It is correct that Judaism cannot be understood by reference to the OT any more than Christianity can be understood by reference to the NT: both religions rest on a large number of beliefs nowhere found in those and indeed often (if not routinely) contradicting them.

Judaism in particular, sometime after the Exile, came to rest on what is called Oral Torah, better known as the Mishnah, which was regarded as Moses’s interpretations of the Torah laws, and thus as the definitive way to read them (much like the Supreme Court adds more law in the U.S. to that passed by any U.S. legislature, by “reinterpreting” every law in light of “the Constitution” and this or that “judicial philosophy,” hence you can’t understand the American legal system by simply reading its statutes). Think of Mishnah as primary Hadith.

That became even more complicated later (post-temple Judaism) when the Mishnah acquired its own commentary, the Talmud (so, now, a commentary on a commentary; think of this as secondary Hadith).

That was built out of interpretations spanning many centuries, but including the Second Temple period, hence the Talmud preserves the conflicts in interpretation between the sect of Hillel and the sect of Shammai (and other sects; theirs were only the most popular, not the only game in town, even within the Pharisee sect, much less beyond). So, in a sense, an “oral Talmud” existed in the Second Temple period (debates around how to interpret the Mishnah), it was just a lot briefer and less authoritative. Modern Judaism rests on the written Talmud, which includes opinions spanning many more centuries beyond (and also faces questions of reliability even in preserving any of them), but most generally sides with Hillel (Shammaite opinions will usually just get get footnoted).

And that’s even just Orthodox Judaism of course; Reform Judaism has all but abandoned all of these texts in practice, in much the same way most Christianity has functionally abandoned both the OT and the NT (conservatives reject everything liberal in the NT, which is actually, like, 80% of the NT, and cherry pick what OT laws to keep or abandon, keeping, at best, 1%; while liberals abandon everything conservative in the NT, and implausibly reinterpret the OT to match).

That’s very helpful to know.

It looks like Second Temple Judaism especially in its last two centuries was somewat different from the Judaism that dominates most of the OT/Hebrew Bible (which is the form of Judaism that I vaguely have in mind because I know very little about this period).

On the bright side it’s nice that we have non-Christian sources about the period since they were a very small minority. In the case of Islam and due to its very successful militant early approach, we only have the Islamic tradition about the Arabs of Muhammad’s time which paints a cartoonish picture that I am sure is extremely far from the truth.

He might not be any more progressive than Hillelite Jews (a faction of the Pharisees that Jesus in fact was made to align with more than most people are aware). The “conservatives” you are thinking of are the Shammaite Pharisees, the ones anachronistically depicted in the Gospels as “the” Pharisees (in fact the evidence suggests they were at best rivals and at worst a minority often outvoted by the Hillelite Pharisees; the absence of Hillelites siding with Jesus is one of several features of the Gospels that render them a convenient ahistorical fiction). Also, Paul is a Diaspora Jew (he appears to have been educated and grew up in the Greek world, not Judea), and they often were more liberal (being influenced by the liberalism of Hellenism generally and even the Romans). Of course, we are all talking “relatively speaking” here. They were not liberal by modern standards, but by the Overton Window of that time.

And yes, indeed, OHJ is a valuable reference book even for people uninterested in its overall thesis. Case in point: I cite scholarship on this Hillelite connection to the teachings of Jesus and how they track closer to actual Pharisee teachings than the Gospels portray.

That makes sense. I haven’t made the connection between the donations and accepting him as an apostle before.

Do you agree with the impression that he is pretty liberal and progressive for his time and Jewish background? If so, do we know anything about the reason for that?

I think I will get and read On the Historicity of Jesus at some point. I am not really interested in whether the man existed or not but I am very much interested in all the background knowledge you provide there from the blog posts and comments I have seen in which you reference it.

I discuss this in Element 15 of Ch. 4 in On the Historicity of Jesus, and a bit more in Ch. 11; and more generally in Ch. 10 of Not the Impossible Faith.

