Is It Possible Paul Didn’t Write ANY of the New Testament Letters?

Shirley Paulson:

We are going to get into a very surprising topic for today. My guest, Dr. Nina Livesey, has been studying Paul and Pauline letters for quite some time, and now her research is leading to some startling new conclusions.

Before we get there, let me introduce her to you. Nina is a professor emerita of religious studies at Oklahoma University College of Professional and Continuing Studies. In addition to her specialization in Pauline letters, she’s interested in a variety of aspects of Christian emergence. I also have come to know Nina through our mutual work with the Westar Institute. She was one of the co-chairs of the recently concluded Christianity Seminar Phase II. Nina has also written three significant monographs. The one we’re talking about today is newly published and is titled The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Epistolic Authorship. So welcome, Nina. So glad to have you with us today.

Nina Livesey:

Thank you so much, Shirley, and it’s great to be with you, my friend.

Shirley:

Yes, this is a wonderful friendship, and it’s fun to talk about difficult topics with somebody that you trust and know. So I’m happy to have this with you, Nina.

I must say, your book is a startling one. You have come up with a lot of reasons for why you doubt that Paul is actually the author of any of the New Testament letters. Since around the end of the 19th century, most scholars tended to agree that Paul wrote at least six of the 13 letters attributed to him in the New Testament. And now you think he didn’t write any of them! So within the context of the next half hour, I hope we can learn from you why you think so and maybe something of what these implications might be. So maybe you can start by telling us why you first started to doubt Paul as the author of these six.

Nina:

Well, thank you for the question. So it was around 2018, actually, that I first began to doubt that Paul wrote any of the letters. And it was in 2018 that I started research for the book that was published. So to explain and a little backdrop for your audience, much of Pauline scholarship finds that actually seven letters are considered authentic, written by Paul and genuine correspondence, actually sent letters. Paul sent these letters out. And those are:

1. Romans
2. 1 and 2 Corinthians
3. Galatians
4. Philippians
5. 1 Thessalonians
6. Philemon

But I gradually came to have a different perspective than this dominant one that those are genuine letters. And it was in large measure based on the work of my earlier, the second book that I wrote, which was on Galatians from a rhetorical perspective. And I think you and I talked about this book earlier. That set the ground, you might say, seeds of doubt of Pauline authorship, although even after that book was published and a few years after it, I still held to Pauline authorship. But it was in that book, actually, that I could no longer take any of the letters, the contents of the letters at face value. And it was that work on rhetoric and looking into ancient rhetorical theory that made me understand a little bit more about how ancients wrote and what their compositional goals were.

I was particularly influenced by a scholar called George Lyons, New Testament scholar, who wrote on Pauline autobiography. And he wrote that ancient autobiography—as an example of what I’m talking about—is not about historical reality as you might expect from a modern notion of autobiography, but it’s more about human potentiality and idealization. That impacted me quite a bit. That one notion has played a large role in my thinking. What do you mean ancient autobiography is not about trying to get at the actual person, something real about that person? So that really changed my thinking about ancient writing even more largely.

Then, in addition to that—and I’m almost to the end of your question here—I was in touch with, and it was just serendipity, you might say, with a classicist friend who advised me that ancient authorship is really not very easy to ascertain. We can’t know that just because that name is applied to a work. You can’t automatically assume that a work is by that person. That too struck me rather hard. You might say, it made a larger influence on me so that it occurred to me then that Pauline scholars were likely overconfident in their assessment that Paul actually wrote these letters.

And those two issues, combined, started my quest, you might say, about authenticity and the letters. So the book was to find out whether these letters were authentic? How do we know these letters are authentic? I wanted to probe that question.

Shirley:

Well, you know, I’m glad to hear that you actually had doubts about it too. You didn’t start off trying to prove everything was wrong. You had to go through a process yourself, which is helpful for us to hear you. So that’s helpful.

And you know, speaking of writing, I know that Bible readers usually notice that there are discrepancies between the stories in the book of Acts and Paul’s letters. So how does your understanding of Acts then help you to think about Paul?

