So I debated Jason DeCosta on his version of the Israel Only theory, which purports to “fix” all the problems I found in The Incompetent Crankery of the Israel Only Movement before (all discussed on MythVision years ago). You can watch the whole insane thing if you want to (the description there also lists his books and other resources if you want to go down that rabbit hole). But the debate was just him ignoring everything I said and spinning endless circular arguments, as I had to explain there multiple times.

And yes, DeCosta’s view does assume Full Preterism, which I debated before with Don Preston in Did Jesus Get It Wrong About the End Times? and followed up in Did the Rapture Already Happen!? No. Nor Will It Ever. But there’s a twist. DeCosta doesn’t believe any of this. And he said so. He does not think anyone was actually saved or that Paul was magically finding lost Israelites. DeCosta’s theory is that Paul believed he was finding and converting only lost Israelites and therefore preached that “only Israel” can be saved. So “therefore” Christianity is false and no one should be a Christian anymore. It’s an antirealist version of Israel Only. Although this would still take out Christianity even if magic did exist, because then they’d be committed to the same things being real. It’s just that nothing DeCosta says is correct.

Paul painstakingly and repeatedly explains that everyone in Jesus is Israel now—not lost Israelites, but magically new Israelites. So “Israel only” to Paul does not refer to biology at all. It refers to God’s election. And God can do whatever the fuck he wants. He’s God. That’s literally Paul’s argument. Over and over again. And modern Christianity is built on the embers of that original idea. It’s one of the few things about modern Christianity that actually does trace back to the beginning—or almost. Paul was a heretic. The original sect was “Jews only,” so Gentiles had to convert to Judaism to get in (this is the implied messaging of Matthew, James, and Revelation). All Paul changed was the “converting to Judaism” part. And he had the begrudging endorsement of The Originals to do this. So, I guess, you can still count this as “original” Christianity, sort of. But it is actual. Unlike so many things Christians believe today that the likes of Peter and Paul would be mortified to hear or would outright laugh at. So by denying this Jason is picking a weird hill to die on.

Here I will provide an edited version of my opening statement, rewritten to account for developments and clarifications later in the debate, so it’s really the only thing you need read—if you even care, given that this is so obscure and, honestly, irrelevant to contemporary concerns. But alas, someone has to staunch the crazy. So here we go.

Problem One: Paul Never Says This

DeCosta claims that Paul preached that only “lost sheep” of Israel, actual biological descendants of the original twelve tribes, could be saved, and that all Paul was doing was going around trying to find them among the Gentiles they had assimilated to, counting on “the Holy Spirit” to identify them and cause them to accept Christ and convert, and no one else.

The first problem with this is that … Paul never says this. There is no sentence anywhere in the Bible (or outside the Bible) where anyone ever says the thing DeCosta wants them to have believed. Paul never says salvation is for “biological” Israel Only and that other Gentiles are excluded and can’t be saved.
 So Jason has to invent this as Paul’s belief through convoluted reinterpretations of what Paul did say, generally against any modern expert consensus, and often against the plain meaning of the text. Which is crankery 101. Not the idea that maybe we’ve misunderstood what an author meant; but simply assuming it without evidence.

And that warrants skepticism. It places the burden of evidence on him. Because DeCosta’s theory predicts Paul would outright say salvation is for Israel Only, that he is looking for lost descendants only; he would not be coy or vague about it. 
He would want to make that clear so anyone who knew this about themselves could come to him and be saved, and so those who didn’t know this about themselves would understand why most of their Gentile peers feel no inclination to come to him and be saved. Paul’s mission requires he be absolutely clear and explicit about who he was seeking out to save. Yet he’s not. Which is already good evidence against DeCosta.

In my previous article about Israel Only being false I wrote: 


At no point does Paul say, “You are actually descendants of the Israelites, and that’s why we need you to join the community of Christ” or “those Gentiles who reject the call of Christ must not be Israelites” or “you need to join us because you are descendants of the Israelites that God wants back in the fold” or any such clear declaration of the point. 


Yet there is no reason why Paul wouldn’t have said things like that if that’s what he was preaching.
 So the evidence begins against Jason’s theory.
 Which, to be fair, is not fatal. The peer reviewed literature often proves we’ve misunderstood something. 
So we still do need to look at Jason’s evidence, or whatever he purports to be evidence.
 But I want you to put a pin in this because I will come back to it: most of the passages Jason tries to reinterpret don’t even matter here because they don’t establish that Paul thought what Jason does.

Which is the real problem. The original authors of scripture often meant completely different things than Paul thinks they did. So we can’t cite the scripture itself as evidence of anything. We need evidence of what Paul thought these scriptures meant, not what they actually meant. So the only relevant passages to analyze here are Paul’s own words.
 And here’s the kicker: any exegesis of scripture that Jason performs here can only be a hypothesis about what exegesis Paul was performing on it, rather than a hypothesis about what it really meant. DeCosta confuses the two repeatedly and thus doesn’t even know how to test or prove his hypothesis at all. Yet he acts with absurd confidence that he does. And that’s always a bad sign.

