Arguments Against Paul's Writings

Okay, if you're used to being very silent in Sunday school, which is normal for us, I do most of the talking, but today you're gonna have to, maybe have to speak up a little bit, okay? Let me read a section for you here and we're actually going to, I'm not going to answer these things initially.

I'm going to allow you, the class, to interact with these things and I think you'll see why. Reading from a popular, recently published book within the past four months, I think, I mean, four or five months.

When I was teaching at Rutgers in the mid -1980s, I regularly offered a course in the life and teachings of Paul. One of the textbooks for the course is a book on Paul by the conservative British scholar, F .F. Bruce.

I use the book because I disagree with just about everything in it and I thought it would be a good idea for my students to see a different side of the story than the one I told in class. One of the things F .F. Bruce thought about the writings of Paul was that Ephesians was the most Pauline of all the Pauline letters.

Not only did he think Paul wrote it, he thought it encapsulated better than any other letter the heart and soul of Paul's theology. That's what I once thought, too, years earlier when I was just starting out in my studies.

Then I took a course in the New Testament of Princeton Theological Seminary with Professor J. Christian Beaker. Beaker was a formidable scholar of Paul. In the late 1970s, he wrote a massive and influential study of Paul's theology, one of the truly great studies.

Ever to be published on the matter.

Beaker was thoroughly convinced that Paul had not written Ephesians, that in fact Ephesians represents a serious alteration of Paul's thought. At the time when I took the course, I wasn't so sure, but the more I studied the matter, carefully comparing what Ephesians says with what Paul himself says in his undisputed letters, I became increasingly convinced by the time I was teaching at Rutgers, I was sure Paul had not written the letter.

Today, the majority of biblical scholars agree Ephesians may sound like Paul, but when you start digging a bit deeper, large differences and discrepancies appear. If you want to be writing down what these are, feel free to do so, because I will be asking us to interact with this.

Ephesians is written to Gentile Christians to remind them that even though they were once alienated from both God and his people, the Jews, they have now been reconciled, they have been made right with God and the boundary that divided Jew from Gentile, the Jewish law has been torn down by the death of Christ.

Jews and Gentiles can now live in harmony with one another in Christ and in harmony with God. After laying out this theological set of ideas in the first three chapters, especially chapter two, the author turns to ethical issues and discusses ways that followers of Jesus might live in order to manifest the unity that we have in Christ.

The reasons for thinking Paul did not write this letter are numerous and compelling. For one thing, the writing style is not Paul's. Paul usually writes in short, pointed sentences. The sentences in Ephesians are long and complex.

In Greek, the opening statement of Thanksgiving, verses three through 14, all 12 verses is one sentence. There's nothing wrong with extremely long sentences. In Greek, it just isn't the way Paul wrote.

It's like Mark Twain and William Faulkner, they both wrote correctly, but you would never mistake the one for the other. Some scholars have pointed out that in the hundred or so sentences in Ephesians, nine of them are over 50 words in length.

Compare this with Paul's own letters. Philippians, for example, has 102 sentences, only one of which is over 50 words. Galatians has 181 sentences, again, with only one over 50 words. The book also has an inordinate number of words that don't otherwise occur in Paul's writings, 116 altogether, well higher than average, 50 more than Philippians, for example, which is about the same length.

But the main reason for thinking that Paul didn't write Ephesians is that what the author says in places does not jive with what Paul himself says in his own letters. Ephesians 2, one through 10, for example, certainly looks like Paul's writing, but just on the surface.

Here, as in Paul's authentic letters, we learn that believers were separated from God because of sin, but have been made right with God exclusively through his grace, not as a result of works. But here, oddly, Paul includes himself as someone who, before coming to Christ, was carried away by the passions of our flesh, doing the will of the flesh and senses.

This doesn't sound like the Paul of the Undisputed Letters who says that he had been blameless with respect to the righteousness of the law, Philippians 3, 4. In addition, even though he is talking about the relationship of Jew and Gentile in this letter, the author does not speak about salvation apart from works of the law.

As Paul does, he speaks instead of salvation apart from doing good deeds. That simply was not the issue Paul addressed. Moreover, this author indicates that believers have already been saved by the grace of God.

