Let's help biblical scholars - Paul's letters

[JarekS]

Let's help biblical scholars - Paul's letters


The Price-Ehrman debate showed the entire weakness of biblical studies as a field of research. A natural weakness with nothing strange about it. Bob and Bart almost broke up the debate when it came to the authenticity of Paul's letters. One of them got angry when he was laughed at by the other one. But neither of them noticed that biblical studies alone cannot provide a definitive answer in this case. The text itself makes it impossible to distinguish historical tradition from invented tradition. Additional criteria are needed. Let's try to reach for them to sincerely help our favorites.

As for the story of Pauline Corpus, it is perfectly described by Zuntz, which Bart emphasized in another debate with Daniel B. Wallace. Zuntz's reconstruction is considered the best.
According to Zuntz, the letters are known only from an anthology written around 100 CE. No one we know has ever had access to the originals from the original distribution of the letters. Before they got there, they were edited (all of them), supplemented and put together from different pieces. Thus, the secondary distribution of letters is described below line 100 CE and the primary one above. Let's start with the 100 CE line. What determines it? Nothing permanent, unfortunately. This is the date of publication of 1 Clem on the matter determined by modern biblical scholars by vote. But that doesn't matter. The secondary distribution of letters described below line 100 CE does not raise any major objections. Let's look at primary distribution.
This reconstruction was created without any realistic thought. It assumes that the corpus is created in some magical, disorderly way and that the letters are edited by whoever wants, when they want and wherever they want. And then someone collects them all in these different locations and puts them into one publication. While collecting, he does not notice that 3 of them are fakes by other authors.
This is an unrealistic and unlikely scenario.
The Corpus is created in a simple way as shown below. Someone sends a letter, someone else picks it up and packs it into one codex. And so, over the course of 20 years, he manages to collect 7 letters. In this way, primary copies of the corpus are created, from which secondary copies can be made. And so on.
Let me ask you a question - where do you think all this editorial work on the 7 letters took place? Where were these three fakes added?
I have my own answer, which I will share in the next note, but I offer everyone a moment of entertainment and creative thinking.
Feel free to share your ideas.

[Peter Kirby]

3 possibilities:

1) the earliest collection of Paulines was an epistolary pseudepigraph
2) the earliest collection of Paulines combined one or more letters originally by Paul (and maybe some not)
3) the earliest collection of Pauline letters was arranged by Paul himself

At least a couple advantages of model (3) over (2):

a) In antiquity it's known that some authors kept a copy of their letters with an eye to publication.
b) lengthy, complex, and expensive epistles are easier to understand if they were written with literary intents.

Neither consideration rules out (1).

[Secret Alias]

One early collection started with Galatians and it wasn't Marcion's.

[Peter Kirby]

Where were these three fakes added?

Colossians + the other seven could have been written by Paul. Things like 2 Cor may have been properly split up at this point.

Ephesians could have been written in the first century with access to those 8, and that edition became the archetype (from which all Pauline letter collections derive). Whatever editorial decisions which combined some of Paul's letters that were originally separate could have happened in this edition.

2 Thessalonians might have been written as a stand-alone pseudepigraphon and might have entered the collection when Marcion collected Paul's letters. This might explain some data where 2 Thessalonians is an odd man out (not used but the rest of the collection is).

(Phrased tentatively, obviously, because I don't intend to argue that this is the only possibility)

[Peter Kirby]

Asia Minor could be the location of the collection with Ephesians. Someone with money and an affinity for Paul are simple, plausible assumptions. There's more unknown about history than is known. Overdetermining the identity of the publisher here is not necessarily helpful.

[RandyHelzerman]

I don't know how much help I'll be to the scholars or even this thread, but here's some random thoughts I have on Paul's letter collection.

0. Was Paul even a historical character? After reading the first few chapters of Galatians, it's really hard not to think so. Even now, he's more alive than most living people are. Very few authors have ever been able to write such a "real" fictional character--e.g. Shakespere's Hamlet.

But some have. So maybe, maybe not. But it doesn't even matter-- the Paul that we find in the letters--in a *collection* of letters--is the Paul which has shaped history. He himself says that his physical appearance is not at all commensurate with this letters. Maybe this actually happened, maybe is a pseudonymous author's way of winking at us. But it makes virtually no difference at all if we want to study *Paul* or how his letter collection came to be.

1. Paul's letter collection went through many stages. We can discern that there must have been a 7-letter collection. Since 7 is a magic number, and it would be funny if exactly 7 letters had been written, perhaps there were even earlier collections of fewer letters, rounded out to 7--by psudonomy?

I take the 7 letters of the Apocalypse of John to be evidence that VERY EARLY on there was a 7 letter collection, and even by that time it had circulated around and was very controversial.

2. What was the motivation for formulating the initial collection, and for making all these expansions? Well, Paul is very concerned that the gospel has been corrupted, by people wanting to interpolate in elements of Judaism. Which is the same concern of Marcion....(and of Luther).... Purifying the gospel from interpolations by (ironically!) interpolating into Paul's letter collection has been the main motivation and the main trend---since even *before* there were written gospels.

