Previously I summarized why I am not convinced by Nina Livesey’s thesis, in her new study The Letters of Paul, that all his letters were forged in the second century (Are Paul and His Letters a Second Century Fabrication?). There I mentioned I have never been convinced by arguments that Paul did not exist, not because it’s implausible, but because (unlike the case for Jesus) the arguments for it are not empirically or mathematically sound. Indeed, in On the Historicity of Jesus I explain at several points why the same arguments do not work for Jesus. So they can’t work for Paul. While the arguments that do work for Jesus do not exist for Paul. I have already treated this point in The Historicity of Paul the Apostle and How Do We Know the Apostle Paul Wrote His Epistles in the 50s A.D.? (as well as Was the Entire New Testament Forged in the Second Century?). Here I only address Livesey’s case.

I must also reemphasize that I am focusing on what I think Livesey gets wrong here because that explains why I am not convinced. But do not get the wrong impression thereby: Livesey’s book is also overflowing with tons of valuable information and good discussions of the facts, and the scholarship, and the possibilities. There’s a lot of hard work here (her bibliography alone is nearly thirty pages long), and it’s mostly right about stuff. That you need to fallacy- and fact-check any specific claim in it before trusting it is a folly of most peer reviewed studies in biblical studies (as indeed she herself documents). So the mistakes I catalogue are not peculiar.

Maybe vs. Probably

I won’t challenge Livesey’s point that we can doubt Paul existed (that this is entirely plausible), because apart from being only slightly overstated, she’s right. Her first and second chapters demonstrate that biblical historians have been overly gullible in just “trusting” everything passed on to them. She is right that we need a reason to believe the authentic Epistles aren’t just another series of forgeries, that they come from a real man writing in (most likely) the 50s A.D. I just think we have that reason. The same follows, crucially, for 1 Clement—the only external corroboration of Paul’s historicity. Livesey dates that to the “mid-second century” (pp. 110, 113–18) but on no real argument; she just prefers the historians who argue that, and never engages with (or even mentions) any of the latest scholarship that (to my mind) decisively proves 1 Clement dates to the 60s (see How We Can Know 1 Clement Was Actually Written in the 60s AD; and I make my own case in OHJ, §7.6, §8.5). Thomas Herron isn’t even named, nor Clayton Jefford or Andrew Gregory, or the important work of David Eastman that bolsters the case (see Interpreting 1 Clement’s Supposed Descriptions of Fabulous Murders).

So that all this is fake is just a “maybe,” not a proof. And it declines in probability when we examine the internal evidence that I already summarized before. The authentic letters are too chopped up and realistic, and too naive and uninformed for a 2nd century context, to have been forged (much less by Marcion). And the Gospel of Mark is not plausibly a second century text, yet employed the Epistles as source material. So the most Livesey can carry here is that doubting Paul existed is plausible enough to consider her next two arguments (as I explained last time). But by itself it cannot carry her case. The balance of probability favors the historicity of Paul.

Indeed, as a mundane person (and not a superhero) prior probability favors Paul’s existence (just like Hannibal). Unlike Jesus, you need good reasons to doubt he existed, not the absence of good reasons to believe it. Indeed, if you are going to conclude the mundane Paul can be doubted, you should doubt the unmundane Jesus. That is a character far more likely not to exist than Paul, with less evidence in support and more against. Jesus belongs to the genre of fabulous superheroes; we have no writings plausibly from him or anyone who knew him; and he is corroborated by no contemporary.

Still, Livesey is correct in describing as unwarranted the academy’s insistence that Paul was real (e.g. their citation of Ignatius, now dated to the 140s or later, is no longer useful, nor is most else). That claim is not a successful argument against her thesis. The question really is whether the letters provide evidence to doubt Paul was real. Which gets us to her second and third arguments, which I treated last time (and will go into more detail on next time, which will go live soon).

Are There Suspicious Omissions in the Letters?

