Paul’s Letters: The Evidence Mythicism Cannot Accommodate
When we look at figures from the ancient world, our understanding depends on the surviving sources. For example, we know about Julius Caesar not because we can independently verify every detail, but because we have his own writings, accounts from contemporaries, later historians, and archaeological evidence. This is also true for people like Augustus, Cicero, and Herod the Great. In ancient history, we do not use the same standards as a modern courtroom. Instead, historians try to make the best sense of the evidence that remains, even if it is incomplete.
Using this approach, the evidence for the historical existence of Jesus is quite strong when compared with that for many other ancient figures. There are several written accounts from within a few decades of his death, and even some references from non-Christian historians within a century. The rapid growth of a movement centered on a recently executed leader also tells us something important. Most significantly, we have letters from Paul, who personally knew Jesus’s brother and had direct contact with his closest followers.
Paul’s letters are especially important in this discussion. They are the primary evidence challenging the mythicist view, since they come from someone who actually knew people close to Jesus. Even some mythicists, like G. A. Wells, changed their minds over time because of this evidence. Any serious argument for mythicism has to deal directly with what Paul wrote, but so far, none have convinced most historians who study this period.
In this article, I want to look closely at what Paul actually wrote and what it tells us about Jesus. We’ll start by looking at which letters are considered genuine from Paul, and what they say about Jesus. We’ll pay special attention to Galatians 1:19, where Paul refers to ‘James, the Lord’s brother,’ as this is key evidence. We’ll also look at other places where Paul talks about Jesus’s life, teachings, followers, and death. Finally, we’ll consider some of the ways mythicists have tried to explain this evidence, and why those explanations have not been convincing to most scholars.
Paul knew Jesus’s brother and his disciples. He wrote about Jesus as someone who lived recently, had a family, taught specific things, had close companions, and died in a specific way. This does not fit with the idea that Jesus was only a mythical or celestial figure. Instead, it points to Jesus being a real person in history, whose family and followers Paul actually met.
What the Undisputed Pauline Corpus Is
Before we can examine what Paul says about Jesus, we have to be clear about what the Pauline corpus is and which parts of it count as undisputed evidence. The New Testament contains thirteen letters attributed to Paul, but New Testament scholarship has, for well over a century, distinguished among these letters along lines of authorship. The consensus across the field, including among scholars with no theological commitments to defend, is that seven of these letters are genuine compositions of a single first-century author whom we can identify as Paul of Tarsus. These seven are Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon.
The remaining six letters fall into two categories. The so-called “deutero-Pauline” letters, Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians, are disputed, with significant scholarly opinion on both sides of the authorship question. The “Pastoral Epistles,” 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus, are widely regarded as later compositions written in Paul’s name, probably in the late first or early second century. For our purposes, none of this matters. The seven undisputed letters are by themselves more than sufficient to establish the case, and we can confine our attention to them without any real issue.
The dating of these seven letters is unusually good for ancient history. Most were written in the 50s AD, with some possibly as early as the late 40s or as late as the early 60s. This means they were written about twenty to thirty years after Jesus’s death, which is much closer in time than most sources we have for other ancient figures. For example, our main sources on Tiberius or Hannibal were written long after their deaths. Paul’s letters were written while many people who lived during Jesus’s time were still alive.
It’s also important to remember that Paul’s letters were not written as formal histories or theological essays. They were real letters, written to address specific problems and situations in early Christian communities. For example, Paul wrote to the Galatians to respond to rival teachers and to the Corinthians to address disputes and confusion in the church. When he wrote to the Romans, he introduced himself and explained his message. Because these letters were written for practical reasons, the personal details Paul mentions are not the focus of his arguments; they are just part of the background.
This is important for historians. The most valuable details in ancient documents are often the ones mentioned in passing, not the main points of the argument. These casual references are less likely to be invented, since they are not being used to make a case. When Paul says he stayed with Cephas for fifteen days, or that he saw James, the Lord’s brother, or that Jesus gave specific teachings, he is not trying to prove these things. He just assumes his readers already know them.