The short answer is: good liars will endeavor to sound like the real thing; so it is difficult to tell when someone is actually having visions (like a trancer or schizotypal) or when someone is pretending to (and to make it harder: the same people can even do both), especially so far removed as we are, with so little evidence.

It’s different for Mormonism, for example, where extensive documentation makes it easy to tell Smith was a liar, or the book of Revelation, for example, where the author went too far off role (no authentic vision plays out so long, in such detail, and with such meticulous literary structure) and thus gives away the fact that they are merely pretending (a.k.a. lying) about that all being a vision they had.

In Paul’s case, I suspect it’s both, and that he was good at it. He lies a lot, fudges and distorts a lot, but also genuinely thinks he talks to Jesus in his head and was chosen by God for some great purpose. As such, Paul is not unlike many a semi-insane cult leader throughout history. Charismatic, eloquent, and manipulative, as well as passionate, driven, and occasionally bonkers.

But he could yet be just another Joseph Smith and just good at pretending to sound like genuinely schizotypal street shamans, because they commanded respect among the masses and so that was what one had to do (the anthropology of this I cover, with scholarship citations, in NIF). To be more accurate, Paul is more analogous to Brigham Young (and Peter to Joseph Smith) but we have so much less data about Peter (was he also running a pious con or genuinely trancing or both?).

We can see so much of Paul’s letters hint at a suspect movement of money, for example, that casts suspicion on the lot of them. There is an inordinate number of occasions (almost once or more in every letter) where Paul has to defend himself against accusations of graft (he was clearly culling money from his congregations, and his congregations started side-eying the question of where all that money was going), and there are plenty of hints that he was “tipping out” the original Apostles.

Paul references that money going to “the saints” of Jerusalem, likely code for the apostles; some scholars want that to mean “the poor,” but that, too, could be a pose, “the poor” coming with a wink-wink, when it’s actually going to the apostolic command center’s treasury, with some of course filtering down to “the poor” to keep up appearances—like almost literally every Christian and Islamic charity in history.

But either way, the fact that Paul is culling funds from all his congregations abroad and bringing sacks of cash back to the apostles in Jerusalem goes a long way to explaining why they accepted his mission (they were taking kickbacks) and closed the mission with him (because they couldn’t push adding to the apostolate too far without diluting their authority, and Paul would have the first-mover advantage in the Gentile market, so creating more competition there would have been counter-productive).

But again, we can only suspect these things. We lack sufficient evidence to prove or disprove any of them.

You are correct. I totally support reporting typos, clarity issues, broken links, etc. So keep them coming!

Thanks a lot!

The explanations of the Greek were really helpful.

I also don’t know how I forgot that he said that Jesus appeared to all the apostles as well but I am not very well-versed in the Bible anyway so that’s understandable I guess.

On a not very related note, I am very perplexed by Paul. The man sometimes seems very articulate and even very progressive for his time and yet sometimes he appears to be very delusional and not only with his Jesus visions but with going to the third heaven and so on.

Did you touch on this in any of your writings? I mean in a lot of similar cases (like Muhammad for example), it appears these people were just lying but I am not sure that Paul was deliberately lying tbh.

Thank you. I will go through the suggested reading.

That makes a lot of sense. I do know that you represent your opponents as fairly as possible.

I wasn’t aware that she accused you of this as I only left Islam in late 2022 (or even early 2023 I can’t exactly remember when the breaking point happened) so my knowledge about the history of these discussions and debates (Atheists vs Christians) is quite limited. Anyway, I think the sentence now is very clearly worded.

Thanks for the tip/hack. I am aware of it and have been using it myself for years (I am more tech savvy than I probably gave the impression of when I didn’t realize I could use HTML tags in the comments 😀 as I am a backend software engineer). I assumed based on the blog posts and comments I read that you want the blog posts to be as typo free and self contained as possible and that’s why I was reporting the broken links and minor typos. Please let me know if any of these suggestions are not relevant and I will happily conform to the rules.

(1) Could Paul have meant “in fulfillment”? Not really.

