A Middle Way Between Authenticity and Forgery

One thing that has helped me in thinking about Pauline authorship in the New Testament epistles is that while we may think about someone writing in another person’s name today as forgery and the copying of their ideas as plagiarism, that wasn’t how people thought about it in the first century when all of these epistles were being written. It would have been relatively common, even within scripture itself, for followers of a spiritual leader or prophet to continue writing in their name once they died. One example is the book of Isaiah in the Hebrew Scriptures, which was likely not written all at once by a single prophet named Isaiah, but written in three distinct section in three separate periods of time. They have all, though, been combined into one book.

Instead of a person forging letters from Paul, it was more likely that any pseudo-Pauline letter was written by a person who had been a follower or fellow-evangelist of Paul’s writing in his name as a continuation of his ministry and thought. These pseudo-Pauline authors would have been very familiar with his theology and his vocabulary, and thus the similarity between the contested and uncontested letters, but they were still different people living in later times, and thus the slight inconsistencies with uncontested Pauline epistles.

This way we don’t need to create a dichotomy where the pseudonymous epistles are either lies or need to be removed. Instead, they invite us into mystery in a new way. The same goes for the idea that if one contested letter of Paul is actually Pauline that then every contested letter has to be authentically Pauline. It is likely that at least a few, if not all, of those 6 contested letters was authored pseudonymously, but we will most likely never know. So amazing, I think, that we are invited to find authority in these letters based on something more than just their authors. Instead, we can approach them by recognizing that their authority comes from us, in that they are authoritative in as much as they resonate with the human experience of those who have read them and made them part of the cannon, and we who continue to read them and hold them gently today.

Related posts:

Outsourcing image annotation services is one the most crucial task for AI companies seek training to develop the models. Actually, machine learning training data is a kind of fuel works for…

Java 8 implements many features of functional programming such as Optional, Completable Futures, Streams, Lambdas and many more. All these Features have created a language which is more readable and…

Victim blaming is the act of holding a victim of a crime, such as sexual assault, responsible for what happened to them, rather than placing the blame solely on the perpetrator who committed the…