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 already summarized why. But last time I provided more detail on why I am not convinced by arguments Paul did not exist (see Can We Doubt Paul Existed?). Now as promised this time I will provide more detail on why I am not convinced the core six letters of Paul were forged. And that means Romans, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and 1 & 2 Corinthians. As for the other letters, I have been convinced Philemon is probably fake, and scholars generally agree all the rest are. Philemon is particularly instructive because the evidence for it being a fake school-exercise style epistle (the very thing Livesey argues the others are) is actually good. Yet none of that evidence exists for the other six.

Do These Letters Even Make Sense as 2nd Century Inventions?

Contrary to what Livesey and others have said, the answer is “No.” First, the core six letters cannot be written by Marcion because even his versions of them contain too many things he would not put in them, and they lack too many things he would put in them. For example, they are full of early-high-Christology that places God or Jesus in the position of Marcion’s Demiurge (and credits to God’s righteous punishment or Satan’s avarice everything Marcion credited to the Demiurge), directly contradicting Marcion’s entire theology (for scholarship see The Idea That Christianity Began with a High Christology). Whereas Marcion would want to make Paul advance Marcion’s anti-demiurge (and anti-Yahweh) rhetoric, especially because it challenges the competing Jewish Christianity Marcion is supposed to be against (for more examples of what I mean, see comment).

I made other points like this in my original summary. For example:

2 Thessalonians was written to emulate 1 Thessalonians yet shows no knowledge of the interpolation at 1 Thess. 2:14–16 (which in turn assumes the Jewish War is past), yet that is in Marcion’s edition of 1 Thessalonians. So that interpolation entered the first letter before Marcion, which means neither 1 nor 2 Thessalonians can have been composed by Marcion. Which eliminates the entire thesis that he wrote the others, because stylistically the author of 1 Thessalonians wrote the others.

One can adduce many more examples.

This is why previous forgery theorists could only sustain their view by positing hundreds of interpolations into the existing letters, all with no evidence at all, just the need to remake the evidence to fit the theory. Which is illogical. But the interpolation of 1 Thess. 2:14–16 is a case in point: that is a perfect example of the kind of thing post-war forgers would want to have Paul say. Even if Marcion believed Paul didn’t survive the war (but why—the belief that Paul was killed by Nero is a legend that might not even have existed when Marcion started, or have been anything Marcion would endorse), he would still know how to craft a similar point for Paul that fit that chronology. For example, having Paul predict the destruction of the temple and thus the inevitable obsolescence of the Jewish cult altogether—indeed proving God’s condemnation and thus abandonment of it—would do the same work. “Your entire atonement system doesn’t even exist anymore and was publicly condemned by a conclusive Act of God” is just too rhetorically powerful an argument to leave on the table. Hence the core six letters simply cannot have been written after the war, much like 1 Clement or Hebrews could not (though the case for them is stronger). You can see this in any second century text that ever argues against Jewish Christianity, from the Trypho of Justin to the Epistle of Barnabas: they all cite these obvious facts against it. That looks like second century construction.

The core six letters, by contrast, still reflect a milieu when the temple still stood and traditional Judaism was still a potent opposition, indeed the dominant form of Christianity—a state of play second century Christians did not want to remind anyone of or even grant as true. Remember, but for the Paulines, no such idea would exist. If Marcion was inventing this, the last thing he would do is invent a tradition whereby Christianity was originally Jewish and Paul had to sneak in a distortion of it as a latecomer who never even met Jesus, relying on dubious “visions,” and then struggle to defend that with elaborate and specious apologetics. And then fail—because the Paulines don’t argue Marcion’s position (they support Torah-observant Christianity for Jews and only exempt Gentiles: see below). Galatians is simply never a letter anyone would invent in the second century. Nor Romans. Nor 1 or 2 Corinthians. And Philippians and 1 Thessalonians have their own problems, being just as unintelligible for that milieu for different reasons. Part of the problem for forgery theorists is that they don’t think through how these letters make sense to contrive when they don’t yet exist. Too many of the “reasons” they offer for why anyone might write them as they are are based on the letters’ contents predating their being written. Which is, of course, physically impossible.

