Let the Reader Understand

Midway through the thirteenth chapter of Mark, in a speech about the ruin of the Temple, the evangelist steps out from behind his own story. Jesus is speaking privately to four disciples on the Mount of Olives. He warns them of a day “when you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be,” and at that point a parenthesis breaks in which none of the four could have heard, because it is addressed to someone holding a scroll decades later: “(let the reader understand)” (Mark 13:14). The aside runs to three Greek words, ho anaginōskōn noeitō, and it concedes something the Gospel seldom concedes about itself, which is that certain things in it were written to be grasped by those equipped to grasp them and passed over by everyone else.

What the reader was meant to understand can be recovered in outline. The phrase echoes Daniel’s “abomination that makes desolate” (Dan 11:31; 12:11), and Matthew, copying Mark, names the prophet outright while keeping the aside (Matt 24:15). Luke does something else. In his version the coded phrase disappears and an event takes its place, “when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies” (Luke 21:20), which is what a writer does once the thing has happened and the code no longer protects anyone. That reading of Luke is my inference, and I hold it with some confidence because the substitution is so exact.

Mark had company. The seer of Revelation calls Rome by the name of Babylon, seats his harlot on seven mountains so that no Roman could miss the city meant (Rev 17:9), and stops before the number of the beast to say, “This calls for wisdom: let him who has understanding reckon the number of the beast” (Rev 13:18). The first letter of Peter closes with greetings from “She who is at Babylon” (1 Pet 5:13). These authors lived under an empire that crucified provincials for the crime of royal ambition, and they learned to speak of that empire in a vocabulary it could not easily bring to trial.

In 1952 Leo Strauss published a slim and much disputed book, Persecution and the Art of Writing, proposing that writers under censorship developed a way of placing their real teaching between the lines, legible to the attentive reader and invisible to the censor. His cases were medieval and early modern, Maimonides and Judah Halevi and then Spinoza. I bring him in with some reluctance, since his method has licensed a great deal of ingenious nonsense (readers who discover a secret doctrine wherever the surface of a text disappoints them), and that objection falls on any argument of the kind this essay makes. The discipline that answers it is modest. A hidden meaning has to be tied to a visible irregularity in the text, an aside or a scribal alteration or a name that should be present and is missing, and the irregularity has to be something a reader who has never heard my thesis would also notice.

Across the volumes of Unmerging Origins I have argued that several of the founding figures of the New Testament are composites, each assembled from more than one historical man, and that the joins show at the places where a Herodian presence would have been dangerous to name. What follows moves through those places in the order the evidence permits. I mark three kinds of claim as I go: what a source says, what can reasonably be inferred from it, and what the series reconstructs by setting inference upon inference. The third kind carries the greatest risk, and a reader deserves to know when the ground changes underfoot.

Three Words in a Greeting List

The sixteenth chapter of Romans is the kind of text a reader skips. Paul commends Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchreae, and then sends greetings to more than two dozen people by name, the greater part of them otherwise unknown to history. Two lines in the middle of that roll call deserve a slower pace. Paul writes, “Greet those who belong to the family of Aristobulus,” and then, with nothing between them, “Greet my kinsman Herodion” (Rom 16:10-11). The Greek fixes Herodion with three words, ton syngenē mou, and those three words have yet to receive an explanation that accounts for everything around them.

The name comes first. Herodion derives from Herod, and it was also the name of the fortress palace Herod built south of Bethlehem, the Herodeion of Josephus. As a personal name it points toward the dynasty, whether its bearer was a member of the family, a freedman of the household, or a child named in its honor, and the name alone cannot decide among those options. The neighboring greeting narrows the field somewhat. J. B. Lightfoot, in his 1868 essay “Caesar’s Household” appended to his commentary on Philippians, proposed that the Aristobulus of Romans 16:10 was the grandson of Herod the Great and brother of Agrippa I, a man who lived in Rome as a private person, and that his slaves and freedmen might have passed into imperial ownership while keeping his name as a label. The adjacency of the two greetings belongs to the source. Lightfoot’s identification is an inference, and a respectable one, made by a Victorian bishop with no stake in the question this essay asks.