A lot of Livesey’s arguments against the letters’ authenticity are non sequiturs—a point I already made last time and will explore more next time. But some of these she uses to argue against the historicity of even Paul. So those warrant closer look.

For example, Livesey says “the express (and likely intentional) lack of specificity in the letters surrounding the named communities’ precise location and makeup suggests that they are instead fictive” is a conclusion that does not follow from its premise. Arguments from Silence require the silence to be improbable (Proving History, index). But here we have no reason to expect this information. Why would Paul ever have to specify these things? Those details never matter to any point he is making, so there is no reason for them to be there. Paul does identify the city of each receiving congregation—except Galatians, because it is addressed to “the churches in Galatia,” plural (and hence the Galatians as a people), not to a single city or congregation. While the specific address (directing a messenger where to take the letter) would be on the verso of any actually delivered letters and thus wouldn’t be included in any copy of the letter made even by the Corinthians themselves, and certainly not in Paul’s own dossier—which would contain copies of letters sent, not the letters actually sent, and only for reference. Their versos would contain more text of the same or other letters, while Paul’s addressbook would be an entirely separate document.

Livesey also inserts undefended premises here. “Likely” intentional? How does she know that? This appears to be circularly assuming the conclusion in the premise. And “express”? She appears to be misusing that word. Because there is no expressed effort by Paul to not discuss those things in these letters. There is merely no occasion to. Even if we tried to fix all this and argue something more grounded, like that the dateline is missing (as indeed that should be on the recto directly above the text, as with the letters of Pliny and Cicero), we still don’t get traction because what we have are edited dossiers, not the original letters or even copies made from them.

These letters were not collected from their destinations; no one went around the churches gathering up letters (even Livesey agrees the evidence does not support that). Rather, someone published Paul’s dossier of self-made copies, which he would have kept only for his own reference, and those may well have not included the datelines (especially if Paul is the one pastiching the letters as I noted before), but even if they did, whoever edited them for publication (who may be the one who pastiched them up into long pseudo-letters) would then be the one who removed the datelines (as being superfluous or undesired—or no longer apt, if the resulting letters are pieced together from separate letters spanning years). So we can’t get to “it’s improbable these copies would lack datelines” from “it’s improbable Paul would omit datelines” because we have no evidence by which to establish that Paul did omit the datelines in the original letters, whereas it is not improbable that he would in his self-kept dossier.

Is Paul’s Name Too Weird to Believe?

The above shows Livesey suffers the same tendency to fall into fallacious reasoning as all professional historians, as extensively documented in D.H. Fischer’s Historians’ Fallacies. But Livesey also runs into factual errors that stem from overtrusting her peers, which is a particular problem in biblical studies. There it is common for publications often to be wrong about things. Accordingly, you really need to “check” anything they say or conclude before believing them. A case in point is when Livesey says “Paulus” (the name Paul) is “largely unattested as a cognomen (a nickname) in the ancient world” (p. 83) or even “unknown as an ancient cognomen” (p. 253) This is also a logical fallacy (“only a few people had that name, therefore none of those people existed,” does not work for any other Paulus, and so it cannot work on Paul). But it’s also false: Colin Hemer documented Paulus was so common a cognomen that even a random sailor’s heir had it.

I assume Livesey is not confusing cognomen with praenomen here (the praenomen Paullus was arguably rare; not the cognomen). But she seems to think the Paulus in the name of the famous aristocrat Lucius Sergius Paulus is a nomen. That’s incorrect: it’s a cognomen. And that it was popular in the Sergii clan does not mean they owned it. To the contrary, that only supports how popular the name was. It could indeed have been taken by any of the likely hundreds of that family’s freedmen (or, indeed, auxiliary soldiers released from their service with a diploma of citizenship), or the resulting thousands of their descendants, over the centuries, and thus proliferated as a beloved family name well outside the Sergii clan itself—even if it originated in those other family lines generations before Paul’s own family gave it to him. And none of that is even necessary to presume. We don’t know who gave Hemer’s sailor’s heir Gaius Julius the cognomen Paulus, but it was no one connected to the Sergii; they are certainly no direct relation even to the imperial Julii clan, but most likely again an ex-slave or retired auxiliary—or the son or descendant of one (like the famous pagan jurist Julius Paulus, also probably no relation). And the cognomen Paulus was favored by other clans, like the Anastasii, the Aemilii, and so on.

