“[W]riters who perpetuate mistakes out of ignorance are to be pardoned and gently corrected, while those who do so deliberately should be condemned without mercy.” – Polybius, The Histories, 12.7.
- Adam Gopnik, writing for The New Yorker, has a piece on some recent scholarship concerning the apostle Paul, including the recently edited volume Paul within Paganism (Fortress Press, 2025). I read it through my Apple News subscription, but you can find it on The New Yorker‘s website.
- I recently got my hands on Brandon Grafius’ latest and I hope to have a review out for it around Halloween of this year. (I have a lot of reading to get through between now and then so we will see.)
- David Litwa responds to Michael Bird’s review of Litwa’s Marcion: Gospel of a Wholly Good God. It’s a doozy!
- If you’re needing some reading material, Matthijs den Dulk’s Ethnic Stereotypes and the Letters of Paul is available for a free download!
- Paul Davidson looks at Revelation 13’s weird beasts and fleshes out the Jewish and pagan sources that stand behind it. He likens it to an Avengers film where various characters make cameos.
- Sarah Emanuel talks with Ryan Lambert about her recent book Wrestling with Paul. I hope to get my hands on this one soon and offer a review. In the meantime, here is an excellent interview with Emanuel.
- Gregory Paulson talks about UBS 6th edition of the Greek New Testament and some significant changes from the 5th edition. For example, the Pauline corpus is placed after the Catholic Epistles. (If you use Tyndale House’s Greek NT this shouldn’t be an issue.)
- Robyn Walsh talks about the origin of the Gospels with CJ Cornwaite.
The Amateur Exegete 
Thanks for another weekly round-up.
I read Paul’s write-up on Revelation 13 earlier this week and really enjoyed it.
And the back-and-forth between Litwa and Michael Bird reminds me of the time I read a piece by Bird on the Gospel of Luke trying to portray it as “proto-feminist.” He made some rather dubious claims but it at least gave me some insight into his apologetics and how he typically operates.
The work on the apostle Paul by den Dulk looks kind of interesting since some of the ethnic stereotypes in the New Testament tend to be overlooked by scholars. But Jesus in the gospels and Paul both talk about “gentiles” as people who engage in sinful acts to be avoided by the righteous: it’s almost as if they employ the term as a belittling benchmark to say that those who don’t follow certain teachings are no “better” than foreigners.
Honestly, Paul is kind of a controversial figure in my mind for both Jews and non-Jews: his work has historically been employed for anti-Semitic purposes but he appears to maintain in certain passages (e.g. Romans 1) that gentiles are responsible for their ignorance of the faith in spite of never having received the revelations from God that the prophets of the Old Testament did.
The fact that the core tenets of Christianity have never been derived independently by various cultures (for example, the Pre-Colombian civilizations of the Americas) and yet Christians still hold them to be somehow condemned was one of the early reasons for my becoming a skeptic: A God who privileges one group with the teachings requisite for being saved and requires the work of missionaries and the flawed transmission of holy writ for reaching the others seems to be playing favorites.
-J Source
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I’ve been reflecting on Paul’s internal logic and I’m curious to know how you see a few points that I’ve been weighing: Regarding ‘ignorance of faith’:
What does it mean? Do you think Paul is demanding that the Gentiles have knowledge of something they never heard (the Gospel), or is he pointing to a failure to follow that basic ‘light’ that nature and conscience already offer to everyone?
Do you think that, in Paul’s view, the Bible and the prophets would have been necessary if humanity had been faithful to that internal ‘moral sense’ and understood the revelation found in nature? In other words, would Jesus be a ‘contingency plan’ or a requirement that God forgot to distribute equally?
One thing that puzzles me is whether salvation, for these biblical authors, is seen as a human right or as unmerited favor. If we assume that no one ‘deserves’ anything, do you think the idea of ‘favoritism’ still makes sense, or does the issue become the very nature of this God who chooses how and when to act?
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Sorry it took me a while to respond but I wanted to provide a detailed response to your questions:
1.) Consider the following analogy to illustrated why it is difficult to accept that apparent divine favoritism is actually just God’s prerogative to show mercy to whom he chooses:
A group of scientists creates a virus that eventually results in the deaths of those infected They are quarantined and banished to an island after they accidentally contract it. Eventually, a medical team synthesizes a cure for the virus and, having some pity on the exiled scientists, sends a doctor to the isle with a number of vials sufficient enough to cure each of them and himself, in the event he contracts it.
Now upon his arrival, he befriends one of them and immediately administers the cure to his new friend. But whether from somehow forgetting the other scientists or suddenly deeming them unworthy, he simply tells the one he has cured how to manufacture more vials and returns to the mainland. Because of the time it takes to make more cures, the others succumb to the disease within a few months before the survivor is given passage back to the mainland the following year.
