I cover that possibility in Was the Entire New Testament Forged in the Second Century?. But I am also writing a critical review of Livesey that will go into it more. Overall, it’s plausible (as in, worth taking seriously; it’s not crank or ridiculous), but not probable. I outline some of the reasons already in the linked article. I’ll outline more in my next.

Outside the stylometry, the Christ before jesus book has some interesting pulls from others. Seeing Marcion’s Evangelion as the precursor to Luke is interesting. I’ve read from others who think this is likely. It’s on the valid level of consideration for me.

No mention of Paul before Marcion…no real idea of how much of Paul’s 10 letters are included in Marcion or if material from those 10 get added later is also interesting to consider.

Wondering if Paul’s authentic letters are compilations to whatever degree is also a worthwhile thought, I’d think. That second century people had no shame, apparently, writing for Paul and then those get picked up as authentic and scriptural has also felt a bit telling….or very much worth further investigation.

Positing a Proto-Mark seems useless to me, or always had, but if Evangelion was pre-Mark, and Mark, whoever wrote it, was aware of Marcion, then we have something. Plus Marcion is just little Mark.

I’ve also looked into Livesey’s new book about Paul being more of an invented literary tool as well. Others have taken that up. IT’s an interesting idea. And considering the lack of anything about Paul i see why others think its quite likely.

It apparent after Marcion puts together his new testament, an explosion of writings and ideas start to appear–a worthy consideration.

Something I intend to look into more is the idea that Marcion’s story has some parallel to Paul’s–also something akin to Josephus’ story…I’d have to begin to dig a bit there.

in all I’m certainly feeling less and less convinced there was a Jesus story in the first century. I don’t get a good feel, or haven’t, as to why the gospels must have been first century. The later dates seem more reasonable at this point. But it wasn’t the Christ before Jesus book that brought me there, per se. But they do seem to share some of the those ideas.

Good catch. Thank you. Fixed.

How secure are we that a trained scribe back in the day would not leave his “finger prints” on the letters? Maybe some did; maybe some did not.

First, there is no evidence of it, but there would have been were it a thing. So it’s not a viable hypothesis.

Second, all ancient rhetorical education trained writers to take unique control of what they write. Collaboration was not promoted or taught as a thing, and ran contrary to the entire point of ancient rhetoric, which was to establish yourself as a unique authority and not someone else’s shill or subject to someone else’s “editing.”

That’s why forgeries and interpolations were so rampant: no one wanted to claim to be “an editor” or “co-author,” they needed to claim to be that singular author, or else no one would take it seriously. Conversely, Paul would never let someone else (least of all someone with no apostolic authority) put words into his mouth, as that would be corrupting his authority and control over what gets said.

Even the exceptions prove the rule. There are a few works in the first person plural and thus marketed as coauthored or community texts, like 1 Clement and 1 John and even (contrary to what most people seem to notice) the Gospel of John. But data shows they were consistently styled and thus actually always by a single author (e.g. the coherence of style across the Johannine literature demonstrates this: they are by a single person claiming to be several).

Third, “fingerprints” would not be of any measurable effect here. To deviate as much as Colossians does from the six authentics would require massive overwriting, not just a few changes here and there. And this holds even in standard stylometry, which points to strangely different uses of words, which Paul could not have endorsed because they contradicted how he expected those words to be used and understood, so he wouldn’t have signed off on that even if he allowed a co-author.

But above all, the main point to remember is that Paul never says there are co-authors. That is a made-up modern idea. So why are we falling for a modern fabricated notion? We should start with the evidence. And there is no instance anywhere of Paul saying anyone helped him write these letters. Their introductions don’t say that, however much modern scholars want to anachronistically “spin” what they do say into an imaginary “co-author” hypothesis. But I already covered that in the article.

As for the James text, you can write down a hundred hypotheses. That gets you nowhere to knowing which is true. “Possibly therefore probably” is a fallacy and thus is no part of sound historical reasoning.

And remember, those hundred hypotheses include anomaly (e.g., a 1% chance of accidental match predicts 1 in every 100 texts will accidentally match, and thus finding one doesn’t prove anything more than that). So they are already “considering false positives.”

