Challenging the Authenticity of Paul’s Letters

Continuing from:

1. New Book Questioning Authenticity of Paul’s Letters
2. Nina Livesey’s The Letters of Paul in their Roman Literary Context

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This book argues that these seven letters* are … pseudonymous, literary, and fictional, letters-in-form-only. Their likely origin is Marcion’s mid-second-century speculative/philosophical school in Rome, the site and timeframe of our earliest evidence of a collection of ten Pauline epistles (c. 144 CE). Deploying the letter genre, trained authors of this school crafted teachings in the name of the Apostle Paul for peer elite audiences.

This study contributes to an important conceptual shift in our under­standing of early Christianity. (2)

* – referring to the seven of the New Testament letters that are widely accepted as genuinely authored by Paul or his secretary: Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon.

But how is the layperson, someone with an interest in Christianity but busy with other matters, to know “what’s what” about the sources? I am also mindful of the interest in the Christ Myth theory among several readers here and in the course of these posts I will point out where I believe some popular notions in that quarter might need rethinking.

Hopefully interested laypersons will find something to think about from this part review of The Letters of Paul in their Roman Literary Context.

A good place to start is getting our bearings on how we got to the position today where a core of the NT letters are considered to be genuine writings of Paul.

Scripture Status from the Beginning

To begin at the beginning, as NL does, we are not surprised to learn that notable Church Fathers such as Irenaeus and Tertullian (late second and early third centuries) appealed to their copies of Paul’s letters as if they were authoritative scripture. But is that how those (or the one) responsible for the letters meant them to be read? NL replies:

In that these authors are only at a slight remove, likely only several decades, from those responsible for the Pauline letters (see Chapter 4), it is reasonable to assume that their assessment of them as scriptural is how they were first envisioned to be. (36 – bolded highlighting is my own in all quotations)

Keep in mind that Irenaeus and Tertullian protested virulently against another prominent figure, Marcion, whom they accused of falsifying the letters. The actual words Paul supposedly wrote were matters of heaven or hell from the very first time we read about them in the external witnesses. That note does surely raise the question of how informal correspondence to scattered places could have been placed so soon on a par with Scriptures.

Criticism and Rescue

The European Enlightenment was the age of Isaac Newton, Mozart, Voltaire, Rousseau, Bentham, Locke and James Cook. The new rationalist spirit sought to discover what could be understood about Paul’s letters by examining what the letters indicated about the situation of the author and his addressees. It is worth noting some of the milestone critics for a better perspective on modern views:

Edward Evanson (1731-1805) proposed criteria and tests to determine the authenticity of the letters and their historical reliability.

His conclusion: All except for 1&2 Corinthians, 1&2 Thessalonians, Galatians and 1&2 Timothy were inauthentic. The only trustworthy gospel was that of Luke. Acts was also a useful guide to testing which letters were genuine.

As we too often find even among modern scholars, Evanson’s criteria and methods were often circular and more subjective than he might have liked to admit.

Wilhelm M.L. de Wette (1780-1849), assuming the letters to be genuine, laboured over reconstructing the historical setting of those to whom the letters were written along with teasing out clues that would allow a more graphic biography of Paul himself. This approach

serves to give the impres­sion – without adequate evidence – of the realia of Paul, his communities, and the letters as genuine correspondence . . . . (41)

The reader is taken away from the main theological and doctrinal contents of the letters and ushered into a socio-historical-biographical world of Paul and his churches. The foundations of this world, however, are the letters themselves along with Acts, so again we encounter a circular process. The letters are understood in terms of the social world and persons and communities that are taken from the letters themselves.

De Wette had the imagination and gift to breathe life into Paul and his communities, their trials and successes, but alas, reading imaginatively into a text and seeing a life behind it is not the most disciplined of scholarship.

De Wette has won a more positive memory for his dissertation arguing that Deuteronomy was composed around the time of Josiah, not by Moses, in only a few dozen pages.