Nina:

Right. I do think Acts is very important for the whole idea of Paul. And as you correctly note, biblical scholars have long recognized that there are character differences between the Paul of Acts and the Apostle Paul of the letters. And since the mid 19th-century work of F.C. Bauer, they have discounted the book of Acts as a historically reliable narrative of early Christianity. And that’s a widely held position, I would say, in scholarship today. Acts is not historically reliable.

Ironically, that same influential scholar, F.C. Bauer, also bequeathed to the field the legacy that Pauline letters are by contrast historically reliable and authentic. It’s funny because Bauer had a double influence. The one caveat there is with Bauer, he limited authentic letters to four. And those four are:

1. Romans,
2. 1st and 2nd Corinthians,
3. Galatians.

The letters that end up getting most of the scholarship right now, those are called, well, for Bauer, they were called the chief letters. And really in current scholarship, we deal with them as though they’re the chief letters. The meat of Paul, you might say.

So I very much agree with the view that Acts is unreliable. But then I extend that also to Paul as characterized in that writing. So I guess that is a more important point with regard to my own thesis here.

So as I mentioned in the book, the author of Acts—and this is also an important point, I think, for where I’m going and my understanding of the letters—the author of Acts is a master at manipulating character names to help advance his narrative goals. It’s really rather clever.

So a major plot line in Acts, if you will, is the movement of the message of Christ to Gentiles after the Jews reject it. You see that theme over and over again. And the whole thing is about how does the message go to the Gentiles? Who’s taking it? And how does it get there? But a change in character name functions as a literary device to advance that exact plot line. So for example, Simon is a Jewish name, a figure given in Hebrew writings. And in Acts, this character is called by an additional Greek, Gentile you might say, named Peter. You know Peter.

So Simon is involved in the conversion of the first Gentile, a Roman centurion Cornelius. You probably know that’s a very well-known story in Acts. And during the lengthy episode replete with angelophanies, it’s quite theatric, the narrative of the conversion of Cornelius. The author of Acts mentions three times, and three times is significant in Acts, that Simon is called Peter. That happens three times. I can give you the verses, but I won’t go into that. The character is referred to Peter when he makes a speech that witnesses of Christ, which results actually in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and ends in the acceptance of baptism by Cornelius. So he’s Peter at that point.

But you see something similar. I mentioned Peter because the same kind of thing, or very similar thing I would say, is happening with Paul, the character Paul. Yeah, so we tend to say Paul is a unique person and operated differently from a lot of other characters. But the same treatment you see with Paul. So we see this character Paul who goes from Saul, not Simon and Peter, but Saul to Paul. Saul is certainly a Jewish name and associated moreover with this flawed King Saul in the book of Samuel. And then he goes to Paul, Paulus in the Greek, a Roman name with his first miracle, which happens to be the conversion, again a conversion, of a Roman Gentile governor of the city of Rome, an important figure in other words, Sergius Paulus. And I think the name Paulus is significant there.

So it’s reasonable, I mean it’s not a big leap—literary leap—to see the connection between Paul, Paulus, and Sergius Paulus. So it seems reasonable to assume that’s how Saul becomes Paul. He takes the Gentile’s family name for his own cognomen or nickname. But both episodes, the Peter episode and the Paul episode, are similar and part of the author’s strategy to narrate the movement of the message of Christ from Jew to Gentile. So character names make that happen.

But Paul is also important in Acts, very important I would say, because the entire last half of Acts has to do with Paul. It’s like all the other characters roll away and it’s about Paul and his missionary travels, right? And he becomes, you might say, the hero of Acts. So I understand the Paul in Acts to be a fictive character. He’s given the name Paul, a Roman name, which serves to help advance the plot. And this character, I argue, becomes later the Apostle Paul of the letters. And he is meant to be recognizable from Acts. You know that that’s the same character, even though that character in the letter now has his own voice and he becomes more doctrinal. He speaks more about the doctrines and does moral exhortation to Gentiles, though. He speaks exclusively to Gentiles. Where in Acts, he’s talking first to Jews. All the time you see Jews first, and then Gentiles.

