Pauline epistles

• 1. Introduction

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  The Pauline epistles are the thirteen books of the New Testament attributed to Paul the Apostle. They rank among the very earliest Christian writings that still exist. They open a window onto the beliefs and disputes of early Christianity. As part of the New Testament canon, they also form foundational texts for Christian theology and ethics.

  One of the thirteen, the Epistle to the Hebrews, does not even carry Paul's name. Yet for centuries it traveled bound together with his other letters. Scholars broadly agree that Paul personally wrote several of these epistles, doubt that he wrote others, and are simply split on the rest. Some of his letters may never have reached us at all, referenced only in passing inside the letters that did survive.

  What follows traces which epistles can be trusted as Paul's own words. It also traces how his letters actually came to be written down, and what became of the ones that vanished.

• 2. Whose Words Are These

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  Galatians, dated by most scholars to around 48 AD, heads the list of seven epistles judged authentically Paul's own. The other six are Romans, First and Second Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon and First Thessalonians. Consensus dates for these seven run from about 48 AD into the late 50s, with Philippians and Philemon sometimes placed as late as 62 AD.

  Except for Hebrews, every epistle in this collection has its writer explicitly claim, in the text itself, to be Paul. Whoever wrote the six contested letters may have written them under Paul's name outright, since attributing new work to a revered figure was accepted practice in that era.

  Three more letters split scholarly opinion roughly evenly: Second Thessalonians, Colossians and Ephesians. Second Thessalonians is dated to around 51-52 AD, while Colossians and Ephesians are placed in the late 50s or as late as 62 AD. If these three are not authentically Paul's, their consensus dates are probably wrong too.

  The final three, First and Second Timothy and Titus, are considered pseudepigraphic by many scholars, meaning followers likely wrote them under Paul's name. Their traditional dates run from about 62 AD for First Timothy to 66-67 AD for Titus. Their content, though, suggests they were actually composed a decade or more after those traditional dates.

  Colossians complicates the picture further. Its language carries stylistic traits found nowhere else in the New Testament, traits some scholars call indisputably Pauline. Defenders of Colossians's authenticity also argue that its differences from Paul's other letters have been overstated.

  None of this explains why several of Paul's authentic letters read so differently from each other. That puzzle traces back to how they were actually written down.

• 3. Writing By Another Hand

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  Vision loss or damaged hands, scholars argue from biographical details in his letters, may explain why Paul rarely wrote in his own hand. Paul states explicitly, in more than one epistle, that he used secretaries, occasionally naming them outright. That detail offers one explanation for letters that read as though someone other than Paul composed them.

  A secretary jotting down Paul's words was apparently not the whole story either. He seems to have relied on scribal secretaries and possibly a team of readers, adding layers between his words and the final written text.

  Candida Moss has pushed this further. She argues that enslaved and formerly enslaved secretaries played a significant but largely overlooked role in producing early Christian texts such as the Pauline epistles. She calls for wider, more ethical recognition of their contribution to authorship, beyond the traditional assumptions historians have made.

  None of this affected where the letters would eventually sit inside the New Testament, an arrangement that followed a completely separate logic.

• 4. A Deliberate Sequence

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  Modern editions place the whole set of Pauline epistles between the Acts of the Apostles and the catholic epistles, sometimes called the general epistles. Most Greek manuscripts actually reverse that order, putting the general epistles first. A few minuscules, numbered 175, 325, 336 and 1424, push the Pauline letters to the very end of the New Testament instead.

  Romans opens the New Testament's internal arrangement of Paul's letters. First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians follow next. After those come First and Second Thessalonians, First and Second Timothy, Titus and Philemon. Hebrews trails at the very end of the sequence. This order stays remarkably consistent across the surviving manuscripts, with only a handful of deviations.

  Descending length of the Greek text seems to be the guiding principle. Even so, the three pastoral letters, addressed to individuals rather than communities, are grouped separately at the end regardless of size. The only real anomaly is that Galatians appears before Ephesians, even though Ephesians is slightly the longer of the two.

  A different order emerges when scholars trace where and when Paul is thought to have actually written each letter. Galatians likely came first, composed around 48 AD, possibly in Antioch, though that location remains uncertain. First and Second Thessalonians followed from Corinth, and First Corinthians came later from Ephesus. Second Corinthians was written from somewhere in Macedonia, and Romans from Corinth again. Later still, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians and Philemon are all traditionally placed in Rome. First Timothy came from Macedonia and Titus from Nicopolis, and finally Second Timothy, also from Rome.

  That question of exact placement, especially where Hebrews belongs, was one that scribes across the centuries answered in strikingly different ways.