Upon his return he proclaims that the doctor was both the best medical practitioner he could ever hope to encounter and that he the most decent human being in the nation. According to him, this man should serve as a role model for every other person in health care. Other doctors denounce him for the fact that no one else survived from the island and he had more than enough doses to cure them. They wonder why he is a better doctor and person than any other citizen. In response, the survivor claims that the doctor had the privilege to decide who to cure since he is one of a select number of individuals with the expertise.
Who has made the better claim?
The banished scientists represent humanity according to Christianity. They created the condition that put them in peril, just as all humans are guilty of sin in Christian doctrine. The doctor represents the Christian God, who is supposedly both all-powerful and all-loving. The survivor represents Christians who claim these attributes for their deity and think he is the best possible god. And the other doctors correspond to skeptics or non-Christians.
Christianity typically claims that God is either the embodiment of love or shows never-ending love. Yet in the interpretation of the biblical authors you provided, he ends up granting a select number of people with something they do not deserve. That would definitely appear to be a case of bounded love or even arbitrary hatred toward certain individuals.
(Continued Below)
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If the Christian God can behave this way and still be considered loving, how can he serve as a moral exemplar for humans who are not permitted to show favoritism? To show favoritism is precisely to behave more positively toward some individuals who do not deserve it rather than others or to withhold rewards from those whose actions would otherwise merit them. If our definitions of love and favoritism do not correspond with God’s, then what other ideas need to be readjusted in light of divine attributes? Could our ideal of honesty even be the opposite of his standard?
To go further, what would prevent someone from another religion from claiming that their deity is loving and yet behaves in this way? Some forms of Islam preach a form a determinism and that Allah has decreed who will be a Muslim or non-Muslim.
To my mind, the above are reasons why claims about deities must be evaluated in light of human understanding or you risk falling into “might makes right” thinking where God is hard to distinguish from a demon.
I think Bertrand Russell one argued that there is nothing theoretically impossible about the creator of our universe being both evil and omnipotent. (If you need an explanation for why a good God allows evil, then you would just need a reverse explanation in this scenario.). In that case, humans would actually be morally obligated to disobey him.
2.) It can be argued that there are three more just or loving or possibilities for a deity than granting salvation selectively as a gift: withholding it from all humans, unconditionally granting it to all, or allowing some form of choice. If God condemned every deserving sinner to hell or annihilation, he might be quite cruel but fair in some sense of the word. If God eventually allowed everyone into heaven, he could be considered infinitely loving. The final possibility involving individuals choosing whether to accept salvation would be the most meaningful but just leads to another problem with Romans 1: People need to be aware of their options for meaningful choice to take place.
Now my interpretation of Paul is probably similar to yours with a few caveats: he seems to posit that pagan gentiles at one point had knowledge of the Jewish God but rejected him. This is kind of ad hoc on Paul’s part since there is no historical evidence that, outside of any contact with the Hebrews or Christians, other civilizations ever had this knowledge or that it could be derived logically or empirically. Christian doctrine teaches that you need to believe in a particular deity as opposed to just any god. So the question is how pagans could be responsible for this lack of knowledge.
Compounding the problem is that, according to the Old Testament, hundreds if not thousands of prophets were sent to the Hebrew people regardless of whether they were being obedient to God at given time. Idolatry would end up becoming a grave sin in Judaism, so it doesn’t seem possible that Paul or any other biblical author would allow gentiles living before Christ to be saved while worshipping their own gods. But where would they have learned this other than by reading Jewish scriptures or encountering those familiar with Jewish teachings?
If the Jewish/Christian God did in fact send prophets or appear to pagans before Christ, where is the written evidence from those cultures? In the case that the ancestor of a gentile nation rejected him, why not send more messengers to his descendants later?
Even when the Hebrews were said to have forsaken the Mosaic religion in the Hebrew Bible, prophets were still sent to warn them to turn back to their faith.
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I believe the gentleman who interviewed Prof. Walsh spells his name Cornthwaite.
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Corrected! Thanks for catching that!
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Gopnik’s piece is uneven. Starts well, then with his Alexander the Coppersmith comment, he sounds like he thinks 2 Timothy is actually Pauline.
Then, his comparing Paul to Trotsky is pretty much off the rails. Since Paul was using the Stoic diatribe, there’s no reason to say that he sounds like a Marxist diatribe. Indeed, “Stoic” and related words aren’t even in the piece.
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Paul’s piece? He and I have been certain degrees of “cross-influencers” for years. I had a couple of comments there.
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