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Paul Bearer
Hermann Detering's Forgery Fantasy
James Patrick Holding
In the Fall 2003 issue of The Journal of Higher Criticism ("Can't pass peer review? Try here!"), an author named Herman Detering offers an item titled The Falsified Paul. The dedication tells the story by itself; it is partly to G. A. van den Bergh van Eysinga, someone of whom we once wrote much with extensive credit to Mark Nanos. The train of thought here is a form of highly radical criticism of the NT which ends up at the destination that declares the whole thing a forgery, though here, Detering is only concluding that "the Pauline letters in their entirety are inauthentic."
Now even at their wildest, the worst of "liberal" critics like Crossan and Mack do not even go this far. They are at least willing to grant some of Paul's letters as authentic, if not the majority (at least 6 or 7). And to his credit, Detering admits his thesis will have a hard road to follow if it is to become accepted. But what are his arguments for total Pauline inauthenticity (or TPI, as we will shorthandedly call it)? Looking at these in installments will be our goal; and being that I have such a low tolerance for such foolish counter-consensus positions these days, I'll be biting off of Detering's 203-page manifesto in approximately 25-page chunks each day I report.
Update, 7/6/08: While searching for something else, I found a reply to a portion of this document from a self-congratulatory blogger styled "Vridar" whose primary pursuit is making excuses for his arguments to work apart from evidence. We will now address his claims as well. If Vridar has any guts at all, we challenge him to show up on TheologyWeb and debate me -- we could use the laughs. :D I started a thread for those who want to partake of the pickin's here. Any further responses by Vridar will also be answered in this thread. (He answered 7/12/08.)
Pages 1-26
The first argument out of the gate needs no introduction [9ff]: Detering remarks almost at once upon what he finds to be the oddity of Paul saying so little about Jesus. This of course is the case of the twenty-pound gorilla. And Detering shows no signs of knowing any of the answers we provided to this (that is, not of my version particularly, but anyone's).
Detering hints next [12] to allegations of inconsistency in Paul's theology and biography, but offers no details as yet. He seems to readily dispense with Acts as a historical source under the influence of those who say it is not history but more like a "romance" [15]. This too is old news; for more on the reliability of Acts as a historical source, and alleged conflicts with Paul, see here. Detering does a disservice if he believes he can assume this as a bedrock of his thesis and ignore contrary arguments. (Where Detering further uses arguments covered in the linked article -- such as Paul not having authority to arrest people in Damascus [19] -- we will not specifically address them here.)
Detering does some depth analysis on the story of Stephen's stoning (Acts 8) though it is hard to call it "depth" at all. In terms of arguing for ahistoricity, Detering spends more time complaining about how commentators add drama to the scene with their own colorful descriptions than he does actually addressing the narrative. He cites Schoeps as determining ahistoricity by the simple point that Stephen plays "no great role in early Christian literature" and his martyrdom "falls entirely into the background" compared to other martyrdoms like that of James. [20] How this argues for ahistoricity is not explained. It is not quantified in any sense (eg, no literary statistics of mentions of Stephen vs James, etc in Christian literature; nor any critical evaluation of how their relative importance is demostrated). It isn't sufficient to just say, "huh, that's funny" and move on with the argument. Going further as Shoeps does, and alleging that Luke created Stephen as a way of subtly assaulting theologies with which he disagreed (!), is simply paranoid mirror-reading and sheer creativity.
The truth is that in terms of honor ratings, priority to someone like James over Stephen is completely intelligible. Schoeps' mindset is that of the modern individualist who thinks every individual deserves equal time; just as CNN sees fit to report in depth the deaths of single soldiers in war and stories of their families. Schoeps is off target socilogically, and so is his criticism. Stephen would not become a leading example versus someone like James simply because he was not a community leader whose example would be the one to be followed.
Then appears another familiar canard: Paul's conversion account has things which look like elements from other stories. This is simple ignorance of reporting methods used in this period; see here. Imitation does not equate with ahistoricity.
Further objections by Detering range from the used before (see link above) to the outright silly (such as, in Acts, Paul is seen primarily as a missionary and miracle worker, not as a theologian as he is in his letters -- 22 -- as if these two were mutually exclusive).
Before beginning, and so I do not forget, I will note a point made by the reader who requested this project. There is an irony in Detering in that he dispenses with Acts based on incompatibility with the Pauline letters, even though he argues that those letters are entirely inauthentic. Logic and clear thinking are obviously not one of Detering's strong points.
