That last line is the grenade. Christians will often treat Paul’s silence as harmless because “he didn’t need to mention everything,” then turn around and treat silence, late sources, or transmission gaps in Islamic history like prosecutorial evidence. Either arguments from silence are weak and need caution, or they aren’t. Historical method shouldn’t suddenly change religions halfway through the exam.
Accepting a claim means having a method for testing it. If the same method validates a claim and its opposite, the method isn't what's doing the work, and you know it.
Take the argument that what happened to Jesus has to be factual because so many people saw it. Now run that same argument on the report that Muhammad split the moon in two, said to have been watched by two of the biggest cities in Arabia. Either the alleged number of people who say they saw something settles the question, or it doesn't. You don't get to count witnesses in one case and start asking harder questions in the other.
It struck me at one point that Paul while everyone else was writing ‘gospels’ and creating the mythos of Jesus, Paul was doing the business of organizing and taking over the leadership of the church and establishing the logos of the church. The CEO while the apostles were the Board of Directors.
At some point the Pauline faction decided they needed their own gospel because everyone preferred a good story rather than Paul’s dry business letters. They wanted a gospel that centres Paul, make establishes his apostolic authority and consolidates his position as directly descending from Jesus. That became Luke/Acts - two books that should be considered as one narrative, a lead in collecting existing stories then launching into Paul as the true successor.
Paul was working against a deadline. Jesus was coming back, maybe within the year, and the job was to bring in as many people as possible before he did. Making converts keep the laws of Moses would have slowed that down, and so would anything that gave Rome a reason to look closely. Everything but the bare essentials could go, and what was left when the stripping was done was believing. That's where salvation by faith alone comes from, and modern Christian fundamentalism is still standing on it.
"But take care that this freedom of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak." 1 Cor 8:9 (Paul taught that it was perfectly fine to eat things sacrificed to idols if one has 'gnosis'.)
"‘But I have a few things against you, because you have some there who hold the teaching of Balaam, who kept teaching Balak to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel, to eat things sacrificed to idols and to commit sexual immorality." Rev 2:14 (A different group of Jews objected to teachings like Paul's.)
Was Paul's 'gnosis' a bold new way to interpret the old tradition, a way to openly violate that tradition (with redirected reverence), or both? I claim it was both; that their were different groups of Jews engaged in violence toward each other over Torah compliance; and that Paul was not on the same side as the true followers of Jesus who continued to insist upon full Torah compliance.
"but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block..." 1 Cor 1:23. Paul knew exactly what he was doing.
Resurrection to Torah zealots was a reward for strict Torah observance. Paul taught that resurrection was symbolized by openly violating Torah with a ritual meal of two unclean substances. Are these two different things, or the same thing? There is not enough spackle to cover that huge crack, but miraculously, it always seems to be enough.
I agree Paul knew exactly how radical he was being, and there was massive resistance from early Jewish Christians who saw his teaching as a step too far.
To answer your core question: it was both.
It was a bold reinterpretation because Paul believed idols didn't actually exist, so meat was just meat. In his eyes, he was taking monotheism to its logical extreme.
It was an open violation to traditionalists (like the author of Revelation or the Jerusalem assembly), who viewed eating idol meat and bypassing the Torah as outright apostasy and a betrayal of the covenant.
If the epistles were written in the 50s, why is the first record of their existence nearly one century later? Why have so many scholars identified 2nd century sectarian conflicts in them?
First of all, Paul's letters wouldn't be accepted as evidence in a modern courtroom. There are no originals, and there's nothing we know for certain came from Paul to compare the rest against. However, for ancient times there is a lot of inference, because the evidence is usually thin and the tolerance for thin evidence is high. That's how historians handle ancient sources across the board, so Paul gets the same allowance every other figure from that period gets, and Christianity doesn't get an extra one stacked on top. Read the rest bearing that in mind.