A brief digression is in order on where such things surface. Medieval manuscripts carry colophons, the few lines at the end where a scribe records his name, the date, and sometimes a complaint about the cold or the ache in his hand, and palaeographers prize them because they are the one place where the copyist stops performing the text and speaks as himself. Greeting lists in ancient letters behave somewhat like colophons. They were the least theologically worked portion of a letter, the part a later editor had the least reason to touch, and so they preserve connections the body of the letter never discusses.

Then the word. Paul uses syngenēs elsewhere for Israelites at large, “my brethren, my kinsmen by race” (Rom 9:3), and the conventional reading of chapter 16 treats the six people so labeled (Andronicus and Junia in 16:7, Herodion in 16:11, Lucius, Jason and Sosipater in 16:21) as fellow Jews. The difficulty is Prisca and Aquila. Paul greets them first and warmly (16:3-4), Acts identifies Aquila as a Jew from Pontus (Acts 18:2), and yet Paul withholds the word from them. If syngenēs meant only “fellow Jew,” its selective use in a list that contains other Jews asks for an explanation, and the narrower sense of blood relation begins to look like the simpler reading. I name the weakness in this at once: the argument depends on Acts for Aquila’s origin, and Acts is a partisan witness. A second uncertainty compounds the first. T. W. Manson argued in 1948 that Romans 16 was originally a separate note sent to Ephesus, and if he was right, Herodion lived in Ephesus and the Roman household of Aristobulus drops out of the picture.

Robert Eisenman gathered this greeting together with several other texts in his 1996 article “Paul as Herodian”: the Antioch list of Acts 13:1, the nephew of Paul in Jerusalem who could walk into the Roman commander’s quarters with a warning (Acts 23:16-22), and a certain Saulus in Josephus, described as a kinsman of Agrippa, who led violence in Jerusalem in the 60s and later carried messages to Nero (Ant. 20.214; War 2.556-558). Critics answer that the Josephan Saulus is a different man in a different decade. On the identity of persons the critics have the better case, though the parallel still establishes that a Saul of the royal house was a living type in first-century Judea and not a modern fancy.

The Composite Paul, the second volume of the series, follows the kinship through a line Josephus half records. Alexander, son of Herod by Mariamne, married Glaphyra of Cappadocia. Josephus reports that the descendants of that marriage gave up Jewish customs for Greek ones, and that one of them, another Alexander, received from Vespasian rule over a territory in Cilicia (Ant. 18.139-141). The volume reconstructs an unnamed daughter of Alexander and Glaphyra as the channel through which a Herodian line reached Cilicia within a generation of Paul, which would make Paul and Herodion third cousins, or third cousins once removed, through Herod the Great. That is reconstruction and I label it so. It is also falsifiable, since an inscription or papyrus naming the daughters of Alexander and their marriages would confirm or break it. One further oddity belongs here, because it concerns what the letters themselves leave unsaid: Paul never names Tarsus anywhere in his own correspondence, and the city appears only in Acts (9:11; 21:39; 22:3).

The Name the Scribes Removed

Some silences in the New Testament belong to its authors and others to its copyists. The best documented case of the second kind comes in Matthew’s trial scene. In a group of witnesses that includes Codex Koridethi, the manuscripts of family 1, and the Sinaitic Syriac, Pilate offers the crowd two men with the same name: “Whom do you want me to release for you, Jesus Barabbas or Jesus who is called the Messiah?” (Matt 27:17, NRSV). The received text lacks the first “Jesus,” and Origen tells us why somebody wanted it gone. Commenting on the passage in the third century, he observes that many copies do not say Barabbas was also called Jesus, and he approves of the omission on the ground that the name of Jesus ought not to belong to any evildoer (Commentary on Matthew, Series 121). Bruce Metzger reports that the committee behind the United Bible Societies text judged the longer reading likely original and its disappearance a scribal act of reverence, while printing the name in square brackets to signal the committee’s own hesitation.