Moreover, a hypothesis cannot be evidence for itself. Anyone can claim Paul read the scriptures any way they want. That doesn’t make them right.
 We need evidence that Paul thought as we want him to. So where is this evidence?
 Which evidence cannot be the theory itself. Remember this. It will come up a lot as you interact with Jason’s arguments.
 It is fallacious to reinterpret a passage using a theory, and then use the new interpretation as evidence for the theory. That is textbook circular reasoning, which can never lead to a believable conclusion.
 Every time, it could instead be that Paul is reinterpreting the scriptures exactly as all mainstream scholars agree he did, and not in the way Jason wants. So we need evidence to reject mainstream readings. We can’t get by with just the possibility. Jason’s theory has to be a conclusion, not a premise. That is the only way to get it to be probable, not just “possible.” Jason shows no signs of understanding this. He has no idea how to prove a theory.

Problem Two: Paul Repeatedly Says the Opposite of This

The second, and most fatal, problem for DeCosta’s theory is that the actual text of Paul is elaborately rejecting DeCosta’s thesis, not affirming it. I’ll prove this with some key examples. But the same fate befalls all of Jason’s examples.
 They either don’t say anything relevant, or don’t say what he wants—or they say the opposite of what he wants.

• Let’s start with Romans.

Jason likes to quote things out of context. So let’s read things in context. That’s the only correct method here. So get out your bibles and follow along as I identify passages.
 In Romans, Paul is writing to reconcile Jews and Gentiles in the church at Rome and calm a conflict that had arisen between them (this is explained diplomatically across Romans 1–2). He starts by explaining (across Romans 2–4) that the Torah is not as important as the Jewish Christians at Rome are insisting. And then (across Romans 5–8) Paul argues at length the opposite of Jason’s theory: that you don’t need a biological claim to be saved; but that (he argues across Romans 9–11) the Gentile Christians also need to stop acting like they are superior to their Jewish Christian comrades. He closes (across Romans 12–16) with a lengthy articulation of how they should all behave, and resolve to get along, until the end.


So it is immediately a hit to Jason’s theory that what Paul never says to calm this conflict is that they are all kinsmen in the flesh. He does not say they are all proper biological heirs of Abraham. He does not say that the “Gentiles” are not “everyone else” as that word usually means, but just select survivors from among lost Israelites. He never says that they should not be confused by his strange use of the word “Gentile.” Thousands of words, and Paul never says this.
 That’s Problem One. And it’s already fatal. Problem Two just nukes the site from orbit. Because instead of Paul saying what DeCosta’s theory predicts he would say, we get Paul saying the opposite.

You can follow my verse-walk from here. The list to the left is roughly the order I’ll mention some in.
 But, for example, in Romans 9:3–4, Paul says, “I wish” I were “cut off from Christ for the sake of my people, those of my own race, the people of Israel,” in the Greek, συγγενῶν μου κατὰ σάρκα (suggenôn mou kata sarka), my “fellow-born in the flesh,” which does mean born, not circumcised (it’s syn-genôn, from “beget,” not “made”), thereby distinguishing himself from his Christian readers who are not born to Israel. This sentence entails Paul believed many of the saved were not racially Israelites like him.


Paul then says, in Romans 9:8, that “it is not the children of the flesh who are God’s children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham’s offspring.” Here Paul’s Greek is explicit: the children of God now are not (he explicitly says not) “the children of the flesh,” but “are considered as if the seed,” not “are” the seed. He uses the Greek phrase λογίζεται εἰς σπέρμα (logizetai eis sperma). The Greek construction λογίζεται εἰς, or “count as,” demarcates the opposite of identity, declaring equivalence, that one is like as to but not identical to. Paul is thus saying exactly the opposite of what Jason wants here.


Which we expect because this is why Paul does not say what Jason claims in Paul’s introduction to that argument, in Romans 9:4. Jason claims Paul says that “the divine adoption as sons” and the promises and covenants and everything else “belong” to the Israelites. But that word is not in the Greek. The Greek in context is more general than the specific sense of exclusive property that DeCosta wants here. The implied sense of “belong” here, that some English translations add that word to convey, instead means that these things come “from” them, that they made them, they got them first (as indicated by the relative pronoun ὧν and its context). It’s their stuff; not, “you can’t use their stuff.” You can see this by scanning different translations, few of which use the word “belong.” Most correctly use an ambiguous possessive instead (that’s what’s actually in the Greek). Some more accurately convey the contextual sense as “originate” rather than “exclusively possess” (like Good News, God’s Word, Contemporary English, and the NLT).

Which is why this verse, in the context of Paul’s entire argument, affords no evidence of Jason’s theory. Because it is entirely consistent with the power of Christ now extending these rights to new people, exactly as Paul goes on to explain.
 Paul’s point is that because the Israelites have this gift, you have to get into their family to get it too—and Paul explains how baptism gets you in. This is explicit in Romans 6:3–5: “all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death” and “therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that” we be saved with him. Paul does not say “all of us who were baptized into Christ are thereby confirmed to be the lost Israelites and that is why we are saved with him.” Paul would not say baptism itself is what gets you in if you are already biologically in. Paul’s entire argument across Romans is about how to get in. You don’t do that for people who are already in. You would just say you’re already in, you just need confirmation, a “renewed” declaration of allegiance. But that’s the opposite of what Paul says.

