Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science
Category: New Testament
Mostly straightforward but still some questions arise. Where does New Testament end and Church history and question of Christian origins, also certain roles of Marcion, begin? (Marcion’s argued influence on NT should be included here; also evidence of early readings found in Fathers like Tertullian.) Relevant manuscript discoveries and analysis belong here, including histories of their later copying.
Many have written about the influences of Philo and the god Dionysus on the Gospel of John, but for extensive detail and placing it in the broader context it is hard to surpass Julius Grill.
Anyone interested in the Gospel of John and its
strong themes of the god Dionysus on Jesus
indebtedness to Philo’s discussion of the Logos/Word
closely related Persian, Buddhist and Hindu concepts
very different Jesus from that of the synoptic gospels
and analysis of why the gospel was written
will find something of note in the two volumes on the Fourth Evangelist by Julius Grill — now “translated” from the German. I was alerted to Grill’s study by Robert Vipper who wrote:
A number of studies in Gospel criticism (particularly noteworthy is the work of Grill: Untersuchungen ϋber die Entstehung des vierten Evangeliums [=Studies on the Origin of the Fourth Gospel], 1908 and 1924) established the fact of the late origin of these works and their dependence on religious-philosophical currents in the literature of the 2nd century. (Vipper, 120 – translation, my bolding)
But a warning! I said that I “translated” Grill’s study. It might almost be better to say that I have “transcribed” it from the German. My initial motivation was to have a copy for my personal use only. I did not expect to make it public at the time. In a strenuous effort to avoid the AI translator from creative whims when translating, I set the parameters so strict that the result reads more like a word-for-word transposition from German to English. This can make it a tiring read. But for what it’s worth, here it is for anyone interested enough to make the effort.
Here I am making a few responses to Professor Gabriele Boccaccini’s discussion that I translated — see the previouso post. (Note: I did not make the transcription — that was supplied by the homesite of the video, and it was machine generated. I used AI to assist in translating it.)
The first point of note was the following:
7:15 Nina Livesey is a colleague from Rome. Her book, however, needs to be clarified somewhat, because it does not actually claim outright that Paul did not exist. She presents a fairly nuanced version of this issue.
Yes indeed.
Boccaccini, as did Livesey herself, explained to audiences what has gone before in the scholarship. It’s a bit like knowing one’s history. To be ignorant of history is to remain forever a child, someone said. To contribute meaningfully to a discussion it is important to take a little time to listen to what has been said before one chimes in with new ideas. . . .
8:46 When one wants to assess the seriousness of certain arguments, one must place them within a line of discussion. Scholarly hypotheses do not arise because one of us wakes up one morning and suddenly produces some radical novelty.
Another point worth keeping in mind . . .
28:04 What I would also like to clarify is that there was never a single, unified Christianity that later fractured. Such a monolithic religion never existed
Yet it seems to me that many scholars have written forgetting this point. This arises from the assumption that the gospels are the product of an oral tradition that began with historical events, and that passed on those historical events, and that gospel authors were keen to pick up those traditions and with pious intent (and exaggerations) record them for posterity. Paul’s letters, it is assumed, were related in some way to the group behind that oral tradition. That is all assumption. It is based on another assumption — that the gospels represent sincere attempts to portray a historical figure.
Readers impatient to get to the nitty gritty of Boccaccini’s discussion of Livesey’s thesis, begin here . . . .
34:01 This brings us, at least in part, to the substance of Nina Livesey’s book.
Boccaccini’s difficulties with dating Paul’s letters to the second century are set out in this slide:
Here I think Boccaccini has missed a key point. Livesey is asking us to consider the scenario where the letters did not exist singly prior to their inclusion in a corpus. No. The letters were written from the beginning to be part of a corpus. That answers B’s first criticism above.
On the second point, I wonder if B is assuming that the present state of the letters is the same as their original state. I think there is much evidence for rival theological groups tampering and altering the letters after they were presented by Marcion. So I think that answers B’s second difficulty.
The third point (Hellenistic origin should be better understood as “Greek/gentile origin” to avoid confusion with “the Hellenistic period”) is pointing to what is known as the “new perspective” on Paul. Further on in the discussion B explains his point when he introduces the last slide (1:41:54) in his presentation: he argues that some “recent” scholarship argues for the “Jewishness” of Paul and that such a view of Paul is best explained as a first century phenomenon. B argues that the NP on Paul is a good explanation for how the “Jesus movement” developed, how it shifted from Jewishness to something more open. My response is that the singular “Jesus movement” is an assumption: see 28:04 above, the same point B himself made.
Two responses: 1. the New Perspective on Paul (that he was more Jewish in his thinking than generally realized) is a hypothesis, and interpretation, and not a fact. It is open to revision or even being discarded; 2. If the NP proves to be valid, it may mean little more in the end than that Marcionism needs to be understood with more nuance. NP is a hypothesis and not a fact that must be weighed in assessing a date for the letters.
B in the following is continuing with his assumption that the letters existed singly prior to being found in a corpus:
38:13 Why is Paul transmitted as a corpus? Obviously, transmitting an author as a corpus has the function of homogenizing the author’s thought.
and again,
1:12:59 Paul cannot be transmitted as a single, isolated letter; Paul must always be seen as a corpus. The function of the corpus is always to homogenize. .
Letters were known to be published as a corpus. Pliny the Younger’s letters were published as such. So were Seneca’s as Livesey, I think, points out. I am not sure that there is any reason to think that the original corpus contained contradictions that needing “homogenizing”.
39:51 Thus, if Marcion and later the Church Fathers attribute a corpus of writings to a particular author, this means that the author was already famous.
40:06 . . . knowledge of Paul must predate the moment when the corpus itself is formed—pushing us back to the beginning of the second century or even earlier.
How this book came into the hands of Marcion, whence the legend of the apostle Paul and the very name Paul arose—these questions will hardly ever be resolved. Even for the contemporaries of the publication of the “Epistles” this was a difficult riddle; 25-30 years after their appearance the author of the “Acts of the Apostles” could advance on the question of the personality and activity of the apostle Paul only hypotheses, conjectures, combinations. Judging by how highly Marcion valued the collection of letters of the apostle Paul, one may suppose that he believed both in the real existence of the apostle himself and in the work accomplished by him. But another supposition is also possible: Marcion, a native of Pontic Sinope, may have had memories of a remarkable Asia Minor organizer and preacher named Paul, into whose mouth the compiler of the “Epistles” (whether Marcion himself or someone else from his school) placed his own thoughts, his own system of doctrine, in the same way that Plato set forth the entire rich content of his philosophy—the proof of the immortality of the soul, the hymn to universal Eros, the teaching of the best state—through the person of a single, in his eyes incomparable, holy, divine teacher, Socrates. (p. 186 translation)
Back to B:
57:50 . . . What seems most paradoxical to me is that some of these texts, which do not fit naturally into the second century, reproduce concepts and ideas that run counter to the very purpose of forming the corpus—ideas that go against Marcionite theology . . .
. . .
1:24:01 At least some of the material in these letters gives good, well-founded reasons for thinking it comes from the first century,
1:24:07 because it reflects that kind of debate and discussion.
I think this is somewhat circular. Is it on the basis of other NT documents whose dates are also questionable that it is believed particular topics were of interest in the first century? We know from Justin Martyr, for example, that the question of circumcision was indeed a hot topic in the middle of the second century. Paul’s letters are topical for this time. See also Hermann Detering’s works for more examples.
2:08:09 Finally, regarding Acts: it is unlikely to be a simple anti-Marcionite reaction.
2:12:00 Acts presents a very Jewish Paul—something difficult for a second-century author aligned with later church positions.
2:13:09 No one invents something that causes embarrassment.
On the contrary, if I recollect correctly, a good number of scholars have pointed to Acts being a catholiczing work, a narrative that aimed to “homogenize” different Christian sects or groupings, into one faith. That’s not a “simple anti-Marcionite reaction”; it is a constructive and judicious reaction. A Marcionite figure was embraced, but he had some changes in his clothes. No-one invents embarrassments for oneself, but readers can often misjudge what was written and prematurely dismiss it as if the writer was him/herself in knots.
Here is an English translation of the transcript of Professor Boccaccini discussing the main idea of Nina Livesey’s book, The Letters of Paul in their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship. [I took the machine-generated transcript from the Ora Sapere! site for translation.]
I have included images and translations of Boccaccini’s slides in his presentation. —
0:00 [Music] Today I am able to understand it and to admit that order can arise from chance, and that the first step is to bring the human being back to the center.
0:15 Not predestined, but imperfect products of events and of chemical infatuations.
0:24 The needles hidden in a straw man are found more easily if you burn him with a torch; the burst of flame washes over my face, and you teach me light, hope, and also reason, which is made of science—and I can no longer live without it.
0:41 [Music]
0:49 [Applause][Music]
0:56 [Applause][Music] When I have a mystical crisis at fifty-five,
I hope you come to arrest me. I will have a mystical crisis at fifty-five; I hope you come to arrest me. I will have a mystical crisis at fifty-five, from this moment on.
1:47 And here we are. So—[Music]
1:53 A few months ago a book was published, a book by the academic Nina Livesey and this book, let’s say, put forward a thesis that caused quite a stir:
2:12 the idea that Paul—indeed, the author of the Pauline letters according to traditional attribution—might actually be a non-historical figure.
2:25 When the book came out, I avoided doing a live broadcast immediately after finishing it, because, given the topic and the nature of the proposal, I decided to look for an expert—with a capital “E”—to deal with the issue.
2:44 And finally the moment has come when we have that expert with a capital “E.” So I would like to welcome Professor Gabriele Boccaccini, author of numerous books and a leading expert on Second Temple Judaism, and, I’m told, also a specialist on Paul—so perfectly suited to the question we need to explore today.
3:07 So, hello everyone. I am your Faber Lumière. Welcome to Al Lume della Ragione Show, the weekly appointment every Sunday at four o’clock, where we seek the truth starting from the evidence, to bring clarity to a sea of confusion.
3:28 Episode 247. As usual, if you find the video interesting, remember to leave a like, share it, let me know in the comments, or join us on the server linked in the description and via the icon at the top right: gruppovismo3.0.eu, the site where you can find all my content and that of the rest of the group.
3:45 I apologize for the long introduction. Professor, would you like to tell us a bit about yourself—who you are, what you do?
3:59 First of all, I greet everyone who is connected, and those who will connect in the future by watching this video. I thank you for the invitation and for the opportunity to talk a little about the status quaestionis, as we say in technical terms—that is, what scholars are discussing, including Nina Livesey, and what the issues are that are currently under scholarly debate.
4:33 I am essentially a specialist in Second Temple Judaism and in Christian origins, including Paul, because I approach him from the standpoint of ancient Jewish tradition.
4:45 For me, Christianity is one of the apocalyptic and messianic movements that arose within Second Temple Judaism. So I treat early Christianity in the same way that I treat the Dead Sea Scrolls, the works of Philo of Alexandria, or the works of Josephus—as one of the many manifestations of a Jewish world that was extremely diverse and very different from what we usually imagine.
5:12 That is because we know Judaism mainly through the rabbinic reform, which comes later. I study Christian origins from this perspective.
5:24 On this occasion, I was asked to clarify, at least a little, what the terms of the question are. I have also prepared a few small slides to give you an idea of how to situate this discussion within a debate that certainly did not begin today—a debate that has been going on for centuries.
5:52 So I prepared a few short slides. Before we move on to them, however, I must confess—very culpably—that I forgot to offer a greeting and acknowledgement to Dr. Cuscito, whom I must thank for putting us in contact and who also sends his greetings. I’ve also made videos with him; he is always a very important presence.
6:18 Okay. The second issue, before getting into the substance of the matter, is to clarify who “Lizzi” is. In these kinds of discussions, it is often difficult to keep track of the scholarly weight of the various positions.
6:46 There are people who arrive at a hypothesis such as “Paul never even existed” in a completely arbitrary way—by guessing blindly, in the depths of ignorance, so to speak.
7:05 As far as I know, this is not the case with Lizzi. Could you give your view on the level of scholarly credibility we are dealing with here?
7:15 Nina Livesey is a colleague from Rome. Her book, however, needs to be clarified somewhat, because it does not actually claim outright that Paul did not exist. She presents a fairly nuanced version of this issue.
7:29 It is a discussion of the Pauline letters, especially the Pauline corpus, and therefore also of the attribution of authorship.
7:51 These are issues that need to be situated within a broader scholarly discussion. And the point you raise is very important, because many times theses are advanced in a rather amateurish way.
