'The Letters of Paul in their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship'

[MrMacSon]

Nina E. Livesey, The Letters of Paul in their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship, Cambridge University Press.

available from: July 2024 (in Hardback)

Book description

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Since the late-nineteenth century scholars have all but concluded that the Apostle Paul authored six authentic community letters (Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, and 1 Thessalonian) and one individual letter to Philemon. In this book, by contrast, Nina E. Livesey argues that this long-held interpretation has been inadequately substantiated and theorized. In her ground-breaking study, Livesey reassesses the authentic perspective and, based on her research, reclassifies the letters as pseudonymous and letters-in-form-only. Like Seneca with his Moral Epistles, authors of Pauline letters extensively exploited the letter genre for its many rhetorical benefits to promote disciplinary teachings. Based on the types of issues addressed and the earliest known evidence of a collection, Livesey dates the letters' emergence to the mid-second century and the Roman school of Marcion. Her study significantly revises the understanding of Christian letters and conceptions of early Christianity, as it likewise reflects the benefit of cross-disciplinarity.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/le ... nformation

eta
Livesey, Professor Emerita of Religious Studies at the University of Oklahoma (College of Professional and Continuing Studies), published a 2016 monograph, Galatians and the Rhetoric of Crisis: Demosthenes, Cicero and Paul (Polebridge Press), which "probes techniques of persuasion around four general themes (urgency, promotion of self, emotive language, and disjuncture) and compares those themes across the Philippic speeches of Demosthenes and Cicero and Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. Against conventional Pauline scholarship, I demonstrate a broad use of rhetorical techniques in the NT letter of Galatians." via http://ninalivesey.oucreate.com/

And see https://sites.google.com/view/ninalivesey* and https://ninalivesey.oucreate.com/scholarship/

* "My training is in biblical studies with a specialization in Pauline letters. My scholarship can be broadly characterized as the investigation into various aspects of Christian emergence. My first book, Circumcision as a Malleable Symbol (Mohr Siebeck, 2010), explores interpretations of the Hebrew rite of circumcision across a diversity of ancient texts and challenges a common assumption of a unitary signification of this Judean practice. My second book, Galatians, and the Rhetoric of Crisis: Demosthenes, Cicero, and Paul (Polebridge Press, 2016), is a comparative study of the rhetoric of urgency, encomium, emotive language, and disjuncture across the Philippic speeches of Demosthenes and Cicero and Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. Against traditional scholarship, the book provides evidence of a wide use of rhetoric in Galatians."

[dabber]

I think some of these scholars take skepticism too far. If they were mid 2nd century Paul would know gospels. There's a very long list of ignorance of Paul - Nazaraeth, Virgin birth, Pilate, earthly miracle working Jesus, sermon on the Mount, lords prayer etc. Reading Paul's letters esp Galatians place very much at start of Christianity.

[Chrissy Hansen]

I am personally very excited for Livesey's book and will be reading it eagerly. My own book arguing against the authenticity of Philemon is going to be coming out hopefully this year as well, so Livesey's will be a nice complementary work. I am interesting to see what she says on it (and the others).

[RandyHelzerman]

Couple of thoughts;

1. If we take the canonical letters of Paul at face value, they were always a collective, not an individual endeavor. Romans has Tertius popping his head up and saying "hi", the Thessalonian correspondence has Paul, Timothy, and Silas as authors, Colossians: Paul and Timothy......Paul loved community and collaboration....as long as they weren't from the circumcision party

2. So if Pauls letters were more properly said to have been written by a school of Paul, then it is imaginable that the same school might have kept on writing letters from Paul even after he was dead... (kinda like the Beatles did after Paul was dead?) This is the position of Luke Timothy Johnson vis-a-vis the pastorals, and, if you are not impressed with his NT credentials, you are a very hard person to impress.

3. There are a couple of flies in the ointment: the reconstructions of the Marcionite versions of Paul's letters are shaky. But there is a clear tendency to *not* include all those other collaborators: all the letters are from Paul alone. Marcion's desire to elevate Paul above anybody else? Perhaps. Or proto- orthodox trying to domesticate Paul by diluting the apostolic source? Perhaps.

And the Paul of the pastorals just doesn't sound the same as the Paul of Galatians....or the Paul of Hebrews (just kidding!) Actually, that's a good question: does this volume plump for Pauline authorship of Hebrews too, while we are rehabbing apostolic authorship?

4. Romans isn't convincing as a letter. It's far, far larger than any letter from antiquity. It certainly has been expanded somehow. Perhaps even interpolated. If it were a single letter, written by Paul why is it so hard to interpret?



Does Romans say we have to keep the law, or not? How much of the law? What parts are left behind? If Paul was so very clear on this, why did my parents have me circumcised? If Leviticus is a dead letter, then why do contemporary christians quote so liberally from it, e.g., when condemning homosexuality? Is it just the ten commandments that are still valid? Then (ask the seventh-day Adventists) why are ya'll not keeping the sabbath?

We've been reading Romans for almost 2,000 years, and nobody agrees on what it actually says. Perhaps its time to just admit there is no coherent theology there to be found; because its been interpolated back and forth by competing factions of christianity.

I really think that any effort to assert apostolic authorship of Paul needs to address this.

Photographic proof that Romans is Interpolated