It all started with watching the Ehrman-Wallace debate “Is the original NT lost”. In his first speech, Bart made it clear that we only had access to the Pauline Corpus collection from 100 CE, that all the letters were heavily redacted, that we don’t know if Paul wrote 2 Cor. because it is an amalgam of 2 to 5 different writings, that 3 letters of another author/authors have been added to the original 7 letters. Bart has cited author Gunther Zuntz as the originator of the modern consensus on the reconstruction of Paul’s tradition.
The story of Paul’s letters in Zuntz’s reconstruction is presented in his handwritten diagram.
** you do not have permission to see this link **
Everything above 100 CE is mostly guesswork. It is assumed that all letters will be individually circulated and their subsequent copies made. The dependencies between the lists are shown. 6 letters written independently of each other, the seventh depends on the two earlier ones, reconstruction of the dependence of letters of other authors on Paul’s letters. All of this is plausible until these scattered lines flow into a single point called the Pauline Corpus around 100 CE except one that goes to Marcion. This line represents a copy of Gal. mentioned by Tertullian different from the one that went to Pauline Corpus.
This drawing requires analysis not only from biblical scholars. They pass over it on a daily basis without drawing any logistical conclusions.
A. Gathering letters into a collection from scattered copies is an extremely difficult task. However, it is very easy to make anthologies in the place where they were all created.
B. The 100% efficiency of collecting scattered letters is a miracle of resurrection of the dead – there is no letter outside the collection found by someone else. Points A and B strongly point to one publishing center
C. If the letters were in individual circulation and valuable enough to be copied and imitated, where was Paul’s tradition for 40 years? Why is there no one who would admit to being acquainted with anyone from the circle of Paul or his disciples or disciples of his disciples. Who copied these letters and why?
D. The writing did not stop – subsequent authors write the Pastorals, correspondence with Seneca.
E. Paul is the subject of numerous fictional narratives – Acts, Acts of Paul, Acts of Paul and Thecla
These are the issues that determined my position.
Jarek said
.B. The 100% efficiency of collecting scattered letters is a miracle of resurrection of the dead – there is no letter outside the collection found by someone else. Points A and B strongly point to one publishing center
Like Robert notes, we have no Christian ms copied in the first century. What we have from the second century are very rare and fragmentary.
It makes perfect sense that the collection, once it arrives, would displace the tradition of individual letters. Why copy one-off letters if you have a complete collection to copy? Imagine you are a James bond fan and want to BitTorrent all the movies; if you can choose between assembling a complete collection from individual torrents of individual movies or just downloading the full collection already assembled as a complete collection, which do you pick? Almost certainly you just get the complete collection.
So I think the most natural scenario is, individual letters circulate during the first century, those copies are lost like everything else from the first century.
Near the end of the first century, someone collects all the extant and available letters and publishes them as a set. The set becomes the standard (consider, by analogy, the way Migne became the de facto standard edition, for a century, for the fathers; he didn’t invent the writings, but his became by far the most popular edition simply because it was complete).
What survived are copies that came through the most popular family–the collection.
The others were lost. But that isn’t at all surprising: We have no physical ms from the first century, and those independent letters were not copied after the collection was introduced.
Oh, and the collection wasn’t 100% efficient. We know some letters were lost (and I think this has been recognized since the patristic period), or least least don’t survive in their original form.
And why would we expect to find copies of letters not in the collection? If the first century editor of the collection couldn’t lay hands on a first century copy, why would we who have 0 first century copies of anything expect to be able to get out hands on a first century copy that was already scarce in the first century?
Robert said
Jarek said
It all started with watching the Ehrman-Wallace debate “Is the original NT lost”. In his first speech, Bart made it clear that we only had access to the Pauline Corpus collection from 100 CE, that all the letters were heavily redacted, that we don’t know if Paul wrote 2 Cor. because it is an amalgam of 2 to 5 different writings …
Jarek, Jarek, Jarek, we really do like you as a person, but … You’re greatly exaggerating. ** you do not have permission to see this link ** only doubts that one small part of 2 Corinthians was written by Paul (6 verses, 6,14–7,1). Other than this small section, the various partition theories consider that someone combined various parts of authentic letters.
