Questioning Paul’s Letters. Were they really “occasional”? Or rhetorical fictions?

Edited with a few minor additions and corrections of lots of typos at 16:16 pm CST (Australia) time, 21st Dec 2012.

I don’t know the answer to those questions in the title. But I have been looking at scholarly arguments that maintain Paul’s letters were, indeed, carefully crafted works of theological instructions that were composed in the form of occasional correspondence. That is, their appearance as spur-of-the-moment letters is a rhetorical fiction.

I have never known what to make of Paul’s letters. There are many reasons for that. But there have always been two reasons I have been at least open to questioning what they seem to be:

1. Patricia Rosenmeyer in 2001 published a book, Ancient Epistolary Fictions, demonstrating that the writing of fictional letters was an art form well known and practiced in the literary culture of the era we are talking about. I dot-pointed some of the highlights from her book in an old post of mine, Rosenmeyer, Ancient Epistolary Fictions;
2. I stumbled across a very modern voice from a 1904 publication warning New Testament scholars of the danger of accepting ancient sources at face value or according to their own self-witness, and the need always to demonstrate, never assume, that ancient sources are in fact what we (or even the ancients) think they are:
   • The history of classical literature has gradually learned to work with the notions of the literary-historical legend, novella, or fabrication; after untold attempts at establishing the factuality of statements made it has discovered that only in special cases does there exist a tradition about a given literary production independent of the self-witness of the literary production itself [that is, we need to ask if our earliest references to Paul’s letters base their information or knowledge of those letters on what the letters themselves say, and not from any independent tradition]; and that the person who utilizes a literary-historical tradition must always first demonstrate its character as a historical document. General grounds of probability cannot take the place of this demonstration. It is no different with Christian authors. In his literary history Eusebius has taken reasonable pains; as he says in the preface he had no other material at his disposal than the self-witness of the books at hand . . . .
     

     This is from an academic paper delivered in 1904 by E. Schwartz: “Uber den Tod der Sohne Zebedaei. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Johannesevangeliums” (= Gesammelte Schriften V, 1963,48-123). It is cited in a 1991 chapter by Luise Abramowski titled “The ‘Memoirs of the Apostles’ in Justin” pp.331-332 published in “The Gospel and the Gospels” ed. Peter Stuhlmacher.

Earlier this month I wrote my first post explaining why Paul’s letter to the Galatians may not have been spontaneously written by a fearful apostle agonizing over the possibility of losing his flock as most readers have always assumed: Sowing Doubt That An Emotional Paul Authored Galatians. Paul’s “spontaneous emotional outburst” may well be seen as an artful reconstruction of passages in Jeremiah. I will have more to say about the literary/theological nature of the “opponents” Paul speaks about in that letter later in this post.

There are many other passages in Paul’s writings that can be explained as being carefully crafted on Old Testament narrative passages and structures. I am currently catching up with one of Richard Hays’ works (The Faith of Jesus Christ) along similar lines, but till I complete that I will point to aspects of Thomas Brodie’s works. 1 Corinthians 6:1-11, for example, that we have always taken to be Paul’s response to nasty squabbles within the Corinthian church involving members taking one another to court, may instead be a theological teaching based on, and “spiritualizing”, the teaching of Deuteronomy 1. To give just the bird’s eye overview (avoiding the details for now), we have in both passages

• appointments of the wise to judge
• the judging among brothers
• the command to avoid unjust judgement/unjust judges
• defining those who will not inherit the land/the kingdom
• defining those who will inherit the land/the kingdom
• reference to moral failure leading to complete defeat

The ensuing passages in 1 Corinthians with their seemingly random sequence — instructions on foods, sexual relations, food again and eating with knowledge, and the perishing of the weak brother — may be less randomly sequenced than we think if we compare the Genesis account of God instructing Adam and Eve on foods, then sex and the distinct roles of Adam and Eve, then eating with knowledge, and the death that follows, in particular of Cain’s brother.

Okay, that’s going to seem bizarre to most — and it did at first to me, too. So I should back up a bit at this point and bring in at least one passage from Richard Hays. In Romans 10:6-8 a character Paul names “The Righteousness from Faith” says:

Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’ ^{. . .} or ‘Who will descend into the deep?’ . . . The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart.

