This past week I was in Clinton NY giving a lecture at Hamilton College (lovely place) (snowy place) hosted by my former student Ian Mills (who did his PhD at Duke but took courses with me). One of Ian’s current projects involves a once-famous now not-widely-known letter forged in the name of Paul, the Letter to the Laodiceans (found in a number of Latin manuscripts of the Bible), and we, naturally, had some good talks about “Lost Letters of Paul.”

Then I remembered I had posted about this years ago, and thought it would be a good time to post some more —  in response to a very good question I received, and receive several times a year (!): which of the lost early Christian writings would I most love to have discovered?  (More than the letters of Paul: but here’s what I say about those in particular, in two posts. Here’s the first.)

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QUESTION: 

What lost early Christian books would you most like to have discovered?

 

RESPONSE:

Ah, this is a tough one.   There are lots of Christian writing that I would love to have discovered – all of the ones that have been lost, for example!

But suppose I had to name some in particular.   Well, this will take several posts.  To begin with, I wish we had the other letters of Paul.   Let me explain.

In the New Testament there are thirteen letters that claim Paul as their author.   But scholars since the nineteenth century have argued that some of these do not go back to Paul.  There is no absolute consensus on the issue of course; fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals argue that all thirteen go back to Paul; some critical scholars agree (not many!); others think that ten go back to Paul.  But the most widespread view is that six claim to be written by Paul even though he didn’t write them.

The six are the “Pastoral epistles” of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, which are very widely seen as pseudepigraphical (i.e. forged in Paul’s name by someone else) and the Deutero-Pauline letters of Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians, also forged.   When I was in graduate school we were taught that it was a common practice to write books in the name of someone else and that no one thought of that as a deceitful or scurrilous practice.  It turns out that is flat out WRONG, as I’ve stressed in a number of earlier posts.  But it is not to my purpose here.  In these six instances, someone claimed to be Paul knowing he wasn’t Paul, and these six do not go back to Paul himself.

We do not have any other letters from outside the New Testament that go back to Paul either.   We have a letter to the Laodiceans that is forged, the book of 3 Corinthians that is forged, and the exchange of letters – -fourteen altogether – allegedly between Paul and the great Roman philosopher Seneca, also forged.   But we have no authentic Pauline letters outside of the seven within the New Testament.

Now it is true that *two* (at least) of these surviving letters appear to comprise more than one letter that were later scissored and pasted together.   And so it is sometimes thought (by me, for example, even though I didn’t come up with this idea!) that the letter to the Philippians actually consists of two separate letters that were combined, with the beginning of one and the ending of the other removed when they were edited into one letter.   And 2 Corinthians is almost certainly two letters (on that there is widespread agreement) or maybe as many as five (on that there is less) spliced together by a later editor.

So in one sense we have more than seven letters of Paul even within the New Testament.   But let’s just count Philippians and 2 Corinthians as one letter: then we have seven writings by Paul.

It seems impossible to think that Paul did not write more letters – lots more letters.   That is because of the reason he wrote letters.  It was to substitute for his apostolic presence.  Here’s the deal.   Paul established churches in various parts of the northern Mediterranean, possibly in Syria, Cilicia, Asia Minor (modern Turkey), Macedonia, Achaia, at least as far west as Illyricum (roughly modern Croatia).  He spent most of his adult life doing this.

When Paul established a church in one city or another, he would convert people, teach them what they needed to know, assemble them into a worshiping community, get them started as a Christian church, and then move on to the next stop to do the same.   Some places he might stay a few months, others possibly a year or more.   But when he moved on, he would inevitably hear news of how the church was doing, and would write a letter to help them deal with their problems.

These are the letters we have: two of them to the church in Corinth, one to the churches in the region of Galatia, one to the church of Philippi, one to the church of Thessalonica.  He also wrote a personal letter to a man named Philemon about a situation involving his run-away slave (strikingly, Paul urges him to take the slave back without punishing him for the wrong doing he did, but he does *not* ask him to set the slave free!  Paul was not opposed to slavery) (then again, almost no one else was either) (except the slaves).   And he wrote yet another letter to a church he did not found, and had not visited, the church in Rome.

So we have five letters that he directed to the churches he had started to help them deal with their various problems about what to believe and how to behave.   But he must have written LOTS of letters to these churches over the years, and LOTS MORE to yet other churches that he founded.

And so one of the most perplexing questions of the earliest period of the church, a question that to my knowledge has not been asked very often:  Where are the other Pauline letters?

The answer is, obviously, that they are lost (probably forever) because they were not preserved.  They were read and then discarded.  But it’s hard for us to imagine how that could be.  Why would someone throw away a letter from Paul, of all people?   I don’t know the answer to that, but throw them away they did.  I suppose we would have to say that even though we ourselves, knowing what we do, would be desperate to have more writings available to us from the hand of Paul, his earliest followers simply didn’t feel that way.  It’s hard to imagine, but it must be true.

I’ll say a bit more about this in the next post.