No it is not. For so long as your focus remains on the matter of Paul's inspiration, you are not evaluating whatever was the gospel he preached. That is because the gospel which he preached was not the alleged fact of his having been divinely inspired
I have evaluated the content directly and on its own terms. Paul’s program is recoverable as human moral and communal reasoning: care for the weak in conscience and refrain for their sake, mutual up-building, charity as the highest virtue, unity over faction, sexual ethics, work discipline, almsgiving, and collection for Jerusalem. These are argued through reasons, examples, and consequences. That is content analysis. Separately, when Paul uses “not of human origin” as a warrant to trump rivals, the origin claim becomes part of the argument and must be tested. Doing both—assessing content as human reasoning and rejecting an unsubstantiated origin claim—are not mutually exclusive.
For so long as you focus on the matter of whether or not Paul was divinely inspired, you do not evaluate what he says about "ethics", in particular ethics as love which, there is reason to think, was a key aspect of what he preached. Then, once you set focus upon Paul's understanding expressed as ethics as love you further the discussion by indicating how it is that such a message was "ordinary Greco-Roman ... argumentation about ethics", with emphasis on "ordinary".
Paul’s love ethic can be—and has been—analyzed on its own. His portrait of agapē as patient, other-regarding action maps onto recognizable paraenetic topoi: virtue catalogs, example-and-exhortation structure, and community-preserving norms. “Ordinary” here is not a value judgment; it means “fully explicable by known human sources and literary conventions.” The love command is inherited from Jewish scripture and Second Temple teaching; its applications in conflict mediation, status leveling, and beneficence are paralleled in contemporary Jewish and Greco-Roman moral discourse. That shows the content is humanly sourced and intelligible without appealing to a non-human cause.
The fact that such a message would be at all sensible or at all understandable within a Greco-Roman context is to be expected; such is the nature of communication and communicability. Sensibility does not necessitate or justify the attribution of "ordinary". Some might mistake that point as a semantics matter; it is not; it is a logic matter (although it is, of course, a fact that semantics is not independent of logic).
Furthermore, were an actual case presented that showed how some other non-Christian, non-Jewish, non-religious preachings about ethics as love could be read as significantly similar to Paul's teaching, that in no way detracts from Paul's teaching, and, given the nature of inspiration (not to mention the nature of divine inspiration as understood by Jews, for example), it does not even put a chink in Paul's claim of having been divinely inspired which, as previously discussed, is made ultimately irrelevant with the development of understanding that became Paul's message, which is to say the development of an understanding about Paul's understanding.
“Ordinary” is a historical classification, not semantics gamesmanship. If a text’s concepts, rhetoric, and use-cases are accounted for by extant human traditions and forms, the logical conclusion is that a human explanation suffices. Logic favors the sufficient cause we can observe over an unnecessary, untestable one. Calling the result “ordinary” simply marks that no supra-human explanatory residue remains after the human causes are identified.
Similarity elsewhere does not detract from the ethical value of Paul’s counsel, but it is decisive against the necessity of a non-human source. When an idea sits within a continuous web of human precedents and literary forms, the simplest and only warranted inference is human origin. Your fallback—declaring inspiration “ultimately irrelevant”—concedes that the origin claim adds no evidential weight to the content. Yet Paul himself invokes that claim precisely to ground authority in disputes. You cannot treat it as irrelevant when evidence is demanded and decisive when authority is asserted. On public criteria, the content stands or falls as human philosophy and communal policy; the assertion “not of human origin” remains an unfalsifiable add-on with no place in a factual argument.
Now, there is very good reason for rejecting the above attribution of "ordinary". As Arendt notes in The Human Condition, love is "one of the rarest occurrences in human lives" and "indeed possesses an unequaled power of self-revelation and an unequaled clarity of vision ... Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical human forces." And, long before Arendt, Machiavelli was well aware of these very same facts about ethics as love.
