James The Least

We have letters not written by Paul, but attributed to him, that date from the early second century. If the person writing them subscribed to church tradition, then he was well aware that the historic Paul was long dead by then, and thus was writing to intentionally mislead people into thinking it had been written during Paul's supposed lifetime.

I fail to see why this same phenomenon could not be going on with the seven undisputed epistles. The author is trying to imagine what a historic Paul would have written in the 50s. That he is not as obvious a phony as the Pastorals' author is a tribute to his literary skill, not to the letters' authenticity.

thief of fire

OK, fair call.

aa5874

Please, understand that we have NO letter dated to the early 2nd century. People have made presumptions but all dated Texts of the Pauline letters are LATE 2ND to 3rd century.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...stament_papyri

There is no need to assume that the Pauline writings are early when NO DATED Text support it.

thief of fire

We don't. We have a consensus that some letters previously attributed to Paul are not by Paul. I don't as you appear to regard this as uncontestable.

The more we build on things that might be true or are probably true, the more likely we are to mislead ourselves, unless we remeber the tentativeness of much of NT criticism.

We can say probably (according to the experts) about these letters previously attributed to Paul, but when we use that assumption to build another theory on top of we must remember it is not set in stone.
And so the gist is we cant use them the way you try to here (as a definite).

James The Least

Nothing in biblical studies is set in stone. It's all theory and interpretation; that's all it will ever be.

Duvduv

In terms of the discussion about whether the epistles were written before the gospels or after the gospels in the second century or later, the missing element seems to be something else.

Scholars do not seem to be interested in thinking about the implications of WHY they were written by whomever. Were they intended to be mere individual letters of encouragement to ostensible followers? Were they intended to be kept for posterity as holy scripture as the framework for a new faith?

Do scholars care that there is no evidence that there were any sects who disagreed about the number of "authentic" Pauline letters (as compared with unauthentic Ignatian letters)? Do they care that this was never in dispute, and that no one ever mentioned the epistles of Paul except as a SET of letters?
Do they ever wonder why there is no evidence of any communities actually receiving any such letters or even responding to them? Do they ever even ask whether there is any evidence that these letters were actually written to the addressees, as opposed to being a set of generic didactic sermons in the form of letters?

Or is the only issue of interest what kind of Greek is used in which letters?

In any case, if they were all forgeries then it is hard to assume that they were actually written as forgeries as individual letters, but rather that they were written as a whole set of letters that were never questioned or in dispute by any adherents to Orthodoxy.

And if so, WHY were they written in the first place if not for mere didactic purposes as sermons attesting to the "antiquity" of Christian teachings back to the first century, rather than as holy writ, since there was no official canon of Christian holy writ for a long time?

James The Least

Scholars have to accept that the letters are real letters and the author is a real person named Paul. That's what they present themselves as, so we must just take them at face value. We have other letters that demonstrably are not by the same person, but still claiming to be by Paul. Rather than call these forgeries, let's just say they are written by "the school of Paul" and therefore carry the master's imprimatur. Orthodoxy cannot be challenged, because that might imperil faith, and well ... we can't let that happen.

David Trobisch has proposed that the 'undisputed' letters were conceived of and published as a literary unit, possibly by Paul himself. Whether or not they were written to real churches about real situations is another matter.
This bears repeating, often:

"Proper recognition of the rhetorical elements in Paul's autobiographical remarks provides a further challenge to existing approaches, which characteristically reach historical conclusions before the question of literary function has been adequately addressed."

-- George Lyons, Pauline Autobiography: Toward a New Understanding (1995), quoted in Brodie 2006.

Toto

I don't think you've read a lot of scholarship. Robert Price has addressed these issues.

There were disagreements on the number of authentic Pauline letters in antiquity. Marcionites did not accept the Pastorals. The followers of Apelles only accepted 1 Corinthians. Presumably some Christians did not accept any.

Duvduv

How do we know this is a fact? What would be the significance of accepting only one of 14 epistles, and since nothing exists from Marcionites, no one can say what they really believed.

Toto

Read up on historical methods. We don't know anything with absolute certainty, but we can make reasonable guesses based on the surviving documents.