We see this same thought again in Romans 11:1, where Paul says, “Did God reject his people? By no means! I am an Israelite myself, a descendant of Abraham, from the tribe of Benjamin,” clearly indicating he is different in this from the Gentiles he is writing to (and the same as the Jewish Christians he is also writing this to). Here is where Paul would say his Gentiles can make the same claim, so their Jewish peers should accept them as they accept him. But Paul is doing the opposite: he is apologizing for the fact that he can’t make that claim about the Gentile members of his church, and therefore needs a different way to assuage their Jewish compatriots to accept them. It is also worth noting that Paul is here defining “Israelite” for this chapter as any descendant of Abraham. Which evokes the question: who gets to count themselves as a descendant of Abraham? And that is the question Paul is answering, by elaborately arguing that there are two ways to do this: by adoption in the spirit (e.g. Romans 8) and by descent in the flesh (e.g. Romans 9).


Paul then uses an analogy in Romans 11 that makes this entirely clear: he explains that Gentiles are a people grafted into Abraham’s genealogy from outside it. They are not a lost branch returned. Paul is so explicit about this that DeCosta can only be clinically delusional to deny it. Paul literally says these Gentiles grafted in are not lost tribes of Israel, and not Israel at all—until they are grafted in. His entire argument and metaphor makes this indisputably clear, because he even talks about returning branches as distinct from the new ones. So he is here including lost Israelites in his discourse yet he is distinguishing them from the Gentiles in his discourse. This flatly refutes Jason’s theory.


Because denying this requires taking crazy pills, I have to quote the whole thing so you can check yourself for sanity: “If some of the branches have been broken off, and you, though a wild olive shoot, have been grafted in among the others, and now share in the nourishing sap from the olive root, do not consider yourself to be superior to those other branches” (Romans 11:17–18, where the “now” translates the sense of συνκοινωνὸς…ἐγένου, synkoinônos egenou, “you have become a fellow-sharer,” so you weren’t before). Paul explicitly says the Gentiles here are not broken off branches being grafted back in: they come from a completely unrelated tree (representing completely different biological roots). Paul then says, in Romans 11:24: “you were cut out of an olive tree that is wild by nature, and contrary to nature were grafted into a cultivated olive tree.” He is thus referring to separate trees with separate roots. In the previous line he says lost Israelites are a third group, the ones broken off from the same tree and grafted back in. So he is excluding Gentiles from being lost Israelites.

That’s where Paul says “how much more readily will these, the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree!” Here again Paul is referring to the lost Israelites. But he is clearly demarcating them as not the Gentiles that get grafted in from the other olive tree. 
Paul is thus distinguishing being biologically Abrahamic and being adopted into it. The Greek he employs across these verses is κατὰ φύσιν (kata physin), “by nature,” and παρὰ φύσιν (para physin), “not by nature” (lit. “aside nature,” “contrary to nature,” the same as in “contrary to teaching” in Romans 16:17), which was then a normal phrasing for distinguishing biological from adopted children (we have tons of inscriptions and papyri using this distinction so routinely it would have been immediately recognized terminology to Paul’s readers: see The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire, 44–45, and, e.g., Adoption & Fosterage and The Exposed Child). And Paul outright says in Romans (and Galatians—more on that shortly) that he means adoption rather than birth (υἱοθεσίας, huiothesias, “appointed, made, placed as” a son, the opposite of “born as”).

The lost branches Paul does say will also be grafted back into their own tree (with the Greek word ἰδίᾳ, “their own”); but that the Gentile branches will be entirely new grafts never before a part of that tree (it is not “their own”). Jason’s theory is being directly denied by Paul here.
 And remember, Paul already explained his logic here, in Romans 4:16, where he said, “the promise comes by faith, so that it may be by grace,” by which Paul is outright saying it does not come by blood inheritance—it is by grace, not birth. That is how salvation, Paul says, “may be guaranteed to all Abraham’s offspring—not only to those who are of the law but also to those who have the faith of Abraham.” He does not say “to those who have the blood of Abraham.” And that word choice refutes Jason’s theory. Paul avoided affirming Jason’s theory but chose to deny it instead: faith is superseding blood in Paul. That’s his entire argument.


Hence when he says “not only to those who are of the law but also to those who have the faith” Paul does not say (and nowhere ever says) anything like “but also to those fallen away” or “but also to those heirs who abandoned the law” or anything that connects these other children biologically. To the contrary, Paul says faith alone makes you a child of Abraham, not blood. And that is how Abraham, he says, “is the father of us all.” Notice what Paul does not say here: that the reason Abraham is the father of us all is that we all trace descendance to him in the flesh. Paul says the opposite: that we all become his children through faith, which is an act of choice, not biology. So when Paul quotes scripture saying “I have made you a father of many nations” in Romans 4:17, Paul is telling us what he thinks that verse means: Abraham “is your father in the sight of God,” not your father in the flesh, not your father by ancestry, not your father by blood inheritance. No. Paul says he is your father only “in the eyes of God,” which means not by blood—it means God has to choose to include you, you are not already included physically, but you can become included metaphysically (as in their view, infusion of the spirit was a physical transformation into the same nature, not a “social construction” like we imagine adoption today). Here is where Paul would have said what Jason wants. Instead Paul chose to say exactly the opposite. And that again refutes Jason’s theory.

