This looks suspiciously like AI generated content, which is banned on my site. But I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that’s not the case.

The interpolation hypothesis remains a minority position rejected by the overwhelming majority of Pauline scholars.

That’s not true. I said “mainstream” scholars. I am not counting Christian apologists and exegetes. Obviously Christian apologists and exegetes don’t believe Paul has been corrupted. That is not a reaction to evidence but emotion. I am interested only in rational, evidence-based arguments, not apologetics. And you should too.

Matthew Jensen’s 2019 survey…finds the case for interpolation unpersuasive.

False. He found it inconclusive. He ends by saying “this debate will continue until a definitive work comes to hand.” You have mistaken a neutral presentation of (most, not actually all) the arguments pro and con as an endorsement of one side over the other. Jensen stays neutral and concludes it has not been decided.

Standard commentaries…

Commentaries are Christian faith texts. Not objective scholarship. The Hermeneia Commentary Series is the only one now that sometimes obtains objectivity, but its commentary on Thessalonians hasn’t been published yet.

You correctly note that no early manuscripts omit the verses and argue this is “neutral” because pre-second-century meddling is undetectable (your prior of ~1 in 400). But this cuts both ways, and you refuse to acknowledge it.

Mentioning it is acknowledging it.

You are just repeating my point, not answering it.

**You claim** the passage is an “awkward digression” that disrupts Paul’s thanksgiving and has no parallel in 1 Thessalonians 1. This is false. It directly **extends** the imitation/suffering theme of 1:6-10.

No, it does not. Thess 2:14 is miles away from 1:10 and in a different context, while 1:10 does not refer to a persecution (it refers to something happening before Paul converted them). In the actual context where 14-16 are:

Paul starts by talking about his worries that the Thessalonians have strayed from the faith and soured on him, and ends by delighting in finding out they haven’t—leaving no truly coherent place for him to insert this anti-semitic rage-post in between, referencing a supposed pagan persecution in Thessalonica he never elsewhere even mentions or consoles them over.

You are simply ignoring my actual point here. That’s apologetics. Just like the kind you cite from other Christian apologists and exegetes. You can’t recover an argument by ignoring its refutation and just repeating the argument already refuted.

**You dismiss** stylistic and grammatical oddities as “not glaring enough” yet still try to count them against authenticity. Schmidt’s linguistic arguments have been answered by detailed syntactical analyses showing clear Pauline patterns. Paul varies his style across letters; this is not diagnostic of forgery.

That there are responses does not entail they succeed. So merely re-stating things does not change where they land. This is again behaving like an apologist, not an objective analyst. I already said some are weakened by responses (such as Still). But others are not. So you aren’t answering me here. You are just restating a point I already made.

Moreover, logically, weak evidence still counts—as weak evidence. You have not rebutted the status of the surviving case here as weak evidence to count. You have simply restated why it is weak. I already said it counts weakly. And it does. You can’t just gainsay that fact.

**You speculate** about links to 2 Thessalonians and claim your counter-scenario (a forger of 2 Thessalonians using 1 Thessalonians) proves nothing. Exactly—it proves nothing either way. The grammatical echoes are consistent with Paul’s own language.

You have not even described a single argument I made regarding 2 Thess. here. So you aren’t rebutting any of my actual arguments here. Just ignoring them. Which is more apologetics.

**You assert** the passage contradicts Paul’s view of authorities, Romans, and Jesus’ death. Yet Paul implies Jewish responsibility in multiple places (1 Corinthians 2:8; Galatians 3:13; 2 Corinthians 11:24-26). He echoes Old Testament and Jewish self-criticism of killing prophets (Nehemiah 9:26; 2 Chronicles 36:15-16). This does **not** deny Roman involvement (which Paul rarely details anyway) or contradict Romans 13 or 1 Corinthians 2:6-8. Polemic against specific gospel opponents is standard for Paul.

I already rebut this aoologetic in the article. You are now just completely ignoring my arguments.

**You call** the anti-Jewish tone a “peculiarly late Christian notion” post-70 CE. Overstated. Anti-Jewish polemic appears in pre-70 texts, including Paul’s own letters. Here “Ioudaiōn” functions contextually as “Judeans” (the hostile ones in Judea), paralleling “your own countrymen” in Thessalonica—not a blanket ethnic slur. Paul routinely distinguishes current opponents from future salvation.

