Adam Gopnik — a semi-fail on the historical Paul

 New piece by Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker. One takeaway early on:

A detailed story of Paul’s travels and mission, Acts is also generally agreed among scholars to be largely, if not entirely, fictionalized, containing an improbable number of shipwrecks and prison breaks and snakebites and other twists typical of Greek storytelling from the period.

While not expressly citing A.N. Sherwin-White, who noted in "Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament," that the "we" passages of Acts were essentially a literary trope from this type of Hellenestic "historical romance" or whatever we should call it, of the 1st-2nd centuries CE, this clearly reflects similar thinking. More here.

Second point he notes is the genuine letters of Paul fall on one side of the Jewish Revolt and Acts, along with everything else with the possible exception of a Baptizer-disciple core of Revelation, is on the other.  

Third, some of Paul's own rhetoric gets a reality check:

He became aware of the Jesus cult very shortly after its emergence, in the thirties C.E., and at first, by his own account, he “persecuted” the new faith—though, given how small the cult still must have been and how few public powers were available to Jews to enforce their prejudices, this was more likely persecution by argument than by torture.

Right. But why? And, if we identify this as a rhetorical trope, it spurs us to look carefully at other such tropes, ie, "Pharisee of Pharisees." 

But then Gopnik has a big fail:

The most remarkable thing that emerges from these texts is what you might call Paul’s emotional availability. He instructs, cajoles, gives shrewd advice—“be all things to all people” is his positive counsel on how to build coalitions—and sometimes engages in what certainly sounds like the hyper-cynical placation of opposing poles: cagily paying off that rival Jerusalem sect, warning against heretical influences, begging his far-off correspondents to avoid “splitting,” praising competitive apostles, and taking exasperated digs at obscure obstacles to his work, oddly personal in tone for one so inspired by the Lord. “Alexander the coppersmith,” he sighs at one point, “did me great harm.” Then Alexander and his copper disappear from the record.

We all know that 2 Timothy is not Pauline and is from the second century. So, Gopnik is not so well read on this subject after all. (There's no authorial caveats by Gopnik in this or surrounding paragraphs, and Gopnik frames it just as though Paul were the author.)

It then gets worse, when he compares Paul to Trotsky, leading him to this:

His mode of argumentation resembles nothing so much as Marxist dialectics, sinuously arguing from opposites and forcing a desired conclusion upon unobliging texts.

Uhh, the Stoic diatribe already existed, Adam. 

It sounds like what he is doing is Hegelian dialectic, with the thesis of Greek Paul, the late 20th century move to Hebrew Paul, leading to the synthesis of Hellenistic Paul. In reality, no such moves are needed. For starters, much of Jerusalem, let alone diaspora Judaism, was never implacably opposed to Athens.

One might think he recovered somewhat with the idea that Paul's letters were literary performance as much as anything, and perhaps weren't even actually sent. He notes Nina E. Livesey as a leader in reading a revisionist Paul, including with the idea that even the authentic letters are second century. It's an idea I reject, including the comparison with Seneca's letters, but it's interesting.

That said, what would that do to Marcion? Maybe Livesey postulates him as the author? Her book is here; one 1-star reviewer, speaking of that, says she's overly dependent on Markus Vinzent. It also has a Wiki piece. Per it, Jesus mythicists have lapped up her book. Shock me. Some even use it to support their claims of Paul mythicism.

Gopnik appears at least fairly open to the idea. I think he's wrong. 

The truth about Berenice, sister of Herod Agrippa II

 

As in the Berenice mentioned with him late in Acts.

Per Bruce Chilton, not only will you not find it in Acts (shock me), you also won't find it in Josephus.

First, background. Given Paul's accusation of taking goys into the Holy Place, when he said it was for Jews fulfilling a Nazirite vow, Chilton notes that a couple of years later, she completed her own such vow, complete with shorn hair. That was after Florus replaced Festus. He then notes it was Berenice, not Agrippa II, who appealed to Florus, head still shorn, at this point. Josephus will tell you that, as he'll later tell you that she started an affair with Titus, which drew the ire of later Roman historians such as Dio Cassius.

But, he'll also claim Berenice and Agrippa II had an incestuous relationship. That said, he attacks her morals, not his, in a mix of sexism and probably some sort of political triangulation.