As it turns out, the verb saved in Paul's authentic letters is always used to refer to the future. Salvation is not something people already have, it's what they will have when Jesus returns in the clouds of heaven and delivers his followers from the wrath of God.

Relatedly, and most significantly, Paul was emphatic in his own writings that Christians who had been baptized had died to the powers of the world and were aligned with the enemies of God. They had died with Christ, but they had not yet been raised with Christ.

This would happen at the end of time when Jesus returned and all people living and dead would be raised up to face judgment. That's why in Romans 6, 1 -4, Paul is emphatic, those who are baptized have died with Christ and they will be raised with him at Jesus' second coming.

Paul was extremely insistent on this point, that the resurrection of believers was a future physical event, not something that had already happened. One of the reasons he wrote 1 Corinthians was precisely because some of the Christians in that community took an opposing point of view and maintained they were already enjoying a resurrected existence with Christ now, that they already were enjoying the benefits of salvation.

Paul devotes 1 Corinthians 15 to showing that, no, the resurrection is not something that has happened yet, it is a future physical event yet to occur. Christians have not yet been raised with Christ.

But contrast this statement with what Ephesians says, even when we are dead through our trespasses, God made us alive together with Christ and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places, Ephesians 2, 5 -6.

Here believers have experienced a spiritual resurrection and are enjoying a heavenly existence in the here and now. This is precisely the view that Paul argued against in his letter to the Corinthians.

In point after point, when you look carefully at Ephesians, it stands at odds with Paul's own work. This book was apparently written by a later Christian in one of Paul's churches, who wanted to deal with a big issue of his own day, the relation of Jews and Gentiles in the church.

He did so by claiming to be Paul, knowing full well that he wasn't Paul. He accomplished his goal, that is, by producing a forgery. So, I would imagine some of you can probably guess what book I'm reading from and who the author is.

Any guesses?

Oh, you saw the book. Well, that's, I appreciate your honesty at that point.

That's very good.

No guesses.

Bart Ehrman, thank you very much, Mr. Ricketts. And his new book is called Forged. And that's why he addresses what he's addressing, obviously. Unfortunately, I would imagine this book will be being read by college and university students all across our land this semester.

It came out, I think, I recall April, May, somewhere around in there. I had, I listened to all of it within a day or two of it coming out. That's a nice thing these days. You can get it electronically and get through it very quickly.

Anyways, I listened to a radio debate between Dr. Ehrman. For those of you who do not know who Bart Ehrman is, Bart Ehrman is the James Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies, I believe. Well, let me just read you here.

James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He's written numerous books, including Misquoting Jesus, God's Problem, and Jesus Interrupted. He is a graduate of Moody Bible Institute, Wheaton College, and Princeton Theological Seminary.

He is an apostate, having once professed the faith, but now denies the faith, and is probably the leading critic of New Testament Christianity in the English-speaking world today. A couple of you might know, I debated Dr. Ehrman back in January of 2009 on the accuracy of the transmission of the text of the New Testament down in Florida.

In listening to this particular presentation, and in listening to the radio debate that I heard, I have been struck once again by the kind of argumentation that is given just free reign in our modern world.

Dr. Ehrman is making the talk show circuits, and I'm sure that, though I haven't bothered to even look, I'm sure he's probably been on a fresh air by now, and NPR, and all the rest of this stuff, and when we seek to present the gospel to people today, we need to realize that we no longer live in our grandparents' generation.

There is a day when you quote the Bible, and there is a general respect for the Bible in our culture. That day is long past. If you were to, for example, quote Ephesians chapter two, verses eight and nine, as to what the nature of the gospel is, to someone who has read this book, one of the initial thoughts across their mind is not that you are giving to them the word of God, but that you have been deceived into thinking that that even belongs in the Bible.

That's actually a lie. It's a forgery. So as you were listening to the arguments,.

How would you respond to them?

One of the reasons I wanted to do this study this morning is that in listening to Bart Ehrman and Darrell Bach from Dallas Seminary, going back and forth on the Unbelievable Radio program just a couple weeks ago, and there were a number of people militating to have me do that one, but you got Dr. Bach to do that, and that's perfectly fine with me.