I could say more, but I think I’ll stop there.

Shirley:

Yeah, yeah. It’s so much to say with a book, how to summarize everything.

Nina:

It’s impossible in a short interview.

Shirley:

Yeah, that’s right. And I read your book from cover to cover, just really enjoyed it. And I know you have many, many more examples that convinced me to sort of follow this line. But for people who are still skeptical, which I imagine is just not easy to follow this, taking your word for it right now, we’ll keep going.

When, then, would you think that the letters of Paul would have been composed and why would you think so about when they were composed?

Nina:

Okay, thank you for this question. So once I was able to demonstrate that authenticity of the letters was inadequately and uncritically determined, it didn’t look like you could make a good case that the letters were authentic, even though it’s so commonly assumed that they are. But when you dig down, that case for the authenticity is very weak and it’s flawed, methodologically flawed. So once I had gone through all of that, I had determined all of that, then I looked for evidence of Pauline letters.

Well, where do we first know of these letters? Where can we first say we’ve actually seen the letters? And that is where after digging some more, I found that our first knowledge of the letters comes with Marcion, who’s a mid-second century figure. And I determined then that the school of Marcion then was a reasonable and even likely place for the origination of the letters, that the letters are crafted there in the second century in a school setting with Marcion as the, you might say, the school head.

I also want to add here that I am not the first person to have said Marcion is responsible for the letters. And I say that because, well, it’s a little bit of scholarly comfort, you might say, that I’m not just coming up with this. But this is an argument that was made in the past, earlier in the past, that Marcion seems like a likely originator of letters not deemed to be historical letters. And Marcion being in the second century, not the first. Second century.

Shirley:

So maybe you should tell us a little bit more about Marcion since he’s not in the Bible and we don’t know him if we just read the Bible. So who is Marcion and why would he be writing like this?

Nina:

So, yeah, it’s another question. And another thing I had to dig into once I landed on Marcion. And I’m not a Marcion expert. There are other Marcion experts. In fact, I’m hearing more from them since the book has been published. So with that aside, I was able to determine Marcion—you might think of him as a writer-intellectual and a head of a school—which I already mentioned, in the mid-second century. And there are sources that refer to him as having a school in Rome. Ancient sources also called him a philosopher and a teacher. So an intellectual, writer-intellectual, I think is a good way to understand who Marcion was. His dates are thought to be between 85, perhaps born in 85, and he’s thought to have died around 160. So a little after the middle of the second century.

Shirley:

So Paul would have not been around if there were such a thing as Paul by then?

Okay, so if Marcion was born in 85, I’m still trying to wrap my mind around Paul not actually being a human being but a fiction idea. But was this character of Paul maybe invented by Marcion, or was he a kind of a character that people knew before Marcion? Where did he fit with Paul, Marcion and Paul?

Nina:

Well, one cannot definitively know whether there was a historical Paul. But I’ve taken the position that it’s better to not think of Paul as historical, because I think that ends up complicating this issue quite a bit because of how I understand these letters. I think of the letters more as scripture. And because I’ve gotten to the second century and I see a gospel even coming later, Marcion also published a gospel along with these 10 letters. I see all of that happening later in the second century and one going with the other, that gospel and then Paul, who is—you might say—proclaiming that gospel of Marcion’s gospel. Then it’s not so helpful for me to be thinking back to the historical Paul who sent actual letters. So I’ve put that aside, you might say, that question.

And as I said, I argue that Paul was a created character from Acts. And that goes along with the type of letter that I think we have with the Pauline letters. You need to have a character before you have the letters. And in the scholarship, the dominant scholarship, Pauline scholarship around those seven letters, those letters are early. They come before any other writing that we have. So it is a flip. What I’m saying is quite a change in how we understand how the letters could have come about.

Shirley:

So one thing I sort of have to struggle with in my thinking about all this is that I’ve always envisioned Paul traveling around, going to these different places and sending letters to these people that he met along the way. So are you saying that then nobody talked about him traveling around until the second century? Am I getting that right?

