Comments on: I'm Sort of on TV This Weekend – And in Some New Videos Online https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/4708 Announcing appearances, publications, and analysis of questions historical, philosophical, and political by author, philosopher, and historian Richard Carrier. Tue, 02 Jun 2026 21:17:22 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.1.2 By: Richard Carrier https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/4708#comment-11054 Mon, 21 Oct 2013 17:27:43 +0000 http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/?p=4708#comment-11054 In reply to Tim Bos.

A little from column (a) and a little from column (b). I have my doubts about Philemon, for example, but I haven’t taken the trouble to vet those doubts, because there is nothing in it relevant to my work (no discussions relevant to the historicity of Jesus). I have independently confirmed to my own satisfaction (via stylistic, literary, and historical analysis) that the other six were written by the same author, and that this was not the author of the Pastorals, the Deuteropaulines, or 2 Thessalonians (or Hebrews, but that doesn’t claim to be by Paul). Although there is room still to convince me otherwise, since my examination wasn’t exhaustive, just enough to satisfy me that the widest consensus is probably correct.

Now, one could still argue that though those six were written by the same author, nevertheless they are fictional, but that cannot follow from their content, which is perfectly explicable without that hypothesis (I have satisfied myself that arguments to the contrary are invalid, e.g. Detering’s case is built on fallacious reasoning), so one would need some sort of external evidence to conclude that, and there isn’t any that I know of. Moreover, contra Brodie, they simply do not look like fictional letters–I’ve read a lot of examples of the latter from antiquity, and they have little in common in style and content with letters like Paul’s (the one argument that they are unusually long has a more plausible explanation in the fact that we have evidence they are actually stitches of several letters, which evidence would not exist if they were fictional, but is exactly what we’d expect if real letters were stitched together).

So I am sufficiently confident at least those six are by the Paul they claim to be written by and were written in the 50s AD.

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By: Tim Bos https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/4708#comment-11053 Sun, 20 Oct 2013 18:02:18 +0000 http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/?p=4708#comment-11053 Hi Dr. Carrier. I just finished watching the INR talk. I thought it was just great, but I do have a question about the talk. I noticed there and elsewhere that you accept the “7 genuine epistles” view of mainstream scholarship. Do you do so (a) because it is preferable, strategically, to simpy accept this view in making your general case, or (b) because as the result careful study of careful study of the epistles and their historical context, you have concluded that the most likely explanation of all the data is that a single person named “Paul” wrote all 7 letters?

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By: Scott D https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/4708#comment-11052 Fri, 18 Oct 2013 13:41:55 +0000 http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/?p=4708#comment-11052 I love this topic! Imagine only studying Christianity with evidence and reasoning and not the massive “affirming the consequent” that so much of New Testament Studies involves! I am watching the video now!

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