Which is all why in 1 Corinthians 10:1 Paul can say “our fathers” and mean the patriarchs, whose family the baptized have been adopted into. DeCosta wants this to mean Paul thinks all the Corinthians are biologically Israelites, but everything Paul says makes clear he never thinks that, about any of his congregations. As is clear in 1 Corinthians 10:18, where Paul says to “behold Israel after the flesh: are not they who eat of the sacrifices partakers of the altar?” Here he distinguishes the Israelites from the Corinthians he is writing to, which means he does not understand those Corinthians to be Israel in the flesh. He has to make the distinction “according to the flesh” because Paul’s Christians all regard themselves as Israel (as Paul elaborately explains in Romans, for example), so he can’t just say “Israel” here. He has to specify he means biological Israelites, not spiritual. He is therefore distinguishing his Corinthians as Israel not after the flesh. And he gives no indication he means circumcision here, either, which is one of DeCosta’s circular arguments. The context is of ancestry, biology—just as Paul uses the phrase kata sarka everywhere else (Romans 1:3, Romans 4:1, Romans 8:4–5, Romans 8:12–13, Romans 9:3–5, 1 Corinthians 1:26, 2 Corinthians 1:16–18, 2 Corinthians 5:16, 2 Corinthians 10:2–3, 2 Corinthians 11:17–20, Galatians 4:23, Galatians 4:29). So the evidence is all against DeCosta here.

As in these cases so in all: evidence, not theory, always determines what Paul means. So, for example, we know Paul’s citation of Hosea in Romans 9:25 was understood by Paul to refer to all of Israel, not just the northern kingdom as DeCosta wants to claim, because Paul explicitly said so in Romans 9:1–5, that this entire chapter is about all Israel, going all the way back to the Patriarchs and Covenants, not just the northerners. So we cannot conclude Paul just suddenly changed his meaning whenever we want to. There is no evidence he did that. And where there is no evidence, there is no result (or as Taylor Swift will tell you, “No body, no crime”).

The evidence goes the other way in fact. For Paul’s sense is consistent across that chapter. And we can confirm that, as I already showed, from the following and preceding chapters in Romans. This is how evidence works: if you want Paul to have interpreted a scripture a certain way, you need evidence that he did so. And we have abundant evidence of how he interpreted Hosea here: as referring to all Israel back to the Patriarchs. It does not matter what Hosea originally meant. All the evidence is against Jason’s reading of Paul here. None for it. Remember what I told you to put a pin in earlier? Arguing over what Hosea originally meant is irrelevant here. What we want to know is what Paul thought, not what Hosea thought. And Paul tells us. But he does not tell us what Jason wants. He tells us the opposite. And that’s the end of Jason’s theory. Drop mic. Move on.

• Which all connects to 1 Corinthians.

In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul is extensively explaining why we need Christ to be resurrected and thus escape death, a death that was introduced due to the sin of Adam and thus infected all human beings. So while the law is one escape from this, Christ is another. 
As Paul says in Romans 2:12, “All who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, while all who sin under the law will be judged by the law.” So, to Paul, sin, and its penalty of death, does not require the law as DeCosta incorrectly claims. Sin and death afflict everyone. The law is just a way out.
 Because in Paul’s view (like every other messianic Jew at the time), the Torah covenant was invented long after Abraham to provide an escape route from this death sentence. It’s a kind of parole contract. Do x and get y. Which I explained in detail last time.


As Paul says in Romans 5:14 and 5:12, “death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command,” because, he continues, “sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned.” Not to some people. Not just to the children of Abraham. All people. The children of Abraham were given a deal later to escape death. That’s the covenant. But everyone sins and dies.
 Paul is clear about this when he concludes that point with Romans 5:15, where he says “if by the trespass of the one the many died, much more did the grace of God” through “the one man, Jesus Christ, abound unto the many,” hoi polloi here meaning everyone, because everyone dies, ergo everyone can be saved through Christ. This statement alone refutes DeCosta. For here Paul would have stated the “Israel Only gets saved” thesis if he believed it. But he didn’t because he doesn’t. Instead, Paul believes everyone can become an Israelite.

And there is no wiggle room here, either. Because Paul gets even more emphatic a few lines later when he repeats the point in Romans 5:18: “just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people,” and the Greek here is πάντας ἀνθρώπους (pantas anthrôpous), all people, “so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people,” again πάντας ἀνθρώπους, all people. Not some. Not Israel Only. All people. The parallelism here is indisputable: Paul means everyone who dies has access to Christ’s salvation. This is precisely where Paul would deny that if he did, where he would say not “the same many as die” or “all people” can be saved by Christ but “the lost Israelites only,” or something like that. He chose to say the opposite. That refutes Jason’s theory.