Nina:

I don’t actually say that in the book, but that is an implication of what I’m saying. I don’t know that anyone would have known about Paul until you have the book of Acts which actually comes up with the character Paul. And well, the other thing that bears on this question and posits in some conceptions of early Christianity: again, Paul was the first writer, and he wrote to actual communities of the mid first century. So there were Christians there in the mid-first-century that Paul was already in relationship with. And I’m more skeptical about that.

I don’t see how you could have these communities around Jesus Christ, let’s say, until you have a gospel that talks about Jesus Christ and has Jesus go through various acts, dies, and then, you know, in three days, resurrects again.

I think you need all of that before you could have communities around that notion. And so I don’t think you have that gospel narrative. I’m not speaking history anymore. I’m only talking about the narrative. The narratives are now, almost all of them, are being pushed past 70 that we’ve had that for a long time. And now many scholars are saying those gospel stories, the four gospels, for instance, that we have are early second century.

So I think we have to wait then to answer your question until we have those gospel stories. Then in my read of how it would have worked, you have to have at least one gospel and the book of Acts, the Paul character, and then the letters of Paul. None of this I am thinking has a necessary, historical backing.

I’ll go a little further here, and it’s not anything I’ve thought about other than just when I’m talking to you now, to say today, in other words, this is not to deny historical Jesus. That is a question that I really am not engaging very much, even though I know Westar, it’s a big question with Westar, a big issue with Westar. But I don’t think my thesis, in other words, would overturn, let’s say, historical Jesus. It’s just something I don’t take up. I just don’t think that you’re going to have the narrative until that second century, if that makes any sense.

Shirley:

Yeah, it does. That’s very helpful.

Nina:

And it’s nothing that I talk about in the book either. I’m going a little off track with you.

Shirley:

Yeah, but that’s helpful to keep in perspective here.

So just real quickly then, what were the letters supposed to accomplish?

Nina:

Okay. So the letters, and I love this question that you’re asking. The letters permit an expansion of doctrine or teachings and moral exhortation from an authoritative figure of the faith rendered seemingly in his own voice. Okay, that is one sentence synopsis. And Paul’s relationship to the letters remains very important. So those letters are important because of that figure Paul, and none of that changes.

Shirley:

So then this might be a good time for you to explain the importance of the genre of letters in antiquity. Like why would these writings come in the form of letters if they weren’t genuine letters of Paul?

Nina:

That’s a good question too, and that’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot once I got into this is. Wow, why did they pick a letter? So I delved into that scholarship as well, this modern epistolary scholarship. And I found out that, well, a letter is different from a treatise! It’s actually more inviting to a reader, a secondary reader. It seems more casual than a treatise. I said before the letters are doctrine, but they’re not doctrinaire, you might say, because they’re in the form of a letter.

And there’s more to this then. So they’re more attractive to readers, other readers—not the correspondence parties, but people who are coming onto the letters—reading them secondarily. They’re attractive to those secondary readers, you might say ‘us,’ because of this aspect of overhearing. We’re overhearing a conversation that is ostensibly not meant for us, but for somebody else. And that overhearing is seductive for people. I mean, you know, you’re in a restaurant, you hear something interesting at the table right next to you, it’s like, “Hey!” So it’s a common human condition, you might say, or response to be curious.

And letters play on that, you might say, this overhearing. So that’s kind of interesting with a letter. A letter. And one auditor made a very interesting comment hearing me speak elsewhere, and so I repeat what he says. A letter invites the reader into a vicarious experience, drawing the reader into a relationship that’s already in progress. I found that very good. So repeating that to you, I think that gets it across, gets some of the sense of what I’m trying to say across as well.

Shirley:

So I’m just wondering, Nina, I know that this is a difficult message, especially for people who love Paul. Certainly you’ve had to explain to skeptics why this is worth considering. What do you say to people who are really doubtful about this? How do you help us to deal with this uncomfortable conclusion that you’re finding?