8:11 Someone writes a text, and only later do we discover that they lack any academic background or scholarly credentials. That is not the case here.
8:25 We are dealing with serious problems, and therefore with a debate that exists within the academic world and must be understood in its seriousness.
8:46 When one wants to assess the seriousness of certain arguments, one must place them within a line of discussion. Scholarly hypotheses do not arise because one of us wakes up one morning and suddenly produces some radical novelty.
9:06 That may be how things appear in the press, but it is not how scholarship actually works. There are questions, debates, and sustained investigations, and one must go back to the roots.
9:23 That is why I am happy to come here and explain how the work of Livesey came into being—it did not spring up like a mushroom out of nowhere. These issues have been under discussion for at least two centuries.
9:44 Each scholar adds a small new tile to the structure that makes up this long conversation, which continues within the scholarly community, welcoming different voices and contributions.
9:56 So we are not talking about a conspiracy theory; we are talking about a serious hypothesis that deserves discussion. Let us deal with serious matters and talk about how these problems arose.
10:15 As I said, if you show the first slide, we arrive at the historical-critical research you mentioned.
10:23 We must understand that historical research essentially emerged at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. We have to go back a bit and study, because it arose in a religious context and was therefore influenced by the religious paradigms of the time.
10:50 In the first slide, we see that two elements inherited from religious tradition had long been treated almost as dogmas—not in a religious sense, but in an interpretive one—and they became the starting point for scholarly reflection.
11:16 First: Paul’s letters form a corpus, that is, a coherent collection of works by a refined first-century theologian, the historical Paul, marking Christianity’s emancipation from Judaism.
11:42 The unifying feature of the corpus was its anti-Jewish element: Paul was understood as the theologian who separated Christianity from Judaism. This was taken for granted by everyone, Jewish and Christian alike.
11:57 The second point was that the letters of Paul formed a single unit: the thirteen letters attributed to Paul (originally fourteen, since Hebrews was included until the sixth century, before that attribution was abandoned).
12:20 These thirteen letters were all considered to be written by Paul himself, and that Paul was identified with the Paul described in the Acts of the Apostles.
12:34 These were the two “dogmas,” the two fixed points of early scholarship.
12:46 If you move to the second slide, you can see—and feel free to interrupt me with questions at any moment to keep the discussion lively.
13:00 I am not giving a full lecture; I am using just a few slides to establish some fixed points.
13:06 The second point is that in the nineteenth century historical research began to emancipate itself from religious tradition, gaining autonomy and no longer being strictly controlled by religious institutions or churches.
Josephus writes of a madman named Jesus son of Ananias who cries out a warning of doom to Jerusalem. He is brought before a Roman official but dismissed as having lost his wits.
Another Jesus figure in Josephus was a rebel and companion of seamen as well as land workers.
Josephus writes of prominent rebel leaders named Simon and John. Simon is even said to stage a kind of “resurrection” after the Roman conquest.
Josephus wrote of a slaughter of Galileans in the lake of Galilee that brings to mind the slaughter of men being compared to catching fish.
Josephus narrates encountering three crucified figures, one of whom he rescued from the cross. No doubt there are more that escape me at the moment.
What are we to make of these echoes of gospel accounts?
Some scholars have understandably attempted to find a “real Jesus” and his historical activity in them. Some have even attempted to find a Jesus who was of a similar kind to other false prophets and bandits Josephus writes about. Those efforts, to my mind, are overly speculative. I think there is a simpler explanation.
To appreciate that simpler explanation one must accept the likelihood that all of the gospels were written well after the time of Josephus. The advantage of a post Josephan date is that it has the support of independent evidence: the existence of the gospels is not testified until the second century.
That simpler explanation follows. The authors were searching for material from which to shape the person and narrative for gospel Jesus:
But long before Christian censors attempted to adapt the text of Josephus Flavius to their own purposes, early Christian writers, those who worked on the compilation of the books of the New Testament, tried to find in Josephus Flavius proofs of the real existence of Jesus Christ. Their insistence in this direction can be fully understood. For Josephus Flavius was for them one of the most important sources that could give an explanation of the events that took place in Palestine in the 1st century C.E. One need only look closely at the peculiar—by our standards extremely naïve, but at that time entirely usual and widely practiced in literary work—methods and techniques of searching employed by the evangelists, and it becomes clear how eagerly they seized upon the slightest hints in Josephus’ narrative that could serve them as support for depicting the life and activity of Jesus Christ.
Very characteristic are the various identifications that were made by the evangelists in connection with the name Jesus. At one time Jesus, son of Sapphias, appears as the leader of a detachment of rebels recruited from sailors and the poor (ναύται καὶ πένητες) (Vita Josephi, 12). At another time it is Jesus, son of Ananias, a half-mad peasant who appears in the streets and squares of Jerusalem several years before the uprising of 66, with a plaintive groan and cry foretelling the destruction of the sacred city and its great temple.
Both episodes were used by the evangelists. They “corrected” and idealized this image in their own way, while nevertheless preserving concrete details. Jesus remained at the head of the poor and of sailors, people engaged on the water and on boats; it was only necessary to turn sailors into fishermen–boatmen, from whom the first group of apostles is recruited, and to call the quiet Lake of Gennesaret a sea (θάλασσαν τῆς Γαλιλαίας) (Gospel of Mark, I, 15 ff.). Once adopted, the metaphor of “people engaged on the water” was then developed with the addition of new motifs: the calming of the night storm, walking on the water as on dry land, delivering a sermon from a boat, and so forth. The evangelist proceeds in the same way with Jesus, son of Ananias, the crazed commoner who came from the village. Prophetic words about the destruction of the great sanctuary are spoken by Jesus Christ, ascending a hill from which one could admire the view of Jerusalem and its temple.
In both cases, what belongs to the evangelist is only the artistic elaboration of the original motif borrowed from the account of Josephus Flavius.
However weak and primitive the scholarly and literary methods of the Christian writers may now seem to us, in one respect the historian of our own day must render them justice: they persistently sought in Josephus an answer to the question of who the predecessors of the Christians were.
. . . .
This narrative [Gamaliel’s reference to Theudas and Judas], of course, has no independent historical value, but it once again shows the extent to which Josephus Flavius was important for Christians as one of the sources for knowledge of the history of Judaism in the first century A.D., and then, in particular, reveals to which events in this history Christians paid primary attention, which figures, which directions of religious-political thought of that epoch attracted their sympathies. (Vipper, 76-77, 80 – translation)
Vipper, Robert Iu. Rim i rannee khristianstvo
(Рим и раннее христианство)
[Rome and Early Christianity]. Moscow: Izdatelʹstvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1954.
I am expecting this year to enter a master’s program researching the historical origins of our canonical Christian literature. The thesis I have discussed with a potential supervisor is the evidence for their composition as late as the mid to late second century. So it was with mixed feelings that I read Robert Vipper’s 1946 Russian study that in many ways coincided with the very thesis that I had been developing in recent years.
I was first very pleased with his explanation of his approach to historical sources. Yes, he applies the same methods that historians in non-biblical or non-theological studies take for granted. He sees right through the circularity of most biblical scholars taking the narratives of the gospels and epistles at face value (or at least that they are attempts, however mythologized, to rely on some historical core), without any independent controls to test their character as source material. That’s been a “hobby horse” of mine for some years now. I am in step with his method of testing and evaluating the sources. (I pull back a little, however, on his positivist view of historical analysis — that is, Marxist-Hegelian interpretation of “laws” of historical development. Though I was intrigued by his conclusion that Christianity as we would recognize it began more as a movement led by the reasonably well-to-do members of society. All of that is another discussion for another day.)
I said I had mixed feelings. One of them was feeling humbled in having to acknowledge that others (or at least Vipper) have long ago paved the main path I have been traveling on. But that is also reassuring. Vipper identifies the horrific calamities inflicted on the Judeans not only in the war of 66-70 but even moreso with the massacres under Trajan and Hadrian as being critical factors in the emergence of what we think of as conventional Christian literature. Where he has gone on well ahead of what I had been thinking, though, is that he finds as much explanatory power in the post-Hadrianic period: that is, the “enlightened” flavour of the times under Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. He even points to Plutarch’s “parallel lives” (published much earlier) as having a significant influence on the gospels. That’s an idea I attempted to explore a long time ago and Vipper tempts me to revisit that possibility.
Other encouraging points in common:
The original view of a suffering and crucified messiah was not that it took place in heaven but that it was originally an abstract or mystical act beyond space and time. In the second century we see various efforts to transfer this idea into a real place and setting in history.
Justin Martyr (mid second century) does not know the canonical gospels
The Epistle of Barnabas is a “pre-gospel” text
Other hypotheses that surprised me:
The Shepherd of Hermas and The Didache are pre-Christian writings (or at best “proto-Christian”)
Jesus was a minor deity among Jewish associations prior to Christianity. Here Vipper points to some of the stronger arguments of W.B. Smith.
All of the above is found in
Vipper, Robert Iu. Vozniknovenie khristianskoi literatury
(Возникновение христианской литературы)
[The Emergence of Christian Literature]. Moscow: Nauka, 1946.
The other work I have translated
Vipper, Robert Iu. Rim i rannee khristianstvo
(Рим и раннее христианство)
[Rome and Early Christianity]. Moscow: Izdatelʹstvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1954.
Here Vipper explores in more detail the historical background from which Christianity emerged in the later second century. Given recent discussion here on the letter of Pliny the Younger to Trajan about Christians, some readers will find Vipper’s chapter on that letter of interest.
While translating Dibelius’s book on John the Baptist (Die urchristliche Überlieferung von Johannes dem Täufer, 1911), I have been contemplating his discussions concerning methods of literary criticism. In particular, how do we identify bits of tradition from the later narrative framework in which they were placed?
Martin Dibelius (1883-1947)
The collectors’ additions are often clearly distinguishable from collected material: Information about changes in location and time,1 remarks of a pragmatic nature,2isolatedsayings of the Lord conveyed according to oral tradition, frequently added simply to insert a catchphrase, and finally, the so-called summary reports,3 with general information about healings.
(Dibelius 1911, p. 4, my translation, italics his)
Don’t imagine that Dibelius thought that separating out earlier tradition, layer by layer would be an easy task. Not at all, but at times the evangelists do reveal some obvious seams, and the “precious stones” stand out from the settings.
Hence, the religious nature of the gospel writings precludes an “objective” historical account in the modern sense. However, the non-literary character of the Gospels assures the likelihood that some elements of the ancient and original tradition could be preserved within the accounts. After all, the authors do not want to create literary works, but rather to preserve and reproduce the tradition that was handed down to them. The fact that they polish the stones, fit them together, and place them in a framework does not necessarily rule out their understanding of the innate properties of these stones. (Dibelius 1911, p. 2, my translation, bold emphasis mine)
Here we see Dibelius giving credit to the compilers of the Gospels. According to his way of thinking, they didn’t write non-literary books because they lacked ability or ambition. Instead, he believed they valued the preservation of tradition above all else.
The image of polished stones set within a frame reminded me of the largely misunderstood metaphor of pearls on a necklace, usually attributed to K. L. Schmidt. In actuality, he said the opposite of what most people think he said:
We could illustrate it with this metaphor: the Markan account is not a necklace made of loosely strung-together pearls between which we can squeeze one sometimes here, sometimes there, but rather a pile of unstrung pearls, even if some pearls will match up from time to time. (Schmidt, 1919, p. 281, emphasis mine)*
At the same time, I became interested in a term Dibelius used, “Sammelberichte,” usually rendered as “summary reports” in English. Obviously, the presence of a summary paragraph at the end of a set of stories indicates a joint or a seam in the narrative. And while searching for cases in which scholars talked about such literary breaks, I came across a truly wonderful analogy for bits of tradition within a later framework.
Soup with Large Croutons (Wikimedia)
Julius Wellhausen’s croûtons-in-the-soup simile aptly describes the evidence and data paradigm needed to re-examine the single authorship of Luke and Acts. While “joints and seams” form the literary intersections that unite segments of written material, they simultaneously define the boundaries where those segments have been linked. That is to say, functionally they both unite and divide. (Walters 2009, p. 43)
In January this year I posted a series discussing Nina Livesey’s book, The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship. Livesey proposes that our canonical letters of Paul were for most part produced in the second century as treatises by the school of Marcion. The Book of Acts that relates the story of the early church created the figure of Paul before these letters were crafted. It was the heroic Paul of Acts in whose name the Pauline letters were written. A recent response to Livesey’s book has appeared in The Journal of Higher Criticism:
Lambert, Derek, and Robert M. Price. “Pauline Letters After Acts? Reversing the New Testament Timeline.” Journal of Higher Criticism 20, no. 2 (Summer 2025): 106–37.