This is how probabilistic reasoning works. “Maybe 1 Corinthians was forged by a chimney sweep in Belgium in 1922” has a nonzero probability of being true. That does not mean anyone should ever believe it, much less use it as a premise.

The argument for authenticity comprises converging evidence, not singular evidence. “Says it was by Paul and nails his style” equals “Hundred to one odds Paul wrote it.” Those odds then go up as standard stylometry and historical arguments get added (the letters are coherent in ideas and backstory, non-anachronistic, match across even hard-to-notice quirks, etc.). You can’t get to 100% certainty. But the odds have stacked the way they have and that’s what we should go with.

Thanks for courteous reply.

Re-reading my original note, I sure wish I had a scribe to fix my typos and text 🙂 … and make me make more sense.

How secure are we that a trained scribe back in the day would not leave his “finger prints” on the letters? Maybe some did; maybe some did not.

I would be surprise if the scribe’s patron did not expect the scribe to make “improvements” that would give a better impression of the patron.

This brings me to your comment:

“the most Pauline of all the non-Paulines is…James. … If we didn’t know better, we’d have classed this as authentically by Paul.”

We could speculate why. A shared scribe? A common redactor between the original letter and cannon? Two writers share a similar/same schooling? One writer trying to sound like the other? etc.

But there also the possibility that these are two separate writers, times and places, making this is a false positive … This could mean that authors making stylometry base arguments need to seriously consider false positives.

Just musings from a non-scholar.

As explained in the article you are commenting on, scribes are not composers. The choice and arrangement of words, the structure of each argument, was always dictated by the singular author.

And as for “do evolving styles still match for a single author over time,” that has been tested quite a lot and the answer is yes. This is why the authentic letters of Paul show evolving deviation but remain in the statistical orbit of the same author.

The Testimonium Flavianum, meanwhile, is too short for statistical stylometry to operate on. It can only be tackled by standard stylometry (see: Olson for vocabulary; Hopper for grammar; etc.).

As for what Britt and Wingo are doing wrong, that’s documented in the article here that you are commenting on. Those errors are not solved by just “using publicly available stylometry software.”

For example, it is of no use if that software is ready to handle a tagged Greek text; you still have to tag the Greek text (and correctly). You also have to explain what you are measuring. Just “claiming” to have used a properly tagged text is not communicating anything; we need to know what kind of n-gram or other technique they used that way, and what settings they chose for it, and what thresholds they set for common authorship and why. And yet they haven’t even said they used a tagged text, much less any of the rest.

Until they do what Laken did, their results are useless. Because they contain no data, or methodology by which to assess what they even did with that data, and thus why it would indicate anything usable. That’s the definition of incompetence. You cannot judge a competent statistical stylometry (Laken) by the utter abject failure of amateurs to use it properly (Britt and Wingo).

That the method is worth the lift has been demonstrated across a vast literature. This is a widely studied technique (that’s why software exists now: that was not just “made up,” but built on a foundation of thousands of peer reviewed scientific studies). To say “Britt and Wingo completely fucked this up, so maybe the whole method is a bust” is simply to fail to comprehend what is even happening here.

If Paul used a different scribe for each of his letters, how are we to know what is Paul and what is the scribe du jour?

I am also curious if stylometry would find 2005, 2015 and 2025 Richard Carrier writings to be an exact match? Or if stylometry could slice and dice a Richard Carrier co-written paper? Maybe yes, maybe no.

The promise of stylometry is that it might give us a definitive answer wrt alleged tampered texts like the Pocket Gospel in Josephus. (I am sure that the apologists would take the Pocket Gospel remove all of the non-Josephus words and phrases and try desperately to make sense of that, because of course they would)

BTW, you may have been a little rough Matthew Britt and Jaaron Wingo. They claim to be amateurs and likely would not dispute your “folie à deux” label. Regardless of their “findings”, they say that they have made their source documents (NT Greek) publicly available. IIRC they are using public available stylometry software that has been trained with or configured to handle ancient Greek (by someone else) :shrug: You in theory could duplicate their results or not, which gets back to my original question … is the juice worth the squeeze?