Appealing to Arendt and Machiavelli does not convert rarity into supernatural origin, nor does it make Paul’s ethic anything other than humanly explicable. “Ordinary” in historical analysis means “accounted for by known human sources and conventions,” not “commonplace” or “banal.” Paul’s love ethic sits squarely within identifiable human traditions. Its Jewish backbone is explicit: “love your neighbor” comes from Leviticus 19, amplified in Second Temple teaching and in Jesus’ summary of the law, which Paul cites. Its Greco-Roman resonances are also well-documented: discussions of beneficence, mutual obligation, and universal concern appear in Cicero’s De Officiis, Seneca’s De Beneficiis, Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, and the Stoic notion of concentric circles of concern (oikeiosis) and cosmopolis. Arendt’s twentieth-century taxonomy of love as “unworldly” is a philosophical interpretation, not evidence about first-century literary dependence or divine causation. Machiavelli, for his part, treats love as a political affect less reliable than fear; he is not testifying to a transcendent ethic but analyzing power. None of this establishes that Paul’s ethic requires a non-human source; it shows exactly the opposite—that it can be mapped to antecedent human discourses.
This means that a preaching of ethics as love would not have been predominant in the Greco-Roman context; therefore, the ethics as love message would not have been "ordinary" regardless of who preached that viewpoint.
Were you actually "evaluating" the ethics as love aspect of Paul's teaching, then you would realize that this ethics is not about establishing "community order" in the sense of imposing such an order. A community order would/could follow from an aggregation of persons as they developed understanding about the manifestation of love as acts, but that, too, is an issue far removed from the question of whether Paul was divinely inspired or not.
“Not predominant” is not the same as “not human.” Minority schools and countercultural moral programs are routine in antiquity. Stoic universalism, Cynic critiques of status, Jewish diasporic ethics of charity and neighbor love—all were present though not dominant. A message can be distinctive in emphasis and still be ordinary in origin if its concepts, vocabulary, and argumentative forms are continuous with known traditions. Paul’s prose is standard Koine epistolary rhetoric; his paraenesis, virtue lists, and vice catalogs have abundant analogues; his love hymn in 1 Corinthians 13 is rhetorically striking but conceptually traceable to Jewish and Hellenistic moral topoi. Distinct does not equal supernatural.
Paul absolutely uses his ethic to regulate community behavior directly. He commands exclusion of an offender in Corinth, stipulates procedures for gatherings, limits ecstatic speech, adjudicates food and idol questions, instructs on financial collections, urges work discipline, and prescribes reconciliation practices. Those are explicit directives aimed at producing order, not merely hoping it emerges spontaneously from private virtue. The record shows argument plus enforcement mechanisms—hallmarks of human community leadership. And even if one reframes those outcomes as flowing from love, they remain fully explainable by ordinary social dynamics. Nothing in that pattern verifies a non-human source. Your own concession that the origin claim is “far removed” from these issues confirms my point: the content can be assessed—and is sufficiently explained—on human grounds, while “not of human origin” adds no evidential weight and remains an unfalsifiable assertion.
It in no way supports your remaining focused on the question of whether or not Paul was divinely inspired. Were you to move off of that focus and, instead, set focus upon understanding, then you will have to come to an appreciation of the differences between discussions and arguments. You will have to understand that in ethics as love, even in arguments the burden of proof is not assigned; it is shared. That, of course, transforms argument into discussion.
Furthermore, with regards to evidence, you will have to take account of what would be evidence of the actuality of ethical love - including whether love can be actual without being noticed. I'll jump way ahead and note that love can indeed be actual without being noticed - which can be re-stated as love can be actual without being evident. But all that is for a discussion way down the line from where we are at present.
I have already evaluated Paul’s content as human reasoning about community life and ethics; doing that does not exempt his separate origin claim from scrutiny. When Paul invokes “not from men,” “received from the Lord,” or anathematizes rivals, he has moved from discussion to assertion of a cause that outranks competing teachers. Epistemically, the burden of proof tracks who introduces the non-ordinary explanation. If someone claims a text’s source is non-human, they must supply evidence that discriminates that cause from normal authorship and transmission. “Sharing” the burden does not absolve the claimant of supporting their own positive thesis; it simply means each side is responsible for the claims they advance. I’ve met mine by showing that everything observable in the letters—their language, genre, argument structure, and manuscript history—is fully human. You have not produced any objective criterion that would separate “divinely inspired” from “humanly composed.”