Livesey does offer a suggestion here (which she does not fully commit to, provide any evidence for, or even build-out a theory of), that Acts was the first Christian publication and Marcion is reacting to that (p. 89). But that rests on too many ad hoc suppositions to carry any argument to a probability. It also doesn’t really work, e.g. Acts has Peter be the first to receive the Torah-free Gentile mission in a vision from God, which is definitely not in the letters and yet should be if it predated them; and Acts is unintelligible without a prior Gospel (which Livesey rejects any possibility of: pp. 245, 250, etc.). For example, there is then no Roman crucifixion (only the Jews kill Jesus: Acts 2:36, 7:52–53, etc.), Acts refers to the gospel but (without Luke as preface) never explains what it is, and without the preceding Gospel of Luke, what on Earth is then happening in Acts 1 or Acts 2? There’s too much missing context. And on top of all that, why would the forger of the letters grant anything in Acts? If you get to forge whatever you want (and you do), you’d forge a complete repudiation of its entire narrative as fake. There is also, so far as I know, no reference to Marcion ever discussing or knowing about Acts. So, with all that together, this suggestion isn’t even plausible.

The core six have other problems besides. 1 Clement cannot possibly have been written post war, yet references Paul and the Paulines. And both it and the Paulines do not employ any of the tools a later author would if trying to win the same arguments, much less win the arguments taking the front seat in the second century. For example, like 1 Clement, the Pauline author only knows bishops as mere household managers, not authorities (at all, much less to defend that status for them—they are folded under mere bottom-rank “administrators” in Paul’s hierarchy). He also knows nothing of the invention and elevation of “disciples” over apostles in order to defend doctrine that can be assigned their pedigree—that was a second century thing. So their author is unaware of the debates and arguments he is supposed to be winning, rather than undermining.

And so on. I won’t belabor every point here. The overall lesson is that you have to stop and question every claim and argument Livesey and other forgery theorists make by actually thinking through the milieu they are proposing these letters were forged in, and specifically to win—and doing so with the understanding that, per their own theory, none of this stuff even exists yet for forgers to react to.

A pre-war context better explains why Paul is made both to offer no advice relevant to any post-war doctrinal disputes or concerns that would occupy the Gospels or other forged letters and to take for granted states of affairs that no longer existed in the 2nd century (like baptism for the dead, de facto tithing to the Jerusalem community, or the dominance of Jewish Christianity, contrary to its post-war decline), including issues that would be especially rhetorically disadvantageous if forged then, such as Paul’s persistent assumption that the end would come within his lifetime—a problem after the War that Mark tried to “fix” by having Jesus say at least “one” member of that generation would still be around come the end (kicking that can down to the late 1st or early 2nd century), which the last redactor of John had to fix again by having Jesus say he could keep that last man alive indefinitely. By the mid-2nd century no forger would deliberately sell the idea that the end was coming in Paul’s day (see Did the Rapture Already Happen!?). And so on. All the same is true, again, of 1 Clement, which attests Paul and his letters, so that it also fits the early 60s and no later (indeed even more forcefully) corroborates the same for Paul’s letters.

In my last article I already summarized several other flaws in Livesey’s argument: she relies on mis-identifying the genre of the core six Epistles and thus compares them to the wrong things (they are actually inter-organizational doctrinal correspondence in the form of mailed orations to be performed by a proxy, which we have few to no examples to compare as Livesey would need); and she overlooks the fact that what we have are demonstrably edits, not direct copies of the original letters, and forgers don’t compose that way (they just write the letters they want—they don’t write a bunch of letters, then edit and stitch them together haphazardly leaving key material out and including superfluous indicia of their once having been multiple independent letters). Because of all these features and all these letters’ other incongruences with Marcion’s mission, the Pauline dossier had to have been edited and published on its own before Marcion (including Galatians: see my endnote).

