By What Authority?

The Library Edition is a hardcover edition. Each volume is separated into its own hardcover book.

By What Authority? is a five-volume scholarly argument that Paul's letters in the canonical New Testament were selectively edited in the second century. Every identified edit moves Paul in the same direction: toward law-continuity, covenant affirmation, institutional hierarchy, and submission to authority. The edits are not random. They are directional.

The argument rests on five independent lines of evidence: structural ruptures in Paul's Greek text, writing-style anomalies identified by mainstream scholars working without any Marcionite agenda, Marcion's second-century canon as hostile-witness confirmation, manuscript instability at precisely the contested passages, and the institutional motive that makes each addition load-bearing. Each line can be checked independently.

Companion B - The Reconstructed Pauline Letters presents the seven authentic Pauline letters as they read once the passages identified as secondary are set aside. It is a reading text, not a scholarly edition. There are no footnotes interrupting the flow. The evidence behind every excision is in Companion A; this companion lets you read the result.

The letters are presented in Apostolikon order - the order Marcion's canon used, which predates the canonical ordering: Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Laodiceans (Ephesians), Philippians, Colossians, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians, and Philemon. Removed passages are marked inline so readers can see exactly what has been taken out.

What emerges when the reconstruction is read continuously is not a deficient Paul but a more internally coherent one. The governing-authorities passage is gone. The household codes are gone. The Abraham apparatus in Romans is gone. The Israel chapters in Romans 9-11 are gone. What remains is the Paul of grace without condition: a God not previously known, grace as a different governing logic, faith as reception rather than performance, and an ethic that dissolves the social hierarchies the Creator's world depends on.

The companion closes with a synthesis - "The Teaching of Paul" - that reads the reconstructed corpus as a coherent system of thought. It does not interpret. It reads. The system that emerges is coherent, radical, and markedly different from the orthodoxy the received text was edited to support.

Series: By What Authority? - Companion B. Released under CC BY-SA 4.0. No institution. No publisher. Freely shared.