Paul does not use the Greek words or phrases for fulfillment (example, example, example, example). He uses the Greek word for source (in every case where it means “in accordance with” it does not mean in respect to a prediction but a law, custom, or desire, which is not the sentence Paul forms). Every other case in all of ancient Greek literature of kata + author/document means source, not “fulfillment.”

Translations and interpreters are going against all precedent in the language (even in Paul). And elsewhere Paul appears plainly to mean source (see Romans 16:26, which says the only sources were scripture and revelation and not eyewitness testimony; and Galatians 3:1 for example; the latter is also commonly mistranslated, so I linked a literal translation, which renders the word actually in the text, which is “forewritten,” i.e. “before-written,” prographô, hence seen in scripture as the sole cited source).

But even if we played along with faith-based abuse of the Greek language and went with the translations and interpretations that imagine Paul simply meant the scriptures predicted these things, Paul still cites no other source for those events than scripture (per Romans and Galatians above). Paul thus never says anyone saw any of these things. The first time Paul says anyone saw anything, it’s solely revelations/visions (starting in the very next verse, “appeared/as seen by” only refers to the risen Jesus, not the events of his life or death).

(2) Could someone reject Acts 2 as evidence for the mass visitation? Yes, but then you lose all the evidence for its content. Which is worse.

Most Christian apologetics, remember, dances across horns of a dilemma: if they choose one solution, it tanks their argument; if they choose the other option, it still tanks their argument but in a different way. So they will dance from one horn to the other as they need, or as you call out these consequences.

So, here, if we decide Acts is the same event (the one its author heard about and thus narrated), my point follows, which is bad for the apologist; whereas if we decide Acts is not the same event, then there is no record of any such event in all the Gospels or Acts, which is also bad for the apologist. Christians thus lose any ability to argue what that experience consisted of, or even that it really happened—since if no Gospel author ever heard of it, despite purporting to know quite a lot about the appearances, and despite this being, the Christian has to suppose, the most spectacular and thus most memorable of them, then that calls its historicity into question (or its content, since, if we adopt the Christians assumptions, then the later authors must have rejected it because its content wasn’t very convincing to them and was best deleted from the narrative).

Hence my point here is that the best a Christian can claim is that we have a corroborating record in Acts, but that doesn’t go well for them. And yet if they reject even that evidence, then their empirical situation is even worse.

I discuss this further in another article, Then He Appeared to Over Five Hundred Brethren at Once!

(3) Does my inference follow as to which events were simultaneous in Paul’s mind? Yes.

That Paul goes out of his way to specify a simultaneous vision in only this line in a sequential list of visions logically entails the others did not have this quality. Otherwise he’d have added that quality to them, or else seen no need to specify that quality only in this one case. To single one case out entails it is distinct from the others in precisely the way singled out.

And yes, it would be as essential to point out with a dozen people as with five hundred people. The difference in numbers has no bearing on the relevance of it being all at once rather than individually. It’s a lot of people either way; and the property of simultaneity is as important to both. Note that the next line has “all the apostles” clearly not in the sense of simultaneous yet entailing the same or a larger number than twelve (the Gospels claim there were 70 apostles; that’s dubious, but Paul must think they outnumber the mere twelve). So Paul is being clear in demarcating which experiences were and were not “all at once.”

Remember, the reason Paul deems it necessary to add the peculiar feature of “all at once” is not some arithmetical difference between “dozens” and “hundreds” which would be of no relevance to the detail, but the fact that these are visions (Galatians 1, Romans 16). It is peculiar for any vision to have even two simultaneous witnesses, much less twelve. That is why he has to append that detail here: it is the one remarkable thing about that event, relative to all the others listed.

This of course all assumes the text has been accurately preserved. I suspect it hasn’t. But that’s a side point (see my linked discussion for more on that). In my review here I simply adopt the mainstream assumption (that the text here is accurately preserved) for the sake of argument, arguing a fortiori (“even granting” that, the empirical situation is poorer than Keller represents).