Arguments from silence can’t get a different result here, as we have no manuscripts that descend even from Marcion’s edition, much less any editions (or individual publications) prior to that. Every copy we have comes from the late-second-century anti-Marcionite edition (see Three Things to Know about New Testament Manuscripts), which is why we only have collections of them: they are all copies of that collection of them. That cannot signify that the Gospels did not circulate separately as competing documents before Marcion (and Marcion seems aware they were, and thus was not originating the Gospel genre either) or that the Epistles did not.

Again, the Epistles likely only came to be published from Paul’s own traveling dossier of them, not by someone traveling to church after church collecting them. And that publication was maybe a hundred years later, by which time it is doubtful the original destination letters even still existed (indeed even the original churches may have not: Christianity almost died out around the turn of the century and thus had lost all prior history of itself). And even if they did, there is no reason to believe anyone would have credited them. A single letter at a single church, likely by then a copy (since no original is likely to have survived that long), could simply be denounced as fake, or too politically inconvenient to keep. So there is no way to “get at” any earlier version than our anti-Marcionite deluxe edition. But that does not mean there was nothing to get at. Even Marcion’s edition was completely erased. Why should prior editions have had a better chance? The complete loss of Marcion’s edition is not evidence it didn’t exist. Ergo neither is the loss of its exemplars evidence they didn’t exist.

So, given that what we have are double-edited pastiches of some prior dossier, which Marcion cannot have constructed, most of Livesey’s arguments cannot proceed, as they depend on this not being the case. “The evidence is deeply compromised” does not get us to “the evidence is fake.” Indeed, it has the opposite effect: their extremely compromised state undermines any confident conclusion they are fake. What we need is different evidence altogether (like we have for Philemon, the Pastorals, 3 Corinthians, the Paul and Seneca correspondence, Abgar, Barnabas, and so on). And we just don’t have that for the core six. Whereas what we do have all points in the other direction: their ignorance of second century debates, concerns, and circumstances, their mixed-up pastiched condition, the realism of their desperation and tactics and references (and its all being odd for the second century), and other factors, all up the probability of authenticity, not forgery.

Would No Jew Abandon Torah?

One of Livesey’s continuing arguments is itself a non sequitur: that no Jew ever left or changed their faith into something new. Like some kind of reverse anti-semitism, Livesey mytho-gullibly imagines Jews as special and not like every other human being on the planet, and thus anachronistically adopts the premise that Jews “would never” abandon Torah law. Obviously even in antiquity many did—apostates were a thing. And we know many other fringe sects of Judaism abandoned all manner of supposedly central Jewish tenets. Sadducees rejected apocalypticism and resurrection. The Samaritans had their own Bible. Other sects rejected the entire Torah and the entire system of sacrificial atonement (keeping only circumcision), even claiming the Pentateuch was a forgery (Epiphanius, Panarion 18–19). So we cannot say one weird fringe sectarian “wouldn’t” have done this then. But more importantly, anthropologically, we know syncretism works exactly like this: Christianity fits the criteria of a revolution cult (see OHJ, ch. 5, §29), and they always transform their native religion by adapting to it elements of an imperialist occupier’s religion. Abandoning circumcision is an expected innovation here.

The Cargo Cults are the most famous example, but Judaism is itself one: it adopted apocalypticism, demonology, messianism, and resurrection from Persian Zoroastrianism under Persian rule—so what transformations do you imagine might be attempted under Roman rule? The adaptation is always made by natives (not imperialist interlopers, hence we expect Christianity to have been constructed by a Jew) and always involves altering or abandoning the most socially obsolete elements of native cult and replacing them with the most socially popular aspects of the imperialists’ religion. Christianity perfectly fits this anthropological model. Accordingly, it cannot be argued that a Jewish Paul “would not” abandon circumcision, for example. To the contrary, that is precisely the kind of thing a Jewish innovator and syncretizer would do who wanted to create one new mutually popular religion of Jew and Gentile alike, which is Paul’s explicitly stated mission (see my discussion of the obvious utility of this move in Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 52, 116, 131, 260). And that mission made perfect sense in his political context, solving a number of going problems in Judaism at the time (see OHJ, ch. 5, §23–28).

