Russell, I think Josen chose 1 Samuel 9:21 and 1 Samuel 15:17 because they establish the pun “small/tiny” and Paulus means small/tiny. The rest (like the pursuer/persecutor mimesis) then inspires Luke’s build-out of his story. Livesey’s thesis is that Paul was invented from this (as also the legend of his being a persecutor), but she says this might be prior to Marcion (she is noncommittal but proposes Acts could predate him and every Gospel). The mainstream thesis is that Acts either invented the Saul name connection because of the useful fit with describing an already-established persecutor using the 1 Samuel narrative that then allowed (i.e., the order of causation is the other way around), or that Paul (as praenomen) coincidentally having the name Saul (as cognomen) and being a persecutor gravitated Luke to the 1 Samuel story to build-out his myth from (i.e., the order of causation is the other way around but inspired by an existing coincidence).

1 Samuel 26:18 Saul why does thou pursue me?

It’s crank apologetics.

I have an exposé ready to publish on this next week so stay tuned.

But for a sneak peak, see my comments where it would have been most apt to ask this question: under my article Josephus on Jesus? Why You Can’t Cite Opinions Before 2014 (in future you can use the search box on my blog or the category dropdown menu to find a suitable article for asking any question).

Hello Dr. Carrier,

I follow your work with great interest. I have recently finished watching a virtual lecture you gave for the library in Bangor, Maine last year.

Please forgive me that this comment isn’t directly related to the article—I did find it both informative and highly relevant to the research I’ve been doing on the historicity of Paul—but I wasn’t sure where else I could post a general question.

What is your opinion on Dr. T.C. Schmidt’s recent assertion that the passage on Jesus by Josephus was, in fact, not doctored or altered? Does this change its value as evidence for the historicity of Jesus in any way?

Thank you for your time and your important contributions to historical scholarship.

Respectfully,
M. Elliott

I think you misunderstand my point.

You may be falling victim to a multiple comparisons fallacy here.

When the author of Acts wanted to spin narratives about Paul, he searched around across all his source texts (like the OT and apocrypha), and landed on the ones he found most useful. “Oh, look, I can use this Saul narrative as a framework, all I have to do is claim Paul was named Saul!” or “I know Paul’s praenomen was Saul, oh look, I can use the ancient Saul story to frame my narrative about Paul!” are both plausible (indeed routine) ways authors composed texts.

So we cannot tell the order of causation here. Livesey wants it to be “Luke invented Paul, and decided to also name him Saul (why have his name Paul then?), because he found that useful narratively (even though the letters don’t exist yet so there is no basis for believing Paul was a persecutor).” That’s bad reasoning. The rest of us conclude Acts is reacting to Marcion and thus the letters, and so more likely “Luke invented the additional name Saul because he could use it to spin a particular narrative about the persecutor” or “Luke knew (from some source lost to us) that Paul really was also already named Sail, so he made up a fake story about being ‘renamed’ from Saul to Paul, because the name just happened to connect to something useful for Luke in the OT.”

The multiple comparisons fallacy is to forget that the author has thousands of options to work with, so the probability that he will find one convenient one is ~100% not 1 in 1000. Thus we cannot tell from the data whether Luke invented the name Paul or Saul or any of this except the narrative he spins by connecting Paul to the ancient Saul, but the latter can be because of inherited data that made that an obvious choice, so we cannot know that it is because Luke invented all of it. So there is no way to get to the latter conclusion here. It stays merely “possible” (and worse, because it runs into weird problems, as the theory then depends on the prior existence of evidence that, ex hypothesi, did not exist then, complicating Livesey’s order of events).

Excuse me if I return on this point. You say: That’s great for explaining why Acts connects the name Saul to Paul. but we all know (and agree about) the real and only reason Acts connects the name Saul with Paul: because king Saul was a persecutor of the Messiah and Acts wants to make Saul/Paul a persecutor of the Christians. There is none other reason. Hence it is a false implication the idea that the reference to ‘little’ twice in 1 Samuel (in reference to king Saul) dictated the choice of the king Saul as a midrashical source for Paul. The persecution motif dictated the choice. I derive the conclusion that, according to your view (assuming a historical Paul), the presence of ‘little’ twice in 1 Samuel in reference to king Saul is a mere, fortuite coincidence. But it ceases to be a coincidence if Acts preceded the “letters” as per Livesey’s theory. Isn’t therefore this evidence more expected on Livesey’s theory than on your traditional view ?