I was really taken aback, once again, at how basic the issues really are and how we need to demythologize scholarship. Just because a man graduated from Princeton doesn't mean he has even the slightest bit of common sense in the reading of an ancient text.

I'm sorry, this just doesn't follow. I'm one of the few people that I know in the world,.

To be perfectly honest with you,.

Who's actually read his doctoral dissertation, and he's an expert on the development of the Proto-Alexandrian text type, in particular, Egyptian writers. That does not make you an expert on much of anything else.

There are some people in here that have expertise in very specific areas, but I've met people who have high functionality in one little area over here that can't tie their shoe. So it just doesn't follow that having all those degrees after the name necessarily means that you can think straight at all.

And I do not think that these are issues that he has raised here, that in any way, shape, or form should cause any of us to cower in fear and close our mouths as Christians. So let's think about, that's the entirety.

I mean, he moves from there to Colossians. That's the entirety of the argument. Now he says he's just now finished his full scholarly work on this. Well, okay, I'll get that too, but let's listen to what the arguments against Ephesians were, and demythologize the scholarship for, first of all, our own benefit, our own growth in confidence in the faith.

But when we've thought these things through, then you can try to help others to think these things. If you've not thought through them yourself, it's impossible for you to guide somebody else in that process, okay?

So what were the arguments? First of all, the reasons for thinking Paul did not write this letter are numerous and compelling. First of all is writing style. Paul writes with nine sentences in Ephesians that are over 50 words in length, but only one in Philippians.

And only one in Galatians. Well, there you go. Now, I immediately, one of the reasons I would have been willing to accept the invitation to do the radio program, even though it was very short notice, it's been like two days.

One of the reasons I would have been happy to do that is I would love to point out that if you were to compare Bart Ehrman's books with one another, it would be very easy to prove that Bart Ehrman did not write all of them.

I have all of Bart Ehrman's books.

I have a shelf.

I have helped to enrich the man, and he has been quite enriched. I have all of his books, and there are two distinct groups. There's three distinct groups in his bookshelf. A number of them are really just where he's edited ancient writings, and he's giving you quotes of all sorts of other people.

We can sort of leave them aside because he didn't write much in there. It's primarily texts from early church writers or Gnostics or so on and so forth. So leaving them to the side,.

There's two groups left.

There's his scholarly works like the Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, which he's doing a second edition on, which are written for scholars, and evidently this new book on forgery will be written for scholars.

And then you have these. You have Forged. They're all put out by Harper One. It's funny. If you read the jacket copy and the promotional copy for these books, very different than what's actually in the books because Harper One, it loves to publish anti-Christian stuff, very strong anti-Christian bias for Harper One.

I mean, they're the leading. They love to publish atheists. Anything that's anti-Christian, they love it. And so you've got Forged, Jesus Interrupted, Misquoting Jesus, God's Problem and the Subject of Evil, which got panned universally by philosophers as being really bad, and it was.

He's not trained as a philosopher in any way, shape, or form. Not trained as a theologian either for that matter, but be that as it may, these are the popular level books and they're the ones that are getting read.

Then you have these scholarly works. And I have, for example, a Brill compilation. Brill is a publisher, not, oh, it's Brill. I need to translate that for those of you under 25. And it's $169 or something like that for this one volume.

Just a ridiculous amount of money. If I were to take and analyze the style of the Orthodox Scripture of Scripture and the Brill compilation of all the scholarly articles, all that stuff, which I've read, and compare it with what's in these, what would be the inevitable result?

Same author could not have written them. Just not possible. The style's totally different. He uses longer sentences. Look at how many footnotes and endnotes this man uses in comparison to this man over here.

I mean, 2 ,000 years from now, if you dug all these up, there would be a clear case to be made that there were multiple people running around claiming to be Bart Ehrman. And so I think either he has a ghostwriter.

Or maybe he hasn't considered the fact.

That Ephesians is probably that letter mentioned in Colossians 4 .16, which he thinks is a forgery as well, but that letter that is coming from Laodicea. It is a circular letter. It is not personal. Have you noticed Ephesians?

How long did Paul stay in Ephesus, according to Acts?

Three years.