Page 28 offers us reports to the standard canards about forgery in Christianity and gospel authorship. Detering takes a great deal for granted here, and time he wastes on reactions to the charge of forgery [29f] would have been better spent trying to formulate defenses against the sort of arguments offered in our links. It speak for itself that Detering resorts to saying that the authenticity of Pauline letters is staked on the "reputation" of scholars rather than evidence. [30] He is, like his peers who write for TJOHC, front-loading the charges of bias and spin-doctoring to immorally stake the high ground.
There is the usual screed on the inauthenticity of the Pastorals, with nothing new [31]. So likewise in screeds against Colossians and Ephesians. 2 Thessalonians too is doubted, but I have not researched that issue yet, so I can offer little comment, other than that the finding of parallels with 1 Thessalonians means little; Detering is insensate to the fact that indeed, a writer of the ancient world could and would echo his prior work in composition.
From here Detering briefly speaks of historical questions about Pauline authorship by radical critics. I will pick up on page 54 where he offers some specific arguments. These comprise four pages and since it is the first time in a while Detering is doing his own arguing, I will give them their own section.
I have discovered just recently that one might be confused by the pagination of the PDF document from which I drew Detering's comments. From here on I will endeavor to use the page numbers printed in the original JHC article and not the PDF pagination.
Starting on page 54 Detering sums up some arguments used against Pauline authenticity:
- There are a series of comments offered about alleged peculiarities in the openings to Paul's epistles. Detering seems to be under the impression that where Paul offers his credentials (eg, "an apostle") this somehow could indicate that someone else wrote the letter. He claims (with no documentation, other than quoting a single such greeting from a letter, "Cicero greets Atticus") that the greetings employed by Greeks and Romans were "very unpretentious." Not that, again, Detering provides examples, much less examples of letters from a person in authority to a person or persons under them. Oddly enough, we find here no comment from a classical scholar about Paul's greeting in Philippians being more "pretentious" than that of the one Detering uses as an example. Much less does Detering quote any authority that regards Paul's openings as unusual; it's the usual case in higher criticism of inventing a problem out of whole cloth. In fact, Paul's assertions of his credentials make perfect sense in an honor-based culture, given Paul's unusual situation as one whose authority was a question mark at times; but for Detering, Paul is just an average Westerner or he is nothing at all.
Vridar response:
Either Holding is simply not familiar with ancient letters or assumes his audience would not be familiar with them or both. Anyone who is familiar with ancient letters knows that the example Detering provides is quite sufficient to jog their memories.
Wrong. I am very familiar with ancient letters, and have used many sources that are, such as Richards' work on the use of a secretary in the letters of Paul. As it is, this is typical of Vridar, who merely babbles that an opponent is "not familiar" with some topic, but then manages to fail to give specifics demonstrating the alleged lack of familiarity. In this case, the issue is that Detering needs to show that letter openings as a whole lacked "pretense" (whatever that is supposed to mean) and then also show that in the specific case of Galatians, this "pretense" is unwarranted. I ask for evidence; Vridar gives none, but rather babbles on for a paragraph about "argument from authority."
His response to the classicist is even more amusing and useful:
So I googled that classicist's name and university, found his homepage in one shot, and lo and behold, there in its left hand margin is a nice bright golden crucifix link that takes one to that classicist's homepage of zillions of bible-study tools. So much for Holding attempting to give the impression he was appealing to "the authority" of an umpire with no conflict of interest.
It is no surprise that someone with no answers and even less intellgience immediately resorts to the old "bias" canard. This is not an answer to the classicist's argument, but it does how that Vridar does not have such an answer. On my point about an honor-based culture, Vridar is even more lost:
Okay, so Paul was the only one who wrote letters from an unusual situation in that culture? Paul's situation was so unique that he was the only one to use the letter's introduction to argue a controversial point?
That's for YOU to answer, Vridar -- not me. I'm not going to create your arguments for you.
Yes, the honor based culture thing again. Didn't Paul pass on Christ's teaching to come out of the world's ways and follow humility? But of course it is surely obvious that Holding is arguing in a circle here. He is simply repeating the contents of the introductions as if that is sufficient to explain why the introductions contained such material in the first place.
I think it speaks for Vridar's ignorance that he tries to find some dichotomy between "honor" and "humility" here. There was none -- Vridar is manifestly ignorant of the workings of honor-based cultures and so has nothing worthwhile to say. As Pilch and Malina note (Handbook of Biblical Social Values, 118) "humility" meant staying within one's status and not claiming more for yourself than was warranted -- and Paul was claiming no more for himself than was true. It remains that none of this is an answer -- it is the vain mouthings of someone with no relevant education and no answers.
