Right. Livesey’s argument would work better if what we had were instead the Paul-Seneca Correspondence or 3 Corinthians, and not what we actually have, which looks 180-degrees different in exactly all the ways that destroy her thesis.

Yeah, my thoughts exactly. I think the theory falls on its own internal tensions. Paul is just not good enough of a fictive voice to cast your words in from the internal evidence… unless there was someone who you could claim as a Paul type, even if not literally named Paul, who was the first innovator of the Gentile church. But then there was a “Paul” in some sense, even if we have none of his extant writings. And that further invites the question of what the hell Acts wants from him if he’s not going to be viewed by their communities as basically #2 to Jesus, the guy who you naturally tell the story of as your central protagonist after Jesus exits stage left. Why did two separate groups want to make up this specific guy who is so inconvenient in so many ways?

I think Livesey’s thesis would be stronger if we had evidence that the other members of the twelve, who I’d say are your natural fit if you can get away with it (e.g. the Gospel of Judas), themselves had a clear set of traits and arguments attributed to them. But from my understanding, the only person besides Paul we have some idea about the original perspective of is Peter, and even then not much.

And I also think the theory stumbles on its own probability in a different way. If we remove all of the Epistles of Paul as forgeries, then the extant literature left for Christians is so minute, and 2 Peter proves so capable of being altered, that why bother making up a guy at all? I have a sense (and perhaps this is unfair) that Livesey isn’t thinking about the fact that her theory actually entails that we have essentially no authentic correspondence from the early church.

The usual answer is that “someone” had to be invented to do all this; and for this kind of thing, it had to be someone not already known. Because if they are known, people will notice they never said any of this; if suddenly a hundred years later these mysterious books no one heard of show up, saying exactly the opposite or something wildly different from what they are known for, it’s going to be a hard sell. But some guy no one heard of? That’s easier to explain. “You just didn’t move in those circles so as to know about this.”

That’s why 2 Peter works as a forgery because it plays to what people think or were told Peter taught and thus it’s “just what he would say” (in their minds). Similarly 1 and 2 Timothy, especially given the misogynistic interpolation in 1 Corinthians 14. These stretch things (the real Paulines are much more egalitarian) but by surrounding the stretches with plausible “sounds like him” ideas to sort of “cover” for the fact that this looks odd to an attentive follower of Paul’s previous work, it can succeed. Because Paul never says explicitly exactly the opposite thing. You have to extract that by inferences across many letters and statements. So the “fake news” approach is less stymied by this.

In short, a pre-existing legendary guy constrains what you can get away with and how. That’s why the Gospels contradict each other but still aim for plausible changes that can be explained by intervening interpreters or divergent memories.

In essence, on this theory, Paul is himself an invented legend, like Ned Ludd, designed to give credence to new or competing ideas. This is why Livesey spends so much time arguing that his name is fake (she’s wrong, but it’s still why she has to argue that). If the name is itself part of the propaganda, then you have an even better explanation. That doesn’t mean fake authorities don’t get randomly named just because they need “a” name and it doesn’t matter what (the fake historians in the latter half of the Historia Augusta are a famous example; likewise the fake authors of the Ned Ludd florilegia; Alan Cameron’s study of Greek mythology has a whole chapter on fabricating named sources as a common device to lend authority to myths by dissolving the anonymous source suspicion).

My problem with this is, rather, that it seems a silly thing to do. If you are going to make this up, why not just say Jesus came to you and told you directly? Or invent a neglected disciple who heard Jesus say it all in life and those other dastardly apostles kept it hidden?

In other words, why invent a problematic weak tea advocate? If you are inventing, just invent a rock-solid exactly-what-you-need advocate. This is, again, why 2 Peter is 2 “Peter” and not the “Letter from Bouplagus” and people are scratching their head at who Bouplagus is or why they should care what he thinks. Moreover, this is why 2 Peter adamantly and deliberately invents evidence of meeting Jesus in life and confirming his divinity first hand, rather than spinning a convoluted story about private visions and mission backstories that you have to struggle to convince the other apostles of, all the while constantly defending yourself against accusations of graft as you openly admit to taking sacks of cash to the apostolate. It’s just not a plausible thing any forger would think to do. They would go for far more direct and obvious mechanisms and scorn anything that would distract or problematize their mission.