Hemer cites as evidence that Paulus was commonplace in the prosopography of Iiro Kajanto, The Latin Cognomina (pp. 243–44), which notes it took many forms. Paulus, Paullus, Polus, and Pollus, are all the same name: they all mean “Tiny,” and all Roman names were just like mafia nicknames that way. Cicero meant “Bean” (likely in reference to his nose or a growth on his face), Caesar “Hairy,” Festus “Happy,” Felix “Lucky,” Scaevola “Lefty,” Balbus “Stuttermouth,” and so on. But you can check more recent studies. For example, Andreas Gavrielatos (Names) has documented that “Paulus” was a beloved and much-used name among Celtic citizens of the Roman Empire, as attested in, for example, potter’s marks from the first century, which rule out this being somehow only used by aristocrats.

And it doesn’t end there. We see the cognomen Paulus all over, in papyri (e.g. P.Mil. Vogl. I 24, A.D. 117, attests yet another average Joe named Paulus; P.Dura 98, A.D. 218, attests a soldier named Aurelius Paulus, again surely not of the imperial Aurelii but a descendant of someone who served them as a slave or auxiliary) and inscriptions (e.g. Gargilius Paulus, Aelius Paulus, Aebutius Paulus, etc.). So Livesey has based her conclusion that Paul doesn’t exist on false information. She was misled by some scholar somewhere who made some claim about this that simply wasn’t true. That this is so common a mistake in this field is why we can’t just “believe” scholars like Livesey any more than she should have just “believed” the scholar she relied on for this herself. Always ask if you are wrong before believing anything, even coming from an expert (and yes, that includes me: hence all the evidence I am citing here, so you don’t have to just “trust” me on this—and why I myself thought to check this claim).

But more important than that is the logic. For example, Livesey has a great section on how Acts is probably spinning a tall tale about Paul having changed his name from Saul. I concur. Paul could have had the name Saul, though it wouldn’t be a name change. Paul’s full actual name could have been, say, Saulus Aemilius Paulus (with his praenomen his Jewish name, his cognomen ending in -ius as his family name, however his family acquired it—and Paulus his cognomen), and Luke could have known that (e.g. if the charging document he records for Paul from Claudius Lysias was based on a real thing, it would have included Paul’s full trinomen). But the way Acts treats this looks far more fictional and made-up (Livesey makes a decent case). But that doesn’t tell us anything about Paul or his letters—as he never makes that claim about himself there. That Acts is fiction deliberately engineered to undermine the narrative of Paul’s letters does not entail Paul’s letters are also fiction.

Conversely, Livesey has some interesting ideas on why the author of Acts has the apostle “Paulus” interact with the senator “Paulus” (Sergius), which she argues could mean Acts invented our Paul and his name (p. 89), which does not jibe with most scholars who deem Acts an anti-Marcionite text that post-dates the letters and in fact is their counter-narrative (Livesey does not declare herself for who wrote Acts or when, but cites the possibility that Acts predates the invented Epistles). But literarily, she doesn’t consider the alternative: that this is why the author of Acts invented interactions between those two Pauls in the first place. Neither man need be invented for such fiction to be contrived (and indeed Sergius most definitely existed). So there can be no argument against the historicity of Paul himself here. Livesey’s reasoning is a non sequitur, failing to properly consider the alternative explanation and whether it makes the evidence any more or less likely (or—more importantly—neither). Even experts need to remember The Scary Truth About Critical Thinking.

Is Paul’s Mention of Aretas Anachronistic?

