Who wrote the “Pauline Letters”?
For nearly two millennia, no one questioned the authorship of the epistles attributed to Paul. Thirteen of them in the official New Testament canon bear his name, not to mention a number of other letters outside the canon ...
... Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860), the founder of the Tübingen School of New Testament criticism, whittled down the Pauline canon...finding himself left with only the four Hauptbriefe (“principal epistles”), 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, and Romans, as authentic and unassailable, minus a few questionable passages here and there. Beyond the Hauptbriefe, Baur dismissed the letters as disjointed, colorless, impersonal, and lacking specific occasion. Colossians, for instance, is awash in the terminology of later Gnosticism, with Christ as the pleroma, or embodied divine fullness, as well as the final goal of cosmic evolution, precisely as in Valentinianism, one of the most influential of the 'Gnostic' movements, with everything finally imploding into oneness.
Gnostic influence is also evident in the notion of the cross as the defeat of the principalities and powers, the archons and authorities, which are angelic entities. And like the heretics condemned in the Pastorals, the author of Colossians says the resurrection has already happened at baptism (Col. 3:1; cf. Rom. 6, which stops on a dime, just short of this). Conservatives like to pretend that the author is the historical Paul and that he was merely using the terminology of Gnostic opponents ironically to refute them—a strange and obscuring tactic if ever there was one! No, the language and conceptuality are the author’s all right, just not from the author we know as Paul.
For Baur, Ephesians seems to be the work of the same author as Colossians, just a different version of it. Later scholars would point out that although the vocabulary is Pauline, the sentence structure is not. The sentences are long chains of genitives with no end in sight. The first chapter comprises only two sentences in the original Greek! Edgar J. Goodspeed would demonstrate by use of a table chart, much like a gospel synopsis, that every single verse of Ephesians comes straight out of, or at least closely parallels, material from Colossians, most of the other Pauline epistles, and the Septuagint, with nothing left over. No wonder it sounds like Paul—though without being by him.
Philippians presents Paul with fond hopes of one day being raised from the dead (3:10-11), whereas in his authentic epistles, his theology gives him absolute confidence in Christ. We are witnessing a shading off to Catholic “works piety,” especially when believers are told to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (2:12). What is the “perfection” Paul says he has yet to attain (3:12)? The real Paul would never have spoken this way, since in his view, one either lays hold on Christ or does not. In fact, readers receive the impression that the perfection the author aims at is actually martyrdom, which he plainly “anticipates” in nearly the same masochistic spirit as the author of the Ignatian Corpus [6: Ignatius, To the Romans, chaps. 5-8]. Furthermore, Philippians is connected not by any sustained argument but rather by catchwords (“rejoice”). There is also uncharacteristic vocabulary. The author uses the adversative plan (πλην) three times, for example, whereas in all other Pauline letters it appears but once.
... Philippians...is filled with heavy irony, presupposing that the reader knows what finally happened to Paul. He didn’t escape death as anticipated, but continued to edify his beloved Philippians nonetheless with posthumous letters like this one! This, plus the mention at the beginning of “bishops and deacons,” makes Philippians almost a fourth Pastoral Epistle. And why does “Paul” promise to send Timothy with all the latest news when he is sending this present letter back to them via Epaphroditus? Couldn’t Epaphroditus have filled them in? It is all artificial.
Nor is Philippians without a distinct Gnostic flavor. Specifically, the Kenosis Hymn in 2:6-11 bears the marks of Valentinian theology. Just as Colossians had the pleroma embodied in Christ, Philippians has him exit the godhead (the pleroma) to sojourn in the extra-pleromatic sphere, the kenoma (“emptiness”). In thus disdaining an undeserved equality with God, he succeeds where Sophia failed, having trespassed from her perch on “the Limit” (what Jack Kirby called “the Source Wall”) to seize the deep things of the Father. These are not mere seeds of Gnostic ideas that might one day grow into real Gnosticism; it is the real thing, met in passing allusions that will mean something to those familiar with the second-century system.