1 Clement, a letter from Rome usually dated to the 90s, tells the Corinthians to pick up "the letter of the blessed Paul" and reminds them what he wrote in it about their factions. Ignatius, a bishop writing on his way to execution around 110, knows a collection of them, and Polycarp of Smyrna quotes several a few decades later. Marcion's canon in the 140s is the first published edition, which is a different thing from the first evidence they existed.
That still leaves forty years of silence, and the second-century material is real. The pastoral letters to Timothy and Titus fight over church offices that didn't exist yet in the 50s. The command for women to keep silent in 1 Cor 14 interrupts its own argument and floats to a different spot in some manuscripts. The passage in 1 Thessalonians blaming the Jews for killing Jesus reads like something written after the temple fell in 70.
To the best of our knowledge at the moment, the letters spent their first century in the hands of people who copied, edited, expanded, and forged in Paul's name, and they arrive carrying that traffic. Getting from there to "there was no Paul writing in the 50s" takes a further argument, and it has to explain why the forgers invented a founder whose authority they then had to keep patching.
Hans Delbrück warned about historians relying on questionable sources simply because they’re the only sources. At best, all we can say is ‘we don’t know.’ Bible study scholars ignore this sage advice.
Volkmar laid out numerous reasons to date 1 Clement to 125-135, which Loman and van den Bergh van Eysinga expanded on and further pushed out the dating.
Polycarp’s letters serve as introductions to the Ignatian epistles, which are widely considered third century forgeries. Thus, so are Polycarp’s.
In truth, we have no knowledge or evidence of Paul’s letters being distributed in the 1st century, only a need for that to fill in the awkward absence of them (or any mention of their putative author) until they suddenly appear in the hand of Marcion.
The Pauline epistles show clear signs of heavy interpolation by rival sects, not ‘patching’ by the original authors.
For an explanation as to why a ‘Paul’ would be invented, see Herman Detering’s The Fabricated Paul.
The most important thing I learned from creationists is the method: assemble your handful of credentialed dissenters, hold them up, and call everyone else a consensus defending its turf. The procedure delivers whatever conclusion you walked in with, which is why it can't establish anything.
Even if I read Detering and came away completely convinced, being convinced isn't what makes something true, so it would carry no weight with the reader.
You’re admitting that no amount of evidence could ever change your mind. Your description of creationists’ methods thus applies to you as well. When I began my inquiries, I didn’t care one way or the other whether Paul was real, or if the Jesus in the gospels was historical. My initial assumption was, they were. I went where the evidence led me. In contrast, you clearly cannot even entertain the possibility that they aren’t.
Real dating, a real and worth-answering Galatians point, but the "development over time" thesis collapses once you notice the earliest material Paul actually preserves is the highest Christology in the whole New Testament, not the lowest. IMO
I did not say God disguised a development. I said there isn't one to disguise.
I would check your own dating. Same letter you're quoting, 16:22, preserves marana tha, which is Aramaic. Untranslated. Paul drops it in uses it because he expects Corinth to already know it, which means it didn't start in Corinth. 🤔
There are no actual historians who say anything about the Pauline epistles. Of your citations, Ehrman has Divinity degrees, Fredericksen a History of Religion, Vermes a PhD in Theology. Bible History studies does not apply sound historical methodology, instead relying on things like circular reasoning and the fabricated 'criterion of embarrassment.'
I can give you a list of historians from respectable universities, and it wouldn't move you, because a list of names isn't an argument and we both know it.
If the test is what a courtroom accepts, proof beyond reasonable doubt, then nobody can tell you Paul wrote a single line, and nobody can tell you he existed. There are no originals. The confirmations that look independent may not be independent at all, because one writer copying another produces the same result as two witnesses agreeing, and from where we sit, those two situations look identical.
However, by those standards, nobody can tell you with certainty that Socrates ever existed, let alone wrote a single word. Everything anyone says about him comes from a student with a philosophy to sell, a second student selling a different one, and a comic playwright who put him on stage hanging in a basket.