That much is source and textual history. The inference follows closely behind it. Origen’s remark shows third-century readers experiencing the name as an embarrassment, and the manuscripts show scribes acting on that embarrassment in one direction only, toward fewer men called Jesus in the story. Mark, the older Gospel, gives Barabbas no first name but supplies something almost as telling, since he places him “among the rebels in prison, who had committed murder in the insurrection” (Mark 15:7), with a definite article that presumes the reader already knows which insurrection is meant, although Mark never describes it. The patronymic adds its own strangeness. Bar-abba is Aramaic for “son of the father,” so that Pilate’s choice, in Matthew’s fuller form, sets a Jesus son of the father beside a Jesus who called God his father, and the scene begins to resemble the two goats of the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16, one released and one given to death, a correspondence I explored in an earlier essay on this site and still find harder to dismiss than to explain.

The reconstruction of The Gospel as Mirror, the first volume, goes a long way past this. It identifies Jesus Barabbas with Herod, son of Herod the Great by Cleopatra of Jerusalem, whom Josephus lists beside his full brother Philip the tetrarch (Ant. 17.21; War 1.562), and with Judas Iscariot, and it argues that the man crucified under Pilate was this Herodian claimant. The mechanism turns on a Hebrew word. When Acts applies Psalm 109:8 to Judas, “His office let another take” (Acts 1:20), the Hebrew noun behind “office” is pequddah, a charge or commission held in trust. The series reads the verse against its grain and proposes that the office changed hands at Gethsemane, so that the man who went to the cross carried the title “Jesus of Nazareth” that had belonged to the Galilean teacher. Of all the claims in the five volumes, this one rests on the tallest stack of inference, and I say so without apology, because its value lies in what it would explain, including why the scribes’ instinct ran the way it did.

Mark leaves one more trace at Gethsemane, and it is the oddest two verses in his Gospel. After the arrest, “a young man followed him, with nothing but a linen cloth about his body; and they seized him, but he left the linen cloth and ran away naked” (Mark 14:51-52). Frank Kermode made this youth an emblem of the Gospel’s resistance to interpretation in The Genesis of Secrecy (1979), and commentators have proposed Mark himself, a baptismal candidate, or a symbol of the disciples’ flight. The source offers two verbal returns that anyone can check. The word for the cloth, sindōn, comes back when Joseph of Arimathea wraps the body in a linen shroud (15:46), and the word for the young man, neaniskos, comes back at the empty tomb, where “a young man” in a white robe is seated on the right side (16:5). The series reads the youth at Gethsemane and the youth at the tomb as the Galilean Teacher, the abandoned linen marking the office he surrendered. I should record that I changed my position on this figure twice before settling there, having first identified him as Herodion, and a reconstruction that has moved under its author’s hand ought to say so in public.

A Foster Brother at Antioch

At Antioch, according to Acts, the church had prophets and teachers, and Luke names five of them: Barnabas, Symeon called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, “Manaen a member of the court of Herod the tetrarch,” and Saul (Acts 13:1). The phrase the RSV renders “a member of the court” translates a single Greek word, syntrophos, which denotes a person reared alongside another. It can mean a foster brother or a companion from the nursery, and in the Hellenistic courts it served as an honorific for men who had grown up beside a king; the author of First Maccabees uses it for the officers who had been brought up with Alexander from boyhood (1 Macc 1:6). The Herod in question is Antipas. Luke therefore places, among the leaders of the church that sent Paul on his first mission, a man raised with the ruler who beheaded John the Baptist and who, in Luke’s own Passion, dressed Jesus in gorgeous apparel and sent him back to Pilate (Luke 23:11), and after that single verse Luke never mentions Manaen again.

The name had a history at the Herodian court before Acts. Josephus tells of an Essene called Manaemus who met Herod the Great as a boy on his way to his teachers, greeted him as a future king, and gave him a slap on the backside to make him remember the prophecy; when Herod came to power he summoned the old man and, for his sake, held the Essenes in honor (Ant. 15.373-379). That account is the source. The pattern it preserves, a holy man from the pious circles bound to a Herodian prince from childhood, is what the series calls the syntrophos principle, and Acts 13:1 repeats it a generation later with the same name, Menahem in Hebrew, attached to the next Herodian ruler. Whether the Manaen of Acts descended from the Manaemus of Josephus cannot be shown. Menahem was a common name, and a Menahem son of Judas the Galilean broke into the armory at Masada in 66 and made himself briefly master of the revolt in Jerusalem (War 2.433-448), a reminder that the name travelled through more than one household and more than one politics.

