Here are some questions I have received recently from readers:

QUESTION:

I’m curious about when Paul’s letter were compiled and by whom? It seems almost miraculous that, in that time period, letters sent to various destinations around the Mediterranean could somehow be gathered up together in one place. What are the earliest fragments or complete copies we have?

 

RESPONSE:

It’s an unusually complicated issue, and it has vexed scholars for a very long time.  But there is nothing miraculous about it per se. The letters of Ignatius (somewhat weirdly, we have seven of those too), were also collected at some point, and they too were sent to a wide range of places.  But how it happened (in either case) is the tricky question.

With respect to Paul, we already a references to his letters in 2 Peter 3:16, where the anonymous author (without telling us which ones he knows) calls them Scripture! And Ignatius himself, (around 110) mentions Paul’s letters.

Our earliest relatively full manuscript of the letters (called P45) comes from later, around 200 CE.  Both Marcion (around 140 CE ) and P45 apparently were missing the three Pastoral epistles of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus:  (P45 is fragmentary is missing the last few pages, but the missing pages would not have been enough to fit in the three letters; Marcion had only 10 letters in his canon — whether he knew more can’t be determined.).

Some people have proposed that Paul himself kept copies and that’s where the collection started, but that seems improbable, since he must have written hundreds of letters and certainly could not have kept them all.  Usually it is thought that a church like Corinth or Philippi that has a letter or two heard that another church had an important one and got a copy for themselves, and .. and it kinda snowballed from there.  But there’s no way to know for sure.

 

QUESTION:

Bart, what should we understand by “exousia” in I Cor 11.10?

 

RESPONSE:

Ah, right. Paul says that a  woman is to have an “authority” (exousia) on her head.  In this context the word is sometimes translated “veil” though it clearly does not literally mean veil: the word means something like “power” “control” or “authority.” One problem is that “authority” can be an abstract authority (“I have authority to do this”) or some person/entity that yields that abstraction (“I got in trouble with the authorities”) .  It could mean something like “symbol of authority,” and so that may be something like what Paul has in mind.  The veil on a woman’s head shows that she is “under” an “authority” (that of her husband).

The matter is complicated by the even more famous problem of the same sentence, that Paul explains that the woman needs an “authority” on her head “because of the angels.”  Uh, what?  What’s it mean?  There are two main lines of thought about that.  One is that he might mean the wicked angels, as in Genesis 6, where the “sons of God” looked upon the “daughters of men” and came down to have sex with them producing the giants who roamed the earth, leading to the flood; in this case the veil would somehow protect the woman from the wicked angels.  But how?  Would the veil provide some kind of power that can repel their advances?  It’s not clear how a literal veil or her husband’s authority could do that.  Or maybe the veil hides the woman’s beauty so the angels aren’t attracted to her (Her beauty is under her husband’s authority? Or needs to be hidden from them by a veil?).

The other explanation is that Paul is referring to good angels, who, in Jewish tradition, were used by God to create and structure the world and its hierarchies.  In that case, the veil would show that the woman is under the authority of her husband, as ordained by God and his angels.  So that’s why she should wear one..

As you can imagine, there are lots of debates about all of this and almost no certainties.

 

QUESTION:

In section/chapter 12 of The Jesus Dynasty James Tabor brings up the idea that the Eucharist as presented in John and by Paul was not the original ceremony. He refers to a first century or early second century document found in Greece in 1873 called The Didache (teaching) that gives a different prayer commemorating the eating of bread and wine. The wine represents the cup of the vine of David given as a gift to Israel and the bread represents Jesus marriage to his church.

Do you give any credence to the idea that Paul changed this to the body and blood symbolism and negated the original Eucharist prayer?

RESPONSE:

Yes, the Didache is an important document of early Christianity (I translated it in my edition of the Apostolic Fathers; you can find the relevant portion with a brief introduction in my book After The New Testament, 2nd ed. pp. 460-61; a bit more information can be found on pp. 436-37).  It probably dates to around the year 100 CE.

The Didache does record two prayers spoken by the author’s community at the communion meal, one over the bread and the other over the cup (ch. 9), and then a prayer of thanksgiving after everyone had eaten (ch. 10).  The prayers are not like the words spoken by Jesus at the Last Supper as recorded in the Synoptics and in 1 Cor. 11:22-24.

BUT the passages in the New Testament, unlike the Didache, are not prayers to be said at the meal.  They instead indicate what Jesus himself said at the time he instituted it at the Last Supper.  Moreover, the Didache does not indicate that the prayers were used everywhere or that they were the “original” prayer said or that they were what Jesus himself said when instituting the meal.  They are prayers that Christians said in this particular community.

Since they are prayers attested much later than the NT sources and are not words of institution by Jesus but prayers by his later followers for him, I don’t think that they were likely to have been earlier than Paul’s account (or the Gospels’) or that the NT accounts developed out of them.  (I’m afraid I haven’t reread James Tabor’s discussion so I’m not sure exactly what he is saying about them; you may want to check to make sure).