Solo

Perhaps you will find upon further reflection that there has to be base text to any presumed interpolation whether simple or layered. A conterfeit five-dollar bill assumes a genuine five-dollar bill. Finding there are fake or altered five-dollar bills means admitting there are printed notes which are authentic issue with a nominal value of 5$.

All I am actually saying that one needs to make one's mind whether there is an authentic base of Paul or not, and that positing the interpolation into Paul excludes logically the possibility of believing at the same time that the corpus is itself fake, i.e. does not have any standards by which to measure what belongs to it and what does not.

Best,
Jiri

DCHindley

Jiri,

It seems to me that Spin is more correct here. There were a number of authoritative fakes in antiquity, including purported letters or treatises by Plato, Seneca, Aristotle, etc. Some of the technical treatises were based on student lecture notes, representing what the lecture giver "would have" said, had he actually wrote a technical treatise on the subject at hand.

Some of these exercises were close enough to the known thinking of the lecture giver that a non-professional could think they were written by the lecture giver himself. Others among the ranks of amateur admirers of the lecture giver, noting differences from or inconsistencies with known authentic works, may then try to "tweak" them to get them "just right."

In that kind of case, though, you would still have a work being preserved on the basis of the reputation of the purported writer.

The kind of reputation the person of Paul might have had among early Christians is hard to pin one's hat upon.

Acts and the letters present some overlapping traditions (Paul as a traveler, one who organizes and encourages congregations of believers - leaving aside for the moment what they believed in), but they also have inconsistencies between them (the Paul of Acts is a Roman citizen while the Paul of the letters makes no such claim, in the letters cities addressed or written from do not fit especially well with Paul's itinerary in Acts, etc).

In the case of my oh-so-wrong hypothesis, Paul was revered by a group of non-Christians and his works may or may not have circulated. These same communities later became commingled with Christian communities due to overlap of interests (the justice of the God of the Jews, etc). Some Christian(s) later attempt to assimilate the hero of the Pauline congregations into the belief systems of the Christians. All this Christian needs to do is take bodies of works that Pauline congregations at least think are by him, or perhaps could be by him, and "Christianize" them.

For all we know, some or all of the base letters so "Christianized" may have been real. For instance, one of the letters from the pastoral collection even mentions a trunk containing his manuscripts "left" at Troas. If 2 Timothy* is a pseudepigraph, as most think, this is either an admission that the author got his letters from such a source, even if it was not a real trunk left at Troas during the visit there mentioned in 2 Corinthians,** or the excuse to explain how they came into his hands to publish in the first place.

DCH

*RSV 2 Tim 4: 13 When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, also the books, and above all the parchments.

**RSV 2 Cor 2:12 When I came to Troas to preach the gospel of Christ, a door was opened for me in the Lord; 13 but my mind could not rest because I did not find my brother Titus there. So I took leave of them and went on to Macedonia.

aa5874

Multiple versions of Myth fables are NOT really considered interpolated.

Doug Shaver

Of course everything in history is tentative, but an opinion is not unjustified solely because it is subject to change.

I think "suspect" is too strong a word to apply universally to ancient texts. I agree that a blanket presumption of authenticity is unwarranted, but so is the rank cynicism that I see routinely applied to early Christian writings. It sometimes looks to me as though in the opinion of some skeptics, Christians from Day One were constitutionally incapable of ever uttering a true statement.

dog-on

I am not sure what you mean by "uttering a true statement" in relation to my point, nor do I propose that an opinion is unjustified solely because it is subject to change. I am simply saying that, barring an autograph, a position of scepticism towards the content is probably the most reasonable starting position, making any argument, by default, tentative. That is what I meant by the word 'suspect', which I do not think is too strong in this context.

aa5874

History is not only about Jesus Christ, God Incarnate and the Pauline writings.

There is evidence of antiquity for many events and characters of the past.

WE have STILL have PHYSICAL evidence of the ERUPTION of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE.

Whoever made such a claim that "Christians from Day One were constitutionally incapable of ever uttering a true statement"?

Sometimes I think that there are Skeptics who do NOT want to ask for actual evidence to protect the flawed opinions of their favorite Scholars.

aa5874

'

And what you say is even more necessary when dealing with UNRELIABLE sources.

The Pauline writings are about HEAVENLY bodies, the resurrection of the dead, Gods and angels and appears to contain fiction and implausibilities.

It would be illogical and foolhardy to assume veracity of the Pauline writings by using the same Pauline writings as its own corroborative source.

dog-on

I am not referring, in any way and for instance, to whether or not Paul wrote fact or fiction, in fact, I am not even referring to whether or not the writer's name was Paul.

The only thing I am referring to is the accuracy of an existing MS to it's actual autograph.

Solo

Hi Dave,
I am at a loss to see where this touches on my 'rule'. I was commenting on Doug Shaver's view that there may be evidence which supports that there was no genuine Paul but that interpolations were not that evidence. I was saying in effect, it's worse than that: if there was no 'Paul' there were no interpolations into him. The view that all letters in the corpus are fakes only loosely manifesting a corona of related beliefs makes the business of reading interpolations into them a meaningless exercise.

I am not disputing the existence of practice where the master's signature was authorized to be 'faked' by students. Dennis MacDonald, e.g. believes that Mark was written on the basis of a Homeric 'mimesis', standard fare in the ancient schools.

I am only saying that it would be silly to argue at the same time the masters did not exist - that the brand name, of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Seneca originated in some committee deciding what the mythical teacher was teaching, and what the telling points of his writing were.

Best,
Jiri

aa5874

Well, I am dealing with the OP.

Once there are no corroborative sources for the Pauline writings then we cannot accept them as reliable.

The Pauline writers mentioned many non-historical entities like Gods, angels, devils, Satan, Spirits, heavenly bodies and a resurrected Jesus Christ.

It just cannot be shown that the Pauline writers could NOT have written ALL the Pauline writings.

Based on Scholars, It would appear that there were MULTIPLE Pauline writers and that they wrote at different times so how in the world can it ever be shown that "Paul A" and "Paul B" or "PAul C" or any combination, did NOT write the very Pauline writings THEMSELVES and IMPROVED their own epistles as they SAW fit?

There is ZERO corroborative historical source of antiquity for a single Pauline writer and it has not been established what the Pauline writers could NOT have written or what any single Pauline writer composed.

Claims of interpolations in the Pauline writings are ALL unsubstantiated.

No person today can show what a SINGLE PAULINE writer composed and show when it was composed using credible historical sources. No-one.