Luke’s Gospel is threaded with the tetrarch’s people in a way the other Gospels are not. Joanna, “the wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward,” appears among the women who supported Jesus from their own means (Luke 8:3) and returns at the empty tomb (24:10), and neither Mark nor Matthew knows her name. The hearing before Antipas during the Passion (23:6-12) belongs to Luke alone, as does the warning from certain Pharisees that Herod wants Jesus dead (13:31). The inference I draw is that Luke had informants from inside the tetrarch’s household, and that his silence about how such people came into the movement is conspicuous in an author who elsewhere takes pains over origins. In an earlier essay on this site I read the parable of the dishonest steward (Luke 16:1-8), another story found only in Luke, against Chuza’s position as a steward of a royal estate, and that reading remains a proposal and I would not build on it here.

The principle earns its keep as a tool of detection. Where Josephus documents a pair, the Gospels may preserve pairs they no longer present as pairs. The expectation of doubled figures was widespread in the literature these writers knew: Zechariah’s “two anointed” who stand by the Lord of the whole earth (Zech 4:14), the messiahs of Aaron and of Israel in the Qumran Community Rule (1QS 9:11), the paired teachers of the rabbinic Zugot, and Jesus sending the Twelve out “two by two” (Mark 6:7). Astronomers know a star in the head of Cygnus, Albireo, which looks like a single point to the naked eye and resolves into a gold star and a blue one in the smallest telescope, and the series proposes that the Galilean Teacher and a Herodian companion were such a pair, fused into one light by the distance of a generation and the weakness of the instrument that later readers brought to the Gospels.

The Disciple Without a Name

The fourth Gospel keeps one name back with unusual stubbornness. The disciple whom Jesus loved reclines beside him at the supper (John 13:23), stands at the cross (19:26), outruns Peter to the tomb (20:2-8), and recognizes the figure on the shore (21:7), and the book in its final chapter claims him as the witness behind everything it has written (21:24), yet the author never once tells us who he was. The second century filled the gap. Irenaeus names John, the disciple of the Lord who leaned on his breast, as the one who published the Gospel at Ephesus (Against Heresies 3.1.1), and that identification held for sixteen hundred years. Raymond Brown, who accepted it early in his career, came to regard the Beloved Disciple as a historical companion of Jesus who stood outside the Twelve (The Community of the Beloved Disciple, 1979), and Brown was nobody’s radical.

One scene locates this man socially. After the arrest, Simon Peter follows Jesus “and so did another disciple. As this disciple was known to the high priest, he entered the court of the high priest along with Jesus,” and then went back out, spoke to the maid who kept the door, and brought Peter in (John 18:15-16). Whether this “other disciple” is the beloved one has been argued both ways. The Gospel itself tilts the question, since at 20:2 Mary Magdalene runs “to the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved,” joining the two descriptions in a single phrase. My inference from the source is modest: a disciple on familiar terms with the household of the high priest had a place in Jerusalem society that a fisherman from Bethsaida did not.

The cross comes next. Standing near it are his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene, and Jesus, seeing his mother with the disciple he loved, says to her, “Woman, behold, your son!” and to the disciple, “Behold, your mother!” John adds, “And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home” (John 19:25-27). The scene has troubled careful readers for a long time, because Mark names four brothers of Jesus (Mark 6:3), and a dying eldest son who entrusts his mother to an outsider while his brothers are alive does something that Jewish family custom would find hard to credit. The usual answer is theological: the scene founds a new family of faith. That answer may be right about John’s purpose and still leave the historical oddity untouched.

The Qumran community offers a parallel for a movement that withholds names. Its scrolls speak again and again of the Teacher of Righteousness and his enemy the Wicked Priest, and in all the surviving documents neither man is named, though the sect knew perfectly well who they were. Scholars have spent more than seventy years matching those titles to high priests and to teachers, and the lack of agreement is instructive, because a community that suppresses names is protecting someone, whether the man named or itself or both, and the protection outlasts the danger that called it forth.