Another example of all this is Livesey’s attempt to argue that “King Aretas IV’s authority over Damascus” is unlikely, therefore Paul’s claim of it indicates a forgery. But she has again fallen victim to over-trusting her peers and doesn’t know that that’s not even the most likely explanation of the relevant passage, as Paul never says Aretas controlled Damascus—that’s a modern scholarly theory. In fact Paul’s narratives suggests Aretas did not control Damascus (hence why his marshals had to wait outside the city and couldn’t hunt him down inside it). I cover these kinds of mistakes (which are not just hers; her peers are guilty here) in my article How Do We Know the Apostle Paul Wrote His Epistles in the 50s A.D.?

There are three kinds of errors to look for here, as anywhere else in her study.

• First, there actually are reasonable arguments for Aretas briefly holding Damascus precisely then, and no actual evidence against it, so we actually can’t derive the premise that it is “unlikely.” So Livesey, as often, over-sells premises that she has not actually established.
• Second, there are in fact better explanations of the scene than that—such as fit the fact that (odd for a forger) Paul is cagey about what happened in Arabia after he converted and later returned to neighboring Damascus (a tale he oddly skips quickly past in Galatians 1), yet here Arabia is precisely whose goons are trying to grab him outside Damascus, exactly after he returned from Arabia. Do the math on that. There is a personal story here that Paul is skirting around. And that is not how an ancient forger would operate. This sounds like a real guy with an actual shady past who is genuinely trying to trade on it without getting into the weeds, and accomplishing this by only mentioning the bits that are self-serving. Real people can also be false narrators, remember (Paul could be real and lying—after all, how would the Corinthians know what really happened at Damascus a thousand miles away?). Once again, Livesey is failing to take alternative explanations properly into account: a common failure-mode among biblical historians.
• Third, Livesey strangely relies on the premise that “Paul’s presence in Damascus is only cited” in 2 Cor. 11 and therefore we lack “sufficient evidence to locate Paul in Damascus at the same time.” This is kind of an own-goal, an unnecessary premise that is so obviously false that adding it actually makes her argument worse. Because Paul does mention his presence in Damascus somewhere else: Galatians 1:17, where he even connects this fact with Arabia again, and even gives us a chronology that actually signals he was in Damascus three years after he converted, precisely when Aretas could have been holding Damascus. It’s a coincidence that in fact counts as evidence for the territorial argument. Livesey overlooks this and thus gets her facts and logic wrong. And we don’t even need the territorial argument.

Again, these errors are not uncommon. Biblical studies is rife with them. But that is why you have to check these things. Livesey’s section on Acts is full of interesting and valuable observations and is worth reading. But as I found, you can’t count on any detail of it that you haven’t double-checked yourself.

Did Wealthy Patrons Not Have Large Homes?

We see all of this (bad facts, bad logic) in Livesey’s attempt to argue that even wealthy patrons (whom Paul’s letters attest hosted congregations in their homes) could not host “fifty” people and therefore none of Paul’s churches could have existed.

This is so illogical an argument it is hard to even know where to begin. First, Livesey ironically gives no evidence for any congregation being that large then—so to argue for something not existing because there is no evidence, she argues something existed despite there being no evidence. Her methodology is self-contradictory. But her other premise is also false. Insurance standards even today establish that fifty people can safely attend an event in just 250 square feet. That’s just 16 x 16. Which is not even twice the size of a tiny slave room. And ancient people were neither as large as modern, nor inclined to adhere to OSHA regulations. But even a small home of means would have a space that size—and wealthy homes, even more so, especially those with an atrium in a twostory, which doubles the floor space at its mezzanine (see image).

