On October 6th I asked whether we can learn anything from early writings — the Bible’s neighbors, the books that circulated alongside it in the first generations. My main exhibit was Clement of Rome: a letter the Roman church sent to Corinth near the end of the first century, plus a sermon that traveled under his name. I gave the short version then. This is the longer one — what Clement actually says, and what an atheist can honestly learn from him.

First, a correction to that earlier post, because it needs one. I wrote there that Mark was written in 70 CE, four years after the crucifixion. The date was right and the arithmetic was a typo: Mark, around AD 70, comes roughly forty years after the crucifixion, not four. The timeline for everything below runs: crucifixion about AD 30–33; Paul’s letters in the 50s; Mark about 70; Clement’s letter about 95–97. Keep those gaps in mind, because one of them is the whole story.

I keep running into it. Not every day, but a few times a year, regular as weather: on a podcast, in a video, in some panel discussion — somebody raises the question of whether the Apostle Paul even existed. Not whether he wrote all the letters with his name on them. Whether there was a Paul at all.

Hear anything that often, from people presented as scholars, and you start to assume there’s something to it. A live question. A growing school of thought. Scholars investigating, the way scholars do. So I went looking for them — all of them, by name — expecting to find a movement. I found six. Since 1950.