We did not understand each other. Bart said that 2 Cor. it consists of 2 -5 different Paul’s texts connected together. I meant nothing else. I didn’t even know about 2 Cor. 6:14-7:1 problem. Case 2 Cor. shows exactly that before the letter went into circulation, it was subject to prior redaction. There were no different letters only one 2 Cor. composed of various texts and released for circulation after editing. The same thing happened with others. Creating an anthology of Paul’s works from scattered copies of copies of copies of letters would be a difficult and unprofitable task. And it would have had a completely different course and end result.
Finding content from the past of deceased authors is a safe solution for content development. It was thanks to this solution that Luke was able to write his Nativity Story without looking at Matthew.
The new content, so needed by the congregations, was initially checked for usability. In the first period it was an illiterate itinerant preacher and as long as he had something to say he was welcomed and rewarded, recommended to other congregations. Later they would come with books – read excerpts from them, show them how to use them and sell them.
Fryderyk Chopin did nothing else. He traveled around Poland, from palace to palace. He offered his own concerts, piano lessons and manuscripts of his works. Depending on the wealth of the host, he delivered the ordered products.
The next stage is the sales representatives of a large organization equipped with anthologies, who, regardless of the existing congregations, come to found their own, with the task of defeating the existing ones.
Nobody collected anything in the field
Robert said
You fail to realize that all of the deutero-Pauline letters were attempts to claim Pauline authority and the author of Luke/Acts does indeed imply that he was indeed a fellow traveler with Paul, and 1 Clement praises Paul.
D. The writing did not stop – subsequent authors write the Pastorals, correspondence with Seneca.
E. Paul is the subject of numerous fictional narratives – Acts, Acts of Paul, Acts of Paul and Thecla
These are the issues that determined my position.
I fail to see how D & E support your position, and your earlier points are misinterpretations or exaggerations.
—————–
Luke has done incredible things. He invented the harmonization of the Apostle and the Disciples of Jesus, figures from different traditions. He wrote Paul’s second biography, not caring too much about the biography resulting from the letters. Both tasks were accomplished by the Acts of the Apostles. He wrote the gospel in several stages. Harmonization was needed by both Marcion and Rome, the idea was successful and there was no shortage of customers. The gospel was also popular on both sides of the ‘theological’ conflict.
He must have watched with disgust as one side tried to bully the other with differences between editions of his work, which he couldn’t admit to.
I still have the impression in the back of my mind that all these publications were offered to communes by external centres. Some product presentation, offer and “take it or leave” decision. Writers seem unsubordinated to anyone – they “find writings from the past” and offer them on the market. A market closed to people who can read with understanding and interpret. Subsequent editions of their own works are good for them because in this way they stimulate demand among the recipients of previous editions.
“You fail to realize that all of the deutero-Pauline letters were attempts to claim Pauline authority.”
Exactly. Deutero-Pauline letters are additional content, a supplement to the first author’s work. The idea caught on, the publisher invested in enlarging the crew before the competition adds more, appropriating the hero and his correspondence. It’s like the Thorgal comic. All hands on deck.
** you do not have permission to see this link **
“and 1 Clement praises Paul” . Maybe, but there is no clear recommendation from the professionals about dating and authenticity of 1 Clement. Not my fault.
Porphyry said
Jarek said
.
B. The 100% efficiency of collecting scattered letters is a miracle of resurrection of the dead – there is no letter outside the collection found by someone else. Points A and B strongly point to one publishing center
Like Robert notes, we have no Christian ms copied in the first century. What we have from the second century are very rare and fragmentary.
It makes perfect sense that the collection, once it arrives, would displace the tradition of individual letters. Why copy one-off letters if you have a complete collection to copy? Imagine you are a James bond fan and want to BitTorrent all the movies; if you can choose between assembling a complete collection from individual torrents of individual movies or just downloading the full collection already assembled as a complete collection, which do you pick? Almost certainly you just get the complete collection.
So I think the most natural scenario is, individual letters circulate during the first century, those copies are lost like everything else from the first century.
