Who ACTUALLY Wrote the New Testament?

The end of one chapter, you have Jesus say, all right, well, let’s get out of here. And then the next chapter begins, and it’s just Jesus sermonizing. It seems like some sermons were just inserted in there. And so. I don’t know, man.

You’ve never tried to leave a party with my wife. You can say, let’s get out of here, and then have lots and lots of talking before you leave.

And maybe they were drunk. Maybe they were like. But then. So. No, listen, listen, hang on, guys.

Dude, let me just tell you this last thing.

Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation. about the same. How are we doing today, Dan?

Good, good. I. We’ve got mysteries to solve this week. I’m excited. It’s a. It’s a whole week of whodunnit.

It’s a. Have you seen this boy episode? The. The.

Yeah, this is going to be good. We. We are going to figure out once and for all, sort it out. We are.

The.

The answers that we come up with are final for who wrote what in the New Testament. Because there’s a. There is. There’s a lot of questions.

Yep.

Out there.

Yeah. This is a controversial topic. Every time I bring this up. I know that there are people on YouTube who are going to dedicate videos to why I’m a heretic. So we’re just going to lay those reasons out on the table right now.

Yeah, absolutely.

There will be no doubt regarding why I’m a heretic after this episode. So.

And I’ll be even more of a heretic for just believing you. So this is great.

That. That is. That is the racket that. That we’re getting away with here. So. Yeah. One day we’ll even make money at it, too.

Yeah, we’ll see. We’ll see about that. I’m not counting my horses.

As the great poet said, today is not that day.

All right, so we’re starting off with the very opening of the New Testament. We’re going with the. With the Gospels.

The Gospels.

And. And these gospels are named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, ostensibly after their. Their presumed authors. But we’ve talked about this a little bit before on the show. That’s probably not right.

Probably not.

All right, well. Well, walk us through. Why do we. Why. Why are we not. Why are we saying that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are probably not the authors of these texts.

Well, there are a handful of reasons. We’ve got some internal and we’ve got some external things to consider. First thing, and something that came into my head is like, think of people you know named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Were these people running around in the first century? I get, I get that question a lot. Are, were these people really named Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? And, and two things there. One is that we borrow those names today from the Bible. So the fact that it sounds like a 21st century name is just because you are exposed to it in the 21st century, but they come from yonder. Additionally, they are English transliterations of usually Greek or Latin transliterations of what originate as Greek and Latin names. So. And Hebrew, so. So yes, they are perfectly natural first century Syro-Palestinian names.

So that is not a reason for rejecting their authorship of the Gospels.

The names themselves.

Yeah, but when we look into the Gospels, none of them explicitly say so. And so is the author of this story that I’m about to tell you. The closest we get is that the Gospel of John repeatedly refers to in the third person to this beloved disciple as the one who, who’s telling the story, the one who wrote these things. And there are pretty reasonable reasons to say, well, the beloved disciple sounds an awful lot like John. But it requires triangulating from the other gospels lists of who the disciples were and, and all this kind of stuff.

Also, it’s, it’s already creepy to be writing about yourself in the third person. That’s already a little weird. Don’t go referring to yourself as beloved then. Come on, man. That’s.

Just say, call me Ishmael.

That’s right.

That’s how you do it. This is, we’re going to be honest, but, but there’s an interesting thing. When we look in John at the very end, as you have kind of the wrapping up of the book, you have this statement and this is the one who wrote these things. And we know that his testimony is true. Oh, who’s we? Yeah, because suddenly we are narrating this story. And so we’ve got a little complexity here. And, and there are, there are a handful of different ways to approach this. Maybe there was somebody who identified themselves as the beloved disciple who may or may not have been identified with John, who originally started circulating this narrative. And maybe it got passed into a Johannine community or to authors, literarily competent writers who decided, I’m going to take the beloved disciple story and I’m going to write it out, or a group of such writers, so said we’re going to do this.

Or the Beloved Disciple or a scribe on the Beloved Disciples part wrote out the Gospel of John . And then it was edited by a group, maybe a community dedicated to this telling of the Gospel story, a Johannine community or group of authors or something like that. And they’re just providing this little final note at the end. We don’t have an indication of when the. We breaks in and when the Beloved Disciple is speaking. So.

But, but. So. But the long and the short of. Of the claim of the. The end of the book is everything was written by the Beloved Disciple except this part. This is. This is our. This is the part about that part.

Yes. This is not the greatest story ever told. Right? This is.

This is a tribute.

