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Hidden Treasures

As a Bible devotee, I must admit that for many years I have thought how great it would be if someone were to discover a cache of new Pauline epistles, even one or two. It was not any particular dissatisfaction with the epistles we have in the biblical canon that prompted these daydreams. On the contrary: I loved them so much that I naturally wanted more. Call me a scripture glutton. Is that a sin? How wonderful when, as rarely, such a dream actually comes true. I remember the thrill I experienced when I first beheld the newly-published Gospel according to Thomas. I never expected to feel that thrill again, but then, here it is.

One reason I (and I suspect you, too) have always secretly yearned to see something else written by Paul is that I hoped there might be added light shone on questions raised in the canonical epistles, but left ambiguous there. How many church splits, after all, have been occasioned by different, and entirely plausible, readings of the Pauline texts? Well, in the present collection, we do in fact find certain Pauline topics revisited, including baptism, the divine nature of Jesus Christ, the role of the state, the ministry of women, the Jewish Law. Some, like the question of homosexuality, appear in a whole new light in these texts.

It has also been irresistible to wonder what Paul would have said concerning certain issues that never happened to arise in the traditionally received epistles. What a delight and a surprise, then, to find in these pages treatments of "new" issues including capital punishment, pacifism, religious pluralism, abortion, suicide, even the treatment of animals. None of these are exclusively modern issues. Any student of antiquity knows how widely all of them have been debated for two or three thousand years; it is just that we did not know till now how Paul might have weighed in on the issues. It is safe to say that, reading these newly available Pauline writings, both those who love Paul and those who can't stand him will find their views reinforced--though each will be faced, I dare say, with some surprises, too.

Who? When? Where? Why?

In his fascinating book The Postcard, the great French philosopher Jacques Derrida suggests that we should interpret any text as if it were a postcard delivered to us by mistake. We can speculate about its point of origin and about who may have written it, since the signature itself may be no more than a smeared nickname. It may appear to embody an answer to some question first asked by the recipient, though we will, again, have to speculate as to what that question may have been. And this is doubly circular: we cannot decide what the question may have been without understanding the answer, and we can no more tell what the answer means without already knowing the question. Hence it is never possible to be sure we have derived the "truth" about the brief writing. And yet the mind insists on making some sense of the written text before us, which manifestly wants to be a message, to convey meaning. And from this, we can learn a larger lesson about all texts, whether cave paintings, postcards, computer printouts or doctoral dissertations. We can never have a total grasp of all the background information we should require for securing certain knowledge. We must take a text as we find it and make of it what we can. What is true for the humble postcard is equally true for the Pauline epistle.

Any reader of the epistles ascribed in our Bibles to the Apostle Paul knows that exactly these difficulties challenge us there. Why did Paul write to the Romans? We think we can guess by examining what he wrote to them, but then we cannot be sure we have his point unless we presuppose some working hypothesis as to whom he was writing. Were his intended readers Jews? Jewish Christians? Gentile Christians? Some mixture of these? If so, which element predominated? Which are supposed to be the "weaker brethren," and why does he speak of them as if they were not among the readers, as if they had left the room for a moment? Which Galatians was he writing to? The ethnic Galatians? Or the provincial Galatians? It makes some difference, because he would have been addressing the one group before, but the other group after the events described in Acts 15, where the various apostles convened to decide whether Gentile converts to the Christian faith had to be circumcised and keep the laws of Moses. They decided to require only a short list of four basic commandments, and this they wrote into the Jerusalem Decree, to be sent round to all the Gentile congregations. And no such thing is mentioned in the Epistle to the Galatians. Depending on which group of Galatians we choose as Paul's intended readers, we may have our hands full deciding whether and why he skirted the provisions of the Jerusalem Decree. You see the problem.