Near the end of the first century, someone collects all the extant and available letters and publishes them as a set. The set becomes the standard (consider, by analogy, the way Migne became the de facto standard edition, for a century, for the fathers; he didn’t invent the writings, but his became by far the most popular edition simply because it was complete).
What survived are copies that came through the most popular family–the collection.
The others were lost. But that isn’t at all surprising: We have no physical ms from the first century, and those independent letters were not copied after the collection was introduced.
Oh, and the collection wasn’t 100% efficient. We know some letters were lost (and I think this has been recognized since the patristic period), or least least don’t survive in their original form.
And why would we expect to find copies of letters not in the collection? If the first century editor of the collection couldn’t lay hands on a first century copy, why would we who have 0 first century copies of anything expect to be able to get out hands on a first century copy that was already scarce in the first century?
Someone collects. Ok. How?
2 Cor.
Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians consists of texts taken from various works by Paul, previously unpublished but separate works. Biblical scholars recognize in 2 Cor. from 2 to 5 such separate works by the same author.
It is unlikely that such an amalgamation would be made to address the vital current problems of the Corinthian congregation. So how was it?
The author does not need to copy paste because he has it all in his head and can easily write a new text based on old thoughts adapted to the needs of the moment and the new recipient.
This is what an editor does with the author’s original texts.
Another person using this technique is a ghost writer who has an interest in getting paid for everything he has written, even if some of it has been rejected 100 times before. Such a profession.
Conclusion – Primo 2 Cor. this is the work of a ghost writer whose rights the editor did not take into account. Secundo 2 Cor. is the work of a ghost writer who, following the sacred tradition of this noble profession, pushed the client what the client previously rejected, only packaged differently.
Primo or Secundo?
Jarek said
Porphyry said
Jarek said
.
B. The 100% efficiency of collecting scattered letters is a miracle of resurrection of the dead – there is no letter outside the collection found by someone else. Points A and B strongly point to one publishing center
Like Robert notes, we have no Christian ms copied in the first century. What we have from the second century are very rare and fragmentary.
It makes perfect sense that the collection, once it arrives, would displace the tradition of individual letters. Why copy one-off letters if you have a complete collection to copy? Imagine you are a James bond fan and want to BitTorrent all the movies; if you can choose between assembling a complete collection from individual torrents of individual movies or just downloading the full collection already assembled as a complete collection, which do you pick? Almost certainly you just get the complete collection.
So I think the most natural scenario is, individual letters circulate during the first century, those copies are lost like everything else from the first century.
Near the end of the first century, someone collects all the extant and available letters and publishes them as a set. The set becomes the standard (consider, by analogy, the way Migne became the de facto standard edition, for a century, for the fathers; he didn’t invent the writings, but his became by far the most popular edition simply because it was complete).
What survived are copies that came through the most popular family–the collection.
The others were lost. But that isn’t at all surprising: We have no physical ms from the first century, and those independent letters were not copied after the collection was introduced.
Oh, and the collection wasn’t 100% efficient. We know some letters were lost (and I think this has been recognized since the patristic period), or least least don’t survive in their original form.
And why would we expect to find copies of letters not in the collection? If the first century editor of the collection couldn’t lay hands on a first century copy, why would we who have 0 first century copies of anything expect to be able to get out hands on a first century copy that was already scarce in the first century?
Someone collects. Ok. How?
Like so many other details about first century Christianity, I don’t know the details, but it doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to find possibilities. The early churches were in communication with each other. Any letters of Paul would have been of interest to a significant number of early Christians.
I can imagine Christian travelers stumbling on letters while they happened to be visiting other communities and then bringing a copy back to their own community–thus initial incomplete collections might have formed organically and without design. I can also imagine someone deliberately setting out to collect Paul’s letters by writing to other communities and asking for copies of any letters they have.
Jarek said
2 Cor.Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians consists of texts taken from various works by Paul, previously unpublished but separate works. Biblical scholars recognize in 2 Cor. from 2 to 5 such separate works by the same author.
It is unlikely that such an amalgamation would be made to address the vital current problems of the Corinthian congregation. So how was it?
The author does not need to copy paste because he has it all in his head and can easily write a new text based on old thoughts adapted to the needs of the moment and the new recipient.
