Scholarly consensus
Thirteen letters in the New Testament carry the name of Paul of Tarsus. Not all of them are his. Since the early nineteenth century scholars have sorted them by vocabulary, style, theology and the church situation they presuppose, and the result is a broad agreement that seven were written by him, three are disputed, and three were written in his name by others after his death. This page states the division, the reasons for it, and the rule this website follows because of it.
The three groups
- Undisputed, seven: Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon. Almost every critical scholar, Christian or otherwise, accepts these as Paul of Tarsus’s own, dictated between about 50 and 60 CE. 1 Thessalonians is probably the earliest surviving Christian document.
- Disputed, three: Ephesians, Colossians and 2 Thessalonians. Scholars divide. Colossians and Ephesians share long sentences, a vocabulary and a view of the church as a cosmic body that the seven do not have; Ephesians reads in places as an expansion of Colossians. 2 Thessalonians corrects the expectation of 1 Thessalonians that the end is near, and warns against forged letters in Paul of Tarsus’s name (2:2), which is itself a sign of the problem.
- Widely held to be later, three: 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus, the Pastoral Letters. About a third of their vocabulary is absent from the other ten letters; they presuppose ordained bishops, elders and deacons, a fixed deposit of doctrine (“guard what has been entrusted”, 1 Timothy 6:20), and a settled church of the early second century. They are missing from the earliest list of Paul of Tarsus’s letters (Marcion, c. 140) and from the oldest surviving collection (Papyrus 46, c. 200). Most scholars date them between 100 and 130 CE.
How the sorting is done
The method is the same one used on any ancient author. A writer has habits of vocabulary and sentence structure that are hard to fake across a whole letter. He answers the questions of his own day, not of a later one. He does not contradict himself on matters he cares about. Measured so, the seven form a consistent body: short clauses, rhetorical questions, abrupt turns, an expectation that the Lord will come within the writer’s lifetime (1 Thessalonians 4:15-17; 1 Corinthians 15:51), no church offices beyond local “overseers and servants” (Philippians 1:1), and women named as co-workers, deacons and an apostle (Romans 16:1-7). The Pastorals forbid women to teach (1 Timothy 2:12), lay down qualifications for bishops (1 Timothy 3:1-7), and treat the faith as a body of tradition to be handed on. The difference is not of mood but of generation.
Writing in another’s name
Writing under the name of a revered teacher was common in antiquity and was also condemned in antiquity as forgery when it was detected; the author of 2 Thessalonians condemns it. The church of the second century rejected the Acts of Paul and 3 Corinthians on exactly these grounds. The question for the historian is not whether the practice was sincere but whose voice a text preserves. Ephesians preserves the voice of a disciple of Paul of Tarsus a generation on; it does not preserve his.
The rule used on this website
Where this website makes a claim about what Paul of Tarsus himself taught, the claim rests on the seven undisputed letters and on nothing else. A verse from Ephesians, Colossians or the Pastorals is not used to show what he believed, however convenient it might be. The Pastorals’ instruction that women keep silent, for instance, is not charged to his account. The reason is plain. An argument about a man’s teaching that leans on letters he did not write can be answered by pointing that out, and the argument here is meant to stand on ground that critical scholarship broadly accepts. Acts, which is a narrative about Paul of Tarsus written a generation later by someone else, is used as a second source and is corrected by the letters where the two disagree; see Acts against Galatians.
What the seven letters are
They are occasional letters, written to particular churches about particular troubles, and dictated to a secretary (Romans 16:22 names one). They are the earliest Christian writings that survive, older than any gospel by fifteen to forty years. They never quote a saying of Jesus from the gospels at length, mention almost nothing of his life before the night he was handed over (1 Corinthians 11:23), and say openly that their author did not learn his gospel from any man (Galatians 1:11-12). That is the Paul of Tarsus this website examines: the one who speaks in his own voice, in his own letters, to people who could have contradicted him.
Sources
- Raymond Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, chapters on the Pauline letters and on pseudonymity.
- Bart Ehrman, Forged: Writing in the Name of God, and Forgery and Counterforgery, on the Pastorals and the deutero-Pauline letters.
- Udo Schnelle, The History and Theology of the New Testament Writings.
- Werner Georg Kümmel, Introduction to the New Testament.