul’s case, we know of his relationship with a proconsul of that name, and we should not overlook the minor yet significant detail that, as Paul took his first steps beyond the provinces familiar to him from his youth into new regions, he adopted the cognomen of a Roman proconsul.
¹ Justus was also the name of a geisiarch (synagogue leader) mentioned in a recently discovered inscription near Ostia, Notizie degli scavi< 1906, p. 411 (with commentary by Ghislanzoni), Eph. epigr. 9, 583 (printed edition). ² Gesammelte Schriften II, p. 27. ³ By the Neronian period, this had changed; under Nero, we find a procurator of Thrace named T. Iulius Iustus and a proconsul of Asia named Vettius Niger.
¹ Also found among a noble Pompeian and possibly a member of the Pomponii family of the time (Prosopography III, pp. 71, 495; 80, 565), but not among the common people. ² The external similarity of the names undoubtedly played a role, but neither Silas himself nor his parents would have chosen Silvanus entirely on their own. It is therefore unlikely, as Ramsay (St. Paul, p. 176) suggests, that Silvanus was the original name and Silas the abbreviated form. ³ An older but noteworthy case is the Pharisee Pollio (Josephus, Ant. 15, 1, 1; 10, 4). Whether or not this man is identical to the Abtalion mentioned in Jewish sources (Schürer, Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes i, II³, p. 358), his name likely became known in Judea through Herod’s close relationship with C. Asinius Pollio (Josephus, Ant. 15, 10, 1).
Charlottenburg
H. DESSAU
Dessau, H. “Der Name Des Apostels Paulus.” Hermes 45, no. 3 (1910): 347–68.
Groag, E. “L. Sergius Paullus.” In Paulys Real-Encyclopadie Der Classischen Altertumswissenschaft, II, A,2:cols 1715-18, 1923. http://archive.org/details/PWRE51.
Harrer, G. A. “Saul Who Also Is Called Paul.” The Harvard Theological Review 33, no. 1 (1940): 19–33.
This book argues that these seven letters* are … pseudonymous, literary, and fictional, letters-in-form-only. Their likely origin is Marcion’s mid-second-century speculative/philosophical school in Rome, the site and timeframe of our earliest evidence of a collection of ten Pauline epistles (c. 144 CE). Deploying the letter genre, trained authors of this school crafted teachings in the name of the Apostle Paul for peer elite audiences.
This study contributes to an important conceptual shift in our understanding of early Christianity. (2)
* – referring to the seven of the New Testament letters that are widely accepted as genuinely authored by Paul or his secretary: Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon.
But how is the layperson, someone with an interest in Christianity but busy with other matters, to know “what’s what” about the sources? I am also mindful of the interest in the Christ Myth theory among several readers here and in the course of these posts I will point out where I believe some popular notions in that quarter might need rethinking.
Hopefully interested laypersons will find something to think about from this part review of The Letters of Paul in their Roman Literary Context.
A good place to start is getting our bearings on how we got to the position today where a core of the NT letters are considered to be genuine writings of Paul.
Scripture Status from the Beginning
To begin at the beginning, as NL does, we are not surprised to learn that notable Church Fathers such as Irenaeus and Tertullian (late second and early third centuries) appealed to their copies of Paul’s letters as if they were authoritative scripture. But is that how those (or the one) responsible for the letters meant them to be read? NL replies:
In that these authors are only at a slight remove, likely only several decades, from those responsible for the Pauline letters (see Chapter 4), it is reasonable to assume that their assessment of them as scriptural is how they were first envisioned to be. (36 – bolded highlighting is my own in all quotations)
Keep in mind that Irenaeus and Tertullian protested virulently against another prominent figure, Marcion, whom they accused of falsifying the letters. The actual words Paul supposedly wrote were matters of heaven or hell from the very first time we read about them in the external witnesses. That note does surely raise the question of how informal correspondence to scattered places could have been placed so soon on a par with Scriptures.
Criticism and Rescue
One of my favourite books as a teenage history buff. Its opening words of chapter 1: In 1784, at the height of the Age of Enlightenment, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote an article for a popular audience explaining the meaning of the word that gave the age its name. “Enlightenment”, Kant began, “is man’s emergence from his nonage. This nonage, or immaturity, he continued, was caused not by lack of intelligence, but lack of determination and courage to use that intelligence without another’s guidance. Sapere aude! Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own intelligence.”
The European Enlightenment was the age of Isaac Newton, Mozart, Voltaire, Rousseau, Bentham, Locke and James Cook. The new rationalist spirit sought to discover what could be understood about Paul’s letters by examining what the letters indicated about the situation of the author and his addressees. It is worth noting some of the milestone critics for a better perspective on modern views:
EE’s conclusion on the gospels and the beginning of his arguments on the letters begin here (archive.org).
Edward Evanson (1731-1805) proposed criteria and tests to determine the authenticity of the letters and their historical reliability.
His conclusion: All except for 1&2 Corinthians, 1&2 Thessalonians, Galatians and 1&2 Timothy were inauthentic. The only trustworthy gospel was that of Luke. Acts was also a useful guide to testing which letters were genuine.
As we too often find even among modern scholars, Evanson’s criteria and methods were often circular and more subjective than he might have liked to admit.
Wilhelm M.L. de Wette (1780-1849), assuming the letters to be genuine, laboured over reconstructing the historical setting of those to whom the letters were written along with teasing out clues that would allow a more graphic biography of Paul himself. This approach
serves to give the impression – without adequate evidence – of the realia of Paul, his communities, and the letters as genuine correspondence . . . . (41)
The reader is taken away from the main theological and doctrinal contents of the letters and ushered into a socio-historical-biographical world of Paul and his churches. The foundations of this world, however, are the letters themselves along with Acts, so again we encounter a circular process. The letters are understood in terms of the social world and persons and communities that are taken from the letters themselves.
De Wette had the imagination and gift to breathe life into Paul and his communities, their trials and successes, but alas, reading imaginatively into a text and seeing a life behind it is not the most disciplined of scholarship.
De Wette was dismissed from Berlin in 1819 on account of his having written a letter of consolation to the mother of Karl Ludwig Sand, the murderer of Kotzebue. A petition in his favour presented by the senate of the university was unsuccessful, and a decree was issued not only depriving him of the chair, but banishing him from the Prussian kingdom. (Wikisource)
De Wette has won a more positive memory for his dissertation arguing that Deuteronomy was composed around the time of Josiah, not by Moses, in only a few dozen pages.