False. I already refuted this argument. And you are ignoring what I said.

And as I said, you are conflating arguments slandering all Jews with arguments (not slanders) critiquing some Jews (not all Jews). You are thus ignoring my entire argument and rewriting it into a different argument to straw man it. That kind of fallacy mongering is apologetics, not scholarship.

**You insist** Paul “never blames the Jews for the death of Jesus” elsewhere. False. He implies Jewish responsibility repeatedly (1 Corinthians 2:8; Galatians 3:13). He indicts “the Jews” or Jewish leaders for hindering the gospel in exactly the same way (2 Corinthians 11:24-26; Galatians 1:13-14). This is not “unprecedented”; it fits his pattern of prophetic-style critique.

In none of those verses does Paul say the Jews as a people killed Jesus. He doesn’t even mention Jews at all. And when he mentions Jewish opponents, he always qualifies as indicating they are a few Jews, not all Jews. So you are again conflating “some Jews are bad” with “all Jews are the enemy of mankind and deserve God’s wrath” to create a passage that doesn’t exist. I am arguing against the passage that does exist. Not the fantasy passage you just made up. Ignoring what I actually said rather than responding to it. This is more apologetics. Not objective critique.

**You claim** Paul “never talks about the Jews as if he wasn’t one of them” and always preaches their salvation. Paul **does** distinguish himself rhetorically when addressing opponents (Galatians 2:15; Philippians 3:4-5; Romans 9:1-5).

You start with “talks about the Jews as if he wasn’t one of them” and end with passage where Paul makes clear he is one of them. I don’t comprehend how you think this works to your desired point. You are proving my point. Likewise with respect to salvation: all your cited passages come in contexts making clear Jews should be saved. Proving my point, again, not yours.

Romans 11:25-28 promises future salvation for “all Israel” **after** the current “hardening” and partial judgment on unbelieving Jews—perfectly consistent with 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 targeting specific persecutors. Paul damns unbelieving opponents (Jewish or Gentile) while holding out hope for broader redemption. No contradiction.

“Final wrath has come” contradicts “they will be saved eventually.” And again, “holding out hope for broader redemption” is precisely what is missing from 1 Thess 2:14–16; it declares the opposite. You are thus, again, proving my point. This is not a very effective way to rebut the point.

**You assert** God’s wrath is “only future” and Paul would never say it “has come.” The aorist “ephthasen” (“has come”) is **prophetic/proleptic**—a standard Greek and Old Testament idiom for certain future judgment spoken as already realized (Romans 8:30; Revelation 10:7; Smyth §1934). It need not reference a completed historical event. Plausible pre-70 triggers include persecutions under Agrippa I (41–44 CE) or under Cumanus (~48/49 CE). Paul links it to “filling up sins” (an ongoing process), not a single post-70 catastrophe.

That’s all false. You’ve been duped by an apologist. The aorist never means future except in a relative clause where a past tense verb (actual or implied) places another event before it (and no such clause exists here: this is not a clause placed relative to an even more past event). This is basic Greek. And it’s been pointed out in the literature several times (and both your examples and the one in Smyth show this, so I am guessing you didn’t check and are just repeating this from some apologist you gullibly believed). And double use of completion words as here is an intensifier, so it absolutely can only mean a completed event. This is basic Greek. And it’s been pointed out in the literature several times. And the events you list make literally no sense to what Paul says. That’s just bizarro apologetics. In reality, this is a quotation of Testament of Levi (as many have pointed out) describing the destruction of the Schechemite city and their race, thus telling us its author understood what it meant. You, evidently, do not.

**You declare** “wrath … to the uttermost” **must** mean the 70 CE destruction of the temple (when Paul was already dead). This is your linchpin—and your weakest point. “Eis telos” means “completely/to the end,” not exclusively “final national destruction.”

It’s a double-completion statement (aorist of completed event with telos of completion), which definitely is exclusively “final national destruction” or equivalent. That it is the same line from TLev saying the same thing proves the point. It’s also riffing on Paul’s actual statement in 1 Thess 1:10 that says this “wrath” is still to come in the future. The real Paul thus knew what it meant. The fake Paul is hoping you forgot what he said in the last chapter.