Much of the article addresses the Greco-Roman literary overlaps with Acts. Think of works by Dennis MacDonald and others. The problem presented to the reader is that the Acts narrative evidently owes so little to the letters, and that the letters appear in places to be picking up on details in Acts: if so, then is it not more likely that Acts preceded the letters?
The argument is reasonable. A problem remains, however. Many scholars have simply argued that the author of Acts did not agree with the theological nuances of the letters and chose to ignore them, and in the process created a “more theologically correct” Paul.
The Lambert-Price article concludes:
As always, more research and debate will test these ideas. But one thing is clear: the Acts of the Apostles is a fundamentally mythic text, rich with literary artifice. And once we see that, we have to ask – what does it say about the writings attached to Paul’s name? Perhaps they are part of the same tapestry of myth and meaning. (p. 137)
That got me thinking. What research could test the idea of a second century, post-Acts, origin of letters of Paul? (I am not including the Pastorals — many scholars concede they are likely second century.) I propose the following investigations to test the idea:
1. Further analyses of specific words and concepts in the letters that point to a second-century as opposed to first-century provenance. There are already various studies along this line although many of them conclude that words are second century interpolations and not part of the original letters. So further analysis is required that might be able to render inadequate the “interpolation” explanation for such terms.
2. The topics and questions raised in the letters need to be checked against independent evidence for their relevance to second century readers — alongside demonstration, again through independent evidence, that they did not apply to the first century. Herman Detering (a name also cited by Livesey) made a special contribution in this area with his argument that the heresies attacked by Paul belong to the second century. There are other passages that scholars have again argued are post-Pauline interpolations. What is needed is independent evidence against which to test these ideas.
Placement of the TF: 1st disturbance: Resistance to Pilate’s attempt to smuggle imperial images into Jerusalem 2nd disturbance: Resistance to Pilate’s expropriation of Temple funds 3rd “disturbance”: Jesus and his followers 4th disturbance: Shameful Isis priests bring destruction on themselves and their temple 5th disturbance: Criminal Jews lead to expulsion of Jews from Rome
Despite the hopes I expressed in my previous post I simply cannot complete even one more response to Tom Schmidt’s Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ. Instead, I will place here my draft that addresses only one small part of Schmidt’s rationale for finding the Jesus account placed in the midst of various disturbances. Better to half-fulfil a promise than to come up with a complete blank. Please keep in mind that the following is a copy of my draft. Normally I would take time to tidy up the wording and structure.
Tom Schmidt writes (my bolded highlighting):
First, its placement. In the Antiquities, the TF [i.e. the Testimonium Flavianum, the Flavius Josephus’s testimony about Jesus] is situated amid five different stories of uproar, all of which tell of murder, intrigue, blasphemy, and other wrongdoing. Given the context, it is unlikely that a Christian scribe would have risked associating Jesus with such themes by inserting the TF amid a litany of evildoers and disturbances, as the author of the TF pointedly does.(Schmidt 2025, 128)
Sounds reasonable. But then I recall reading the following:
The Christian movement itself was doubtless a θόρυβος [“disturbance”], the greatest disturbance of all . . . [T]he Christian movement was so obviously a disturbance of the first magnitude, as it is represented in the New Testament . . .(Thackeray 2007, 140f)
With that perspective in mind, surely a Christian scribe who was pretending to be Josephus would consider it most appropriate to place the Jesus passage in the middle of disturbances that horrified or at least were noted by a Jewish author. Thackeray does not suggest a Christian did add the account there but by acknowledging its appropriateness from the perspective of a non-Christian Jew he does allow for one to think even a Christian impersonating Josephus would likewise consider its place among other disturbances in the time of Pilate quite suitable.
Even so, the account about Jesus and his followers is not depicted as a disturbance. Any notion of a disturbance must come from the reader’s knowledge of how “the Christian movement” was “represented in the New Testament”.
Further — it is just as reasonable to suggest that a Christian scribe would relish placing his Gospel-informed Jesus in a position to suggest his power to unsettle the Jewish rulers.
Note: one must know both the canonical gospels and Acts to see this episode as a “disturbance” and so justify its “placement” among somewhat comparable episodes.
Schmidt argues that because in Josephus we read that Jesus was crucified, it logically follows that Jesus must have been a subversive, a rebelitious, and the reader is meant to conclude that he created some kind of disturbance. But that is not what we read in Josephus’s text. The passage does not describe any kind of disturbance initiated by Jesus. Disturbance has to be read into the passage, not out of it.
On the contrary, the passage in Josephus leads any reader ignorant of the New Testament to wonder why Jesus was crucified given that it infers that Jesus’ followers felt renewed spiritual inspiration after the crucifixion, and that the crucifixion accelerated their movement rather than handicapped it.
Finally, one enduring aporia in New Testament scholarship concerns the question of why Jesus was crucified. Pilate, a figure who is historically cruel and unintimidated by mobs, in the gospels yields to mob pressure to crucify a man he knows to be innocent – even though that mob had days earlier venerated the same Jesus. Religious leaders, who in historical accounts are known for their popular sympathies, in the gospels hate Jesus because he does good. If we assume the gospels are trying to hide the “real reason” for the crucifixion to protect theological interests, then we would surely be right to expect an independent historical record, one written by a Jew/Judean whom the gospels represent as the enemies of Jesus, would explain for us exactly why Jesus was crucified.
But no. The Josephan account knows nothing more than the Gospels. The Josephan account is just as mysterious as the gospels. It leaves the reason for the crucifixion unexplained.
I’d like to think that I will post 5B later this year/early next year.
Postscript on the seditious Jesus hypothesis:
To veer off into another question – of course the crucifixion of Jesus is at its core a theological event, not an historical one. Its reason is theological. As such, it is constructed narratively around the Jewish Scriptures that point to a saving figure who must take on all the sins of his people, to suffer their worst humiliations and weaknesses, to be despised as a nobody, as an evildoer, even as a rebel. The motifs are theological, not historical. The rebel-bandit-robber motif is as consistent with the interests of the authors as are the miracles and resurrection. And this is where the current “seditious Jesus hypothesis” collapses at the starting post.
Schmidt, T. C. 2025. Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thackeray, H. St John. 2007. Josephus: The Man and the Historian. With George Foot Moore and Samuel Sandmel. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger.
I will continue writing posts in response to Thomas Schmidt’s Josephus and Jesus, New Evidence so this post is a quick interjection before I have the time to write more fully about another Jesus hypothesis that appears to be being widely discussed at the moment — the hypothesis that Jesus was an anti-Roman rebel, a seditionist, in particular, the following book:
Bermejo-Rubio, Fernando. 2023. They Suffered under Pontius Pilate: Jewish Anti-Roman Resistance and the Crosses at Golgotha. Fortress Academic.
(We met Fernando Bermejo-Rubio as recently as my last post, by the way, where I examined his citational support for Josephus writing a negative passage about Jesus.)
The reason I am jumping in early at this time is to flesh out (just a little) some responses I have made in discussions relating to other posts. It’s been a long time since I posted about historical methods, especially as they relate to Jesus, so consider this a brief reminder or recap.
Bermejo-Rubio repeats a common assumption:
As Justin Meggitt has rightly observed, “to deny his existence based on the absence of such evidence, even if that were the case, has problematic implications; you may as well deny the existence of pretty much everyone in the ancient world.”
I responded to Justin Meggitt’s claim back in 2020. It is available here:
Evidence for Historical Persons vs Evidence for Jesus
A few of my other posts addressing the same question of how we know about ancient persons and whether the evidence for Jesus is comparable to anyone else:
Other statements by Bermejo-Rubio that struck me as misguided:
After all, although some biographies of ancient historical characters such as Alexander the Great and the emperor Augustus contain quite a few mythical elements in their framework, it does not justify our disputing in principle the historicity of the characters themselves . . .
That point is answered in the above posts. When historical figures are overlaid by others — and even by themselves — with mythical trappings (e.g. Alexander as Dionysus, Hadrian as Hercules), we can see clearly where the real human is distinct from the mythical propaganda image.
Inconsistencies and Incongruities are a Common Element among Mythical Figures
Another:
Had Jesus been a construct created out of whole cloth, the accounts about him would presumably have been far more homogeneous. The fact that our sources are systematically inconsistent and are riddled with incongruities is better explained if we assume that a real character on the stage of history was modified in the later tradition.
Sarah Iles Johnston explains why the inconsistencies in mythical gods and heroes have made them so appealing and believable.
Quite the contrary. It is real historical figures that emerge with fair measures of consistency; it is the mythical characters who are riddled with contradictions and incongruities. In fact it is the inconsistencies that are part of the enticing mystery and allure make such figures so attractive and believable! See
And one page that sums it all up in a simple table:
The Bible — History or Story? — where I sum up the error at the base of so much biblical studies by distilling the main points of Philip Davies pivotal publication.
But for now — back to work on some other aspects of Thomas Schmidt’s argument for Josephus making a valuable contribution to our knowledge of Christian origins. . . .
(By the way — questions of historicity and authenticity do arise in classical studies, too. I look forward to posting a few instances and comparing how they are approached by ancient historians and scholars with a primary focus on biblical studies.)
Chapter 4 (“Problems with Josephus”) of Michael J. Alter’s book contains a comprehensive discussion (50 pages) of the arguments relating to the TF’s authenticity. He sets out arguments in helpful tabular format, discusses the contributions of John Meir, Robert A. Van Voorst, Gary Goldberg, Ken Olson, Paul Hopper and others (Allen, Carrier, Doherty, Feldman, Leidner, Licona, Paget, Price, Shulman, Viklund, Whealey…) in addition to his own analysis.
Sixteen rebuttal arguments against authenticity of the TF are presented. But the question of authenticity is shown to be only one of the “problems with Josephus” regarding the historical Jesus.
That’s chapter 4 — here is the TOC for the rest of Volume 1:
1 Habermas and Licona’s First Minimal Fact: Jesus Died by Crucifixion—An Overview
2 Jesus Was Not Brain-Dead While On the Cross
3 Problems with the Gospels and Acts
4 Problems with Josephus
5 Problems with Mara bar Serapion
6 Problems with Tacitus
7 Additional Problems with the Gospels
8 Problems with the Gospel of John and Jesus’ Crucifixion 1
9 The Shroud of Turin
10 Medical Issues Continued
11 Islamic Theology and Jesus’ CrucifixionDid Jesus Die on the Cross?
12 Is Joseph of Arimathea Historical?
13 Was the Tomb Really Accessible?
14 Could the Disciples Preach an Empty Tomb in Jerusalem?
15 Why a Lack of Controversy Over the Tomb by the Public?
16 Why a Lack of Interest in the Tomb by Roman Leadership?
17 Why a Lack of Interest in the Tomb by the Jewish Authorities?
18 Was There Controversy About the Empty Tomb Among Jesus’ Followers?
19 What Were the Consequences of an Empty Tomb?
20 Three Alternative Possibilities
21 Interactions with Christian Apologists
Bruce Chilton writes the Foreword: This highly concentrated volume is only the first fruit of a series dedicated to “The Resurrection and Its Apologetics.” The care of this initial foray promises future volumes that are relentless in their argumentation, sharp in their polemics, and judicious in their selection of the evidence and the arguments presented.
Alter, Michael J. 2024. The Resurrection and Its Apologetics: Jesus’ Death and Burial, Volume One. Resource Publications.
Who am I to discuss the meaning of an ancient Greek word? This is something new for me so I must justify this foray. Up until this year I only had a self-taught level of understanding of koine Greek (the Greek of the New Testament) and would never have had the confidence to address Schmidt’s argument publicly. But this year I have undertaken formal studies at Macquarie University in ancient Greek (Attic). I have been awarded 95%, 96% and most recently 99% in the grammar and translation tests to date. The course covered so far has informed us of the meanings and forms of the word Schmidt claims means “truisms” – along with pointing us to the multiple online tools to assist us with its many occurrences by ancient authors, including Josephus.
Thomas Schmidt attempts to argue that Josephus used a belittling word to describe the teaching of Jesus that attracted his disciples. At best, Schmidt claims, the word he uses is ambiguous, but that the weight of evidence should lead us to read Josephus as depicting the followers of Jesus loving trite banalities. I demonstrate in this post that Schmidt is simply flat wrong. The word Josephus uses cannot be translated the way Schmidt claims.