For at least one-hundred and thirty years, W.M.L.de Wette (1780-1849) has been cited in practically every scholarly discussion of the history of textual and source criticism of the Pentateuch . . . (Harvey/Halpern, 47)
F.C. Baur (not to be confused with Bruno Bauer) is a name many readers have heard of for good (or “not so good”, depending on your point of view) reason. His influence is still with biblical scholarship however much his views have been modified. Baur’s focus was on understanding Christian origins. He concluded that Christianity arose from a “spiritual insight” under the guiding light of Paul in reaction against an essentially legalistic Judaism led by the apostles James and Peter. For Baur, only four epistles were genuine: Galatians, 1&2 Corinthians, Romans (the Hauptbriefe). Those four were to be the platform from which to view Christian origins: Acts was unreliable as history.
Baur’s analysis, however, contained a fatal methodological flaw. He deployed circular reasoning. That is, “NT documents [the Hauptbriefe] are used to reconstruct early Christian history; the reconstruction of early Christian history provides the framework for the assessment of NT documents [the Hauptbriefe].” Otherwise put, Baur posits a great rift between Judaism and Christianity from reading the Hauptbriefe, and then relies on those same letters to confirm his historical reconstruction.(45f)
F. C. Baur
Further, NL points out that Baur came to his understanding of Christian origins largely as a result of his attachment to the notion that Judaism was a kind of primitive legalistic religion and Christianity a liberating spiritual one, along with the belief that ancient historical narratives almost by definition windows, however much darkened, into real historical events. There was also a prevailing view that history’s conflicts were stepping stones towards an overall advancement of human civilization.
Critics arose but in varying ways they embraced Baur’s assumptions — especially their high esteem for the person of Paul as a religious innovator. How to determine a letter’s authenticity? Four guidelines prevailed:
1. Did a letter fit the Christian-spiritual vs Judaism-legalistic model of Christian origins? This question led to the final conclusion, still accepted today, that seven of the letters are authentic: Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon.
2. Did a letter conform to Pauline style?
3. Are there early external witnesses to a letter?
4. Did a letter agree with Acts?
Such guidelines have become standard to the extent that I think many lay readers accept them as reasonable grounds for assessing authenticity. NL prompts us to pause and think and take note that they cannot function as independent tests of authenticity.
Thus NL traces the emergence of criticism of Paul’s letters through to the current generally held opinion that seven are from the hand of Paul or his secretary. Paul is the pivotal genius responsible for the shape of Christianity.
The main point that NL is stressing is that the value of these letters since the Enlightenment rests on their historical veracity and what they reveal about the true historical situation of the early church.
. . . for biblical literature to be credible and worthy, it needed to be historically reliable. (53)
I add a note here for those who rely on Paul’s letters for their view that Jesus began as a mythical figure who was later historicized. If we remove ourselves from Baur’s influence and consider the possibility that none of the letters are first century compositions and not written many years before the gospels, how securely can we maintain the interpretation that their author understood Christ to have been a heavenly and not an earthly figure? If he were writing around the same time as the gospels were appearing would we not expect some explicit evidence — whether in the gospels, letters or other sources — of a clash of the heavenly against the earthly career of Jesus? Might not the dearth of historical details of Jesus in the letters simply be a consequence of the author/s placing themselves as an independent voice in a post earthly Jesus time setting?
Genuine Letters?
G. A. Deissmann
In many ways Paul’s letters don’t look like other letters. Compare for a start the rambling openings in which the author asserts his authority and makes historical notes about the recipients on the one hand with the normal letter opening of the time on the other: “To Rufus, Greetings…” The foundational scholar on this question is the philologist Gustav Adolf Deissmann (1866-1937).
As with Baur, NL addresses the apologetic assumptions guiding the investigation. The letters look different, Deissmann explained, because they are written within a spontaneous spiritual fervour that cast aside formal literary discipline and wrote from the heart. (Another scholar attributed the “uniqueness” of the gospels to a similar origin.) The letters were “artless, personal, genuine, and [therefore] historically reliable” (57).
Deissmann and others scoured ancient personal letters especially from Egypt and the Levant for comparison, studying presentations and words used in known manuscripts and newly discovered papyri, to find “natural” settings for many of the details (biographical, structural, wording) thus “confirming” their genuineness.
For NL, the enormous scholarship undertaken in these studies was misdirected. For example, Paul’s letters are closer in length to the letter-treatises of upper class Romans like Cicero and Seneca than to any personal letters from the papyri.
So scholarship has ever since been seeking to find commonalities between Paul’s letters and other letter formats to establish that they are genuine letters, while at the same time putting their differences down to the unique situation of early Christian “spiritual life” and particular circumstances. We are asked to believe that the letters are genuine outpourings from the intoxication of “new beliefs”, especially the expectation of an apocalyptic return of Jesus. It is sometimes claimed that a letter of Paul is essentially a “directly spoken world” without literary artifice without any authorial attention to literary artifice. Such a view defies all that we otherwise know about any form of writing.
But biblical scholarship in some quarters at least has come to learn (especially, as I understand it, from anthropological studies) that new religions do not romantically erupt in a wave of spiritual fervour generated by new beliefs (such movements usually break out within established religions) but that rather, “in the beginning”, is ritual, practice. Myths come later to explain the rituals.
Deissmann posited an understanding of early Christianity that was ahistorical, and mythical. There was no Urchristentum as Deissmann (and Overbeck) imagined. Modern scholars of religion remark that rather than a concept or belief at a religion’s core, one finds instead practices. Only later is meaning applied to those practices. (64)
If beliefs and letters are not at the starting gate, what is?
