And why should anyone care? It is not just that we have factual and fictional letters of "Paul" or that those 13 letters are mixed between a Paul and a Pseudo-Paul. It is not just that, after Paul's death, followers imagined him in new situations and had him respond to new problems -- as if in a seamless if fictional continuity from past into present and future. The problem is that those post-Pauline or Pseudo-Pauline letters are primarily counter-Pauline and anti-Pauline.
What happens across those three sets of letters is that the radical Paul of the authentic seven letters Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon is slowly but steadily morphed into the conservative Paul of the probably inauthentic threesome Ephesians Colossians, 2 Thessalonians and finally into the reactionary Paul of those certainly inauthentic ones Timothy, Titus.
In other words, the radical Paul is being deradicalized, sanitized and Romanized. His radical views on, for example, slavery and patriarchy, are being retrofitted into Roman cultural expectations and Roman social presuppositions.
Watch, then, how it works in terms of slavery I leave patriarchy for my next blog in this series on Paul :. The radical and historical Paul sent back the now-converted slave Onesimus to his owner and told him that a Christian could not own a Christian for how could Christians be equal and unequal to one another at the same time?
He reminds him "to do your duty," to free Onesimus, and to consider him "no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother -- especially to me but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord" Philemon , Next, the later, conservative counter-Paul takes Christian owners with Christian slaves absolutely for granted, addresses both classes and reminds each of its mutual obligations.
Christian-on-Christian slavery is back but now in kinder, gentler mode! Finally, the still later and reactionary anti-Paul never mentions mutual duties, addresses only the master, and says to "tell slaves to be submissive to their masters and What is at stake in that sad progression from Paul to anti-Paul? Some suggest that 1 and 2 Corinthians and Philippians have been stitched together from shorter fragments. Beyond these undisputed Paulines are two classes of texts: the disputed letters and those generally thought to be forged.
Among the former, one generally finds 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, and Ephesians, while among the latter are 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, the so-called Pastoral Epistles. Many scholars challenge the authenticity of 2 Thessalonians because it looks like a deliberate attempt to rewrite 1 Thessalonians. Second Thessalonians quotes from and follows the format of 1 Thessalonians while offering an alternate plan for when the end of time will come.
While some scholars dispute whether there is any contradiction between the two texts, these considerations are what frame the debate about 2 Thessalonians. Colossians and Ephesians present a different problem. Both texts seem to differ from the undisputed letters about concepts like baptism and the resurrection, while they also possess a very dissimilar writing style and vocabulary.
Added to this is the fact that Ephesians copies large chunks of Colossians. The Pastorals present a different set of issues. Few question that these letters represent a time period distinct from that of Paul because they present a more elaborate set of church offices and services and new concerns about doctrine and practice.
Vocabulary, style, and even key Pauline concepts have been either ignored or changed to represent the church as a rigid hierarchy modeled on the patriarchal household. This is just a sketch of the issues that are involved in deciding authorship, and the curious reader can dig further into the details.
Just like determining the true Rembrandt from the false, scholars of Paul must make use of what we would call subjective criteria—standards based to a degree on perception instead of on only empirical facts.
To call this process subjective is not to demean it; rather, it is to put it in its proper frame. Some of these people wrote in a style that indicates word-by-word dictation, while others seem to have taken his ideas and put them in the words that seemed best to them. We know that Paul used an amanuensis at times—a scribe who wrote down his letters as he dictated them—and he often lists a coauthor at the beginning of his epistles.
Why would someone have done this? It is possible that at least one of the previous letters had been partially damaged or a portion of it lost, hence the need to integrate the existing portion into another letter. These disputed letters are, in the order they appear in the New Testament, Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus.
These letters are questioned for various reasons. Some show a difference in theology and vocabulary compared to the undisputed letters of Paul.
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