3 When the letters of Paul show up to us, even in the very early 7 letter collection, it is *as a collection*, i.e. something more than just a grab bag of individual letters, but as something which was deliberately curated, edited, and arranged, by someone somewhere, for a specific purpose--which I hypothesize to be purifying the Gospel.

4. Hence, any Paul we have is to some degree a constructed and pseudonymous Paul. The letter collections stand between us and Paul in the same way that the gospels stand between us and Jesus.

5. Curiously, Marcion's Apostolicon did *not* have 7 letters, or any magic number of letters. Marcion's order of the letters is weird too. It does, however, make sense that he would put Galatians first---that letter is the perfect introduction to Paul, and after reading it, you know exactly who he is and what he is about.

6. I think its significant that Marcion's Apostolicon contains at least one letter which is pseudonymous: II Thes. Put this together with the suspiciously round number of 7 epistles in the earliest collections, and perhaps we can conclude that making up fake letters by Paul has been a thing since the earliest collections we know anything about.

7. Galatians--the very letter in which Paul comes most alive to me, might be pseudonymous!!! Tertullian says that Marcion "discovered" the letter. And its one of those letters which has tacked on to it something like "Yeah, this is really Paul!! I'm writing in my own hand here!!" Suspiciously like the one at the end of II Thes.

If somebody *did* want to make up a letter by Paul to introduce a collection of letters of Paul, its hard to think of a better one than Galatians. Acts is not as good of an introduction.

8. Speaking of which, once Acts was written as an introduction to the letters, Galatians no longer had to come first. Perhaps the advent of the current canonical order of Paul's letters marks when Acts was written.

9. The letters as we have them today have been endlessly edited and interpolated. Romans may have started off as a letter, but it's *way* longer than any other letter from antiquity. The letters are only nominally letters.

The scales fell off my eyes on this point when I read R M Price's point: Theologians have never come to any consensus as to what Paul is talking about in Romans--not even something seemingly as black-and-white as whether or not we should still keep the laws of the OT. No matter how many spin cycles they go through in hermeneutic circles, it remains very obscure.

Interpreting Romans--or any of Paul's letters, as an integral whole is an exercise in harmonization. Perhaps it's just time to admit that there really isn't any coherent theology there to find. Romans has just been such a football through the ages, and so many people have tacked on their own particular takes, that it can mean anything and nothing.

10. Nevertheless, there's a reason that even atheists read, study, and thrill to, Paul's letters. You read about Paul's ideals, say, as given in I Cor, and *you want to be part of a community like that.* You want to be loved like Paul describes love, and you want to love others that way in return. You read that in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, free or slave, Male or Female, and you just *ache* for a world in which all of these bogus distinctions no longer divide us--rather, our differences serve to enable each of us to make our own necessary and unique contributions to the body of Christ, like the differences between the head, hands and stomach harmoniously work together in the human body.

[Peter Kirby]

Put this together with the suspiciously round number of 7 epistles in the earliest collections, and perhaps we can conclude that making up fake letters by Paul has been a thing since the earliest collections we know anything about.

I can suggest that Ephesians, when added to the archetype (= from which all known copies derive) of the Pauline letter collection, brought the number of churches addressed up to seven.

[RandyHelzerman]

I can suggest that Ephesians,

You mean Laodiceans? *chuckle* The fact that they couldn't even keep the name straight is a smoking gun in favor of your suggestion.

[Peter Kirby]

A common issue is making inferences without any controls. So are the letters of Paul too incoherent to have one author? Okay, that might be an argument. Which authors were used as controls to test the hypothesis of coherence? And have those authors been put through the same wringer to try to produce different interpretations? But I don't think anything like that was done.

[JarekS]

The letters are well written and seem authentic. But these are just letters, and you can write anything.
Let us agree with the overwhelming majority that Paul himself created the first copy of the Collection composed of authentic letters. Other similar copies were probably created by the recipients of the letters as a result of periodically receiving correspondence from Paul and combining them together into codexes. We rejected the theory of searchers combing half of the Empire to find Paul's epistle from a few decades ago.
Reading the original letters made some readers decide to add additional letters and attribute them to Paul. They didn't do it at the beginning of his career because it wouldn't make sense and the most likely time would be after Paul's death. Adding a letter is easy to explain. Well, I found Paul's new letter, and since you don't have it, well...
Three epistles were added to the Original Corpus. What is the conclusion from this? Well, all three epistles were added by one publisher or group cooperating with each other and exchanging material.
In any other case, the creation of a 10-letter Corps is unlikely. But let it be - one creative publisher who owns the original Corpus adds 3 epistles to seven.
The real problem is that in the Corpus the old epistles are full of interpolations and traces of editing that do not come from the alleged author. And again - all these interpolations should come from one source, otherwise they would not be included in one book. Moreover, a publisher who would decide to interfere so much with the original texts would have to be sure that only he had them.
These conclusions are unlikely. So Paul is not the letter writer.