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By What Authority?: Volume 2 - How Paul's Letters Were Edited
Hardcover
Series: By What Authority?, Book 2
ISBN13: 9781764672917
Publisher: Chrestos
Published: May 21 2026
Pages: 420
Weight: 2.04
Height: 1.31 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, with the complete dataset and scoring methodology open for inspection. There is no paywall. There is no institution behind it. If the argument is wrong, the tools to demonstrate that are already in your hands.
Volume 2 - How Paul's Letters Were Edited is the full case. Forty-nine chapters. Every claim made in Volume 1 is evidenced here.
It opens by establishing why Paul's letters matter: written twenty years before the earliest gospel, they are the oldest Christian documents we have. What they say - before editorial alteration - is not what the received tradition presents. The volume establishes what the letters looked like in Marcion's recension around 140 CE and what that comparison reveals about the second-century state of the text.
The core of the volume is a letter-by-letter analysis. Romans receives the most sustained treatment: the wrath passage (1:18-3:20), the Abraham blocks (3:31-4:25), the governing authorities passage (13:1-7), and the Israel chapters (9-11) are each assessed against all five independent signals. 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon follow. Philemon is the null-hypothesis control: the method produces zero interpolation flags on the universally authentic letter.
The volume includes the full patristic timeline - who cited which passages, when, and in what polemical context - and a chapter-length treatment of the Greek text and what it carries that English translation flattens. It covers the gospels as secondary evidence, the Nag Hammadi library, the Didache, the Sermon on the Mount, and the Q source. It closes with sixteen honest responses to the strongest objections the argument faces.
Appendix A is a complete verse-by-verse interpolation assessment for all seven authentic letters. Appendix B covers methodology and hostile-witness theory. Appendix C is the full passages-assessed reference. This volume is both the argument and its apparatus.
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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