The Galatians Passage: The Closest Look
We come now to the single most important passage in the entire historicity debate. The text is Galatians 1:18-19, and it deserves to be quoted in full and examined word by word, because the mythicist response to this passage involves so much interpretational contortion that the natural force of the original is easily lost in the controversy. Paul writes:
“Then after three years I did go up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and stayed with him fifteen days, but I did not see any other apostle except James the Lord’s brother.”
This brief notice occurs within a much longer autobiographical defense that Paul mounts in the first two chapters of Galatians. The contentious context is critical. Paul is writing to a community in Galatia that has been infiltrated by rival missionaries, usually identified as so-called “Judaizers,” who claim that Paul is a second-rate apostle, that his gospel is a derivative and watered-down version of the true gospel preached by the original Jerusalem apostles, and that the Galatian Christians need to supplement Paul’s teaching with adherence to the Jewish ceremonial law, including circumcision. Paul’s response, in the autobiographical section, is to argue forcefully that his gospel is not derived from any human source, including the Jerusalem apostles, and that his apostolic authority is independent of and equal to theirs.
To make this case, Paul has to walk a delicate rhetorical line. On the one hand, he needs to deny that his gospel is derivative of what the Jerusalem apostles taught him. On the other hand, he needs to demonstrate that the Jerusalem apostles, when he eventually met with them, recognized and affirmed his gospel, because if they had rejected it, his own claim to apostolic legitimacy would collapse. The chronology of his Jerusalem visits is therefore not a casual aside in the letter. It’s more of the backbone of the argument. Paul is establishing, with precision, when he met the Jerusalem leadership, how often he met them, and what was discussed.
It is within this carefully constructed chronological argument that the reference to James, the Lord’s brother, appears. Paul is listing the people he saw during his first visit to Jerusalem, three years after his conversion. He saw Cephas, that is, Peter, identified by his Aramaic name, for an extended fifteen-day visit. Of the other apostles, he saw none, with one exception: James, whom Paul identified as the Lord’s brother.
Three features of this reference deserve particular attention.
First, the reference is incidental to Paul’s argument. Paul is not trying to establish that Jesus had a brother. He is not engaged in any debate about Jesus’s humanity or his family background. He is simply giving the chronology of his Jerusalem visit, and the identification of James drops into the narrative as background information that requires no defense and that Paul assumes his readers will accept without question. The casual, unargued quality of the reference is what gives it its evidential force. Paul has no rhetorical motive to invent the relationship. The relationship simply is what it is, and Paul mentions it because it is the natural way to identify which James he is talking about, distinguishing him from other Jameses in the early Christian movement, including James the son of Zebedee and James the son of Alphaeus, both of whom are mentioned in the Gospel tradition.
Second, the reference is set within a polemical context in which Paul has every motive to minimize his contacts with the Jerusalem leadership and no motive at all to invent additional ones. The entire rhetorical thrust of Galatians 1 is that Paul’s gospel did not come from the Jerusalem apostles, that his contacts with them were limited and late, and that his apostolic commission is independent of theirs. If Paul were going to fabricate a personal acquaintance, the last thing he would fabricate is a meeting with the brother of Jesus, which would undermine his claim to independence by giving him a direct family link to the founder of the movement. The James reference is the kind of detail that Paul would suppress if he could. Paul includes it because he cannot honestly leave it out.
Third, and most decisively, the natural reading of the Greek phrase ton adelphon tou Kyriou, “the brother of the Lord,” in this context is straightforward and unambiguous. The Greek word adelphos carries a range of meanings, including the metaphorical sense of “fellow member of a community,” which Paul uses elsewhere when addressing his correspondents collectively as “brothers.” But the specific construction here, with the definite article and the genitive of the Lord, is not the language of communal address. It is the language of personal identification. Paul is using the phrase to specify which individual named James he met. The phrase functions exactly the way “John, the brother of James” would function in English: as a way of disambiguating one specific person by reference to a family relationship.
