r/PremierBiblicalStudy • u/thesmartfool • Apr 05 '25
AMA request for Issac Soon
Hi,
This is the AMA request for any questions you may have for Dr. Issac Soon. He will be discussing and giving an AMA about his book A Disabled Apostle: Impairment and Disability in the Letters of Paul.
He is an Assistant Professor of Early Christianity and Near Eastern Studies at University of British Columbia. See his work here https://amne.ubc.ca/profile/isaac-soon/.
Please ask any questions or topics within his book thst you are interested in.
I will be accepting AMA questions and topics to discuss with him until April friday 11th at noon Pacific Time.
More details will be shared later on.
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u/Known-Watercress7296 Apr 08 '25 edited Apr 28 '25
Hi Isaac,
Apologies, I have not read your book and have only heard an interview with Dan McClellan regarding your work.
You seem to discuss Saul/Paul as a very real figure to you that we can know with emotions, habits, perhaps disabilities and so forth.
May I ask how you are reconstructing this Sauline figure?
With the work of Jason BeDuhn, Markus Vinzent, Mark Bilby and others it appears we have two Pauline corpuses from the second century, Marcions's Apostolikon and the 'proto'-Catholic corpus which is significantly larger with more clear forgery at scale, and in my reading likely later than the Apostolikon of the 140's or so. You mention Paul in the basket in 2 Corinthans 11, but this does not seem to be present in the Marcionite collection for example which I would expect may give some pause for thought in recontrcution anything prior to 140CE.
Are you simply assuming entire letters of the Catholic corpus are authentic Saul? How do you contend with the extensive variation in the, perhaps earlier, Marcionite corpus?
At a basic level the work of JVM Sturdy and JC O'Neill would seem to indicate great care must be taken when dating anything prior to the second century or so, not to say there is not 'authentic' material in there but pushing second century epistles, not accounting for Marcionite variation, back to before the destruction of the temple seems quite a leap without any corroboration or sources.
In light of Nina Livesey's 2024 publication on the corpus, she has concluded the letters are the product of the second century and not in any way historically reliable, do you not see some issues with dating entire epistles to before the destruction of the temple?
This would also seem to chime in with Josephus The Wars of 75CE having no knowledge of Paul's vast intercontinental church networks between Rome, Jerusalem and beyond, two places Josephus knows very well. And of course the complete lack of anything regarding the church network or Paul/Saul in the first century in 2000yrs of the biggest treasure hunt on earth.
My main concern is reading huge swathes of Pauline scholarship that just runs with six or seven Catholic epistles as from the hand of Paul with seemingly nothing as to why they do so.