I was watching a Youtube interview featuring James Tabor, a towering figure in New Testament studies, on Bart Ehrman’s channel. What struck me in this interview is that Tabor said that, given the percentage of his students who come from a religious evangelical background, he’s inclined to call the so-called “authentic” Pauline letters the “early letters”, so as not to offend those religiously minded students.
Yikes!
In other words, in this scholarly setting at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, where one of the top biblical scholars in the world (arguably in the history of the field) teaches, he has to censor overwhelmingly consensus scholarly opinions so as not to melt the delicate little snowflakes who seek to advance the field.
The supreme irony here is that it’s usually conservatives who are quick to call college students “snowflakes” for being offended by certain topics. Yet it’s that same ideologies which can’t stomach the notion that the Bible is not the pinnacle standard for honest virtue.
I cannot imagine a more dishonest paradigm. It’s *literally* the same issue as biology professors skirting that the Earth is ~4.4 billion years so as not to offend the Young Earth Creationists in class.
Of course, the evidence for the interpolation, redaction, and outright apocrypha present in New Testament Pauline writing is blatant and obvious from a number of different lines of evidence, not just writing styles, manuscript age, Christology, (political) agenda, word choice in the Pastorals and other non-authentic Paul New Testament material, but also from the Marcionite corpus, which lacked the obviously inauthentic Paul letters.
So is there any hope for this field?
My sense is no, there is not. This is not just because of the kid gloves with which prominent scholars treat their students, but also from the fact that many of the most likely future students of the field are hopelessly biased in their desire to encapsulate, embrace, and authenticate the New Testament’s ideology.
Tim Stepping Out 
Glad you are back!
It is interesting that even among mythicists, the “authentic” Pauline letters are assumed to be authentic. I find this extraordinary, as the whole idea that Paul writes these big theological essays, then delivers them to churches, these churches keep them, copy them and send them everywhere – it seems far fetched. Seems more more likely these are literary works using the “epistle” as a structure. They are sort of a vehicle of delivering pragmatic theology under guise of a letter. I don’t suggest they are forgeries, more an imagining that readers of the time probably understood.
I suspect many mythicists hold onto “authentic” Paul, because they use it to advance their arguments?
Did you publish a book? I have been out of the loop!
LikeLike
nothing is as fragile as religious garbage. The poor theists have all of their self-worth wrapped up in make believer.
LikeLike
The supreme irony here is that it’s usually conservatives who are quick to call college students “snowflakes” for being offended by certain topics. Yet it’s that same ideologies which can’t stomach the notion that the Bible is not the pinnacle standard for honest virtue.
This is like how Ben “my wife is a doctor” Shapiro would say stuff like “facts don’t care about feelings” but would walk out in a BBC interview or how Candace Owens saying in a video that nobody cares about the political opinions of celebrities unless it’s Nazi apologist Kanye West.
LikeLike