So it is crucial to observe that in 1 Corinthians 15:22 Paul repeats this point with the same parallelism: the problem of death is that “in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.” Again, πάντες (pantes), all. Notice the parallelism is the same as in Romans 5, and just as totalizing, and again entails “all” means “all” in both cases: everyone dies (not just the descendants of Abraham), and so everyone can be saved (not just the descendants of Abraham). If Paul meant the opposite of that, he would have said so. He didn’t. So here, where Jason’s theory predicts Paul would declare salvation is for Israel Only, Paul declares it is for everyone the world over. That refutes DeCosta again.


How does DeCosta react to being refuted here? He uses his hypothesis to change the meaning of “all in Christ” to match the one he wants, and then uses the resulting new meaning as evidence his interpretation of this verse is correct. Which is not correct. That’s a circular argument. The evidence is that Paul means a universal “all” on both sides of his conditional. If Paul did not mean that, he would have written these conditional statements differently. So Jason is just wrong here. Paul did not write what Jason wants him to have written. And that’s simply evidence against Jason.


Because across the whole of 1 Corinthians 15 Paul argues, in detail, that Christ solves the problem of death (through resurrection in a new body), which Paul says is due to having a body of flesh—which describes everyone, not just Israelites. As we see in 1 Corinthians 15:42, “the body that is sown is perishable,” but “the one raised is imperishable,” and as 1 Corinthians 15:47 says, Adam died because “he was of the dust of the earth,” as all humans are. This is Paul’s distinction between natural bodies that by nature die (the σῶμα ψυχικόν, sôma psychikon, the “breathing body”), and supernatural bodies (the σῶμα πνευματικόν, sôma pneumatikon, the “spirit body”) that by nature live forever, in 1 Corinthians 15:44–46. Paul argues at length that death is an inalienable property of the kind of body you have.


Indeed, Paul says Jesus will defeat death in the world entirely. Look at 1 Corinthians 15:24–26: “Then the end will come, when” Jesus “has destroyed all dominion, authority and power,” and indeed Paul says all, not some, and destroyed, not bypassed, nor temporarily subverted for a few people, and then Paul says Jesus will put “all his enemies under his feet, and the last enemy to be destroyed is death.” Not for some people. Altogether. And not leaving death still around. It is canceled (katargeitai, “abolish,” “to make completely inoperative or to put out of use”). Paul explicitly does not say anything about only solving a covenantal death as DeCosta claims. He is entirely clear he means solving actual physical death, a problem of what body you have and not whether you signed a Jewish contract, a problem that afflicts all humans, predates any covenant, and which the covenant was originally proposed as a solution for.

By joining that contract, you get saved.
 So Paul is saying there is now a new contract you can join instead, one that does not require biological descent because it can get you in by spiritual adoption, as Paul literally says repeatedly—as for example in Romans 8:15 and 8:9: “you have received the spirit of adoption” (not “you are descendants in the flesh” and thus don’t need to be grafted in by adoption) and again, “if Christ is in you, then even though your body is subject to death because of sin, the spirit gives life,” which entails anyone gets this benefit. Because he says anyone who takes baptism takes the spirit of Christ. Paul never says this is limited only to Israelites. He never says Christ won’t enter people lacking a birthright. This is even referenced by Paul in the same argument: he describes baptism for the dead in 1 Corinthians 15:29. He does not say that that only works for biological descendants of Abraham. He never says that. He instead keeps saying you need to be adopted to get in, not “you are already genealogically in.”

• But the biggest shatter of DeCosta’s theory comes from Galatians.

I cover this in good detail in chapter nine of my book The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus. Paul’s argument in Galatians 3–4 is that inheritance can come by adoption, not just by biology, and therefore anyone can be an Israelite if they choose to, by baptism. This is the opposite of Jason’s thesis.
 You can pull out your Bibles and follow along again here.

Because Galatians 3 and 4 comprise a single running argument against Jason’s theory. The structure of Galatians 3–to–4 consists of an elaborate reinterpretation of the Abraham-Hagar-Sarah narrative to explain Paul’s mission to the Gentiles.
 The fact that Paul had to compose two whole chapters of well over a thousand words to make this argument alone disproves Jason’s theory. Because if all Paul meant to argue here was that his Gentile converts are actually just lost Israelites who deserve to get cut back in on what they were already promised because they are kin by blood, then Paul could just say that—and it would take less than fifty words. The only reason Paul needed fifteen hundred words is that that simple idea is not what he is arguing.

Instead, Paul is arguing that people who are not biological descendants of Abraham should get counted as if they were (remember the line from Romans 9:8: λογίζεται εἰς σπέρμα, “counted as if they were seed”). Which is such a radical idea that it does indeed require a lot of tortuous reinterpretations of scripture, colorful analogies, and fancy rhetoric.
 It requires hundreds and hundreds of words and a dizzyingly convoluted argument—because Paul was a crank, too.