The phrase also stands out because it’s used only twice in Paul’s work. Once in Galatians, and a second time in 1 Corinthians, when he talks about the brothers of the Lord. Both times, it’s clear that Paul is speaking about specific individuals, and not something more generic.
The mythicist response, pioneered by Earl Doherty and developed by Richard Carrier, is to argue that “brother of the Lord” was a technical title within the early Christian movement designating a particular class of devotee, perhaps the most committed members of the community, perhaps a specific office-holding group analogous to apostles or deacons. In this reading, James was not Jesus’ biological brother at all but simply a particularly devoted Christian who happened to hold the honorific title.
This interpretation requires us to believe a number of things that are extremely difficult to defend. It requires us to believe that there existed in the earliest Christian movement a class of officeholders called “brothers of the Lord,” a class for which no other surviving evidence exists, anywhere, in any source. It requires us to believe that Paul’s first-century readers in Galatia were familiar enough with this class to recognize the title without explanation, even though we have no record of the title being used in this technical sense anywhere else in early Christian literature. It requires us to believe that Paul, writing in a polemical context where he is trying to clearly identify who he met in Jerusalem, would have used an ambiguous honorific rather than a biological identifier when the biological identifier was available and was, by everyone’s admission, the natural reading of the Greek. And it requires us to believe that every subsequent reader of the Pauline corpus for two thousand years, including the earliest Christian commentators, who lived within a generation or two of Paul and who shared his linguistic and cultural background, systematically misunderstood the phrase, until modern mythicists finally recovered its true meaning.
The more explanations mythicists add, the more complicated their case becomes. The straightforward reading of the text is still the strongest.
The 1 Corinthians 9:5 Confirmation
The case against the mythicist reading of Galatians 1:19 is strengthened decisively by a second Pauline passage that uses the same phrase in a slightly different construction. In 1 Corinthians 9, Paul is defending his apostolic rights, specifically, his right to be supported financially by the communities he serves and his right to travel with a wife if he chooses to. In the course of this defense, he asks rhetorically:
“Do we not have the right to be accompanied by a believing wife, as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?”
The verse identifies three groups whose practices Paul invokes as precedent for his own rights: the other apostles, the brothers of the Lord, and Cephas. These are presented as three distinct categories, not as overlapping descriptions of the same group.
This distinction is rather fatal to the mythicist reading. If “brothers of the Lord” simply meant “fellow Christians,” the verse would be nonsensical. It would amount to Paul saying that the other apostles, the fellow Christians (a category that obviously includes the apostles themselves), and Cephas (who is both an apostle and a fellow Christian) all travel with their wives. The construction only makes sense if “the brothers of the Lord” refers to a specific, identifiable group within the early movement, distinct from both the broader apostolate and from Cephas individually.
What could such a group be? The most obvious answer, and the one that has commanded essentially universal scholarly assent for two millennia, is that “the brothers of the Lord” refers to the biological brothers of Jesus, a group of individuals identified by the Synoptic Gospels as James, Joses, Judas, and Simon, several of whom were known to have become prominent figures in the early Jerusalem community. The Pauline reference distinguishes this family group from both the broader apostolate (the Twelve and the wider circle of missionary apostles) and from Cephas specifically (who, as the leading disciple, is named separately).
The mythicist reading cannot accommodate this distinction without resorting to further auxiliary hypotheses. If “brothers of the Lord” is a technical title within the movement, then it would have to be a title distinct from “apostle,” but the surviving evidence gives us no indication of any such non-apostolic officeholding category in the earliest Christian movement, and no plausible function for such a category if it existed. If, alternatively, the phrase is a generic honorific, it would not be set in distinction from “apostles” in the way the Corinthian passage requires. The mythicist is forced, in effect, to invent an early Christian institution that left no other trace in the historical record, simply to avoid the natural reading of two Pauline passages.
When we look at these passages, the simplest explanation is that Paul was talking about real people and real relationships. The idea that ‘brothers of the Lord’ refers to Jesus’s actual family fits the evidence best. The mythicist view needs to invent extra ideas unsupported by other sources.