The problem of positing “belief” as the seed and core of early Christianity is in part set out in an article available publicly (and cited by NL): The Concept of Religion and the Study of the Apostle Paul by Brent Nongbri. As further noted by NL, Nongbri draws upon “The Origins of Christianity Within, and Without, ‘Religion’: A Case Study”, which is the final essay in William Arnal’s and Russell McCutcheon’s The Sacred Is the Profane. The Political Nature of “Religion”. (The title is a reply to Mircea Eliade‘s pioneering The Sacred and the Profane of 1959.) Arnal and McCutcheon address the general isolation of biblical studies within the broader academy along with their all too often clearly flawed methodologies. “Religion” itself is largely a modern concept that has the unfortunate result of deflecting scholarly investigation away from specific practices, community behaviours and identities, that formed the real foundation of what became Christianity. Our focus on New Testament and related texts further blinkers us from other evidence that suggest quite different practices and tastes that can be discerned in archaeological remains and in what we know of other community formations. Indeed, it is suggested that the New Testament authors meant to impose a new textual understanding on the communities. The authors of these texts were literati who “viewed themselves as schools”. The texts constructed Jesus as an outsider figure who represented the communities themselves. They don’t mention Bruno Bauer but BB said as much more than a century and a half ago. In Arnal and McCutcheon’s words,
Speaking about Jesus as a particular type of social strategy was attractive for exactly the same reasons that, at the same time and among similar people, escapist novels, Stoic philosophy, and voluntary associations also flourished. (Sacred Is the Profane, 168)
I find it very easy to accept NL’s argument given what surely must have been many displaced persons looking for a clearer identity after the destruction of the Jewish way of life in Palestine and beyond as a result of the savage wars of Trajan and Hadrian to suppress Jewish uprisings. Not only Jews themselves but the gentile proselytes and “god-fearers” who had been attracted to “Judaism” would have been seeking a necessarily revised identity.
Continuing…..
Arnal, William, and Russell T. McCutcheon. The Sacred Is the Profane: The Political Nature Of “Religion.” New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Halpern, Baruch, Paul B. Harvey, and Wilhelm Martin Leberecht De Wette. “W.M.L. de Wette’s ‘Dissertatio Critica …’: Context and Translation,” January 1, 2004. https://www.academia.edu/1202115/de_Wette_diss_crit.
Livesey, Nina E. The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Nongbri, Brent. “The Concept of Religion and the Study of the Apostle Paul.” Journal of the Jesus Movement in Its Jewish Setting: From the First to the Seventh Century 2 (2015): 1–26.
With thanks to Cambridge University Press for an inspection copy.
Nina Livesey’s The Letters of Paul in their Roman Literary Context raises questions that go beyond the authenticity and date of Paul’s letters. If we no longer discern a wandering charismatic preacher, one who is competing with other preachers, and planting house churches in Asia Minor and Greece as he works his way, via a thriving Jerusalem, to Rome, then what do we have in his place?
The argument structure of The Letters is as follows:
— an explanation of the origin of the current consensus that the New Testament letters of Paul include some that are authentic, mid-first century, writings to real churches; Nina Livesey (NL) shows that the arguments giving rise to this view [that is, the historicity of Paul, the authenticity of the letters, their first century date, and the related “home churches”] are circular and grounded more in conservative piety than independent evidence;
— a comparison of the letters of Paul with letter-writing more generally at this time (the Roman world of the first and second centuries); NL explains how the training of authors prepared them to create characters, both of apparent authors and recipients, and situations that attracted readers because they seemed “so real” and “personal”; NL further compares Seneca’s use of fiction to teach applied Stoic philosophy through artificial letters with the Pauline correspondence, pinpointing many similar literary devices. A case is made that Paul’s letters were a collection intended for general publication from the point of their creation by “a school” of a highly educated elite.
— independent evidence that explains the contents of the letters does not appear until the wake of the Bar Kochba war that (132-135 CE), far more than the first Jewish war of 66-70 CE, saw a genocide of the inhabitants of Palestine and even a denial of their name for their homeland as an ultimate punishment. In the context of Judea and Jewish practices like circumcision becoming a byword for all that Rome found contemptible, “Christian” teachers migrated to Rome where they set up “schools” not unlike other philosophical schools. It was from here that one such teacher, Marcion (later relegated by the “proto-orthodox” teachers as a “heretic”), identified with “Paul” and purportedly produced the letters under his name around 144 CE.
Further, the letters point to intertextuality with Acts and the gospels, indicating that the authors of all these works knew one another. Indeed, in Acts one finds the name of Paul emerging in the context of a work with a cluster of other fictional names, double-names and cipher (or symbolic) names (e.g. Stephen, the first martyr, meaning “crown”).
I look forward to discussing some aspects of NL’s book in more depth. This post is only an introductory overview.
NL’s overall argument does not identify an indisputable, concrete piece of evidence that directly places the letters of Paul (PL) in the mid second century and no doubt many readers will prefer to fall back on their “gut feelings” about the epistles. What NL offers is an argument that has fewer unsupported assumptions than are required by those who trust in at least their partial authenticity. The NL view appeals more directly and simply to the context of the external evidence. This external evidence is used to offer more direct explanations of the contents, the style and the known first appearances of the PL. Most simply:
— there is no first century external evidence to explain the contents and traditional beliefs about PL
— there is second century external evidence that does explain the contents and style of the PL
— what is known of literary education of the time further explains the PL as consisting of literary devices to teach a philosophical or theological set of beliefs; many inconsistencies and other difficulties within the PL that have engaged scholars who read the PL at face value are resolved by NL’s hypothesis of a second century school producing them.
Not too long ago I posted a very lengthy series on three books by Thomas Witulski proposing a Bar Kochba War context for the Book of Revelation. Witulski understood not only that war but the rebellions and massacres of Jews in the eastern Mediterranean under Trajan (prior to Hadrian) had a major impact on “Christians” at that time that was expressed in the “four horsemen” chapters of Revelation preluding the Bar Kochba revolt. Revelation expresses a remarkably different kind of Christianity that we know from the gospels and PL (see Couchoud’s discussions), even pointing an accusing finger at Christians who appear to embrace customs that surface in the PL (e.g. eating meat sacrificed to idols). Joseph Turmel (=Henri Delafosse) considered the “Man of Sin” Antichrist figure of 2 Thessalonians (see 2 Thess at his commentary page) to have been Bar Kochba but I wonder if a better case could be made for it being Hadrian, especially given Revelation’s favourable view of Bar Kochba (Witulski). How that interpretation might fit with NL’s arguments is a question I’d like to think through. Certainly Hermann Detering’s scenario of the “Little Apocalypse” prophecy of Mark 13 (and Matthew 24 and Luke 21) being best explained in Hadrianic times comes to the fore, as does his evidence (much drawn from Rudolf Steck) for Paul’s opponents belonging to the second century. The surviving writings of Justin (post the Bar Kochba War) also strongly suggest — contrary to conventional attempts to read his knowledge of our canonical gospels into his works — a time when there was a free-for-all scope for interpreting Jewish Scriptures as prophecies of “Christianity”.
