Reconciling Deutero-Pauline letters

[sccs]

Hi guys,

So I recently learned about the Deutero-Pauline letters in Scripture. In other words, Paul wrote some letters but scholars believe that many of them (like Ephesians, 1 and 2 Timothy) weren't written by Paul but by other people, perhaps Paul's followers, that wanted to perhaps "soften" up Paul's stance on marriage, women and other such issues.

My question is: as a Christian, how do I reconcile the knowledge of these perhaps "fake" teachings when I study the Bible? If Paul did not write these letters, couldn't the actual authors have made up some stuff?

Thanks for your help.

 

[ebia]

Hi guys,

So I recently learned about the Deutero-Pauline letters in Scripture. In other words, Paul wrote some letters but scholars believe that many of them (like Ephesians, 1 and 2 Timothy) weren't written by Paul but by other people, perhaps Paul's followers, that wanted to perhaps "soften" up Paul's stance on marriage, women and other such issues.

My question is: as a Christian, how do I reconcile the knowledge of these perhaps "fake" teachings when I study the Bible? If Paul did not write these letters, couldn't the actual authors have made up some stuff?

Thanks for your help.

Well. Firstly one can assume they are God breathed regardless of author. God is no more or less capable of working through another author than he is through Paul. We don't know who wrote Hebrews, but that doesn't mean we remove it from the canon.

Secondly, the idea that this author was clearly softening or hardening Paul's teaching is not at all straightforward.

Thirdly, the idea that "scholars do not believe Paul wrote" is very often grossly overstated. Despite claims like "80% of scholars reject Paul's authorship of Ephesians" meta-studies have shown the real rate peaked at more like 60%back in the eighties and has been dropping since.

There are three main reasons given for rejecting Pauline authorship:

Style and vocabulary: the trouble is that Paul does use a scribe and in any case the texts are not long enough for the statistical tests to be reliable.

Developing dogma: except there isn't a clear development

Different theology: if you build a theology on (one way of reading) Romans and Galatians you have trouble fitting Colossians and Ephesians into that. But if you start with Colossians and Ephesians then that problem vanishes. This suggests the problem is in the way Romans and Galatians have been read, not inconstancies between the epistles.

 

[sccs]

Thank you for your reply. Would you mind answering another question that I have? I realize it's a hefty question so I'm still trying to learn more.

Why were the current books in NT chosen to be in the canon? In other words, we see that the Gospel of Truth, Thomas, Phillip and all other such works such as a the Didache or whatever were not chosen.

However, if the answer is: it did not fit the image of Jesus or the theology that was presented in the other texts, then why are those other texts used as a basis? If I were compiling works about Jesus, wouldn't it be more objective to use works that show the totality of who he is rather than select works that all support one view?

I may be completely off here so I'd like to know your thoughts.

 

[ebia]

Thank you for your reply. Would you mind answering another question that I have? I realize it's a hefty question so I'm still trying to learn more.

Why were the current books in NT chosen to be in the canon? In other words, we see that the Gospel of Truth, Thomas, Phillip and all other such works such as a the Didache or whatever were not chosen.

However, if the answer is: it did not fit the image of Jesus or the theology that was presented in the other texts, then why are those other texts used as a basis? If I were compiling works about Jesus, wouldn't it be more objective to use works that show the totality of who he is rather than select works that all support one view?

I may be completely off here so I'd like to know your thoughts.

The primary basis for inclusion was "was this text widely read in churches".

The so-called Gospel of Thomas, etc, have never had that wide use. They appear to mostly have been written in the second century. As time went on of course various people wrote various things about Jesus. Some are clearly gnostic (like "Gospel of Thomas"), some appear to be sometimes dubious looking pious fiction (eg proto-evangellium of James) and so on. There are a mass of such books but they never had that universal use and mostly are clearly of a later vintage. They are often dubious in various ways.. Most of the so called gospels like Thomas are not gospels at all - they are collections of sayings with little or no narrative but a gospel is the announcement of a major event. A lot of what is in Thomas is also in the matt, mark and luke. The bits that aren't range from the mundane, through the clearly political (trying to prioritise Thomas over Peter) to the blatantly gnostic, to outright drivel. It doesn't really take a genius to see why most of these other books wouldn't make the cut - they really are not of the same quality at all, on the whole. They are texts produced later by off-beat sects to bolster the theology of that sect.