Josephus’s words about Jesus, the Testimonium Flavianum (TF), begin thus:
And in this time there was a certain Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man, for he was a doer of incredible deeds, a teacher of men who receive truisms with pleasure. . . . (Schmidt’s translation, p. 6 – my highlighting in all quotations)
Truisms?
A truism is “a statement that is obviously true and says nothing new or interesting”, “a self-evident, obvious truth”, “a statement that is so obviously true that it is almost not worth saying”, “a statement that is generally accepted as obviously true and is repeated so often that it has become boring”, “a statement the truth of which is obvious or well known; commonplace”. All those meanings come up with a general internet search.
And that is indeed what Thomas Schmidt believes Josephus most likely means to convey to his readers. He explains:
The term τἀληθῆ in the TF should . . . be taken to be fairly general or run-of-the-mill truths, as with the English terms ‘facts at hand’, ‘maxims’, ‘pithy sayings’, or especially ‘truisms’. (Schmidt 2025, 78)
The term ‘truisms’ (τἀληθῆ) . . . suggests basic, run-of-the-mill facts, observations, and the like. (Schmidt 2025, 207)
Here are some examples of truisms:
“It is what it is.”
“Money doesn’t buy happiness.”
“You win some, you lose some.”
“Life isn’t fair.”
“Prevention is better than cure.”
“What goes up must come down.”
“No one is perfect.”
“Actions speak louder than words.”
“Actions speak louder than words.”
“People change.”
“Success doesn’t happen overnight.”
“There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
“Hard work pays off.”
“Practice makes perfect.”
“You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.”
“Patience is a virtue.”
“You can’t win them all!”
“Time heals all wounds.”
“We all make mistakes.”
“You reap what you sow.”
“You can’t please everyone.”
It is almost the definition of a truism that it is a saying that cannot be received “with pleasure”. A truism may offer some small consolation, or a mild laugh, but hardly “pleasure”.
Schmidt argues that the word for “pleasure” in association with what he translates as “truisms” casts a negative connotation. I will reserve my response to that particular argument for another time. Meanwhile, anyone who has any acquaintance at all with ancient moralistic or philosophical writings knows full well that taking joy, delight, even pleasure, in “good things” is noble and right; what is deemed a negative is when pleasure is taken in “less than good” things. Schmidt does point out that some later Christian copyists seemed to be uncomfortable with Josephus using the word “pleasure”, but that is a problem for much later Christian ethical viewpoints.
To be fair, Schmidt does in one place acknowledge that his word for truisms is “ambiguous” (p. 31) and that it could be read as a positive content of what he taught. But his main stress is on insisting that it refers to something negative and poor in content.
Schmidt’s attempt to persuade readers that this particular word means “run of the mill”, “prosaic” bromides is misguided. The word means “truths” or “true things” or “true matters” and such.
There is no ambiguity with the TF’s use of this word. There is no reason at all to think Josephus was being sarcastic or in any way hinting that the teachings of Jesus were shallow trivialities.
talēthē — τἀληθῆ — true things or truisms?
The word Schmidt translates as “truisms” is τἀληθῆ. This is actually a contraction of two words: τά and ἀληθῆ. (The technical term for this kind of combination word form is “crasis”.) τά most simply means “the”: it is the plural neuter form of “the”; ἀληθῆ is normally an adjective meaning “true” (as in true facts, true statements, or indicating the truth of a matter). When the two words come together ἀληθῆ becomes as much a noun as an adjective. The two together mean “the truth”, “truths” or “true things”. (Luschnig and Mitchell 2007, 42, 51, 52, 78, 121, 286)
Οne would be hard pressed to translate τἀληθῆ as “truisms” in any of the above instances.
But what about in the time of Josephus? How was the word used in the first and early second centuries?
I will first of all list examples of how the word was used by authors from around the time of Josephus and then quote examples from Josephus himself. Like Schmidt, I limit myself to the crasis form τἀληθῆ even though other appearances of ἀληθῆ can convey the same meaning.
Dio Chrysostom, ca 40 – 115 CE
Here are translations of every instance I found where Dio Chrysostom uses τἀληθῆ. They are from Orationes. Not a single one could be translated as “truisms”. For the Greek text click on this link to the Perseus site.
Speech 3, section 13: …at that time I risked my life for the sake of my soul, but now, when it is permitted for everyone to speak the truth, I lie, though no danger is present…
Speech 3, section 23: …it does not receive any great favor. For what kind of favor is it thought to be, to speak the truth?
Speech 4, section 2: …because of the greatest authority and power, so that they not only recount true things about such matters, but even exaggerate by inventing them themselves.
Speech 4, section 10: But he flattered none of mankind, rather speaking the truth to all, and possessing not a single drachma, just as he wished.
Speech 4, section 59: …strike with your spear into the illusion; for you will hear the truth from me alone among men, and from no one else could you learn it.
Speech 11, section 3: …just as, I think, it is difficult to take away from those who have raised foster children the one who tells the truth—namely what someone said to them in the beginning…
Speech 11, section 4: …you deemed Homer more trustworthy—even though he told the gravest lies about you—than me, who speaks the truth, and you believed him to be a divine and wise man…
Speech 11, section 16: …to begin from a madman, and they are more inclined to think that those who then condemned him judged rightly that he spoke the truth rather than that he was lying.
Speech 11, section 18: …did he say that in such a way? For the one who does not openly state the truth about the goddesses, but rather in the opposite manner so that falsehoods are more likely to be assumed…
Speech 11, section 22: …he had no less confidence and pride in lying than in speaking the truth.
Speech 11, section 42: …they have no need of wine, but water suffices them to drink—just so, those who wish to know the truth have no need of measures…
Speech 11, section 80: …and Homer agrees to this: for he could not have hidden all the truth;
Speech 11, section 83: …giving gifts to each other like friends. After this, he finally tells the truth: …
Speech 7, section 99: …nor did they praise them as being wise and good and speaking the truth.
Speech 34, section 30: …and as a true guardian of his own fatherland, both thinking and speaking the truth, and through whom the city is better governed and has enjoyed some good.
Speech 21, section 3: …I shall make corrections for them, treating each part in turn, if I am believed while speaking the truth about the more important matters.
Speech 23, section 22: …a kind of honor and power, if they are sensible. For you must listen to the truth and not take it badly, if someone, wishing to praise others…
Speech 53, section 2: …tender and especially resembling women—how could you suppose that he speaks the truth or is fit for anything involving hunting? — Not at all.
Epictetus, ca 50 – 135 CE.
Eighteenth century depiction of Epictetus. Wikimedia
Discourses, Book 1, Chapter 7 Question and answer. For what is promised in discourse? To assert what is true, to eliminate what is false, and to suspend judgment concerning what is unclear.
Discourses, Book 2, Chapter 6 Hades? All roads to it are equal. But if you wish to hear the truth: the shorter one is the one sent by the tyrant.
Discourses, Book 3, Chapter 1 Am I such a person? How so? Are you such a person as to be able to hear the truth? Would that you were!
Discourses, Book 3, Chapter 22 …what kind of enemies. And he must come back, having examined things carefully, to report the truth, not being struck dumb by fear, such that he declares enemies where there are none.
Discourses, Book 3, Chapter 23 Come, are we fulfilling their promise? Tell me the truth. But if you lie, I will tell you: …
Plutarch, ca 40 – 120 CE
Plutarch, Pompey, chapter 13 …to offer himself and stand firm even in the utmost dangers; but upon learning the truth, and perceiving that all men were welcoming and escorting Pompey…
Plutarch, Apophthegmata Laconica, chapter 69 He replied, “We are free men; but others—if they do not speak the truth—will groan.
Plutarch, De genio Socratis, section 18 I do not know,” he said, “O Caphisias; for it is necessary to speak the truth to you.
Plutarch, Adversus Colotem, section 15 …the place, namely the class of propositions, in which all true things are included; for although these exist, there is no actual thing corresponding to them…
Plutarch, De liberis educandis, section 14 And all these things—most fittingly—should accustom children to speak the truth; for lying is slavish and worthy of hatred from all mankind.
Plutarch, Cimon, chapter 2 When the general wrote to Lucullus, he bore witness to the truth, and thus the city, which was in danger, escaped judgment. . . . We shall resume in the written Parallel Lives the deeds of the man, setting forth the truth.
I submit that not a single use of τἀληθῆ by the above contemporaries of Josephus can reasonably be translated as “truisms”. In every case “truisms” would be jarringly out of context and make a nonsense of the point being made.
Flavius Josephus, ca 37 – 100 CE
Now for the instances in the works of Josephus. Schmidt says
Τἀληθῆ is also Josephan and is used by him thirty-nine times in its crasis form, eight of which occur in the same case and number as in the TF. Of these eight, five appear in the Antiquities. (Schmidt 2025, 77)
I have not been able to find the 39 uses Schmidt reports. I suspect there has been a misunderstanding at some point there, given that the Perseus site lists 39 instances of all forms of the word (not just the crasis form that Schmidt is speaking about).
book 3, section 74
…he wrote as one who had found the aforementioned arrangement, considering it fitting to bear witness to the truth for those who deserve it, even if it was likely to bring fame to the one being inscribed.
book 3, section 308 …to neither condemn God with falsehood nor trust those who, having been struck with astonishment, have spoken what is not true concerning the Canaanites, but rather (to trust) those who…
book 4, section 219
…not one witness, but three, or at the very least two, whose testimony will be made true by their past conduct. But let there not be testimony of women because of … immaturity, whom it is likely either for gain or out of fear not to bear true witness. But if someone who has given false testimony [= testimony that is not true = μὴ τἀληθῆ μαρτυρῆσαι] is believed, let him suffer these things, once convicted.
book 8, section 23
…Master, (grant) sound mind and good judgment, by which I may judge the people, having received what is true and just.
book 14, section 3
…but above all, historians ought to aim at accuracy, and not claim to speak the truth about things of which they themselves are ignorant, nor trust those who do.
book 18, section 63 — our passage in question
…for he was a doer of startling deeds, a teacher of men who receive the truth with pleasure, and he won over many Jews, and also many of the…
The Jewish War
book 1, section 16
…mouth and tongue are loosened, but when it comes to history—where it is necessary to speak the truth and to gather the facts with great effort—they are silenced… from writing about rulers. Let truth in history [same word, ῆς ἱστορίας ἀληθές, though not in crasis form] be honored among us, since among the Greeks it has been neglected.
book 1, section 594
…(over the) corpse, he asked for what reason she had thrown herself down, swearing that if she spoke the truth, he would release her from all punishment; but if she held back, he would punish her severely.
book 3, section 438
…as the truth was uncovered with time, both what happened at Jotapata…
Life of Josephus
section 262 …that they might repent and, having gone back to their homeland, report to those who had sent them the truth about the way I have conducted myself.
Schmidt’s misleading interpretation
When Schmidt writes of this particular word that . . .
it could also be understood positively as referring to an avid pursuit of certain ideals or hard and fast facts (Schmidt 2025, 137)
. . . surely he is not fairly summing up the evidence that he himself has alluded to. In every case of the above quotations, including those from Josephus, there is no question of the word “also” being understood positively. Just look at them: in every case it is understood positively as referring to “an avid pursuit of certain ideals or hard and fast facts”. There are no exceptions.
One could imagine the word well being applied to Jesus teaching about the law, about the truth of the sabbath, about the truth of prophecy, about the truth of the Pharisees and those who take up their cross and follow him.
Schmidt appeals to context:
Schmidt writes that Josephus “often used” the word for “teacher” negatively and that Josephus uses the word τἀληθῆ to refer to “fairly mundane” things. Most importantly though is that these terms do not indicate a positive estimation of Jesus, for ‘teacher’ (διδάσκαλος) is often used by Josephus negatively, ‘receive with pleasure’ (τῶν ἡδονῇ . . . δεχομένων) is often negative, and ‘truisms’ (τἀληθῆ) is again fairly mundane in Josephus’ writings. (Schmidt 2025, 79)
Again it is quite misleading to tell readers that “Josephus ‘often used’ the word for ‘teacher’ negatively”. He has repeated the claim:
This phrase is thoroughly Josephan. Διδάσκαλος (teacher) is used sixteen other times by Josephus, often quite negatively.101
101 For further discussion on the negative aspects of διδάσκαλος in Josephus, see Bermejo-Rubio, ‘Hypothetical Vorlage’, 354. (Schmidt 2025, 76)
So I turn to Bermejo-Rubio and this is what I see:
The phrase διδάσκαλος ανθρώπων τών ηδονή τάληθη δεχόμενων seems at first sight positive. Yet, the fact that in the sixteen occurrences of διδάσκαλος in Josephus almost half of them the word has a negative meaning by referring to false teachers . . . (Bermejo-Rubio 2014, 354 – my highlighting)
So Josephus uses the word positively more often than negatively! But if Schmidt pointed that fact out it would have undermined the impression he was trying to lead readers into embracing.