**You dismiss** attempts to limit the interpolation (e.g., only verse 16) or read “Ioudaiōn” restrictively. But scholars legitimately do both.

They do it. That does not mean they do it legitimately. You are an apologist citing apologists stating apologetics. You’ll have to do better than that.

The passage cannot be read restrictively. He says the enemy are diaspora Jews (interfering with their mission to the Gentiles), so he cannot mean only Judeans would be punished. And he says the enemy killed Jesus “and the prophets” so he cannot mean just the Sanhedrin who killed Jesus, he can only mean all Jews historically, people who inherited the sin of long dead murderers. He does not say “just the descendants of the few Jews who killed this or that prophet” (which would make no sense even if he did). He says the Jews as a people, the enemies of mankind as an international group, killed Jesus “and the prophets” and have been punished at last for it.

Wallace and others provide grammatical, rhetorical, and historical defenses you label “specious” without engaging their details. Jensen’s review shows these are viable scholarly positions, not “false statements.”

That’s your opinion. I find the opposite. I am certain if we went over them line by line you’ll be very disappointed at the outcome when real evidence, actual logic, and the facts of the text are brought back in and no longer hidden by apologetics like yours.

**You calculate** odds of “millions to one” against authenticity by assigning near-zero probabilities to perfectly plausible Pauline features (strong polemic, prophetic aorist, known persecutions). This is not neutral history; it presupposes your conclusion.

I think you are confusing a translation of my conclusion into mathematical terms with presuming my conclusion. My conclusions are argued in the paper, not presumed. My estimates quantify the conclusions already made. That’s not presumption. It’s arithmeticization.

And you’ve met it with no plausible alternative. Only apologetics, ignoring almost all my actual arguments and evidence, and even relying on false statements (like the use of the aorist and intensifiers of completion).

That’s the difference between us.

**you claim** that “most mainstream scholars have long agreed” these verses are fake—an interpolation added by Christian scribes half a century or more later—and that **no logically sound case exists** against this conclusion. You present your arguments as a “good primer on the difference between logically doing history and irrationally doing history,” dismissing every defense as mere “apologetics.”  

You are wrong on both counts. The interpolation hypothesis remains a minority position rejected by the overwhelming majority of Pauline scholars. Matthew Jensen’s 2019 survey (which **you yourself cite**) reviews all the arguments and finds the case for interpolation unpersuasive. Standard commentaries (Malherbe, Wanamaker, Fee, Jewett, and many others) treat 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 as authentic Pauline material without hesitation. Your Bayesian calculations and sweeping dismissals do not constitute neutral historical method; they reflect your prior commitment to mythicism. Below I refute **every argument** you advance, point by point, using the textual, linguistic, historical, and theological evidence you repeatedly ignore or misrepresent.

### 1. Absence of Manuscript Evidence
You correctly note that no early manuscripts omit the verses and argue this is “neutral” because pre-second-century meddling is undetectable (your prior of ~1 in 400). But this cuts both ways, and you refuse to acknowledge it. **All** surviving manuscripts—including the earliest—unanimously include the passage with **no variants** indicating interpolation. There is zero positive manuscript or patristic evidence of tampering here. Your general “expectation of undetected interpolations” is a possibility, not evidence specific to this text. It requires positive internal grounds to override the uniform textual tradition—which the rest of your case fails to supply.

### 2. Minor Arguments: Contextual “Fit,” Style, and Secondary Issues
**You claim** the passage is an “awkward digression” that disrupts Paul’s thanksgiving and has no parallel in 1 Thessalonians 1. This is false. It directly **extends** the imitation/suffering theme of 1:6-10. Paul frequently employs rhetorical comparisons and digressions (Romans 9–11; 2 Corinthians 11). The verses console the Thessalonian Gentile converts: your pagan persecutors mirror what Judean believers faced from hostile Jews—exactly the kind of encouragement Paul offers elsewhere. No “pagan persecution” is ignored; the analogy highlights shared faithful suffering.

