Duvduv

I have now noticed this interesting fact. Whenever ancient writers talked about "Paul" and the epistles, the writers always described them in a package. You never read that "blessed Paul" wrote four holy epistles.
You never read that blessed Paul wrote one or two epistles "that we are aware of." You never read about Paul and his 20 epistles.

The canonical epistles always come as a package.

As I wrote elsewhere, it strikes me that there are several possibilities:

a) that a particular epistle was not written ONLY to the recipient community such as Galatians or Ephesians, but that they were distributed to all communities of the sect.

b) but even more likely, that they were NEVER written individually from the very beginning at all. They came in a package from the VERY BEGINNING and possibly were not really meant as correspondence to a real community at all, and the style of the letters was merely meant for didactic/educational purposes.

After all, there are no records of anyone writing a response to the author of a particular epistle. There is no record of a description of the community in question or of their reactions to their preachers.

And although the epistles (except mainly for Hebrews) reflect a general common theology and have contradictions and differences among them, it is conceivable that these are all "reconciled" because they are all part of a single collection, and do not reflect differences addressed to different communities, which would make no sense on the writer's part.

And the fact that they WERE accepted as a PACKAGE without dispute or challenge by the historians/apologists (the man-on-the-street never having left any records about it), would suggest that they were accepted rather early, prior to the apologetics confirming the four canonical gospels and no others.

In the case of the gospels we don't see a large package of all the gospels. Just four, which are apologetically explained several times, which would suggest the gospels came around later on.

Some questions to ponder:
But WHEN was all this? Was it all a production still in progress in the 4th century?! Did they supercede prior UNWRITTEN traditions about the Christ that had existed earlier, prior to the 4th century? Did Justin Martyr reflect some of these unknown earlier traditions over 150 years before Nicea?

stephan huller

The 'packaging' of epistles is at least as old as Polycarp's Epistle to the Philippians (in that case the Ignatian corpus). The idea of packaging letters this way goes back at least far as the thirteen Platonic epistles or better yet Anacharsis the king of the Scyths which dates to the third century BC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacharsis

There are many obvious parallels between these epistles and the Pauline corpus and Mani seems to have taken a special interest in Anacharsis

Duvduv

But of course they could not have been a package had they only been intended and sent for each individual community since no central authority would have known how many there were or where they were. It could only have been as I described, whereby every community got copies or they were produced only once there was a predetermined package. And possibly where they weren't actually sent to the designated recipient at all but were crafted for didactic purposes.
As far as Polycarp is concerned, I don't accept the traditional view about him.

stephan huller

The point is that the collecting and canonizing of epistles goes back to before the advent of Christianity

stephan huller

The letters of Anacharsis are also literary forgeries

Duvduv

So for all intents and purposes then it was following a cultural norm. I'll take a look at those other letters you mentioned known as fakes. But what do you think about the issue of conflicting theological issues in the same collection or ideas that are not standard throughout all epistles? And do the Paulist epistles betray the same type of literary flavor as these others which may be much older?

Maklelan

It was the different communities that circulated them with each other, not a central authority. The canon developed slowly from the liturgical collections common to different regions, and the epistles were not packaged from the start. Ignatius only mentions Romans, 1 Corinthians, Ephesians, Colossians, and 1 Thessalonians. Polycarp never discusses Colossians, Titus, and Philemon. Valentinus, the first to include Revelation, didn't discuss from 1 Thessalonians on. Justin Martyr didn't discuss any of them.

Obviously.

So you're saying the epistles were all composed at once? Then why do we have the isolated mention of only a couple epistles here and there in the earliest texts?

What view do you accept, and why?

Imitation was and remains quite common in literary circles.

stephan huller

Which raises an interesting point. The Marcionites (and possibly the early Alexandrian assuming they were separate communities) conceived of the New Testament as such as a collection of apostolic writings (where 'apostolic' represents the equivalent of 'Pauline' in our religious language). As such it wasn't a collection of letters as much as it was a collection of writings from one author where gospel and apostle (here a technical term) were somehow related to one another. I can't shake the idea that the letters were commentaries on the gospel although certainly they are not so in their present (Catholic form).

In this manner the epistles bear some similarities to the Mimar Marqe (= the words of Mark) albeit these writings do not take the specific form of 'epistles' per se. Nevertheless the Mimar isn't a midrash and it is not a systematic 'commentary' on the Pentateuch either. I don't know what it is. The various 'books' (at least six have survived) are kind of like homilies on various themes. Book One and Two (from memory) deal with themes related to the Exodus. I forget what Book Three is about. Book Four is a systematic discussion of the Great Song (= Deut 32).

Yet I have to stress that like the epistles (in their Marcionite form) the Mimar almost never references other interpretations of the Pentateuch, other traditions (which must have existed as the Samaritan culture was very old even then). Both in fact seem more like 'revelations.'

In the case of the Apostolos (at least according to the Marcionite understanding) a revelation which came to the original author of the gospel which swept away the authority of the Law and prophets in some form. In the case of the Mimar a revelation which came to the one like Moses which effectively swept away all other interpretations of the age old Pentateuch.

Now the fact that Justin does not know the Pauline epistles makes manifest that 'the gospel' could be liberated from any association with the apostolos. Was the gospel in a stand alone codex? It just seems strange to think of the gospel standing 'naked' without accompanying texts.

Duvduv

Do the sources you mention indicate that these were all the Paulist epistles that were in existence or were they simply referring to them in their writings, which wouldn't mean the others didn't exist?

I have read material arguing that neither Polycarp nor Ignatius were real people in the 2nd century. For example see Ken Humphrey's website:
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/ignatius.html

stephan huller

Even if we suppose that Polycarp and Ignatius went back to the same historical person the difficulty is that both are cited by Irenaeus. Even if we give a date as late as the early third century for parts of Adversus Haereses, the evidence from Lucian of Samosata seems to indicate that either Polycarp or Ignatius (or both) were present in Roman culture c 160 CE.