I recently did a video response on Mike Licona where he tries to argue that Paul actually matters in the Bible. I agree with him, Paul does matter, just as every other writer in the Bible, but not for the same reasons he thinks. You need to establish a real, historical Paul so that you can objectively and independently verify that the events recorded in the Bible actually happened.

And unfortunately for the religious, you simply can’t do any of that.A lot of theists like to believe that Paul can tell us things about the risen Christ, yet none of that is at all true. All we have in any of the books claimed to have been written by Paul are assertions, not demonstrable facts. Faith doesn’t make reality. Get over it. Therefore, as no one can prove that Paul actually saw Jesus during his drug trip on the road to Damascus, that has to be discarded as irrational at best. We need something far better before a skeptic is going to take that claim seriously.

In fact, we can’t even prove Paul ever existed. Certainly, someone wrote these books but we know that all of the ones claimed for Pauline authorship were not written by the same person. The ones we’re reasonably sure came from the same person include 1st Thessalonians, Galatians, 1st & 2nd Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon and Romans. That leaves the following letters as likely or almost certainly inauthentic: Ephesians, Colossians, 2nd Thessalonians, 1st & 2nd Timothy, Titus and Hebrews. So let’s just throw away that second group as being written by no one authoritative.

But even though we can show that 7 books had the same author, that doesn’t mean it was someone real named Paul, or Saul if you want to go pre-conversion. Well, if we can’t establish the credibility of the author of these books, how can we hope to assign any degree of reliability to the accounts? Just because it’s written down and the religious like it, that doesn’t make any of it true. As I said earlier, faith doesn’t mean a thing in establishing fact. You need evidence for that and the religious are seriously lacking in that regard.

What seems likely to me is that early Christians simply invented the character of Paul out of whole cloth. They chose the most unlikely candidate to convert to their religion and then told a story from his perspective. It’s also entirely possible, based on the contents of the Pauline stories, that this was an early variation on Christianity or an entirely separate religion which heard stories of Jesus from the Christians and tried to get in on the action. The God of Paul is not the same God of Jesus. And that assumes there ever was a Jesus at all, which is an entirely different subject entirely. The more we go around this, the less credible the story seems to be.

We have no evidence of any kind that there was a rogue Christian-hunter who turned to the “dark side”. We have only stories told in an age where lots of stories were told, but there remains no independent evidence that justifies any of it. The religious like the idea because it appeals to them on an emotional level, but that doesn’t mean any of it is true. Faith is pointless. In fact, given the fact that there are so many different manuscripts that were attributed to Paul in the early days, manuscripts that turned out to be stylistically and contextually different and therefore clearly written by many different authors, that lends credence to the possibility that this was a bunch of early Christians trying to use the character of Paul as a conversion tactic.

This is where we have so many problems with the religious assuming the validity of the Bible without being able to prove it. Now that we know that a large part of the books weren’t written by Paul, I don’t see any calls to have them excised from the Bible, do you? Of course not because they aren’t concerned with the validity of the tales. It makes them feel good, so what difference does its accuracy make? None at all. None whatsoever.

It’s why they don’t want to talk to us. We point out all of the problems that they are unwilling to face. Does it matter if these books were written by a real, demonstrably existing Paul? Yes it does, just like it matters if the Gospels are written by actual, demonstrable eyewitnesses. Otherwise, it’s just stories in a book of mythology and no one in their right mind should take it seriously.

It’s why the skeptics don’t.