**You dismiss** stylistic and grammatical oddities as “not glaring enough” yet still try to count them against authenticity. Schmidt’s linguistic arguments have been answered by detailed syntactical analyses showing clear Pauline patterns. Paul varies his style across letters; this is not diagnostic of forgery.

**You speculate** about links to 2 Thessalonians and claim your counter-scenario (a forger of 2 Thessalonians using 1 Thessalonians) proves nothing. Exactly—it proves nothing either way. The grammatical echoes are consistent with Paul’s own language.

**You assert** the passage contradicts Paul’s view of authorities, Romans, and Jesus’ death. Yet Paul implies Jewish responsibility in multiple places (1 Corinthians 2:8; Galatians 3:13; 2 Corinthians 11:24-26). He echoes Old Testament and Jewish self-criticism of killing prophets (Nehemiah 9:26; 2 Chronicles 36:15-16). This does **not** deny Roman involvement (which Paul rarely details anyway) or contradict Romans 13 or 1 Corinthians 2:6-8. Polemic against specific gospel opponents is standard for Paul.

**You call** the anti-Jewish tone a “peculiarly late Christian notion” post-70 CE. Overstated. Anti-Jewish polemic appears in pre-70 texts, including Paul’s own letters. Here “Ioudaiōn” functions contextually as “Judeans” (the hostile ones in Judea), paralleling “your own countrymen” in Thessalonica—not a blanket ethnic slur. Paul routinely distinguishes current opponents from future salvation.

You repeatedly concede these points are “minor” or “weak” and set them aside “a fortiori”—yet they form part of your cumulative case. Each has straightforward Pauline explanations you refuse to grant.

### 3. Major Arguments: Theological “Contradictions” and the “Wrath” Clause
These are the heart of your case, and every one collapses.

**You insist** Paul “never blames the Jews for the death of Jesus” elsewhere. False. He implies Jewish responsibility repeatedly (1 Corinthians 2:8; Galatians 3:13). He indicts “the Jews” or Jewish leaders for hindering the gospel in exactly the same way (2 Corinthians 11:24-26; Galatians 1:13-14). This is not “unprecedented”; it fits his pattern of prophetic-style critique.

**You claim** Paul “never talks about the Jews as if he wasn’t one of them” and always preaches their salvation. Paul **does** distinguish himself rhetorically when addressing opponents (Galatians 2:15; Philippians 3:4-5; Romans 9:1-5). Romans 11:25-28 promises future salvation for “all Israel” **after** the current “hardening” and partial judgment on unbelieving Jews—perfectly consistent with 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 targeting specific persecutors. Paul damns unbelieving opponents (Jewish or Gentile) while holding out hope for broader redemption. No contradiction.

**You assert** God’s wrath is “only future” and Paul would never say it “has come.” The aorist “ephthasen” (“has come”) is **prophetic/proleptic**—a standard Greek and Old Testament idiom for certain future judgment spoken as already realized (Romans 8:30; Revelation 10:7; Smyth §1934). It need not reference a completed historical event. Plausible pre-70 triggers include persecutions under Agrippa I (41–44 CE) or under Cumanus (~48/49 CE). Paul links it to “filling up sins” (an ongoing process), not a single post-70 catastrophe.

**You declare** “wrath … to the uttermost” **must** mean the 70 CE destruction of the temple (when Paul was already dead). This is your linchpin—and your weakest point. “Eis telos” means “completely/to the end,” not exclusively “final national destruction.” Context concerns Judean persecution hindering the Gentile mission. Historical data shows real persecutions in the 40s CE that Paul could easily view as divine displeasure. Even if eschatological, it fits Paul’s imminent judgment expectation (1 Thessalonians 1:10; 5:9). Your “vanishingly small” probability that Paul wrote post-70 simply ignores the near-universal scholarly dating of 1 Thessalonians to the early 50s.

Your “stacked improbabilities” rely on rigid, anachronistic readings. Paul **does** criticize Jews harshly when they oppose the gospel, while holding out hope for their ultimate inclusion.