This seems to me to be evidence of the authenticity of the letters. Why would a forger choose to forge a document that is so incongruous? An amateur editor trying to assemble a collection of Paul’s writings, however, might very well produce something like this if he was working with incomplete copies.
Another person using this technique is a ghost writer who has an interest in getting paid for everything he has written, even if some of it has been rejected 100 times before. Such a profession.
Wait, so you are proposing a forger whose prior forged letters have been rejected 100 times before rebundling his prior work and pawning it off?
First if it has been rejected 100 times before, wouldn’t it be sort of hard for him to move his work? Wouldn’t he be a pretty notorious fraud by that point?
“Oh, look guys, I found yet another long lost letter of Paul–this one’s real I promise! Nevermind that it seems to reproduce verbatim material from those earlier ‘lost letters’ that you all rejected as fake.”
Second, a forger good enough to pull off such a stunt successfully would–I’d expect–be able to compose a letter that is internally coherent, unless he was deliberately marketing it as a series of fragments from otherwise lost letters. Can you think of any case where a forger has passed off a forgery of a lengthy work that is made up of text skillessly copied and pasted from prior attempts at fraud, each with a very different tenor? The closest I can think of is the Gospel of Jesus’s wife, but that was entirely different–it was a few scattered words that didn’t even form full sentences, and the forger evidently didn’t know Coptic very well (hence the need to copy phrases from a published work.)
Robert said
Jarek said
Robert said
Jarek said
It all started with watching the Ehrman-Wallace debate “Is the original NT lost”. In his first speech, Bart made it clear that we only had access to the Pauline Corpus collection from 100 CE, that all the letters were heavily redacted, that we don’t know if Paul wrote 2 Cor. because it is an amalgam of 2 to 5 different writings …
Jarek, Jarek, Jarek, we really do like you as a person, but … You’re greatly exaggerating. ** you do not have permission to see this link ** only doubts that one small part of 2 Corinthians was written by Paul (6 verses, 6,14–7,1). Other than this small section, the various partition theories consider that someone combined various parts of authentic letters.
We did not understand each other. Bart said that 2 Cor. it consists of 2 -5 different Paul’s texts connected together. I meant nothing else.
So when you said “Bart made it clear … that we don’t know if Paul wrote 2 Cor. because it is an amalgam of 2 to 5 different writings,” you didn’t really meant to say that?
And here we come to the difference between Bart’s version and mine.
If the ghost writer wrote the letter using 5 of his other works pulled out of the drawer, everything is simple. Full content control, clear motivation and safe operation. Work finally accepted, cash in a pocket.
If an editor pulled 5 of Paul’s different writings out of a drawer and created a sixth, nothing is clear here.
Was the editor sure he was the only owner of Paul’s 5 unknown writings? How could he know about it?
Why would he risk his forgery being discovered instead of publishing these texts separately?
Who composes some fictitious letter from real works? Where is the profit at such a great risk of being ridiculed?
No content control, high risk. What for?
Jarek said
Robert said
Jarek said
Robert said
Jarek said
It all started with watching the Ehrman-Wallace debate “Is the original NT lost”. In his first speech, Bart made it clear that we only had access to the Pauline Corpus collection from 100 CE, that all the letters were heavily redacted, that we don’t know if Paul wrote 2 Cor. because it is an amalgam of 2 to 5 different writings …
Jarek, Jarek, Jarek, we really do like you as a person, but … You’re greatly exaggerating. ** you do not have permission to see this link ** only doubts that one small part of 2 Corinthians was written by Paul (6 verses, 6,14–7,1). Other than this small section, the various partition theories consider that someone combined various parts of authentic letters.
We did not understand each other. Bart said that 2 Cor. it consists of 2 -5 different Paul’s texts connected together. I meant nothing else.
So when you said “Bart made it clear … that we don’t know if Paul wrote 2 Cor. because it is an amalgam of 2 to 5 different writings,” you didn’t really meant to say that?
And here we come to the difference between Bart’s version and mine.
If the ghost writer wrote the letter using 5 of his other works pulled out of the drawer, everything is simple. Full content control, clear motivation and safe operation. Work finally accepted, cash in a pocket.