In sum, while it is true that Paul sometimes goes long on his prescript (I have noted a comment that Romans 1:1-7) is "one of the longest" -- not "the" longest) in antiquity), I can find nothing to suggest that this is reason to deny the letters to Paul, and one must certainly do more than Detering has -- hold up the prescripts and yell, "gawrsh that's long" -- to prove a problem. There are other contextual reasons for the length in these cases: matters of identity and honor, and the insertion of Christological material, for example, which would not apply to something like "Cicero greets Atticus".
- Detering also makes some rather silly remarks, such as commenting on Gal. 1:1, "to the churches in Galatia," saying, "The poor letter-carrier!" Yes, I'm quite sure the experience was unbearable, but despite Detering's ignorant sarcasm, people had ways of getting letters around: For example, you looked around for someone heading out the same way as the letter's destination, or hired a messenger, or got a slave to carry it. Then again, if Detering thinks one person carrying a letter around Galatia may have been a hardship, I suppose he thinks that no one in antiquity ever got up from their seats. Most of Detering's remarks are nitpicks of the same order that deserve no response (eg, his claim of contradiction between Rom. 1:1 and 2 Cor. 5:16, which he doesn't even bother to explain), and are no more than either "duh, this makes no sense to ME" matters. But it does well to select a few anyway to comment upon.
Vridar response: Holding appears not to have comprehended Detering's argument. It was all about the vagueness of the addressees. Holding completely ignores this, the only point Detering was discussing. "Vagueness" of the addressees? If that is so, then Detering's point is even stupider than I realized. Does he think the carriers of the letter had no instructions as to where to go? THEY would see no vagueness; they would know their job. But no, I got Detering's point, and the answer is the same. There were plenty of ways to get letters around. It's a goofy objection, and Vridar is merely distracting from the answer.
- Gal. 2:6: But of these who seemed to be somewhat, (whatsoever they were, it maketh no matter to me: God accepteth no man's person:) Detering blows his stack over the use of "were," supposing it means the apostles in question were dead, so this means this was written well past Paul's time. It's funny how a forger this clever can miss such an obvious point, but it's the usual case of overblow we get from the radical criticism school: Contextually, "were" just as well refers to former positions of status within a community (such as, "I used to be the top student under this rabbi").
Vridar response: There isn't one. Vridar just mumbles and jumbles and the only thing approaching a "reply" is to say, He completely fails to see that he (Holding) is actually arguing that the author of the letter of Galatians believes that Peter, James and John were only apostles by a "former status" within the Jerusalem community. Not hardly. Aside from failing to defend Detering's silly idea that "were" means they were dead, Vridar has stupidly equated Peter, James and John with the "those" named in 2:6. A far closer antecedent is the "false brethren" in 2:4 -- suitably unnamed, as would be appropriate if Paul is shaming them.
- Gal. 6:11: See what large letters I use as I write to you with my own hand! Detering goes gaga over this, wondering why Paul wants to guard against falsification of letters in his own lifetime. As before, Detering seems to be the only person who thinks this would not happen; as if indeed forgers only worked with dead people, which is obviously true today. That said, more informed scholars like Witherington (Galatians commentary, 442) have an obvious reason for this authentication: Given the sensitive nature of the letter, Paul wishes to affirm that though (as was normal for the period) a scribe penned the bulk of it, he stands fully behind it; no one can say that someone else is trying to cover for Paul or speak on his behalf, which would be a sensitive issue of honor under the circumstances. (The same answer is intelligible in 2 Thess. 3:17 as well.)
Vridar response:
Curiously, Holding fails to provide "an authority" that ancient forgeries had different targets from those today. But I would rather he pointed to other ancient examples of letters forged in the names of contemporaries. Even more interesting had he explained how they got away with establishing such forgeries as the generally accepted authentic writings while the contemporaries were alive to expose them.
I don't know where Vridar gets this argument ("ancient forgeries had different targets from those today") out of the above, but chances are it had something to do with powerful medications. The closest point is that people did not just forge letters from dead people -- then or now -- as Detering indicates, which means that therew was every reason for Paul to be on guard. The rest is not my burden to explain just because Vridar can't answer the argument and needs a distraction. The subject here is Galatians, not every letter from antiquity. In any event, Vridar would upend Detering with any examples of letters forged in the name of contemporaries; if he wants to do that, he can. As I see it, the argument was dumb enough to be refuted without such examples.
