At our last meeting, Juliana, just before she had to leave for class, she asked me (because I’ve been to seminary) about questions of Pauline authorship. Specifically she said that someone claimed that Paul didn’t even write such epistles as 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, and (if I remember right) Colossians. Still fearing that text critics might be hovering in low-earth orbit ready to pounce on my rusty seminary lore, I proceed nonetheless.
The data in question have to do with the reception history of and a few features within those letters traditionally called Paul’s. For one, the earliest extant post-Biblical Christian writing makes reference to some of Paul’s letters but not to others. In addition to that, the vocabularies of the documents changes fairly radically somewhere between Romans and 1 Timothy–somewhere in the neighborhood of a third of the words in the pastoral epistles appear nowhere else in Paul’s letters. Finally, people have detected fairly radical shifts in attitudes towards social divisions as one moves from Galatians, which say that “in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female” (3.28, NIV) towards 1 Timothy, which calls for slaves to obey their masters and women to be silent in the assembly.
Those are the data, and few people dispute them. As far as how one reconciles them, it’s hard to separate out the political/ecclesial ramifications from the disputes about the authorship itself largely because of the third reason above, so here’s an attempt at two ways to take the radical differences in the Pauline epistles:
- Whoever wrote Galatians, somebody else must have written 1 Timothy. The attribution of a work to a beloved master (cf. Plato and Socrates) is not uncommon in the ancient world, and whoever wrote 1 Timothy, though his politics and written style differ radically, wanted to honor Paul and claim his authority by writing in his name.
- Paul wrote all of the letters traditionally ascribed to him, and the vocabulary changes presumably come from the same processes that make most of us write somewhat differently when we’re 30 and when we’re 50. The political changes have to do with the problems that occasion his writing rather than an entirely different author putting ink on scrolls (cf. Augustine vs. Pelagius and Augustine vs. Faustus the Manichean).
- It doesn’t really matter who wrote “Paul’s epistles”; what matters is that in the sweep of Church history, those documents and their context in the Paul-narrative has been normative for churches.
I tend to favor the second theory, partly because I know my own ways of writing (and my politics) have changed in the last ten years and partly because I do think that the letters make sense as one Christian’s written corpus.
Anyway, that’s a fast, dirty, and probably over-simplified version of the debate. I encourage folks to pick up a volume or two from UGA library’s sixth floor (you should remember that place well, Michael and Eric) and read up for yourselves.
Nathan, many thanks for the thoughts. Good to know specifics. What specific tomes on the sixth floor would you suggest? Or should I dangerously browse? I may never come out…
My textbook as a college freshman (and one that’s still on my shelf as a ready reference) is Bruce Metzger’s The New Testament: Its Background, Growth, and Content.”. It’s more of a survey of academic New Testament studies, but for that very reason it’s a good entry into these questions. (And, as of 10:15 on the morning of October 10, it’s on the shelf in the Main Library.)
Of course, a good study Bible is the best tool, and I’d recommend equally the New Oxford Annotated (my trusty Bible when I minored in Bible as an undergrad) and the Harper Collins Study Bible (my seminary Bible and the one I assign to my freshmen when I teach Bible). Both of those Bibles are study texts in the tradition of the 1611 KJV, and the scholars they assemble are top-notch. Folks who think that most of the academic world is “liberal” call these Bibles “liberal,” but I tend to define that category more narrowly, so I’d call them ecumenical the way that the KJV is ecumenical.
I’ve heard good things from conservative people about the ESV Study Bible, but since I have not looked at it myself, I won’t at this moment vouch for it. I’m all for good conservative scholarship, but I do insist on good as well as conservative.
But back to books: on textual criticism in general, I have looked at Vincent Taylor’s The Text of the New Testament: A Short Introduction, and it’s a nice gateway with a chapter on the Mark 16 question. With regards to Paul in particular your best bet would be some good scholarly commentaries on the disputed books themselves. I’ve not done as much with Paul as I have with the gospels and the Hebrew Bible, so a bit of browsing in the LCC range of BS 2700 and following is about the best I can recommend.