Long time. That means he had close friends there. He was staying in people's homes. He stayed there longer than almost any place else. But everyone know something about Ephesians? There's nothing personal in it at all.

No greet this person, greet that person,.

Because it's a circular.

It's meant to be read in multiple churches. It's not a personal letter. Now, if I were to write a letter, well, let's just put it this way. I'm writing a book. I'm way behind in it, but I'm writing a book.

And is there going to be a difference in the vocabulary I use, sentence structure I use in a book that's going to be written by a wide variety of people in comparison to an email that I send to my wife or my daughter or my son or somebody that I know?

Of course there is. Because you have a different audience in mind. Ephesians has a different audience in mind. Compare that with Galatians. Now, Dr. Ehrman believes Galatians was actually written by Paul.

It's one of the, Dr. Ehrman believes there are seven letters written by Paul. And Galatians is one of them. Galatians is very choppy. Its style is very different than Romans, but he accepts both of them as being written by Paul.

And yet they're vastly different on style levels. And in fact, if you were to take Galatians out of the seven genuine letters.

And now redo your database.

And compare Galatians with the six letters, it would be more different than Ephesians is from the seven with Galatians in it. You see, when you hear all this stuff about, well, style and length of sentences and numbers of words and stuff like that, realize something, folks.

He who creates the original sample determines the result. He who says, well, these are, I'm going to say that these are genuinely Pauline and then compare everybody else to this. There's always someone gonna come along and say, oh, but I don't think one of them is.

And I've debated one fellow, remember Dr. Price? Dr. Robert Price. He doesn't believe Paul wrote anything.

Okay.

So you've got the whole spectrum to be expressed there.

Who gets to say?

He who starts the discussion and says, well, notice how many times he said, well, in the genuine letters of Paul, he says this. So what he's done is he said, okay, I'm gonna take these seven as being Paul.

And I'm gonna develop a theology out of these seven. And then anything that's different than that must not have been Paul. But if you started with 10 instead of seven, wouldn't your result in theology be different?

And couldn't you harmonize the 10? Well, of course you could. So when I read this stuff, people, I just think of the poor university student who's got too much to read already anyways, reading this going, wow, sounds good to me.

And how many evangelical Christians would have anything to say other than, well, I just trust my Bible because God gave it to me. Well, that's wonderful and fine, but don't you think it might help them to realize that the person they're reading is pulling the wool over their eyes?

Now, does he realize this? He doesn't get challenged very often. He doesn't handle it very well when he is, but he doesn't get challenged very often. And so I would have liked to have been able to point these things out.

But that wasn't the only thing that was said. He says that there are fundamental theological differences. And this is where I want to hear back from you folks. For example, Ephesians 2, 1 through 10, for example, certainly looks like Paul's writing, but just on the surface.

Here is in Paul's authentic letters, we learn that believers are separated from God because of sin, but have been made right with God exclusively through his grace, not as a result of works. But here, oddly, Paul includes himself as someone who, before coming to Christ, was carried away by the passions of our flesh, doing the will of the flesh and senses.

This doesn't sound like the Paul of the Undisputed Letters who says that he had been blameless with respect to the righteousness of the law, Philippians 3, 4. How do you respond to that? Yes, ma 'am. Welcome home, or here, or wherever.

Now, how would you back that up? I mean, Paul does include everyone under sin, but think of Ehrman's position. I suppose it would help you if you knew which books he considers to be Pauline. Romans is Pauline.

So think about that for just a small second, and how many references can we come up with in Romans to Paul's own testimony that was the law that brought death to him, and thou shalt not covet, and the universal sinfulness of man in Romans 1 and Romans 3, and all of this stuff.

I mean, it just screams everywhere. And yet, you can actually confuse Paul's talk about the fact that as to touching on the righteousness of the law, I was a Pharisee of the Pharisees. I was blameless.

I was a Hebrew of the Hebrews. Can you confuse and then think that what that means is I wasn't amongst the children of wrath? Of course not. It makes perfect sense. There's no reason to create a contradiction here, and yet, here you have a man, graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary.

Well, folks, today that doesn't mean a whole lot. I mean, I don't want to sound like a backwoods hick, but I think you could learn more at the Princeton Cemetery today than at the Princeton Seminary today.

