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.

Let me back up and lay the floor first, because this whole subject sits on a distinction that gets trampled in the retelling. Thirteen letters in the New Testament carry Paul’s name. Critical scholars — the mainstream, not the fringe — sort them into three piles. Seven are accepted as genuinely his: Romans, First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, First Thessalonians, and Philemon. Three are honestly argued over: Ephesians, Colossians, Second Thessalonians. And three — First and Second Timothy and Titus, the so-called Pastorals — are judged by a strong critical consensus to be forgeries, written in Paul’s name by later hands after he was dead.

So “Paul didn’t write everything with his name on it” is not a scandal. It’s the textbook answer. But notice: it’s a claim about the letters. “There was no Paul” is a claim about the man. The scholars who doubt the man insist on keeping those two claims separate, and so will I, because nearly everything misleading about this topic comes from blurring them.

Now, the ones who went all the way. The idea isn’t new. In the 1800s a German named Bruno Bauer argued that every one of the letters was a second-century production, and a school of Dutch scholars picked it up and ran with it — most remarkably Willem van Manen, who wrote his doctorate defending First Thessalonians and then turned around and repudiated all thirteen. The Dutch school was serious, credentialed, and completely dead by 1957, when its last man died. For decades afterward, essentially nobody in the profession held the position.

The modern revival runs through a handful of names. Hermann Detering, a Berlin pastor with a doctorate on the letters, argued in The Fabricated Paul that the epistles were born with Marcion — the second-century heretic who first collected them — and that “Paul” himself is a legend built on an older figure, Simon Magus, the sorcerer from the Book of Acts. Robert M. Price, who has two doctorates and has spent his career outside the academy’s mainstream, dissolves the letters into fragments by other men — some by Simon, some by Marcion, some by Gnostic writers, the whole pile stitched together later — leaving “Paul” as a character narrating other people’s work. Darrell Doughty, Price’s own teacher at Drew, held the letters were layered composites no one can unpick back to a writing apostle.

And then there’s the newest and most respectable version. Nina Livesey, professor emerita of religious studies at the University of Oklahoma and a Pauline specialist, published a book with Cambridge University Press in 2024 arguing that the famous seven “authentic” letters are literary fictions — composed around AD 144 in Marcion’s school in Rome, the way ancient writers composed fake letter-collections from famous men — and that Paul began as a made-up character in the Book of Acts. She calls it Dutch Radical Thought 3.0. Add Thomas Brodie, a Dominican scholar who treats the letters as unified literary creations rather than records, and that’s the census: six credentialed scholars in seventy-five years — five, if you don’t count the Dutch school’s last survivor, who died in 1957.

Six. The Society of Biblical Literature has more than 8,300 members.

Now the other side, because they deserve to be stated at full strength too. Start with the earliest evidence. Around AD 96 — within living memory of Paul’s death — a letter from the church in Rome to the church in Corinth, known as First Clement, tells the Corinthians: “Take up the epistle of the blessed Apostle Paul.” That’s Rome instructing Corinth to go re-read a letter Paul had written them, about a church fight that the letter itself describes. Detering and Livesey both have to declare that passage fake or the letter redated to get past it, and a theory that keeps needing extra patches is telling you something.

Then there’s the character of the letters themselves. Galatians is a man losing his temper in writing — admitting he used to persecute the movement, telling the world he confronted Peter to his face and called him a hypocrite, quarreling about money and authority. Schools manufacturing a founder do not usually manufacture his blowups, his failures, and his half-lost arguments. And the forgeries cut the wrong way for the doubters: men forged letters in Paul’s name in the second century because Paul was a real, dead, revered authority whose name was worth stealing. You don’t counterfeit a currency your own generation invented.

The newest doubt got a named answer almost immediately. Paula Fredriksen of Boston University reviewed Livesey’s book for the Society of Biblical Literature in 2025 and took it apart on the record. Her neatest point concerns the mechanics of Livesey’s theory, which needs the Jerusalem temple to have been destroyed in the Bar Kokhba war of AD 135. The temple fell in AD 70. She also answers the argument that the letters look literary, like fiction: so do Seneca’s letters, and Seneca was real. “So literary is not necessarily fictive,” she writes. “True for Seneca; true too, I submit, for Paul.” And there’s the silence argument — no first-century outside source mentions Paul. As Fredriksen asks: who would have? He was an obscure preacher in a tiny messianic sect. The surprise would be finding him in the records, not missing him.

But the witness I can’t get over is Richard Carrier. Carrier is the academy’s leading Jesus-mythicist — his whole career is arguing Jesus never existed — and he examined Detering’s case, called it the best formal attempt anyone has made, and ruled: “His case is not sound.” His verdict on Paul deserves quoting whole: “the historicity of Paul is actually, unlike Jesus, highly probable.” He’s not alone among mythicists, either. G. A. Wells and Earl Doherty, who built their names doubting Jesus, both treat Paul’s letters as genuine first-century documents, because their theories need them to be. When the professional doubters refuse to doubt, the layman should notice.

Which raises the question I started with: if the roster is six names long, why did I keep hearing about it? I think I’ve got the answer now, and it’s not flattering to any of us who consume this stuff online. The doubt has six scholars, but it has a distribution network. Podcast and video channels — Myth Vision, which I watch myself, hosted by Derek Lambert — have interviewed both Livesey and Price on exactly this, more than once. The spiciest version of any claim is the one that gets booked. Then the telephone game does the rest: “scholars doubt Paul’s letters,” which is true and mainstream, gets heard and repeated as “scholars doubt Paul,” which is neither. Add in voices with no credentials at all — Joseph Atwill’s theory that Rome invented the whole story has reached millions on video, though scholars and mythicists alike reject it — and a handful of names starts to sound like a movement, simply because you keep bumping into the same six people wearing different interview chairs.

So here’s where I land, and it’s the opposite of where I started. Paul existed. On the evidence, that’s about as settled as anything from the ancient world gets. What’s genuinely unsettled — and genuinely interesting — is everything downstream: which letters are really his, and what he did with the message he inherited. I wrote about that second fight a few days ago, in Did Paul Teach a Different Gospel Than Jesus?, and that one is a real argument among real numbers of scholars. This one, mostly, is an echo — of six scholars, amplified. A skeptic’s job isn’t collecting doubts. It’s weighing them. And this one doesn’t weigh much.