So you can see how NL’s book ties in with many ideas I have been toying with for some years now. I look forward to discussing some of its details.
Livesey, Nina E. The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Nina E. Livesey is Professor of Religious Studies, Emerita at the University of Oklahoma.
Today I received a review copy from Cambridge University Press of Nina E. Livesey’s The Letters of Paul in their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship. I have already read the Introduction and Chapter 4 and highlighted along the way a few dozen other works referenced by Livesey to follow up. But what I found most inviting is that quite a few other references I have already posted about — and in some cases translated — here on Vridar. It is encouraging to meet a friend who likes and has found value in my other friends.
The first reference that stands out is Patricia Rosenmeyer. I posted on one of Rosenmeyer’s works in 2006 and it is one Livesey refers to often (as I also have done in subsequent posts):
Livesey references many scholars I have discussed here (some more extensively than others) but some names stand out as being more “radical” than others — to name but a handful some long-term blog readers may recognize:
Bruno Bauer — whose relevant works discussed by Livesey I translated and made available here: see his Pauline Letters and Christ and the Caesars. Livesey writes of BB, “his arguments are more sophisticated than those typically found in current Pauline scholarship” (19). Nice.
Paul Louis Couchoud — a very nice surprise to see him make an appearance
Rudolf Steck — my translation of one of his works is online at https://vridar.info/
Joseph Tyson — I posted at length on his work on Marcion and Luke-Acts
Herman Detering — whose scholarship is vastly under-rated by at least one prominent name who notably failed to do a basic Bayesian analysis of his work (see Staged Forgeries — another work I have translated)
Markus Vinzent
Richard Pervo
Boyarin, Daniel — of whom Larry Hurtado expressed distinct discomfort for his forays into New Testament studies
Nina Livesey argues that the Pauline letters all date from the mid second century — after the Bar Kochba War.
I feel a little ashamed that till now I have only allowed myself to wonder if all of the New Testament writings should be dated to the post Bar Kochba war period. Livesey takes that step boldly.
Drawing on Rosenmeyer and numerous others I look forward to reading Livesey contextualizes the Pauline letters within the ancient custom of “schools” and teachers writing letters in the name of others in order to teach and persuade. Paul’s letters are not the product of a “wandering charismatic preacher” but of someone belonging to the wealthy elite.
Such a portrait, however, poorly suits an individual both trained and socially positioned to produce such letters. On the other hand, there is ample evidence of creative literary activity and production in schools (haereses). As I argue in what follows, a second-century social and political context and a school setting, such as that of Marcion, are suggestive of a viable location for the creation of doctrinal exhortative letters written in the name of the Apostle Paul. (xif)
And the thesis extends beyond the letters:
While certainly a contentious and debated issue, the dating of NT writings plays an important role in my thesis. Not only Acts, but also the canonical Gospels are more recently considered not first- but second century writings. If we consider – as did the Dutch Radicals – that the Pauline letters were produced alongside of and in a complex and dynamic relationship with the Gospels and Acts, the forward shift in the dating of the latter lends further support to a second-century provenance of the letters. (27f)
So it’s back to Marcion and the post Bar Kochba era for “everything”.
“Christian” teachers arrived in Rome in the wake of the Bar Kokhba revolt and established schools under Roman authority near one other. “Christian” literature, including gospel texts, flourished during this time, with compositions reflecting a post-Jewish temple and post-Judaea social and political reality. Marcion’s publication of what has been interpreted as the First New Testament, consisting of a gospel (Evangelion) and a collection of Pauline letters (Apostolikon), is likely one of the earliest among these compositions. (251)
I look forward very much to reading the work in full and posting about it as opportunity permits.
Livesey, Nina E. The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
For the ordinary lay person who does not have the background to draw upon to enable a confident “vetting” the arguments of a consensus, I thought the three-part conditions set out by Avazier Tucker were a good rule of thumb for when to justify appeal to a consensus. It certainly provides a good answer to anti-vaxxers. Similarly, it offers good guidance to conspiracy theorists of various types. (Not that many of them would be convinced, of course, but it is nonetheless good to have “an answer” out there for those who are ready to change their minds.)
Richard Carrier thought Tuckers’ three part program was no answer at all to the problems he raised. It’s my fault entirely. I sneakily hid Tucker’s antidotes to the very problems Carrier raised in between the title and the last line of the post so anyone can be excused for missing them.
These conditions cannot be met in captured fields (e.g. you will never ever see a “consensus” in biblical studies by this definition that Jesus did not rise from the dead and is not God or the literal Son of God), so it is not useful as a metric.
Oh dear — my fault entirely. I should not have hidden the fact that Tucker’s three point proposition is explaining exactly why what is regarded as a consensus in biblical studies is not a justifiable or trustworthy consensus. I really do have to stop hiding the main points of my posts beneath their titles.
But more to the point, and by way of demonstrating how biblical studies fails on Tucker’s point 2 — the issues of Thomas Thompson and Thomas Brodie certainly illustrated the failure of Tucker’s points 1 (coercion) and 3 (coercion but also alert to the public about the heterogeneous character of the opposition to the consensus) in the field of biblical studies — more to the point, as I said, I must point to a work by Michael Alter published in the SHERM journal, Dataset Analysis of English Texts Written on the Topic of Jesus’ Resurrection: A Statistical Critique of Minimal Facts Apologetics —
This article’s abstract:
This article collects and examines data relating to the authors of English-language texts written and published during the past 500 years on the subject of Jesus’ resurrection and then compares this data to Gary R. Habermas’ 2005 and 2012 publication on the subject. To date, there has been no such inquiry. This present article identifies 735 texts spanning five centuries (from approximately 1500 to 2020). The data reveals 680 Pro-Resurrection books by 601 authors (204 by ministers, 146 by priests, 249 by people associated with seminaries, 70 by laypersons, and 22 by women). This article also reveals that a remarkably high proportion of the English-language books written about Jesus’ resurrection were by members of the clergy or people linked to seminaries, which means any so-called scholarly consensus on the subject of Jesus’ resurrection is wildly inflated due to a biased sample of authors who have a professional and personal interest in the subject matter. Pro-Resurrection authors outnumber Contra-Resurrection authors by a factor of about twelve-to-one. In contrast, the 55 Contra-Resurrection books, representing 7.48% of the total 735 books, were by 42 authors (28 having no relevant degrees at the time of publication). The 42 contra authors represent only 6.99% of all authors writing on the subject.