Hannibal marched an army around Italy for fifteen years and not one Carthaginian account of it survives. What we have was written by the descendants of the people he was fighting, the earliest of them working roughly sixty years after the war ended.
Boudica burned three Roman cities and exists in two Roman writers, one of them working a century and a half later, and in nothing at all from the Britons, who left no written record of her.
The sayings attributed to Confucius were assembled by the students of his students, and the collection kept growing for centuries after that.
Doubt is an inseparable part of what we know of ancient times.
The fair complaint here, and I'd back you on it, is people taking what can't be proved beyond doubt and handing it over as unquestionable fact.
My issue is that your list would consist of 'bible historians' in Divinity departments. Theirs is a cargo cult version of history, with methodologies that would be laughed out of any actual History dept. The 'test' is what would pass muster in the latter. Hannibal, Socrates and Boudicca do, Paul does not.
Mythicism, properly defined and understood, is the best explanation for Paul’s silence re the Gospel Jesus. Believing in a celestial Lord who does all of his incarnating, dying and rising in a sublunar heavenly realm also explains why Paul never mentions a Second Coming or Return of Jesus in any of his letters. All such references are FUTURE TENSE. Must say I am also very surprised that you attributed the Damascus Road conversion story to Paul. It appears only in Acts, written many decades later. Not in any of the Epistles. Unless you read the (much) later Gospels back into them. And you really shouldn’t do not, if you want to understand what Paul is really saying.
I am far from a Biblical scholar of course. I have my own inclinations as to what seems reasonable to me, so just my opinions. My personal idea is that Paul purposely kept his distance from the Jerusalem community. We get hints of that from Paul himself and I believe in Acts.
My personal supposition is that Paul heard a few details, and built his own theology subsequently. Details about what Jesus actually did or said would be a distraction.
The most interesting bit for me is the construction of the Gospels. Their Christology is Pauline, but there also seems to be echoes of the Jewish Christian community, especially in Matthew.
Matthew 25:31-46 is as close as I can imagine the Gospels get to the historical Jesus.
There is a movement called Matthew 25 Christians. I have inlaws that essentially follow that ideal.
Interesting … I was unfamiliar with Matthew 25 Christians so I asked AI for more information. AI asked in what context the movement was mentioned, so I summarized your comments. AI basically agreed with your analysis of how Paul might have developed his own theology, leaving out details of Jesus’ teachings.
What if all the things Paul left out (in the letters of his we have) were common currency amongst the churches he dealt with and were not needed in what he was writing about.
Of course, anything's possible. But once you start adding claims that aren't in the text for the sake of convenience, you've gone beyond interpretation. At that point, you can justify adding whatever you like to make the Bible say what you want.
That's actually how Islamic doctrine stays internally consistent: not by sticking to the text, but by allowing outside additions whenever they're convenient and it works.
There seems to be little commonality in the Jesus following communities, so this is a weak argument. They should have been making their man points right and left trying to convince the others of the errors of their ways.
Paul isn’t writing a biography, sure, but a virgin conception would have been the single strongest argument he had against those questioning his authority and gospel, far beyond mere "biographical detail." It also comes down to how you define "what needed to be said." For Paul, what needed to be said, apparently, never included the very thing every later Christian considered essential to who Jesus was.
There will always be comforting explanations to smooth over these gaps. What matters, however, is whether we reach a conclusion through evidence or through confirmation bias. If you think the evidence suggests Paul knew about a miraculous conception and Jesus being the literal Son of God, but simply treated it as irrelevant biographical detail, that's your call. Anything is possible; the real question is whether it's probable.
That last line is the grenade. Christians will often treat Paul’s silence as harmless because “he didn’t need to mention everything,” then turn around and treat silence, late sources, or transmission gaps in Islamic history like prosecutorial evidence. Either arguments from silence are weak and need caution, or they aren’t. Historical method shouldn’t suddenly change religions halfway through the exam.