The series proposes an identity for John’s unnamed witness, and here the argument passes from inference into reconstruction. The Syntrophos Principle, the fourth volume, identifies the Beloved Disciple as Herodion, Paul’s kinsman of Romans 16:11, and as the son of the Herodian claimant who was crucified as Jesus Barabbas. The volume further proposes that Mary, the Galilean’s mother, had years before sheltered and raised that Herodian boy, so that the words from the cross are a dying father commending his own son to the woman who had once been a mother to him. The name Clopas enters at this point, since the series connects Mary of Clopas at the cross and Cleopas on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:18) with Cleopatra of Jerusalem and her kin. I flag the philological weakness in that link without softening it: Clopas looks Semitic, Cleopas is a shortened Greek name, and scholars disagree about whether the two are the same name at all. If they are distinct, that thread of the reconstruction loses its strongest support, and the Herodion identification has to stand on John 18 and Romans 16 without it.

Another Comforter

In the long farewell of John 14 to 16, Jesus promises that the Father “will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever” (John 14:16). The Greek word is paraklētos, the King James Version’s “Comforter,” and the adjective “another” matters, because the first letter of John applies the same noun to Jesus himself, “we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 John 2:1), so that the promised figure is a second of the same kind as the first. The coming of this second figure is conditional on the departure of the first: “if I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you” (John 16:7). The Gospel identifies the Paraclete with the Holy Spirit (14:26), and that identification is the text as we have it, which I have no intention of pretending away.

The Hebrew behind the idea points somewhere else as well. Menaḥem, the name that Greek renders Manaen and Josephus renders Manaemus, is the participle of the verb nḥm and means “comforter.” In Lamentations the city laments that “a comforter is far from me” (Lam 1:16), and the Babylonian Talmud, listing the names of the Messiah, gives one of them as Menahem son of Hezekiah and cites that very verse as proof (b. Sanhedrin 98b). The rabbinic passage is centuries later than John, and I treat the gap as a real limit on what it can show; it establishes that the word could function as a messianic name within Jewish tradition, and it cannot establish that John’s circle knew the usage.

The series gathers these threads toward one man. The Syntrophos Principle devotes its culminating chapter to Manaen of Antioch, and the fifth volume, The Comforter, contends that the Pharisee who wrote the seven undisputed letters was this Manaen, the syntrophos of Antipas and, in a way the Gospels leave unstated, a kinsman of Herodion. On that reading the Paraclete promise encodes a commissioning, and the Gospel that never names its own witness also never names the successor it promises, except by a title that in Hebrew was a man’s name. That is reconstruction at its farthest reach, and the chronology it needs has to be argued against Acts. Paul’s own account in Galatians has him go away into Arabia, return to Damascus, and wait three years before a fifteen-day visit to Cephas in Jerusalem (Gal 1:15-19), and Acts compresses those movements into a sequence from Damascus straight to Jerusalem (Acts 9:19-28) that the two texts have never been made to agree on.

The objection that bites hardest comes from the verse the whole identification begins with. Acts 13:1 lists “Manaen” and “Saul” as two different men in the same sentence, which on its face separates them. The series answers that the Saul of Acts is himself a composite, and that Luke’s list preserves both halves of a pair his later chapters fuse into a single career, and I recognize that this answer asks the reader to accept the thesis in order to defuse the evidence against it. Age raises a further question, and I cannot resolve it cleanly. A foster brother of Antipas, who was born around 20 BCE, would have been in his seventies by the middle of the 50s, and when Paul describes himself in the letter to Philemon the word he uses is presbytēs, “old man” (Philem 9), which the RSV translates “ambassador” in its text and “old man” in its margin, on the assumption of a spelling variant for presbeutēs. The translators’ choice there has always seemed to me a small instance of the pressure this essay is describing, since the plain word makes Paul older than the career Acts gives him comfortably allows.

