1 Corinthians 4:15-16 taken at full strength and defended as literally true. Neville puts the objection himself before anyone else can — now isn’t that the most arrogant, arrogant statement in the world, “Be imitators of me”! — and then answers it: it’s a true claim, what he’s telling you. The reading turns on what fatherhood means once a man has left the wheel. Paul is not claiming to have taught the Corinthians a doctrine (the scholars’ reading, which Neville quotes and dismisses with you just have to smile: that if a man can convert someone to his way of thinking, then he fathered your thinking). He is saying he is the one bringing them out. He’s leaving this wheel of recurrence, and he will be turning it from above — I am bringing you out, being born, and when I bring you out, you and I are one. Because there aren’t many little Christ Jesuses, everyone incorporated into that body is that body, so a father speaking from there is not a rival to God. The proof text for who Paul is comes from the next letter: the same instruction appears in Ephesians 5:1 with God in the place of me. He’s telling you who he is: There is only God. 1053 also carries Neville’s complaint that the doctrine is not spelled out anywhere in the epistles — there must be some missing book of Paul — which he offers as evidence of loss rather than of his own invention: I’ve read the Bible backwards. I haven’t seen anything where Paul spells it out. Do not merge this with the many lectures that say there is only one Father (76, 1024, 1025, 1041, 1158, 1232): those argue the unity of the Father of all, a different claim. The probe was run and it separates cleanly. COUNT: mine and provisional — two lectures, 1053 (four passages) and 1325, where the verse is quoted in a closer translation (although you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers) and carried to the same end: be imitators of me until Christ is formed in you. Then the true meaning of the fatherhood of God will be revealed, and you will know yourself to be the Father.