The Independent Confirmation in Josephus
The Pauline evidence for James, the brother of Jesus, does not stand alone. It is independently confirmed by a non-Christian source written four decades later: the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, in Book 20 of his Antiquities of the Jews, which we will examine more fully in a later article of this series.
The Josephan reference appears in a narrative about the high priest Ananus the Younger, who, during an administrative interim in AD 62, convened a Sanhedrin and executed several individuals. Josephus identifies one of the victims as “the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, whose name was James.” The execution prompted protests from prominent Jews in Jerusalem and led to Ananus’s deposition by the incoming Roman procurator Albinus.
The convergence with the Pauline evidence is extraordinary. Paul, writing in the 50s, identifies James as the brother of Jesus and as a leader of the Jerusalem community. Josephus, writing in the 90s and drawing on entirely independent sources, identifies the same James as the brother of the same Jesus and confirms that James was executed in Jerusalem in AD 62. Two completely independent first-century sources, with no apparent connection to each other and no shared motive, identify the same individual by the same family relationship and place him in the same city in the same period.
The mythicist must explain this away in both sources simultaneously. Paul, on the mythicist reading, was using a technical title that meant something other than biological brotherhood. Josephus, on the mythicist reading, either did not write the disputed phrase at all (the claim Carrier has tried to argue through a textual-critical reconstruction with no manuscript support) or used the phrase in some other sense that did not refer to biological brotherhood. The probability of both reinterpretations being correct, against the natural reading of both sources, is vanishingly small. The probability that the natural reading of both sources is correct, and that Paul’s friend James was the biological brother of the historical Jesus whose execution Josephus later recorded, is overwhelming.
This is a good example of why independent sources matter in history. We do not have to take everything Paul or Josephus says at face value. But when two writers from different backgrounds and times both identify James as Jesus’ brother, the evidence becomes much stronger.
As a side note, it is worth noting that although Josephus wrote in the 90s, he was still a contemporary of James and was active in Jerusalem around the same time. He was also connected to the High Priests and the other leaders in the community. This is not to say that Josephus would have known James personally, but it is likely he could have gotten his information about James from people who were there.
The Broader Pattern: Paul’s Earthly Jesus
The Galatians and Corinthians passages on James are the most decisive pieces of Pauline evidence, but they are far from the only ones. Throughout the undisputed Pauline corpus, Paul writes about Jesus in ways that presuppose a recent historical person with a specific biography, specific teachings, and specific companions.
He was born of a woman. In Galatians 4:4, Paul writes, “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law…,” The phrase “born of a woman” is a standard Jewish idiom for ordinary human birth, used throughout the Hebrew Bible and intertestamental literature to emphasize the genuine humanity of the person being described. It is not metaphorical language. It is the language of biological origin. The accompanying phrase “born under the law” specifies that Jesus’ birth occurred within the Jewish covenantal community, that Jesus was a Jew, born to a Jewish mother, and subject to the Mosaic law. This is the language of historical existence within a specific cultural and legal context. It is not the language of a celestial mythological figure.
He was descended from David according to the flesh. Romans 1:3 identifies Jesus as one who “was descended from David according to the flesh.” The phrase kata sarka, “according to the flesh,” is Pauline shorthand for biological or genealogical descent, distinguished from the spiritual or theological status that Paul will go on to ascribe to Jesus in the following verse. The claim of Davidic descent is historically significant because it situates Jesus within a specific genealogical tradition that was central to first-century Jewish messianic expectations. The claim makes no sense if applied to a purely celestial figure with no genealogy in the ordinary sense.
He instituted a meal on the night he was betrayed. In 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, Paul gives an account of the Lord’s Supper that he says he received and is now handing on. The account locates the meal “on the night when he was betrayed,” en tē nykti hē paredideto, using a specific Greek verb that elsewhere in Paul refers to handing over or betraying. The reference is to a specific historical occasion, not to an event in some atemporal mythological realm. Paul is describing a meal that took place on a particular night in the recent past, when a particular act of betrayal occurred.