Why the Silence Held

Which brings up an uncomfortable question, the one any reader of the preceding sections is entitled to press: if a Herodian thread ran through the founding of the movement, why would every author who knew of it decline to say so? The answer lies in the years after 70. The Herodian house survived the war by siding with Rome. Agrippa II had pleaded with Jerusalem not to fight (Josephus gives him a long speech on the futility of resistance, War 2.345-404), his troops marched with Vespasian, and his sister Berenice went to Rome as the companion of Titus, until popular feeling forced the new emperor to send her away (Suetonius, Titus 7). For a Christian writer of the 80s or 90s, a founder with Herodian blood was a liability on two fronts at once. To Jewish readers the dynasty meant Idumean upstarts; Josephus records Antigonus, the last Hasmonean king, sneering at Herod as a commoner and a half-Jew (Ant. 14.403). To Roman readers a royal claimant executed by a Roman prefect under the charge “The King of the Jews” (Mark 15:26) was a seditionist, and a movement that advertised descent from such a man was inviting the attention of magistrates.

Theology pressed from the other side, and with equal force. A church confessing “one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim 2:5) had little room for two men who had shared a name, a title, or a death, and the single figure grew more single with every generation of confession. Acts shows the result in miniature. The book ends with Paul in Rome for two whole years, welcoming visitors and preaching without hindrance (Acts 28:30-31), and it says nothing of his death, which Luke writing a generation later can hardly have failed to know. Josephus, for his part, finished the Antiquities in the thirteenth year of Domitian (Ant. 20.267), under a Flavian patronage that shaped what he chose to record about the family of Agrippa, and the historian who preserved Manaemus and Cleopatra of Jerusalem was himself writing under pressure of his own.

A caution against myself belongs here, because the argument from silence is the weakest instrument in the historian’s kit and silence by itself proves nothing. What the texts surveyed in this essay show is something narrower and more stubborn than silence, a set of pressure marks, the places where a writer or a copyist can be seen working to keep something quiet. Mark’s aside to the reader is one; the scribal removal of a first name from Barabbas is another, and Luke’s courtiers who arrive without introduction, John’s witness who never receives a name, and Paul’s kinsman who receives nothing else belong in the same class. William Wrede noticed one such mark in 1901, the repeated commands to silence in Mark, and built on it his theory of the messianic secret. His conclusions have been contested for well over a century, and his observation that Mark labors to keep something hidden has outlived every attempt to set it aside, which is the fate I would wish for these observations too, whatever becomes of the reconstructions I have built on them.

In the early thirteenth century a scribe in the eastern Mediterranean took an old parchment book, scraped away its text, turned the leaves sideways, and wrote a prayer book over them. Around the turn of this century conservators at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore imaged those pages under ultraviolet and X-ray fluorescence and recovered what the scribe had erased, including the only surviving copy of Archimedes’ Method. The prayer book was a real prayer book, made by a devout man for use in worship, and it deserves to be read as one; the lower text had been there the whole time, faint and sideways under every line of devotion, waiting for readers willing to trust the parchment more than the latest hand to write on it.

Notes

Scripture quotations follow the Revised Standard Version, except Matthew 27:17, which follows the New Revised Standard Version because the RSV does not adopt the reading “Jesus Barabbas.”

Josephus is cited by the standard Niese section numbers: Jewish Antiquities 14.403; 15.373-379; 17.21; 18.139-141; 20.214; 20.267; Jewish War 1.562; 2.345-404; 2.433-448; 2.556-558.

Robert Eisenman, “Paul as Herodian,” Journal of Higher Criticism 3 (1996).

Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.1.1.

Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).

J. B. Lightfoot, “Caesar’s Household,” in Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians (London: Macmillan, 1868).

T. W. Manson, on Romans 16 as a letter to Ephesus, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 31 (1948).

Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994), on Matthew 27:16-17.

Origen, Commentary on Matthew, Commentariorum Series 121.

Raymond E. Brown, The Community of the Beloved Disciple (New York: Paulist Press, 1979).

Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952).

Suetonius, Titus 7.

Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 98b.

William Wrede, Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1901).

The Qumran Community Rule, 1QS 9:11.

The arguments of the series referred to throughout appear in Ronnel D. Chua, Unmerging Origins, vols. 1-5: The Gospel as Mirror; The Composite Paul; The Twelve Who Were Not; The Syntrophos Principle; and The Comforter.