Note Mark is the one reifying Paul. Matthew is anti-Pauline. So Matthew is probably not using the letters of Paul at all.

Paul refers to the trope that serpents are cunning. Elsewhere he refers to God sending snakes to kill the disobedient Israelites. When Paul talks about trampling, he says Satan specifically, not serpents generally.

Matthew 10 does not touch on any of these statements or analogies. It clearly has no connection to anything Paul ever said. It’s just a collection of metaphors as pragmatic advice to missionaries (“be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves”), using the same trope that serpents are cunning, but in a different context and purpose. It is not a reference to Satan.

Matthew and Paul are also not talking about the same things when they use the metaphor of leavening. Those passages have nothing to do with each other. They are not even using the same trope.

Paul is using leavening as a metaphor for spoiling or corrupting, so that unleavened means simple, pure, honest. Hence Paul says Christians should renew and purify themselves and speak simple words with honesty. Matthew is using leaven as a metaphor not for impurity but pervasion, that’s why he doesn’t say “heaven is like leaven” but “heaven is like leaven that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough,” the metaphor is the whole sentence, the whole simile, not just the word “leaven.” The analogy intended is not to leaven’s sacral status but leaven’s ability to permeate everything and thus be everywhere at once, once “worked in” (referring to the mission to work the kingdom into the world like leaven into dough).

no undisputed evidence

Neil, that’s evidence. To confuse “we have complaints about the evidence” with “we have no evidence” is precisely the fallacious reasoning I had in mind when I caught you over-trusting Salm. This is the argument of a crank. I explained in detail why the “complaints” are fallacious and thus do not remove the evidence, which is indeed quite abundant. You can go on ignoring that, and never recovering any point from it. But then I get to say that’s what you did. So you are going to have to pick a lane here.

read Dark’s work critically for yourself

I did. Indeed, I repeatedly refer to his shortcomings and where he goes wrong.

If you have caught this new book in an actual error, let’s see the receipts. That would be productive here. But please don’t refer me to opinions. I am talking about provable fallacies and errors, which are relevant (not irrelevant) to the conclusion.

Stop bloviating, and do the work. Stop asserting and give evidence. Or else please stop. Because this is just wasting everyone’s time here.

Keep me apprised. I haven’t read LTS yet but have it and plan to. I suspect it’s already refuted by my previous work against the Holland argument (linked and summarized in No, Tom Holland, It Wasn’t Christian Values That Saved the West). But I won’t know for sure until I check.

One thing to check is if Ehrman completely blanks on xenia, the Greek principle of kindness to strangers; and whether he blanks on pre-Christian Jewish teachings similar. Indeed, so far as I know, there is no human civilization that ever lacked some version of xenia.

Even kindness to enemies is pagan. It is best advocated by Musonius Rufus but predates him; and it’s all over Confucianism and Buddhism, which both predate Christianity. It is elaborately discussed by Plato (whose fictional Socrates denounces the popular “eye for an eye” ethos and elaborately argues any harm even to an enemy is unjust in The Republic and The Gorgias).

Aristotle’s take on conflict resolution was more nuanced and rational (turning the other cheek is actually horribly bad philosophy) but even he discusses the importance of reconciling with enemies, in fact his entire political theory, the reason we need democracy, is to resolve conflicts with enemies peacefully by substituting discussion and community voting for violence, while avengement upon the recalcitrant should be rational and fair, not subject to anger (which, needless to say, is how all Christendom actually behaves, so Christians follow Aristotle, not Jesus).

And so on.

I will take this occasion to remind readers that my blog has a search box (on desktops, it is on the upper right margin; on other devices it might be right at the top).

If you used it to search “die for a lie” you would find:

Did the Apostles Die for a Lie?

(1)

Mark never demonizes the family. He mentions the family only twice: first (Mk 3) as an aetiological myth explaining the origin of Christianity’s fictive kinship model (Christians are each other’s family now; biology means nothing anymore), which is all over Paul and thus an obvious thing for Mark to invent a myth to illustrate or reify; and then (Mk 6) as a reason for outsiders to fail to understand the gospel, and as an apologetic myth to relate when missionaries run into the same problem that “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home,” which was likely a common problem they needed a story to tell to explain away, and this obviously was constructed to suit.

Only in the latter case is James ever named, but not singled out for any opinion at all. In the former case his family is getting haughty but no one is named. When Mark wrote no one had ever heard of any real family of Jesus (it’s missing entirely from 1 Clement for example, yet should be there), so in these stories, he’s making them up out of whole cloth. In Luke, the entire family are all believers (Acts 1); then all vanish (James and all) as soon as the public history begins (in Acts 2–28). So there was no knowledge of the family being actually in the church (much less as leadership). That was a made-up story (Luke is just riffing on Mark; but hadn’t invented the legend of James being a leader yet; that myth would be invented afterward—it first shows up in dubious apocrypha recorded in Hegesippus).

