The Authenticity of Paul

 Recently, I've seen several folks online arguing that Paul didn't even exist and that his letters were a fourth century fraud. For some reason, this absurdity keeps making the rounds and there are far too many people who buy into it. The latest person I encountered suggested that they could have been written as late as the seventh century because Koine Greek extended between the second century BCE to the seventh century BCE. The constant error behind this is that those who make this claim don't understand the language in which they were written, or how language changes over time. Five hundred years give or take is generally when two stages of a language become mutually unintelligible, though it becomes a lot tougher around four hundred. I thought I'd post my response to this here:
     "Seventh century CE is pushing it. A lot. Seventh century Greek would be unintelligible to a first century speaker and would at the least be very, very different. The Greek of the New Testament is definitely what was spoken between the first and second centuries. You can tell this by comparing it with other first century and early second century writings in the Koine such as Epictetus and the Early Church Patristics like the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, and others. You have to take language change into account, even within the same language. To say that the New Testament could have been written in the fourth century, much less the seventh, doesn't take into account the change in the language over time, as well as regional accents and dialects. It's like saying Chaucer could have been written in the 1900s because English has technically been spoken since the 900s or even earlier. I would draw your attention to the Book of Mormon as an illustration of an obvious linguistic forgery. It attempts greatly to mimic the language of the King James Version, but any honest comparison of the two would conclude that the author of the former doesn't actually know how to wield the Elizabethan form of the language and it comes off as completely erroneous. The only way anyone can conclude that the New Testament was not written in the first century is if they had never actually read it in the original Greek and had never compared any other Greek texts from various periods and regions either. I have. I assure you, they are very different. I've been doing it for thirty years. The writings of Paul are first century and all written or dictated by the same person."
     To add to this, I would put forth as an example the original Greek form of the Philokalia. This is the second most important book of the Eastern Orthodox Church and is a series of mystical and theological essays and spiritual reflections written in Greek over a period between the fifth century CE and the fifteenth century CE by multiple religious and monastics across the Orthodox spectrum. The Greek in which it was written is diverse from beginning to end as it moves from late Koine into Byzantine and the proto form of what is now Modern Greek.
     My point to all of this is that you can tell what period a text was written in simply by comparing the form of the language to other texts in the same way they you can tell what period an English text was written in whether it was Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, Elizabethan, eighteenth century, or present day twenty-first century English. You can also tell from what region the speaker or writer came from by the idioms, spellings, and choices of vocabulary. It's not hard to distinguish J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter from Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. It's also not hard to distinguish Jane Eyre from the original text of Beowulf. Even C.S. Lewis's writing style can be distinguished from J.R.R. Tolkien's, and they were contemporaries, friends, and colleagues in roughly the same socio-linguistic landscape!
     Paul's writing is distinct from all the other New Testament authors, but it is clearly written by a single author who lived in the first century, was clearly educated in the Greek classics and Roman Stoic worldview as well as of a distinctly first century Jewish education and identity. Everything from the internal evidence of his letters pinpoints the mid-first century and largely the eastern Mediterranean. Could they have been faked at a much later date? Honestly, I can't see how. These letters were known by the Patristic Fathers and mentioned by them as far back as the late first century, as was Paul. No one in the first three centuries of Christianity ever actually questioned their authenticity. There were a number of writings which were questioned, even within the canon N.T., but Paul's never actually were, and they were among the earliest to be translated to Aramaic in the second century if memory serves at all.
     Finally, Paul's letters are personal from beginning to end, and they're personal in a way that strikes of authenticity. One would have to be a very talented novelist to be able to express this much authentic emotion through the words of the original first century Greek. They would have had to not only fake Paul's letters, but most of the book of Acts in which Paul's story was told, and as such, the Gospel of Luke as well which is written in the exact same style, dialect, and accent as Acts. They would also have had to really had down Paul's movements and the first century historical figures mentioned in them to such an extent as to be able to authentically write and keep track of where he was writing from and the events surrounding the period in which he was writing. This would have been a massive scholarly undertaking considering it would have had to be written in at least two different styles and dialects of the language which no longer existed by the fourth century, much less the fifth. Honestly, it takes less faith to believe these writings are exactly what they purport to be as the preponderance of internal evidence is just rabidly against their being a fraud.
     Whether one agrees with St. Paul or not, whether they understand what he was really writing and saying, there is really just no other conclusion that can be drawn except they they were written when they say they were, by whom they say they were, and to whom they say they were. Any suggestion otherwise just betrays an utter ignorance of the language, the time period, and every other factor involved all for the sake of ignoring what the reader perceives to be what Paul meant.