As for the specifics of the argument cited as Witherington's (the obligatory authority), I agree that it would make perfect sense for Paul to write a bit of it with his own hand. No doubt all the churches in Galatia had access to a file which contained a copy of Paul's handwriting, kept in secure vaults and verified by Justices of the Peace or local magistrates, and also to professional handwriting experts, to establish to the readers that the parchment or whatever really was from "the Paul".'
Notice the childish bit on "authority" -- though apparently using Detering as an authority is not a problem. The rest is all childish as well, a straw man set aflame with red herring oil. Handwriting experts and vaults were not needed to authenticate such letters -- in an age when 90% of the people were illiterate, it was hardly difficult to have a form of writing that was distinctive, certainly within a limited peer group; and it is hardly unlikely that copies were needed when simple memory would do. If Vridar wants to answer such things by positing more clever forgers, that speaks for itself as a case of a theory driving the facts for what he wants to be true. And that is just what he does:
Of course, no scribe could ever make a second copy of the letter. Or if he did, he would have to omit those last words or at best add a gloss to them. (Why has such a gloss not come down to us in any manuscripts?) Let's leave behind this "hermeneutic of suspicion" a moment and suggest that the letter was finally faithfully copied without qualms after the original readers had died out or the issue addressed was long since dead. (In which case what would have been the purpose of copying this very tattered parchment or papyrus at all . . . - and if according to Justin Martyr the issue was still alive in the mid second . . . . ??)
Sorry, no. A scribe cannot make a second copy of the letter with Paul's handwriting at the end and pass it off as authentic. As for the rest, 1) it would only be relevant to a letter lacking such a signatory ending by Paul, and that is not what is at issue here. 2) The question, "what would have been the purpose" is just as well asked of any work of any man of letters (Cicero, Pliny, etc). Whether for antiquarian interest, or whether simply because it is by Paul, does not matter; it was done, and it is Vridar's burden to present actual problems as shown by evidence, which he does not do.
If my point is still unclear, this claim for evidence of authenticity can only "work" in a late forgery. An original author making such a claim would, if he had half his wits about him, have realized the vacuousness of such a claim. Or perhaps Holding can cite an authority that this was the most obvious and normal practice authors used to authenticate their letters.
Whatever this is supposed to mean. No authority is needed to argue that this was an "obvious and normal practice" for authors -- signing your name in your own writing is quite obvious as a normal tactic. But if he wants an authority, Vridar can put down "The Poky Little Puppy" and pick up Witherington's Galatians commentary and look at page 439-40. It was a well-known practice to add a postscript in your own hand after a scribe did the bulk of the work for you.
It is also worth noting that one of Detering's objections amounts to saying that the people of Galatia would be too backwards and stupid to understand Paul's letter. [56]
- Detering cannot understand why Paul would go into Arabia and not Jerusalem. It's not too hard to figure: Paul is perhaps following the path of the Exodus, and perhaps even visiting Mt. Sinai, as Wright has suggested. However, it is just as well to suppose that he chose this as a nearby mission field after Damascus; and has every reason to NOT return to Jerusalem to face his Pharisee superiors who are naturally not going to be pleased that he botched on his job of arresting Christians by becoming one.
Vridar response: None here, either. Vridar just says I and Wright are "mak[ing] up imaginary itineraries to explain away the implausible," as if indeed a pilgrimage to one of Judaism's holiest sites by one of its most strident devotees were "implausible." Vridar can't seem to explain why this is "implausible" though he does come up with some excuse that Paul "was in opposition to the Mosaic law," which certainly means that Paul also happened to think that the giving of that law was somehow not a historic moment in salvation history. Not that it matters, since this is the usual wah-wah from someone who fails to grasp the nature of Paul's view of the law, per what was happening in Galatia at the time. Vridar also manages to insert a reference to Paul as one who "counted all his past life in the law as dead" though that this sentiment occurs in a much later letter after Paul would have had time for reflection does not seem to occur to him. Finally Vrdar manages to see in Galatians some idea that Paul "went hermit, like Jesus into the wilderness," for that entire time, but there's nothing to suggest that that was the entirety of his experience in Arabia. Being a missionary in Arabia would not mean "conferring" with anyone who was an authority for information on the Gospel, which is the point of Gal. 1:15-17. Not to mention that we have both Acts and Paul to affirm that Paul was in trouble with Aretas in Arabia -- I suppose Vridar thinks in was because Paul was going to be arrested for littering.
