You write:

“As you know, the older the manuscript, the more deviations from standard it generally has.”

No, that’s not true. It all depends on the age of the oldest manuscript we actually possess relative to when we thought the original was written. The chain of manuscript evidence also allows us to compare consistency over time and determine how accurate the transmission of the book has been. For example, prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest text we had of the Book of Isaiah dated from 1000 AD. The DSS contained a manuscript of Isaiah dating from the 1st century BC. When the two were compared, only very minor differences were find. Very good testimony to the accuracy of the scribal tradition involved in its transmission. But if you have evidence that the verse I cite is corrupted, please share. Also note that the earliest text of Colossians that we have dates only from the 2nd century AD. So the intervening centuries between then and now are meaningless in terms of contributing “deviations from the standard”.

You say: “So [the] fact that I can document Paul actually commanding his letters be shared among different churches isn’t evidence that they were?”

I don’t know of any documentation other than the current texts we have of the Pauline corpus, which as I’ve said, has no doubt been subject to much change. Just cause the Gideon bible in your drawer (or the Hort-Westcott text) says it doesn’t mean that the ancient texts did. As you know, the older the manuscript, the more deviations from standard it generally has. And, as I’ve said, there is no documentation that anyone actually quoted the letters, as they did everything else.

I didn’t mean to imply that the apocalyptic message of Revelation came from Paul, merely, as Dr. Goodspeed says, that it would be a bit of a coincidence to suggest that, right after Paul’s letters were apparently circulated as a group, another book is written that uses as a literary device — wait, wait, don’t tell me — a collection of letters addressed to Christian churches in the same general area of those to whom Paul wrote.

Now I guess that could just be a coincidence. After all, as you suggest, Paul didn’t invent the letter, and as I would concede, he also didn’t invent the collection of letters, a literary form well known in ancient times. But it seems a bit coincidental to my way of thinking that we get Luke-Acts exploding on the Gentile Christian front, introducing Paul to the masses, then the collection of Paul’s letters posited by Goodspeed, then Revelation, which uses the same literary device, and they aren’t connected. The other thing a lifetime of practicing law has taught me is to be suspicious of coincidence.

Paul did not invent the epistle. In writing his epistles, he was simply following the accepted forms for written correspondence of his day. So to say that anyone else who writes in an epistolary style can only be consciously imitating Paul is absurd. That Revelation is both an apocalypse and a book of prophecy – both genres Paul never created or worked within – tells us how far from Pauline this book is. Just to take one subject – the legitimacy of Roman authority – we see how diametrically opposed they are. Paul unconditionally affirmed the validity of Roman authority. Revelation is all about how that same authority is demonic and must be destroyed. Etc. So your argument here is very, very weak.

Also, there is no reason to believe that Revelation was written by the same author as the Gospel of John. If you read Greek – as I do – it’s impossible that one and the same person could have written both, since the style of each is completely different. The text of Revelation is famous for being rough, almost uncouth and barbaric. A far cry from the smoothe sophistication of the Gospel of John.

“As for your statements that the letters must have been circulated because Paul said so, that’s pretty weak,”

Ha ha. Thanks for making me laugh. So that fact that I can document Paul actually commanding his letters be shared among different churches isn’t evidence that they were? Give me a break. Particularly when we understand the letters would have been carried by his own servants and proteges. It’s in fact excellent evidence that supports my point.

Reginald Fuller, for one, does not believe that Mark was written in Rome. Indeed, the relation of Mark with Rome is based entirely on the spurious pairing of Mark with Peter’s ministry, for which there is really no historical support.

Eduard Schweitzer represents the critical consensensus on the Gospel of Matthew, that it is very much a product of Jewish Christianity. Matthew uses the Midrash form extensively throughout his Gospel, Jewish customs are assumed rather than explained, etc.

Goodspeed’s theory is a rickety piece of nonsense that is both ahistorical and illogical.

Dr. Johnson suggests that the author of revelation adopted the literary device of the use of a collection of letters, expressly based upon the collection of Paul’s letters extant:

“Almost the first book to show acquaintance with them is the Revelation of John, written by the prophet of Ephesus in exile on Patmos. His book is so swayed by the newly published corpus of Paul’s letters to seven churches that he actually begins his book with a corpus of letters to seven churches. If any literary resemblance could be more striking and massive than this, it is difficult to imagine what it would be. Yet students of the Revelation have been so engrossed in its apocalyptic atmosphere that this obvious fact about it, which strikes one in the face on the first page, has actually escaped their attention.

But it is most unnatural for an apocalypse to begin with a letter, still less with a corpus of letters—seven letters, in fact—and these letters addressed to Christian churches. Can this possibly be dismissed as coincidence? Not when we observe the further fact that the Revelation corpus is not a real collection of letters that have been sent to their several readers; the collection is avowedly a literary device, and all the letters go to all the churches. It is no actual collection of letters once sent and later collected that meets us in Revelation, chapters 1-3. The letters are written as a collection and made to form the portal of the Apocalypse, and the whole work is sent to all the churches in the list.