### 4. “Weaseling Out,” Partial Interpolation, and “Judeans vs. Jews”
**You dismiss** attempts to limit the interpolation (e.g., only verse 16) or read “Ioudaiōn” restrictively. But scholars legitimately do both. The grammar allows reference to particular hostile groups (not every Jew everywhere), and partial interpolation lacks evidence—yet the whole passage coheres without it. Real Judean/Jerusalem church persecutions pre-70 fit Paul’s eyewitness knowledge. No “excuses” are needed; the text is intelligible as is.

### 5. Your Treatment of Lüdemann, Wallace, and Others
**You call** Lüdemann’s defense “wholly illogical” and “apologetics.” Yet Lüdemann (a liberal critic) explicitly affirms authenticity, citing Old Testament parallels for “killing prophets” and pagan/Jewish critiques. Your rebuttal (e.g., the Testament of Levi parallel) actually supports Paul borrowing common Jewish traditions—precisely what an authentic Paul would do. Wallace and others provide grammatical, rhetorical, and historical defenses you label “specious” without engaging their details. Jensen’s review shows these are viable scholarly positions, not “false statements.”

### 6. Your Bayesian Conclusion and Overall Method
**You calculate** odds of “millions to one” against authenticity by assigning near-zero probabilities to perfectly plausible Pauline features (strong polemic, prophetic aorist, known persecutions). This is not neutral history; it presupposes your conclusion. Real scholarship weighs the cumulative evidence—uniform manuscripts, contextual fit, historical parallels, and lack of contradictory data—in favor of authenticity. “Making excuses” cuts both ways: **you** must contrive a forger who perfectly mimics Paul while inserting an irrelevant anti-Jewish rant with no manuscript trace.

In sum, Richard Carrier, **every argument you make fails** when tested against the full textual, linguistic, historical, and theological data. 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 is authentic Pauline material written in the early 50s CE. It provides early, firsthand evidence that Paul knew Jesus as a historical figure executed in Judea—precisely the evidence your mythicist project seeks to evade. The case for interpolation rests on special pleading, manufactured probabilities, and selective dismissal of counter-evidence, not sound logic or history.

In the absence of any other data, yes, the prior for forgery is better than interpolation. But we have a lot of other data establishing (1) 1 Thess is not a forgery and (2) 2:14–16 were not originally there. So, we conclude thus.

The best stylometric study, by Katarina Laken, shows why 1 Thess is Pauline and 2 Thess is not. But we don’t even need math to point to visible markers of divergent style. The author of 2 Thess is trying to accuse 1 Thess of being the fake, and uses a manner of discourse that looks like trying to sound like Paul but badly. Moreover, the forger of 2 Thess used 1 Thess as a model but we can use that fact to show that 2:14–16 was not in the copy of 1 Thess the author of 2 Thess was mimicking. And so on.

That’s why I land where I do. But this all requires diving the extensive literature on this.

Also the verbal correspondences between 1 and 2 Thessalonians don’t scream an obvious composition order to me.

(1) That grammar argument is not logical.

Because the Jews who killed the prophets are dead. So how can wrath have befallen them “at last”? Paul can only be speaking of Jews who are still alive (or were very recently; recently enough to have been “wrathed” recently enough for it to be “at last”). That means he cannot mean here only a few select Jews. The only living Jews who could be blamed for killing prophets centuries ago are the Jews of Judea, collectively.

So the most one could argue is that he means the latest generation of Jews of Judea (the ones who actually could be responsible for killing Jesus, as claimed in the Gospels that includes “the people” and not just the elite), since the Jews of the Diaspora cannot be blamed for that, while the prophets cannot be said to have been killed by recent Jews (as those deaths go back centuries and had diverse killers), so the Jews meant would have to be all the Jews of Judea, as a collective (and thus not certain specific Jews).

That could mean he is excluding any straggling Jews still remaining in Judea (imagining that God made sure all those guilty were cleansed by the Roman devastation leaving only those spared by His mercy). He doesn’t say that. But it is possible. It’s just that that still can only refer to the Jewish War.

(2) The argument is not that Paul does not speak negatively of Jews. The argument is that he never damns them like this; he never says anything remotely close to these things about them, but in fact says exactly the contrary, repeatedly.

This argument is a standard apologetical word game, where we choose to ignore how negative Paul speaks of Jews here and conflate that with just “anything” negative, and then claim that therefore this is like Paul. Once you expose the word game, the argument falls apart, by literally avoiding the argument it is supposed to be answering.

