Corpus-Paul

["Graham Hamer" <G.Hamer AT icsl.ac.uk>]

Jimi Fosdick raised a question as to certainty about the authenticity of
the Pauline letters.

I don't think it is possible to be certain that Paul wrote any of the
letters attributed to him.  However, it is possible to say:

1) There is reasonable evidence that at least some of the letters existed
in the 1st century CE;
2) There is very good evidence that all the letters existed in the 2nd
century CE;
3) Christians were not all that numerous in the 1st century, particularly
from well educated groups;
4) The Pauline letters appear for the most part to be the work of a
powerful theological thinker (or thinkers);
5) It is probably unlikely, given the frequency of communication between
early Christian communities (illustrated in Acts, the letters of Ignatius
etc) that such a thinker (or group of thinkers) would have remained unknown
to the tradition;
6) Basically then, if Paul is not the author then you have to invent
someone lost to the tradition who wrote some really powerful stuff but for
some reason wanted to invent a lot of things to provide a context for what
he/they wished to say.  Possible, I suppose, but is it likely?
7) Are the letters, if they do go back to Paul, heavily interpolated?  Well
probably, but I think that could well apply to all books of the NT.  (I
will leave the debate about the concept of the "original text" to the
tc-list but as, for example, Parker [ "the Living text of the Gospels"] and
Gamble [Books and Readers ...] this whole concept is problematical.)

Graham

Graham Hamer
Inns of Court School of Law
London