Finally, Schmidt says a Christian interpolater would have used another word for “truth”:
Turning to the word ‘truths’ (τἀληθῆ), it appears at first to signal a positive meaning, but when examined in the context of Josephus’ usage pattern a more neutral implication of τἀληθῆ can be sensed. Of the thirty-nine times that Josephus makes use of the term in the crasis form, as it occurs in the TF, he never once appears to refer to some deep, sublime reality or mystical truth. Instead, in all cases he seems rather to be speaking of various ‘facts’, the ‘present situation’, ‘the way things are’ or ‘truisms’. (Schmidt 2025, 78)
If the historical Jesus was the Jesus of the Gospel of John, maybe so. There Jesus talks in “hidden mysteries” the whole time. But few critical scholars would give much credence to the historical characterization of Jesus in that Gospel. The teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, of the Little Apocalypse, of the Last Supper, of what must be done to inherit eternal life, of the sins of the Pharisees, and so on. Even the parables are pointers to “the facts of the matter about the Kingdom of God”. All of these teachings are best described with the same word that Menander, Dio Chrysostom, Epictetus, Plutarch and Josephus consistently used to refer to truths that may have been hidden but that had to be sought out, truths about the future, about prophetic fulfilments, about the faith and obedience required to enter eternal life, and the message of the gospel to be preached: τἀληθῆ.
There are no grounds that I can see for imagining that the word τἀληθῆ would not be used by a Christian in a positive sense. There are certainly no grounds for translating the word in a way to suggest Josephus was expressing some negativity (or even neutrality!) towards the teaching of Jesus.
Bibliography:
Bermejo-Rubio, Fernando. 2014. “Was the Hypothetical ‘Vorlage’ of the ‘Testimonium Flavianum’ a ‘Neutral’ Text? Challenging the Common Wisdom on ‘Antiquitates Judaicae’ 18.63-64.” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period 45 (3): 326–65.
Luschnig, Cecelia Eaton, and Deborah Mitchell. 2007. An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach. 2nd edition. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
Menander, of Athens. 1990. Menandri Reliquiae selectae. Oxonii : E Typographeo Clarendoniano.
Menander, of Athens, and Francis Greenleaf Allinson. 1921. Menander, the Principal Fragments, with an English Translation by Francis G. Allinson. London W. Heinemann.
Schmidt, T. C. 2025. Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Many readers by now will have heard of a new book, freely available, arguing that the first century Jewish historian Josephus really did write a passage about Jesus. The book has been discussed on public forums, blogs, youtube channels, other websites, etc. If you happen not to have heard about it, you can download the book at the publisher’s site:Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ by Thomas C. Schmidt (links to academic profile).
I may discuss core aspects of the work in a series of posts over the coming weeks or months. There is much detail to address but I’ll begin with responses to two striking curiosities in Schmidt’s argument (striking, at least, to me). TF in the following is the abbreviation for Testimonium Flavianum, the technical term scholars have given for the passage about Jesus appearing in Book 18 of Jewish Antiquities by Flavius Josephus.
Schmidt argues that Josephus intended his words about Jesus to be
neither openly negative nor openly positive, and therefore largely neutral. (Schmidt 2025, 203)
That seems straightforward so far. But what follows confuses me. Schmidt proceeds to claim that what Josephus wrote was in some sense deliberately ambiguous.
He did however insert a healthy amount of ambiguity, enough for one to draw several negative or positive inferences about Jesus. (Schmidt 2025, 203)
I don’t quite understand. If one is writing from a perspective of neutrality, neither wanting to express an explicitly hostile nor an explicitly favourable view of Jesus, then one would expect both those hostile to Jesus and those who worship him to be more or less equally disappointed in what they read. If one wants to express neutrality one avoids writing in a manner that can be used as weapons by opposing sides. Neutral expressions do not normally become weapons for hostile debate.
A neutral expression about Jesus would certainly not be a statement that could be interpreted either as outstanding praise or as sneering put-down. That would be surely most unusual. Yet that’s the kind of argument Schmidt uses, at least in part, to justify his claim that ambiguity was to some extent Josephus’s method of writing neutrally.
Look at Schmidt’s assessment of Josephus’s words in introducing Jesus:
‘if indeed one ought to call him a man’
Here’s the context (Schmidt’s translation):
And in this time, there was a certain Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man, for he was a doer of incredible deeds, a teacher . . . (204, my bolding)
A Sarcastic Josephus – Version 1
For Schmidt, the bolded words can reasonably be read as sarcasm:
[O]ne could always interpret the above statement as sarcastically implying that Jesus was less than human. Evidence of this is that Josephus does elsewhere enjoy using sarcastic barbs in his work. For example, in Against Apion, he sarcastically calls Apion ‘the wonderful Apion’ (ὁ δὲ θαυμαστὸς Ἀ πίων). And he does the same with Justus of Tiberias, his hated enemy, whom he names ‘the most skillful of writers’ (δεινότατε συγγραφέων). If one interprets the TF’s statement about Jesus’ humanity as sarcasm, such would then cast negative light on the previous statement that Jesus was ‘wise’ in as much as it too would become sarcastic. The statement may thus hearken back to how in the Gospels Jesus was accused of not only being in league with demons, but also of being a demon himself. (Schmidt 2025, 71f)
This is surely a blinkered rationalization. Josephus leaves readers in absolutely no doubt about his real views on Apion and Justus. When he uses flattering terms for them the sarcasm is blatantly obvious. There is no doubt about his sarcasm. Sarcasm only works when the speaker or writer gives obvious clues that they are being sarcastic – otherwise the speaker is only having a smirk to himself and hiding his attitude from his audience. I will return to this point.
But do the words “if one ought to call him a man” necessarily mean to say that Jesus could be higher than a human, like an angel or deity? No, not at all. Here we have another ambiguity. Josephus could even be suggesting that Jesus was a demon. Schmidt explains:
Further, as regards Jesus’ humanity, the TF rhetorically wonders whether ‘one ought to call [Jesus] a man’. This harmonizes with how the Gospels present first-century Jews as being conflicted over Jesus, with some . . . accusing him of not only being in league with demons, but of being a demon himself. (Schmidt 2025, 206)
Gospel Foundations
Where did this idea come from? Schmidt cites Matthew 10:25 which quotes Jesus as saying to his disciples:
If the head of the house has been called Beelzebul, how much more the members of his household! (NIV – all Bible verses quoted here are from the NIV)
You were not aware that Jesus’ enemies called him a demon? Maybe that is because Matthew 10:25 is the sole witness in the New Testament that they did. If you are open to diverse scholarly opinions, you will be interested to know that some scholars have concluded that that one verse (Matthew 10:25) was invented by Matthew himself, was in none of Matthew’s sources, and was not spoken by Jesus at all:
The allusion to the Beelzebul incident is Matthew’s own invention. (Funk, Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar 1993, 171)
So the possibility that Josephus sarcastically suggesting Jesus may have been a demon rests on a single debatable verse in the Gospel of Matthew. In other words, it rests on the assumption that the Gospels are trustworthy historical accounts, at least insofar as they help us make a case for the authenticity of the TF.
But I only quoted half of Schmidt’s words above. He also acknowledged that the phrase could also be understood to suggest that Jesus was higher than a man – that is, an angel or even a deity. Here is the other possible allusion:
Further, as regards Jesus’ humanity, the TF rhetorically wonders whether ‘one ought to call [Jesus] a man’. This harmonizes with how the Gospels present first-century Jews as being conflicted over Jesus, with some speculating that he might be the Son of God or even God, and with others accusing him of . . . (Schmidt 2025, 206)
Again, you might be wondering where in the Gospels we read about some Jews speculating that Jesus might be the Son of God or God himself. Schmidt points us towards the following verses, only one of which is from a gospel:
John 20:28
Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!”
Hebrews 1:8 (citing Psalm 45)
But about the Son he says, “Your throne, O God, will last for ever and ever; a scepter of justice will be the scepter of your kingdom.
Philippians 2:6 (Paul citing a Christ hymn)
Who, being in the very nature of God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage.
Few critical scholars would consider the Gospel of John a reliable historical narrative, and fewer still would consider the words of Thomas on confronting the resurrected Christ as historically reliable. Even fewer would regard them as evidence of debates among early Jews about the nature of Christ. If we are to rely on the witness of the Gospels we need to focus on the Jewish debates concerning Jesus in the Gospels such as sabbath regulations and messiahship.
Thus far we have seen how Schmidt attempts to justify specific interpretations of ‘if indeed one ought to call him a man’ by anchoring them – with mixed or uncertain success – to the Gospel accounts. This is necessary for Schmidt’s larger argument. What Schmidt argues is that Josephus’s sources of information about Jesus derive from prominent Jewish political and religious persons who had been alive at the time of Jesus, some of whom even met and questioned Jesus. These Jewish leaders, Schmidt avers, knew the controversies surrounding Jesus back around the year 30 CE – that is, they knew first-hand the controversies that we read about in the Gospels. Therefore, the Gospels can be used to throw light on what we read about Jesus in the TF. By a gracefully symmetrical circular argument, Schmidt can then affirm that the TF confirms the historical accuracy of much that we read in the Gospels.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
A Sarcastic Josephus – Version 2
Schmidt is not alone in suggesting that ‘if indeed one ought to call him a man’ was written with a sarcastic pen – and therefore must be considered authentic words of Josephus.
While it is unconvincing that the entire TF could be interpreted ironically or sarcastically, Vicent Cernuda makes a strong case that at least this phrase of the TF could be interpreted in such a way; see Cernuda, ‘El testimonio flaviano’, 359–65. (Schmidt 2025, 71)
Cernuda believes that Josephus was in the company of some Roman Christians when he was writing Antiquities and these Christians pressed Josephus to include something about Jesus in his historical account. Josephus did so, Cernuda suggests, with a cheeky deceit:
This gives reason to think that the prominent Roman Christians who asked Josephus to include the episode of Jesus among the events of the time of Pilate also requested that he indicate his miraculous, virginal origin; and that the shrewd Jew complied by implying it as a secondary meaning . . . .
This double meaning was absolutely necessary for the ironic development Josephus intended and which we are trying to demonstrate. Only if this double sense — both positive and negative — of σοφός is kept in view can the following clarification be properly understood: εἴ γε ἄνδρα αὐτὸν λέγειν χρή = if indeed he should be called a man. The widely held view that this phrase comes from a Christian hand, because it implies the idea of divinity, is easily answered: a disciple of Christ would not have expressed himself in so vague a manner. On the contrary, if we accept the irony or semantic duplicity of σοφὸς ἀνήρ — “an eminent man” or “a clever type” — then the ambiguity of γε [my note: γε = indeed] (as either restrictive or affirmative) fits perfectly. To the Christians pressuring Josephus, the phrase could implicitly denote the divinity of Jesus, and they might have been satisfied with the formulation, recognizing that no more could be expected from a non-believer. But to the one who cunningly crafted the circumlocution, a latent scorn emerges clearly: is someone truly a man of honor who gains fame as σοφός, when in fact he is just clever — even a rogue? The exaltation of something that is in fact being despised is one of the classic signs of irony. And Josephus must have felt a deep aversion to Jesus and his persuasive power, as we recently observed in the study of Caiaphas’s conversion. (Cernuda 1997, 360f, 363f – translation, bolding and highlighting is my own)
So Cernuda posits a different scenario for how Josephus came to write a mischievously ambiguous line. For Cernuda, Josephus’s sources for Jesus were Christians; for Schmidt, his sources were prominent elderly Jews. Both suggest that Josephus was writing ambiguously.
