renassault

Not really. If you open a door and expect to find an elephant in the room and there is none, the absense of evidence is evidence of absense.


It's not unsupported as per the below reasons.

No, it's an unsupported assertion to maintain the text was in a state of flux without any justification or overturning the below barriers. That there was no agreement on the canon up until around the 4th/5th century is well-known, but irrelevant.

Not if you stop to think for two seconds.

Uh, you have absolutely no comprehension of anything that was written in that post. If Ehrman maintains our present deviations stem from the 2nd and 3rd centuries, he's clearly appealing to our lack of knowledge of the extremely minor variations that ocurred in the years 50-150, due to the below factors, not stretching into huge interpolations such as 1 Cor. 15:3-11 without any record in the mss. tradition. Either Ehrman has misinterpreted the 98.5% textual purity of the text as per Aland, or Walker quoting him.

2 Thess. 2:2 is a solemn condemnation of forgeries. That you can't read is not my problem. The letter warns against letters sent falsely in the Apostle's name, how much more forged parts of a genuine letter? That the letters of Paul were not to be tampered with at one's leisure, contrary to what Bart Ehrman would like us to believe, is shown by 2 Thess.'s statements, which was not written after 100, long before any strict canon. And so, hardly would anyone forge it while anyone in the congregation was still alive, and by that time there would have been many copies of Paul's letters.

It's not. They clearly couldn't stop the Gnostics from using canonical books, so how can they contain all mss transmissions?

If they fixed the deviations they wouldn't have left such huge ones as Romans 16:25-27 (which appears at very different places, such as at the end of Rom. 14, 15, and 16.



It's not straying. If they would have weeded out the deviations in the Pauline mss., they would have done so with the rest of the books including Acts.

There's no overgeneralization. If they could have weeded out all the deviant mss. in unity, they would have agreed on the canon before the 4th century.

renassault

That's easy to establish. See for example here: here

The consensus on the "Hauptbriefe" has been there unmoved since Baur, and critical examination has confirmed that at least 7 (if not 10) of those letters come from the historical Paul. For example, who would forge Philemon and why would it be kept around if not Pauline? It is short, has nothing of value in it except personal references, and so on. The tradition is unanimous and too strong (1 clement quotes 3-4 or so as authoritative, meaning not written after 70, and that really begs to wonder how the forgery was spread if not by Paul prior to 70), as well as the internal evidence point to primitive conditions that can't really be accounted for in the last third of the 1st century (e.g. little to no concern with the ecclesiastical issues and early Catholicism as exhibited for example in 1 Clement, focus on the group as a charismatic whole, gifts of tongues, prophecy, etc., i.e. the transitional period of the church which was 50-70).

Grand assumption, but several Pauline verses mark Jesus at a divine status making Paul at the very least a binitarian, e.g. Philippians 2:5-7, Rom. 9:5, and so on.

Um, yes they certainly do.

Care to point out some specifics?

Acts of the Apostles has been confirmed in many small details to be so easily called a fraud. The Pauline writings can't be called a fraud with Acts.

But it doesn't appear to be later. Paul clearly still refers to the oral tradition of Jesus (1 Cor. 7, 10-11, etc.) which was behind the composition of the Gospels.

renassault

Just because they have disappeared doesn't mean there weren't a lot of them. If the Scillitan martyrs in 180 AD could be carrying Paul's letters, clearly they were very widespread.

I know, I was giving you an example as to how changes don't go unnoticed in the mss record. There are no other divergences because Marcion was condemned. It's really surprising that the Romans doxology got into the mainstream mss at all, and just testifies more to the impossibility of forging the mss tradition without a trace.

It's not the same at all. No one would have dared do it while there were still members in the congregation, to whom the letter was read out loud (see Col. 4:16; least of all if it went to be read in other churches).

renassault

Well take a random verse from Shakespeare and tell me why you think it's authentic as opposed to a 17th century forgery. Simply, not only is there no reason to suggest it based on the evidence, but if a forgerer were trying to solidify proof of the Resurrection, he would not have used the verb for "appeared" in 1 Cor. 15:3-11, but the one used in Acts 1:1-4 which denotes a physical resurrection beyond question. Furthermore, 15:8 seems a very odd thing to say about the Apostle Paul if a later Paulinist were inserting it; it sounds genuinely as by the man himself, i.e.: "finally appeared to me as to one abnormally born" is highly unlikely for a forgerer to put in. Finally, the whole thing doesn't seem smooth which a forgerer would have undoubtedly had: one is almost left with the impression that the Twelve are not apostles (15:5 vs. 7).

renassault

Baur's reasoning was simple and straightforward: the primitive arguments of Jewish and Gentile Christianity. That is a criteria which, combined with supporting factors pretty much solidifies the 4 letters he accepted as Pauline. The other 3 are widely accepted based on style and other reasons (for examples the absense of disputes over the Law in 1 Thess. is due to the lack of evidence that it was ever a problem there, or at least not as early as 51).