For at least one-hundred and thirty years, W.M.L.de Wette (1780-1849) has been cited in practically every scholarly discussion of the history of textual and source criticism of the Pentateuch . . . (Harvey/Halpern, 47)

You can peruse a translation of his Historico-Critical Introduction to the Canonical Books of the New Testament at archive.org.

Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860)

F.C. Baur (not to be confused with Bruno Bauer) is a name many readers have heard of for good (or “not so good”, depending on your point of view) reason. His influence is still with biblical scholarship however much his views have been modified. Baur’s focus was on understanding Christian origins. He concluded that Christianity arose from a “spiritual insight” under the guiding light of Paul in reaction against an essentially legalistic Judaism led by the apostles James and Peter. For Baur, only four epistles were genuine: Galatians, 1&2 Corinthians, Romans (the Hauptbriefe). Those four were to be the platform from which to view Christian origins: Acts was unreliable as history.

Baur’s analysis, however, contained a fatal methodological flaw. He deployed circular reasoning. s That is, “NT documents [the Hauptbriefe] are used to reconstruct early Christian history; the recon­struction of early Christian history provides the framework for the assessment of NT documents [the Hauptbriefe].” Otherwise put, Baur posits a great rift between Judaism and Christianity from reading the Hauptbriefe, and then relies on those same letters to confirm his historical reconstruction. (45f)

Further, NL points out that Baur came to his understanding of Christian origins largely as a result of his attachment to the notion that Judaism was a kind of primitive legalistic religion and Christianity a liberating spiritual one, along with the belief that ancient historical narratives almost by definition windows, however much darkened, into real historical events. There was also a prevailing view that history’s conflicts were stepping stones towards an overall advancement of human civilization.

Critics arose but in varying ways they embraced Baur’s assumptions — especially their high esteem for the person of Paul as a religious innovator. How to determine a letter’s authenticity? Four guidelines prevailed:

1. Did a letter fit the Christian-spiritual vs Judaism-legalistic model of Christian origins? This question led to the final conclusion, still accepted today, that seven of the letters are authentic: Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon.

2. Did a letter conform to Pauline style?

3. Are there early external witnesses to a letter?

4. Did a letter agree with Acts?

Such guidelines have become standard to the extent that I think many lay readers accept them as reasonable grounds for assessing authenticity. NL prompts us to pause and think and take note that they cannot function as independent tests of authenticity.

Thus NL traces the emergence of criticism of Paul’s letters through to the current generally held opinion that seven are from the hand of Paul or his secretary. Paul is the pivotal genius responsible for the shape of Christianity.

The main point that NL is stressing is that the value of these letters since the Enlightenment rests on their historical veracity and what they reveal about the true historical situation of the early church.

I add a note here for those who rely on Paul’s letters for their view that Jesus began as a mythical figure who was later historicized. If we remove ourselves from Baur’s influence and consider the possibility that none of the letters are first century compositions and not written many years before the gospels, how securely can we maintain the interpretation that their author understood Christ to have been a heavenly and not an earthly figure? If he were writing around the same time as the gospels were appearing would we not expect some explicit evidence — whether in the gospels, letters or other sources — of a clash of the heavenly against the earthly career of Jesus? Might not the dearth of historical details of Jesus in the letters simply be a consequence of the author/s placing themselves as an independent voice in a post earthly Jesus time setting?

Genuine Letters?

In many ways Paul’s letters don’t look like other letters. Compare for a start the rambling openings in which the author asserts his authority and makes historical notes about the recipients on the one hand with the normal letter opening of the time on the other: “To Rufus, Greetings…” The foundational scholar on this question is the philologist Gustav Adolf Deissmann (1866-1937).

As with Baur, NL addresses the apologetic assumptions guiding the investigation. The letters look different, Deissmann explained, because they are written within a spontaneous spiritual fervour that cast aside formal literary discipline and wrote from the heart. (Another scholar attributed the “uniqueness” of the gospels to a similar origin.) The letters were “artless, personal, genuine, and [therefore] historically reliable” (57).

Deissmann and others scoured ancient personal letters especially from Egypt and the Levant for comparison, studying presentations and words used in known manuscripts and newly discovered papyri, to find “natural” settings for many of the details (biographical, structural, wording) thus “confirming” their genuineness.