Accepting a claim means having a method for testing it. If the same method validates a claim and its opposite, the method isn't what's doing the work, and you know it.
Take the argument that what happened to Jesus has to be factual because so many people saw it. Now run that same argument on the report that Muhammad split the moon in two, said to have been watched by two of the biggest cities in Arabia. Either the alleged number of people who say they saw something settles the question, or it doesn't. You don't get to count witnesses in one case and start asking harder questions in the other.
It struck me at one point that Paul while everyone else was writing ‘gospels’ and creating the mythos of Jesus, Paul was doing the business of organizing and taking over the leadership of the church and establishing the logos of the church. The CEO while the apostles were the Board of Directors.
At some point the Pauline faction decided they needed their own gospel because everyone preferred a good story rather than Paul’s dry business letters. They wanted a gospel that centres Paul, make establishes his apostolic authority and consolidates his position as directly descending from Jesus. That became Luke/Acts - two books that should be considered as one narrative, a lead in collecting existing stories then launching into Paul as the true successor.
Paul was working against a deadline. Jesus was coming back, maybe within the year, and the job was to bring in as many people as possible before he did. Making converts keep the laws of Moses would have slowed that down, and so would anything that gave Rome a reason to look closely. Everything but the bare essentials could go, and what was left when the stripping was done was believing. That's where salvation by faith alone comes from, and modern Christian fundamentalism is still standing on it.
"But take care that this freedom of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak." 1 Cor 8:9 (Paul taught that it was perfectly fine to eat things sacrificed to idols if one has 'gnosis'.)
"‘But I have a few things against you, because you have some there who hold the teaching of Balaam, who kept teaching Balak to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel, to eat things sacrificed to idols and to commit sexual immorality." Rev 2:14 (A different group of Jews objected to teachings like Paul's.)
Was Paul's 'gnosis' a bold new way to interpret the old tradition, a way to openly violate that tradition (with redirected reverence), or both? I claim it was both; that their were different groups of Jews engaged in violence toward each other over Torah compliance; and that Paul was not on the same side as the true followers of Jesus who continued to insist upon full Torah compliance.
"but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block..." 1 Cor 1:23. Paul knew exactly what he was doing.
Resurrection to Torah zealots was a reward for strict Torah observance. Paul taught that resurrection was symbolized by openly violating Torah with a ritual meal of two unclean substances. Are these two different things, or the same thing? There is not enough spackle to cover that huge crack, but miraculously, it always seems to be enough.
I agree Paul knew exactly how radical he was being, and there was massive resistance from early Jewish Christians who saw his teaching as a step too far.
To answer your core question: it was both.
It was a bold reinterpretation because Paul believed idols didn't actually exist, so meat was just meat. In his eyes, he was taking monotheism to its logical extreme.
It was an open violation to traditionalists (like the author of Revelation or the Jerusalem assembly), who viewed eating idol meat and bypassing the Torah as outright apostasy and a betrayal of the covenant.
If the epistles were written in the 50s, why is the first record of their existence nearly one century later? Why have so many scholars identified 2nd century sectarian conflicts in them?
First of all, Paul's letters wouldn't be accepted as evidence in a modern courtroom. There are no originals, and there's nothing we know for certain came from Paul to compare the rest against. However, for ancient times there is a lot of inference, because the evidence is usually thin and the tolerance for thin evidence is high. That's how historians handle ancient sources across the board, so Paul gets the same allowance every other figure from that period gets, and Christianity doesn't get an extra one stacked on top. Read the rest bearing that in mind.
1 Clement, a letter from Rome usually dated to the 90s, tells the Corinthians to pick up "the letter of the blessed Paul" and reminds them what he wrote in it about their factions. Ignatius, a bishop writing on his way to execution around 110, knows a collection of them, and Polycarp of Smyrna quotes several a few decades later. Marcion's canon in the 140s is the first published edition, which is a different thing from the first evidence they existed.
