Barbarian

I don't get the question. Is someone claiming that all epistles were collected? (Surely not; AFAIK Paul himself refers to a missing epistle.) If not, what is so extraordinary in collecting some epistles - 50%, 10%, 1% out of the total number written?

andrewcriddle

Some have suggested that Philemon is in the canon because Paul's letters were collected by Onesimus who had a personal interest in that one.

(This theory usually involves the idea that the Christian leader called Onesimus mentioned by Ignatius is the same as the Onesimus mentioned by Paul which is IMHO unlikely. )

Andrew Criddle

Ben C Smith

I think it was Raymond Brown who also disagreed with that identification but thought that it was a suggestion worth making, or something like that. Was it Knox who suggested that the two men named Onesimus were the same?

Ben.

andrewcriddle

IMS yes.

My problem is that IMO the letters of Ignatius date from c 125 CE not c 110 CE (Eusebius' date) which if so makes the identification somewhat unlikely.

Andrew Criddle

Equinox

Spanky wrote:


I don’t see it as a stupid question (few honest questions are). I do think it has a relatively simple and logical answer.

As with any text that people feel is religiously significant, people will want their church to have a copy (to read aloud, study, or what have you). If the letter is in one church (say, Corinth), a visitor from a church out of town (say, Ephesis) may ask to copy it (if he’s one of the few literate people), or more likely pay someone to make a copy - as do other visitors who want a copy. (of course, back then hand copying letter by letter was the only way to make a copy). So he takes his copy to his church in Ephesis, and a later visitor (from Laodicea) there wants a copy, so he makes and takes a (now third generation) copy back to Laodicea. This seems tedious and slow, but remember two things – one, it only takes a few days to write out a copy (or a few minutes for a letter like Philemon), and there are a lot of days in a year, not to mention a decade or a century. Next, note that this is an exponential process. The first copy is copied maybe 15 times, but each of those copies may be copied 45 times, and each of those may be copied 10 times, and each of those may be copied 12 times, and each of those may be copied 20 times, and now we’ve got 1,776,000 copies floating around the Roman world! Thus, a lot of copies means it is no longer obscure. Plus, notice that due to this exponential growth, nearly all of our copies (over 94%) are the latest generation (5th generation in this case) – thus, if a random copy is available today, or any day (even in the first or second century), it’s most likely a later generation copy than an earlier one.

Now, with many copies of many letters claiming to be by Paul (and no one even back then at the time knows for sure which are authentic, since Paul is long dead), it’s no surprise that the church was able to get many letters together, since so many copies were floating around. Note also that we clearly have several forgeries in the name of Paul in our New testament, and also are probably missing some authentic letters (1Cor 5:9 references an earlier letter, yet there is no earlier letter to Corinth “0 Cor?” in the NT). In fact, scholars looking at several of Paul’s letters think that several of them are patched together from several smaller letters). So thinking about how copying is done in the ancient world by people who have a religious reason to want a text, the present bible makes sense – they would have gotten copies, put them together, and some would be from all kinds of sources, and no one would know for sure.

Have a fun day—

Equinox

Ben C Smith

I was going to identify and list all your problems for you pretty soon here, but since it appears you are well on your way I shall desist.

Seriously, I have read (at least some of) your arguments for dating Ignatius to 125, but cannot recall where. Do you have a link? Thanks.

Ben.

andrewcriddle

Hi Ben

http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=125774

plus some contribution to http://www.hypotyposeis.org/weblog

Andrew Criddle