The Didache is slightly different in that it is, or at least may be, earlier but it still was never proclaimed in worship widely. It's more of a manual for life and worship than a book to be proclaimed in worship.

The canon is not trying to be a library of everything ever written on Jesus, but a list of those texts to be proclaimed in worship, and it was arrived at by consensus of what was being universally used that way. In the majority of cases there was overwhelming consensus across the board.

 

[joey_downunder]

Hi guys,

So I recently learned about the Deutero-Pauline letters in Scripture. In other words, Paul wrote some letters but scholars believe that many of them (like Ephesians, 1 and 2 Timothy) weren't written by Paul but by other people, perhaps Paul's followers, that wanted to perhaps "soften" up Paul's stance on marriage, women and other such issues.

My question is: as a Christian, how do I reconcile the knowledge of these perhaps "fake" teachings when I study the Bible? If Paul did not write these letters, couldn't the actual authors have made up some stuff?

Thanks for your help.

Was the writer Bart D. Ehrman?
Book Review of Bart D. Ehrman's Forged: Writing in the Name of God ”Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are | Parchment and Pen

 

[ebia]

Was the writer Bart D. Ehrman?
Book Review of Bart D. Ehrman's Forged: Writing in the Name of God ”Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are | Parchment and Pen

There's a whole mass of very respectable scholars who have queried Pauline and Petrine authorship of various epistles over the years.

 

[Ishraqiyun]

Another major reason for inclusion or exclusion- Do the people making the decision to include/exclude agree with the text in question. Does it teach what they teach. If yes then it's more likely to be included in their canon. If not then it gets thrown out.

 

[dana b]

Thank you for your reply. Would you mind answering another question that I have? I realize it's a hefty question so I'm still trying to learn more.

Why were the current books in NT chosen to be in the canon? In other words, we see that the Gospel of Truth, Thomas, Phillip and all other such works such as a the Didache or whatever were not chosen.

However, if the answer is: it did not fit the image of Jesus or the theology that was presented in the other texts, then why are those other texts used as a basis? If I were compiling works about Jesus, wouldn't it be more objective to use works that show the totality of who he is rather than select works that all support one view?

I may be completely off here so I'd like to know your thoughts.

The Books chosen to make up the Holy Bible are an act of God.
You might want to look at the post "Bible divides into three parts" in the Bibliology and Hermeneutics section of this forum.

 

[hedrick]

The point of Ehrman's book isn't arguments for why many of the epistles weren't written by the stated authors. That's been around for quite a while. The point of his book is that ancient standards said that claiming authorship falsely was not acceptable. It was an attempt to get Paul's authority for something that Paul hadn't written. Yes, it was done commonly, but attitudes weren't different then and now, because false claims were an attempt to claim an authority to which one is not entitled.

I'm inclined to agree. The NT books were certainly those that were in common use, but it was pretty clear that folks who accepted the Pastorals thought that they were written by Paul. If it had been known that they were not, and that someone had faked details of Paul's life to make them look authentic, I don't believe the books would have been chosen.

Hence I believe that if you accept the argument that the books are not actually by Paul, you would not want to accept their authority, although they would still be usable as sources for what some in the next generation of the Church believed, and that might still be useful.

I think some of Ehrman's points at the end of the book are less convincing. E.g. I can easily imagine reasons for the "we" sections in Acts other than fakery. (Using a source that said "we"; the author was actually present at just those times, but Paul didn't present his theology to his traveling companions in enough detail to prevent the differences in perspective between Acts and Paul's letters). I am also not convinced that the census in Luke was a fabrication. If it's wrong (and I'm not entirely convinced that it is), there are plenty of reasons that the sources he says he used could have been mistaken, or he could have been mistaken. Not every error is the result of lying. But it's hard to believe that claiming to be Paul when you're not would be simply a mistake.

I'm not stating here whether they were or were not actually written by Paul. I don't feel like I know the issues well enough to say that. I'm just looking at the consequences if in fact the claims for authorship are false. I will say, however, that generally I want major points of doctrine to be based on several different NT traditions. Thus I would be very wary of something that is only present in the Pastorals, but that concern is not unique to them.

One of the most interesting cases is the woman taken in adultery. It's pretty clear that this wasn't part of the original text of John. However I've always assumed it was a legitimate story about Jesus, that was passed down separately. It's easy to imagine innocent ways in which it could have become included in the text. Why do I assume it is a real story? Because the attitude of the early church on forgiveness and sexual purity was such that it's hard to imagine it being made up later.