If an editor pulled 5 of Paul’s different writings out of a drawer and created a sixth, nothing is clear here.
Was the editor sure he was the only owner of Paul’s 5 unknown writings? How could he know about it?
Why would he risk his forgery being discovered instead of publishing these texts separately?
Who composes some fictitious letter from real works? Where is the profit at such a great risk of being ridiculed?
No content control, high risk. What for?
What if the editor wasn’t trying to defraud anyone, but he was just trying to reconstruct Paul’s letters based on the material available?
Why assume that this was nefarious and profit driven, when it could have just been an amateur critical scholar trying to reconstruct a document that survives only in fragments, just like modern critical scholars do all the time?
Robert said
“You fail to realize that all of the deutero-Pauline letters were attempts to claim Pauline authority.”
Exactly. Deutero-Pauline letters are additional content, a supplement to the first author’s work.
So you must admit to that there was a pre-existing Pauline tradition that was being co-opted by the author of the deutero-Pauline letters. Previously you had asked, “If the letters were … valuable enough to be copied and imitated, where was Paul’s tradition for 40 years? Why is there no one who would admit to being acquainted with anyone from the circle of Paul or his disciples or disciples of his disciples. Who copied these letters and why?” The deutero-Pauline letters prove the existence of an earlier Ur-Pauline cipher. Surely there must have been a certain amount of time for the Ur-Pauline component to become important enough for the deutero-Pauline forger to deem it worthwhile to try and co-opt this authority.
The assumptions of your reconstruction take time, ur-Pauline tradition. I look at the content market in a completely different way. This is wildfire. Time is a luxury that no one can afford. New ideas, new heroes are introduced instantly.
If I see a collection of redacted letters, an artificially created amalgam, additional letters from other authors, I see a completely different story than you do. The letters were created only to not wander around the world alone, but to send the younger ones taught on the letters, motivated by the heroic Paul and his realistically outlined problems and challenges.
Letters is the first Christian textbook. This is an assumption that needs to be proved or disproved. This is not the final result
Porphyry said
Jarek said
Robert said
Jarek said
Robert said
Jarek said
It all started with watching the Ehrman-Wallace debate “Is the original NT lost”. In his first speech, Bart made it clear that we only had access to the Pauline Corpus collection from 100 CE, that all the letters were heavily redacted, that we don’t know if Paul wrote 2 Cor. because it is an amalgam of 2 to 5 different writings …
Jarek, Jarek, Jarek, we really do like you as a person, but … You’re greatly exaggerating. ** you do not have permission to see this link ** only doubts that one small part of 2 Corinthians was written by Paul (6 verses, 6,14–7,1). Other than this small section, the various partition theories consider that someone combined various parts of authentic letters.
We did not understand each other. Bart said that 2 Cor. it consists of 2 -5 different Paul’s texts connected together. I meant nothing else.
So when you said “Bart made it clear … that we don’t know if Paul wrote 2 Cor. because it is an amalgam of 2 to 5 different writings,” you didn’t really meant to say that?
And here we come to the difference between Bart’s version and mine.
If the ghost writer wrote the letter using 5 of his other works pulled out of the drawer, everything is simple. Full content control, clear motivation and safe operation. Work finally accepted, cash in a pocket.
If an editor pulled 5 of Paul’s different writings out of a drawer and created a sixth, nothing is clear here.
Was the editor sure he was the only owner of Paul’s 5 unknown writings? How could he know about it?
Why would he risk his forgery being discovered instead of publishing these texts separately?
Who composes some fictitious letter from real works? Where is the profit at such a great risk of being ridiculed?
No content control, high risk. What for?
What if the editor wasn’t trying to defraud anyone, but he was just trying to reconstruct Paul’s letters based on the material available?
Why assume that this was nefarious and profit driven, when it could have just been an amateur critical scholar trying to reconstruct a document that survives only in fragments, just like modern critical scholars do all the time?
I use market motivational categories because they are simple, brutal and understandable. It’s easy to show the competitive process. In addition, they give my interlocutors additional motivation to critically evaluate my ideas.