He quotes them. He reproduces long segments from a few of them, in a similar manner as he does from Psalms etc., so we know he quotes 3-4 of them.

The short Philemon has Pauline characteristics (the greeting), plus the lack of point of forgery combined with the fact that Colossians knows it (the greetings in Colossians are identical) and the fact that it was copied means it must be Pauline.

andrewcriddle

See My archive posts Post-Resurrection Appearances Page 2 and The Empty Tomb

Irenaeus says of the Valentinians Marcion's text of Paul is difficult to establish. The clearest evidence that his text of Corinthians included at least part of 1 Corinthians 15 v 3-11 is that Epiphanius in the Panarion gives a list of passages left in Paul by Marcion which Epiphanius holds support Christian Orthodoxy against Marcion's heresy. For 1 Corinthians the list includes 'he rose on the third day'

There are also passages in the works of Tertullian and Adamantius against Marcion which quote verses from 1 Corinthians 15:3-11 in a way that most scholars have held implies that Marcion's Paul also had these verses. (ie if Marcion's Paul omitted these verses the argument would not work against its intended targets.)


Andrew Criddle

Johnny Skeptic

Why can't a writer's style be successfully duplicated in an interpolation? Why must all interpolations be obvious?

renassault

It's not a question of style (but in the case of style it's because a writer's style would be odd to duplicate). It is exactly because there was no reason not to put, for example, the word for "appeared" - "optanomai" instead of of "horaho" in 1 Cor 15 (15:5, 7, etc.). It's simply useless and very unlikely for a forgerer to do this or give an unconnected version of appearances in 15:3-11 for no reason really. A forgerer would have seen the Twelve as apostles (see Jude 1:3), and would not have separated them as he does in verses 5 and 7. It's not simply a matter of style (which by itself would be enough to do away with forgery, simply because the situation becomes one not of determining inauthenticity vs. authenticity, but demanding inauthenticity is the case.. the position of most here).

It's exactly the style that is deemed unique, with a forgerer having slip ups (i.e. compare 3 Corinthians with the rest of the Pauline corpus), and errors are usually not obvious, such as for example using different connectives than Paul usually does, and so on.

aa5874

Your arguments for the early date of Clement 1 are assumptions based on speculations and are unsupported external of the Church writings.

Your claim that Clement was a bishop of Rome is most likely false since it was also claimed Clement knew Peter. Peter was a fictitious character in the Jesus stories written after the Fall of the Jewish Temple.

You have no credible historical source external of the Church writers to account for 1 Clement.

Your supposed concensus is "FAITH-BASED" or supported by speculation.

I need credible HISTORICAL sources of antiquity not some fallacy about concensus.

Now, once you link 1 Clement to the gifts of the Holy Ghost and talking in tongues, you are placing 1 Clement around the time of Acts of the Apostles. Up to the middle of the 2nd century Justin Martyr wrote nothing about the gifts of the Holy Ghost, talking in tongues.

But, the post-conversion history of Saul/Paul is in Acts of the Apostles, the book that you have confirmed is fraud. The Pauline writer has corroborated some of the fiction in Acts of the Apostles.

The Pauline writer, as in Acts, claimed he persecuted Jesus believers after Jesus went to heaven in a cloud.

Jesus was a fictitious character invented after the Fall of the Temple. There was no ascension of any character called Jesus.

And the Church claimed Paul was aware of gLuke.


The Pauline writer must be a fraud when he attempted to historicise fiction.


The Pauline writer claimed he was LAST to see Jesus.

The Pauline writer or the Church made no claim at all that he invented Jesus.

The Jesus story was invented after the Fall of the Temple.

It is a complete fallacy that a writer called Paul who was blinded by a bright light, wrote about a character called Jesus in the 1st century before the Fall of the Temple.

1 Corinthians 15.3-11 are not interpolations but the actual evidence that the Pauline writings are all late.

Johnny Skeptic

I correspond with Bob Price from time to time. I asked him today about the issue of forgery, and he said: