09 Jun '07 04:00>1 edit
As a young evangelical thumbing through the Bible, I was usually bored out of my gourd when forced to read introductory notes to any particular book. I found the arguments about authorship to be absurdly irrelevant -- why even bother arguing the case? Of course Paul et al wrote 2 Thessalonians! It says so right in the opening verses.
It never occurred to me to wonder why the editors of the Bible felt the imperative to include defensive comments about the traditional authorship of the New Testament books.
So I was surprised to discover that, contrary to my belief, that of my friends, and the arguments in the notes to my Bible, scholars by and large (xian and non-xian alike) agree that some books of the Bible were probably not written by the person that the text claims is the author. The actual writer "borrowed" the voice of a famous person in order to lend authority to their message.
Such books are referred to as "pseudepigrapha." Sounds so much more genteel than "forgery," doesn't it? There are some books of the Bible that most scholars agree fall into this category, and there are others that are the subject of scholarly debate. Lastly, there are of course those books that most scholars agree were indeed penned by the stated author. I'll stick here just to the Pauline epistles. In brief:
Church tradition holds that Paul wrote the following fourteen books:
Romans
1 & 2 Corinthians
Galatians
Ephesians
Philippians
Colossians
Hebrews
1 & 2 Thessalonians
1 & 2 Timothy
Titus
Philemon
Hebrews
Scholars are in agreement that Paul probably wrote these seven epistles:
Romans
Philippians
Galatians
1 & 2 Corinthians
1 Thessalonians
Philemon
Scholars continue to debate the Pauline authorship of these books:
Colossians
2 Thessalonians
What was most disturbing, though, was that most scholars agree that Paul did not write these books:
1 & 2 Timothy
Titus
Ephesians
Hebrews (not technically pseudepigrapha per se)
So put yourself my former shoes: that is, in the shoes of the evangelical, for whom the Bible is inerrant. The painful question for me was, of course: how could I consider a text that begins with an outright lie to be a reliable messenger of truth? If I couldn't, then what would this do to the integrity of the bible? What should I do in the face of these probabilities?
Here were the options as I perceived them:
1. Seek out all evidence to be had in support of actual Pauline authorship, and fight to continue to subscribe to that perspective. This lets go of neither inerrancy nor infallibility.
2. Discount the importance of the opening and closing, and perhaps even consider them the result of later scribal error or emendation. After all, the opening and closing are pretty much just the wrapper to the real meat of the letter. The deeper truths aren't in those salutations; they're in what the author says in the body of the letter. This is letting go of inerrancy in the translated copy as we now have it, but holding to the essential infallibility of the text.
3. Dismiss the letters as fabrications, and as such completely untrustworthy. How could an evangelical trust anything in a letter that begins with a lie? You can hardly call such a letter inerrant in its present form. This is holding the Bible to the standard of inerrancy, finding that it does not pass the test, and -- declining to accept the prospect that truth could be mingled with untruth -- also letting go of infallibility.
4. Treat the letters as specific interventions written by godly persons to specific audiences for specific purposes, and find value in the substance of both what is said as well as the godly intentions of the writers, insofar as a close analysis of the letters can reveal. That is, choose not to be bothered by the false claim of authorship, and focus instead on what the writer was trying to achieve rhetorically. To do this, the reader must be willing to accept that pseudepigrapha are not fatally flawed as lies, damned lies.
5. Try not to think too hard about it, knowing that other, more informed readers know better and still buy it, etc. etc.
Here's what I did:
My initial thought was to resist and go for #1. That didn't work so well. Again, all I could find among arguments that didn't sound either hysterical or flimsy was that it was possible that Paul wrote the letters now thought to be pseudepigrapha. Anybody who wants to make a case here, go for it.
#2 seemed a better choice. It's actually a common argument that God inspired the original manuscripts of the NT, and that human fallibility has since introduced error. Of course, the next question: is if God went to all the trouble to give us perfect manuscripts, why didn't he make them perfectly resistant to human fallibility, such that the 5400 or so manuscripts we now have were absolutely identical? It would be a lot better than what's now observable: that the mass of extant copies contain more textual differences among them than there are actual words in the New Testament. Still, though, #2 had appeal.
#5 was dumb, and morally dubious. I mean, this wasn't the same dealio as the John 3 question. There's a historicity question there, but as has been pointed out, "artistic license" doesn't come across the same way as "lie."
#4 sounds pretty good now, but I couldn't really take that avenue at the time, because I was (all together now!) an evangelical. #3 was the thing, you know.
Further, I'm not convinced that the early church fathers wouldn't have chosen #3 either. While it may be argued that authenticity was a loose term in early xianity, this is a problematic claim in light of what early xians actually did about it. Tertullian recounts the case of the forgery The Acts of Paul and Thecla, wherein the forger both was caught and confessed to the act. And guess what? No Acts of Paul and Thecla in the NT. Forgery was a common accusation leveled at putative apostolic letters which contained ideas unpopular with certain sects of xianity. Authenticity of authorship seems to have been important to church fathers.
I wondered what the early church fathers might have done with regard to the so-called Deutero-Pauline letters if they had been made privy to current scholarly thought on those letters.