This is a tribute. That’s right. And so it gets a little complex. And there are reasons to think that there are multiple editorial layers in the Gospel of John as well, in addition to somebody sneaking in and saying, yeah, we know that it’s true. We have some narrative incongruities like you have. There’s a part. I forget exactly which chapter, but they’re in Jerusalem and there’s sermonizing going on. And then it says, so they crossed over to the other side of the Sea of Galilee. That’s on the other side of the country. And so it kind of leaps. There’s a big leap. They did not say Jesus walked all the way back up to the Galilee and was on one side of the Sea of Galilee. So either some stories got put together or some stories got taken out, leaving this kind of incongruity. There’s another one toward the end of. Of the Gospel of John . I think it’s in, like, chapters 13, 14, 15, 16, something like that.

The end of one chapter, you have Jesus say, all right, well, let’s get out of here. And then the next chapter begins, and it’s just Jesus sermonizing. And it’s like two to three chapters of Jesus sermonizing. And then the next chapter after those begins. So they got out of there. And like, you can take out all those sermons and it says, Jesus says, let’s get out of here. So they got out of there. Which is a lot more fluid, a. A narrative flow. It seems like some sermons were just inserted in there. And so, I don’t know, man.

You’ve never tried to leave a party with my wife. You can say, let’s get out of here, and then have lots and lots of talking before you leave. That is something that can happen.

And. And maybe they were drunk. Maybe they were like but then, so no, listen, listen, hang on guys. Hang on a minute.

Dude, let me just tell you this last thing.

So there are, there are reasons to think that the Gospel of John has gone through some, some editorial work. It has had work done. And so who is telling the original story? If the beloved disciple is just responsible for the original phase of that story, how many other layers are there? And can we say for sure that this beloved disciple was the Apostle John? So John is probably the closest we get to something where we can make a reasonable triangulation of a name for an author. But we also have indications that that author is definitely not responsible for everything in John. And we don’t have a good idea of how much any such author is responsible for. Now when we get to Matthew, Mark and Luke, the only one who, the Gospel of Matthew is the only one that is identified with an actual disciple of Jesus. So that’s the only one that has any kind of claim to having been eyewitness testimony.

But we don’t have any identification of the author as Matthew. And we’ll get in a little bit down the road into why that authorship may have been assigned. And then when it comes to Mark and Luke, Mark was not an apostle, Luke was not an apostle. Luke explicitly is saying, I did research, I’d gathered stories and so that it is explicitly second to third hand. But again, no one is saying this is my name.

Right.

The earliest designation of these four gospels as having been written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. As we know those figures today comes around 175, 180 CE. So probably a full century after they were originally written. And we get this, this early Christian author, one of the most important early Christian authors, Irenaeus of Lyons. Don’t say lions or everyone will come after you in the comments section. That’s a lesson I learned the hard way. That’s a lesson I learned the hard way. Because you got to curate when you’re going to go with a more authentic pronunciation of non-English names and when you’re not. Yeah. And between Irenaeus and whenever these texts were composed, we have a few different ways that the Gospels are referred to. Our earliest attestation of the texts that we now know as the four Gospels. Don’t group them together into individual gospels and don’t name them. They don’t assign authorship to them.

We have quotations and they’re also bleeding into each other. Like some of the quotations don’t exactly match. They could be from Mark, they could be from Matthew, or maybe that’s probably from Matthew. But there’s a little Markan thing over here. And. And then other times they, they fit exactly what we now have. But no one ever says this is from this gospel, or no one says this is from a gospel. When we get to the second quarter of the second century CE, so between 125 and 150, we have references to the memoirs of the apostles. We have kind of generic references to the whole group of texts that are sometimes referred to as gospels, but we don’t have authorship assigned to them. And one of the things that this is likely indicating is that there’s not a lot of importance assigned to who authored them. It’s not until a. An early Christian author named Papias, who by the way, was not an incredibly important early Christian author.

In fact, folks like Eusebius of Caesarea, who’s responsible for the document called Church History from the 4th century CE, described Papias as kind of a moron. Like they did not think this dude knew what he was talking about, except for two things that Papias said and exactly two things that Papias said. One, he said somebody named Mark wrote a gospel and somebody named Matthew wrote a gospel. And I’m going to read you the entirety of what Papias said. This is the statement about Mark. This is what the elder—and Papias refers to an elder, somebody named John, who is probably not to be identified with the beloved disciple, but some people try to make that argument. But this is what the elder used to say when Mark was the interpreter of Peter. He wrote down accurately everything that he recalled of the Lord’s words and deeds, but not in order for he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied him.

