ABuddhist wrote: ↑Thu Feb 10, 2022 5:42 pm
neilgodfrey wrote: ↑Thu Feb 10, 2022 5:33 pm
ABuddhist wrote: ↑Thu Feb 10, 2022 6:54 am
For what it is worth, I am partial to the claim that Justin would not have quoted from Paulines because he did not trust them - because they were linked to Marcion et al.
So if the letters were considered heretical by Justin, then presumably Paul was also considered heretical if he knew of him (though we have no evidence that he did), then how do we explain the complete turnaround after Justin making Paul the centre of Christian expansion across the Roman world?
From what I understand, Paul's letters after Justin's time were "rescued" for the proto-orthodox cause through a combination of redaction and claims that Paul had been orthodox and that the "heretics" had mutilated his letters in order to support their doctrines.
Are you aware of any claims that Marcion may have invented Paul? After all, he was the first Christian associated with proto-orthodoxy to promote Pauline letters.
We simply don't know where the letters came from or when. The standard hypothesis (though it is usually presented as a fact rather than a hypothesis), of course, is that they were written by Paul in the 50s and 60s and were "rescued" by collectors some time late in the first century or early second century. The first time our independent evidence refers to Paul's letters is when they are in hands of the Marcionites and persons like Irenaeus and Tertullian are accusing Marcion of mutilating the letters in the interests of his "heresy". There are reasonable grounds for thinking that some passages in the Marcion's versions of the letters were original and that it was the "orthodox" who "redacted" them.
But if we think of Acts of the Apostles as being written in the mid second century -- I think it has to be written after Justin's surviving writings -- then that is the first time Paul makes his appearance among the "orthodox". Before then he was a complete unknown, not even a heretical figure (unless he is a cipher for Simon Magus but I have not studied those arguments enough to make any judgement about the likelihood of that identity.)
Luke, or whoever it was who implied he was Luke and who wrote or redacted our version of Luke-Acts, appears to have had some sort of catholicizing agenda insofar as his work suggests an attempt to combine different parties into "orthodoxy" by rewriting those different parties and accounts in a way to makes them all united in one big happy family and the founders of "True Christianity". So we have Jerusalem as the starting point and Rome as the finish line (Jews and gentiles are one), Peter and Paul and James all being the best of buddies and teaching the same thing, and even John the Baptist is subsumed happily into the tapestry. But no mention of the letters. Though quite likely the same author or one of his followers did produce the Pastorals in the name of Paul to crown the work of Luke-Acts.
Once Paul was made safe as part of the larger foundation of Christianity it became all the more important for the letters to also be "catholicized", and so they were "redacted" to be made safe for "orthodoxy".
In fact, however, these founding names were all necessary inventions of a later age who needed founding myths to justify themselves. Justin and Aristides knew only of "Twelve" who were sent out to evangelize the world. That was the first myth. Marcionites could not accept the "Judaizing" Twelve so they had their own founding father, Paul. Luke attempted to reconcile the contradictory myths of origins in Acts.
That's how the evidence looks to me to be best explained. Such a scenario reduces the number of hypotheticals to make it work. It does not need the hypotheticals of a Pauline mission (for which we have no evidence until the mid second century) or the hypothetical of a selection of Twelve apostles, etc.
Some scholars have suggested that Marcion himself may even have written the letters of Paul. I don't think we have enough information to know exactly how the letters were produced, except that it is clear that various hands were at work. And once Marcionites were able to show the letters as the grounds for their doctrines, no doubt rival groups produced their own variations or "redacted" some of the letters Marcion used.