Thanks for the links! On the subject whether Paul refers to an historical Jesus; there is 1Cor 15:45 where Paul mentions the creation of both Adam and Jesus in the same sentence.

“So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being the last Adam (Jesus), a life-giving spirit.”
Paul uses ginomai (became) once for both Adams! Obviously the first Adam was not born….

Earlier I’ve created a summary list on Pauls’ Jesus;

Paul’s letters show no knowledge of an earthly Jesus of Nazareth. References to the imminent arrival of a celestial Jesus Christ are always, and only, in future tense – he is to come, to arrive etc. Nowhere does Paul state that Jesus will return, come again or gives any other indication of an earlier earthly residence of Jesus Christ;

Nowhere does Paul state where, or when, the death and resurrection of Jesus took place;
None of the Jerusalem Church members Cephas (Peter), John and James, or anyone else, are ever identified as followers (disciples) of an earthly Jesus;
Paul never identifies Jesus Christ as a preacher, teacher, or a leader of any Palestinian religious movement;
In Gal. 4:14 Paul identifies Christ Jesus as an angel of God;
Nowhere are Paul’s “the twelve” from 1 Cor. 15:5 identified as disciples. That misplaced notion comes from reading the Gospels into Paul’s letters. Apparently, Peter (Cephas) was not part of the twelve;
Paul does not state where, or when, the bread and wine ceremony in 1 Cor 11:23-26 took place – or whether it even occurred on earth, Paul claims he received his information about the ceremony through a revelation from Jesus;
Paul states that his knowledge about Jesus Christ came through direct revelations from Jesus Christ and scripture only – and not from any person. Gal. 1:11-12 and Rom.16:25-26;
There is no evidence that other apostles obtained their knowledge about Jesus Christ by means other than revelations and scripture as in 1 Cor. 15: 3-8;
Paul describes Jesus’ crucifixion in Gal 3:13 as having been hung from a tree. The scripture reference is to Deut. 21:22-23. The OT verses deal with the postmortem display of executed criminals and not the Roman execution method. “Hanged from a tree” in Greek will be translated as “crucifixion”;
In 1 Cor 2:6-10 Paul tells us who killed Jesus – without specifying a time or location. Jesus was “crucified” (see 10) by the “rulers of this age” (archonton tou aionos toutou). By using the term “rulers of this age” Paul refers to the supernatural powers of Satan and his demons who live in in the firmament, and not to earthly authorities. Apparently, these supernatural powers were ignorant and mistakenly killed Jesus – and by doing so are doomed to perish;
Elsewhere, in Romans 13:1- 4, Paul states that earthly authorities are servants of God who can do no wrong. Good conduct need not fear, but wrongdoers will be punished by God servants. Here Paul contradicts the Gospel’s claims that Jesus was not guilty of a crime, and unjustly executed – another indication that Paul Jesus Christ is not the Jesus of Nazareth of the Gospels;
In Rom. 8:22-23 Paul promises his followers adoption by God. Consequently, in Rom 8:29 God’s firstborn Jesus will be surrounded by many (adopted) brothers. They are, “the brothers of the Lord”;
A key part of Paul’s belief was a soon to come end-times cosmic battle when Satan, his demons and death, are defeated and subjugated by the celestial Christ. Since Christ had assumed human form in the firmament, his sacrifice nullified death introduced by the disobedience of Adam. 1Cor. 15:20-27;
The late first century manuscript, “The Ascension of Isaiah”, describes the crucifixion, (hanged from a tree), and resurrection of a celestial Jesus in Satan’s world. It fits Paul’s Jesus story well. On the other hand, The Pauline narratives remain a difficult fit for an historical Jesus.

I’m sure the “course” will be about as fair and balanced as Fox news. For Ehrman and his crowd there is a lot at stake; reputation, credibility, lucrative publishing income, employment, peer acceptance and more.

Much of religious studies faculties get financed by religious institutions and mythicism is poison for those, Ehrman has a number of talking points based on misrepresentation or ignorance. We covered some of those. He is not looking for facts that do not fit his views. He’s forever reading the gospels into Paul’s letters.

And yes, Paul states the the women are allegory in Gal 4.