The Jameses who show up in Paul are mere Christian brothers and the apostle, brother of John, not Jesus. No actual family of Jesus ever shows up in Paul. That has always been a misinterpretation.

There is a lot more evidence for these points than what I just briefed here. I have an entire chapter on James in Paul in Obsolete Paradigm and entire sections on the other texts (in and out of the Bible) in Historicity (see index, “family of Jesus”).

(2)

Yes.

That in fact was the commonplace role everyone understood for visions—real and pretended. And this tracks all human history. I cite the science in Element 15 of Ch. 4 of Historicity. A lot more has been published since, including a lot of scholars who concur (and argue even more conclusively than I did) for this in particular being a vision, as I cite and discuss now in Paradigm.

Paul himself relates entire conversations he had with Jesus, and entire sets of instructions he (or someone he trusted) received in heaven, in 2 Corinthians 12. Acts has similar visions attributed to Peter and others. And all ancient apocalypses were models intended to be believed as such (Ascension of Isaiah, Revelation, etc.). Outside that, we have the example of the shamanic communications received that started the Cargo Cults (discussed in Historicity), Joseph Smith’s pretense, and so on.

It’s important to remember that it is impossible to tell the difference between real visions and pretended because pretenders specifically aimed to sound like the real thing (I discuss the anthropology of this, citing scholarship, in Ch. 10 of Not the Impossible Faith). Likewise, the words for vision in antiquity did not distinguish between trance states and mere dreams. The ancients believed a god talking to you in your dreams was the actual god talking to you. So “visions” included dreams, which could be long narrative dreams or instructionals. But trance states could induce the same experience, and lots of methods of trancing were then known (incubation, marathon prayer/chants/dance, sleep deprivation, etc.; also drugs, but there’s no evidence Christians used that method) and there is a whole anthropological reality of schizotypal shamanism to account for (covered in Element 15).

2 Clement is certainly unrelated. It never even claimed to be related. Calling it that was a late legend about the document, not a claim made in the document. It never says it is by anyone named that or by the author of 1 Clement, and never says when it was written, and thus never pretends to be anything other than what it is (a random sermon by a random person). The modern opinion that it is mid-second century is reasonable. It certainly predates the 4th century and post-dates the 1st.

1 Clement has no similarity to 2 Clement. And it cannot have been written after the 60s AD: see How We Can Know 1 Clement Was Actually Written in the 60s AD. If Litwa has any arguments not already refuted there, let me know what they are in comments there, and I’ll tell you what I think.

Thank you for your reply and your time, but I still have questions:

1) If James wasn’t Jesus’s true brother, then what’s the point of Mark’s polemic? It was initially assumed that Mark, being from Paul’s sect, was deliberately demonizing Christ’s family to paint James in a bad light, but why would Mark make him part of that same family? Isn’t it more reasonable to assume that James’s status as a member of Christ’s family didn’t arise out of nowhere?

2) You believe that the scene where Jesus breaks bread isn’t a late legend, but a vision of Paul’s. But are such visions with clear instructions even possible?

Thank you in advance for your answers.

Concerning the “nobody would die for a lie” assertion. I seem to recall you (or maybe it was someone else) refuting that claim and giving at least one specific example of a time and place in History where that has happened.

Can you cite any specific examples and maybe explain the condition or scenario where that might be possible?

Thanks..

Litwa in a couple of recent Patreon / Youtube posts makes I think a good case of 1 Clement (which he calls by its title) as 2nd c. https://youtu.be/2i2wJfO-JDM?si=bbg2w3kPMwcKdFMs
Also 2 Clement as possibly Valentinian.
https://youtu.be/2i2wJfO-JDM?si=bbg2w3kPMwcKdFMs
Neither by a bishop called Clement.
Would be interested in your take.

I am only a few chapters into Ehrman’s latest book, Love Thy Stranger, and frustrated. He is an engaging writer. But I don’t have the background scholarship knowledge to counter his “christianity transformed moral teachings for all of Western Civilization” claims, they just seem simplistic so far. And cherry-picking. Like the loss of so much ancient science as collateral damage? But it does not pretend to be a balanced assessment. How did the crusades & pogroms & other not so loving Christian campaigns fit this? Internal sectarian strife? Modern Christian nationalism (no hate like Xian love?). Just more flawed humans defying the teachings again I guess. I will read on and see if Ehrman addresses such things.Yes it is a trade general interest book – but still.

I hope you will give it a thorough review when you can find the time – and would chip in to commission that!

From the jacket blurb: “From the earliest times through Greek & Roman antiquity, moral thinkers prioritized generosity toward friends & family….Jesus changed all this, introducing a revolutionary new eithical obligation to show love to those you don’t know…through acts of care….” Of course this also is through “canon goggles” as Litwa would say – the character Jesus of the “gnostic” gospels may have some other ideas too.

Anyway, I hope to see some properly critical (in the best sense of critical) reviews.

Regardless the texts & teachings he cites are the work of the anonymous gospel authors, not any proof of a factual historical Jesus.

Ok, back to reading, perhaps he will convince me.