That still leaves forty years of silence, and the second-century material is real. The pastoral letters to Timothy and Titus fight over church offices that didn't exist yet in the 50s. The command for women to keep silent in 1 Cor 14 interrupts its own argument and floats to a different spot in some manuscripts. The passage in 1 Thessalonians blaming the Jews for killing Jesus reads like something written after the temple fell in 70.
To the best of our knowledge at the moment, the letters spent their first century in the hands of people who copied, edited, expanded, and forged in Paul's name, and they arrive carrying that traffic. Getting from there to "there was no Paul writing in the 50s" takes a further argument, and it has to explain why the forgers invented a founder whose authority they then had to keep patching.
Hans Delbrück warned about historians relying on questionable sources simply because they’re the only sources. At best, all we can say is ‘we don’t know.’ Bible study scholars ignore this sage advice.
Volkmar laid out numerous reasons to date 1 Clement to 125-135, which Loman and van den Bergh van Eysinga expanded on and further pushed out the dating.
Polycarp’s letters serve as introductions to the Ignatian epistles, which are widely considered third century forgeries. Thus, so are Polycarp’s.
In truth, we have no knowledge or evidence of Paul’s letters being distributed in the 1st century, only a need for that to fill in the awkward absence of them (or any mention of their putative author) until they suddenly appear in the hand of Marcion.
The Pauline epistles show clear signs of heavy interpolation by rival sects, not ‘patching’ by the original authors.
For an explanation as to why a ‘Paul’ would be invented, see Herman Detering’s The Fabricated Paul.
The most important thing I learned from creationists is the method: assemble your handful of credentialed dissenters, hold them up, and call everyone else a consensus defending its turf. The procedure delivers whatever conclusion you walked in with, which is why it can't establish anything.
Even if I read Detering and came away completely convinced, being convinced isn't what makes something true, so it would carry no weight with the reader.
You’re admitting that no amount of evidence could ever change your mind. Your description of creationists’ methods thus applies to you as well. When I began my inquiries, I didn’t care one way or the other whether Paul was real, or if the Jesus in the gospels was historical. My initial assumption was, they were. I went where the evidence led me. In contrast, you clearly cannot even entertain the possibility that they aren’t.
My opinion.
Real dating, a real and worth-answering Galatians point, but the "development over time" thesis collapses once you notice the earliest material Paul actually preserves is the highest Christology in the whole New Testament, not the lowest. IMO
It would seem deceptive of God to do things that only appear to have evolved, much like a man-made trick.
That answers a question I didn't ask.
I did not say God disguised a development. I said there isn't one to disguise.
I would check your own dating. Same letter you're quoting, 16:22, preserves marana tha, which is Aramaic. Untranslated. Paul drops it in uses it because he expects Corinth to already know it, which means it didn't start in Corinth. 🤔
There are no actual historians who say anything about the Pauline epistles. Of your citations, Ehrman has Divinity degrees, Fredericksen a History of Religion, Vermes a PhD in Theology. Bible History studies does not apply sound historical methodology, instead relying on things like circular reasoning and the fabricated 'criterion of embarrassment.'
I can give you a list of historians from respectable universities, and it wouldn't move you, because a list of names isn't an argument and we both know it.
If the test is what a courtroom accepts, proof beyond reasonable doubt, then nobody can tell you Paul wrote a single line, and nobody can tell you he existed. There are no originals. The confirmations that look independent may not be independent at all, because one writer copying another produces the same result as two witnesses agreeing, and from where we sit, those two situations look identical.
However, by those standards, nobody can tell you with certainty that Socrates ever existed, let alone wrote a single word. Everything anyone says about him comes from a student with a philosophy to sell, a second student selling a different one, and a comic playwright who put him on stage hanging in a basket.
Hannibal marched an army around Italy for fifteen years and not one Carthaginian account of it survives. What we have was written by the descendants of the people he was fighting, the earliest of them working roughly sixty years after the war ended.