For Cernuda, the ambiguity was a trick: Josephus was poking fun at the Christians by pretending to write something positive while really he was being sarcastic. Schmidt, though, is more gracious:
He did however insert a healthy amount of ambiguity, enough for one to draw several negative or positive inferences about Jesus. Whether this was because Josephus hoped to curry favor with an audience divided over their estimation of Jesus, or because he himself had no certain opinion of Jesus, or because his sources differed regarding Jesus, or because he admired Jesus but did not want to reveal his true feelings, or because he simply did not care, I cannot tell. (Schmidt 2025, 203)
Imagining Scenarios
The difference between Cernuda and Schmidt underscores the fact that both scholars are arguing on the basis of creatively imagining who Josephus was talking to or what conversations he was recalling at the time of his writing. I am reminded of Richard Bauckham’s tenuous links the authors of the gospels had to eyewitnesses of Jesus. (Godfrey 2008) What we are witnessing are ad hoc scenarios to explain why we should be convinced of the hypothesis that Josephus wrote the TF. Don’t misunderstand, though. Schmidt is very thorough, comprehensive and learned. He argues a case to justify his scenario. What I have shown in this one small part of his argument is that his case does not rest on secure foundations. There is much more to address. I am just getting started. More to follow.
An Uncertain Josephus
Till then, let’s conclude with a note on Schmidt’s personal conclusion about what Josephus meant by “if indeed one ought to call him a man”. In the end, he pulls the rug out from the entire notion of any sarcasm:
Whatever the case, the TF does not present Josephus as actually calling Jesus divine anyway, but only presents this as a potential possibility—as long as one does not interpret the statement more negatively. . . .
I am inclined to think that the phrase should be interpreted straightforwardly as Josephus expressing diffidence, uncertainty, or ambiguity regarding his personal estimation of Jesus, or on the other hand, he might instead have used the phrase as a way of acknowledging that Jesus was a polarizing figure among his readers, whatever Josephus’ own opinions may have been. (Schmidt 2025, 72, 73)
Does one normally depict a polarizing figure with a question over whether that figure was more or less than human? Is the phrase really nothing more than a “personal estimation of Jesus”? Hardly – it is a question about whether or not he is human! At least the interpretation that Josephus was being sarcastic hews more honestly to the meaning of the line.
If Josephus was being sarcastic he was not being neutral. His ambiguity was hidden from his Christian readers. If he was being neutral or disinterested over a polarizing figure, and if his sources were his Jewish peers, it is odd that he should be expressing confusion over whether Jesus was an angel or a demon. At least there is no evidence in the gospels — apart from Jesus’s words in Matthew 10:25 — that any Jews claimed he was a demon, and certainly none that he was divine. The only Jews who proclaimed the divinity of Jesus were the Christians and they were the “heretics” in the eyes of the Jews. Only by reading Acts as containing genuine history could we think otherwise, at least on the part of some non-Christian Jews. Not to mention that the whole question becomes even messier if the Gospels and Acts were all composed after Josephus.
Postscript – added about 2 hours after posting the above
One more point that Thomas Schmidt advances in support of Josephus having written “if indeed one ought to call him a man” is that the innuendo of those words would be heretical for early Christians:
The TF also makes claims that disagree with early Christian belief, such as how the TF wonders if Jesus was actually human (or less than human), when early Christians viewed denying Jesus’ humanity as heretical . . .
In this one must remember that Christian authors like Origen, Eusebius, and practically all others ardently felt that Jesus was in fact human. They consequently would have viewed any denials of his humanity as heretical. Therefore, most Christians—authors and scribes—would likely not have interpolated such a statement into the TF. (Schmidt 2025, 198, 71)
Here Schmidt is in effect contradicting his earlier argument that Josephus was drawing on Jewish memories of long ago controversies about Jesus, controversies that supposedly left their traces in the Gospels. There is no hint in any of the canonical Gospels that anyone, whether Christ followers or Jewish opponents, thought Jesus might not be human.
Furthermore, we cannot avoid noticing a certain orthodoxy bias in Schmidt’s argument here. By saying that “early Christians viewed denying Jesus’ humanity as heretical” Schmidt is excluding the possibility that the doctrines that became orthodox Christianity were a later development and that many of the earliest Christians did indeed view Jesus as a human in appearance only (cf. Philippians 2:7-8).
Bibliography
Cernuda, Antonio Vicent. 1997. “El Testimonio Flaviano, Alarde De Solapada Ironía.” Estudios Bíblicos 55 (3, 4): 355–85, 479–508.
Funk, Robert W., Roy W. Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar. 1993. The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus: New Translation and Commentary. New York: Polebridge Press.
Godfrey, Neil. 2008. “Bauckham: Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.” Vridar (blog). January 23, 2007 to June 4, 2008 [=58 posts]. https://vridar.org/tag/bauckham-jesus-and-the-eyewitnesses/.
Schmidt, T. C. 2025. Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/9780191957697.001.0001.
It is the orthodox view that Jesus came in order to fulfil the Jewish Scriptures, but he did so in a manner that defied the expectation that the messiah would conquer the enemies of the Judeans. I have suggested that this view of Jesus arose in a wider context of ideas whereby a Jesus or Saviour figure came to overthrow the works of the Old Testament creator and lawgiver god.
My view is built on Nina Livesey’s argument for Paul’s letters being produced by one of the several “Christian schools” that existed in Rome in the second century. As I pointed out in my previous post, I have found it difficult to understand how the kinds of teachings we associate with “gnosticism” — arguing that Jesus did not have a flesh and blood body, that the Jewish god was evil, that creation itself was evil — arose from what we know of our gospels and letters of Paul. But as per my previous post, I think that the relationship between those “gnostic” ideas and the ideas of orthodox Christianity makes sense if we set orthodoxy as the latecomer.
As Livesey points out, Paul’s letters, arguably critical of “Judaism”, arose at a time when Jews or Judeans were seen as having caused horrific losses to Roman military power in the Bar Kochba war of 132-135 CE and were themselves being severely punished. I would extend the time when Jews (and Jewishness) were widely abhored to the decades before when under the emperor Trajan there were widespread Judean revolts and massacres throughout the eastern part of the empire. (One might compare the widespread loathing of the “troublous” Palestinians – and Muslims – in Israel and the West today.) This was also the time when we see the emergence of “gnostic” or similar types of teachings arguing that the Jewish Scriptures testified to an ignorant (or even evil) god whose rule only promised death.
But there is an argument that “gnosticism” emerged after Christianity. This argument denies that there was any kind of Jewish gnosticism before the gospels and letters of Paul. Edwin Yamauchi pointed out…
A major difficulty in accepting a Jewish origin for Gnosticism is to account for the anti-Jewish use which most Gnostics seem to have made of these elements. The anticosmic attitude of the Gnostics contradicts the Jewish belief that God created the world and declared it good. . . .
Many scholars therefore believe that it was probably through the mediation of Christianity that these Jewish elements came to be used in such an antithetical way. (Yamauchi, Pre-Christian Gnosticism: A Survey of the Evidences, 2nd ed, p. 242f)
Then a few pages later,
Gnosticism with a fully articulated theology, cosmology, anthropology, and soteriology cannot be discerned clearly until the post-Christian era. According to Wilson, were we to adopt the programmatic definition of Jonas ‘then we must probably wait for the second century’. Hengel would concur: ‘Gnosticism is first visible as a spiritual movement at the end of the first century AD at the earliest and only develops fully in the second century.’ (p. 245)
Both of these objections fall by the wayside if we place the whole game in the second century. Anti-Jewish ideas are readily understandable in a world that saw Jews as hostile to humanity “and the gods” and deserving of the bloodshed they were suffering. That is, in the times of Trajan (110s) and Hadrian (130s).
The second objection cited above expresses the point I am making: that yes, we are looking at second century developments.
It is not altogether coincidental that scholars who assume a Gnostic background for New Testament documents in some cases also adopt very late dates for these books, because late dates for these documents would make a stronger case for affinities with Gnosticism. Thus Rudolph dates Colossians to AD 80, Ephesians to the end of the first century, and both the Pastoral and the Johannine Epistles to the beginning of the second century. Koester dates the Pastorals to as late as between AD 120 and AD 160. (pp. 192f)
And why does Koester date the Pastorals to the middle of the second century? In large part because it is believed that it would have taken decades for Paul’s first century church assemblies to have evolved into the authoritarian episcopal structures that those letters indicate. But as Livesey has pointed out in her recent book, the “home gathering” situations of the letters is a rhetorical device aimed at building a sense of community among readers. They are not documenting a historical situation.
There is no independent evidence that dates any of our New Testament writings earlier than the middle of the second century. Yamauchi acknowledges that a second century date for the gospels and letters would make the possibility of a “pre-Christian” gnosticism more likely. I think the argument goes beyond mere chronological ordering of sources, though. That returns me to the point I was making in my previous post.
In coming posts I may (as much for my own benefit as anyone else’s) post notes on various teachers who appear to me to have preceded (proto-)orthodox Christianity and whose followers appear to have engaged with the new gospels and Pauline writings.
I think I have been searching in the wrong places for the origin of the Jesus figure in our New Testament writings. Of course it would be easiest to assume that there is some truth to the gospel narratives and that there was a historical preacher by that name who was crucified and whose followers believed he rose from the dead and went to heaven. But then I would be unable to explain why the earliest uncontested and independent evidence we have for that person does not appear until a full hundred years after his time and without a hint about how that life, so rich in allusions to mythical acts and persons, came to be known. Or I could conjure up an explanation that involved ordinary (generally illiterate) persons passing on ever more imaginative “oral reports” about the person but that would be letting my imagination fly in the face of studies that tell us that’s not how fabulous tales about historical persons originate. (They are composed from the creative imaginations of the literati.)
I used to fuss fruitlessly over trying to understand what might have led to the first gospel, widely believed to have been the Gospel of Mark. I liked the idea that that gospel portrayed a Jesus who could readily be interpreted as a personification of an ideal Israel, one who died with his nation in the catastrophe of 70 CE (the destruction of the Jewish Temple by Titus along with myriads of crucifixions of Jewish victims) and rose again to establish a new “spiritual” Israel in the “church”. But that idea did not explain the kinds of Christianities (there were many types) that swelled and plopped like bubbles in a vast Mediterranean hot mud spring. Not even if we moved the gospel to a later time so that it had the Bar Kochba war (132-135 CE) in mind.
An old door reopened
An important work to be read in conjunction with Nina Livesey’s The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context
Nina Livesey (re)opened a door to a room for me that maybe I should have investigated more thoroughly before. In the book I recently discussed, Livesey speaks of a multiplicity of “Christian” schools comparable with the many philosophical schools in Rome. They usually centred around a prominent teacher, attracted an inner circle of disciples while also holding open public sessions, and would not be averse to publishing both trial and final versions of tracts illustrating some point of their teachings. Livesey revives the idea that the letters attributed to an apostle named Paul were published by one such school, one led by Marcion. Marcion was also reputed to have produced “a gospel”, one that many in later antiquity and since have considered to be an early form of our Gospel of Luke.
Let’s pause there and collect our thoughts for a moment.
Marcion was not the only “Christian” teacher in Rome around the middle of the second century. Other teachers or school heads (not all in Rome) around the same period include Apelles, Basilides, Cerdo, Heracleon, Justin, Marcion, Saturninus/Satornilos, Tatian, Valentinus . . . You get the idea. There were many competing teachings. Some of them came to be dismissed as a consequence of being labelled as “gnostic”. But they were there from the beginning — at least if by “the beginning” we insist on appealing only to independently verifiable sources.
Now when Marcion published “Paul’s letters” some other schools picked them up and used them as foils through which to teach their own doctrines. Multiple interpretations and textual variants were the result. That’s how the schools worked: they would be open to engaging with each others’ teachings, either with modifications, elaborations, or outright rejections. So it is difficult from our perspective to always know what the original teachings of some of these schools were: they were capable of changing over time.
Back to the gospels. When Marcion wrote up a life of Jesus, he was using that figure of Jesus as a means of promoting his (Marcion’s) view that “Christianity” was an antithesis of the Jewish religion. Marcion’s Jesus was not even real flesh and blood but a spirit being in the appearance of flesh and blood: the antithesis even in this respect to the physical ordinances of Moses.
Schools opposing the biblical narrative
But other schools had other ideas about Jesus. More than that, they had ideas about the origins of the Jewish religion and even of humanity itself that we today would find quite bizarre. There were multiple ideas about god and creation. Many of these ideas were borrowed from Greek philosophy, some from Greek literature and myths, as well as from the Jewish Scriptures. Some said that the god who created this world was a god lower than, and ignorant of, the ultimate “Good God”; some said the serpent in the Garden of Eden was actually a benefactor of humankind and the god who punished him (according to the Book of Genesis) was the wicked god; some said that the line of Cain (depicted in Genesis as the first murderer) was the righteous genealogy; some said Jesus first appeared in the form of Adam’s third son, Seth. Indeed, Jesus held different positions among these various schools. He might be seen as one of a number of spirit beings who were “born” in the earliest moments of time. Or he was a human, fathered by Joseph, who was possessed by a spirit being called Christ. Some saw him as hating the laws of the god of Moses and promising deliverance to all whom the Jewish god had condemned.
