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By What Authority?: Volume 3 - The Chain from Scripture to Sovereignty
Hardcover
Series: By What Authority?, Book 3
ISBN13: 9781764672924
Publisher: Chrestos
Published: May 21 2026
Pages: 212
Weight: 1.22
Height: 0.69 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 3 - The Chain from Scripture to Sovereignty traces the downstream consequence of the textual argument: what the institution did with the edited Paul, and where that chain leads.
Parts One through Three stand on primary documents that can be checked without any prior theological commitment. They trace the chain from the papal bulls of the fifteenth century - Dum Diversas (1452), Romanus Pontifex (1455), Inter Caetera (1493) - through the legal doctrine of discovery, James Cook's instructions and the legal fiction that treated inhabited land as terra nullius, and the foundational common law case Johnson v. M'Intosh (1823), in which the United States Supreme Court incorporated the Doctrine of Discovery into domestic property law. The Vatican's 2023 partial repudiation of those bulls is examined and found to leave the legal structure intact.
Parts Four and Five draw on the textual case in Volumes 1 and 2. They ask what the authentic Paul - the Paul of Galatians and Philippians, without the governing-authorities passage, without the household codes, without the Abraham apparatus - actually authorises. The answer is that he does not authorise the chain. The passage that grounds it (Romans 13:1-7) is one of the clearest interpolation candidates in the corpus. The institution built European territorial sovereignty on a text it inserted.
The volume closes with the question the system cannot answer: if the authority rests on the papal grant, and the papal grant rests on scripture, and the scripture has been altered, what remains? Volume 3 does not resolve that question. It makes it impossible to avoid.
This volume can be read independently. Readers coming from the legal, constitutional, or indigenous sovereignty angle can begin here. Readers who want the textual case first should begin with Volume 1.
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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