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corpus-paul - Re: Paul's persecution of the Church

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  • From: RSBrenchley AT aol.com
  • To: corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re: Paul's persecution of the Church
  • Date: Thu, 6 Jun 2002 16:07:01 EDT


Dave Hindley writes:

> Yes, I think this is so. Actually, no, there are few textual
> variants that could support such a concept. Of course, the
> significance of the presence or lack of presence of variants
> is connected to our assumptions about the transmission
> history of the text(s). With regard to this aspect, I've
> been looking at David Trobisch's work (especially _Paul's
> Letter Collection_) that suggests that rather than being
> based upon individual mss copies circulating independently
> (a process which can be expected to produce variants if the
> text had been altered by one or more copyists) the Pauline
> corpus we have today trace back to a single "published"
> edition (with the exception of Hebrews, possibly added
> later). While there is evidence that the published edition
> is comprised of several smaller collections, Trobisch finds
> very little evidence that these smaller collections were
> circulating at the same time as the collected published
> edition.

So somebody collected Paul's letters - presumably then existing in very
few copies - redacted them, and made them into a collection from which all
surviving manuscripts descend. This sounds plausible, given the origin of
these letters as individual missives from the leader of a small faction, and
the way Paul's message was, to my mind, bowdlerised after his death by a
movement which had come to venerate his memory while rejecting some of his
more radical views. The collection, then, would represent the 'official',
acceptable Paul for the church emerging after 70, and the Pauline
pseudepigrapha would add to that. I can't explain the prevalence of Pauline
pseudepigrapha any other way, and what you say is consistent with that. We
should, perhaps, be thankful that so much of the real Paul survived. I'll
leave it to others more expert than me to point out any holes in this.

Regards,

Robert Brenchley
RSBrenchley AT aol.com
Birmingham UK




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