Both Thessalonian epistles are false, written perhaps by the same hand. The writer of 2 Thessalonians might have been embarrassed into correcting his own initial apocalyptic enthusiasm by dismissing his earlier work as that of some crank and not his own. The referent of 1 Thessalonians 2:16 must be the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE. The writer must therefore have lived after this event. Once one stops insisting the text is the work of a man who died in 62 CE (Paul), it begins to make more sense. Most scholars today nervously attempt to pry this verse out of its context as a later interpolation, leaving the rest as genuinely Pauline. But this stratagem reminds one of fundamentalists’ suggestions that Moses wrote the whole Pentateuch except for the account of his own death and burial (Deut. 34:5-8), which they suppose Joshua to have added. But in fact, it is just one more clue among many.
As with Galatians (6:11) and others (1 Cor. 16:21; Col. 4:18), the Thessalonian letters imply a contemporary cottage industry of spurious Pauline documents, against which one must learn to carefully guard (2 Thess. 2:15; 3:17). These are surely markers of a time, long after Paul, when collections of his letters were considered authoritative ...
... there came to be emphasis on apostolic writings, the church at length grew understandably suspicious of the living voice of prophecy ...
Baur’s observations should have settled the matter, but just as the majority of Martin Luther’s followers lacked the daring to go with their master’s relegation of Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation to a canonical appendix, so most critical scholars quailed in the face of Baur’s challenge. Even the supposed arch-skeptic Rudolf Bultmann quietly assumed the authenticity of seven Pauline epistles, restoring the haloes to 1 Thessalonians, Philippians, and Philemon. One hates to think that the magic number seven had anything to do with it. However, there were a few scholars who studied Baur’s results and took off in the opposite direction, believing that he had not gone far enough.
The Dutch Radical Critics
Willem C. van Manen (1842-1905), Professor of Old Christian Literature and New Testament Exegesis at the University of Leiden, was identified with the school of Dutch Radicals who sought to go beyond F. C. Baur and carry his investigations into the Pauline epistles to their logical conclusions. In a series of articles and books,[10] he pressed his case that Paul had not written even the four Hauptbriefe (Romans, Galatians, 1 & 2 Corinthians) that Baur had left him. Though Van Manen confessed his debt to the pioneering work of Baur and saw his own work as the natural continuation of it, he reproached Baur for not having gone far enough. Baur had simply assumed that some of the “Pauline” epistles must be the work of the historical Paul. Closer examination of the Hauptbriefe, however, led Van Manen and his immediate predecessors to the conclusion that these, too, were pseudepigraphical.
Van Manen acknowledged his predecessors Edward Evanson (who wrote in 1792), Bruno Bauer, Allard Pierson, Samuel A. Naber, and Abraham D. Loman. These men wrote in the nineteenth century, and Van Manen considered Loman to have begun a new period of strictly scientific study of the question. Loman had attracted colleagues such as Rudolf Steck, Daniel E. J. Völter, and Van Manen himself. Van Manen first met Loman’s theories with vigorous opposition, but his objections soon evaporated, the more closely he scrutinized his opponent’s case. At length, Van Manen assumed the mantle of leadership of the new school of criticism because of the volume of work he devoted to the subject. No doubt, he was quite correct. The work of only one of these scholars has appeared in English, but thankfully, that one is Van Manen. Even then, however, we must be content with his articles in the Encyclopaedia Biblica.
Van Manen pointed out that external, or patristic, attestation of any epistle is worthless for establishing authorship ... it provides nothing more than the opinion of some in the early church and proves nothing as to whether any ascriptions of the writings were actually justified ... On the one hand, tradition does not support the authenticity of the Hauptbriefe any more than that of the Prison Epistles (Philippians, Ephesians, Colossians, Philemon) or the Pastorals. Van Manen pointed out the inconsistency of those critics who supported the authenticity of Romans or Galatians by appealing to early patristic citation but who also counted such citations as irrelevant when they felt there were adequate internal grounds for rejecting the authenticity of epistles such as Ephesians. If it means nothing in one case, it can mean nothing in the other. An overarching unity among the Pauline epistles means only that there is the general conformity of a school of thought, not that of a single authorship.
Internal indications can demonstrate the fact of different authors but not, of course, whether Paul was ultimately the author of any one of them. To show that 1 Timothy is not the product of the same author as Romans implies nothing as to whether Romans was the work of Paul. All we can say is that they are not by the same Paulinist. Even within the Hauptbriefe, we find similar differences between the Corinthian epistles and Romans as exist between Romans and Philippians. The differences are linguistic, stylistic, ethical, and theological. The grounds for maintaining the pseudepigraphical character of all the epistles are as follows.