But later, as I indicated, he accompanied Peter, who used to adapt his teachings for the needs at hand, not arranging, as it were, an orderly composition of the Lord’s sayings. And so Mark did nothing wrong by writing some of the matters as he remembered them. For he was intent on just one purpose, not to leave out anything that he heard or to include any falsehood among them. So the description of whatever text this is that somebody named Mark wrote is kind of a sayings gospel. But there are some deeds in there as well, but it is not written in order, which has led people who have tried to interpret this text to indicate that it does not follow a very rational narrative trajectory that we would find in most of the accounts of Jesus’s life. Trying to identify this with what we now have as the Gospel of Mark doesn’t make sense because the Gospel of Mark as we have it now is in order, at least as far as we can tell.

There’s nothing that is clearly out of order. The Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke follow a very, very similar order. This is basically a one-ish year ministry that starts in the Galilee, ends up in Jerusalem. Everything is in an order. John is the one who kind of mixes it up with a three-year ministry and there’s going back and forth. And so John is kind of out of order, but Mark is not.

Yeah.

Now here’s what Papias says about Matthew. Now here’s what Papias says about Matthew. And so Matthew composed the sayings in the Hebrew tongue and each one interpreted them to the best of his ability. That’s it. So according to Papias, Matthew 1 was originally written in Hebrew and 2 was just sayings. Now we have examples of sayings gospels like the, the Gospel of Thomas is known as a sayings gospel because there’s not a narrative framework around the sayings. It’s just a collection of a list of sayings, literally utterance one, utterance two, utterance three. And so that, that’s known as the sayings gospel. And a lot of scholars believe that there was some kind of sayings gospel that functioned as the source for the gospel authors, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Matthew is not a sayings gospel period. Additionally, it was not originally written in Hebrew. It was originally composed in Greek.

And there are a number of different indicators of that. And so you can’t really identify what Papias is saying here with the Gospel of Matthew as we have it today. And so scholars would say as evidence for Matthean or Markan authorship of the Gospels of Matthew and Mark as we have, as we have them today. Papias is not strong evidence. Right.

Because they, it. Because Papias seems to be referring to two totally different texts.

Yeah, the, the description of these texts do not match the description or do not match what we have today as the Gospels of Matthew and Mark.

He’s just talking about a different Matthew and Mark. It was just two different guys or.

There were a number of different texts in circulation and somebody was like, yeah, yeah, it was this dude named Mark wrote that. And you know, there are any number of ways that this tradition could have originated. But Papias, I mentioned Eusebius doesn’t really take Papias very seriously because Papias has entirely different accounts for how Judas died. For instance, he says Judas swelled up to the size of a house.

Oh yeah, I remember that. I remember I was talking about that.

Yeah. And like got stuck in the road and got run over by a wagon or something like that. And that’s how he died. And that happens. He like popped and spewed stuff everywhere and then like it stinks down to this very day over a century later. And like that has nothing to do with, with either account from the book of Acts or the book of Matthew . And then, and then Papias makes a bunch of other outlandish claims as well that have no relationship to what we have in the New Testament. And so when you look at the, the totality of Papias’s claims about early Christianity, all of them are just dismissed except for these two statements. And it’s very clear why these two statements are accepted is because they function as evidence for the Matthean and the Markan authorship of these two Gospels. If you just overlook the fact that whatever Papias is describing does not match the Gospels, other than the fact that.

It doesn’t make any sense, it’s very good evidence.

It makes perfect sense. Yeah. And so we don’t have, I don’t think that works as evidence of authorship. Now there, there’s another interesting thing to consider. The, the Gospel manuscripts that we have, the earliest we have are like 2nd 3rd century and we now call them the Gospel according to Matthew and Mark and Luke and John because those titles are in the manuscripts. But something interesting happens as you go back earlier in time into the 3rd and 2nd century CE. The titles occur in different parts of the manuscripts. Sometimes they’re at the end, sometimes they’re at the beginning. sometimes they’re at the beginning. It is not consistent and you get to a point where you don’t have the first page or a page with a title preserved in the manuscripts. Like our earliest fragments, the fragment of, from the Gospel of John , that is a little credit card sized fragment that may date to as early as around 125 CE.

You know, we don’t have Gospel of John written anywhere on there, so we can’t get back any earlier than in time than Irenaeus’s identification of these gospels in the manuscripts to find if they had authorship assigned in the manuscripts. But the fact that the titles are kind of mobile, they’re occurring in different parts of the manuscripts, is indicative that this is not something original to the manuscript. This is something a scribe is adding. This is supplemental information because if a scribe inherits a manuscript that has a clear title, they’re not going to screw around with where that title is. So the mobility of the title is indicative that the title is supplementary information that a scribe is providing rather than something that is being faithfully copied from pre-existing manuscripts.

That makes sense to me.