It is also worth noting that Paul did not actually “abandon” Torah and circumcision. As Livesey admits, he did so “only for gentiles” (p. 225). In the core six letters, Paul never says Jews should abandon Torah (or circumcision), and he himself did not. He says he was flexible in how observant he was (on behalf of the mission), but he never argues that Jewish Christians should abandon Torah—only that Gentile christians did not have to pick it up, a crucial distinction. The idea of asking Jews to give it up may have evolved into play during his ministry, but we do not see it explicitly argued until the anonymous Epistle to the Hebrews, which appears written shortly after his death, and what it is reacting to (if Galatians is anything to go by) appears to have been an innovation made within Paul’s congregations independently of him, not one he argued them into. It was a natural evolution of the syncretistic revolution. Not some sudden radical idea.

Meanwhile, Livesey’s argument that Paul’s “assessment of Jewish law” finds “no parallels in primary sources dated up through Josephus” is both circular and a non sequitur: you have to assume the conclusion (that Paul’s letters, and Hebrews, aren’t an example of this) in the premise (that no such literature existed) to get the conclusion (that Paul’s letters, and Hebrews, aren’t an example of this); and we have almost no other counter-mainstream Jewish literature from the period in question, so we don’t know that Paul’s take was all that novel (we cannot argue from the silence of documents we don’t have), nor would its being novel entail it didn’t happen (obviously every novel idea begins sometime—and we have no reason to believe it didn’t begin then). And yet, ironically, Livesey disproves her own assertion here by quoting the early-first-century author Philo (Mig. Ab. 16.89–94) attesting to “Jews who fail to uphold the rite of circumcision” by arguing against them (pp. 213, 222). So, not new.

By contrast, as already noted, if none of this existed when Marcion set out, then these are absolutely not the letters he’d forge to sell his ideas. He’d have them directly sell his ideas. For example, even if he was somehow stuck with Peter as founder (but did Peter even exist as a character yet?) he’d have him immediately from the first resurrection appearance of Jesus or even during his ministry teach the whole the-Demiurge-did-it, circumcision-is-now-rescinded gospel from day one, and declare all counter-narratives false gospels from the Devil. He certainly would not create (or reinforce, if somehow they already existed) the defeaters of his own position, as the core six Epistles are full of (even in what we can reconstruct were his versions of them), and leave out half the things he actually wants to defend.

So there is no way to push this development into the second century. It is not anachronistic in the pre-war period. To the contrary, historically and anthropologically, the early first century was the most ideal period for this syncretism to occur. The core six letters thus fit that context perfectly, not awkwardly.

Do the Paulines Look Like the Senecans?

Another of Livesey’s core arguments is that the letters of Paul (and I will mean here only those core six) are so much like Seneca’s Moral Epistles that we can assume they are parallel in their entire milieu and purpose, and “therefore” the Paulines are forged fiction. I already noted last time that this is fallacious at the first premise (Seneca’s letters aren’t forgeries). But it’s also false. These letter collections are neither at all alike nor would that entail they are fictional. Livesey’s fallacy here is in leaping automatically from the “possibility” that the Moral Letters are Seneca’s fiction to the “probability” that they are (on no sound basis of evidence) and thence to the “certainty” that they are, and then transferring this illegitimate conclusion over to Paul.

There are so many non sequiturs here it is hard to keep up. But the bottom line is: possibly is not probably. For example, the Senecan letters are addressed to a friend of his named Lucilius (of equestrian, not senatorial rank), whom Livesey says “could” be a fabrication and not a real person. But we do not know that (see my endnote). With no evidence that the letters’ addressee does not exist and was not receiving these letters, you simply cannot operate on an assumption that they didn’t. Because then it’s just assumptions in, assumptions out. Which is miles away from a factual conclusion. And all the same goes for Paul. Just because fake letters are designed to “look like” real letters does not entail real letters are fake. And just because we have lost all surrounding literature does not mean the fact that “we have no other evidence for Lucilius” entails he did not exist. We cannot get that argument from that data. We cannot argue from the silence of documents we don’t have.

