Doug Shaver

Orthodoxy is hardly safe even if you're dead wrong. Earl Doherty accepts the authenticity of the seven letters accepted by mainstream scholars. That didn't stop him from concluding that Jesus never really existed.

DCHindley

Show,

I'm not sure where you are coming from here. The problem with "authenticity" is directly related to Christology. The first four letters are the only ones usually considered "genuine" (ignoring for the moment the radical critics who think all of them are fabricated) and it is no accident that these four have the largest proportions of Christ dogma within them. All the rest are questioned by scholars to some significant degree.

Once scholars chose "authentic" letters on the basis of Christ dogma, they had made an arbitrary choice based on dogma, and the comparison of these four to the others is tainted by this arbitrarity. A comparison based on vocabulary alone is primitive when compared to what is now being done in the world of literary stylostatistics. The results of stylostatistical analysis of the Pauline corpus have been ambiguous, and have been interpreted variously, often based on what the interpreters want to be the case.

The biggest hurdle to making any conclusive comparison stick is that we do not have an absolutely authoratitive corpus of indisputable writings of Paul to use as the control. The analysis of suspected letters among the Federalist Papers is possible because we do have large samples of undisputed letters and other writings from the hands of the authors (Adams et al). We don't have this with the letters of Paul, unless we find that trunk he left at Troas in an archeological dig, in situ, preserving the "parchments" intact. Good luck at that.

DCH (on lunch break boss)

spamandham

Sucks to be us then. It'd be best to hedge our bets and consider both positions; that some of the content really is an autobiography, and that none of it is

I am not discounting their historical value. I'm saying that our understanding of history is different if we start with the presumption that none of the letters are authentic, than if we baselessly presume authenticity for 7 of them. In either case, the content of the letters is extremely important.

Not only when, but also why. If they are all pseudepigrapha, then who the hell was Paul? Why did anyone attribute writings to him?

Acts has his name being changed from Saul to Paul. Doesn't this seem a bit far fetched as far as real history goes?

What if Saul is the same Saul of the Old Testament...and his name change to Paul is there because Saul was a Benjamite, the smallest tribe. (see 1 Sam. 9:21). Now it makes sense that letters would be attributed to Paul...he *is* an authority figure. This is speculation of course, but this is how drastically different our understanding of Christian history may be if we properly dispense with the silly idea that 7 of the 13 Pauline epistles were really written by the character they represent.

spamandham

We have no a priori knowledge of the probability of authenticity. It's as much a random variable as anything else we don't know a priori.

DCHindley

Oh spitski,

That wasn't Adams et al but Madison, Hamilton & John Jay. That will teach me to check my factoids.

See Here for the list of essays attributed to each author, and a short discussion of the disputed letters.

The authorship of seventy-three of the Federalist essays is fairly certain. Twelve of these essays are disputed over by some scholars, though the modern consensus is that Madison wrote essays Nos. 49-58, with Nos. 18-20 being products of a collaboration between him and Hamilton; No. 64 was by John Jay. Some newer evidence suggests James Madison as the author. The first open designation of which essay belonged to whom was provided by Hamilton, who in the days before his ultimately fatal gun duel with Aaron Burr provided his lawyer with a list detailing the author of each number. This list credited Hamilton with a full sixty-three of the essays (three of those being jointly written with Madison), almost three quarters of the whole, and was used as the basis for an 1810 printing that was the first to make specific attribution for the essays.

John Jay, author of five of the Federalist Papers, later became the first Chief Justice of the United StatesMadison did not immediately dispute Hamilton's list, but provided his own list for the 1818 Gideon edition of The Federalist. Madison claimed twenty-nine numbers for himself, and he suggested that the difference between the two lists was "owing doubtless to the hurry in which [Hamilton's] memorandum was made out." A known error in Hamilton's list—Hamilton incorrectly ascribed No. 54 to John Jay, when in fact Jay wrote No. 64—has provided some evidence for Madison's suggestion.

Statistical analysis has been undertaken on several occasions to try to decide the authorship question based on word frequencies and writing styles. Nearly all of the statistical studies show that the disputed papers were written by Madison.[1][2]

1) Frederick Mosteller and David L. Wallace. Inference and Disputed Authorship: The Federalist. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass., 1964
2) Fung, Glenn, "The disputed federalist papers": SVM feature selection via concave minimization, New York City, ACM Press, 2003.

DCH

Doug Shaver

Authenticity, where it obtains, is an empirical fact. No empirical fact is knowable a priori. All empirical knowledge is a posteriori.

spamandham

...and if it does not obtain, it is not an empirical fact, and we just don't know and we are stuck treating it probabilistically.

That's the case we are facing with the epistles. We don't know that any of them are authentic, they simply haven't all yet been proven inauthentic. But based on what we do know ...that 6 of them are inconsistent enough with the others to conclude different authorship, and knowing that we don't know that the other 7 are authentic, the proper conclusion is that they are all inauthentic.

Where is the failed reasoning here? What possible reason is there for even suspecting that the any of the other 7 really are autobiographical given what we know?

hjalti

Or that we don't know

spamandham

We have evidence that allows us to draw a conclusion. That conclusion is stronger than about anything else that is generally concluded in regard to these texts. Sure, it's a tentative conclusion, but a valid one nonetheless.

Can you explain why it is not a valid conclusion?

mountainman

Faith