It, I, it does make sense. Now it’s, it’s obviously not determinative in and of itself, but I think from a text-critical point of view, if we’re going to be critical about this, it makes sense that this is something that seems like it’s added in later. So we don’t have direct external evidence that the earliest manuscripts did not have these titles with authors attributed. But from based on deduction, it seems unlikely that they did. We don’t see anybody referring to authors until we get to Irenaeus at the end of the second century CE. Now another consideration is that we can explain how someone might come up with Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as the four names of the gospel authors. Because the most prominent disciples of Jesus were James, John, Peter and Paul.

So those don’t match Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But here are some reasons that you need to replace some of these. So we’re gonna, we’re gonna, the beloved disciple is the closest to identifiable with one of those four, and that’s identifiable with John. So we’re gonna, we’re gonna make that identification really easily. So we got John taken care of. James is an issue because James was martyred quite early in the history of Christianity. So James was not around to write a gospel. So that one’s out. We need something to account for that. So we’re gonna put a pin in James.

Okay.

Okay. So then we’ve got Peter. Now Peter was like first in command. According to Catholic tradition, Peter was made the head of the church.

Right.

This is the apostle. In the late first, early second century CE, there was a Gospel of Peter in circulation that was known to be spurious. This is, well, second century CE was known to be spurious. So we’re not going to call this gospel the Gospel of Peter. We also have no indication that Peter wrote any gospel down. But we have this tradition from Papias about Peter having this interpreter, Mark. And so we can represent Peter’s gospel by attributing its authorship to Mark. And so we tag the Petrine base by assigning this gospel to Mark. So we don’t have a Gospel of Peter, but we have Peter covered with the Gospel of Mark . Because Peter was not well educated. Peter was not that literate. He had an interpreter. Mark was very clearly written in Greek. So we’re going to say Mark wrote it and that tags Peter’s base.

So we got Peter and we got John taken care of and then we got Paul. Well, Paul’s got a bunch of epistles but never wrote a gospel. But we have the Book of Acts which talks about Paul. And in the Book of Acts , Paul has a travel companion who is named Luke. Okay. And so we can attribute the authorship of the gospel now known as Luke and the Acts of the Apostles to that traveling companion of Paul. And in that way we have tagged the Pauline base as well. So we have stories that we can say come from Paul, Peter and John, even if the authors of the gospels are different, Mark and Luke. So that leaves the Gospel of Matthew . James is the, is the apostle there. That is the, the big time apostle died, so would not have been able to write this gospel.

But we have this fourth gospel and it is a very, it is emphasizing Jesus’s fulfillment of all these prophecies from the Hebrew Bible. It’s a very Hebrew oriented gospel. We’ve got this story of Papias who says somebody named Matthew wrote a gospel in Hebrew. Well, it just so happens that the gospel we now call Matthew has a tax collector who goes by Matthew in there who figures prominently and does not figure prominently in any of the other gospels. And so because that gospel resonates a lot with Hebrew. And since Matthew the tax collector figures prominently, in fact he goes by a different name in the other gospels, we’re going to identify this fourth gospel with this Matthew who wrote a Hebrew gospel.

Sorry, the claim here is that this Matthew guy was a tax collector and wrote himself into, prominently into his own gospel. Just, just, just wanted to give himself a little bit of fame and fortune. He didn’t want to just be a ghostwriter. He didn’t, he wanted to get some, get some fame out of it.

Well, he, he went anonymously in the gospel. He, yeah, he represented himself. I mean he’s the one telling the story. He thought he could get away with it. But we figured out that he was the one who wrote this precisely because he figured so prominently in the story. But then we have the account of Papias. And so we have Peter, Paul, James and John as the four main disciples of Jesus that start the early church. And our four gospels are not directly from them, but we can get to them, at least for Peter, Paul and John. And then James, his account is just replaced with the account of Matthew. And so Papias’s story doesn’t really line up with what we know about these gospels, but probably contributed to how in the decades between Papias, who was second quarter of the second century CE and 175, 180ish, the fourth quarter of the second century CE, somewhere in between there, people took Papias’s account and used it to put together this notion that, oh, well, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were the four authors of the Gospel.

And here’s an interesting thing. A lot of people suggest that because there are no alternative authors that are asserted, we don’t see any arguments about this. We don’t see people say, no, it wasn’t John, it was this other person. That’s nowhere in early Christianity. And so people suggest that is evidence that the traditional authorship is original as authentic, or it’s just evidence that the first claim to authorship became widespread. Right. And there was no chance for anyone to come up with a different claim because it’s. They’re being shared anonymously for decades. And so we don’t have a reason to think that all of a sudden a bunch of different people suddenly said, oh, we’re gonna attribute it to so and so. And, you know, on the other side of town or on the other side of the country, somebody else was like, I’m going to attribute to somebody. I think Bart Ehrman makes a good case that most likely what happened is someone in Rome produced a manuscript of all four gospels and attributed this authorship based on this idea.