1. The question of their form
a. They are treatises, not letters, whether to an individual or a group.
The matter of the epistle is destined for publicity. If the letter is always more or less private and confidential, the epistle is meant for the market-place ... All that is in the letter—address and so forth—[and] is of primary importance, becomes in the epistle ornamental detail, merely added to maintain the illusion of this literary form. A real letter is seldom wholly intelligible to us until we know to whom it is addressed and the special circumstances for which it was written. To the understanding of most epistles this is by no means essential.[11]
b. They cannot have been written to the ancient churches whose names they bear since they have left no trace [of] the history of those churches.
c. The imaginary nature of the letters is evident from catholicizing phrases like “to all that are in Rome, called to be saints,” “to the church of God which is at Corinth, them that are sanctified in Jesus Christ, called to be saints, with all who invoke the name of our Lord Jesus Christ in all places, etc.,” “to the church of God which is at Corinth with all the saints in the whole of Achaia,” “to all the churches of Galatia.” Admittedly, one can reply that these phrases represent later, post-Pauline additions to make it easier to circulate the letter far beyond its originally intended readership. But again, how is this different from the desperate fundamentalist attempt to ascribe the Deuteronomic account of Moses’s death to a later writer in order to attribute the rest of the Pentateuch to Moses himself?
d. They have been redacted. They teem with discontinuities and internal contradictions indicating, for example, that the epistles to the Corinthians and Romans are patchwork quilts in the style of a Synoptic Gospel, while Galatians seems to have been a Marcionite document overlaid with a corrective series of orthodox interpolations. As Darrell J. Doughty points out, when we see such anomalies and anacoluthas in the Gospels, we readily recognize them as redactional seams, but when they arise in the epistles we dust [them] off [as] rusty 'harmonizations' and go to work! It is just the sort of “blindness and insight” (Paul de Man) evident in the earliest days of the Higher Criticism when it simply did not occur to scalpel-wielding Old Testament critics to subject the New Testament to the same surgery.
2. Their contents
a. There is confusion over the nature of the churches and Paul’s implied relations with them. In Romans, “Paul” writes to a church ostensibly unknown to him, yet he does so with great presumption. In Galatians and Corinthians he is portrayed as writing to old friends and having to cajole, then threaten, after first boasting and flattering—none of which must be necessary if he is the authoritative oracle Romans makes him out to be. Which is the real Paul? Perhaps neither!
b. We can draw no coherent picture of the opponents Paul faces in his epistles. It seems rather that a pseudepigraphist or redactor is aiming scattershot at various heretical options current in his day, much like the later works of Irenaeus and Epiphanius who wrote “against all heresies.” This is why scholars assuming Pauline authorship have repeatedly come up with implausible chimeras combining elements of Gnostics, Judaizers, apocalyptic enthusiasts, and charismatic triumphalists as candidates for Paul’s opponents. This is like a police artist’s conception of a crook created by combining features from this and that page of the standard sketchbooks.
c. The complexity and depth of the theology and ethics betoken a time long after the days of the historical Paul, who must have lived only a few years subsequent to the crucifixion. Apologists argue that we can trace a process of development between earlier and later epistles, reflecting a deepening of Paul’s thought. Paul himself, as he is presented in these very same epistles, would hardly countenance such a view since he represents himself everywhere simply as the recipient of a prepackaged revelation from heaven, a “gospel not from man.”
d. The kind of virulent advocacy, opposition, and reinterpretation of Pauline doctrine evidenced in these writings really is more appropriate if their subject is an authority of the past. We seem to be witnessing a debate over Paulinism by the Christians of a subsequent generation, much as we see in James 2:14-26 and 2 Peter 3:15-16, only here the writers are all posing as Paul in order to correct things authoritatively from within the Paulinist ranks. Paul’s “previous” teaching to these churches (“Do you not remember that when I was with you I told you?”) smacks of intrascholastic controversy, like Lutherans arguing over Luther. Imagine the peasants and proletarians of Corinth or Iconium scratching their heads over Paul’s ratiocinations on the subtleties of justification and the Law. “How could the unphilosophic Galatians understand this letter? Loman compares it with Hegel lecturing to the aborigines of the East Indies,” says Gustaaf van den Bergh. What we actually seem to have are rebuttals of one Paulinist’s interpretations by another, pulling rank by assuming the pose of Paul himself: “And why not do evil that good may come?—as some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just” (Rom. 3:8; cf. Gal. 5:11).