The article is available at the link above. The book referred to with the complete study is A Thematic Access-Oriented Bibliography of Jesus’s Resurrection. I don’t know how Michael had the stamina to undertake such a study, but again, it’s good to have things like this done and available.
Consensus per se is not a reliable sign of rationality. It depends on how consensus is reached. All sorts of methods can yield consensus: brain-washing, the threat of the rack or burning at the stake, totalitarian control of the sources of information. Consensus reached by these means does not guarantee rationality. — Goldman
Recent discussions have sent me back to a second look at Aviezer Tucker’s Our Knowledge of the Past. (I posted about this book back in 2013.) A detail I had forgotten in the meantime is Tucker’s interesting explanations about when a consensus is more likely to be trustworthy than not. Here is part of what he writes:
In the real world, there is no universal consensus on beliefs because some people always dissent. There are still people who deny that the earth is round or that it revolves around the sun and others who deny that there was a Holocaust. This led philosophers who consider consensus to be philosophically valuable to attempt to prescribe whose opinions matter for determining whether or not there is a consensus on beliefs. Reliance on professional organizations or academic institutions, affiliations, and certifications is a tempting approach. If all professional astronomers agree that the earth is round and revolves around the sun, it must be because they have knowledge of the heavens and those who honestly dissent must be either ignorant or irrational. At their best, professional and academic institutions should indeed reflect the qualities that make consensus among their members significant as a possible indicator of knowledge. Still, this appeal to authority failed too often in history. Academic and professional institutions have proved themselves to be too susceptible to political threats and manipulation, economic dependence and graft, or the common biases of a class of people who share professional interests and often social background. The corruption of the German academic system under the Nazis, the rejection of relativity in physics, the destruction of psychology, anthropology, and historiography in favor of dark racist fantasies is just the most extreme example of the ever-present temptation of academic and professional institutions, even in previously excellent academic systems, to prefer their institutional, class, and professional interests to intellectual integrity. (33)
So what does Tucker advise given the fact that the consensus of authorities may not always be a reliable guide to the truth of a matter?
The alternative approach I present here does not have to rely on authority, nor does it require universal consensus. It merely requires unique noncoerced heterogeneity: It does not matter if some do not agree to a set of beliefs, as long as the people who do, are sufficiently different from each other to reject alternative hypotheses to the knowledge hypothesis, and those who dissent are sufficiently homogenous to support hypotheses that explain their dissent by particular biases. For example, the group that reached consensus on Darwinian evolution is uniquely heterogeneous, it includes people who are secular and religious, and of many different faiths. The community that upholds the alternative “creationism” is quite homogenous, composed exclusively of biblical fundamentalists, almost all of whom are American Protestants, though many American Protestants believe in Darwinian evolution. Their bias in favor of an anachronistic, historically insensitive interpretation of Genesis is the best explanation of their beliefs. (34)
I know many readers of this blog will be thinking of the consensus on the historicity of Jesus. In the light of the above, we may see a reason certain critics of the Christ myth theory attempt to portray “mythicists” as a singular group of Christian-hating atheists. By ignoring the broad spectrum of “mythicists” — atheists, Buddhists, prominent public intellectuals, and even faithful Christians and others who have expressed a high regard for Christianity — the mythicists are portrayed as a narrow, homogenous group with a unique hatred of Christianity and thus able to be comfortably dismissed.
Tucker says a reliable consensus must be uncoerced and sufficiently large. How large?
The heterogeneous group that reaches consensus must be sufficiently large to avoid accidental results. Small groups can never be sufficiently heterogeneous to exclude hidden biases. . . . If only four scientists work on a particular problem and they agree on a set of related beliefs, it does not imply that their agreement reflects common knowledge. The four may be a professor, her assistant, a former student, and an untenured member of faculty who needs her vote on the tenure committee. The minimal size of a significant consensus depends on local circumstances such as whether the people who develop a consensus are related socially, the nature of their relations, and whether they attempted to replicate the process that generated the beliefs or merely accepted the conclusions of others on faith or authority (Sarkar, 1997, p. 510). Usually, when the consensus involves hundreds of people who are geographically, institutionally, and professionally dispersed, it is safe to assume that it is large enough. If the consensus is on an esoteric topic, and only a handful of experts are competent or interested enough to reach the consensus, they may possess knowledge, but their consensus cannot function as an indicator of knowledge. It is necessary to follow their reasoning to evaluate the status of their beliefs. (34)
Those are three key features for “mere outsiders” to look out for when deciding whether they have a right to hold any reservations about a consensus among the experts:
The consensus is uncoerced;
The consensus is found among a “sufficiently large” and heterogenous group;
Dissenting voices are from a “sufficiently homogenous” group such that their biases are readily apparent.
They look like a neat rule of thumb to me.
Goldman, Alvin I. “Foundations of Social Epistemics.” Synthese 73, no. 1 (October 1987): 109–44. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00485444.
Tucker, Aviezer. Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Since I began drafting this post, Richard Carrier has responded specifically to some of my subsequent comments that were made in an exchange over what I, rightly or wrongly, understood to be some confusion about my view of Bayes’ theorem. He has not, as far as I see — again, I am open to correction and reminding — responded to the central argument of these posts. Further, I began posting a detailed review (scroll to bottom of the page for the reviews) of Carrier’s Proving History in 2012 but other questions arose that distracted me from that project after three posts. This series might be seen as an update on my views of Carrier’s application of Bayes’ theorem to history generally and Jesus in particular.