Finally, Vridar finds it odd that Paul might avoid his Pharisee superiors, because a later Paul took on the leading apostles and the high priest. To which we can only say that Vridar's one-dimensional understanding of human nature needs some polishing. He might also consider that if Paul has been told that he had a job to do by the Risen Jesus, it hardly makes sense for him to immediately go back home where he will likely be executed or imprisoned.
- There is a typical lack of comprehension of 1 Cor. 11. Please note that Detering does not bother to deal with any scholarship on this or any other of these subjects before announcing his conclusions.
- The usual canard about 1 Thess. 2:14-16.
In a section following [57ff] Detering tries to make issue of alleged lack of "traces" of Paul in ancient sources. Why this ought to be an issue, other than Detering's personal incredulity, is not explained; as before, he simply postures amazedly, so much so that he forgets to explain. This is Remsberg's argument all over again; before being taken seriously here, Detering needs to explain why any particular source ought to have said anything at all; as if someone like a Columella would know (or care) that Paul had been shipwrecked three times and would see fit to change his subject from agriculture to say so. It is frankly asinine for Detering to complain that none of this is mentioned in Greco-Roman or Jewish literature. It is not enough to say that Plutarch, for example, was "open to all religious movements" of his time and then stand back amazed that Paul is not mentioned despite this. Plutarch also did not mention Gamaliel, or Hanina ben Dosa; were they also mythological? Did Plutarch name all the missionaries of the Mithras cult?
A section following [61ff] offers some canards from the standard Paul vs Peter. There is little or nothing new here, and Detering is of the school that thinks silence can be manipulated into positive proof of a position, by hook or by crook. Justin Martyr, he says, is not aware of Paul; but what about places where Justin seems to have been influenced by Pauline material? That's simple, says Detering: The letters were around, but not yet attributed to Paul [73], which doesn't seem to explain why Justin doesn't mention the true author of the letters, or at least say, "according to these letters which go around anonymously". Proof that this could have been done is found in that it was also done with the letter from James....probably! And strangely, while Justin could have been hesitant to name Paul because his letters were considered forgeries, he was still dumb enough to use ideas clearly derived from these forged letters.
There's another matter as well: 1 Clement and Ignatius clearly testify to Paul early enough to satisfy Detering's contrived requirements; but that's no problem, because those letters are fake also, for the same kind of strained reasons Detering finds problems over Paul. But that's another subject, and we'll pick up again on page 85 where Detering talks of Paul again.
In his next section, Detering, having assumed his thesis of Pauline fabrication proven, moves on to discuss the origin of Paul's letters as he sees them; there's not a great deal that needs to be said here, since if Detering's foundation is rotten, there is no need to knock over the bricks he erects upon it. Just a few points of observation, then, that speak for themselves:
- Detering gives credence to Edwin Johnson, an author writing in 1887 who supported the Christ myth thesis, and who also claimed that the historical period that was once (erroneously) called the "Dark Ages" was merely a fabrication [88ff].
- Marcion was the true author of the Pauline epistles [90].
- An absurd argument is offered about Gal. 2:3-5 [103]:
But neither Titus, who was with me, being a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised: And that because of false brethren unawares brought in, who came in privily to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage: To whom we gave place by subjection, no, not for an hour; that the truth of the gospel might continue with you.
Much is made of alleged difficulty in whether the "not" appears in the original text, and Detering whinges on about how the passage has been "tendentiously reworked" by the church. Despite Detering's paranoia, and the complicated conspiracy he proposes, it is far more likely that such ommissions were accidental; getting rid of the "not" doesn't serve at all to turn Paul into a "complaint pacifier" since the act of non-submission -- Titus' lack of circumcision -- remains plainly obvious.
- Further analysis of Galatians shows Detering oblivious to the honor-shame dialectic being presented there, which resolves all his claims of problems which cause him to decree Gal. 1:18-24 an interpolation (with no hard textual evidence at all).
- Sorry, slowpokes: 10-20 years just isn't enough time for the early church to have developed creeds and hymns about Jesus for Paul to quote [109]. The church, I suppose, was too busy filing its nails. It's too bad they weren't industrious like the Mormons, who were producing a wealth of specifically LDS hymns, poems, etc as early as 1836 -- just 6 years after Joseph Smith formally founded the LDS church, and just 16 years after Smith's reported "vision" of God.
