spamandham

Ok, so 6 of 13 letters have been identified as likely complete pseudepigrapha. The remaining 7 have not been shown to be authentic, they just haven't been shown to be inauthentic.

Given that sampling, what is the probability that the remaining 7 letters are genuine, even in part? It ain't good. Simple probability tells us that it is extremely unlikely that any of the letters are genuine.

That said, all the letters, genuine or not, nevertheless represent the thinking of some Christian authors of the period, and are thus still useful to historical investigation.

hjalti

Sorry, I can't see how you come to that conclusion just based on the knowledge that at least 6 of them are forgeries.

Well, we know that the marcionite version of those 10 epistles was different, shorter, than the version we have today. We have 0 copies of the marcionite version.

Marcionites were accused by those who added 3 forgeries to that 10 letter collection of removing stuff from the 10 "original" letters.

I think these facts should make us very suspicious about the canonical version.

spamandham

You have a group of 13 objects. You know the objects can be either red or not red. They might all be red, they might all be not red. You don't know what the probability of red or not red is in advance. Also, the lights are turned off and so the best you can do is to try to devise tests to figure out if they are red or not.

Of the 13, you can not figure out how to test 7 of them, but the other 6, you have figured out how to test, and in each case, the test tells you they are not red.

What is the probability that the remaining 7 are red? If you can't figure exact numbers, just say "high" or "low".

hjalti

Spam, but the problem is that according to you we have a test that can only give positives (i.e. "The remaining 7 have not been shown to be authentic, they just haven't been shown to be inauthentic."). I think your assumption that the others haven't been tested is false.

If we have a machine that can only give the result: "This is red" or "I don't know if this is red or not." We would expect only to be sure of having red objects, even if 6 of them weren't red.

mountainman

An excellent analogy spamandham, but we need to add to the 13 objects a few other associated objects - the letter exchange between "Paul" and Seneca for example. These other objects have been also found to be red, but I am not sure how many there are. How many letters did "Paul" forge to Seneca?

I totally agree with this assessment of combinatorial probability. It is a logical conclusion from the status of the data. And by bring in more "Pauline forgeries" these chances diminish rapidly.

show_no_mercy

How do we tell whether the "authentic" seven are inauthentic? To do that we have to have a normative model of Paul to compare them with. I can't see how we can do that without begging the question - assuming what we want to prove. At the most, we can conclude that the "authentic" seven were written by a different person than the "inauthentic" six.

Someone wrote the seven, and they more than likely wrote them before the other six. I don't see why we can't call the person who wrote the seven "Paul".

spamandham

I agree that the tests are only capable of proving false rather than positive, but nonetheless, 6 out of 13 is pretty disgraceful results for anyone claiming there is anything authentic in them. It's silly to presume authenticity in light of this, or even to presume agnosticism. To the extent we can assert anything at all about these texts, we can more justifiably assert they are all psuedepigrapha.

spamandham

Suppose for a moment I'm right and none of the letters are authentic.

If we call the writer Paul, and also identify the writer with his character, this is going to hinder rather than help historical analysis. Don't you agree?

The history of Christianity plays out completely differently if I'm right.

show_no_mercy

But without some sort of authentic letters, we have no way of determining what is authentic and what isn't. The question of "authenticity" becomes a nonsense question if you have no means of authentication. What's more, the letters of "Paul" depict early Christian thought so they are more important to early Christianity and early Christian thought than an unknown (non-letter writing) Paul.

What really matters is which letters depict early/earliest Christian thought. These would be the "authentic" seven, no matter who wrote them. I think what you're really trying to get at is when these authentic seven were written. If they don't represent the earliest Christian thought, then I think I could follow where you're going.

Doug Shaver

That would seem to depend at least in part on whether authenticity is a purely random variable. Last time I checked, it wasn't.