Corpus-Paul

["Frank W. Hughes" <fwhughes AT sunbeach.net>]

I think it is important to deal with this question not only from the standpoint
of literary, form, or rhetorical criticism, but also from the standpoint
of textual criticism.  I think the days when any NT text critic would
publish an edition of the Greek Testament with the title The NT in the
Original Greek, as Westcott and Hort did, are long gone.  We don't
have "the original Greek."  We have a scholarly reconstruction of
the Greek text that circulated in the church in, generally speaking, somewhere
between the 2nd and 4th centuries C.E. at the very earliest.  I don't
know of any dating of P46 earlier than 200 C.E.  And Zuntz showed
that P46 was a corrected text.  So, since Paul generally wrote in
the 50s, and our earliest MS. of most of the corpus paulinum can be dated
as early as 200, we have a considerable length of time, well over a century,
for various things to happen to the Greek text.

Given what Koester showed in his dissertation, Synoptische Ueberlieferung bei den Apostolischen Väter, namely that the 2nd century quotes of the synoptic gospels don't match the Greek NT text that we now reconstruct, I often wonder whether, if we had MSS. of the Pauline corpus dating before 200 C.E., we would really have a firm text, or whether we would have rather different texts of Paul perhaps in different regions or among church people of different theological persuasions.

There are a lot of partition theories of both 1 and 2 Corinthians, going back as far as Johannes Weiss in his brilliant 1910 Meyer-Kommentar on 1 Corinthians.  Betz gives a lengthy history of partitioning of 2 Corinthians in the intro. of his 2 Corinthians 8 and 9 (Hermeneia).  So the answer to your question, Liz, is that there have been a lot of very respectable scholars who have proposed partition theories of both 1 and 2 Corinthians or of 2 Corinthians.  These include Johannes Weiss, Günther Bornkamm, Wolfgang Schenk, Walter Schmithals, Rudolf Bultmann, Philipp Vielhauer, Gerhard Sellin, Dieter Georgi, and Robert Jewett.  Quite a number of people have proposed partitioning Philippians (I'm not convinced one way or the other on Philippians).  A few people would like to cut 2:14-16 out of 1 Thessalonians, but the strong consensus (which I have joined) is against this.  T. W. Manson and others wanted to hack off the 16th chapter of Romans, but Kurt Aland and Harry Gamble quite independently have confirmed the original 16 chapter form of that letter.

So to make a long story short, I think it's an open question, and should be explored on a letter-by-letter basis.

All best,
Frank W. Hughes
Codrington College
Barbados