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By What Authority?: Volume 1 - The Argument In Brief
Hardcover
Series: By What Authority?, Book 1
ISBN13: 9781764672900
Publisher: Chrestos
Published: May 21 2026
Pages: 68
Weight: 0.65
Height: 0.31 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The Library Edition is a hardcover edition. Each volume is separated into its own hardcover book.
By What Authority? is a five-volume scholarly argument that Paul's letters in the canonical New Testament were selectively edited in the second century. Every identified edit moves Paul in the same direction: toward law-continuity, covenant affirmation, institutional hierarchy, and submission to authority. The edits are not random. They are directional. And the direction is the signature of who made them and why.
The argument rests on five independent lines of evidence: structural ruptures in Paul's Greek text, writing-style anomalies identified by mainstream scholars working without any Marcionite agenda, Marcion's second-century canon as hostile-witness confirmation, manuscript instability at precisely the contested passages, and the institutional motive that makes each addition load-bearing. These lines converge on the same passages. None was assembled to reach a predetermined conclusion. Each can be checked independently.
The series is offered in full, for free (in PDF), with the complete dataset and scoring methodology open for inspection. There is no paywall. There is no institution behind it. The licence allows unrestricted redistribution. If the argument is wrong, the tools to demonstrate that are already in your hands.
Volume 1 - The Argument in Brief is the entry point. It presents the complete case in a single sitting - approximately ninety minutes of reading.
It begins with the tension that most readers of the Bible have felt but rarely named: the God who commands the destruction of cities and operates through conditional covenant is not the same figure as the one whose Father sends rain on the just and unjust alike and whose reach comes before anything has been done to earn it. That tension is not a mood variation. It is structural. Volume 1 names it, traces its origin, and follows the tracing.
The volume covers: who Marcion of Sinope was and why the institutional church expelled him; how Paul's letters were assembled into a canon before the gospels existed; what the hostile-witness method is and why adversarial evidence carries more weight than friendly testimony; the five core signals that identify secondary material; and the specific passages - Romans 13:1-7, 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, the Abraham blocks, the household codes - that drive the argument.
It closes by following the textual argument to its institutional consequence: the edited text became the foundation for the Doctrine of Discovery, the legal architecture of colonial sovereignty, and the oath system that extends it. That chain is developed fully in Volume 3. Volume 1 establishes why the textual question matters beyond textual criticism.
The complete verse-level evidence and scoring methodology are in Companion A. The reconstructed letters - read as they stand once the secondary material is set aside - are in Companion B. Volume 2 gives the full forty-nine-chapter case. Volume 1 is where you start.
Released under CC BY-SA 4.0. No institution. No publisher. Freely shared. Full series: archive.org/details/by-what-authority-full-series Dataset and workbench: archive.org/details/by-what-authority-pauline-analysis-zip
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