I’ll just go through some examples proving my point:


In Galatians 3:6–7: Paul says that since “Abraham ‘believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness’, so understand that those who have faith are children of Abraham.” The logic here is clear: Abraham was not declared righteous by biology, but by faith; ergo, Paul’s Gentiles will be, too. Which is arguing they don’t need biological descent. Faith is enough. Just as it was for Abraham. So when in Galatians 3:8 Paul quotes the scripture that says “all nations will be blessed through you” Paul tells us what he thinks that means, and it is not what Jason wants: Paul says “therefore those who rely on faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith.” Faith, not biology. That’s Paul’s entire thesis. And if you don’t believe it, just wait.


In Galatians 3:14: Paul says Jesus “redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ,” which is the opposite of saying it comes to them “through blood inheritance.”
 In Galatians 3:16: Paul says “the promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed … meaning one person, who is Christ.” Here Paul is taking away the biological descent argument by reinterpreting the seed scripture to only refer to Jesus, not the converted: for Paul, here, “the seed” does not mean lost Israelites, but Jesus alone, and therefore anyone baptized into him.
 This is Paul’s most crucial premise.
 Because he has removed biological descent here, and transferred this power to Jesus, for the very purpose that now everyone baptized into Jesus gets the promise.

Adoption has thus replaced blood inheritance, as Paul explicitly says later, in Galatians 4:4–6, where it is by joining Christ that “you also become an heir through God.” Through God, not blood; meaning they weren’t an heir before. Which is the opposite of Jason’s theory. Gentiles get this status only “by an act of God” (διὰ Θεοῦ, dia theou, “by means of God,” “through God”), which Paul had explained a few lines before is accomplished through baptism, not biological descent.
 In Galatians 3:22: Paul says “what was promised is given through faith in Jesus,” so, not through a biological right of inheritance; and 3:26, “in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith,” again, not blood. Paul has eliminated biology and replaced it with faith.


In Galatians 3:29, therefore, Paul reasons, “If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed.” Not “If you descend from Abraham, then you belong to Christ.” Which would be Jason’s theory. Paul’s theory is the reverse. He does not say “If you are a lost descendant of Abraham, then you inherit the promise made to him.” No. Paul always says the opposite: you can bypass any such blood relation through adoption into Christ. That’s Paul’s entire argument here. Christ first; belonging follows. Not the other way around.
 Hence in Galatians 4:23–25: Paul’s allegory of Sarah and Hagar makes this replacement theory clear, providing Paul’s exegetical basis for what he said in Romans 11, that the Gentiles are not the lost branches grafted in, but wholly new ones: as here he says “Abraham’s son by the slave woman was born according to the flesh, but his son by the free woman was born as the result of a divine promise,” meaning, by god-magic, and “these women represent two covenants,” the old and new, and so Gentiles “are children of the promise” not children “of the flesh,” because the magical power of God made it so, not birth.


So when Paul says “the son born according to the flesh persecuted the son born by the power of the Spirit and it is the same now” he means that biological descendants of Abraham persecute his spiritual descendants, the Gentile Christians. This argument entails the Gentile Christians are not biological descendants of Abraham. They are not the ones born in the flesh. 
They are born by the spirit. This is important. Paul is conspicuously not saying his Gentiles biologically descended from Hagar or Sarah: he explicitly says these are symbols, not women, and they represent by allegory two different ways of becoming the children of Abraham—biologically and spiritually. You can inherit by blood (and thus “by nature,” as we saw he says in Romans) or by adoption (and thus “by the power of God,” likewise). Paul’s argument across chapters 3 and 4 of Galatians entails the option of blood is not available to his Gentiles. So they need the spiritual option to get in. Paul is therefore denying these Gentiles are lost Israelites.
 Which means Paul is outright denying Jason’s theory.

This is indeed the damning peculiarity of Galatians 3–4: Paul elaborately and explicitly argues for why adoption into Israel can magically work. But there is no reason he would ever make this argument if the people he means are already family. You don’t have to be adopted into a family you are already in. Paul would not even say (much less spend thousands of words across multiple letters arguing) that to become heirs to the promise you need to be adopted (Galatians 3:26–4:7) so that Jesus can be “the firstborn of many brethren” (Romans 8:29) if the people he was talking to were already biological heirs to the promise. Because then that’s all Paul would have to say. Which he could say in a quick paragraph at most. But that is the one thing he never ever says. All he says entails he did not believe that, and that is why he needed a convoluted loophole to get people outside the family into the family. Hence Paul rejects DeCosta’s theory.

We don’t get Jason’s theory out of any of the other books of the Bible either. Acts denies it outright—in verses 15:14, 10:28, and 26:23. Which in context say the opposite of what Jason claims. As does the Gospel of John (in John 1:11–12). The other books fall to the same analysis as Paul: (1) none state DeCosta’s thesis; (2) and DeCosta has no evidence to support his reinterpretations of anything they do say. And that’s that. But to be thorough I will continue with an appendix here on these other texts and DeCosta’s false readings of them.