e. Is it really conceivable that the pronounced post-Jewish Christianity of Paulinism, which had utterly abandoned the authority of the twelve apostles, the Jewish Torah, and the nationalistic conception of the messiah for a spiritualized and internationalized religion, could have arisen only a matter of a few short years after the death of Jesus? Why do the Synoptic Gospels seem to attest a more primitive Christology than Paul? If Van Manen is right, it is because they are earlier than the Pauline epistles.
f. Insofar as the epistles address issues of concern to their intended readers (even if these are not the imagined readers in the Corinthian churches of 50 CE but the implied or actual readers of the next [second] century), the concerns addressed are anachronistic for the mid-first century; they are really later concerns over celibacy (encratism) and the criteria of true apostleship.
g. There is a historical retrospective tone to the epistles. They look back on the work of the apostles as something now in the past. Note, for instance, 1 Corinthians 3:6ff, where Paul is the revered founder of the Corinthian Church and Apollos is his successor; the whole thing is now in the hands of the post-apostolic generation, which is addressed with the warning: “Let each take care how he builds!” Paul’s work is over. The writer can already assess that Saint Paul did more than the other apostles (15:8-10).
h. An advanced, post-apostolic gnosis is in view in 1 Corinthians 1:17-31; 2:6, 16 (cf. Baur on Colossians and Ephesians), though again, apologists desperately posit that Paul liked to turn his opponents’ terminology and conceptuality against them. This would surely be the strangest and most muddying of polemical techniques, distorting the clear notes of the bugle into a confusing din: if Paul sounds so much like Corinthian Gnostics, does he agree or disagree with them?
i. Romans 9-11 speaks of the rejection of Israel in a manner impossible before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. Baur made the same point in the case of 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16, though, as we have seen, apologists claim these verses are a later interpolation in an otherwise genuine epistle. What event can have decisively signalled that God had written off the Jewish people? What, besides the disaster of 70 C.E. (or even that of 132 C.E.), could be the event to which Romans refers? Why has their “table” (temple altar) become their downfall and a “retribution” (Rom. 11:9)? Why is a parallel drawn with Elijah lamenting, “Lord ... they have demolished thy altars” (Rom. 11:3)?
j. There were apparently no persecutions in the early period in which Paul would have lived; these were phenomena of a later period. Yet they are mentioned as a matter of present experience in the writer’s day (Rom. 5:3-5; 8:17-39; 12:12, 14; 2 Cor. 1:3-7).
k. The epistles come from a time when “traditions” can be said (by Paul!) to derive from Paul (2 Thess. 2:15). Would he have spoken in this way of his own teachings, with the palpable air of venerable antiquity? Not likely. Again, what we have here is like 2 Peter 3:2, where the writer, passing himself off as “Simeon Peter,” momentarily lets the mask slip and mentions how “your apostles” prophesied in the past of events that have now come present. Where is Peter writing this from? Heaven? Likewise, how old would Paul have to be for his teachings to be known as traditions? In 2 Thessalonians 2:5, Paul recalls the days of long ago: “when I was with you, I told you.” What makes this any different from Luke 24:44, “These are my words which I spoke to you when I was still with you”? In each case, do we not have a writer clumsily putting his own words into the mouth of an authority of the past, having him speak as if from the Great Beyond in the present, forgetting to have him speak as from his own time? He is still with them in “story time,” though someone seems to have forgotten it. “In a word,” writes Van Manen, “the church has existed for not a few years merely. The historical background of the epistles, even of the principle epistles, is a later age ... Everything points to later days ...”
The historical Paul
With the so-called Pauline epistles removed from consideration as sources for Paul’s life, what evidence is left? Van Manen believed that Luke, in writing Acts, had made use of an earlier book of the Acts of Paul (not our apocryphal Acts of Paul), which was the source of Luke’s Pauline episodes. Of this material, Van Manen judged that only some of the travel notes were authentic, as well as some details of the supposed “we source,” the sections of the Acts written in the first person plural, as if by a companion of Paul. These data yield the minimal picture of a Paul somehow converted to a Christian faith of a still-Judaic type (no other type had yet made an appearance). Paul was a Hellenistic Jew and may have been one of those who first preached to gentiles after the martyrdom of Stephen. However, he remained within the bounds of Judaic Christianity, as witnessed by the various notes in Acts 18:18; 20:16; 21:23-26 about his undertaking vows and attending Jerusalem festivals. He differed in no essential respect from the twelve apostles and there is no reason to doubt that he preached among the gentiles.