People fulfill themselves anonymously, dedicate their lives to something. Hagiography, asceticism, invented tradition as a communication tool, philosophical dialogues, myths about people and gods – all this was before. But people compete with each other for various unknown reasons, and I argue that those who see things in a straight market way win.
Porphyry said
Jarek said
Porphyry said
Jarek said
.
B. The 100% efficiency of collecting scattered letters is a miracle of resurrection of the dead – there is no letter outside the collection found by someone else. Points A and B strongly point to one publishing center
Like Robert notes, we have no Christian ms copied in the first century. What we have from the second century are very rare and fragmentary.
It makes perfect sense that the collection, once it arrives, would displace the tradition of individual letters. Why copy one-off letters if you have a complete collection to copy? Imagine you are a James bond fan and want to BitTorrent all the movies; if you can choose between assembling a complete collection from individual torrents of individual movies or just downloading the full collection already assembled as a complete collection, which do you pick? Almost certainly you just get the complete collection.
So I think the most natural scenario is, individual letters circulate during the first century, those copies are lost like everything else from the first century.
Near the end of the first century, someone collects all the extant and available letters and publishes them as a set. The set becomes the standard (consider, by analogy, the way Migne became the de facto standard edition, for a century, for the fathers; he didn’t invent the writings, but his became by far the most popular edition simply because it was complete).
What survived are copies that came through the most popular family–the collection.
The others were lost. But that isn’t at all surprising: We have no physical ms from the first century, and those independent letters were not copied after the collection was introduced.
Oh, and the collection wasn’t 100% efficient. We know some letters were lost (and I think this has been recognized since the patristic period), or least least don’t survive in their original form.
And why would we expect to find copies of letters not in the collection? If the first century editor of the collection couldn’t lay hands on a first century copy, why would we who have 0 first century copies of anything expect to be able to get out hands on a first century copy that was already scarce in the first century?
Someone collects. Ok. How?
Like so many other details about first century Christianity, I don’t know the details, but it doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to find possibilities. The early churches were in communication with each other. Any letters of Paul would have been of interest to a significant number of early Christians.
I can imagine Christian travelers stumbling on letters while they happened to be visiting other communities and then bringing a copy back to their own community–thus initial incomplete collections might have formed organically and without design. I can also imagine someone deliberately setting out to collect Paul’s letters by writing to other communities and asking for copies of any letters they have.
Nobody has details from the past. It can only assume some scenario and try to test it. I also imagined this collecting process in a similar way. It wasn’t until I heard Bart and found Zuntz’s artwork online that I changed my mind. OMG Someone wrote a manual. Not for believers, but for missionaries.
Robert said
The very fact that Marcion called his gospel a “gospel” shows that it was not the original gospel. As far as we know the gospels were not called “gospels” until the time of Marcion. It is sometimes thought that Mark called his own work a “gospel” (1,1), but that’s an anachronistic use of the term. It is possible that Marcion thought Mk 1,1 as a title identifying that work as a “gospel” and thus used that term to refer to other gospels circulating at that time. But the author of Luke’s gospel does not use the term not even once in his account of the life of Jesus.
———————————————————————–
Gospel as a word is present in Paul’s letters about 50 times. Synchronisation of different writings – Paul’s letters are gospel, new writing is also gospel. Marcion saw *E and knew he had to take it. He had no choice whatever he thought about the authenticity and veracity of this document. He knew Jesus’ resume would outpace the Pauline Corpus in the mass market. Marcion just understood the meaning of *Ev, meaning of Pauline Corpus before everyone else.
Jarek said
Porphyry said
Jarek said
Robert said
Jarek said
Robert said
Jarek said
It all started with watching the Ehrman-Wallace debate “Is the original NT lost”. In his first speech, Bart made it clear that we only had access to the Pauline Corpus collection from 100 CE, that all the letters were heavily redacted, that we don’t know if Paul wrote 2 Cor. because it is an amalgam of 2 to 5 different writings …
Jarek, Jarek, Jarek, we really do like you as a person, but … You’re greatly exaggerating. ** you do not have permission to see this link ** only doubts that one small part of 2 Corinthians was written by Paul (6 verses, 6,14–7,1). Other than this small section, the various partition theories consider that someone combined various parts of authentic letters.
