St. Paul Remade Human History. How Did He Do It?

This revisionist view of Paul has reached a climax with Nina E. Livesey’s recent book, “The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context” (Cambridge). Despite its dry title, the book argues, astonishingly, that Paul’s epistles, indeed “Paul” himself, are inventions of the second century—that they actually were written largely by the crucial yet easily overlooked figure of the heretical editor Marcion and then backdated. Livesey, a professor emerita at the University of Oklahoma, is recognized as a significant Pauline scholar, and her book is closely argued, formidably annotated, and beautifully provocative. In her view, no first-century evidence exists for Paul, just as little exists for Jesus. More important, Paul’s preoccupations with the politics of circumcision, and with Jewish ritual generally, seem to fit badly within a first-century, pre-Jewish War context. Back then, with the Temple still intact, those things were not controversial. The preoccupations make far better sense in a second-century context, when a wave of anti-Jewish suspicion filled the Empire, particularly after the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132-35 C.E., the last great Jewish uprising against Rome, which ended in catastrophic defeat, mass death, and the refounding of Jerusalem as a pagan city. No one cared about condemning circumcision in 50 C.E.; everyone did a century later.

Letters were, in any case, a genre more than an epistolary act: most collections of antique letters, Livesey points out, were unmailed and literary, written to enlarge a theme, not persuade a recipient. The proliferation of letters in the New Testament is also typical of second-century literary activity; letters written as rhetorical models, using the epistolary form as an intimate vehicle for argument, are everywhere in the later period. So Livesey thinks that Paul’s letters make much better sense as a literary performance, too, if keyed to second-century Greek concerns and practices. This dramatic redating also contextualizes those odd interpolations—the Jew-hating sentences make more sense if written after the Bar Kokhba revolt—and, indeed, the broader question of how, exactly, there could have been so many practicing churches for Paul to correspond and commune with so soon after the establishment of the Jesus cult.

Livesey’s thesis is so tightly and rationally argued that it can’t be readily dismissed, and, even if it’s wrong, it could be one of those theses which point the way to a larger rightness. Meanwhile, Livesey’s arguments have been met with respectful—and, to this amateur reader, persuasive—rebuttals by several fellow-scholars, most formidably by Fredriksen and Walsh. Paul’s letters, they note, read like letters, not literary performances, filled with local detail, tempest-in-a-teapot controversies, and people, like that coppersmith, who read only as living annoyances, not neat symbolic figures. They are also filled with apocalyptic premonitions that make sense only in a first-century context, when Jesus was credibly thought by his followers to soon be on his way back home, ready to take believers up to Heaven, or the moon, with him. By the second century, even devout Christians had to walk back this belief. Why, Fredriksen has asked, would writers of the mid-second century, composing pseudonymous letters in the voice of a first-century figure, include statements predicting Christ’s imminent return?