Indeed. Both conspiracy theories exist. Both are ridiculous crankery. And both have origins in Nazi ideology (2 directly; 1 indirectly).

The timing is interesting as well, because for the past 6 months or so, I’ve seen more talk (layperson, online forums, etc) of Paul as Conspiracy. Interestingly enough, it has manifested in two distinct versions:

1) Paul was an invention of the Romans to pacify both Jews and Christians into a more easily controlled populace through a nonviolent “future kingdom” religion. He didn’t exist, but was created to steer the growing cults away from active revolution, and toward passive waiting.

… the other has a bit of an antisemitic tilt

2) Paul was either — a) an agent of, or b) a fictive creation of — the Jewish elite/priesthood used to hi-jack the teachings of Jesus/the Good Teacher/Christians, in order to subvert and control the growing Gentile/Goyim church, thereby controlling Rome and its reaches with a desire for global control. (Which seems an odd conclusion, because creating the Pauline-Christian church would be the single largest backfire against Jews in history seeing that it gave the Jews nearly 2 millennia of antisemitism, persecution, and discrimination).

I didn’t realize that anyone had recently taken an academic interest in the ahistorical hypothesis of Paul. I haven’t read Livesey’s work yet, but your explanations and rebuttals are incredibly insightful and interesting. Many thanks for taking the time to hash these things out for us.

First, in general, it’s a vast amount of work to rethink the entire history of biblical studies. So if someone is going to change literally every starting assumption as to when each book was written and by whom, they’ve created a monster of work to do to rethink millions of conclusions that have all been based on the standard narrative (which is the current mainstream consensus).

Because when you change who wrote what when and in what order, you change a vast number of things. Like putting Acts before the Gospels and Epistles: you’ve just nuked ten million conclusions that were based on assuming the reverse, and you are probably relying on one million of them yourself, which leads to contradictions in your own theory. So this is a difficult business. It can’t just be handwaved. And since I am not convinced it’s worth the bother, I certainly won’t be doing that work for them. It’s on them.

Second, in particular, to be fair, Livesey agrees that some of the Epistles were later anti-Marcionite forgeries (like the Pastorals) and that Marcion had the help of students (whom, she might argue, he assigned the task of writing the Deutero-Paulines), thus explaining the stylistic differences. The bulk would be written by Marcion himself (the rest he would edit in for publication), so that would explain the core six sharing a style. And so on. So that much I think her model can explain. It works less well if she commits to the Acts-first model (that is extremely hard to defend as even plausible).

The real problems are the ones you note. That a forger simply wouldn’t compose letters like the core six (they would look more like, well, the Deuteros and Pastorals, and Philemon). That the core six don’t fit the context she is proposing for them as well as she claims (nor does Hebrews or 1 Clement, a real problem for her). And that her arguments to the contrary are either fallacious or rely on factually false premises, so they dissolve, leaving no case pro, and some case con intact.

I wholly agree from what I’ve read of Paul’s letters that he comes off too much as a character in ways that would not be useful for any forger.

Do you think there may be an additional issue in terms of there being one alternative author trying to take the name of some person that was plausibly connected to the early Church writing in ways that seem to match the context and are all consistent? To me, the very fact that there are ways of identifying the Deutero-Paulines as distinct from Paul shows how hard it is to actually forge “Paul”. And while obviously if it was all one author forging a first century set of correspondence (at which point the letters being a pastiche is actually nice for the forger because any omissions or weirdness that they miss when they are making it can be explained by “Oh it’s only part of it” just like Q drops played that game) then they would have a distinctive style, I’m much more dubious that they would have been able to successfully keep a style and a rhetorical approach consistent with the early first century. I suspect editorial fatigue would have slipped in.