I suspect it is impossible to ever find a way to reconcile all of these teachings. They span events from time before creation right through to the present and beyond. One thing they all seem to have in common, though: they are all opposed to the orthodox understanding we have of the Jewish Scriptures, or the Old Testament. Not all of them, as far as we are aware, include a place for Jesus. But of those that do, Jesus has a role that is opposed to the Mosaic Law and traditional Jewish Temple. (Not unreasonably, given that Jesus is derived from the name Joshua who was originally understood as the successor to Moses.)
In other words, what I am imagining here is a situation that we can with reasonable assurance place as early as the opening decades and middle of the second century — a time when a find a multiplicity of schools with various notions proposing narratives that contradicted those we read in Genesis and those of the “orthodox” interpretation of the Jewish bible more generally.
Where did those ideas come from?
An Anti-Jewish/Judean time
I am tempted to begin with the beginning of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) as proposed by Niels Peter Lemche and in some depth by Russell Gmirkin. This takes us back to the beginning of the Hellenistic era (from the time of Alexander the Great’s conquests) when Samaritans and Judeans, with the aid of Greek writings, collaborated to construct a narrative of origins that we read today in the books from Genesis to Deuteronomy or Joshua. Genesis in particular has retained hints that its authors were trying to incorporate multiple gods whom later readers would equate with Yahweh. Most scholars have seen multiple hands and schools of thought going into the final product of the Pentateuch. It is not difficult to imagine some intellects associated with the production of the first bible continuing to raise alternative ideas that were infused with Greek philosophy and myth or to imagine that some of this kind of divergent thinking continued through to the Roman era. What are surely critical turning points, however, are the calamities that befell the Jews (or Judeans) first under Vespasian and Titus (the first Jewish war of 66-70 CE), the uprisings and widespread massacres of Jews a few decades later under Trajan and then the “final solution” by 135 CE under Hadrian when the Jews were forbidden even to set foot in Jerusalem.
The bloody times coincided with the emergence of “Christian schools” in Rome. Let’s take a step beyond Nina Livesey’s specific focus on the letters of Paul appearing at this time. Let’s suggest that it is these times that witness the emergence of schools teaching the “end” of the Jewish laws. These times further witness teachings declaring the falsehood of the narrative of creation by the Jewish god, or at least teaching that this creation was evil or less than “good”. Imagine that this is the time when we see the namesake of Moses’ successor, Joshua/Jesus, promising deliverance from the judgment of that lesser god of the Jews.
If we can imagine all of that, we are, I think, confining ourselves to what the evidence in our second century sources allows.
But how does any of that explain the Christianity we recognize today?
It doesn’t. If that’s all we had, no doubt those negative teachings of Marcion, of Valentinus and others would have fallen by the wayside in time.
From antipathy to antithesis to … fulfilment
But something happened after Marcion released his story of Jesus, a Jesus who was an “antithesis” of the best that the god of the Jews could offer.
Another school, perhaps one associated with the “church father” Justin, or with Basilides in Alexandria (I don’t know and can only surmise), responded with an opposing narrative about a Jesus who was less an “antithesis” of the Jewish god than a “fulfilment” of all that the Jewish god had hoped for but had failed to achieve hitherto.
If that happened, we have a revolutionary moment. We no longer have a negative response to “the Jewish religion and scriptures”; rather, we have a way of capturing and finding new and enriched meaning in that old religion and its hoary sacred writings.
What if Jesus could be transformed from an anti-Moses or anti-Yahweh figure into a ‘higher than Moses’ figure, a fulfilment of the higher ethics of god who was henceforth to appear as a newly discovered deity, or as the old deity whose true character was only being seen clearly now for the first time — or as the “one sent to reveal” that newly understood deity?
Such a Jesus had the power to enrich and so preserve with new meaning texts that had long been revered (even among non-Jews). Allegorical reading could infuse them with new meanings. The old was discarded, yes, but it was also retained and revivified as throwing the “new” into 3D relief by its shadows: Joseph and Moses and David and Elijah (and so on) of the Old Testament prefigured the Jesus of the New — at least if read with a little imagination. A gospel could depict Jesus as a personification of an ideal Israel, healing others but suffering unjustly only to be raised up and bring all humanity to salvation. Another gospel could present Jesus as a new Moses delivering a “higher law” in the Sermon on the Mount. And so on.
I suggest that once one or some of those schools (probably in Rome but not necessarily confined to there) discovered a way to both reject and embrace with new meaning the old Mosaic order of things, they were on a winner, as we might say today.
Such a Jesus, just like the other original Jewish writings and again like the writings of “proto-Christian” (including “gnostic”) schools, drew upon the inspiration of Greek myths and philosophy to flesh out their teachings. The Jesus with us today drew upon one additional source — the Jewish Scriptures — and found as a result a longer-lasting heritage. Various “schools” may have competed for the most outstanding way to oppose and supplant the religion of the Jews who from 70 to 135 CE were suffering the calamities of Vespasian, Titus, Trajan and Hadrian. The form of Christianity that became a religion that could boast of a “higher fulfilment” and stronger appeal to literati and hoi polloi alike was the one that learned how to infuse venerable texts and the experiences of their advocates with new meaning and build on their foundation. Rejection of the Old, in way, yes, like the teachings of other schools … but with one important twist.
This post is the final in my series discussing Nina Livesey’s The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship.
Portrayals of Plato’s and Aristotle’s Schools (Wikimedia images)
Nina Livesey (NL) sees the letters of Paul being composed and published in a philosophical school setting in Rome in the second century CE. There were many schools of this type in Rome at this time. We are to imagine a teacher, a philosopher, who attracted student followers. The teacher-philosopher would often hold public meetings to read work they had put in writing; discussion and new ideas would follow; and a final written work then submitted to contracted sponsors who would make copies for distribution to interested persons.
It sounds strange to our ears that Christian teachings should be categorized as a “philosophy” but Christian teachers were described in the same way: teachers of certain doctrines and heads of schools. The physician Galen referred to a “school of Moses and Christ”; the “church father” Justin spoke of one such Christian teacher facing the death penalty (as some philosophers experienced because of indiscreet public pronouncements – discussed by Secord). Many such Christian teachers are found in our sources: Saturninus, Cerdo, Marcion, Tatian, Justin, Valentinus. . . The Latin word translated as “heresy” might be as well understood as a “school” (NL, further citing Vinzent).
We have evidence of mutual exchanges among these various schools. Some would denounce other teachers; others would engage in less heated debate; the surviving writings also demonstrate various means of persuasion, such as listening respectfully to challenging questions and addressing hearers as close friends or even family.
Comparing Paul with the philosopher Justin
One of these teachers or Christian philosophers was Justin, known as Justin Martyr – mid second century – who identified himself as a philosopher. Justin taught that his understanding of the prophecies in the Jewish Scriptures came from an encounter with “an old man” who inspired him to turn his back on all his previous knowledge. The pattern echoes the callings we read about in the gospels and Acts of the twelve disciples and Paul who come to understand the Scriptures through listening to Christ or his servants. NL reminds us of an article by Andrew Hofer, “The Old Man as Christ in Justin’s ‘Dialogue with Trypho'”. NL in fact refers to a host of earlier work discussing the nature and workings of these “Christian” philosophical schools (interested readers might like to follow up some of these in the insert box).
Dillon, John. “Philosophy as a Profession in Late Antiquity.” In Approaching Late Antiquity: The Transformation from Early to Late Empire, edited by Simon Swain and Mark Edwards, 401–18. Oxford University Press, 2003.
Georges, Tobias. “Justin’s School in Rome–Reflections on Early Christian ‘Schools.’” Zeitschrift Für Antikes Christentum / Journal of Ancient Christianity 16, no. 1 (May 15, 2012): 75–87.
Lieu, Judith. Marcion and the Making of a Heretic: God and Scripture in the Second Century. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Schott, Jeremy M. “General Introduction.” In The History of the Church: A New Translation / Eusebius of Caesarea, translated by Jeremy M. Schott. University of California Press, 2019.
Dillon, John. “Philosophy as a Profession in Late Antiquity.” In Approaching Late Antiquity: The Transformation from Early to Late Empire, edited by Simon Swain and Mark Edwards, 401–18. Oxford University Press UK, 2003.
Eshleman, Kendra. The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Nasrallah, Laura. “Mapping the World: Justin, Tatian, Lucian, and the Second Sophistic.” The Harvard Theological Review 98, no. 3 (2005): 283–314.
Rubenson, Samuel. “Early Monasticism and the Concept of a ‘School.’” In Monastic Education in Late Antiquity: The Transformation of Classical Paideia, edited by Lillian I. Larsen, 13–32. Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Secord, Jared. Christian Intellectuals and the Roman Empire: From Justin Martyr to Origen. Penn State University Press, 2020.
Snyder, Harlow Gregory. “‘Above the Bath of Myrtinus’: Justin Martyr’s ‘School’ in the City of Rome.” Harvard Theological Review 100, no. 3 (July 2007): 335–62.
Snyder, Gregory H. Christian Teachers in Second-Century Rome Schools and Students in the Ancient City. Brill, 2020.
Ulrich, Jörg. “What Do We Know about Justin’s ‘School’ in Rome?” Zeitschrift Für Antikes Christentum / Journal of Ancient Christianity 16, no. 1 (May 15, 2012): 62–74.
Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture. Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Wendt, Heidi. At the Temple Gates: The Religion of Freelance Experts in the Roman Empire. Oxford University Press, 2016.
Wendt, Heidi. “Marcion the Shipmaster: Unlikely Religious Experts of the Roman World?” In Marcion of Sinope as Religious Entrepreneur, 55–74. Studia Patristica., Vol. XCIX. Peeters, 2018.
Vinzent, M. Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels. Peeters, 2014.
Vinzent, Markus. “Orthodoxy and Heresy: Misnomers and Misnamers.” Forum: Foundations and Facets. Third Series 10, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 91–108.
Watts, Edward J. City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria. University of California Press, 2006.
Such schools evidently had access to many writings such as the Jewish Scriptures and commentaries on them.
Our reading of Justin’s work, NL points out, alerts us to similar approaches and aims in Paul’s letters:
The assessment of the [Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho] as protreptic teachings redolent of a school setting allows for additional parallels with the letters. Like Justin, the Apostle Paul’s call to “Christian” teachings arrives through other worldly means (Gal 1:13-16). Both Justin and the Apostle Paul are seen to depart from former philosophies (Justin) or a former way of life (Apostle Paul) to embrace the new teachings (Gal 1:13-2:2; Phil 3:4-11).160 As indicated in Chapter 3, the Pauline letters contain numerous instances of the language of friendship and posit community members as family (“brothers”). In the letters, issues of theological import are made applicable to communities, as are community members cautioned against the influence of others.
Furthermore, like the Dialogue, Pauline letters also make extensive use of the LXX161 in support of “Christian” principles. . . Like the Dialogue, Pauline letters contain verses cited verbatim but also those that are strategically amended. This use of scripture, is an indication of their ready availability . . . and thus provides an additional indication of a school like setting. (NL, 235f)
The School of Marcion
NL argues that the letters attributed to Paul were most plausibly produced by the school of Marcion.
Marcion is associated with an influential school in Rome and is known as having advanced “Christian” doctrines, and as having produced and published various compositions. In addition, among the second-century school heads (writer/intellectuals) in Rome, Marcion is regarded as having a nearly exclusive interest in Paul as being the one true Apostle from among all other “Christian” apostles and figures. Marcion’s ten-letter collection of Pauline letters (the Apostolikon) is our earliest evidence of Pauline letters.
