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  • From: "Frank W. Hughes" <fwhughes AT sunbeach.net>
  • To: Corpus-paul <corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Pseudonymity
  • Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1999 18:05:47 -0300

Dear David, et al.,

What I meant by saying that Galatians and Romans were rhetorically effective is that they show a great deal of rhetorical sophistication in terms of their literary structure and argumentation.  Paul seems to have spared no effort to convey the rhetorical effects he wished to convey.  In other words, indications are that the author of Galatians and Romans and 1 Thessalonians knew what he was doing rhetorically and did what he did quite intentionally.

The classic problem of 2 Thessalonians, as reflected by the publication of William Wrede's Die Aechtheit des 2. Thessalonicherbriefes untersucht in 1903, was how you can take seriously the literary closeness of 1 and 2 Thessalonians, which Wrede showed primarily by way of a synopsis in parallel columns.  The best way to explain the very remarkable literary closeness is either (1) Paul wrote both letters, with a very short time between them; or (2) Paul wrote 1 Thessalonians and a Paulinist wrote 2 Thessalonians, using 1 Thess. as a literary source.  The problem for scholarship both before and especially Wrede was how you can have such literary closeness and have such differences in theology, including the major difference in whether or not the Day of the Lord will come so soon as to have apocalyptic signs before its coming.  1 Thess. says there will be no such signs; 2 Thess. gives a lengthy exposition of the signs in 2 Thess. 2:3-12.  There had been an impasse in scholarship over this which I tried to break with my analysis, first of the most difficult passage 2:3-12 and then of the whole letter.  I didn't and don't claim that this is the only possible explanation but I think it is the better one.  To keep 2 Thess. as an authentic letter, you've got to say that the writer of 1 Thess., which I think has great charm and rhetorical skill, wrote within a matter of weeks or a very few months 2 Thess., but put in 2:1-2 which would greatly call into question 1 Thess. and any other letters he had written.  It's remotely possible but would be, as I said years ago, a rhetorical faux pas of the grandest sort.  As you say, Paul "was a minister constant[ly] having to adapt to changing circumstances, unanticipated responses/reactions, uncooperative people (missionaries, converts, etc.) and having to do it from hundreds of miles away through second-hand reports. . . ."  Working under such difficult rhetorical circumstances, why would Paul want to do something to his ethos as terrible as 2 Thess. 2:1-2 and 3:17?

But under the pen of a committed Paulinist, these passages make great sense.  I am very influenced by Dennis Ronald MacDonald's fine book, The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984).  Like the writer of the Pastorals, 2 Thess. waged a committed battle against other Paulinists.  The battleground was Pauline churches and Paul's legacy; and the weapons were the Deuteropauline letters.  They tell us about the conflict and they were the weapons in the conflict.  Evidently outraged by the publication of new Pauline letters which had, as far as our author was concerned, a theology that understood the Day of the Lord already to have come, our author took the oldest Pauline letter he knew and made very remarkable modifications to it to forge it into a new weapon in the conflict.  As Wrede showed, the part of 2 Thess. which shows no literary dependency on 1 Thess. is 2:3-12.  Very interesting modifications in 2 Thess. are in the first chapter when he expands what Paul had written about "endurance" and in the third chapter when he expands what Paul had written about "the disorderly."

I don't have any theological reservation one way or the other about the authorship of any of the disputed letters.  They are Holy Scripture for me no matter who wrote them.  The impasse I tried to deal with was methodological.  The issue is how they best should be interpreted, both historically and otherwise.

Perhaps unadvisedly I will take "neo-Ciceronian" as a compliment, though my model of rhetoric is more broadly Graeco-Roman than that.  Cicero is especially important because at 18 or 19 years of age when he put together De inventione he apparently didn't do much to the Greek rules as he brought them over into Latin.  Thus the young Cicero reflects Greek rhetorical precepts in a big way, as far as we know without his having modified them too much.

All best,
Frank W. Hughes
Codrington College
Barbados


  • Pseudonymity, David Amador, 04/28/1999
    • <Possible follow-up(s)>
    • Re: Pseudonymity, David C. Hindley, 04/29/1999
    • Re: Pseudonymity, Frank W. Hughes, 04/30/1999

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