So it was #3 for me. How 'bout you?
EDIT: Damn that truncated title. The original title of this thread is:
"Pesky Question #2: You're not Paul; you're that Land Shark!"
It never occurred to me to wonder why the editors of the Bible felt the imperative to include defensive comments about the traditional authorship of the New Testament books.
So I was surprised to discover that, contrary to my belief, that of my friends, and the arguments in the notes to my Bible, scholars by and large (xian and non-xian alike) agree that some books of the Bible were probably not written by the person that the text claims is the author. The actual writer "borrowed" the voice of a famous person in order to lend authority to their message.
Such books are referred to as "pseudepigrapha." Sounds so much more genteel than "forgery," doesn't it? There are some books of the Bible that most scholars agree fall into this category, and there are others that are the subject of scholarly debate. Lastly, there are of course those books that most scholars agree were indeed penned by the stated author. I'll stick here just to the Pauline epistles. In brief:
Church tradition holds that Paul wrote the following fourteen books:
Romans
1 & 2 Corinthians
Galatians
Ephesians
Philippians
Colossians
Hebrews
1 & 2 Thessalonians
1 & 2 Timothy
Titus
Philemon
Hebrews
Scholars are in agreement that Paul probably wrote these seven epistles:
Romans
Philippians
Galatians
1 & 2 Corinthians
1 Thessalonians
Philemon
Scholars continue to debate the Pauline authorship of these books:
Colossians
2 Thessalonians
What was most disturbing, though, was that most scholars agree that Paul did not write these books:
1 & 2 Timothy
Titus
Ephesians
Hebrews (not technically pseudepigrapha per se)
So put yourself my former shoes: that is, in the shoes of the evangelical, for whom the Bible is inerrant. The painful question for me was, of course: how could I consider a text that begins with an outright lie to be a reliable messenger of truth? If I couldn't, then what would this do to the integrity of the bible? What should I do in the face of these probabilities?
Here were the options as I perceived them:
1. Seek out all evidence to be had in support of actual Pauline authorship, and fight to continue to subscribe to that perspective. This lets go of neither inerrancy nor infallibility.
2. Discount the importance of the opening and closing, and perhaps even consider them the result of later scribal error or emendation. After all, the opening and closing are pretty much just the wrapper to the real meat of the letter. The deeper truths aren't in those salutations; they're in what the author says in the body of the letter. This is letting go of inerrancy in the translated copy as we now have it, but holding to the essential infallibility of the text.
3. Dismiss the letters as fabrications, and as such completely untrustworthy. How could an evangelical trust anything in a letter that begins with a lie? You can hardly call such a letter inerrant in its present form. This is holding the Bible to the standard of inerrancy, finding that it does not pass the test, and -- declining to accept the prospect that truth could be mingled with untruth -- also letting go of infallibility.
4. Treat the letters as specific interventions written by godly persons to specific audiences for specific purposes, and find value in the substance of both what is said as well as the godly intentions of the writers, insofar as a close analysis of the letters can reveal. That is, choose not to be bothered by the false claim of authorship, and focus instead on what the writer was trying to achieve rhetorically. To do this, the reader must be willing to accept that pseudepigrapha are not fatally flawed as lies, damned lies.
5. Try not to think too hard about it, knowing that other, more informed readers know better and still buy it, etc. etc.
Here's what I did:
My initial thought was to resist and go for #1. That didn't work so well. Again, all I could find among arguments that didn't sound either hysterical or flimsy was that it was possible that Paul wrote the letters now thought to be pseudepigrapha. Anybody who wants to make a case here, go for it.
#2 seemed a better choice. It's actually a common argument that God inspired the original manuscripts of the NT, and that human fallibility has since introduced error. Of course, the next question: is if God went to all the trouble to give us perfect manuscripts, why didn't he make them perfectly resistant to human fallibility, such that the 5400 or so manuscripts we now have were absolutely identical? It would be a lot better than what's now observable: that the mass of extant copies contain more textual differences among them than there are actual words in the New Testament. Still, though, #2 had appeal.
#5 was dumb, and morally dubious. I mean, this wasn't the same dealio as the John 3 question. There's a historicity question there, but as has been pointed out, "artistic license" doesn't come across the same way as "lie."
#4 sounds pretty good now, but I couldn't really take that avenue at the time, because I was (all together now!) an evangelical. #3 was the thing, you know.
Further, I'm not convinced that the early church fathers wouldn't have chosen #3 either. While it may be argued that authenticity was a loose term in early xianity, this is a problematic claim in light of what early xians actually did about it. Tertullian recounts the case of the forgery The Acts of Paul and Thecla, wherein the forger both was caught and confessed to the act. And guess what? No Acts of Paul and Thecla in the NT. Forgery was a common accusation leveled at putative apostolic letters which contained ideas unpopular with certain sects of xianity. Authenticity of authorship seems to have been important to church fathers.
I wondered what the early church fathers might have done with regard to the so-called Deutero-Pauline letters if they had been made privy to current scholarly thought on those letters.
So it was #3 for me. How 'bout you?
EDIT: Damn that truncated title. The original title of this thread is:
"Pesky Question #2: You're not Paul; you're that Land Shark!"