The Perils of "Pauline"

But it gets much "worse" than that. As you may know, the very authorship of the so-called Pauline epistles has been challenged, and these debates will not go away. Today most critical scholars (i.e., those willing to entertain the possibility that Paul's name may be a pseudonym for some later writer) consider Paul the author of Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon. Some scholars argued in the nineteenth century that Paul had written only Romans, the two Corinthians letters, and Galatians. Still others argued that Paul had written not one single epistle among those we possess. He had indeed been a major figure, but that was precisely why there was such a rush to fabricate epistles under his name, to claim his authority, in just the same way Christian sages and prophets attributed their own sayings and oracles to Jesus. It was, after all, quite common in that day for religious and philosophical writers to hide behind the names of the great, whether in collections of sayings or of letters, in treatises or apocalyptic visions.

Writers of epistles who chose Paul's name under which to write them did not choose arbitrarily. Scholars imagine a Pauline School (of thought, not necessarily some sort of monastery, though who knows?) who were determined to keep the tradition of Pauline theology alive after the death of their heroic patron. He had perhaps written letters to his churches to cover the gap in space that separated them from him. But these subsequent writers were attempting to cover the gap in time. Therefore what they sought to do was to bring Pauline wisdom as they understood it to bear on new issues that had not yet arisen in Paul's day. Rather than simply saying, "Paul might have said...," the ancient practice was to say simply, "Paul says..." Even today, when no scholar dares sign any name but his or her own, there are plenty of books in which a scholar will try to systematize Paul's thought, abstracting it from the epistles, and he will call it "the theology of Paul," almost as if Paul had written the book. Sometimes they try to show how Paul might have dealt with issues of our time by extrapolating from what he did say on the issues of his own time. But perhaps the ancient Paulinists were wiser. By writing as the Apostle, they were using a medium that required them to sound, and therefore, to be Pauline, for otherwise, the scheme would fall flat. "Hey! That doesn't sound like Paul!" My point is that it's not going to sound particularly Pauline or un-Pauline if we are not even expressing our Pauline hypotheses in Pauline idiom, and what Paul wrote was epistles, treatise-like letters. We can only detect a ring of truth if what we think is Pauline thought can be plausibly expressed in Pauline idiom.

Author and Authority

The question of which if any of the ancient epistles is genuinely Pauline remains quite controversial because of a theological question that hovers like a ghost over all such discussions. It is the question of "apostolic authority." The apostles are supposed to have the same authority as Jesus Christ in his absence: "Whoever hears you hears me" (Luke 10:16). Protestants say that the Bible is the final authority for all Christian belief and practice. But that is metonymy, naming the whole thing when you mean only a part: they really intend only a portion of scripture, the New Testament. And within that, what they really have in mind is the set of Pauline epistles. This is true even of fairly liberal and even radical New Testament scholars who are willing to admit that we know very little for certain as to what materials in the gospels may authentically go back to the historical Jesus. For them, it doesn't really matter what Jesus said so long as we know what his chief apostle Paul said. This was true for all traditional Calvinists, Lutherans, even fundamentalists. As the great evangelical theologian Edward J. Carnell once put it, rather bluntly: the New Testament interprets the Old; the epistles interpret the gospels; and Romans and Galatians interpret the epistles. But then it becomes very touchy to suggest that some or all the epistles of Paul are not really his. At any rate, Carnell's assessment tells us why almost all Protestant scholars leave at least Romans and Galatians as Pauline.

Even some liberal theologians flinch at suggestions that certain letters are not really Paul's because their model of biblical inspiration and authority is based on the belief that major biblical writers were "religious geniuses," and that their writings are inspired in much the same way those of playwrights and poets are. They do have authority as those who know their subject, the subject in this case being God and religious experience. Reading Paul for them would be like reading Thomas Merton or Meister Eckhart. But then what if this or that epistle can be shown not to stem from the great Paul after all?