We cannot suppose that this artificial corpus of letters preceded the actual gathering-together of Paul’s letters scattered among seven churches. It is clear that the real collection of letters to seven churches must have preceded the artificial one, which was simply an imitation of it.”

So, that’s Dr. Goodspeed’s argument.

As for your statements that the letters must have been circulated because Paul said so, that’s pretty weak, given that there is no supporting evidence. If Paul were indeed the Billy Graham of his age (and that comparison reminds me of the time when, during the presidential election of 1956, Eisenhower suggested that Norman Vincent Peale was “the American apostle,” Adlai Stevenson suggested that, as a Christian, he “found the Apostle Paul appealing and the Apostle Peale appalling”), he managed to do so without a lot of fanfare. It’s awfully easy to read Paul’s letters, and the mostly fictional account of his actions in Acts and believe that everyone in the ancient world knew who he was. It is unlikely that the corpus of Paul’s letters has come down to us in anything like the form in which it was written, and relying on instructions contained therein in the modern versions having been there in the beginning is doubtful at best, and assuming that instructions were carried out is adding an additional layer of doubt to the process.

One of the things I have learned in a lifetime of law practice is that you can never take anyone’s word for anything, particularly when there are written sources to which to look. A hundred years of Baptist Sunday School classes have convinced everyone that Paul was the Indiana Jones of the ancient world, a title he apparently only received after the publication of Luke-Acts, which probably didn’t occur much before the turn of the second century.

Now, why don’t you tell me who some of these biblical scholars who say different are. I’ve revealed my sources, time for you to do the same.

Colossians 4:16: “After this letter has been read to you, see that it is also read in the church of the Laodiceans and that you in turn read the letter from Laodicea.”

As Paul himself describes, his letters came with readers, also sent from Paul. And these readers travelled from church to church sharing Paul’s letters. I Corinthians 16 and II Corinthians 8 also document, in detail, the network of evangelists and messengers that Paul deployed to keep his churches in communication with one another. They would certainly also have been sharing his letters among the various churches. You are depending on a rather modern understanding of a “letter”, where Paul writes something, drops it in the mail box, and only the recipient reads it. That’s not in fact how Paul’s letters were distributed, as the epistles themselves make abundantly clear. Paul was in fact an itinerant preacher – the Billy Graham of his day. That he would only have spoken of the contents of one letter to one church and not to any other is absurd.

The Gospel of Mark is clearly a product of Palestinian Christianity, as every scholar on the subject has concluded. Ditto for Matthew. Which is, as I’ve said, why they would have had no reason to cite Paul, whose ambit was Asia Minor, Greece and Italy.

And it’s interesting you can’t answer why we should see John or Revelation as “influenced” by Paul. You’re the one making the claim, so you’re the one who should be able to back it up.

As far as their influence on the earlier gospels, I don’t know of any evidence that any of the gospels was written in Palestine. Certainly the great church tradition of Eusebius says that the Gospel of Mark was written in Rome, and we don’t know where Matthew or Luke were written, though I don’t know of any scholarly thought they were written in Palestine, though their addition of a post-resurrection narrative has a Jerusalem flavor to it.

As for Dr. Goodspeed’s point about Revelation, I’ll refer you to the source itself: There is a web site called Early Christian Writings, which you can find by googling the name (every time I try to post a link here, the blog won’t take my post), and there’s a link to online books. One of those books is Goodspeed’s 1937 commentary on the NT, which has a chapter on the first collection of the letters of Paul, which he finds to be stylistically similar to Revelation.

Well, yeah. So? Showing that a behavior has a genetic basis in no way shows it to be good or irresistible. The only thing that changes people’s minds is a true moral argument, not a flight into genetics.

If light of this view, it would never be accepted into the mainstream religious orders because it viewed as a sin. If your predisposed, the urge exists where if you aren’t it doesn’t, you could almost called it premeditated. Mainstream religion won’t accept it as it is.

Of course you do. And that’s true even if your disposition is genetic. So your dichotomy between genetic = no choice and acquired = choice is obviously false.

So the parallel is quite exact.

You will never change conservative perceptions about homosexuality. Because you can’t derive an ought from an is. They judge homosexuality by what it is, not by what causes it. Which, by the way, is exactly how liberals should judge it. And if we can condemn alcoholism, even though it might be genetic, why exactly wouldn’t conservatives still be able to condemn homosexuality, even if that turned to be genetic as well?

I didn’t imply that the cause of homosexuality can’t be genetic. All I said was if it turned out to be genetic, that all by itself wouldn’t mean it couldn’t also be wrong.

I made the secondary point that, IMHO, the cause of homosexuality is irrelevant to how we evaluate its appropriateness. So whether it’s nature or nurture is, I think, beside the point.