Chilton later scores him on that issue.

This is part of a new book by Chilton. In a later paragraph, he explains why:

Part of the enjoyment of conducting research was that Berenice made an impact on Roman sources, and evaluating them made a break from the attention to Aramaic texts that has preoccupied me in recent years. Yet whether in Latin or in Greek, whether or not pagan, and whether Christian or Jewish, the ancient sources are palpably wary of Berenice. Acts is not the only writing that doesn’t let her come to voice. (Oddly, Luke in Acts 24:24 does not even mention that Drusilla, the wife of Festus’ predecessor Felix, was Berenice’s sister.) Other members of the Herodian dynasty were also controversial, Herod the Great most of all. But Herod had an apologist, Nicholas of Damascus, who permitted that vicious but effective king to come to voice in the pages of the Jewish historian Josephus. Berenice had no such defender, and Josephus—who might reasonably have taken her part—joined in the rumor that Berenice engaged in incest with her brother, Agrippa II (Antiquities 20 §§ 145-146). In regard to Berenice, Josephus showed himself more the partisan of Rome than he was the advocate of Judaism that he liked to pose as. Indeed, he becomes incoherent in his desire to please his Roman patrons, ridiculing Berenice as libidinous but extolling Agrippa II, her alleged sexual partner, as noble. A woman who provoked the pushback that Berenice received from so many quarters obviously deserves attention, and tracing antipathy to her is an education itself.

Indeed, she deserves more attention. 

That said, Chilton adds that Josephus' rumor may have started with Cynic critics in Rome, perhaps in an attempt to block a marriage to Titus. It worked, as most biblical and classical historians know. Titus dismissed her when he took the imperial throne. She died sometime not too long after his own death, it appears. He dismissed her once earlier, in the mid-70s, and may have intended to recall her again in a couple of years. 

That said, the last one-quarter of Acts is far more nonhistorical than Chilton mentions. I discuss that in much more detail. 

But I DID decide what to do on my most recent vacations

 This is a refutation of Massimo Pigliucci's most recent piece defending determinism, which I decided not to link to.

I pondered it a bit during my winter holidays vacation at the end of last year and start of this, and even more during spring vacation in March.

On the winter vacation, after it started, more than once, I decided to adjust where I would go, and when.

In March, based on weather, I first decided, before leaving home, to kill my original plan of going to Joshua Tree National Park, including the Sonoran Desert side, on day 1, moving day 2 up, and adjusting in other ways.

I decided to start my vacation here, on the Mother Road, then up to Mojave National Preserve, rather than going to Joshua Tree National Park. 

While that was weather dependent, other decisions made within this trip, like the winter vacations ones, were made after talking to and interacting with other people.

Massimo's version of determinism appears to be more than just a physicalism tautology that folks like Coel the slightly bonkers British astronomer and even more clearly, a chap handled as Disagreeable Me used to push on one of his longer-ago sites.

No, it appears to be something more strongly philosophical than that.

And per Johnson vs Berkeley, while I didn't kick an actual rock while on vacation, I still "refute it thus." Per Johnson, any stone I kicked was one I decided to kick. And, since Pigliucci has in the past largely rejected the idea of classical informal logical fallacies ... 

Quantum microeffects aside? Or maybe not aside, since we're arguing this from an entirely secularist, non-metaphysical angle?

First, while quantum mechanics is, generally, classical statistical mechanics all the way down, nonetheless, at a small enough scale just above the fuzzy borderline with the fully quantum world, a "butterfly effect" can indeed happen that is not classical statistical mechanics turtles all the way down.

On the organic, or semi-organic side, call it the "virus effect" instead of the "butterfly effect." A virus could actually get knocked slightly hither or yon, and perhaps infect in a slightly different way. 

That's all it takes.

I've long said I'm not a classic free willer. I've said that I support subconscious semi-free will. Subselves and more. I've cited Daniel Wegner and his "The Illusion of Conscious Will" many a time. Beyond the issue of subconscious free will, or unconscious free will, Wegner talks about how free will, if not an "affect," is similar to that. If we think, or maybe rather believe that we're freely willing something, we have a higher emotional investment in the idea of free will in general and also in the particular matter at hand. (I also think Wegner's idea is compatible with my idea of "psychological constraint," which is that our "working space" for freedom of action is psychologically constrained by past life events, especially traumatic ones.) 