It should also be noted that Paul does not say anything about “the Jews” as a whole in 2 Cor. 11:24. He avoids the definite article there. He is thus there speaking only of some Jews, not all of them. He is thus not racializing the Jews and making a blanket state about them as if he himself wasn’t one of them. It is simply a matter of fact that some Jews attacked him. Just as he goes on to say some Gentiles did. That is not a statement about Gentiles as a whole. It’s just a description of a matter of fact. This is not what is going on in 1 Thess. 2.

(3) There is no “wrath upon them at last” that can make any sense here (as punishing the ancient murderers of prophets and recent murderers of Jesus and be final and thus not a temporary setback) other than the destruction of Judea and Jerusalem. It cannot mean an event outside Judea (as that would have no effect on Jews in Judea). And it cannot mean an event that was recovered from (as that would not be final). And it cannot mean an event that was trivial (as that would not be a final wrath of God; there is a reason we use “wrath of God stuff” to mean big things: little things never qualify for the description).

“For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of God’s churches in Judea, which are in Christ Jesus: you suffered from your own people the same things those churches suffered from the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and also drove us out.”

In this reading “the Jews, who killed the Lord Jesus” and “the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus” have very different meanings. In the former, it’s a more general statement whereas the latter statement is more restrictive of just specific Jews doing the things he said.

It’s more fleshed out here:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/new-testament-studies/article/abs/problem-of-the-antisemitic-comma-between-1-thessalonians-214-and-15/BFD57B5732D7590FE827B4FD747031A8

Another issue for me is that it’s not out of character for Paul to speak about “the Jews” in a negative manner. In 2 Corinthians 11:24 he says:

“Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one.”

Here he is making a negative generalization about what “the Jews” did to him, but he’s clearly not saying every single last Jew on earth lashed him. I think that would be an absurd way to interpret him.

So if it’s possible that he’s not referring to all Jews in the Thessalonians passage, wouldn’t that be possible here? And would that also mean that the “wrath having come” wouldn’t have to be as big as what happened in 70 AD? Or am I missing something here?

None of that is plausible. Get it published under peer review though, and I’ll take it seriously. Until then, it’s far more fringe a proposal than anything I have argued. It’s therefore not worth anyone’s time considering at present.

Hello Dr. Carrier.

In the spirit of Good Friday, I offer a fresh assessment of some highly relevant evidence that you use to argue against the authenticity of 1 Thessalonians 2:13-16. I contend that the evidence in 1 Corinthians 1:18 – 4:16 and 2:8 “archons of this aeon” specifically, supports the authenticity and Paul’s view of who were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus.

I have taken the time and space to patiently show why your assessment of 1 Corinthians 2:6-8 is sidestepping Paul’s actual argument in context.

My argument is inspired by the hermeneutical principles of John C Hurd – “The Earlier Letters of Paul (1998) and the argument of Dale C. Allison in ‘Constructing Jesus – Memory Imagination and History (Baker Academic 2013), and the careful exegesis of Gordon D. Fee in his 2nd edition of his 1 Corinthians commentary (Eerdmans 2014), but I have developed the argument it in my own way.

In the process I seek to demonstrate that ‘the god of this age’ in 2 Corinthians 4:4 is most probably a derogatory term for Jewish idolatry of the old covenant boundary markers. I pay careful attention to conceptual and linguistic parallels between chapter 3:14-18 and chapter 4:3-5 in order to make the case for this interpretation.

I hope that you think this far more detailed argument on Quora [link was not to Quora and is broken anyway and so has been removed—ed.] worthy of a considered response:

Kind regards,
Christian Michael

You seem not to understand what “evidence” is in the pertinent sense. Evidence, in the pertinent sense here, is by definition a fact (not an assertion, but something actually demonstrably true) that is more likely to have come into being on the explanation it is offered in evidence of, than on any other competing explanation. Thus, for example, anything that is just as likely to exist on multiple explanations, is not evidence for any of them.