Having heard you discuss this in one of the most recent discussions on MythVision, something occurred to me.

How the hell does this thesis account for why you would invent Paul at all?

If “Paul” never existed at all, in the same way Jesus did, then we have to imagine that there was a folkloric Paul to put words into the mouth of.

Because if no one had heard of this guy by the second century, why would anyone care what he had to say?

If you were going to forge someone’s correspondence, why not forge Peter, or another Apostle… unless there was a Paul in the traditions that people trusted?

And since Paul is so weird and inconvenient as a source (i.e. he’s a latecomer and former persecutor), if you were going to invent the guy, why not invent someone with better credentials for your argument? I get that some people would say that he proves that persecutors can turn because of how awesome the evidence is and how great Jesus is, but if you’re forging his letters to win doctrinal battles in an alternate timeline where Paul wasn’t a person who had actually become beloved because he basically founded the viable Gentile church version, then why choose him at all?

The alternative is to say that the letters are forged but there was a guy. Not only is that odd to say that we could even know that if our extant communications of him are now late forgeries, but then that makes the thesis totally trivial, right?

Oh thank you for pointing that out! I had not been aware.

The breadcrumb starts here.

That book predates Case Against Q but is still worth having or consulting.

Sorry, I don’t follow your logic. The chopped up letters mean there were real letters that someone chopped up. That “someone” can’t be Marcion unless he had real letters to chop up (so their chapped up status disproves Marcion wrote them), so either the whole letters were published or the chopped text he appropriated was published. But there is no evidence the whole letters were published (else the anti-Marcionites would have them, but instead they have the same chopped-up edition he used). So someone published the chopped letters before Marcion. That could have been Paul. But as I carefully note, it need not have been. It could have been a beloved student (indeed, IMO, that’s more likely).

The question remains who edited them. I described three possible scenarios: Paul had a dossier of the complete letters and (1) he or (2) his student chopped them up for publication or (3) Paul did not keep copies of the whole letters in his dossier but only the bits he wanted to be able to keep referencing for future correspondence, and his student just published what he inherited from Paul, in which case Paul is the one who chopped them up before even contemplating publishing them.

The one thing we can be sure of is that Marcion would never invent letters in this condition. So he cannot have composed them. He must have inherited a previously published edition. And his opponents knew no other edition than that same one, yet clearly did know of it. For example (and this is just one example), they would not have fabricated the stitch between 1 Cor. 8 and 9 either, yet we know Marcion cut a chunk out of 9 but not the part that created the oddity. So the chopped edition both used was clearly published, and not some thing Marcion alone inherited (like as if Paul stuffed it in a chest in an attic and Marcion inherited that house and found it in the attic, or some such odd sequence of events).

..and you consider this extreme fragmentation of the letters as evidence that Paul wrote them. But an exxagerated fragmentation of the letters would imply that the final editor was de facto, if not de jure, re-writing them. It is the paradox of the Theseus ship: were the letters edited by Marcion (after a long list of editors before Marcion) the same original letters, or were they a different thing? If the conclusion is that they were a different thing, isn’t it equivalent to conclude that the final editor (i.e. Marcion) fabricated them?

That would be self-defeating. Forgers never made their lives harder. That defeated the purpose of making a forgery in the first place. The purpose of forgery was to make their lives easier, to sell what they were selling, not undermine it. Much less be jumbled together with doubled endings and missing sections and the like. There just is no appreciable probability that Marcion would have composed these letters as he had them.

Moreover, the problem is far worse than you seem to realize. The letters don’t just fall short. They are explicitly anti-Marcionite as written, even in Marcion’s versions (so far as we can reconstruct). See my comment on the last article in this series.

Tertullian accuses Marcion of working immorally as a secretive deceiver. Technically, could Marcion have hidden deliberately his lamp under a bushel? Afterall, a more explicit anti-demiurgist speech was found (and censored) in the Antitheses, designed to interpret the letters and the gospel. Which implies that also Marcion conceded that the letters were not explicit in condemning the demiurge.