A reader of this passage who is familiar with Deuteronomy hears Paul echoing Deut. 30:11-14 where Moses is exhorting Israel to keep (not the faith but) the law:

Moses’ point is that the Law is near: the commandments of God are neither esoteric nor impossible to obey, for they have been graciously given to Israel in “this book of the Law.” In Romans 10, however, a puzzling shift occurs: as Paul interprets these words, they refer not to the Law but to “the word of faith which we preach” (Rom. 10:8b). Indeed, while claiming Moses’ words from Deuteronomy, The Righteousness from Faith now appears to speak as Moses’ adversary. Through a series of parenthetical interpretive comments, Paul takes possession of Moses’ exhortation and transforms its sense so that Moses is made to bear witness to the gospel.

This tour de force is not an isolated instance. Paul repeatedly interprets Scripture in ways that must have startled his first audience. . . . Paul appropriates the story of Abraham, the forefather of Israel who first received circumcision as a sign of covenant relation with God, in order to argue against circumcision. . . .

In Paul we encounter a first-century Jewish thinker who, while undergoing a profound disjuncture with his own religious tradition, grappled his way through to a vigorous and theologically generative reappropriation of Israel’s Scriptures. . . . [H]e insistently sought to show that his proclamation of the gospel was grounded in the witness of Israel’s sacred texts. The trick lay in learning how to read these texts aright. . . (Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul 1989, pp. 1-2, my emphasis)

We have every reason to expect the unexpected, the counter-intuitive, when investigating how Paul used Scriptures.

We are well aware of the way the authors of the Gospels re-used Scriptures by changing its original meaning and context completely. Elijah soaring into the heavens on a fiery chariot becomes Jesus quietly ascending through the clouds; the healing of a leper of high social standing and matching pride is turned into the healing of a leper who is a social outcast; and so on and on.

Is it possible that the author(s) of the epistles was/were doing something similar with the Scriptures in order to compose his/their treatises?

Thomas Brodie came to the possibility that Paul’s letters were not what they seem to be at face-value through reflections on Robert Alter’s Art of Biblical Narrative. Brodie studied this work to try “to get a better sense of what kind of writing we are dealing with in the Old Testament,” and came to see that the NT epistles fall into the same attributes as Hebrew narrative: they are reticent, composite, repetitive, and — “historicized fiction.” In Brodie’s view,

What hit me was that the entire narrative regarding Paul, everything, the thirteen epistles say about him or imply — about his life, his work and travels, his character, his sending and receiving of letters, his readers and his relationship to them — all of that was historicized fiction. [Anyone who has read Patricia Rosenmeyer’s Ancient Epistolary Fictions (see above) will know that all these sorts of “throwaway details” in the epistles are the very points of verisimilitude that were taught and applied to create fictional letters as an art-form.] It was fiction, meaning that the figure of Paul was a work of imagination, but this figure had been historicized — presented in a way that made it look like history, history-like, ‘fiction made to resemble the uncertainties of life in history’ (Alter 1981: 27). (Thomas Brodie, Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus 2012, p. 145).

Such a conclusion obviously requires an explanation. Brodie continues:

The idea of composing letters and attributing them to someone else, real or fictitious, is not unique. Examples vary from the fictitious correspondence between Paul and Seneca — a series of letters not composed until around 300 CE — to modern letters that are lighter in tone, such as C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters (1942), or humorous , such as John B. Keane’s Letters of a Love-hungry Farmer (1974). The picture of John B. Keane’s farmer may be fictitious and humorous, but he is not vague. The love-hungry John Bosco McLane is fully historicized, complete with life-like details. The letters bearing Paul’s name are in a different league, but some of the same principles apply. For the sake of communicating a message, it is possible to compose letters that evoke a vibrant character and an epoch-making vision.

So — and this reality took time to sink in — the figure of Paul joined the ranks of so many other figures from the older parts of the Bible, figures who, despite the historical details surrounding them, were literary, figures of the imagination.

This did not make these figures without value, any more than the figure of the Good Samaritan on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho is without value. . . . (p. 146)

And further,

The scriptural account of Paul’s life, with its details, from womb to old age, links him both to God and to human existence. Under Jesus, he is presented as someone to be imitated, a central model. ‘Everything was given to him [Paul] so that he could be for all peoples a sign of the merciful God’ (Martini 2008: 24) . . .

The idea that Paul was a literary figure did not remove the possibility that behind the epistles lay one outstanding historical figure who was central to the inspiring of the epistles, but that is not the figure whom the epistles portray. Under that person’s inspiration — or the inspiration of that person plus co-workers — the epistles portray a single individual, Paul, who incorporates in himself and in his teaching a distillation of the age-long drama of God’s work on earth. (pp. 146-147)

Paul as a Literary Figure: Direct Evidence — from the Epistles Themselves

1. Authorship

Scholars now generally agree that Paul is not the real author of all NT letters that bear his name and contain “biographical” details about him.