And I say that because I've visited the Princeton Cemetery, and that's where Edwards is buried, and that's where B .B. Warfield is buried, and there's a lot to be learned from the Princeton Cemetery, and not as much from the Princeton Seminary, which has gone the way of the world, and those who founded it would hiss at it and say anathema.

I mean, just almost a decade ago now, they put out a book on homosexuality where they had a debate on the subject from the members of the staff on both sides, so they can't even figure it out anymore.

So you're talking about a seminary that has long gone the way of most seminaries do, always head off to the left eventually. Very rarely do you see them going the other direction.

So there you go.

In addition, even though he is talking about the relationship of Jew and Gentile in this letter, the author does not speak about salvation apart from the works of the law as Paul does. He speaks instead of salvation apart from doing good deeds.

That simply was not the issue Paul addressed. Now, certainly when we talk about works of the law, there can be instances where Paul is specifically addressing the works of the Jewish law.

That's true.

But is that all that that means? And when we talk about doing good deeds in, for example, Philippians chapter two, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them, what is Paul talking about in Ephesians chapter two?

If he says God has ordained that we should walk in them, it's not by doing them that we get ourselves saved, but it is something that God has ordained us to. Is that not completely consistent with Romans chapter six, walking in holiness, Romans chapter 12, giving us our lives, sacrifice, so on and so forth?

Can we really say that because, and it's funny to me, he admits,.

Who's this written to?

Gentile Christians. So why would he be writing to Gentile Christians specifically about Jewish law-keeping as if that was an issue with them? In other words, it seems to me that Herman is saying, well, Paul cannot recognize that there are different situations in different churches and therefore change his presentation to meet the actual needs of those churches.

He needs to say what I want him to say. And yet so many people in our culture, because this guy has got a bunch of degrees after his name from a big name school, are afraid to even ponder that as a possibility.

Could this guy actually really be missing it on that level? The answer is yes.

They live in a bubble.

I mean, remember one of the big arguments that Bart Ehrman used against me in our debate was? Yeah, well, I have tea with the leading French textual critical scholars.

Really? Wow.

And for him, he thinks that's important. I mean, it might've had some weight if he hadn't said the French. I mean, come on, really?

Seriously?

Honestly?

Come on.

I'm sorry if any of you are French, but it's just like if he had said German or something, at least it would've had a little more gravitas to it. But you see, they live in this bubble and the rest of us just don't even have the right to think their thoughts after them.

One of the big things that struck everybody who watched our debate was just not only how dismissive he was toward me, but toward the entire audience. I mean, one of the first things he said after I gave my presentation is, well, that was a very intelligent presentation,.

Very well done, James.

I'm just not sure how many people here could understand any of it.

I'm just sort of like,.

I'm like, wow, you really wanna bring this group along with you, don't you? Yeah, all right, there you go.

But that reflects an attitude.

And people will say, well, how come so many in liberal schools don't even respond to our position?

Because they don't think it's worth responding to.

In a liberal seminary, they won't even discuss,.

We believe.

In conservative seminaries, we're always discussing what they believe and responding to it, but not the other way around. Remember, I'm a graduate of Fuller, so I know. So keep that in mind. Then we have the now and the not yet, where he says, moreover, this author, in the case of believers, have already been saved by the grace of God.

As it turns out, the verb saved in Paul's authentic letters, in other words, I get to define my parameters here, is always used to refer to the future. Salvation, is that something people already have?

It's what they will have when Jesus returns to the clouds of heaven and delivers his followers from the wrath of God.

Yes, sir?

Oh, no, sorry, I was like.

Well, that looks like, you know, but it's actually an act of thought there.

Okay, all right.

Think about it.

In Romans chapter eight, when we talk about adoption as sons of God, we haven't adopted, we will be adopted. We are in Christ, but we await his appearance. We have been, it's foreknown, predestined, called, justified, and what tense is glorified?

Past.

And who wrote Romans? Paul did. Again, when you're spending most of your time collating variant readings in Egyptian manuscripts in Greek and the Alexandrian text type, you don't have as much time to be listening to theology class, even if the theology class was any good back then.

And so you should not hesitate.