We did not understand each other. Bart said that 2 Cor. it consists of 2 -5 different Paul’s texts connected together. I meant nothing else.
So when you said “Bart made it clear … that we don’t know if Paul wrote 2 Cor. because it is an amalgam of 2 to 5 different writings,” you didn’t really meant to say that?
And here we come to the difference between Bart’s version and mine.
If the ghost writer wrote the letter using 5 of his other works pulled out of the drawer, everything is simple. Full content control, clear motivation and safe operation. Work finally accepted, cash in a pocket.
If an editor pulled 5 of Paul’s different writings out of a drawer and created a sixth, nothing is clear here.
Was the editor sure he was the only owner of Paul’s 5 unknown writings? How could he know about it?
Why would he risk his forgery being discovered instead of publishing these texts separately?
Who composes some fictitious letter from real works? Where is the profit at such a great risk of being ridiculed?
No content control, high risk. What for?
What if the editor wasn’t trying to defraud anyone, but he was just trying to reconstruct Paul’s letters based on the material available?
Why assume that this was nefarious and profit driven, when it could have just been an amateur critical scholar trying to reconstruct a document that survives only in fragments, just like modern critical scholars do all the time?
I use market motivational categories because they are simple, brutal and understandable. It’s easy to show the competitive process. In addition, they give my interlocutors additional motivation to critically evaluate my ideas.
People fulfill themselves anonymously, dedicate their lives to something. Hagiography, asceticism, invented tradition as a communication tool, philosophical dialogues, myths about people and gods – all this was before. But people compete with each other for various unknown reasons, and I argue that those who see things in a straight market way win.
But those motivational categories may be wrong.
Before running wild with this hermeneutic, you need to ask whether the motivation you ascribe to the editor uniquely fits the data we have, and I think there are some problems there. At the very least, there are very reasonable alternatives that, if taken seriously, will yield very different conclusions. For example, what we can surmise about the history of composition and redaction will be very different if we presume the editor was just sincerely trying to collect Paul’s letters, rather than profiting off a massive fraud.
I’m reminded of the expression, “when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail.”
Jarek said
Nobody has details from the past. It can only assume some scenario and try to test it.
I tried to test your thesis earlier–by posing what seemed to me some fairly substantial incongruities between what we actually have and what we would expect to have based on your thesis.
Porphyry said
Jarek said
2 Cor.
Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians consists of texts taken from various works by Paul, previously unpublished but separate works. Biblical scholars recognize in 2 Cor. from 2 to 5 such separate works by the same author.
It is unlikely that such an amalgamation would be made to address the vital current problems of the Corinthian congregation. So how was it?
The author does not need to copy paste because he has it all in his head and can easily write a new text based on old thoughts adapted to the needs of the moment and the new recipient.
This seems to me to be evidence of the authenticity of the letters. Why would a forger choose to forge a document that is so incongruous? An amateur editor trying to assemble a collection of Paul’s writings, however, might very well produce something like this if he was working with incomplete copies.
Another person using this technique is a ghost writer who has an interest in getting paid for everything he has written, even if some of it has been rejected 100 times before. Such a profession.
Wait, so you are proposing a forger whose prior forged letters have been rejected 100 times before rebundling his prior work and pawning it off?
First if it has been rejected 100 times before, wouldn’t it be sort of hard for him to move his work? Wouldn’t he be a pretty notorious fraud by that point?
“Oh, look guys, I found yet another long lost letter of Paul–this one’s real I promise! Nevermind that it seems to reproduce verbatim material from those earlier ‘lost letters’ that you all rejected as fake.”
Second, a forger good enough to pull off such a stunt successfully would–I’d expect–be able to compose a letter that is internally coherent, unless he was deliberately marketing it as a series of fragments from otherwise lost letters. Can you think of any case where a forger has passed off a forgery of a lengthy work that is made up of text skillessly copied and pasted from prior attempts at fraud, each with a very different tenor? The closest I can think of is the Gospel of Jesus’s wife, but that was entirely different–it was a few scattered words that didn’t even form full sentences, and the forger evidently didn’t know Coptic very well (hence the need to copy phrases from a published work.)
I don’t believe you have answered those objections.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
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