spamandham

I do feel that way in this case, sorry, but a bit of common sense is expected here. I've gone way above and beyond in the analysis, and none of it should have been expected.

In general, I'm ok with disagreement, but not if it's clearly irrational disagreement.

hjalti

spam, I just don't see how your "choosing a random" has any resemblance to what we're doing when we try to find out if the epistles are forgeries or not.

We don't just "pick a letter at random" and then check the tag and see if it's a forgery or not. (like your calculations seem to assume).

Rather, we have a test (i.e. looking for anachronisms) and we use that test on all of the epistles. And if an epistle fails that test we tag it as a forgery.

So what we have is something like this:

We have 13 women. And we let them all take a pregnancy test. And let's say that 6 of them get the result "You are pregnant" and the other get the result "Inconclusive".

According to you, the other 7 can't all not be pregnant. Because if we pick 6 of the 13 at random, then the probabilty of picking those 6 that just happened to get "You are pregnant" from the test is 1 in 100.000!

Doug Shaver

OK. I guess I don't have any.

spamandham

Right. The test tells us whether or not a given text is the same authorship as others in the set. We have identified 6 of the texts as most likely of different authorship. The remaining seven texts may very well be of the same authorship. In no way does that imply they are autobiographical in nature. Since all the texts came to us via the same mechanism, and since all the texts take the same form, the same language, etc., it's valid to infer similar fidelity across the set.

It's not a good analogy, because there is no reason to presuppose a causal link between these pregnancies. The same is not true in the case of these texts.

Here's the proper analogy:

Someone hands you a sheet of paper containing 13 facts about the former Soviet Union. They all start off as: Greetings dear {Y} from your dear friend Stalin, this is fact {x}.

Through painstaking effort, you are able to determine that 6 of the "facts" are outright lies - pure political propaganda and certainly were not written by Stalin. On the remaining 7, you are unable to prove one way or the other. Also, the person that handed it to you is an ex-agent of the politburo.

Is it sensible to presume that the remaining 7 are true?

spamandham

If you want to leave it at that, that's up to you. ...or you could poke holes in my argument.

andrewcriddle

I'm frankly dubious about this whole line of argument, but there seem to be at least 2 specific problems:
a/ You are regarding the claim that 6 of the 13 letters are inauthentic as certain, or beyond reasonable doubt, whereas it is at best probable.
b/ A considerable part of the argument against the authenticity of say the pastorals is really an argument against single authorship, ie it is an argument that the same person did not write both the pastorals and the major Pauline letters. On the assumption that Paul did write the major Paulines then Paul did not write the pastorals. If one doubts whether Paul genuinely wrote Romans Galatians and the Corinthians then the argument against Paul writing the pastorals is significantly weakened.

Andrew Criddle

spamandham

I'm not assuming it's beyond reasonable doubt, I'm assuming the ordinary conclusion based on ordinary evidence is proper. If the conclusions regarding the 6 are wrong, then obviously the entire argument falls apart.

Are you saying that if Paul did not write Galatians, that increases the probability that he did write Colossians!?

andrewcriddle

IMHO Paul did write Colossians, but in any case the main arguments against Pauline authorship of Colossians are comparison with the other Paulines. If this argument is invalid, ie we can't assume Paul wrote Galatians etc, then the positive argument against Pauline authorship of Colossians is very weak.

I'll try and restate my difficulties with your argument in another way.

We have 13 letters claiming to have been written by Paul in the mid 1st century. They all appear to be 1st century or very early 2nd century. However they appear to have been written by more than one person and some appear to be later imitations or developments of the earlier letters.

I don't see how this presentation of the situation really supports the idea that none (or almost none) of the letters was genuinely written by Paul in the mid 1st century.

Andrew Criddle

aa5874

The deduction that more than one person wrote under the name Paul cannot at all determine that any writing with the name Paul is authentic and cannot determine the actual date of any Pauline writing.

Assumptions that any Pauline writing is authentic has NO validity, has NO basis, since it is not known if anyone named Paul actually wrote anything or if it was a later writer who was REALLY named Paul.

No external non-apologetic source can confirm who "Paul" actually was and the Church was either completely fooled for hundreds of years, did not care, or deliberately wanted people to believe one writer authored all the Pauline writings.

And further, information found in the Pauline writings did not ever occur before the Fall of the Temple.

The Pauline writings MUST be questioned or are questionable not authentic.

spamandham

*Someone* wrote Galatians, and *someone* wrote Colossians. Those are two unquestionable facts. The texts had a minimum of 1 author. The analysis that shows they are not the same author is valid regardless of the involvement of Paul.

You would have to suppose that 7 letters really were written by Paul, and then 6 more were added that were attributed to Paul but not written by him. This isn't impossible of course, but there is no reason to suppose it, because the existence of a single fraud obliterates the argument that there is fidelity in the delivery mechanism. So the fact that we have exposed 6 frauds weighs against the integrity of the other 7, which have the same form and were delivered to us via the same messenger as a set.