But Seneca’s Moral Letters read nothing at all like the letters of Paul anyway. You can noodle through them and see for yourself. They read more like the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, only addressing and incorporating Seneca’s friend as the specific target of a mentor’s advice, and a lot more focused (unlike Aurelius, Seneca clearly had an agenda of specific subjects of moral, literary, and life advice to cover). As such they are more like literary exercises shared between correspondents (as Pliny and Tacitus refer to in their correspondence). They are rarely particular. Even when they get particular at all, it is incidental, like forcing a reason to bring those details up and connect them to a letter’s theme.

Paul’s letters are quite the opposite of this. Not a single one is a philosophical meditation. They all leap from problem to problem, attempting to dispatch each as quickly as possible, or else build a forceful oration to solve a bigger problem that is more about retaining Paul’s control of his congregations than elocuting a generic philosophical subject. When particulars come up, they are necessary to the purpose, not forced in. And they all are defenses of Paul the man, not big scriptural or philosophical topics—or even institutional topics. For example, unlike the forged Pastorals, the Paulines recognize very little in the way of institutional hierarchies and avoid defending any (other than Paul’s own authority and rights), which makes little sense for the hierarchy-defending church wars of the 2nd century. You can contrast that with forgeries like the Johannines, which avoid particulars, defend no personality against threats and attacks, and instead defend generic church-wide institutional dogmas in a way that completely resonates with the debates over power within the 2nd century church (just as the Pastorals and 2 Peter do). I say more about this in my forthcoming book. But overall, the core six Epistles look too viscerally personal, ad hoc, and real, when compared to known forgeries and literary exercises.

So the entire idea of comparing the Moral Epistles to the Paulines is a false analogy. Whether Lucilius was real or not, using him as an addressee is certainly for Seneca a device, at every turn, and not a spontaneous happenstance. Conspicuously, Paul’s letters do not look that way, while Seneca’s do. So the one feature that Livesey wants to paint as analogous is precisely the feature that is not analogous. And when Livesey builds-out an elaborate set of suggestions for “how” Lucilius and Paul could be fakes, she never presents any evidence that those just-so stories are true. That they are contextually plausible simply doesn’t count. It’s neat stuff to know. But it can’t get you there. This is the same apt critique of naive Jesus mythicism. But there the flaw is not in the logic, but in the facts: mature mythicism is referencing evidence for its conclusions, not mere plausibilities. Livesey is weirdly being too gullible about Jesus and too skeptical about Paul—as if modern social politics, and not evidence or logic, is deciding which subject you get to openly doubt now.

Even when her analogy holds it argues the opposite conclusion. The Senecan and Pauline letters are completely analogous in one respect: they both fit their context far better than epistolary forgeries tend to do (for comparison, see the forged correspondence of Paul and Seneca). This is in fact how we know the Senecans are probably authentic: their contents match exactly the political and cultural circumstances of the 60s, and therefore we are confident Seneca wrote them (even if as fictions, though I am skeptical they are completely fictional, and Livesey presents no evidence they are). By the same fact we know the Paulines are probably authentic: their contents match exactly the political and congregational circumstances of the pre-War period (as I already noted, and pointed out more last time).

Conclusion

Ultimately, there is simply no good analogy between Seneca’s letters and Paul’s, and none of Livesey’s extensive and erudite suggestions as to what’s “possible” about them are backed by any evidence that those suggestions are true. And so this argument cannot carry her conclusion. Neither is there any evidence that the letters are weird or don’t fit their context. To the contrary, they do fit that context, and don’t fit the context Livesey wants them to have been written in, especially if we assume they didn’t exist yet when forged, which removes most of the reasons she could appeal to for them to be forged as they are. Anything still weird about them, meanwhile, is explained by their weird editorial history, not their context or composition. All the rest of Livesey’s arguments rest on fallacies, anachronisms, or incorrect assumptions. Nevertheless, her every chapter is a treasure trove of hypotheses and data that anyone interested in the letters of Paul will benefit from. You just have to take them critically and not just assume her facts are always right, or her assumptions always correct, or her logic always sound.

I could go on cataloguing examples of this for ages. But to give you one last example of what I mean that you need to be on your guard against: at one point Livesey uses the anachronistic word “saints” but it is not clear to me what she wants the reader to understand by that. Paul never calls anyone a “saint.” That is a far later concept that hadn’t even been invented yet. When Paul wrote, that word only meant “holy,” and he says that because theologically all Christians were holy (see Romans 11:16 and Romans 12:1), because they, as a new body, had replaced the holy temple (1 Corinthians 6:19 and 1 Corinthians 7:14) and are living as a holy people (1 Thessalonians 3:13 and 1 Thessalonians 4:7). You can see this in all of Livesey’s own examples (p. 153). She does not specifically make an argument from this so I can’t say it is an error or just a misleading choice of English vocabulary. But I offer this note to forestall readers from being misled by things like this. You have to approach her text as critically as anything else.

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Endnote on Lucilius: It is not entirely true that we have no external evidence for Seneca’s correspondent Lucilius. He is also the addressee of Seneca’s Natural Questions. Which counts against him being made up—much less having false stories told of him in Seneca’s published letters, as the role of dedicatee was typically reserved for important patrons, clients, or friends, whom you would treat with respect. And it is widely believed the Aetna (appearing composed at exactly the right point in time) is the very poem Seneca encouraged Lucilius to write (in letter 79; and he does mean a whole poem, not a mere section of one, contrary to what some scholars assert), and though we are missing that poem’s original author-line, the coincidence is at least somewhat unlikely. There are arguments against this, so it’s not a strong argument by itself. It’s more significant that we don’t expect to have such or any data confirming the reality of any procurator in Sicily (as Seneca implies), much less Lucilius, so our not having it in anyone’s case cannot argue they didn’t exist.

Seneca is unclear as to his friend’s full name or what position he was appointed to. His only description, procuratiunculae pretio, “for the pay of a little office” (31.9) is super vague, but (contrary to what you will read) cannot mean governor, as Sicily was a small Praetorian province without armies, and as such was governed by someone of Senatorial, not Equestrian rank. But much of Sicily had been acceded to the Julians as Imperial family land and assets, and as such would require a lot of procurators, which are not state positions but private management positions (landlords, factory managers, administrators, and the like: see my chapters on this in Hitler Homer Bible Christ). Lucilius would likely be getting a plum position like that (which under the Roman Empire would entail ample graft and self-dealing), as that was a position only Equestrians could serve in.

Overall, nothing in the Moral Letters is inaccurate or anachronistic. Which does not ensure they were really sent, but also does not grant us any assurance they weren’t. For example, as I said the first time, “I’ve written essay-letters to people for their entertainment and ancient authors often refer to mailing each other pieces of literature for critique and enjoyment” just like these. And Seneca’s Moral Letters were edited for publication, so we can’t discount them on other grounds, either, like that their dates have been scrubbed. Since we don’t have copies of the originals that were sent (if such there were), we cannot say what was not in those or that they didn’t exist. Indeed, most likely they would have been mailed with a cover-letter, which would include the proper introduction, date, and incidentals, and refer to the enclosed essay. So we just can’t claim Lucilius was fake or any of the things Seneca says of him are false.

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Endnote on Galatians: Livesey cites Tertullian, in Adv. Marc. 4.3.1, as claiming Marcion alone discovered the Epistle to the Galatians (that he is the one who “found” it: p. 248). But this is unlikely to be what Tertullian meant—otherwise that letter would sooner have been rejected as spurious and never have appeared in our anti-Marcionite edition at all; nor would it pass stylometrics with the other letters. Because on this reading, Tertullian does not say here that Marcion found the letters, but only Galatians, which would entail Tertullian knew a publication of the other letters prior to Marcion. So Livesey’s thesis becomes somewhat contradictory here.

In fact this is a text all too frequently misread by modern scholars, and I think the Latin is here being mistranslated (or its popular 19th century English translation is being misunderstood). This is the same passage often cited as attesting Marcion wrote the first Gospel when in fact it attests exactly the opposite:

What Tertullian actually says is that Marcion tried to discredit those other Gospels (destruendum statum eorum evangeliorum quae propria et sub apostolorum nomine eduntur, lit. ‘tearing down the status of those Gospels, which are genuine and produced under the name of the Apostles’). But he says Marcion did that by admitting those Gospels were written by Apostles but then claiming those Apostles perverted the message (apostolos praevaricationis et simulationis suspectos Marcion haberi queritur usque ad evangelii depravationem, ‘Marcion complains that the Apostles are suspected of prevarication and pretense, all the way to perverting the gospel’). Which means Marcion made, in fact, the opposite claim to what [Markus] Vinzent alleges. 

In other words, Tertullian is saying Marcion wrote attacks on the other Gospels of Tertullian’s edition—and not on their authenticity, but their accuracy; and not after Marcion published his edition, but in his edition. Which entails Marcion well knew (and was responding to) those Gospels already existing before his. This cancels all attempts to argue that Marcion’s was the first Gospel composed. It clearly cannot have been. Marcion himself said so. (Though, notably, at the end of that same section, Tertullian makes clear that Marcion’s Gospel was formally unnamed, concurring with the leading theory that the Gospels only got their names—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—in the anti-Marcionite edition.)

The same happens when we look more closely at what Tertullian says about Galatians in the Latin. Tertullian is describing how Marcion “struggles to destroy the stature of the Gospels published under the personal name of apostles” (connititur ad destruendum statum eorum evangeliorum quae propria et sub apostolorum nomine eduntur), meaning our four Gospels, and says one of the arguments Marcion uses to do that is from Galatians 2:14, where Paul accuses the apostles of corrupting the truth of the gospel (and “therefore,” Marcion’s argument goes, their Gospels are unreliable).

This is where we get the line “Marcion, finding the Epistle of Paul to the Galatians” (Marcion nactus epistulam Pauli ad Galatas), where the key word is nactus. Livesey and others take this to mean “discover,” as in, unlike the other letters, Marcion somehow “found” this letter no one else knew about before, so as to make this argument from it. But were that so, Tertullian’s rebuttal would be to challenge the letter’s authenticity as self-serving. Instead Tertullian grants without even argument that it is authentic and says what he quotes from it. This implies it was part of the original pre-Marcionite publication that Marcion edited and published, and not some new thing only he claimed to have found.

So more likely Tertullian means “light upon” or “get hold of,” not “discover.” The word is nanciscor, which only means “find” in a much broader sense than only “discover” (e.g. “finding the weather favorable,” “finding a foothold,” “finding a passage in a text” and likewise “meet with,” “encounter,” “stumble upon,” and even “acquire” or “arrive at,” per the Oxford Latin Dictionary). In other words, Tertullian is not saying Marcion uniquely “discovered” Galatians. He is simply saying he picked up or got ahold of an edition of Galatians, or lit upon or arrived at Galatians in the course of his argument. Hence “Marcion, arriving at the Epistle of Paul to the Galatians,” as in, getting to that part of Paul’s letters in Marcion’s mining of data for his argument, and “Marcion, receiving the Epistle of Paul to the Galatians,” as in, inheriting or buying or picking up a copy of the Epistles of Paul and using this Epistle in particular to make arguments from, are both credible (if even more plausible) translations of Tertullian’s meaning here.

Certainly we cannot sustain the “discovery” thesis with any confidence on so thin a thread as this.