Loading...In my previous post I tried to show why most critical scholars think that the letter of 2 Corinthians is actually two different letters that have been spliced together. When I was back in graduate school, I learned – to my surprise – that there were scholars who thought that in fact 2 Corinthians was made up of five different letters, all spliced together. At first that struck me as a bit crazy, but as I looked at the evidence I began to see that it made a good bit of sense.
I’m not completely committed to that idea, but I’m inclined toward it. My sense is that this is the view of a sizeable minority of critical scholars, but I have no data, only anecdotal evidence, to back that up.
In any case, what matters more is what you yourself might think of it. I won’t be giving the evidence in full, but here is how I lay it out for students to consider in my textbook on the New Testament for undergraduates. To see the force of the evidence, you would need actually to look carefully at the letter itself, in light of the considerations I suggest here.
(Incidentally: a reader has asked me whether any of the letters allegedly found in 2 Corinthians could have originally been written by someone other than Paul. You’ll see here that this is widely believed by scholars for one small chunk of the letter. On this particular question, there is a much larger critical agreement on the matter, though not complete consensus).
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The Partitioning of 2 Corinthians
A number of New Testament scholars believe that 2 Corinthians comprises not just two of Paul’s letters but four or five of them, all edited together into one larger composition for distribution among the Pauline churches. Most of the “partition theories,” as they are called (since they partition the one letter into a number of others), maintain that chapters 1–9 are not a unity but are made up of several letters spliced together. Read the chapters for yourself and answer the following questions:
- Does the beginning of chapter 8 appear to shift abruptly to a new subject, away from the good news Titus has just brought Paul (about the reconciliatory attitude of the Corinthians) to Paul’s decision to send Titus to collect money for the needy among the Christians? There is no transition to this new subject, and 8:1 sounds like the beginning of the body of a letter. Could it have been taken from a different writing?
- Do the words of 9:1 seem strange after what Paul has said in all of chapter 8? He has been talking for twenty-four verses about the collection for the saints, and then in 9:1 he begins to talk about it again as if it were a new subject that had not yet been broached. Could chapter 9 also, then, have come from a separate letter?
- Does the paragraph found in 6:14–7:1 seem odd in its context? The verse immediately preceding it (6:13) urges the Corinthians to be open to Paul, as does the verse immediately following it (7:2). But the paragraph itself is on an entirely different and unannounced topic: Christians should not associate with nonbelievers. Moreover, there are aspects of this passage that appear unlike anything Paul himself says anywhere else in his writings. Nowhere else, for example, does he call the Devil “Beliar” (v. 15). Has this passage come from some other piece of correspondence (possibly one that Paul didn’t write) and been inserted in the midst of Paul’s warm admonition to the Corinthians to think kindly of him?
If you answered yes to all three of these questions, then you agree with those scholars who see fragments of at least five letters in 2 Corinthians: (a) 1:1–6:13; 7:2–16 (part of the conciliatory letter); (b) 6:14–7:1 (part of a non-Pauline letter?); (c) 8: 1–24 (a letter for the collection, to the Corinthians) (d) 9:1–15 (a letter for the collection, to some other church?); and (e) 10:1–13:13 (part of the painful letter).
If there are five different letters in 2nd Corinthians, were they spliced together at one time? Or is this the result of multiple different people working on the same letter – very possibly not realizing that the ‘one’ letter they’re working on is in fact a Frankensteinian monster?
The common view is that no matter how many letters were originally there (2? 5?) the final splice job was done by one editor at one time. Other scenarios are possible, but get messy with two many unnecessary moving pieces.
Interesting. I assume, then, that the earliest 2 Cor manuscripts we have don’t have much textual variations to indicate splices, interpolations, etc.?
That’s right. That’s why these alterations are not called “textual variants” They would have happened before any copies that were the copies that our copyists copied were copied….
Hi Bart. Are there any suggestions as to who might have edited Paul’s letters and what their agenda was in doing so?
I”m afraid we don’t have any clues.