For example, “Paul uses allegorical interpretations” is true but not evidence for your theory. As it is also fully expected on competing theories. By contrast, abundant evidence in Paul (as I have directed you to) contradicts your interpretation of Romans 9, indeed including the rest of the content of Romans 9. So you are in this case asserting as fact what is actually not a fact but a theory, one the actual facts render improbable, not the other way around. Mere theories are not evidence. Improbable theories, even less so. If you could prove the theory true (as in, highly probable), then its probability could stand as evidence. But I just explained to you, you have not done that; to the contrary, by excluding all the evidence against your theory, you are violating the rules of evidence. Similarly, your argument for 1 Thess. 2 advances a bunch of other assertions about what you think Paul is doing in that verse, which are also not facts, but again mere theories, for which there is no evidence, and even evidence against. Again, as I have explained, and directed you to.

This is important. You cannot argue this way. You don’t get to invent facts by proposing theories, then not testing those theories, least of all ignoring all the evidence against them, or the lack of any evidence for them, and then using those theories as “facts.” You also can’t claim as evidence any actual fact that is just as likely on either theory.

The most I can credit to you is that you seem to want to try and argue for a respectable prior probability of your allegory theory, by establishing Paul’s base rate in using that mode; but this only gets the theory to, at best, equally likely on either explanation. Thus, still not evidence. It would admittedly be worse for you if the evidence established Paul loathed and never used allegorical modes of discourse. But my point here is that establishing someone sometimes does a thing, is not evidence they did that thing in any particular case, much less in precisely the specific way you allege (which is depending on even further epicycles upon epicycles; each one of which halves the probability of your theory, even if each is as likely as 50%). For those claims you need specific evidence. Moreover, you cannot ignore any evidence to the contrary. The probability of a theory is a material product of the sum of all the evidence’s impact, not just some of it (much less none of it), and anything advanced as evidence that is actually just as likely on either theory, adds zero to either’s probability.

These principles must be respected if you want to derive what is the most probable conclusion. It is of no interest to cases like this what is merely possible (that only matters when someone has declared something “impossible”; otherwise, only what is probable matters). And probability requires actual evidence, of precisely the kind here defined; not stacks of merely speculated theories, nor facts equally likely on any theory.

Hi dr. Carrier,

Thank you for taking time to evaluate my argument, and for not resorting to mockery in your response.

You characterize my admittedly loose outline of a much larger argument as piling speculation upon speculation. No facts.

I am not sure how early you stopped following my line of reasoning.

What I wanted to do, but perhaps failed to carry out, was first of all to establish that we have clear precedents in Pauls other letters for allegorical interpretation of stories about Abrahams family, where the role of true descendants of Abraham is reinterpreted by Paul to equal the new covenant people, constituted by being ‘in Christ’.

The old covenant adherents are cast as the outsiders who are circumcised but nonetheless a) sent away without a share in the inheritance b) not children of god or c) hated by God

Example 1: Sarah and Hagar and their descendants. This is explicit in a) Galatians 4:21-31 and implicit in b) Romans 9:6-9

Example 2: The sons of Isaac, Jacob and Esau, are analogous (Romans 9:10) to Abrahams two sons in c) Romans 9:10-13

Romans 9:2-3 shows that Paul, when composing the letter to the Romans, was considering ethnic Israel to be cursed: Unlike Paul, the Jew, they are cut off from Christ:

“I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my people, those of my own race, the people of Israel

The allegories in Romans 9:6-13 function as scriptural pre-figurations of this ‘eschatological fact’ in the apocalyptic mind of Paul.

9:22 asks a rhetorical question that, in context, is concerns the current hardening of Israel:

“What if God, although choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath—prepared for destruction?”

In conclusion, I think I have shown evidence that Paul has made use of allegorical/role-swapped readings of stories about Abrahams 1st and 2nd generation descendants in three instances.

In all three, he casts the new covenant people, consisting of mainly gentiles, as ‘true children of God’: Isaac and Jacob, and ethnic old-covenant Israel as ‘not children of God’, despite their circumcision: Ishmael and Esau. What is more, the old covenant adherent Jews are currently cut off from Christ (9:2-3) and objects of Gods wrath.(9:22)

Do you follow the contextual logic of my reading this far, or do you think I am stacking speculations and committing exegetical errors already at this point?

PS. I consider joining your class the next month on the historicity of Jesus.

Kind regards,
Christian