My position on the historical Jesus
To begin with, I think the only figures of Jesus of any relevance to the historian are
the Jesus in our early sources (especially the New Testament writings)
Attempting to “discover” a Jesus “behind” the sources through memory theory or other means (criteria of authenticity, form criticism) necessarily begins with the assumption that the stories told in the gospels have some kind of relationship with a historical Jesus. In other words, they assume a historical figure was the starting point of everything. (A passage found in a work by the Jewish historian Josephus, even if only partially authentic, can tell us nothing more than what was being said about Jesus some sixty years after he was supposed to have lived.)
My position regarding Bayes’ Theorem
One more point I should reiterate. I have said many times now that Bayes’ theorem is a fine tool to apply to many hypotheses. My point, though, is that I see little historical value in hypothesizing the existence or non-existence of Jesus per se. What is of historical interest is how Christianity emerged. A hypothetical Jesus or hypothetical non-Jesus alone doesn’t help us with that question. We simply don’t know if there was a figure identifiable as Jesus at or near the start of Christianity. The reason we do not know arises from the lack of independent and empirical data to establish his presence. Historical explanations can draw on hypothetical scenarios but when they do they can never be more than hypothetical proposals. I prefer that a historian works more modestly with what can be securely known and seeks to explain that much.
My position with respect to Richard Carrier’s historical methods
When Richard Carrier’s books Proving History and On the Historicity of Jesus first appeared I was intrigued by the Bayesian approach and in large measure rode with it. But what especially attracted me was the comprehensiveness of Carrier’s approach to the question that had at that time been a “hot topic” ever since Earl Doherty’s contributions. At the time I attempted to shelve some discomfort I felt over Carrier’s portrayal of “what historians do” and “how they do things” more generally. He seemed to me to be returning to a positivist view of history, a view that had largely been left in the margins especially since the mid twentieth century. One other discomfort I had was that I thought he was weakening his position and making himself too-easy-a-target for critics by adding new speculative arguments to those of Earl Doherty. I felt a stronger case and smaller target would have been made with less rather than more — with zeroing in on a selection of core arguments from Doherty rather than trying to cover everything that had been argued and adding even to that.
Though I have written many posts in favour of the application of Bayes’ Theorem to questions arising in biblical studies (and I have Richard Carrier to thank for introducing me to the usefulness of Bayes) I have also found myself in disagreement with some of Carrier’s views:
Ironically, in most of those cases, I think that it is Carrier who has dropped the Bayesian ball along with “rational-empirical” argument and it is yours truly who is using Bayesian reasoning to demonstrate where some of Carrier’s views are amiss.
At the time I held back my criticisms mainly because I did not want to be seen as part of what was then a hostile internet backlash against Carrier. But since I have recently been deeply re-engaging with the nature of historical knowledge and history itself I have felt the time is right to try to resolve some issues raised by Carrier’s work that originally left me a little uncomfortable.
Misapplied Conclusions from Bayesian Analysis
If we conclude from Bayesian reasoning that a historical Jesus is not likely to have existed, it tells us nothing useful. All it would mean is that if Jesus did exist there were many views expressed about him that gave rise to suspicions about his existence among later readers. He would not be the first.
No historical event is the same as another and no historical person is the same as another. Each and every historical event and historical person and circumstance is unique in some way. Hypotheses about the existence or non-existence of Jesus are hypotheses about a unique event.
But it is impossible to compute the frequencies of events that are unique. (Tucker, 136 — Tucker further notes, without comment, Carrier’s response to this problem, which is to assign a range of probabilities including subjective but informed probability estimates of experts — that is, measuring )
A Case Study
Carrier argues that even subjective expectations are ultimately (though perhaps hidden from one’s immediate consciousness) based on calculable frequencies of the same kinds of events:
Any time you talk about degrees of belief or certainty, just think about what you base that judgment on, and what facts would change your mind. Always at root you will find some sort of physical frequency that you were measuring or estimating all along. (272)
I am not so sure. Are “degrees of belief” or subjective “certainty” always or necessarily based on conscious or subconscious rational calculation? If so, there can be no such thing as “subjective” belief: every belief would be at some level a rational calculation based on relevant frequencies. I am not as confident as Carrier in the fundamental rationality of all subjective beliefs and expectations.
Alexander David Cooper – THE DEATH OF KING WILLIAM II. Image from https://clasmerdin.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-death-of-william-rufus-accident-or.html
Let’s take a unique historical event, one that Carrier discusses in Proving History, and examine his argument. The historical hypothesis here is that Henry I plotted to kill William II.
In our personal correspondence, C. B. McCullagh observed that to apply BT to questions in history
the hypothetical event has to be considered as a generic type, similar in some respect to others. That might worry historians, whose hypotheses are so often quite particular. For instance, consider how the hypothesis that Henry planned to kill William II in order to seize his throne explains the fact that after his death Henry quickly seized the royal treasure. The relation between these events is rational, not a matter of frequency. . . . (The example being referred to is discussed in C. Behan McCullagh, Justifying Historical Descriptions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 22.)
But, in fact, if the connection alleged is rational, then by definition it is a matter of frequency, entailed by a hypothetical reference class of comparable scenarios. To say it is rational is thus identical to saying that in any set of relevantly similar circumstances, most by far will exhibit the same relation. If we didn’t believe that (if we had no certainty that that relation would frequently obtain in any other relevantly similar circumstances), then the proposed inference wouldn’t be rational. Explaining why confirms the point that all epistemic probabilities are approximations of physical frequencies. The evidence in this case is that Henry not only seized the royal treasure with unusual rapidity, but that his succeeding at this would have required considerable preparations before William’s death, and such preparations entail foreknowledge of that death. Already to say Henry seized the royal treasure “with unusual rapidity” is a plain statement of frequency, for unusual = infrequent, and this statement of frequency is either well-founded or else irrational to maintain. And if that frequency is irrational to maintain, we are not warranted in saying anything was unusual about it. Likewise, saying “it would have required considerable preparations” amounts to saying that in any hypothetical set of scenarios in all other respects identical, successful acquisition of the treasure so quickly will be infrequent, and thus improbable, unless prior preparations had been made (in fact, if it is claimed such success would have been impossible without those preparations, that amounts to saying no member of the reference class will contain a successful outcome except members that include preparations). Again, the result is said to be unusual without such preparations, or even impossible; and unusual = infrequent, while impossible = a frequency of zero. Hence such a claim to frequency must already be defensible or it must be abandoned. Similarly for every other inference: making preparations in advance of an unexpected death is inherently improbable for anyone not privy to a conspiracy to arrange that death, and being privy to such a conspiracy is improbable for anyone not actually part of that conspiracy, and in each case we have again a frequency: we are literally saying that in all cases of foreknowing an otherwise unpredicted death, most of those cases will involve prior knowledge of a planned murder, and in all cases of having foreknowledge of a planned murder, few will involve people not part of that plan. If those frequency statements are unsustainable, so are the inferences that depend on them. And so on down the line.
