Corpus-Paul

["Jeffrey B. Gibson" <jgibson000 AT mailhost.chi.ameritech.net>]

Liz Fried wrote:

> How close are the letters of Paul to the Ur-texts?
> Have scholars detected much editing with his letters? Have the letters been
> added to or glossed over time?  You discuss this with regard to 2
> Corinthians, but I have not seen any general discussion of this issue. Is
> this because scholars think that the rest of his letters are close to the
> ur-text?

To answer your question, I can do no better than to quote at length the 
discussion of
the issue of glosses and interpolations from V.P. Furnish's review of Pauline 
Studies
in _The New Testament and Its Modern Interpreters:

>      Hypothesis about textual glosses and the presence of even longer 
> interpolated units have long
> been a part of textual and literary criticism. During the years under 
> review [1945-1988], several
> older hypotheses have attracted new supporters, and some further passages 
> have been added to the
> list of suspect texts. Of the several instances of glossing Bultman found 
> in Romans (1947), only his
> identification of a phrase in 6:17 has received much attention, and that 
> has been persuasive to but a
> few (e.g., not to Kasemann, 1974:171). There has been renewed discussion of 
> 2 Cor 6:14-7:1
> largely because of apparent affinities with ideas current among the Jewish 
> sectarians at Qumran.
> W.K.M. Grossouw, J.A. Fitzmyer (1961), and J. Gnilka have judged it to be 
> non-Pauline, and Betz
> (1973) has even argued that it derives from the polemic of the apostle's 
> Galatian opponents. The
> long suspected verse in 1 Thessalonians which indicts the Jews for killing 
> "both the Lord Jesus and
> the profets" (2:15 has been newly studied by B. Pearson and D. Schmidt, 
> both of whom conclude
> that the whole of 2:13-16 should be attributed to an interpolator. G. 
> Fitzer's detailed study of 1 Cor
> 14:34-35 has convinced a number of scholars of a gloss here, but proposals 
> about the presence of
> intyerpolated material in Rom 3:24-26 (Talbert), Rom 13:1-7 (Kallas), 1 Cor 
> 11:2-16 (Walker;
> Cope), 1 Cor 13 (Titus) and 1 Thess 5:1-11 (Friedrich) have so far received 
> less support.
>      It is significant, in fact, that there has been no general scholarly 
> argeement on the possibility, or
> even on the plausibility, of any of these hypotheses about glosses and 
> interpolations. For w while it
> appeared that some consensus might be possible about the non Pauline 
> character of 2 Cor 6:14-7:1;
> but the most recent studies have presented important reasons not only to 
> reconsider its authenticity
> but also to reconsider its appropriateness to its present context in 2 
> Corinthians (Barrett,
> 1973:193-204; Dahl, 1977b:62-69; Fee; Thrall; Lambrecht). It is evident 
> that so far no firm and
> convincing techiques or criteria have been developed to aid in the 
> identification of glosses and
> interpolations. This is only confirmed by the wholesale resort to 
> hypotheses about these which is
> characteristic of J.C. O'Neill's monograph on Galatians and his commentary 
> on Romans. Highly
> subjective judgements about content and tone are intermixed with often 
> questionable generalozations
> about the apostle's style and vocabulary. What emerges is a Paul created in 
> the interpretr's own
> image (pp. 324-325).
>

I note that a name missing from Furnish's discussion is that of Alfred Loisy, 
a
prominent advocate of glosses and interpolations in Pauline texts. But 
Furnish, I
suspect, would bring Loisy's work under the judgment that levels against 
O'Neill.

Moreover, it should also be kept in mind that the issue of glosses and 
interpolations
is different from the issue of the integrity of an epistle, i.e., whether the 
epistle
as we have it now is composite -- which really is what those here on the list 
arguing
about 2 Cor are generally dealing with. For a review of *this* topic, see the 
next
section in Furnish's article.

Yours,

Jeffrey Gibson
--
Jeffrey B. Gibson
7423 N. Sheridan Road #2A
Chicago, Illinois 60626
e-mail jgibson000 AT ameritech.net