Somewhere between 100 and 150 CE, Paulinism as a theological system arose out of a mystical and speculative circle. Van Manen speaks of the Paulinist movement and Gnosticism arising from the same circles. As already noted, Van Manen read the original of Galatians as Marcionite. Tertullian called Paul “the apostle of Marcion and the apostle of the heretics,” and both Irenaeus and Tertullian noted how much the heretics cherished Paul’s writings. The first commentators on the epistles were the Gnostics Valentinus, Heracleon, and Basilides.
It is likely, according to Van Manen, that some very early pseudo-Pauline epistles did not survive except perhaps in the form of fragments incorporated in our own Paulines. Second Corinthians 10:9ff, with its reference to a known set of “his letters,” may refer to this earliest group of epistles, but at least it betrays the writer of 2 Corinthians as a later Paulinist referring back to the corpus as in the equally spurious 2 Peter 3:15-16. The epistles we possess have passed through the hands of Catholic redactors who attempted to domesticate and sanitize the writings for the use of the orthodox, just as Bultmann later demonstrated a subsequent Catholic padding out and bowdlerizing of an originally Gnostic Gospel of John.
Luke was writing in the second quarter of the second century and saw himself as the heir of this catholicized Paul, contra Baur who argued that Luke was creating [a] Catholicized Paul in order to heal (or paper over) long-standing divisions between Jewish and gentile Christians, factions loyal to the memories of Peter and Paul respectively. Van Manen judged that Luke was by no means initiating the catholicizing; it was already an accomplished fact for him. The resulting picture is that of a great Pauline innovator of a new era in the development of Christian thought but hardly in a Gnostic direction.
How did 'the historical Paul' come to be the figurehead of the second-century Paulinist school? We cannot say, but then neither can we say how the anonymous fourth Gospel and the three epistles were ascribed to the Galilean fisherman John bar-Zebedee. Similarly, how outlandish is it to call all Pauline epistles pseudepigraphical when we already think the same thing about all the Petrine epistles, gospels, apocalypses, and apocryphal acts? We already dismiss the authenticity of the Acts of Paul, the Nag Hammadi text The Prayer of the Apostle Paul, the two or three Apocalypses of Paul, and the apocryphal Epistles to the Laodiceans, Alexandrians, etc., as well as a good half of the canonical epistles anyway. It should occasion no great surprise if the name of an ancient apostle should have attracted to itself a larger or smaller number of pseudonymous epistles.
The structure of exegetical revolutions
No doubt, many readers of the present summary of Van Manen’s approach have had no trouble in finding alternative, orthodox ways to account for many or all of the anomalies cited, hoping to preserve Pauline authorship. Harmonization is as popular today as it was anciently, and it is an apologetical strategy. It is not a tool of historical criticism. To the apologist’s mind, if there is a way to believe the traditional view might possibly still be true, then it is true [19: James Barr, Fundamentalism, 1976; 85, 98, 126, 127.]. Thus any contrivance that seems to salvage the familiar, consensus position will seem to be ipso facto true since consonance with tradition is such a convincing piece of apologetics.
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... guardians of the reigning paradigm are like the protagonist of The Testament of Abraham who simply will not pack it in even when God sends the death angel to fetch him ...
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I am, of course, suggesting that the revolutionary hypotheses of Van Manen were never given a chance, and at second glance, they look appealing to me. To paraphrase Chesterton, it is not that the Dutch Radical critical paradigm was tried and found wanting; it was found distasteful and not tried. But the rationalizations of our vested interests lose some of their hold on us if we come to recognize them for what they are. If this book can help produce such recognition, it will be because the time is finally ripe for Van Manen, once dismissed with scorn like Nietzsche’s mad prophet, to receive his due and a sympathetic hearing. Like light from the farthest stars, his shocking tidings have taken a long time to reach us, but perhaps now we are ready to see and comprehend.
Price, Robert M.. The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul. Signature Books.
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