General thoughts re: the alleged Pseudepigraphical letters of Paul
I'm curious about Shipmates' thoughts re: 1 Timothy, 2 Thessalonians, 2 Timothy, Colossians, Titus, and Ephesians from the standpoints about what we in this modern age think we know about them, an what if anything could/should be done about that knowledge. This isn't a new issue, but I'm wondering if, in general, we value them in the same way we do the undisputed letters. Does this critical scholarship even matter? Especially re: passages that many find problematic -- in short, Paul's misogyny -- would the Bible be improved by their removal? Is the canon-icity of the Bible important enough to discard this scholarship out of hand?
One critical scholar's take.
One critical scholar's take.
Comments
God knows a change in life and circumstance can drastically change someone's writing style. I'm sure someone could reach that conclusion just looking at my ship posts over the past...has it been 20 years? People change, and the way that they communicate changes. Going to prison can change a person too. It can also change a person's mind on circumstances and policy decisions. Paul was a human, not a computer. He was malleable and fallible.
2 Peter is another Epistle I look at funny because it looks like someone cribbed Jude verbatim and added a chapter.
For a preacher or theologian, I think the text of the Bible stands as itself and the contradictions or paradoxes need to be worked through regardless of question of their origin. I'm also averse to reopening the canonical can of worms at this distance. We're too far away to do it honestly, honestly.
How they are interpreted or used to inform how we should live also varies. There are those who claim to be Biblical*, but it seems to me that they are not sufficiently familiar with parts of their canon being in disagreement with others.
I have recently read a Peter Enns book which gives a stark example
I rather like Peter Enns' perspective of treating the whole of the canon as a wisdom book.
If I come across a passage which doesn't accord with my understanding of how a Christian should behave, then maybe it's because the cultural situation of the intended audience is different from mine.
The Jewish tradition is to debate and argue over passages. I think that is much better than most of the Christian practice of just (half) listening to what the person in pulpit says.
*And they are probably unaware that the version of The Lord's Prayer they use comes from the Didache rather than from Matthew.
What does the bible say about the role of women? Well, you need to look in detail at a whole lot of passages. And explore the translations that you are using - meaning you have to explore the possible meaning of words in the originals. And also, see the context of the original writing and writers - their own culture.
Once you have done that, you should have found all sorts of contradictory answers to whatever question you were asking, and you need to carefully work out how they can all apply.
But of course, that is a lot of work, and proof testing is so much easier.
And we need to understand than things like Actual Authorship were not as rigorous for them. They wanted to know how to live, how to be, and so any writing that they could have pointers from - and as @LatchKeyKid says - argue over it, and discuss it - this is what they craved.
It isn't a rule book. It never was a rule book. Pauls letters (whoever wrote them) were never meant as The Rules You Must Follow, but as encouragements in specific situations to consider what was happening.
Peeling back the layers and references, every path I followed led back to one work: The Problem Of The Pastoral Epistles by PN Harrison in 1921, which is available online.
The argument hung on the number of hapax legomena (words used once only in the body of work by the author) per page, the rate of such words being much higher than in pastoral epistles than the rest of the Pauline corpus. The rate 'per page' seemed rather arbitrary, as opposed to 'per thousand words' or somesuch. It also failed to consider the fact that Paul was writing to individuals rather than churches. If someone were to examine my use of words on The Ship compared to what I use at work, the difference would be stark.
That's not to say that the pastoral epistles are unquestionably Pauline, but the reasons for doubt seem... dubious.
After all an email from me about how to lead a PCC (church council) meeting is likely to be different in tone and vocabulary from one focussed on a pastoral concern or a theological issue.
This is not new. Isaiah is said to have three separate books. Most people understand Genesis was a compilation/redaction of several traditions.
It is what it is, folks. The authorship of any book in the Bible is not the primary question for me. It is more about how the writer reflects his/her/their relationship with God's hesed/grace .
I like that approach a lot. I think the part that scares me is the "if" clause.
The accusation is that some of us like to apply our academic tools selectively. That means that when we like the passage like Salvation by Faith or The Golden Rule or The Beatitudes, we just read it simply and process it without question. On the other hand, if it's something thorny and uncomfortable like "women must obey their husbands, "psalm 137" or "Deuteronomy," we suddenly break out a surgical theater's worth of exegetical equipment so we can tear text into itty bitty pieces, leaving the detritus of history on the floor like so much chaff.