Moreover, when you host a party, you don’t squish everyone into a single room—the party spans many rooms. Even a large dinner party will have set-ups in two or three adjoining rooms with flow between them, and everyone can hear a good speaker in the center of them. The more so if the community meets at different times, first shift and second using the same available space. And even more so if exterior space is in play (like an adjoining garden), or when actually large congregations could afford renting a meeting space. But there’s already no reason to believe these congregations were that large yet. If a congregation starts at 10 people and grows at a common net rate of 5% per year, after 20 years you’ve got only 26 people. So there’s just nothing to stand on here to get Livesey’s argument to work. It fails at five different facts simultaneously.

And So On

I won’t cover every error I found, but you now have the tools to find them: any argument Livesey makes for her thesis, you can “check” and see if its premises or logic hold up.

For example, Livesey argues Paul cannot have collected his own letters because that “relies on a school-like setting for Paul,” but she just admitted Cicero and Pliny kept dossiers of their own letters and published them, and that was not in the context of any “school of Pliny” or “school of Cicero,” so she refutes her own argument in the very same paragraph. Moreover, if you check the facts, you’ll find that this is how schools of thought begin: founding charismatics collect their own writings, which students revere and keep and expand on, thus explaining why Mark has the dossier to build a Gospel from twenty years later, and why Clement knows Paul’s opinions carried reverence and thus were worth citing to win an argument. This is the sequence of events for the Epicurean school, Plato’s school, and so on. None of which requires a physical “school.” Schools of thought are conceptual, not geographical. Hence there was no physical “school of Galen” or “school of Erasistratus,” yet collections of their writings, and “students” avowing their allegiance to them, continued for centuries (and yet we know this only from scant and chance data; and we don’t even have that much for early Christianity, negating arguments from silence, because we cannot argue from the silence of documents we don’t have: OHJ, Ch. 8).

As I said last time:

It seems more likely that the names of all these letters were the names Paul assigned to the scrolls wherein he collected and kept copies of all his correspondence to the same congregations (this was common, e.g. my study of tax receipts where the same roll or section of papyrus was used for every receipt, year after year; or Pliny the Elder’s famed Notebooks which collected citations and quotations he needed for his other books; or recovered archives that show authors kept collected copies of their correspondence, as the publications of Cicero, Pliny, Jerome, etc. likewise prove was the case).

From this example you can see how to apply my questioning to any argument.

So when all is said and done, none of Livesey’s arguments for the ahistoricity of Paul hold up, logically or even sometimes factually. We just don’t have the evidence she needs to argue what she wants. What survives (and doesn’t) is entirely plausible in that ancient context for a real author. So there is nothing to point to that’s “improbable” on the “Paul existed” thesis. Whereas we have plenty of things that look cumulatively improbable on the “Paul didn’t exist” thesis. As I already pointed out last time. But I’ll say more in Do Paul’s Letters Look Fake?

Overall you need to keep distinct three different states of affairs: having evidence against a thing, having evidence for a thing, and having no evidence for or against a thing. I am too often encountering people who can’t get these straight. Likewise “I don’t know why the letters would contain A, B, or C, therefore the letters are fake” is not a sound argument. “The letters could have been forged, therefore they were” is not a sound argument. “We don’t have evidence confirming a thing, therefore that thing is false” is not a sound argument.

In the end, the prior probability that a person like Paul existed is high enough that you need evidence to doubt he existed—unlike Jesus, who is the kind of person whose prior probability is low enough that you need evidence to believe he existed. So they are not analogous even as to priors. Nor are they analogous as to likelihoods (of the evidence). There is a lot of evidence for Paul that does not exist for Jesus, which means facts that are more probable (even if only a little) if Paul did exist than if he didn’t. And even if each item of evidence is weak, when we add up dozens of them, their cumulative effect is no longer weak. And yet even if it still was, any greater probability of the evidence if he existed entails he probably did. He wins on priors. He wins on likelihoods. Jesus wins on neither. So I just don’t buy the idea that Paul didn’t exist. Yes, his existence is not a slam dunk. But everything we do have favors it.

For more, see my final article in this series, Do Paul’s Letters Look Fake? (which will go live in a day or two).