We got John covered, we got Peter covered, we got Paul covered, we got Matthew in place of James, and this manuscript probably became a very popular manuscript. And so it spread widely. And so nobody else was in the let’s come up with authors for the gospel business.

Right?

Until suddenly a manuscript showed up and they don’t, you know, they. Nobody’s like, well, I want to challenge this, right? Everybody shrugged and went, okay, yeah, that was. That’s the most popular manuscript tradition. We’re just going to follow that. Now, this is speculative, but I do think it makes the best sense of the data when we look at what’s going on in early Christianity, when we look at how people are referring to the Gospels, when we consider how manuscripts are transmitted and disseminated throughout the world, when we consider all these things, I think that makes the best sense of the data. The, the notion that the, the traditional authors were known from the very start and that the Gospels all circulated with the. Those names on them. That’s not really supported by the data. It doesn’t. There’s no reason to think that people were just like, oh, I see the author’s name. I’m just going to refer to this as the memoirs of the Apostles. I’m not going to distinguish one gospel from another.

I’m not going to sign authorship until one day they were just like, you know what? We need to just start referring to these by the authors that have been, you know, on the front page ever since the beginning. That doesn’t really make much sense. So I think the, a critical careful consideration of the data would suggest that they were written anonymously. No authorship was assigned to them in the earliest decades of their transmission. And then in the mid second century CE you begin to have Matthew, Mark, and by 180, by the time of Irenaeus, someone has decided we’re just gonna put these authors names down in a manuscript that became very influential in the spread of the Gospels. And so that’s the tradition that Irenaeus has, that’s the tradition that Irenaeus publishes. And by that time it’s too late for anybody to try to come up with an alternative tradition.

Right. You know, can I admit something silly? I think my. Look, I am, I am not someone who has. I, I have never read the Bible cover to cover and I, I intend to at some point. I probably should have done it for before the show, but I haven’t. And the big commitment.

Yeah, it’s a, it’s a big book. It’s a big and difficult book.

Yeah. But I, I also, it just hadn’t occurred to me that Matthew, Mark and Luke are not beloved characters from like, they’re not disciples. They’re not, there’s no stories about them in these books. Like, it just, it. That hadn’t occurred to me that, that they’re, that they’re just authors or attributed authors.

Yeah, we, we don’t really have. So Luke is a traveling companion of Paul in, in the Acts and, and then Matthew is the tax collector. That’s the name given to the tax collector in the Gospel of Matthew . You. But yeah, Mark is not a character who says or does anything anywhere. And so. Yeah, they are. Their authorship of the Gospels is their entire claim to fame.

Really interesting. Yeah, that’s, that’s nuts. Okay.

Yeah.

So there we go. That’s the first four books of the Bible and then one dude claims to have written a lot of the New Testament.

Yeah.

So let’s jump, let’s jump to Paul and further our whodunit.

Yeah.

With, with the epistles.

Yes. The plot thickens with the Pauline epistles now as they, as most people find them in, in contemporary Christian Bibles. If you look in the King James Version, if you look in any modern Bible, you’re going to find them in a specific order and it’s not when we think they were written. It is the length of the epistle, but.

Oh, really?

Yeah. So Romans is first because it’s the longest, and then the ones that have more than one epistle. So you’ve got First Corinthians, Second Corinthians, First Thessalonians, Second, First Timothy, Second Timothy, those. It is the length of the first one that is determinative on where they fall, but they stay together.

Sure.

So you’ve got Romans is the longest, First Corinthians is the second longest, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, First Thessalonians, Second Thessalonians, Timothy, Timothy, Titus, Philemon. And then at the very end, it’s actually longer than most of the epistles that come before it. But we have Hebrews, which is definitely not written by Paul. There are some very traditional folks who might try to make the argument that Paul wrote it, but no scholars really accept that. But it is tacked on at the end because it’s inauthentic. It is kind of grouped with the Pauline epistles, but its authenticity was doubted even when they were putting this together.

And so they were like, we’re just going to put it at the end. That one’s at the back.

Bringing up the rear. But it was still. There were still important things in the Epistle to the Hebrews, according to the early Christians. And so they didn’t want to get rid of it. So they were just like, just put it in the back and. And we’ll pretend that Paul wrote it.

And I assume we’re going to get into why we think that it’s not written by Paul.

We can. Yeah, it’s. It has. It is completely different in. In literary style, in genre, in content, in how it conceptualizes Jesus’s relationship to God, Jesus’s relationship to angels, Jesus’s mission and identity. Like everything is different. But it does say some things that were. Were critical for the formation of. Of early Christology and the early church. And so they just didn’t want to let it go. Right. But when we look at the rest of the Pauline epistles, and this is where sometimes apologists and conservative Christians, they will frequently insist that critical scholarship just presupposes that any claims to authorship are false. And that’s simply not true because critical scholarship agrees that at least seven of the Pauline epistles were written by Paul or were dictated to a scribe by Paul.