So the principle that ostensible authorship and biographical detail in a letter does not necessarily establish they are really by Paul is already established.

Further, the criteria (style and content) used for establishing the genuine epistles are not reliable. I have repeated the observation of another scholar(s) that they are, indeed, circular: “we know these letters are written by Paul because they contain a vibrant style; we know Paul wrote in a vibrant style because those letters are by him.” Brodie, however, uses his own literary analysis of the letters, such as 1 Corinthians and Galatians (as referenced above) to argue that the letters are not at all what they seem to be on the surface.

The claim at 1 Cor. 16:21 of “Paul” adding his signature is another piece of narrative fiction that fitted well with the larger fiction of Paul’s life as well as with the contemporary convention of having a scribe or secretary write for the “real” author.

Brodie concludes:

And once Paul’s authorship of 1 Corinthians goes, Paul’s authorship of all the epistles becomes open to question. (p. 148)

2. Genre/form/kind/nature

Though the task of identifying a document’s nature (what is it, exactly?) is pivotal, it has not been easy in the case of Paul’s letters. They have often been classified with simple, plain letters like other ancient letters, “like spontaneous letters to specific individuals.”

But that mantle of spontaneous simplicity seems interwoven with other features. Under closer scrutiny the documents have emerged as more sophisticated. For instance, in varying ways they use careful rhetoric. Furthermore, the very size of the epistles makes them stand out, and asks if they contain more than normal epistles. On average they are over ten times longer than papyrus letters, and more than two to eight times longer than the sophisticated epistles of Seneca and Cicero. They are in a league of their own. If the epistles are in a league of their own, what makes them different? Does some line separate them clearly from others? (pp. 148-149)

This reminds me of the Gospels themselves. They, too, are innovative, standing out, unlike other works, though similar to many others at the same time.

Brodie explains that while the letters do often look spontaneous with a sense of addressing immediate contingencies, and thus are called “letters” by some scholars, they also appear to contain meticulously shaped essays beneath the surface, and hence other scholars prefer to call them “epistles”.

Brodie concludes, therefore, that these works are a combination of genres, not unlike the way Genesis is s synthesis of genres.

Seneca’s letters too involve blending; they are ‘essays in disguise’. Likewise the Pauline epistles, but more so. They look like letters, but they are essays in disguise, they are multi-faceted epistles. (p. 149)

3. Autobiographical passages

The epistles’ autobiographical passages appear quite spontaneous and realistic, perfect material for a historian.

Oh yes. How that line jells with what I have come to discuss so often with respect to the gospels. Recall Liverani’s observation about “lazy historians” picking up and running with any narrative account that seems to explain it all for them.

However, comparison with other ancient authors shows that Pauline autobiography is part of a larger literary practice and that the epistles deliberately use material that appears autobiographical for pedagogical purposes.

Now that brings to mind Troel’s Engberg-Pedersen’s Paul and the Stoics: Paul appears to use his own life and relationship with the implied readers of his writings as a paradigm of the gospel itself. See my two posts from 2009 discussing this on this blog.

George Lyons concludes (1985: 171, 224-26):

Various strands of evidence come together to support the conclusion that Paul presents his ‘autobiography’ as a paradigm of the gospel of Christian freedom. . .

Since we have only Paul’s autobiographical remarks and not his opponents’ accusations, which the consensus assumes proved them, it is necessary to exercise restraint in asserting too confidently that specific charges actually existed, much less what they may have been. Even the existence of ‘opponents’ in the usual sense of the word is far from certain. . . What he says is determined by his rhetorical approach and not by his opponents’ reproaches. . .

Proper recognition of the rhetorical elements in Paul’s autobiographical remarks provides a further challenge to existing approaches, which characteristically reach historical conclusions before the question of literary function has been adequately addressed. (pp. 149-150, my emphasis)

4. References about readers/communities

What is true of Paul’s picture of himself is true also of his pictures of his reader or communities, including his opponents; they are pedagogical rather than historical. (p. 150)

This, of course, follows from an understanding of the literary function and quality of Paul’s own life.

5. References to receiving traditions

Brodie sees these as leading readers to think of Paul as inheriting an ecclesiastical tradition. If so, this should be evaluated in the same context as the other fabrications of the letters as indicated above. Once again, says Brodie, we have an imitation of history rather than real history.

