Imagine being such a persecuted group in America that you get to blast spam mail to everyone in your community in the name of religion with no repercussions.

  • @kromem
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    28 days ago

    Here’s a chart of a poll of scholars on the letters: https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/uq26n8/which_nt_epistles_did_paul_actually_write/

    And yes, often people who pursue scholarship tend to have a deconversion moment, especially if they were coming from more conservative or orthodox backgrounds. I’ve also seen people go the other direction, which is a bit odd to me, but whatever floats their boat. The texts are a mess of revisionism and edits that fly in the face of any kind of literalism.

    But those revisions and edits reveal a lot in what they sloppily cover up, or the motivations behind the changes, etc. It’s actually a really fun field of study.

    For example, I disagree with the consensus linked for 2 Timothy, as if you look at the letters given a recent finding that covert narcissists talk about themselves more in their writing, Paul talks about himself vs others at a similar relative rate as the undisputed Epistles, which isn’t the case for any other disputed Epistle, and is much more than all the other Epistles. (Some other reasons too, but that’s the main data point I think is interesting.) Paul definitely appears to have been that type of narcissist, and it may reveal what he did or didn’t write.