Are there any indications that any deutero-Pauline letters were contained in the very earliest collection(s) of Pauline letters?
I suppose they are in all the ones we know of (at least some of them). We don’t have any ms or church father listing of just the seven that are “undisputed.”
A silly mind game perhaps but I can’t help but wonder, considering how much ancient literature we know was lost, how the intellectual history of the West would have been different if none of Paul’s letters had survived?
I suspect we know the answer already but can history really be so contingent? History changes because someone with a single manuscript was clumsy with a candle?
I often wonder that too.
Interesting. How many epistles do you think are splices like this? Was letter-splicing a common practice at the time?
We do have other instances — for example, among the apostolic fathers (the Didache, e.g.); in the NT, Philippians is probably a splice of two letters; John 21 was probably added to the Gospel at a later stage; I personally think Luke started originally with what is now ch. 3 ,and that chs. 1-2 were a later add-on. Etc….
That last one is interesting. In at least that respect, Marcion’s gospel was more reflective of the original Luke. Almost like a weaker version of the Marcion priority theory…
Yes, it’s a debated issue. It would help a *lot* if we actually had the thing to look at, instead of just quotations of it by his enemies.
I will take a more careful look at 2 Corinthians at a later time. Anyway, I have been convinced of at least two sources of 2 Corinthians for over three decades.
You jogged my memory with these two posts. Back in 1985 or 1986 when I was a sophomore working on my bachelor’s degree in Pastoral Studies with a concentration in Biblical Studies at a Pentecostal college, I recognized that some passages from another text were added to 2 Corinthians. I did not yet pick up word processing and all my handwritten papers and notes BWB (before word processing) failed to survive various leaky basements and too many moves to count. For now, my independent research of the New Testament is focusing on bigger fish to fry, but I appreciate you jogging my memory about that discovery.
Do scholars suspect that any other writings in the New Testament were also copied and pasted together?
Philippians is often understood to be two letters; John 21 is frequenlty thought to have been added on to the Gospel; my view is that Luke originally started with what is now ch. 3 and chs. 1-2 were later added on . I suppose those are the main other exx.
Hi Bart, Building off an earlier question in the comments: Do you have a position on when and why a person would combine these letters in this way? As far as I know, there’s not a huge amount of evidence for this kind of thing happening in antiquity. Of course, knowing for sure that it happened would require the survival of multiple manuscripts with the right contents. The only good example I know are the letters of the monk Pachomius, which were combined in different ways in the Latin and Coptic manuscripts. But, I’m mainly just curious what you think was the occasion for the creation of 2 Cor as a “composite” (if indeed that’s what it is!).
Hey Brent. My guess is as good as yours. Well, OK, not as good.
Apart from letters, of course, we certainly have lots of composite documents. The Didache. Letter to Diognetus. Etc. Almost certainly John 21 I’d say. Luke 1-2 probably. Of course it’s not quite the same as personal correspondence. So I don’t really know.
When? Has to be early, since it’s the initial text. I can’t remember if you’re happy with ca. 200 for P46. Why did someone do it? Yeah, who knows. Paul’s greatest hits to Corinth? Synopsis of highlights? Need to get rid of some embarrassing parts? One compact letter for ease of transport? My guess is that it was just the highlights, a Readers Digest version.
Are we seeing signs of the gnostic “Paul” here (particularly 2 Corinthians 4.4?) This sounds like a deified “Lord Christ Jesus” as a Pauline construct, not a man but a spirit Savior who descends from a realm of light “above” to a world lost in darkness “below”. The same might be said in Col 1.12-13. It would seem he is offering a diluted dual gnostic dualism – no? These passages (along with Rom 7.24, Philip 3:21, etc…) seem to set up a paradigm in which the flesh is the enemy of the Spirit and should be mortified. But then…..In contrast, the Spirit is holy (Rom 1.4), life (Rom 8.2; 2 Cor 3.6), peace (Rom 8.6), righteousness (Rom 8.10). In an invisible realm in an indeterminate past the dark powers crucified “the Lord of glory” because they did not know God’s “secret wisdom … hidden from before time began” (1 Cor 2.7). The Jews were certainly familiar with manifestations of Yahweh’s personality. They appear throughout Jewish scripture (“the Angel of the Lord” in the burning bush episode (Exodus 3.2-6). But in Pauline theology multiple personalities seem present. No wonder the Jews found “Christ crucified” a stumbling block!
