Hi PeterPeter Kirby wrote:Fictitious letters do tend to be longer than real letters, with the extant letters found among papyri having an average length of 87 words. Most clearly fictitious letters may be "rather short" (do you have any real statistics handy? because I don't), but their average length still beats the average length of real letters, which is extremely short by comparison.
Let's divide first century (and difficult-to-date papyrus) letters into several categories:
1-250 words (A)
250-1000 words (B)
1000-3,000 words (C)
3,000-6,000 words (D)
6,000 words or more (E)
Taking information here (also corroborated from other sources):
http://books.google.com/books?id=8a-o6r ... ry&f=false
(A) ALL extant papyrus letters (~14,000) fall into this category. ALL of them. ALL of them. Wow? The shortest letters by Cicero and Seneca also fall here. None of the letters of Paul fall into this category.
(B) Philemon and Titus fall into here. NONE of the papyrus letters do. The average length of a letter by Cicero is at the lower end of this range (295). The average length of a letter by Seneca is at the upper end of this range (995).
(C) The longest letter by Cicero is in this category (2,530 words). The average length of a Pauline NT letter falls here (2,495 words).
(D) The longest letter by Seneca is in this category (4,134 words). Two Pauline NT letters fall here (Ephesians and Galatians).
(E) Three NT Pauline letters fall into this category: Romans at ~9500 words, 1 Corinthians at ~9500 words, and 2 Corinthians at ~6100 words. I suppose 1 Clement and Hebrews could also weigh in here.
Clearly we don't have much evidence for a lot of these categories. Apart from category (A), all of these letters are fairly anomalous because their literary purpose led them to stretch the concept of a letter (real correspondence, written for a practical purpose, no more than 209 words long) into a treatise while retaining some of the rhetorical conventions of letter-writing.
If we simplified, however, and separated category (A) from category (B-E), the latter category has a much higher incidence of forgery. Every example of forgery that I can think of, anyway, falls into category (B-E). At the same time, some 14,000 or so examples pad out the real letters of category (A).
Essentially, Andrew, you've constructed an argument for a high background probability of forgery (and/or not being an actual letter) given a letter of this length purported to be written in the first century... you just haven't realized it yet (because you started from empirically false assumptions).
You make some good points. However I think you may be blurring together two rather separate arguments.
Argument A The lengths of the letters attributed to Paul shows that they are formal literary letters rather than private informal letters. A much higher fraction of formal literary letters are fictitious than is true of private informal letters. Hence the status of the letters attributed to Paul is a ground for taking the possibility of literary fiction more seriously than would be the case for private informal letters.
This argument is true but IMO not very interesting. (Unless one is suggesting that in the Ancient World most formal literary letters are literary fictions.) Firstly Paul's letters (apart from Philemon) are obviously not private informal letters. We know this without comparing their length to that of the letters in the papyri. Secondly scholars take for granted that fictitious letters are likely to be longer than the type of brief notes we find in the papyri. One has to be potentially suspicious of letters attributed to church leaders in the 4th century explaining why their doctrinal position is right and that of the opposition is wrong. Brief notes attributed to church leaders are highly likely to be genuine. (E.G. letters saying in effect; Dear Emperor, have received your invitation to the church council later this year. I will definitely be coming.)
Argument B The letters attributed to Paul are unusually long even for formal literary letters. This makes it more likely that they are fictitious than is true for a typical formal literary letter.
I don't think this argument is correct. If it implies that within Christian (or fringe Christian) works clearly fictitious letters are longer than average, it seems to be empirically false. E.G. the 3rd letter of Paul to the Corinthians and the letter of Paul to the Laodiceans are both relatively short.
The length of at least the longer Pauline letters is clearly very unusual in the Ancint World and it is probable that this issue has not received the attention it deserves. However, in order to be a good argument for inauthenticity I think one needs to show not only that the length of the letters is atypical of ancient letters (even formal literary ancient letters) but also that this extreme length is frequent among clearly fictitious letters. And this does not seem to be true.
Andrew Criddle