Okay.

And so according to a critical approach, we confirm, or at least to the degree that we are able to, we confirm and agree that Paul was the author of these things. So the notion that critical scholars approach a text convinced or presupposing that the claimed author was not the author is simply false. Now, the seven Pauline epistles that are considered authentic or genuine are First Thessalonians, First Corinthians and Second Corinthians, Galatians, Romans, Philippians, and Philemon. Now, we have two other types of Pauline epistles. We have Pauline epistles that are called disputed, and then we have Pauline epistles that are called spurious.

Oh, it is.

The disputed ones are where scholars are kind of in disagreement. There’s not a clear consensus. On the more critical side, you will have scholars who reject Pauline authorship. On the less critical side, you will have a lot of scholars who assert Pauline authorship. And those are Second Thessalonians, Colossians, and Ephesians. And so for those three, it’s a mixed bag. Maybe they’re written by Paul, maybe they’re not. The last three are First Timothy, Second Timothy, and Titus. These are known as the Pastoral Epistles. And these are ones that most scholars consider spurious. The scholars that assert Pauline authorship of these epistles are in the minority. In fact, there was a. I think it was 2008 or 2009, there was a poll, an informal poll that was conducted at the British New Testament Society Conference. And they had, I think they had like 107 or 108 respondents to this poll.

And the poll was basically, did Paul author this epistle? And it went through every epistle. And for the genuine Pauline epistles, like, nobody said no or I don’t know. The three answers were yes, no, or I don’t know. When you get to Hebrews, I think only one person said yes, like the other 107 said no. And by the way, this is not a very liberal conference. This I would characterize as a more conservative group of New Testament scholars. When you get to the disputed, it’s because it’s conservative. Not as many said no as said yes. But then on the. For the spurious Pauline epistles, the Pastoral Epistles, I think you had like 55% said no. Another 20% said I don’t know. And then about a quarter of the scholars said Paul wrote them. And so that’s. That’s not an overwhelming consensus, but that’s a, a good majority.

It’s a pretty strong.

Yeah, yeah, it’s. It’s a strong consensus that we cannot confidently say Paul wrote these. Right. And I’m hoping to work my. My sister, who is the, the director of data and analytics for a university is going in with me on a survey of biblical scholars to try to produce an actual state of the field thing. And this is one of the big questions we’re going to try to get a lot more respondents for, be a lot more robust about. Love it, but I want to talk about the Pastoral Epistles. That’s what I want to focus on. We can, okay, we can talk a little about the, a little bit about the others, but the Pastorals, I think are the most fascinating.

Those spurious little, little epistles, the little dickenses.

Yes. So these are, these are called the Pastoral Epistles because rather than being like instructions and counsel and responses to questions being written to a whole community, a whole congregation in a specific city, they’re being written to specific disciples. First and second Timothy, to Timothy, and then Titus, to Titus. And they have more of a pastoral tone. It’s not so much, you know, hey, everybody, thanks for doing this. You’re still not doing this well enough. Keep on keeping on. It’s more like, hey, man, I know you’re going through a rough time and it’s kind of trying to help these folks out. Now, there are a number of issues with assigning Pauline authorship to these. The first is that when you look at the places that are mentioned in, in these epistles and what like, historically is going on, it’s not easy to fit those places and those circumstances into kind of the reconstruction of Paul’s life.

Particularly if you use the account from the book of Acts which describes Paul’s journeys and things like that, they are kind of outside of the clearest journeys and stops and places that Paul was staying. So internally like that, it’s a little unclear. Next, the language is very, very different. In fact, there have been some word studies done. If you ignore names and place names, there are about 850 words that occur in the Pastoral Epistles. And a full third of those 850 words are not used a single time in any of the other Pauline epistles. A third. A third.

That’s huge.

And that’s not just the genuine. That’s the genuine and the disputed. A third of the words in the Pastoral Epistles, and they’re concentrated in different books. Like Second Timothy has the fewest unique words, but a lot of the language in the Pastoral Epistles is very unique to the Pastoral Epistles now. So we’ve got a different genre, we’ve got some different language, and folks will say, yeah, well, Paul’s writing to different people, this— It’s not surprising that he would change his tone, that he would use different language, he has different rhetorical goals. So that’s natural. Granted that that does not, that is not determinative in and of itself. But if you look at the occurrence of these words, you take that third of those 850 words. The majority of them are concentrated at the end of the 1st century CE and the beginning of the 2nd century CE within Hellenistic philosophical writings and within the writings of early Christians. And so Paul is living in the 50s and 60s CE.