Boudica burned three Roman cities and exists in two Roman writers, one of them working a century and a half later, and in nothing at all from the Britons, who left no written record of her.
The sayings attributed to Confucius were assembled by the students of his students, and the collection kept growing for centuries after that.
Doubt is an inseparable part of what we know of ancient times.
The fair complaint here, and I'd back you on it, is people taking what can't be proved beyond doubt and handing it over as unquestionable fact.
My issue is that your list would consist of 'bible historians' in Divinity departments. Theirs is a cargo cult version of history, with methodologies that would be laughed out of any actual History dept. The 'test' is what would pass muster in the latter. Hannibal, Socrates and Boudicca do, Paul does not.
Mythicism, properly defined and understood, is the best explanation for Paul’s silence re the Gospel Jesus. Believing in a celestial Lord who does all of his incarnating, dying and rising in a sublunar heavenly realm also explains why Paul never mentions a Second Coming or Return of Jesus in any of his letters. All such references are FUTURE TENSE. Must say I am also very surprised that you attributed the Damascus Road conversion story to Paul. It appears only in Acts, written many decades later. Not in any of the Epistles. Unless you read the (much) later Gospels back into them. And you really shouldn’t do not, if you want to understand what Paul is really saying.
I am far from a Biblical scholar of course. I have my own inclinations as to what seems reasonable to me, so just my opinions. My personal idea is that Paul purposely kept his distance from the Jerusalem community. We get hints of that from Paul himself and I believe in Acts.
My personal supposition is that Paul heard a few details, and built his own theology subsequently. Details about what Jesus actually did or said would be a distraction.
The most interesting bit for me is the construction of the Gospels. Their Christology is Pauline, but there also seems to be echoes of the Jewish Christian community, especially in Matthew.
Matthew 25:31-46 is as close as I can imagine the Gospels get to the historical Jesus.
There is a movement called Matthew 25 Christians. I have inlaws that essentially follow that ideal.
Thanks as always!
Interesting … I was unfamiliar with Matthew 25 Christians so I asked AI for more information. AI asked in what context the movement was mentioned, so I summarized your comments. AI basically agreed with your analysis of how Paul might have developed his own theology, leaving out details of Jesus’ teachings.
What if all the things Paul left out (in the letters of his we have) were common currency amongst the churches he dealt with and were not needed in what he was writing about.
Of course, anything's possible. But once you start adding claims that aren't in the text for the sake of convenience, you've gone beyond interpretation. At that point, you can justify adding whatever you like to make the Bible say what you want.
That's actually how Islamic doctrine stays internally consistent: not by sticking to the text, but by allowing outside additions whenever they're convenient and it works.
I’m not adding to the text, I’m challenging your assumptions.
As I said anything is possible.
Yeahhh, I don’t think ‘anything’s possible’ addresses your assumptions.
What if the author of the epistles left those things out, because they'd never happened?
There seems to be little commonality in the Jesus following communities, so this is a weak argument. They should have been making their man points right and left trying to convince the others of the errors of their ways.
I think this is applicable here: Did Paul Betray Jesus? Why Method Matters in the Jesus vs. Paul Debate https://totef.org/2026/09/11/did-paul-betray-jesus-why-method-matters-in-the-jesus-vs-paul-debate/
Paul was preaching the Gospel, not narrating a biography of Jesus. He said what needed to be said.
Paul isn’t writing a biography, sure, but a virgin conception would have been the single strongest argument he had against those questioning his authority and gospel, far beyond mere "biographical detail." It also comes down to how you define "what needed to be said." For Paul, what needed to be said, apparently, never included the very thing every later Christian considered essential to who Jesus was.
There will always be comforting explanations to smooth over these gaps. What matters, however, is whether we reach a conclusion through evidence or through confirmation bias. If you think the evidence suggests Paul knew about a miraculous conception and Jesus being the literal Son of God, but simply treated it as irrelevant biographical detail, that's your call. Anything is possible; the real question is whether it's probable.