Whether an act of love can occur unnoticed is irrelevant to the origin claim. Unnoticed love may be morally meaningful, but it leaves no public trace that could validate “not of human origin.” The question on the table is causal: did Paul’s message originate beyond human cognition? If the alleged signature of divine inspiration is, by your account, undetectable, then it cannot function as evidence in public argument. What we can detect are the artifacts: letters written in standard Koine, employing familiar rhetorical moves, circulated and recopied with ordinary variants, and used to order communities through explicit directives. Those are precisely the footprints of human composition and leadership. If “divine inspiration” produces no distinct, testable consequences, it cannot underwrite Paul’s authority claims. His ideas can still be weighed on their human merits; the non-human origin claim remains an unfalsifiable add-on that does no evidential work and cannot bind anyone who asks for reasons.
No! No! No! It's absolutely the opposite. When you talk about testing his claims, you have put aside all considerations regarding the matter of his inspiration. I HAVE BEEN TRYING TO SHOW YOU THAT THIS IS PRECISELY WHAT CAN AND SHOULD BE DONE WITH PAUL'S CLAIM ABOUT HIS INSPIRATION!
So, are we now done with the matter of the relevance of Paul's inspiration?
Testing Archimedes’ claims works because the claims themselves generate reproducible consequences that independently confirm or disconfirm them. Setting aside his “inspiration” does not conceal anything essential; the measurable results do the work. Paul’s central origin claim does not generate such public tests. We can and do evaluate his ethical counsel and community rules as human arguments; that succeeds precisely because those are ordinary, observable reasoning and effects. But the extra step—“not of human origin”—adds no testable content. So yes, bracket inspiration when assessing his ideas; no, do not pretend that bracketing somehow upgrades the origin claim. It remains unsupported.
It is irrelevant when judging the coherence or value of his ideas; it is immediately relevant the moment it is invoked to secure authority over rivals or bind communities. Paul himself repeatedly uses the origin claim for that purpose. When a claim is used as a warrant for deference, it must meet public standards of evidence. His does not.
You are the one who said the issue had to do with whether anyone was obliged to accept his claim about his inspiration. I told you no one was so obliged, and you have shown that understanding can be achieved without any consideration regarding the nature of inspiration. You did it for Archimedes as presented, and you should, therefore, be able to do it for Paul.
And, as I have said a few times already, if you want to argue against the way Paul used his alleged inspiration to get his way in (let us just call it) more practical matters, then go for it. That is a different discussion, as I have noted.
One other point to make in closing: From a religious perspective, the ethics as love can be expressed as its being concerned with the development of Godli(ke)ness in human individuals. From that perspective, the development occurs in the world, but it is by its very nature unworldly and, thereby, at least seemingly otherworldly. That perspective is not obligatory; it is arguably not necessary for the development of ethical love, but such a perspective can still be understood - even if it is never a perspective one would adopt as one's own.
Agreed on the first part: no one is obliged to accept an uncorroborated private report. That concession settles the public question. We can fully understand Paul’s reasoning while rejecting his self-authorization as evidentially irrelevant. The difference from Archimedes is crucial: Archimedes’ conclusions are checkable without his origin story; Paul’s origin assertion is not checkable at all, yet he uses it to trump disagreement. That is precisely why it cannot function as a public premise.
It is not a different discussion because it happens inside the same letters. The ethical exhortations and the authority claims travel together. When he grounds commands in “received from the Lord” or anathematizes contrary gospels, the origin claim is doing argumentative work in those practical matters. You cannot cordon it off after the fact. If the warrant is invoked, the warrant must be evidenced. It isn’t.
Framing love as “godliness” is a theological interpretation, not evidence of non-human origin. Ethical development in communities is observable and fully accounted for by human cognition, social learning, and moral reasoning. Calling the outcome “unworldly” does not supply an objective discriminator between divine causation and ordinary human processes. On what we can publicly inspect—language, genre, argument, and transmission—Paul’s writings bear human fingerprints only. His ideas can be appraised on their human merits; his origin claim cannot be established and therefore cannot bind anyone who requires reasons rather than professions.
NHC