Tying this with Dan Dennett and his ideas on consciousness? (I reject his ideas on compatibilist free will.) I don't think "subselves" and "multiple drafts" are incompatible. I think that certain subselves, on a subselves-based version of consciousness, can be seen as more "core" and more stable than others, and therefore more likely to rise to the top of the "drafts." These more stable subselves have more of a "commitment" to the quasi-affect idea that they're causing something.

I don't have to prove my version of free will right. 

All I have to do is show determinism wrong.

Now, in a sense, per Schrödinger, referencing the observer effect, I can't truly do that on quantum effect. But, I've laid the mental framework for that.

Determinism suffers another flaw, this one on the psychological side, for secularists.

I think it remains tainted with Deist ideas of the god who winds up the world like clockwork. David Hume, not Boswell, has refuted that one. 

And, to riff on Wegner, if a quantum butterfly effect means that another person's actions leading up to my interaction with them can't be determined, then the emotional affect of the perception of free will at the moment of that action certainly can't be determined.

Beyond that, modern cosmology and its Big Bang say that ideas of determinism, like general relativity, must yield to the quantum frontier. 

I think Pigliucci's neo-Stoicism, to go beyond Enlightenment empiricism, has influenced him on this one. It's the same idea is Deism, though: a "Logos" put it all in order.

To riff on Hellenistic philosophy in response? Massimo doesn't need to read Stephen Greenblatt to know to take a page from Epicurus.

Or, take a page from Laplace, instead of either Johnson or Epicurus? I do, and I say of determinism that I have no need for that hypothesis. And, as an invocation of Ockham's Razor, at least in part, it's not a logical fallacy.

Beyond the quantum mechanics basics, there's the question, per Einstein's "the old one doesn't play dice," as to whether Heisenberg's Uncertainty Theorum is something that's merely a human limit, or an actual graininess of the universe. Einstein certainly saw it as the latter, as do most modern interpretations of QM, whether they invoke Schrödingerian "collapses of eigenstates" or not. (He smoked too much Gita and his cat stacks the deck. See here.)

Even if just a human limitation, it is such. We can't "measure in" a precision in actions in the world to say "Voila, determinism!" 

So, unless Massimo and other philosophers supporting determinism can top Einstein and offer up the philosophy version of a GUT? No, again, determinism doesn't work. And, remember, if you're a methodological materialist, a scientific naturalist, you can't pluck H. sapiens out of the rest of the world. If determinism fails somewhere else, it fails for human volition. 

And beyond THAT, Massimo himself seemingly fails to square the circle, within his neo-Stoicism, in this Big Think piece, referring back to Epictetus: 

In a sense, Epictetus is saying that only one thing is truly up to us: our deliberate, conscious judgments. If you think about it, our intentions to act or not are the result of our preliminary judgments about things, and our values and disvalues are also forms of judgments.

If they're in my control, and if they're "up to me," the individual version of "up to us," then they're not determined. And, if Massimo, or someone else, claims that my control is itself determined, and therefore actually an illusion? At that point, we're at a determinism equivalent of why Aristotle's prime mover or first cause argument for the existence of a god falls apart, or so I see it.

A few other points.

First, as I said in my initial shorter callout of Little Bobby Sapolsky, this is not a dichotomy. The lack of conscious free will (which is not what I am claiming, anyway, nor defending against, either) does not by default imply determinism. I think Massimo is better than that. I am charitably assuming he is.

Second, per my 10,000 word detailed callout of Sapolsky, I am sure that Massimo is not committing a category mistake. Sapolsky did, in the detailed, precise philosophical sense. His real issue was ethics, and what's really discussing is moral realism, not determinism, in much of his book. That said, per the snarky header, I chose to kill Little Bobby.

Third, the exact moment of willing action X is fleeting. No doubt about it. It's as fleeting as Hume's famous attempts to apprehend his self, noted here:

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself that is, when I introspectively reflect on what’s present to my mind, I always stumble upon some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. ... If any one, upon serious and unprejudiced reflection, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular.