And maybe that's what we're supposed to do, but the selection process makes people question the role of the Scripture as a source of Authority when we're dividing it up ourselves on our own terms. We call it authority when we tell it what it can tell us? What authority is that? Imago Dei much?
Of course, I think such careful dividing is our responsibility as Christians, so it doesn't really bother me that much, but I do get the concern.
The degree to which one takes uncertainty as proof, one way or the other, is a thing.
And note that none of the books collected in the Bible is attributed to a woman. That tells me more than all this other stuff.
We could start heading our posts here like that.
'In Which I Outline My Opinion On The Pseudographical Epistles Of The New Testament Shewing From The Works Of The Most Esteemed Commentators And The Latest Findings In Biblical Scholarship How ....' etc etc etc ...
There is good argument that Esther was written by a woman. Also, Ruth seems to tell a story of a woman from a woman's point of view.
Even if women did not author entire books, several biblical passages preserve women’s words or songs:
Put it another way, two books are about women but written by men. Women's words make up a few dozen verses. The rest is men.
It's bloody hard - I think - to find anything written by a woman in that period, because patriarchy was that much in force across the entire so-called lousy excuse for a "civilization." That said, you're not wrong. And if a scholar can check me on that, you have my deep gratitude!
I think one thing we have to do with the Bible, if anything, is to stop idolizing the culture that produced it and learn to use it to keep moving ourselves forward.
Certainly. It's a tool. Don't worship your tools.
You can argue they were written by men, but I will argue current biblical scholars say they were likely written by women.
See the discussion in https://www.bibleanalysis.org/did-any-woman-write-any-of-the-books-in-the-bible/
and,
https://zondervanacademic.com/blog/who-wrote-ruth#:~:text=In part because the book tells a woman’s,befell even royal women in a patriarchal world.
There are also a number of Psalms that could have been written by women.
Laments (e.g., Psalms 3, 13, 22, 42–43) echo the structure of women’s mourning songs, which were often performed by professional female lamenters.
Songs of thanksgiving (e.g., Psalms 30, 116) parallel the pattern of Hannah’s prayer (1 Sam 2) and Miriam’s song (Exod 15), both of which are female-voiced traditions.
Wisdom psalms (e.g., Psalm 131) sometimes reflect domestic imagery and maternal metaphors that may have originated in women’s oral traditions.
As more feminist scholars work with the Bible, they are seeing more female snippets in the Bible.
Look up the writings of Adele Berlin and Elisabeth Florenza just to name two.
Worship of the Paper Calf is rife.
In the same way, I have no problem in believing that the Gospel writers were saying to their intended audiences from their perspectives of the significance and Christology what they believed Jesus would be saying to their situations.
Well, it makes women primary characters in the story - not the same as being from a woman's point of view. The narrative is in the omniscient third person - could be anyone. And a woman's narrative point of view doesn't mean the author was a woman. James Joyce wrote the last section of Ulysses in the voice of Molly Bloom.
Several biblical passages! Wow.
That first link is to a blog by a guy who cites no sources and lists no credentials.
Your Zondervan writer cites one scholar and draws this conclusion:
Did you draw on a specific source for this info? And why should "female snippets" (seriously cannot believe your wording here), if they exist, convince anyone to take seriously what an overwhelmingly "male" group of texts and a demonstrably misogynist tradition say about women?
I don't see what signs there are that Ruth is written by a women. Part of the message of Ruth seems to be to challenge the Deuteronomic law that no Moabite may ever be admitted to Israel (I take 10 generations to mean it applies in perpetuity). If her descendent is the mighty King David then her admittance must have been blessed by God.
So Ruth seems to have been written by those concerned with understanding the laws of Moses, and would that have been a woman?
But that doesn't answer anything in fact. All it says is that the society that all of this was written in rejected the education of women, dismissed them, treated them like dirt. And some of this is reflected in the writings.
But to separate it out as cultural is important, because then it says that this is not for us to follow. And it says that the culture is not one we need to reflect. And it tells us that those passages where women are raised up and exalted for what they say or do (Deborah, Priscilla, Miriam) are really significant as being counter-cultural references.