Among the “Christian” intellectuals and heads of schools in second-century Rome, Marcion is arguably the most well-known. . . . According to [Judith Lieu], Marcion may have been the first among the “Christian” school heads operating in Rome . . . It has likewise been suggested that the codex form may have derived from Marcion. Vinzent notes that “no other teacher in the history of the Church until Martin Luther received during his lifetime (and continuing after his death) a comparable literary response.” (NL 236f)
All indications are that Marcion moved to Rome shortly after the Bar Kochba war. NL cites David Balás and I’ll quote a little more from Balás than NL specifically mentions (bolded highlighting and formatting is mine):
Marcion’s doctrines are marked by a certain simplicity, not to say single- and simple-mindedness that distinguish them from the elaborate speculations of other Gnostics or the metaphysical analyses of leading philosophers. John G. Gager has recently shown, however, the similarity of some of Marcion’s arguments, as reported by Tertullian, to certain philosophical (notably Epicurean) proofs against providence.19 The difference is that, whereas for Epicure the (especially physical) evils of this world excluded divine providence (the gods dwelled unconcerned in the intermundia) and lead, according to the Skeptics, to doubt of the existence of god(s), Marcion accepted (with the Old Testament!) the existence of a Creator, but concluded from the popular-philosophical arguments that the Creator was neither omniscient nor truly good.
19The evidence considered above indicates that Marcion was also familiar with philosophical issues of his time and that Epicurean philosophy in particular provided an argument which Marcion used to support the key element of his thought. (Gager, “Marcion and Philosophy”, p. 59)
Of course, Marcion’s opposition to matter, body, and passions was also close to contemporary philosophy (Stoic and Neo-Pythagorean). . . .
What seems constant in all the above instances was Marcion’s tendency to provide a simple solution, without much concern for either the complexities of the data or the consistency of the system, a tendency which may explain the popular success and enduring strength of Marcionism.
Besides the Gnostic and popular-philosophical sources, I believe Marcion’s “point of departure” was deeply influenced by his and his fellow Christians’ relationship to Judaism in the middle of the second century. Marcion came to Rome around 136-140 and was expelled from the Roman Church in 144. These dates coincide with the period of the bloody suppression of the great Jewish revolt in 135. R. M. Grant has argued that the disillusionment of Jewish sects with the seemingly powerless and deceptive God of the Old Testament was one of the reasons for the Gnostic reduction of Yahweh to an imperfect or even hostile deity.
Whether this is wholely or partially correct or not, Grant’s similar hypothesis concerning Marcion seems quite possible. Grant said that Marcion “…wanted to dissociate Christianity not only from apocalyptic Judaism, but also from Judaism in general.” Politically and socially, the Christians, especially hellenistic Christians with no national or cultural roots in Judaism, found at this time their association with Jewish history an embarrassing and dangerous liability. Marcion may have found a way to effect this desirable separation by using Jewish self-interpretation at several main points. For instance,
— by accepting the anti-Christian contention of some Jews that Jesus Christ was not the Messiah promised by the Old Testament, a Messiah the Jews rightly expected to be political and warlike, Marcion made a counter claim that Christ was in fact the self-revelation of a previously entirely unknown, all-good God.
— Secondly, the Jewish rejection of Christian typological or spiritual exegesis of the Old Testament, which seemed to threaten Christianity’s claims to historical legitimacy, was now seen as a liberating insight.
— Finally, the shaken confidence of many Jews in the confirmed goodness, omniscience, and all-powerfulness of Yahweh (incompatible as it seemed with the historical realities of the time) was taken as an admission that the God of the Old Testament was inferior to the all-good and perfect God revealed in Jesus Christ.
Paradoxically, it was precisely by having accepted Jewish scriptures and history, at least to a large extent, in their contemporary Jewish interpretation that Marcion arrived at his radical dissociation of the [Old and New] Testaments! (Balás, 98f)
If, as has been argued, Marcion came from a proselyte Jewish family we can scarcely avoid wondering about the impact on him of the total destruction of Jerusalem to the extent of the emperor Hadrian banning Jews even from entering the city and the widespread massacres of Jews that had been carried out under both Trajan and Hadrian. Though Marcion reduced the god of the Old Testament to an inferior deity beneath the higher and more merciful Good God of Jesus and the New Testament, he nonetheless retained key Jewish foundations:
Vinzent comments, “Marcion’s message … built on the Jewish foundations, on the Jewish Scriptures, the messianic hope, Jewish ethics, rituals and the Jewish people.”191 That his was a “book-religion” likewise owes to Jewish influence.192 (NL, 240. Note 191 = “Marcion the Jew”; 192 = Marcion and the Dating)
I’ll quote a little more from Vinzent:
Marcion did not want Christianity to disinherit the Jews and incorporate their Holy Scriptures into its own canon, but saw only one heritage, namely that given by God in his revelation to Paul. Christianity was simply incomparable to anything that the creator had made, be it the universe, its history, the Law or the prophecies of Judaism. And yet, Marcion could not free himself from his Jewish and Greco-Roman roots. That Christianity would be a book-religion in its own right was one of Marcion’s Jewish ideas and objectives, and one that he achieved. And that Christianity would be a thoroughly Hellenized religion without being lost in this world of the creator, in the sphere of apocalyptic religious politics and prophetic cults, Marcion secured by rooting the sayings of a faintly remembered Jewish messianic rabbi into Greco-Roman history. Jesus, who had come down from heaven as an angel-like human being under Emperor Tiberius and procurator Pontius Pilate, delivered his message through a new literary form, a combination of startling sayings and surprising deeds, through unexpected aphorisms and mind-blowing miracles, performed on Jesus’ journey towards the shame of the cross and the unbelievable resurrection. Marcion created a powerful narrative of a transcendent, pre-existing figure who appeared on this alien earth, in the midst of history, to liberate human beings from these physical chains of ignorance, greed, law, sin, judgement and the need for repentance, to rescue humanity through buying men back by paying the price of death on the cross, through his descent to the utmost depths of hell, in order to save all who wanted to accept this helping hand, and to let them be where and what the Risen is. In the same way that this cosmic creation was a despicable horror without end, unfolding as a tragic history, in the eyes of creatures, even of the elect and chosen disciples, the Saviour was regarded as a tragic hero. The only exception was Paul, who understood because he was granted the grace of divine insight. He followed Christ and developed the good news. Marcion’s Gospel, therefore, describes this tragic history of Jesus’ life, the failure of calling and the rejection of the elect. In contrast, among those who follow Jesus are people nobody would have dared to admit, and like the paralytic, these become co-sufferers and equally co-hated with Christ.
. . . . Before Marcion was made the ‘arch-heretic’, he seems to have been the arch-theologian, ‘the founder of a religion’ and of a new cult, Christianity. . . . (Vinzent, Marcion and the Dating, 134f)
Key points noted in this context by NL:
Marcion was a publisher
He published the first New Testament (a gospel similar to our Gospel of Luke and the ten letter collection of Paul)
He published Antitheses, apparently an explanation of his philosophical principles and commentary on his gospel, a list of oppositions between the Law and Prophets on the one hand and the gospel on the other.
Our surviving witnesses to Marcion, coming from the writings preserved by the orthodox church, opposed Marcion as “a heretic”. But in the middle of the second century there was no authoritative judgment seat from which to distinguish truth from error. It is unlikely that in his own day Marcion could be “banished as a heretic” in the sense we imagine such a process of later times. The Marcionite and “Catholic-to-be” communities surely overlapped one another, as NL notes.
Rivals of Marcion produced alternative texts, presumably revising what Marcion himself had written. See, for example, the series of posts discussing Joseph Tyson’s grounds for believing that our version of the Gospel of Luke is an anti-Marcionite revision of Marcion’s gospel.
When we read in the early Church Fathers apparent quotations from the gospels and letters we find that they very often vary in some way from the canonical versions we read in our Bibles. This is especially so in the works that are critical of Marcion’s texts. NL outlines the various theses to account for these differences:
Marcion used and edited an existing copy of the Gospel of Luke (the opponents of Marcion adhered more closely to the original gospel)
Catholic writers and Marcion each revised independently an early form of the Gospel of Luke
Marcion edited an earlier shorter version of the Gospel of Luke and Catholic revisers expanded Marcion’s version to produce the Gospel we recognize today
Noting the lack of evidence of any gospel text prior to the second century, and further suggesting that the first gospels emerged in post Bar Kochba school settings, Vinzent takes the next logical step and proposes that Marcion produced the first gospel.
Vinzent maps the production of the gospel onto what is known of the way the schools functioned. A text was composed, read publicly and discussed and argued among close associates and student followers, revised with a final version being published more generally. The gospel and letters were written in an environment of free exchange of ideas and underwent a number of revisions. In this way the variant early versions of gospels and letters can be explained.
In other words, the explanation for the absence of evidence for any gospel or epistle prior to the middle of the second century is that they did not exist prior to the time of Marcion. Opponents of Marcion claimed he “discovered” or “found” Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. If that motif sounds familiar, it may be because we have come across it in the story of King Josiah discovering the Book of Deuteronomy: see my post showing that this claim was not at all unusual when one sought to introduce a new authoritative text as if it had the authority of antiquity.
According to modern epistolary theorists, the suggestion of finding a letter is what one would expect of an editor of a pseudonymous letter collection who wanted to provide a sense of the letter’s authenticity. If, as argued, Marcion created a gospel, a new literary genre, he – with the help of those in his school – could certainly have crafted and overseen the composition of mock letters in the name of the Apostle Paul, deploying a known and popular literary genre. (NL, 248)
For Marcion, Paul was the only apostle who truly understood the gospel of the Christ who had come from the “unknown god” who was higher than the creator god of the Law and the Prophets. That Marcion published his Gospel and Letters of Paul side by side might be seen as an indicator that he saw his “New Testament” as an “antithesis” of the Law and the Prophets of the “Old Testament”. NL indicates that such factors strongly suggest that Paul’s letters were, like the gospel, originally composed by Marcion himself. If so, then it is also likely that the letters of Paul were written with a clear knowledge of the gospel narrative. They did not precede a written gospel, in other words, but were produced alongside the gospel.
The Marcionite authors were active in the years following the calamity of the Bar Kochba war. NL finds appropriate Jason BuDuhn’s observation:
Whatever the internal developments within Christianity that prepared the way for the creation of a New Testament . . . it is simply impossible to dismiss the coincidence in time of Hadrian’s anti-Torah campaign and Marcion’s call for the establishment of a distinct and separate Christian sacred scripture. (NL, 251, quoting BeDuhn’s The First New Testament)
Letters were a popular means of teaching new philosophies; philosophical schools in Rome were common and responsible for the publications of and readings of rival teachings; the social and psychological dislocations that resulted from the Bar Kochba war provide a plausible background to the “Jewish but not Jewish” religious ideas of Marcion; and Paul, the only apostle said to have understood the gospel of an all-loving and non-judgmental god, was Marcion’s ideal alter-ego.
NL’s argument thus removes the Pauline letters from being in many ways unique in the ancient world, as many biblical scholars have thought, and places them in a social and ideological setting that seems to make them emerge quite “naturally”.
In an appendix NL explores in depth the educational background required to compose the letters. The production of texts that were persuasive, that could be emotionally gripping, that were instructional at the same time, was the work of highly educated persons. They did not emanate from the typical wandering preacher or tent-maker as Paul is supposed to be according to Acts of the Apostles.
With thanks to Cambridge University Press for an inspection copy.
My Concluding Thoughts
I have raised a number of open questions along the way of my re-reading and writing these notes on Nina Livesey’s book, but now I’ll offer something more conclusive. I think Livesey’s explanation of the evidence we have for the earliest New Testament writings has two major advantages over many others: Occam’s Razor and Explanatory Power. One does not need to hypothesize earlier versions of the texts for which we have no evidence. What we see at the beginning — gospel and Pauline letters in the hands of Marcionites — was the beginning of the gospels and New Testament letters. The evidence likewise informs us that the first “Christian schools” and teachers arose from among migrations to Rome in the wake of the Bar Kochba war and of Hadrian’s “final solution” punitive measures against Jews and their ideological base of Jerusalem. Such timing opens up a very plausible explanation for both the form (letters) and the content (presented as a “higher antithesis” of “Judaism”) of teachings that we find among the earliest Christians.
(As has further been discussed in other posts relating to Jesus and the Rank-Raglan hero class, mythical narratives do not evolve from illiterates telling stories around campfires over a generation or two: they are born from the minds and pens of the literate. That is one more point that is consistent with NL’s proposal of a school origin of the gospel story.)
Balás, David L. “Marcion Revisited: A ‘Post-Harnack’ Perspective.” In Texts and Testaments: Critical Essays on the Bible and Early Church Fathers, edited by W. Eugene March, 95–108. Trinity University Press, 1980.
Gager, John G. “Marcion and Philosophy.” Vigiliae Christianae 26, no. 1 (March 1972): 53–59.
Livesey, Nina E. The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship. Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Vinzent, Markus. “Marcion the Jew.” Judaïsme Ancien – Ancient Judaism 1 (2013): 159–201.
—- Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels. Peeters, 2014.