And, do you reject the idea of selfhood, of consciousness, just because you can't pin it down? No, no more than you reject the existence of a quark for that reason, to tie this back to the quantum world. And, so, because a moment of willing can not be tied down, whether or not we actually act before we decide to act, per Libet, also referenced in the link above, doesn't mean that the whole idea should be rejected. (Per that link, I don't see the Libet experiments as supporting determinism.)

To claim that IS the case is to be in the nutbar world of Alex Rosenberg, whom I know Massimo has, or has had, little use for. Maybe that's changed, though; maybe he thinks Hume's bundle theory supports determinism. 

Hume's bundle theory may not be totally right, but it's certainly not all wet.  

Two more notes.

One, per the end of this piece? Even if current conceptions of free will are not right, that does NOT mean that determinism is the default option. 

Second, riffing on me saying "mu," time after time after time, to the old issue, the old chestnut, of "free will VERSUS determinism," if we think in terms of gradations, we avoid polarities. 

Revisiting the "god-fearers" of early Christianity

An excellent piece by Thomas A. Robinson at the University of Arizona's Biblical Interpretation website, an underutilized source for biblical criticism.

Thesis is stated right at the top:

The widely accepted “god-fearer” thesis rests on weak foundations: the ancient terms are not clear technical labels, the evidence is sparse and often overstretched, and the model relies too heavily on assumptions about synagogue-associated Gentiles supposedly primed for Christian conversion. Early Christianity did not require a large class of literate, well-connected god-fearers to explain its growth, and this thesis has significantly shaped, and likely distorted, modern reconstructions of the movement’s origins, membership, and leadership.

Followed by five main points, all apparently taken from a book he wrote on the subject last year. 

The first point delves deeper into the "labeling" issue, looking at the two most common terms, and how and where in Greek they were used in the Septuagint. He concludes that by noting, while "god-fearer" is technically correct, whether as a dynamic translation we should even use that.

Second point? He says there's little evidence of the phenomenon from Jewish, Christian or pagan literature.

Third? He references the "Christianizing" of the Septuagint — including an overreading of how much, vs how little, Paul directly uses it, as a veil of sorts (my idea, riffing on Paul talking about the veil of Moses and analogizing from it) over clearer understanding of the LXX on this issue. He notes that the vast majority of the population was illiterate and so had no familiarity with it anyway.

Fourth point plays off the third and gets directly to Jewish vs Christian interpretations of the phenomenon, and larger Christian vs Jewish differences. He says, or indicated, there's a lot of assumptions at work here that have little standing. One is that Christianity would have been perceived as the only option for any actual god-fearers when a Christian preacher showed up. Another is whether, or not, circumcision was a real hurdle. Third is that conversion to a tiny cult would likely have been offset by a loss of Jewish friendships.

Fifth is the question of how long any significant body of god-fearers were around as a potential tool of converts.

Finally, his conclusion starts with this:

Almost every detail of popular and scholarly reconstructions of early Christianity is affected by the god-fearer thesis, from an emphasis on the economic, social, and intellectual resources of its membership and leadership, to its urban (and urbane) character, and its Jewish-tutored background. Such focus on god-fearers as a vital component in the early Christian movement tends to overlook how flimsy the evidence for god-fearers is and how unnecessary the god-fearers are to the developing Christian movement.

Give the whole thing a read. It's worth it.

Assuming he's right, this means that large swathes of Christianity would have been of a fully Hellenized, or Hellenized/Syriacized (sic) nature by no later than, say, the time of Marcion if not a full generation earlier, without "godfearer" intermediaries. OR, it means, given that we have moved well beyond Josephus on varieties of Judaism, that even more of Christian metaphysic than we have thought has Jewish roots. This, in turn, has implications for Christian development of Christology and related matters. 

 

 

Neil Godfrey calls out Richard Carrier over Bayesianism

VERY interesting. Godfrey, surely known to some of my readers as the proprietor at Vridar, says that using Bayesian probability is a sort of violation of Ockham's Razor: It's simply an unnecessary add-on in dealing with the historical Jesus. 

Here's his nutgraf, or the main sentence within:

One can validly use Bayes to judge between competing hypotheses that seek to explain President Kennedy’s assassination, but one does not need Bayes to determine if there was a historical President Kennedy in the first place. There are much simpler ways to check that datum

Well put, especially as someone here, me, who rejects JFK assassination conspiracy theories. 