The Book of Acts Says the Opposite

Jason also relies on the book of Acts, even though that was not written by Paul or by anyone who knew him, and contradicts his eyewitness testimony repeatedly, and makes documented mistakes, so it is not trustworthy. But if Jason’s theory is that these are false beliefs, the question is whether the author of Acts nevertheless knew about and believed what Jason does or not.

Acts was written long after the Jewish War so we should conclude its author did not believe, nor wanted to promote, what Jason says. Acts therefore cannot be used as evidence for Jason’s theory.
 But it also outright denies his theory.
 In Acts 10:28 the author wrote that Peter went to the Centurion Cornelius who asked his help and Peter said to him: “You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with or visit a Gentile. But God has shown me that I should not call anyone impure or unclean.” The Greek says “associate with another tribe” (he does not distinguish particular tribes; he therefore means all, as we know is indeed what the tradition Peter is citing held, although it was far more convoluted than Luke has Peter claim: on which see discussion and discussion and discussion), and the Greek says to not “call a man common or unclean,” which unambiguously means to include all people. Any man. No exception.
 So Peter is here denying Jason’s theory: he is saying no one is excluded from salvation. This is the position of the author of Acts. If that author had agreed with Jason, then this is where Peter would have been made to explain why Cornelius and his Gentile “family and friends” could be saved: that he and they are lost descendants of Abraham. Yet Peter is made to say the opposite. He issues a blanket declaration that anyone can get in.


So we can rule out Acts as evidence for Jason’s theory.

This is further proved by the fact that Acts 15 does not say what Jason claims, either. Jason wants to reinterpret its quotation of Amos, for example, but that comes after James is made to say this (in v. 14): “God first intervened to choose a people for his name from the Gentiles.” Here the author of Acts has James clearly understand Gentiles as not the Israelites, but as everyone else on Earth. So the author of Acts has told us what they think the quoted passage from Amos means: the opposite of what Jason wants. Since the children of Abraham were chosen by God from among the Gentiles (all the other peoples of Earth), when Amos says “the remainder of men and all the Gentiles,” the author of Acts clearly thinks that means all human beings on Earth—those not chosen before, the Tribe not singled out as God’s chosen people, the peoples “remaining” (κατάλοιποι τῶν ἀνθρώπων, kataloipoi tôn anthrôpôn) thereby comprising all peoples (πάντα τὰ ἔθνη, panta ta ethnê). This directly refutes Jason’s theory. So the author of Acts clearly did not believe in it.

Similarly, when Acts 26 mentions twelve tribes still awaiting salvation, that is based on Josephus. In particular the Antiquities 11.133 (aka 11.5.2), which says only two tribes are in the Roman Empire “subject to the Romans,” while the other ten are “beyond the Euphrates” (which would be in the Persian empire of that time).
 Paul had no known mission beyond the Euphrates. All his letters are to Greeks in Roman provinces. So this can’t get the meaning Jason wants. In fact, what the fictional Paul is explicitly not made to say here is that he plans to evangelize the lost tribes beyond the Euphrates, or lost Israelites at all. He instead is made to say, in 26:23, “that the Messiah would suffer and, as the first to rise from the dead, would bring the message of light to the people and then to the Gentiles” (likewise 26:17), which means in Greek his own people—so the author of Acts clearly does not consider “Gentiles” to mean “Israelites.” The Greek uses the τε καὶ (te kai) construction here, so it unambiguously means “the people” are not the Gentiles, but a separate group, and the definite article in such a case then means “his” people, so it cannot mean those incidentally Jews, but all Israelites.
 This refutes Jason again.

Acts never articulates Jason’s theory. And it says several things that deny it. That means we should conclude Acts did not espouse or even know about Jason’s interpretation.

The Gospel of John Also Says the Opposite

DeCosta also tries to spin his circular arguments from John 11:51–52. But that is also not Paul. This is not something Jesus or Paul said. It’s a late fiction composed long after the Jewish war. But it also denies Jason’s theory. The phrase “not only for that nation but also for the scattered children of God” distinguishes “children” of God from the “race” of Israel. Indeed the gender of the word “scattered” is neuter and thus goes with the word “child.” So the authors of John are grammatically excluding the “scattered children of God” from being racially Israelites. It’s even more clear in the Greek: Jesus died οὐχ ὑπὲρ τοῦ ἔθνους μόνον ἀλλα, “not for The Tribe only” (ouch hyper tou ethnous monon alla), meaning his tribe, the Israelites, thus literally saying not for Israel only. It adds instead “but also” for the children of God, who are thus being distinguished from the Israelites. The Gospel of John thus denies what Jason wants.

This is extra clear because the authors of John define what these children of God are in John 1:11–12: Jesus “came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.” This is unambiguous: they become Israelites (not “already are” Israelites); and Jesus came to save “all,” the word is ὅσοι (hosoi), “whoever” received him, not just the lost children of Israel; salvation goes to any who merely believe in him. And the authors of John go out of their way to say these are not biological descendants of Israel: John says they do not get in “by blood” (ἐξ αἱμάτων, ex haimatôn), nor inheritance of the flesh (θελήματος σαρκὸς, thelêmatos sarkos), nor even the inheritance of man (θελήματος ἀνδρὸς, thelêmatos andros, meaning converts to Judaism or their descendants).
 So John very clearly rejects Jason’s theory.