Most scholars of Gnosticism these days do not see any evidence that it existed in anything like a full-fledged state in the first century, especially as early as Paul. Colossians does seem to have a different theology from Paul’s, which is one reason it is classified as one of the Deutero-Pauline letters (i.e. one that Paul probably did not himself write).
There was a Pope that requested I think 40 Bibles. He wanted 40 Bishops to each have the same book to read from at mass and/or discuss at “Sunday” school in the Mediterranean – Italy, Greece, Anatolia for sure, Egypt – Alexandria. Someone searched the Vatican archives and found a bunch of letters about making the 40 copies, and what to put in it. At the copy session I think they decided to have a reader reading in the middle of the room with 40 scribes writing it down, or some equation, like 10 scribes writing it down, then each making 3 copies of what they had. All 40 Bibles to be exactly alike. They picked the 4 Gospels most popular in Rome at the time, since the Romans would be the most critical astute well educated. The scrolls fell off the lecterns, and it was hard to do O.T. readings and N.T both at mass – an altar boy had to scroll fast to get from one sticky to another, and the scrolls fell to the floors of the cathedrals. (Hence the idea of book pages to turn was born.)
It’s five letters only if you spell it “2 Crntn”
Rats. Wish I had thought of that…
Not directly related but concerning Paul:
What do you make of the idea that John’s character of Nathanael is actually a tip of the hat, early in the Gospel, to Paul?
Parallels adduced: the putatively fictional Nathanael and the real-life Paul are both zealous for the Law, initially skeptical converts, guileless and in opposition/contrast to Peter.
(I heard this from Jack Spong, citing a 1907 book by EF Scott. https://youtu.be/bnlYh-GExB0)
I don’t see it. For one thing, there’s no solid evidence that the author of John even knew about Paul. Nathaniel doesn’t seem to be to be at all like Paul. He shows up on in John 1:45-49 (except for 21:2 where he is simply named). The passage doesn’t say anything about him being particularly zealous for the Law, let alone a persecutor of anyone. He doesn’t oppose Jesus at all, he just wonders how the messiah could come from Nazareth (which is not an issue Paul raises). Jesus calls him and Israelite (as were other Jews) and says that there is nothing deceitful about him (nothing connects him to Paul there). And he converts because Jesus saw him under a fig tree. Again, no connection with Paul. So nothing that is said about Nathaniel would make a reader think of Paul, and, coreespndingly, nothing Paul says about himself seemsparticularly germane to Nathaniel in particular. AT least as I see it.
Thanks very much.
Dr. Ehrman,
Another topic I’ve been focused on is making the argument that when Paul uses the term “spiritual” i.e. 1 Cor. 15:44 he does not necessarily mean something that is immaterial. Do you agree with my case in point below?:
Example of where “spiritual” does not mean immaterial:
1 Cor. 2:15: Those who are spiritual discern all things, and they are themselves subject to no one else’s scrutiny. [Here Paul is talking about human beings, and therefore “spiritual” is in relation to entities who certainly are material]
Yes, spiritual is not the same as non-material. Greek speaking thinkers thought that “spirit” was made up of a kind of “stuff” — it was far more higlhy refined stuff than found in the physcial objects we encounter otehrwise.
Dr. Ehrman,
So per “spiritual body” Paul talks of what we would call a body composed of fine matter. “spiritual body” should not be thought of as invisible either, since that’s what the risen Jesus appeared with when he was seen by Paul and the others per 1 Cor. 15:5-8? Is this all correct?
That’s my view, yes.
So when do you think the last letter to the Corinthians was written?
Not sure. Late 50s some time I suppose.