He was crucified. The crucifixion of Jesus is mentioned repeatedly throughout the Pauline corpus, sometimes in passing and sometimes as the centerpiece of a theological argument. Crucifixion was a specifically Roman form of execution, practiced in first-century Judea by the Roman occupying forces, with no parallel in any pagan mystery cult or celestial mythological narrative. The repeated Pauline emphasis on the crucifixion situates Jesus’s death in a specific historical and political context, the context of Roman judicial execution in a Roman-administered province that has no plausible mythological origin and that points unambiguously to a real human death by a recognized historical procedure.
He gave specific teachings on specific matters. In 1 Corinthians 7:10, Paul addresses a question about divorce and explicitly distinguishes between his own apostolic judgment and the prior teaching of “the Lord”: To the married I give this command—not I but the Lord—that the wife should not separate from her husband.” A few chapters later, in 1 Corinthians 9:14, he invokes another teaching of the Lord: “In the same way, the Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel.”
These references are noteworthy for several reasons. They presuppose a body of teaching attributed to a specific historical figure, distinguished from Paul’s own apostolic authority. They distinguish, with precision, between matters on which the Lord has given a teaching and matters on which Paul must give his own judgment in the absence of such a teaching. And the specific content of the teachings on divorce and on the support of preachers corresponds closely to teachings preserved in the Synoptic Gospel tradition, suggesting that Paul is drawing on a stream of authoritative Jesus tradition already in circulation in the 50s, decades before the canonical Gospels were composed.
Jesus had specific companions whom Paul knew personally. Beyond James and Cephas, Paul mentions the apostle John as one of the “pillars” of the Jerusalem church in Galatians 2:9. He refers to Cephas and Apollos as missionary figures in 1 Corinthians 1:12 and elsewhere. He identifies “the Twelve” as the recipients of a resurrection appearance in 1 Corinthians 15:5. He recounts a personal confrontation with Cephas at Antioch in Galatians 2:11-14, including specific details about Cephas’s behavior toward Gentile Christians and the resulting public dispute.
These are not the writings of a man whose religious movement was constructed around a celestial mythological figure. Instead, they are the writings of a man embedded in a network of real personal relationships with people who had been the founder’s direct companions.
The Mythicist Response and Its Cumulative Failure
The mythicist must, in principle, accommodate all of this evidence within the celestial-Jesus framework. The strategies for doing so vary somewhat among different mythicist writers, but the basic moves are limited.
For the explicit biographical references, born of a woman, descended from David, crucified, betrayed at night, the mythicist must relocate these events from earthly history to some sublunar mythological realm. The “celestial Jesus” in Doherty and Carrier’s reconstruction underwent his birth, crucifixion, and betrayal in a non-earthly mythological space, populated by demonic powers who carried out the execution.
This reading depends heavily on a particular interpretation of the Ascension of Isaiah, a Christian apocalyptic text whose dating and textual history are themselves disputed and whose relevance to mid-first-century Pauline thought is far from established. It has been rejected by virtually every Pauline scholar who has examined it, for a simple reason: there is no textual indication in Paul that any of the events he describes occurred anywhere other than on earth in the recent past.
The mythicist reading requires reading the celestial framework into the text, against the natural sense of Greek, and is supported by an auxiliary hypothesis about a single apocalyptic text that may itself postdate Paul.
For the references to Jesus’s family, “brother(s) of the Lord,” the mythicist must invoke the technical-title interpretation we have already examined, with all the difficulties that interpretation entails.
For the references to Jesus’s teachings, the specific halakhic rulings Paul cites on divorce and the support of preachers, the mythicist must argue that these are revelations Paul received directly from the celestial Christ rather than memories of teachings given by a historical figure.