Thus even so particular a case as this reduces to a network of generalized frequencies. And all our judgments in this case necessarily assume we know what those frequencies are (with at least enough accuracy to warrant confidence in the conclusion). We won’t know exactly the frequencies involved, but we know they must be generally in the ballpark stated, otherwise we wouldn’t be making a rational inference at all. (273f – my highlighting in all quotations)
Here Carrier notes as background knowledge that “considerable preparations” would have been required “before William’s death” for Henry’s actions to have succeeded. He confuses this background knowledge with “evidence” but understanding the complexities involved in asserting full control of the royal treasure is really background knowledge. That background knowledge forms the basis of the hypothesis that Henry murdered William. Carrier leaves this aside. He suggests that Henry’s ‘unusual rapidity’ in taking control reflects subconscious knowledge of how infrequently such events occur under normal circumstances. But I do not know how Carrier could verify that historians really do reflect on how many times a royal treasure has been taken over with such speed, or how often comparable “classes of events” have occurred. Carrier does not give examples of similar “reference class acts” with which to compare and I suspect most historians will need time to think before they could offer instances. Even if one did compile a list of comparable successions in an attempt to establish a reference class with which to compare Henry’s succession of William, historians would be hard pressed to tease out all factors that made each situation unique and to justify its relevance to the particular event of Henry’s replacement of William. Rather, it is simpler and more likely that historians who are informed of the political structures and scale of England at the time use that background knowledge to infer that the speed of Henry’s acts points to the likelihood of murder.
While typing up this post I was distracted by a news item about a woman being interviewed who said that she was told she had a “only a 10%” chance of contracting a certain terminal illness but now she had it. There was no longer any 10% business about it. Statistics and probabilities are relevant when dealing with effectively infinite numbers of factors. But historical contingency is not a probability event. It happens to a particular person with a certainty of 1 regardless of what the odds are in an infinite universe and there was no way to estimate in advance that that particular woman was going to get the illness. That that unfortunate person was part of a 10% subset within a population of many thousands was meaningless to her and her loved ones. A science body had produced statistics. This person experienced an historical event. Most historical events are unforeseen — except, as I keep saying, in hindsight.
Confusing History with Science
Geology and paleontology, for instance, are largely occupied with determining the past history of life on earth and of the earth itself, just as cosmology is mainly concerned with the past history of the universe as a whole. . . .
History is the same. The historian looks at all the evidence that exists now and asks what could have brought that evidence into existence. . . .
And just as a geologist can make valid predictions about the future of the Mississippi River, so a historian can make valid (but still general) predictions about the future course of history, if the same relevant conditions are repeated (such prediction will be statistical, of course, and thus more akin to prediction in the sciences of meteorology and seismology, but such inexact predictions are still much better than random guessing). Hence, historical explanations of evidence and events are directly equivalent to scientific theories, and as such are testable against the evidence, precisely because they make predictions about that evidence. . . .
[T]he logic of their respective methods is also the same. The fact that historical theories rest on far weaker evidence relative to scientific theories, and as a result achieve far lower degrees of certainty, is a difference only in degree, not in kind. Historical theories otherwise operate the same way as scientific theories, inferring predictions from empirical evidence—both actual predictions as well as hypothetical. Because actual predictions (such as that the content of Julius Caesar’s Civil War represents Caesar’s own personal efforts at political propaganda) and hypothetical predictions (such as that if we discover in the future any lost writings from the age of Julius Caesar, they will confirm or corroborate our predictions about how the content of the Civil War came about) both follow from historical theories. This is disguised by the fact that these are more commonly called ‘explanations.’ But theories are what they are. (46ff)
I have recently addressed historical positivism at
What Carrier is describing here is a “positivist” view of history. This is a notion of history that was more widespread up to the middle of the last century. One of its leading exponents was Hempel who argued that historians should be seeking to discover predictable cause-effect relationships. (Hempel took positivism a step further than Carrier by claiming actual “laws” in history could be found.) His colleague, Carnap, stressed the importance of probabilistic reasoning in such an endeavour. The view that history could aspire to be akin to the natural sciences in method grew out of the Enlightenment when there was burgeoning confidence that Reason and Empiricism could liberate humanity from the shackles of superstition and dogma. But positivist history has long since been under strong attack from many quarters.
It is this positivist approach to history that explains the relevance of Carrier’s use of Reference Class. The idea of a reference class is to generalize historical events or incidents so that they can be compared with one another as a common type. That means they are temporarily removed from their historical contingency and treated as sharing common features for the sake of comparison. The point is to isolate generalized cause-effect principles.
Strictly speaking, prior probability is the probability of getting a specific kind of h when you draw at random from a reference class of all possible h → e [hypothesis to evidence] correlations. Those correlations don’t have to be causal, although in history they usually are. Because, in history, we are almost always asking what caused e and proposing h as the answer (see chapters 2 and 3). I’ll thus focus mainly on causal hypotheses and explain how to ascertain prior probabilities in a way that can produce intersubjective agreement among expert historians, and when and why such a process is logically valid. Some critics of BT are skeptical of causal language in applying the theorem, but that’s fundamental to many theories, especially historical ones, since any statement about what happened in history reduces to a statement about what caused the evidence we have. And you can’t propose historical explanations without proposing causes. Historians do distinguish claims about what happened (or once existed) from claims about why it happened (or why it existed). But ultimately all claims about ‘what’ entail claims about ‘why.’ (229)
I pause and ask if that is so. Many historians may agree with the above, but even among those who do, I think most would be sceptical about any attempt to assess varying degrees of causal probability to any of the factors associated with an event. Understanding human behaviour is not so mechanical an enterprise. The example Carrier offers does to me come across as unrealistically mechanically causal and even positivist with a vengeance:
. . . a hypothesis that a religious riot was caused by prior beliefs of that community (such as an ancient prophecy) in conjunction with new events (such as the appearance of a comet) obviously proposes a causal relationship between those prior beliefs and the riot . . . (230)
Such a view of human nature in general and historical events in particular is not one I share. I doubt that many historians have ever concluded that there can ever be such a simplistic one-to-one cause-effect of a riot as “a belief” of some kind. I propose that where riots occur a range of conditions will normally be found to help us understand the what and the why.