Women in the past had more agency to be authors than male erasure makes it seem.
First, Hillel I. Millgram, Four Biblical Heroines and the Case for Female Authorship (McFarland, 2007) https://openlibrary.org/books/OL51603129M/Four_Biblical_Heroines_and_the_Case_for_Female_Authorship
Second: Sorrel Wood, “Writing Esther: How Do Writing, Power, and Gender Intersect in the Megillah?” (2021) https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/opth-2020-0146/pdf
The first two links you gave do not, as @Ruth pointed, actually support your assertions. Now you have cited to a book people may not and likely do not have access to (do you have it?) and to a 25-page article, the abstract of which is so grammatically odd as to make one wonder about the reliability of the article itself.
If you want your assertion to be taken seriously, it’s your job to provide more than just those links, but instead to actually (and accurately) describe, summarize and quote as appropriate from what those sources say in order to show how they support your assertion.
There are quite a number of articles out in the netherworld that discuss the female authorship of Esther and Ruth. I just do not have the time to list ones only to have them discounted by sceptics.
My assertion was contempory Biblical scholars will say Esther and likely Ruth were written by women. I am not out to prove they were written by women, just reflecting what I have been seeing in the general literature out there.
I'd be interested in seeing a list of suggested texts. I think we're pretty far away to be getting into authenticity tests, since that was already getting a little dodgy even in the third century.
I think there's a notion that Ephesians in particular might've been a circular letter, because there were copies of the same text with different headers. So it's possible Paul (or whoever) wrote it as a general pamphlet to multiple churches and it was passed around.
I'm not sure how that effects authorship or stylistic questions, but it might be relevant to this conversation.
Seems like I remember the same being said of the other Pauline letters in seminary too.
While we are at it, it appears Paul may have written three, perhaps four letters to the Corinthians.
In 1 Corinthians Paul wrote: "I wrote to you in my letter." It appears that letter was lost.
Then 2 Corinthians appears to contain maybe three letters:
The tearful letter (2 Cor 2:3-4; 7:4-8
The letter of reconciliation, where Paul expresses joy that the community had repented, there is joy in a restored relationship
And then a separate document defending Paul's apostleship (Ch 10-13)
This comes from 1. The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. 11 (Abingdon Press, 2000)
Ralph P. Martin, 2 Corinthians (Word Biblical Commentary, Vol. 40; 1986, rev. 2014), and
Margaret Thrall, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Second Epistle to the Corinthians (ICC; 1994–2000)
Also
https://ehrmanblog.org/several-letters-in-one-what-about-second-corinthians/
https://www.bibleodyssey.org/articles/the-corinthian-letters/
https://www.gotquestions.org/how-many-letters-Corinthians.html
He replied that in theory, yes, but it would require an Ecumenical Council to do so - by which I understood him to mean an Orthodox one. But he did say that RC and Protestant scholars would need to be involved and that it would be a matter for all Christian churches to consider and agree upon.
Thing is, though, whilst the RCs, Protestants and Orthodox all have the same New Testament we don't all agree on the 'inter-testamental' books and the Ethiopians have more books in their New Testament than the rest of us.
Should we adopt theirs or try to persuade them to drop them?
As for an Ecumenical Council, even if only an Orthodox one, look what happened when poor old Patriarch Bartholomew called one.
That didn't end well.
Perhaps in another 1500 years or so ...
The byzantine Orthodox Churches only defined the canon of scripture at the Synod of Jerusalem in 1672 (in response to discussion with Protestant Churches) . This was a local Council, but its decisions in this matter have been acccepted by all the local churches. No Ecumenical Council involved.
https://gracelutheranhatfield.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Letter-from-Birmingham-Jail.pdf
I don't think trying to add anything new would go down well with them.
There is a big chunk of Protestantism that has hung its hat on the 66 book canon being divinely ordered and refuses to accept the role of the church in shaping it, because to do so would be to accept that the Bible's authority comes through the church, not the other way around.
"All" it says is that women were treated like dirt? I can't just separate that out as merely "cultural." Teachers and purported sages who talked about how people should live their lives but did not recognize the humanity of more than half the people around them are hard for me to take seriously. The counter-cultural references are important, but not enough to save the traditions for me.
la vie en rouge, Purgatory host