Alpha Christianity

There is some support for this possibility in Paul's treatment of the several churches. He seems consistently to oppose people who held what may be recognized as Alpha beliefs. For Paul, what was wrong with these people was that they did not give the Resurrection a prominent place in their theology. The later Beta writers call this "denying Christ." For Paul's diatribes, see for example Gal 1:8f and 1Cor 16:22. Paul, then, was never converted to the Christianity he began by opposing, but rather to a later and doctrinally different Christianity. Toward the primitive Alpha Christians, he seems to have maintained an undiminished hostility. This Paul is perhaps not entirely likable (see again the curse of 1Cor 16:22), but he is no longer psychologically enigmatic. This is the Historical Paul, as our research project has come to understand him.

Epistles. Paul's letters are our obvious best source for Paul, but we cannot validly read Paul from his letters until the letters themselves have been philologically scrutinized. Previous scholarship has convincingly established that only these seven are genuine: 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philemon, Philippians, Romans, and 1 Thessalonians. The most contested of the remaining epistles is 2 Thessalonians, whose spurious status was suspected by Baur and confirmed by Wrede (1903), with a further conclusive demonstration by Holland (1988). The process of detecting interpolations and other additions to the genuine Epistles is still going on; the most reliable results to date are those of Walker (2001 and subsequent articles). The general situation is this: very few interpolations have even been proposed for the spurious epistles, but very many for the genuine ones, and none of the proposed interpolations is supported by manuscript variants, so if these are interpolations, they are very early ones. The obvious moment for them to have been inserted is during the editorial process which preceded their general publication, and thus their exposure to copyist errors and improvements. The obvious sources for interpolations during that editorial process are two: (1) Fragments of other genuine letters spliced into one complete genuine letter. This material is authentic but out of place textually. (2) Passages added by the editor to amend the public persona, and thus enhance the future influence, of Paul as an Apostolic authority for the later churches. This material is inauthentic and out of place chronologically; it speaks to, and comes from, a period after the death of Paul. In the present state of scholarship, one can only anticipate the results of ongoing close study. Our working interim suggestions are given here:

Romans	Philippians
1 Corinthians	1 Thessalonians
2 Corinthians	Philemon
Galatians

It will be noticed that the interpolations include some of the most beloved passages in the Pauline writings. This was to be expected: the point of the editorial additions (of which the most obvious is 1 Cor 13) was precisely to present Paul as a more amiable figure, and in particular a less theologically divisive one, than he appears in his own writings. In this aim, the interpolators, first among whom was almost certainly the editor of the original seven-letter Pauline collection, have admirably succeeded.

Integrity and Date. With this work behind us, and with the probable text of the Epistles thus at last before us, it becomes possible to reassess the perennial questions of their date and place of composition. Given the likelihood of editorial conflation, the number of letters to be reckoned with is greater than seven, and their placement in time thus involves more than seven points on the timeline. Inferences about Paul's travels are directly affected. The previous sense of critical scholarship is that all the genuine epistles are from Paul's last years: the decade of the 50's, leaving the previous decade and a half completely undocumented (nor does Acts, which however highhandedly is still based on the Epistles, have any ideas about that period). That general conclusion is not challenged here, but other adjustments seem to be necessary. Our suggestions for date are the following:

Life. Paul is the only NT figure for whom something resembling a chronological account can be constructed. His own letters, once we actually possess them as he wrote them, are highly relevant sources, though they are also inevitably biased (Paul with his fiery temperament may not be the ideal reporter of his own life). Acts is useful in a sort of inverse way: it is a revisionist and irenic composition, which seems to have been designed (1) to eliminate the doctrinal difference between Peter and Paul by blending the two into each other, making Peter (for example) the first missionary to the Gentiles; (2) to eliminate the ideological tension between Paul and Jerusalem by giving Paul a mythical period of schooling in Jerusalem, and by rewriting his missionary journeys so as to make Jerusalem (rather than the more likely Antioch, and later Ephesus) their focus and point of departure, and to multiply the number of those journeys, thus bringing Paul into closer career harmony with Jerusalem; and (3) to eliminate the theological friction in Christianity by suppressing mention of Paul's controversial Atonement doctrine (for which. in real life, he was promptly attacked by an interpolated passage in the Epistle of James), and making him preach instead from a Jewish view of history and scripture as foretelling Jesus, more or less as in Matthew. Once we eliminate these sources of distortion from Acts, nothing much is left of Paul in Acts, save a continuous effort to show Paul as appreciated, not persecuted, by Roman authority, all civil unrest being caused by malicious Jews or hostile Greeks. This too (like the soft treatment of Pilate in Mark and all subsequent Gospels) is likely to be a politically expedient fiction. As for the Spanish mission, which is implied in the Pastorals (post-Pauline) and accepted by 1 Clement (c96), the best reading of the evidence is that this is yet another myth. It seems to be part of the Roman tendency to attract all Christian history to Rome. Other aspects of this self-interested myth are to link John Mark (via Peter) to Rome, thus annexing to Rome what was probably still regarded as the earliest Gospel. For more on the Spanish myth, see Spain.

For our reading of the life of Paul without these textual and mythical impedimenta, see the Pauline Chronology page.

What seems to be left from all this preparatory work is a clearer view of Saul of Tarsus, a lifelong Pharisee, whose logical mind was at war with his zealous mind, and who tried to frame a theology out of that conflict. Paul was the best-known and perhaps the most vigorous exponent of the Atonement doctrine, which however he seems not to have invented.