I wonder how Brodie’s argument might look if he understood those “receiving” passages as referring to revelations from Scriptures.

On the famous passage of 1 Corinthians 15:1-8 in which the risen Lord makes his appearances to a series of individuals, Brodie sees the construction of this passage as dependent upon the regular appearances of God to individuals in Sinai and the wilderness (Exod. 19:3-11; Num. 11:25; 12:5; 14:10; 16:19; 17:7).

6. References to writings from himself and his readers

Brodie’s next point would come as no surprise to readers of Rosenmeyer either. The many references in the letters to other writings, and other writers, is all part of the fictional drama and do not necessarily refer to real documents.

The procedure of referring to such background documents fits into the larger practice whereby ancient writings, including the Hebrew Bible, sometimes referred to other documents for rhetorical purposes, to achieve a certain effect, even if these documents did not exist (Stott 2008: 122, 136) (p. 151 — I have been long wanting to do a post on Katherine Stott’s book, but it led me to a series of other books, some of which I am still following up in the meantime)

7. Travels

Brodie points out that Paul’s travels “are described in ways that reflect older travel accounts” and cites certain instances. One point that he singles out, and one that I have frequently remarked upon, is the way Acts concludes in the same way as does 2 Kings — with a captivity scene, though also with some future promise and hope implicit in it.

It also occurs to me just now that Paul’s travels may possibly have been a natural metaphor to indicate the transience of this life on earth — in the same way the wilderness wanderings and emphasis on tabernacles (“tents”) served the same thematic function, both in the OT and the Gospel of John. And that “tent” reference segues into Brodie’s final point . . .

8. Occupation as a tent-maker

Brodie believes this reference (Acts 18:3) should be understood in conjunction with the Septuagint image of the tent and the image of Paul as the architect (1 Cor. 3:10-11). I have also stolen some of Brodie’s thunder with my comment on travels above.

Outline of a working hypothesis

Brodie then surveys some of the “Circumstantial Evidence, from Biblical Studies as a Whole” that might lead us to the conclusion that Paul is a literary figure. I won’t detail these points. Essentially he is addressing the recent shifts in biblical scholarly understandings, both of the Old and New Testaments, and the emerging awareness of the literary nature of both.

Finally, Brodie presents an outline of a working hypothesis. I will select just a few snippets for here:

A key purpose in composing the epistles with Paul’s name was to build a new Moses, a figure who, like Moses of old, would bring God’s word to the people, in Paul’s case to all the people, and would do so in a form that showed God’s work as continuing creation into a new phase, into a new creation. In doing this they followed ancient methods of composition. They reshaped existing writings, especially the scriptures — with which they saw themselves in continuity — and particularly the scriptures pertaining to Moses. But instead of using prose narrative, they used letter writing (epistolography), and in doing so brought the composition of epistles to a new level. Yet they did not lose the force of ancient narrative; the epistles were written in such a way that they told powerful narrative concerning God and concerning the new Moses — Paul.

Moses is not the only Old Testament character reflected in Paul. So, for instance, are much later characters such as Tobit and Daniel. . . .

The writers of the epistles were aware of one another, and in diverse ways, while each built something new, they also built on one another.

The figure of Paul was built up not only by the epistle writers, but also by Luke . . . . (pp. 153-154, my own emphasis, as in all quotes)

And at this point I am reminded of the many Pauls who vied with one another for theological “truth”: see my posts on Dennis MacDonald’s The Legend and the Apostle for details about these.

Light on other questions?

One of the biggest curiosities that has perplexed me is how we can account for Paul’s letters being our earliest Christian documents while at the same time finding no external witness to them until well into the second century. Adding to this perplexity is Justin Martyr (mid-second century) writing so much about Christian teaching, and so many times sounding very much like he is drawing upon a passage in Paul’s letters, yet indicating in other ways that Paul is a complete unknown to him. (See also Justin Martyr and the Jews by David Rokeah). There seems to have been something awry, something odd, about the origins of these letters and the way they came to find their place in the canon of the orthodox church.

Roger Parvus has suggested they were originally Simonian compositions. Brodie is suggesting that they were the product of a school, much in the same way Philip R. Davies thinks the prophetic books of the Old Testament were composed in dialogue with one another by different schools. Or are these hypotheses necessarily exclusive of one another?

When I retire I’m gonna have the time to find the answer! 😉

---

If you enjoyed this post, please consider donating to Vridar. Thanks!

---