Of course the next step is to shift ground, to say that a particular writing is as "authoritative" as it is going to get so long as it strikes some chord in the reader, makes us think of something we wouldn't have otherwise, challenges us in some way. Whoever may have written it was a genius, or at least he was having a good day. In any case, though, authority is no longer seen as a matter of simply taking orders and believing unprovable things because the writer is supposed to have had a hot-line to heaven. Some years ago, University of Chicago New Testament scholar Robin Scroggs announced that we have reached this stage. It is our prerogative to grant authority to whichever biblical writings which we hear and assent to. And not just because we already thought for ourselves whatever they tell us, as if we were corroborating them, like a professor giving a student a good mark on a paper. No, the biblical writings tell us new things or, like the Johannine Paraclete, bring things to our remembrance when convenience and self-interest might have led us to forget them. So when we read them, they strike a deep chord, they ring true. We needn't simply swallow whatever they say, and when they say something that fails to ring true, we ought to discard it. So we are left where Paul left the Thessalonians, responsible to test all spiritual utterances and to decide for ourselves which are worth heeding (1 Thessalonians 5:19-22).

Paul: Signature or Genre?

Let me repeat the question: what if a particular text turns out not to have been written by Paul, but rather by a master Paulinist? I think we are in the position of those art critics and those art aficionados who learn that a Rembrandt canvas they have long admired is actually the work of one of Rembrandt's students. Do they repudiate the painting as a fake? Do they lament that they were wrong ever to have hailed it? Of course not. What begins to emerge is the realization that a "Rembrandt painting" must refer to a type of painting, not to the specific origin of a painting. Others besides the original Rembrandt learned, under his influence, whether direct or indirect, to paint the sort of picture he originated. Each such painting will be "a Rembrandt" to the degree it succeeds in embodying the peculiar excellences of Rembrandt. It is even possible that the master himself might have on occasional failed to paint a true Rembrandt, or may have purposely painted some other kind of painting. But that is another story.

All these questions of authenticity will surely, and properly, be raised by readers and students of the present collection of hitherto-unknown Pauline epistles, the publication of which will no doubt make waves. But what would a Pauline writing be that did not? When did Paul ever pen anything so tame? In my rendering of the texts I have tried to preserve Pauline idiom as literally as was feasible. I have noticed, as I am sure the reader will, certain contradictions between these epistles, not unlike those which have perplexed generations of Paul's readers. And I assume they stem from the same causes: either a single author changed his mind, certainly no crime, or the letters may stem from different Paulinist viewpoints. In the latter case, as in the canonical Paulines, we may be witnessing intra-Pauline debate.

Most of the present Pauline letters are addressed to congregations mentioned in the New Testament and with which therefore we already had some reason to suppose Pauline communication. Whether the Eutychus to which one letter is addressed is the man depicted in Acts chapter 20 must remain an open question. All New Testament names were quite common. On the other hand, the Luke to whom one letter is addressed is obviously supposed to be the same man referred to in Colossians 4:14.

The new epistles present us the same challenge the old ones did, in that we will find it necessary to deduce the occasions for them. Did Paul write in answer to a letter from the church? In one case, we can be sure he did. The scribe responsible for the preservation of the Epistle to the Iconians found and included the original letter sent Paul by the elders of the congregation. While it is possible this letter is itself an early attempt to interpret Paul's letter, in the same way early Christians sometimes added brief set-up stories to enigmatic sayings of Jesus to supply a context in which they could mean something specific, so the letter from Iconium may possibly have been written after the fact to elucidate the subject matter of the letter to Iconium. But there is no pressing reason to think so. Let the reader judge.

I have decided here to defer any discussion of the historical authenticity of these "new" epistles. They should have the opportunity to speak afresh to the readers of today, without prior coaching from modern experts telling you to accept them or to disregard them. Perhaps the important question is whether they prove to be "Pauline Epistles" in the sense I have tried to describe, and on this score, I trust each reader will be his or her own expert.

Final Judgments

I have appended another "new" text, the Great Apocalypse of Paul, to the letter collection. Here I must admit the probability seems to me to be against Pauline authenticity, for whatever that may be worth. Virtually all visionary documents like this one were pseudonymous, and this is not even the only apocalypse, or revelation, attributed to Paul. We have two others, one Catholic (from about the fourth century), the other Gnostic (second century?), and we know of others which have not survived as far as we know. This one seems to me not much more likely to be historically authentic, but, like all such texts, it is fascinating in its own right and has something to teach us.

Robert M. Price

June 1, 2003