Nina:

Yes, well, I appreciate the question. I don’t know that I have the perfect answer here, but I suspect that people are loving Paul, although not everyone, many women don’t like Paul at all. But loving him, I think, because he comes across as real for them with the letters. And if that is the case, in a way it confirms the power of the letter genre, or what I think these authors were doing and taking advantage of, you might say. And it also explains why there are an abundance of other New Testament copycat letters attributed to other known important figures from scripture. There’s other apostles. So these teachings, his theology, they’ve guided Christians over the millennia, right?

Shirley:

Right.

Nina:

And I doubt that historicity was a central factor of his influence over that entire time. I tend to think that it’s a modern hang up, you might say, that Paul has to be a historical person. I think ancients could have dealt with that situation more casually. What they’re interested in is an authoritative figure of the faith. I don’t know if that answers, but that’s how I think of it.

Shirley:

Okay, well, certainly we’re going to be thinking about this, and I know that you’ve already stirred the pot, so lots of people are thinking about this right now. And I know we’re running kind of short on time. I just want to ask you also, what do you see are the implications for making this adjustment of the studies of Pauline letters? What does it mean for the early Jesus movements and early Christian history? What’s happening?

Nina:

Okay, well, I gave you some of my background thoughts earlier. So then I would hope that there would be some rethinking of how we understand the first century, the Jesus movement. I think right now we’re saying oral storytelling is how the story of Jesus caught on and grew even in the first century. I’d like to see some more work done in that area or even evidence, you might say, of that.

Another thing would be the chronological arrangement of those New Testament writings. I gave you one snapshot of what I think is going on there, kind of a rough look at it. And also there’s other implications since the historicity of Pauline letters influences how we see other collections of letters that are Christian letters, you might say, that are outside of the New Testament. And one collection that comes to mind are the letters of Ignatius. And if you look at some of the scholarship on those letters, they rely on, you might say, real Pauline letters. So if my thesis becomes more widely adopted or maybe I should just say considered, then it would have an implication for other collections of letters that are relying on that authentic perspective of Paul.

Shirley:

Wow. So let me just ask one last thing. I want to make sure that I’m hearing this kind of a full picture in a very brief moment here. You’ve mentioned that you would like to see more studies of the orality of the first century. What else do you think needs further investigation in this enormously important topic?

Nina:

Well, OK, thank you for this. So if Acts and the Gospels and now the letters are seen as products of the second century. If we see this flourishing, you might say, of Christian literature, and I would say flourishing of Christianity, Christianities or some kind of newness that’s happening in the second century, then I would think more work needs to be done on the why of that. So what is the social and political motivation then? We can devise a social political motivation for the first century, right? Or we have. I would like to see some of that then turning to the second century then. What would be the social and political motivation?

And I’ve argued in the book, the last chapter there posited that that final Jewish revolt, that Bar Kokhba revolt of 132 and 135, that dealt a death blow, a definitive death blow to the temple cult, you might say. And even to the Kingdom of Israel. And I’m using that term intentionally. The Kingdom. It was a political state as well. So that was a big loss. And so now you have this Christian literature being written exclusively under Roman rule, right? There isn’t any Jewish overrule going on now. So how does that play a role in all of this?

And then it would be interesting to see more about how are these works actually written? You know, more about the school process, the writing process, the sharing of documents. You see this interrelationship between the Gospels and Acts and the letters. How did that happen? The sharing of information and the placement of all of that. Was it all in Rome? You know, where did all of this take place?

I think that would be something interesting to pursue as well.

Shirley:

Oh, Nina. Oh, my gosh. I know we could talk to you for hours and hours on this topic because this is going to go on forever. But you’ve whetted our appetite. I want to remind people that the name of your book is The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context, Reassessing Apostolic Authorship. It’s an astonishing book. It’s an astonishing topic. But I want to say to you how grateful I am that you are a thoughtful and kind person because we need that kind of comfort to go through a very difficult topic like this. It’s not easy to think about this, but you’ve been gentle with me in this conversation. And I think you’ve helped us to be willing to consider a topic that’s not easy, but maybe it will shed light on lots of other questions we have. So thank you for opening a huge new door for us.

Nina:

Thank you. Thank you for your questions. It felt very relaxed for me and it was so nice to just chat with you. Thanks so much. Thank you for the invitation.