These words that are unique to the Pastoral Epistles are also far more common after Paul’s death.

Okay.

Than during Paul’s life. They also are focused on the administration of a church institutional structure. So we’re talking about the office of a bishop and the office of a deacon and we’re talking about the long-term life of the church as an institution, which is odd for Paul who never talked about these things and always talked about how the time is short. Jesus is coming back. Stay in the circumstances in which you were found when you were called by God. Because again, the time is short.

Right.

Genuine Pauline epistles. Paul’s like, hey, we got to do this now. Jesus is coming. We don’t got time for kids. We don’t got time for this, that and the other. We don’t got time to get married. Only get married if you can’t hack celibacy. Otherwise we gotta go, go, go. And then suddenly we get to First and Second Timothy and Titus and it’s like, hey, if you want to become a bishop, here are the things that you’re going to have to think about and here’s how you’re going to have to behave in the long term.

Yeah, let’s talk about long-term goals. Yeah, let’s talk about.

We are sitting— This is an HR meeting that we are sitting down in with the Pastoral Epistles, which is completely alien to the rushed state of Paul in the genuine Pauline epistles. Now again people say, well, later in life he could have been like, “Doesn’t look like Jesus is coming back. Maybe I should, you know, get that thousand-yard stare.” I need to have a more long-term perspective. Sure, that’s possible, but I don’t think that makes best sense of the data. We have a number of other indications that what’s going on in the Pastoral Epistles was not written by Paul. Not only do we have this new unique language that is concentrated on the historical timeline after Paul’s death, not only do we have this language and these concerns for the long-term institutional life of the church. A lot of the things that Paul talks about and considers important are not in the Pastoral Epistles.

Paul is very concerned about the body, the soma. Totally absent from the Pastoral Epistles, Paul talks about the time being short. Totally absent from the Pastoral Epistles. Where there is overlap in these thematic discussions, the Pastoral Epistles discuss these ideas differently and in a less sophisticated way. For instance, the idea of righteousness is very different in the Pastoral Epistles than it is in the genuine Pauline epistles. Paul talks about being in Christ, and in the Pastoral Epistles, the concept of being in Christ is entirely different. Paul, Paul’s concept of the relationship of faith to works in the genuine appalling epistles. Genuine Pauline, not genuine appalling.

The appalling epistles, that’s a different category.

Paul talks about being in Christ, faith and works the Pauline. Oh gosh. The fact that both of these words start with P is starting to get under my skin. The Pastoral Epistles are a lot more misogynistic than the genuine Pauline epistles. So we have these statements about, you know, I will not allow a woman to speak in church. Women must remain silent. If they got a question, let them ask their husbands at home, ouch. And then we will. People will point to, well, you got 1 Corinthians 14 . In 1 Corinthians 14 , we have these statements about women being silent in church. However, scholars have noted for a long time this seems an odd thing for Paul to say just a few chapters after saying, hey, women, if you’re going to prophesy in church, just make sure your hair is covered.

Right?

So it seems like an odd thing to say. And it also seems to disrupt the logical continuity of the rest of chapter 14. And so a lot of critical scholars will say, this seems an awful lot like an interpolation, probably from somebody writing at a later time period where we have the more misogynistic pastoral approach to women speaking in church. So all of these things combine to convince the majority of scholars, not all scholars, but the majority of scholars and an even stronger majority of critical scholars, that the Pastoral Epistles were not written by Paul, but were written decades after his death by someone writing in Paul’s name in an effort to arrogate to their epistles that kind of authority over the church. And, and when we look at the early church, there’s not a ton of external evidence, but we do have some evidence that there were early Christians who raised doubts about the authenticity of the Pastoral Epistles.

For instance, there’s a very early. I think it’s P46. I may be mistaken, but there’s a Chester Beatty papyrus manuscript that contains all of the Pauline epistles. It is the earliest witness to the Pauline corpus. Pastoral Epistles are not in there. Codex Vaticanus, one of our most important uncial manuscripts from the mid to late 4th century CE. Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are probably our two best uncial manuscripts which contain the entire Bible, the Septuagint as well as the New Testament Pastoral Epistles omitted from there. According to some writers, Tatian was an early Christian who put together a harmony of the Gospels known as the Diatessaron, rejected the authenticity of First and Second Timothy, but accepted the authenticity of Titus. And then we’ve got a dude named Marcion who is widely condemned as a heretic.