The Gospel of Matthew Rejects Paulinism Altogether

DeCosta also cites Matthew. But that makes no sense. Because Matthew is an anti-Pauline text and therefore is unusable for the opinions of Paul. This matters. Because the line DeCosta quotes, that “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 15:24) is only in that Gospel for a reason: that Gospel is rejecting Paul’s mission to the Gentiles. It only accepts Gentiles if they convert to Judaism (that’s why Matthew alone says “not one jot or tittle of the law” can be disregarded before the end comes in Matthew 5:18). Which is why Matthew made this change to his source text in Mark 6 and why Luke rejected Matthew’s changes in Luke 9. None of this interprets Paul or the Pauline view, which is represented by what Mark didn’t add and what Luke deliberately left out. So there is no way to get to DeCosta’s theory from here.

Ephesians Is a Forgery

DeCosta also cites Ephesians 2, but that is a forgery, and you can’t prove what Paul thought by citing a post-war forgery he didn’t compose. It also post-dates when Jason claims its author is supposed to think salvation ended, so it’s very unlikely its author thought this either. You also have to understand the Greek. In Ephesians 2:12 the Greek word translated as “alienated” is ἀπαλλοτριόω which is apo– allotrios, which means away from things belonging to another. That can include but does not entail previous possession of those things, as we see in Ephesians 4:18 where the same word refers to a thing they never had before they converted (the life of God).
 The forger of Ephesians happens to be emulating another forgery here, Colossians 1:21–22, where this phrase originated: “once you were alienated from God” but “now he has reconciled you.” The forger of Colossians does not mean the Colossians used to be reconciled then became alienated; he means they never had a relationship with God at all and then obtained it.
 So Jason’s theory of the text of Ephesians is not probable.
 Moreover, in Ephesians 2:12 the thing they weren’t let in on, the forger says, is the “polity” of Israel. And Ephesians 2:19 says they become such citizens spiritually, not biologically.
 This simply undoes Jason’s theory. There is just no way to get there from here.

Conclusion: I Will Tolerate No More Blather

DeCosta is a crank. Probably delusional. His theory is literal insanity. It devolves from denying evidence against him and circularly reinterpreting all the remaining evidence to get the “red string board” lined up the way he needs. It’s tinfoil hat. That’s my opinion. And I find this to be tedious.

You need to stop taking these guys seriously. Relegate them to the dunce box along with people who think lizardmen rule the planet, the earth is flat, contrails are mind control sprays, and Donald Trump isn’t the Antichrist. But “if you must,” the key to engaging them is to not let them blather. Always and immediately call out every circular argument, and every time they ignore a refutation you just gave them or even deny evidence outright, and refuse—refuse—to let them keep repeating the same thing you just called out. Just call it out every time they use it again. Every single time. By the time you’ve hit a hundred times of doing that, you probably will start to get why I advise that you just marginalize these streetcorner babblers and stop interacting with them. Stop giving them attention and oxygen. If they ran legislatures or communities, then I can understanding having to engage them. But these guys are an eyelash in the shipping lane. It is more productive to ignore them than boost their signal.

But another bit of advice I have to give you, which applies to all liars, propagandists, and cranks: stop letting them frame the debate. In our debate DeCosta kept arguing that it’s impossible for Paul to have argued, or that Paul would surely say it if he did, that he was annulling or altering the Abrahamic oaths and promises. He refused to acknowledge my explanations that Paul never does that. I pointed out, again and again, with explicit quotes of Paul outright saying it, that Paul is upholding those oaths and promises, not annulling them, not amending them, not changing them. Paul was saying the promise as already made already included adoption as a mechanism to join the family, that scriptural references to a seed were already not restricted to biology. And in fact this is why Paul had to be so obsessively concerned about all this talk of seeds and oaths, this is why Paul had to deploy such elaborate arguments across whole letters of thousands of words: to get his own crank theory about magical adoption to work, without saying the oaths have been annulled or altered.

DeCosta outright ignored me. He kept repeating the same refuted point over and over. He likewise refused to acknowledge, point blank, that when Paul explicitly says there are two separate olive trees with their own roots, that there are two. He ignored almost every prooftext I offered; or kept repeating the same circular arguments to make them go away that I already called out as circular and thus invalid. All of which means it is time to stop talking to him. Anyone who acts like that is insane. And you cannot have a rational or productive conversation with a lunatic about the object of their insanity. Stop giving them a podium. They need a professional psychotherapist, not an internet forum. They rage when we call it like that (which is to say, like it is), but that’s because they are frustrated that they cannot earn the respectability they want. Because their arguments are not respectable. And they are doing nothing to earn respect for them. So they need to be told to leave.

Show them the door. And don’t let them back in.

Accordingly, any comments that do the same fucking shit will be deleted here. And anyone who keeps trying to do that will be permanently banned.

Earn respect by acknowledging facts and their impact and by reasoning logically—or fuck off.