For NL, the enormous scholarship undertaken in these studies was misdirected. For example, Paul’s letters are closer in length to the letter-treatises of upper class Romans like Cicero and Seneca than to any personal letters from the papyri.

So scholarship has ever since been seeking to find commonalities between Paul’s letters and other letter formats to establish that they are genuine letters, while at the same time putting their differences down to the unique situation of early Christian “spiritual life” and particular circumstances. We are asked to believe that the letters are genuine outpourings from the intoxication of “new beliefs”, especially the  expectation of an apocalyptic return of Jesus. It is sometimes claimed that a letter of Paul is essentially a “directly spoken world” without literary artifice without any authorial attention to literary artifice. Such a view defies all that we otherwise know about any form of writing.

But biblical scholarship in some quarters at least has come to learn (especially, as I understand it, from anthropological studies) that new religions do not romantically erupt in a wave of spiritual fervour generated by new beliefs (such movements usually break out within established religions) but that rather, “in the beginning”, is ritual, practice. Myths come later to explain the rituals.

Deissmann posited an understanding of early Christianity that was ahistorical, and mythical. There was no Urchristentum as Deissmann (and Overbeck) imagined. Modern scholars of religion remark that rather than a concept or belief at a religion’s core, one finds instead practices. Only later is meaning applied to those practices. (64)

If beliefs and letters are not at the starting gate, what is?

The problem of positing “belief” as the seed and core of early Christianity is in part set out in an article available publicly (and cited by NL): The Concept of Religion and the Study of the Apostle Paul by Brent Nongbri. As further noted by NL, Nongbri draws upon “The Origins of Christianity Within, and Without, ‘Religion’: A Case Study”, which is the final essay in William Arnal’s and Russell McCutcheon’s The Sacred Is the Profane. The Political Nature of “Religion”. (The title is a reply to Mircea Eliade‘s pioneering The Sacred and the Profane of 1959.) Arnal and McCutcheon address the general isolation of biblical studies within the broader academy along with their all too often clearly flawed methodologies. “Religion” itself is largely a modern concept that has the unfortunate result of deflecting scholarly investigation away from specific practices, community behaviours and identities, that formed the real foundation of what became Christianity. Our focus on New Testament and related texts further blinkers us from other evidence that suggest quite different practices and tastes that can be discerned in archaeological remains and in what we know of other community formations. Indeed, it is suggested that the New Testament authors meant to impose a new textual understanding on the communities. The authors of these texts were literati who “viewed themselves as schools”. The texts constructed Jesus as an outsider figure who represented the communities themselves. They don’t mention Bruno Bauer but BB said as much more than a century and a half ago. In Arnal and McCutcheon’s words,

Speaking about Jesus as a particular type of social strategy was attractive for exactly the same reasons that, at the same time and among similar people, escapist novels, Stoic philosophy, and voluntary associations also flourished. (Sacred Is the Profane, 168)

I find it very easy to accept NL’s argument given what surely must have been many displaced persons looking for a clearer identity after the destruction of the Jewish way of life in Palestine and beyond as a result of the savage wars of Trajan and Hadrian to suppress Jewish uprisings. Not only Jews themselves but the gentile proselytes and “god-fearers” who had been attracted to “Judaism” would have been seeking a necessarily revised identity.

Continuing…..

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Arnal, William, and Russell T. McCutcheon. The Sacred Is the Profane: The Political Nature Of “Religion.” New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Halpern, Baruch, Paul B. Harvey, and Wilhelm Martin Leberecht De Wette. “W.M.L. de Wette’s ‘Dissertatio Critica …’: Context and Translation,” January 1, 2004. https://www.academia.edu/1202115/de_Wette_diss_crit.

Livesey, Nina E. The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. 

Nongbri, Brent. “The Concept of Religion and the Study of the Apostle Paul.” Journal of the Jesus Movement in Its Jewish Setting: From the First to the Seventh Century 2 (2015): 1–26.

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