From the 2nd century CE, Marcion was making a case that the Old Testament needs to be abandoned entirely and we should really just stick with Luke and the Pauline Epistles. That’s really the core of Marcion’s Gospel. And it’s likely that that Marcion’s argument is what ginned up concern for preserving the Hebrew Bible. And Marcion omits the Pastoral Epistles. Paul is like his man. Yeah, all that matters is Luke and Paul. And even he doesn’t think the Pastoral Epistles are genuine. Now most people are going to say, well, he’s a heretic, doesn’t matter what he said. Great, that’s fair. But somebody who loved Paul that much still, like many other folks around this time period, rejected the authenticity of the Pauline epistles. So even the external evidence, it’s not determinative, but it represents more data that there were doubts about this in the early church.

And most of the scholars that you see arguing that we should accept the authenticity of the Pastoral Epistles are going to say we need to consider the external evidence more strongly than the internal evidence. Because despite these few exceptions, the Pastoral Epistles were accepted as authentic by the Church, by the overwhelming majority of the church by the 3rd 4th century CE. And so they’re going to say that’s what should be determinative, not these arguments about language, not all these other things. And there are scholars who have done linguistic analysis to say, well, if we look at these features of language, the differences between the Pastoral Epistles and, and the genuine Pauline epistles are not as big as people have made them out to be, which, I mean, we still have a lot of research to do in that field, but there are limits to that kind of research. And so overwhelmingly, if you approach this from a critical point of view, it seems very likely that these epistles were not written until well after Paul was dead.

Explain this to me or talk me through this because I think that what I’m about to ask, there’s probably no way for us to know this, but one of my thoughts is the epistle means letter, right? It means missive that has been sent out to a group of, to a person or a group of people. These Pastoral Epistles. I, I guess there’s no pro, there’s probably no way to know, but it, what I’m wondering is were they just written as fake epistles that could just be tacked onto the, the sort of regular collection of Pauline epistles? Or were they writt. Letters to somebody sent in Paul’s name and then, and then sort of tacked on? Do you understand the question that I’m asking?

Yeah, I, I, I don’t think these were private correspondences. I think they’re, they’re clearly intended to curate power within early Christianity. And so if there ever was a Timothy or a Titus, they were, they were a MacGuffin here. The real point here was to assert all these values and, and structure power in a way that served the interests of, of the people or the peoples who were writing the texts, specifically the.

Men who were writing the text.

100%.

All right, well, I, that’s crazy to me. I love, I love that we have been able to look at this through a number of lenses and come up with some. I find them very compelling cases that these are, that these are not Paul. Like that. Yeah, that one third thing is blowing my mind, man. That is crazy. And as anyone, as anyone who’s like written quite a bit knows you, you know your words, you know what I mean? Like, you don’t change up your, your whole vocabulary because you’re writing to a different audience. You can change up how you write and when you’re writing, but like a third of your words change.

Yeah, you can, you can count on, you can count on me saying data, you can count on me saying pure and utter nonsense. There are, there are a lot of ways you could tell if something is not my voice. And yeah, I don’t, I don’t change it up too much depending on who I’m talking to. So, yeah, well, there you go.

The, the who done it is. We don’t know that’s who done it.

At least in this case. Paul didn’t done it.

Who ain’t done it is the better question in this case. And it does seem to be that the answer is Paul and Matthew and Mark and Luke and maybe. All right, well, there you go. Have fun with that. It doesn’t change, you know, what, what the, the text means and whatever. And it doesn’t, it, it doesn’t have to call into question the sacredness of it. But it is interesting to note that, you know, it may not be what it purports to be. And that’s, that’s of. Of interest anyway.

Yeah. And, and I think there, there are passages in, like Timothy for instance, 2nd Timothy 3:16, ye olde, “All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for instruction and for reproof” and all this kind of stuff. I think the fact that this doesn’t seem to have been written by Paul is important. I think the fact that this doesn’t seem to have been written by Paul is important. The, the kind of “women know your place” kind of, kind of misogyny also doesn’t come from Paul. That’s not to say Paul was an ally. He was not a yas queen kind of kind of guy, but does seem to approach things from a less misogynistic point of view, at least when it comes to who had the right to speak in church. So I, I think there are, there are ways that this makes the Bible a little less problematic, not unproblematic by any stretch of the imagination, but at least suggests that folks like Paul were not as problematic as sometimes they are made out to be.

Well, and maybe it will give permission to, you know, a pastor now to say, I think I’m okay ignoring the “women shut up in church” bit. I think I’m okay with that.

Yeah. I think if that makes some folks feel better about ignoring that, great. I think that since we’re already ignoring the slavery and we’re already ignoring the ethnocentrism, hopefully, and we’re already ignoring, you know, ideas about where illnesses come from and disability and the shape of the earth, we’re probably okay to be ignoring their misogyny as well.

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