I think the principle applies to most works of historians today. Few, I believe, would think they can reduce historical events to isolated or particular combinations of specific causes each bearing a certain probability factor in the final equation.
In another instance, this time in On the Historicity of Jesus, Carrier continues the same refrain: the existence of prophecies would in effect have caused would-be messiahs to seek martyrdom, so in such a context, Christianity “almost becomes predictable”.
God had promised that the Jews would rule the universe (Zech. 14), but their sins kept forestalling his promise (Jer. 29; Dan. 9), which would also create a motive for would-be messiahs to perform atonement acts, which could include substitutionary self-sacrifice (see Element 43), out of increasing desperation (Elements 23-26). Christianity almost becomes predictable in this context. (OHJ 71)
Admittedly Carrier relegates this statement to a footnote but it does further illustrate the simplistic cause-effect positivism approach he has to the question of Christian origins: prophecy — would have inspired (caused) — would be prophets — to do an atonement act like Jesus — Christianity conceptually predictable (law of cause and effect) in such a scenario. If there were historically verifiable prophets acting that way, most historians would prefer to seek a deeper understanding about why such behaviour emerged at that time and place than the mere existence of a prophecy rolled away in the scrolls.
A recent work of history that I read is Killing for Country by David Marr. Along with Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland and Libby Connor’s Warrior, I have been left with a deep sense of shame about white treatment of the indigenous population of my state and a strong political and social conviction of what we owe their survivors. Those historical works were not about “cause and effect” but about understanding and awareness. There will always be causal elements in any explanation but causes per se are not always what history is about.
Reference Class Revisited
As far as I understand Carrier’s approach, he introduces Reference Class in the question of the historicity of Jesus in order to establish a prior notion of how likely a certain idea of Jesus is the result of a generalized cause-effect class of events. This is an attempt, as I understand it, to introduce some kind of “scientific” validity to the study of history. If we understand the “scientific” approach as one that seeks to establish the general from the particular, this is the intended function of assigning Jesus to the Rank-Raglan hero class and drawing probabilistic inferences based on cause-effect principles found in that class.
The idea is that among figures found in a subset of the Rank-Raglan class few or none are known to be historical. The principle Carrier wants us to conclude from this is that stories of a certain type are “caused” by something other than a historical figure behind them.
If therefore we find Jesus within this subset of story types, then it logically follows that those stories about him likewise owe their existence to something other than an actual historical figure of Jesus.
I agree that in principle — and it is the principle that counts — that is a correct conclusion. Lord Raglan himself expressed the same point:
If, however, we take any really historical person, and make a clear distinction between what history tells us of him and what tradition tells us, we shall find that tradition, far from being supplementary to history, is totally unconnected with it, and that the hero of history and the hero of tradition are really two quite different persons, though they may bear the same name. (The Hero, 165)
Further, I think a good many biblical scholars will also agree that what we read in the gospels about Jesus is in large measure unconnected with a historical Jesus. Many argue that the stories that arose about Jesus were fabricated to meet the needs of later generations.
In other words, the reference class itself is irrelevant to the question of the historicity of Jesus. It is a misguided attempt to establish a quasi-scientific or positivist approach to history by establishing a principle that transcends the uniqueness of each historically contingent event and person.
The mythical stories about Jesus tell the historian something important to the interests of early Christianities but as Lord Raglan pointed out by implication — those stories of themselves cannot have any relevance to the question of whether there was some kind of historical Jesus at the start of it all. If we think otherwise we would need to argue the case with evidence.
Of course, many other biblical scholars are quick to deny this point and will claim “memory theory” and “triangulating” “gists” of gospel stories and sayings can help them see “through a glass darkly” some outline of the historical Jesus. But such notions are founded entirely on the assumption that Lord Raglan was wrong and that the stories did evolve from a historical person.
We simply have no way of knowing if “a historical Jesus” existed. There are many interesting studies that explain the New Testament sources emerging from within the historical, philosophical and literary milieu of the day without appealing to a hypothetical role for a historical Jesus. We don’t need to over-reach and try to “prove” anything within any margin of probability. Hypothetical notions relating to the existence or nonexistence of Jesus cannot help the historian produce any serious reconstruction or understanding of Christian origins. Let’s be content with what we cannot know and focus on what we do know. Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus, especially its Backgound/Context section, offers many areas for further study. As I pointed out above, I think there are some areas where even Carrier can more consistently and profitably apply Bayesian analysis.
Carrier, Richard. Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Amherst, N.Y: Prometheus Books, 2012.
Carrier, Richard. On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014.
Tucker, Aviezer. “The Reverend Bayes vs. Jesus Christ,” History and Theory 55, no. 1 (February 1, 2016): 129–40.
Hayden White is a historian of some notoriety (or acclaim, depending on one’s point of view) in his field, generally acknowledged as the founder of postmodernist history. So some readers may be interested to note what he wrote a decade and a half ago with reference to both historical Jesus studies and the question of the existence of Jesus.
Here is where “historical research” enters: its aim is to establish whether the new event belongs to “history” or not, or whether it is some other kind of event. The event in question need not be new in the sense of having only recently arrived to historical consciousness. For the event may have already been registered as having happened in legend, folklore, or myth, and it is, therefore, a matter of identifying its historicity, narrativizing it, and showing its propriety to the structure or configuration of the context in which it appeared. An example and even a paradigm of this situation would be the well-known “search for the historical Jesus” or the establishment of the historicity (or ahistoricity) of the “Jesus” who was represented in the Gospels, not only as a worker of miracles but as Himself the supreme miracle of miracles, the Messiah or God Incarnate whose death and resurrection can redeem the world.
If some thoughts expressed by certain mainstream biblical scholars be any guide, I suspect some of them will be a little chagrined that White should be so “naive” as to place the question of the historicity of Jesus (“mythicism”, if you will) alongside, without qualification or demeaning predicate, studies on the historical Jesus.