- An argument is made concerning Romans 1:1,5 as proof that there is interpolation here [112]:
Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the gospel of God...By whom we have received grace and apostleship, for obedience to the faith among all nations, for his name..
According to Detering, the switch to a plural "we" does not agree with the singular Paul uses of himself in 1:1, and so could indicate redaction. I had no idea that it was linguistically impossible for a writer to do such a thing in real life. The "we" is also intended to "exclude a special revelation to Paul" (for heaven knows, the receipt of grace and an apostolic mission is something that God would naturally limit to one person -- Detering seems to assume here, by the way, that "apostle" is a formal title, when in fact it simply means someone who is sent, and could be applied to anyone sent on a mission trip). By similar linguistic strains Detering finds in Paul's letters evidence of Marcion's dualism and Gnosticism.
I will pick up again on page 124.
Detering finds great mystery [124] in Paul's hypothetical of himself preaching circumcision in Gal. 5:11, thinking this verse evidence for his "Marcion" theory since he does not figure opponents could make this charge against Paul if he truly were the letter's author. The verse is "enigmatic and debated," as Witherington says in his Galatians commentary [372], but it is far from "bewildering" as Detering claims: The grammar, as Witherington notes, supports the understanding that Paul is referring to his pre-Christian life when he was still a Jew preaching circumcision (or, perhaps, Paul is indeed answering such a charge, based on his circumcision of Timothy; in which case, he is answering as well a charge of inconsistency). Either way it takes far more imagination to suppose, as Detering does, a forged letter being thrust before Marcionite churches and accepted as valid. Detering is also oblivious to the rhetorical pathos of passages like Gal. 4:16 [126] in which Paul wonders if he has become the Galatians' "enemy"; this is not meant to be literal, but is a shaming device, meant to shame the Galatians for what was their much more moderate abandonment of Paul's teaching and the taking up of the teaching of his opponents (so likewise, the equally hyperbolic notion that Paul was first welcomed as though an angel in Gal. 4:14 [137] and the fighting of beasts in Ephesus [138]; Detering clearly needs lessons in the concept of "dramatic orientation").
From here, Detering offers an analysis trying to match letters of Paul with the situation of Marcion; the question never raised is, why would Marcion, himself a figure of high esteem and honor, need the persona of Paul as a proxy to defend himself? Detering is clearly oblivious to the social background which explains such statements as Paul's direction that his readers imitate him (eg, 1 Cor. 4:16) [134]; this is normal collectivist leadership, not in the least "peculiar" or "presumptuous" to the properly informed reader.
Detering then embarks upon an analysis of the much later stories of Paul and Thelca; these need not detain us at all, save to note that Detering's errors on matter such as the above are what lead him to presuppose these stories as sources for items in Paul's letters; when in fact the Thelca tales are making the same mistake as Detering does, overliteralizing a dramatis personae. We need also not be detained by Detering's extended efforts to equate Paul with Simon Magus, for his argument assumes that he has priorly proven his case.
We will pick up on page 173, which will mark the end of our review as well.
Now it is time for some concluding remarks.
To operate against a strong consensus position -- in this case, one which sees Paul as at least the author of seven of 13 letters in the NT, if not more -- requires a great deal of work. Detering has come nowhere near meeting this burden. Most of his objections are pedantic or involve serious conntextualizations. He has interacted with almost no serious Pauline scholarship, and indeed seems to have paid far more attention to arguments done centuries ago than to modern Pauline scholarship.
In light of this, Detering's closing sermon (which is what it is) in which he waxes eloquent (marginally so) about the "freedom" one obtains from following his higher critical method is a tragic farce. Like the bulk of this crowd (Price, Doughty, etc) Detering simply claims the high ground (however illicitly) and pish-toshes those who disagree as priorly committed to the stale paradigm and under an "illusion" that he has been smart enough to see through where countless others of greater education are immature, and have not. He is not as obnoxious about it as some of that crowd can be, but the essence is there; though it speaks for itself that he also stands up for a form of the Christ myth (which sees Jesus as a composite of several historical figures [178].
JHC is a journal for those whose work is so inanely outside the consensus that they can't pass peer review in something more serious like New Testament Studies. Detering's claims would never pass peer review beyond the limited circle of JHC, and he likely knows this. However, he is also likely counting on readers not knowing this.
His case against Pauline authenticity is an abject failure, and shall remain so.
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