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Loading...ANOTHER EXCERPT FROM MY FORTHCOMING SCHOLARLY DISCUSSION OF FORGERY AND COUNTERFORGERY, WHERE IN THE INTRODUCTION I CONTINUE MY ANECDOTES OF FORGERIES THAT CONDEMN FORGERIES AND DECEIVERS WHO GET DECEIVED, THIS TIME BY LOOKING AT A CHRISTIAN EXAMPLE (SEE MY EARLIER POST ON THE DUPED HERACLIDES)
This ironic phenomenon has its rough parallels in the later Christian tradition. To begin with, we might look at a work universally recognized as pseudepigraphic, the late fourth-century Apostolic Constitutions, a so-called “church order” allegedly written by none other than the apostles of Jesus (hence its name), but in reality produced by someone simply claiming to be the apostolic band, living three hundred years after they had been laid to rest in their respective tombs.
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Bart,
Has there been any new scholarship or recent changes in scholarly concensus on the autenticity of the of the Pauline letters?
Well, my new book is new scholarship. But I hold to the critical consensus: 6 of the 13 letters were not actually written by Paul.
This got me wondering-scholars usually tell us that some, if not most of the authentic Pauline letters are actually “mix tapes”-that they are several separate letters of Paul to various churches concatenated into a single letter. Do you think in this process any pseudo-Pauline letters got sewn-in to the Pauline tapestry? Are there any clues in the content, language or structure that indicate that one part of a given “accepted” epistle are less authentic than the rest of it?
There’s no evidence that any
lengthy
portions of other letters were spliced into Paul’s own writings. But a chunk like 2 Corintthians 6:14-18 is often thought of as having come from some author other than Paul.