To see these things and go, that's a basic fundamental error. Now, I'm not suggesting what I do often see people do, where people go, well, Bart Ehrman's wrong, so everything he says is wrong. Bart Ehrman is normally spot on with his facts.

It's his conclusions that are normally way out there someplace. He's normally spot on with his facts, because he's normally not saying anything that's overly disputable when it comes to just the factual information.

It's the conclusions that he comes to that have to be challenged. And unfortunately, a lot of conservative people just react to the man, and instead of taking the time to read it and say, here's where he's missing here, here's where he's missing there, the conclusions of the follow, et cetera, et cetera.

Relatedly and most significantly, I wanna make sure in the next 10 minutes we cover all of this, because there's two more points. Paul was emphatic in his own writings that Christians who had been baptized had died to the powers of the world that were aligned with the enemies of God.

They had died with Christ. But they had not yet been raised with Christ. That would happen at the end of time when Jesus returned, and all people living today would be raised up to face judgment. That's why in Romans 6, one through four, Paul's emphatic, those who are baptized have died with Christ, and they will be raised with him in Jesus' second coming.

And then he talks about 1 Corinthians. Wrote all of 1 Corinthians to dispute the idea that the resurrection had happened yet. But then, and here's his whole argument. But contrast this statement with what Ephesians says, even when we were dead through our trespasses, God made us alive together with Christ, and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places.

Here, believers have experienced a spiritual resurrection, he even says the right word, and are enjoying a heavenly existence in the here and now. This is precisely the view that Paul argued against in his letters to the Corinthians.

Now, we all know that's not the case. How would you demonstrate it? How would you express to someone who says, look, how can you believe this book is written by Paul?

Because whoever wrote Ephesians is arguing.

Directly against what Paul wrote in the Corinthian correspondence, which Bart Ehrman accepts as having been written by Paul. How would you explain it? This is the part where you talk. Okay, I realize that I didn't do as much of that as I thought I was, but in fact, I'll even take a drink while you talk.

Well, what's 1 Corinthians 15 about? Should be, to you, is if you've been a Christian for more than just a few years, not only should you be memorizing scripture, but one thing that's very, very good to do, and a lot of people don't do it,.

But it's very, very good to do,.

Is become familiar with an outline of the books of the New Testament. So in other words, if you turn to the book of John, you have an idea of what each chapter is about. 1 Corinthians, you have an idea of what the theme of the epistle is and where to find important things.

1 Corinthians 15 is one of the most important chapters on the nature of the physical resurrection. It's talking about the nature of the resurrection. And there is a great concern on Paul's part that people understand that that physical resurrection has not yet taken place.

Christ is the first fruit, he's the guarantee, but the general resurrection, the reuniting of the spiritual nature of man with the body, that's what resurrection means, has not yet taken place. That will happen in the future.

And there are people asking questions in Corinth what's the resurrection body gonna be like, et cetera, et cetera.

All right?

So, if you know what 1 Corinthians 15 is about, and that's a good chapter to understand for lots of reasons at home, at the funeral itself, that's a text that is very frequently read, but should also be one that we can discuss and talk about and go, here's what the scriptures say.

This is our hope in the fact that all of us face death.

We're all mortal.

And likewise, it's a text that's very frequently abused by various groups and sects out there that would seek to draw us away from the truth. So, there's Paul's teaching on the physical resurrection, but even Ehrman recognizes here believers have experienced a spiritual resurrection.

Is that what 1 Corinthians 15 is about? Is 1 Corinthians 15 about our union with Christ, our relationship with him now, the nature of that union?

No.

Ephesians is talking about the fact that since we are united with him, we are spiritually united with him. So, where he is, we are, and the certainty of the completion of that work of salvation, which is seen in Romans just as clearly, is as certain as Christ's resurrection itself is.

How is that any different than saying, have been called, have been justified, have been glorified? Romans chapter eight, the golden chain of redemption. I don't see any difference, but obviously Bart Ehrman does.

So much so that he can say,.

That's exactly what Paul was arguing against. It's not even the same subject.

One's talking about the nature of the resurrection body in the future, and he's talking about our current relationship with Christ. One is spiritual, one is physical. How in the world can he confuse these?