But Paul elsewhere distinguishes carefully between teachings he has received from the Lord and revelations he has received personally, and the language he uses for the divorce teaching (“not I, but the Lord”) aligns with the former rather than the latter. The mythicist reading requires that Paul’s audience would have understood “the Lord” in these contexts as referring to a celestial revelation rather than to a historical teaching, a distinction Paul himself nowhere makes, and that has no warrant in the text.
For the references to Jesus’s companions, Cephas, James, John, the Twelve, the mythicist must argue that these were the founding figures of the celestial-Jesus cult who were later retroactively transformed into the disciples of a historicized Jesus. This requires positing a wholesale historicization of the entire foundational narrative, including the invention of a specific Galilean geography, a specific political context, a specific cast of named historical secondary figures (Pilate, Herod Antipas, Caiaphas, John the Baptist), and a specific chronological setting, none of which any earlier celestial-Jesus belief is known to have contained. The historicization, on the mythicist account, has to be rapid, total, and entirely successful, leaving no trace in the surviving documentary record of the original celestial belief.
When you add up all the extra explanations needed for the mythicist view, it becomes very unlikely. To make their case, mythicists have to reinterpret almost every passage about Jesus’s life, propose new institutions and beliefs for which we have no other evidence, and assume that everyone after Paul misunderstood what he meant. This makes the mythicist explanation much less convincing than just taking Paul’s words at face value.
The view that Jesus was a real person does not need any complicated explanations. If we read Paul’s letters as they are, we see that Paul was a missionary who met Jesus’s brother and his disciples, stayed with Peter in Jerusalem, and passed on stories about Jesus’s teachings and last meal. He wrote these letters within a generation of Jesus’s death, and their authenticity is not in doubt.
Why This Is Decisive
It is worth pausing, at the end of this examination, to be clear about what the Pauline evidence does and does not establish. The Pauline evidence does not establish that Jesus performed miracles. It does not establish that he was raised from the dead. It does not establish any specific theological claim about his identity or his significance. These are matters of religious conviction on which the Pauline corpus is, of course, deeply invested, but which lie beyond the reach of historical method to confirm or refute.
What the Pauline evidence does establish, with as much certainty as any historical question about a non-elite figure from the ancient world can be established, is that a man named Jesus existed in the early first century AD. He was a Galilean Jew, born to a Jewish mother and descended from the line of David according to a recognized genealogical tradition. He gathered disciples, including a man named Simon, also called Cephas, and a man named John. He had at least one biological brother named James, who later became a leader of the movement. He gave specific teachings on matters such as divorce and the support of his itinerant followers. He instituted a memorial meal of bread and wine on the night before he was betrayed and arrested. He was executed by crucifixion, a Roman form of judicial execution. His followers, including his brother James and his disciple Cephas, continued his movement after his death and were known to Paul personally, who met them in Jerusalem and corresponded with the communities they founded.
This is what Paul’s genuine letters show us, if we read them in a straightforward way. They were written by someone who met Jesus’s family and followers, and they come from within a generation of the events they describe. If we do not accept this as sufficient evidence for Jesus’s existence, we would have to reject the existence of many other ancient figures with even less direct evidence. By the usual standards of ancient history, the case for Jesus’s existence is very strong.
Mythicists can still argue that ‘brother of the Lord’ was just a title, or that the crucifixion and teachings happened in a spiritual realm, or that the disciples were invented later. But these arguments require reinterpreting the main evidence in ways that run counter to the plain meaning of the text and the views of most experts. Instead of following where the evidence leads, the mythicist approach tries to fit the evidence into a pre-set conclusion.
Historians are not supposed to defend any particular conclusion, but to look at the evidence and see what it suggests. When we look at Paul’s letters, the most reasonable explanation is that Paul knew people who had followed a real person named Jesus, who had recently died. The idea that Jesus existed is not just a religious belief: it is what the evidence points to.
This is why Paul’s letters are such a problem for the mythicist view. Other arguments can be adjusted, but the letters themselves are clear, well-dated, and straightforward. The only way for mythicists to respond is to reinterpret the text in ways that require more and more extra explanations.
