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  • From: "David Inglis" <david AT colonialcommerce.com>
  • To: <corpus-paul AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: RE: [Corpus-Paul] Did Paul's churches copy his letters?
  • Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2003 10:15:54 -0800

Richard Fellows wrote:

> The silence of Clement on 2 Cor makes it difficult to simultaneously
believe
> that letters did not circulate independently AND that 2 Cor 10-13 was
aimed
> at Corinth.

Richard,

As Perry Stepp wrote: "There are other possibilities, of course." There
certainly are. We have no idea why Clement didn't use 2 Cor, and I don't
believe we can infer anything about 2 Cor simply from the fact that Clement
didn't use it. Both of your suggestions are indeed possible, but we can't
say that either of them is probable.

> David Inglis wrote:
>> For example
>> if 2 Cor is a composite of two original letters, wouldn't we expect to
see
>> evidence of those individual letters in church collections? The fact
that
>> we don't either suggests that 2 Cor is not a composite (which appears
>> unlikely) or that the recipients never created copies.
>
> If there had been originally two letters, we would expect to see them
> presented as two letters in ALL our manuscripts! It is better to see 2 Cor
> as directed at two audiences, not written at two times. This dispenses
with
> the need to postulate a bazaar editorial cut and paste job.

Not necessarily. If the recipients never kept or created copies (ie. they
relied on Paul's 'postman' just reading the letters to them) then there
would never have been copies at wherever the recipients were located. In
this scenario, the form of 2 Cor then depends on what the 'postman' kept,
what Paul kept, or what the postman drought back to Paul. For example, if
the two letters were written on parchment then they could have become
'shuffled' by the postman, by Paul, or later by one of Paul's companions.
There would then be no 'bizarre' cut and paste job, just a mistaken
re-shuffle when they came to be copied.

As I have previously stated to you, your comments to me about papyrus being
too expensive to allow Paul's churches to create papyrus copies apply
equally (perhaps more so) to Paul, so make it more likely that Paul would
write on parchment, not on a papyrus scroll.

Dave Inglis
davidinglis2 AT attbi.com
3538 O'Connor Drive
Lafayette, CA, USA





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