But, he doesn't stop there. This:

Carrier approaches history the way positivists used to do in the olden days, approaching it like an empirical science that differs only from other sciences insofar as it has comparatively less data to work with.

Is at least halfway spot on, the positivism angle.

Then? 

Followed by a cite from this Aviezar Tucker critique of Carrier:

Historical sciences use evidence to support hypotheses about historical events such as the Big Bang, the origins of the solar system, asteroids hitting the earth, the evolution and disappearance of species, and who committed a crime. Historical sciences rely more on observations than on experiments and infer particularities more than generalities. In Carrier’s view, science and the historical sciences are not identical but are continuous and mutually dependent with a quantitative difference: in his opinion, historiography has less data and so is less reliable.

Is where the rubber really hits the road. 

I forgot how fucking stupid Raphael Lataster is

And mendacious, too.

Other than thinking Richard Carrier is genius-level mythicism, he thinks the same, in this piece, of Earl Doherty.

I've dealt with Doherty before, starting with his attempt to explain away Galatians 4:4 and claim Paul didn't believe in an earthly Jesus. (Unfortunately, the site I linked to is dead.) 

Lataster repeats the same lie on page 18:

Not only is Paul an obviously unreliable historian, he says nothing of a Historical Jesus, at least not anything that could not also apply to the ‘originally celestial’ Jesus proposed by amateur mythicist Earl Doherty.

How does he deal with Galatians 4:4? Doesn't even mention it. 

It's called mendaciousness, and mythicists are good at it. 

The piece is otherwise strawmanning, with Bart Ehrman — who gets strawmanned by mythicists in general — and Maurice Casey presented as the only two traditional critical scholars. 

Lataster himself has even less in the way of relevant education than Doherty.  

Top blogging, first quarter of 2026

As is usual, these were the most read posts of the last three months, per Google stats. Many may be older than that, and the "evergreen" ones will be so noted.

No. 10? "A Lutheran college myth bites the dust" from 2023 connects to my alma mater, a small college within the conservative wing of Lutheranism, and an urban legend (or worse) from my days that kept making the rounds for many years, claiming that Paul Hill wrote or helped write Bill Withers' "Lean on Me."  

No. 9? From 2023, talking about fascism in that same denomination, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, punningly called Lutefash. It will never go away as long as its current president, Matthew Harrison, continues to play footsie with the current president of Merikkka, Donald Trump, all while also lying about certain classes of people (Sixth Commandment), violating various cherished Lutheran principles about the "two kingdoms" and more. As long as both Harrison and Trump are in office, this piece will surely stay evergreen. It's my currently pinned post, too.

No. 8 is from 2012 and rightfully is trending at Easter time. It's my refudiation of a nutter geologist's claims to have proven Jesus' resurrection date (setting aside that while there was surely a crucifixion, there was no resurrection). 

No. 7, from 2013, is my list of overrated and underrated philosophers. 

No. 6, from 2009, sometimes pinned, but perhaps also trending because it talks about Passover and other things, is one of my personal favorites: "Paul, Passover, Jesus, Gnosticism." 

No. 5, even older, from 2007, was a mini-post about "Patriots, gurus, scoundrels and martyrs." 

No. 4, related to No. 9, is from the last three months. Matt Harrison faces a real problem with a district president arrested on a child porn charge. Given the Lutefash angle, he'll have some wingnuts claiming this was a police sting, and others claiming there's a Comet Pong Pizza secret child porn dungeon inside LCMS headquarters, the so-called "Purple Palace," I have little doubt. 

No. 3: My piece about how Edith Hamilton mistranslated one word in Aeschylus famous saying, and then, how Robert F. Kennedy misquoted her deliberately incorrect translation, talked about how this bowdlerized a thought already bad on the issue of theodicy within classical polytheism and made it even worse within Christian monotheism, and how it also is another reason to question to legacies of both Hamilton and Kennedy. Going beyond the political and sociological angles, I noted how Aeschylus was seemingly writing about corporate, not individual, tragedy and guilt, an angle reflected in Judaism with the first of the ten divarim and Yahweh's inflicting punishment across multiple generations.

No. 2, also within the last quarter, was about the various stupidities of Tim O'Neill. 

No. 1 is a piece that may well remain within the top 10 for every quarter's roundup of top blogging that I put together. "More proof the Buddha was no Buddha."