• 5. Hebrews' Uncertain Place

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  Rome itself, early on, questioned whether Paul had written the Epistle to the Hebrews, even though the letter was traditionally bundled with his collection. From the 16th century onward, scholarly opinion steadily turned further away from Pauline authorship, and few scholars today ascribe the letter to him.

  Style and content undercut the case most directly. Hebrews does not read like any of Paul's other letters, unlike them in both voice and substance.

  Anonymous, and not even really shaped like a letter, Hebrews was nonetheless folded into Paul's collected letters long ago. Some churches still ascribe it to him today, but neither most of Christianity nor modern scholarship agrees.

  Jerome's 4th century Vulgate popularized the modern practice of placing Hebrews at the very end of Paul's letters, just before the general epistles begin. Jerome himself knew of the ancient doubts about its authorship, and nearly all medieval Byzantine manuscripts followed his placement, with hardly any exceptions.

  Before Jerome's arrangement took hold, copyists placed Hebrews all over the collection. Papyrus 46, along with minuscules 103, 455, 1961, 1964-1977 and 1994, put it right after Romans, ahead of First Corinthians. Minuscules 1930-1978 and 2248 instead inserted it between Second Corinthians and Galatians. In Codex Vaticanus, also known as B, the page numbering implies Hebrews sat between Galatians and Ephesians. Galatians ends and Ephesians begins on the same side of folio 1493, just as Second Thessalonians ends and Hebrews begins on folio 1512. A much larger group of manuscripts placed Hebrews between Second Thessalonians and First Timothy, right before the three pastoral letters. That group includes the codices Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus and Vaticanus, plus C, H, I, P, 0150 and 0151. Roughly 60 minuscules belong to this group too, among them 218 and 632. Other manuscripts, labeled D, 048, E, K and L, along with most surviving minuscules, placed Hebrews right after Philemon instead. Two manuscripts, F and G, dropped it from the collection altogether.

  Manuscripts could argue endlessly over where to put a letter that survived. What they could not do was recover the letters that Paul apparently wrote and that never survived at all.

• 6. The Letters That Vanished

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  First Corinthians 5:9 hints at a letter Paul had sent to Corinth even earlier, sometimes called a zeroth epistle, or simply Paul's previous Corinthian letter. No copy of it survives.

  Paul appears to reference a third letter to Corinth, written somewhere between First and Second Corinthians and remembered as the Severe Letter. He points to it in Second Corinthians 2:4 and again at 7:8-9. That letter, too, has not survived.

  Ephesians 3:3-4 points back to an even earlier letter Paul had apparently sent to the Ephesians, one that likewise no longer exists.

  Colossians 4:16 mentions a letter to the Laodiceans that Paul wanted read aloud in Colossae, suggesting he wrote to that city too. Whether that particular letter to the Laodiceans still existed anywhere by the time later Christians went looking for it is a real question. The next chapter takes that question up directly.

• 7. Forgeries In Paul's Name

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  A Third Epistle to the Corinthians surfaced later, presented as two letters. One was supposedly sent by the Corinthians to Paul, and the other a reply sent back by Paul to the Corinthian church. The Syriac Orthodox Church and the Armenian Apostolic Church both accepted it as genuine for a time. Scholars now widely date it to the second half of the 2nd century CE.

  An Epistle to the Alexandrians also once circulated under Paul's name, addressed supposedly to the Church of Alexandria. The 2nd century Muratorian fragment denounces it as a forgery by Marcion of Sinope. Its text is lost, and nothing about its actual content is known.

  Two separate forged letters later claimed to be Paul's missing Epistle to the Laodiceans. The Muratorian fragment denounces one version, the Marcionite Epistle to the Laodiceans, as another forgery by Marcion of Sinope, and its text is likewise lost. A second version, written in Latin, survives in some old Latin Bible manuscripts and is widely considered a forgery too. It is made up largely of verses copied from Philippians. Some theories suggest it was created specifically to counter the popularity of the Marcionite version.

  A collection of letters claiming to be correspondence between Paul and the philosopher Seneca the Younger also circulated. Scholars universally consider it a forgery dating from the 4th century CE.

  None of these forged letters, real or attempted, ever made it into the collection that scholars believe Paul assembled from his own genuine correspondence.

• 8. Assembling The Collection

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  David Trobisch argues it is likely that Paul himself first gathered his own letters together for publication. Letter writers in that era commonly kept one copy for themselves and sent a second to the recipient. Surviving collections of ancient letters trace back to either copy, sometimes the sender's and sometimes the recipient's.

  A collection of Paul's letters circulated on its own, separately from other early Christian writings, before eventually becoming part of the New Testament. When the canon finally took shape, the gospels and Paul's letters formed its core.

  Each of these letters still carries, in the oldest Greek and Latin manuscripts, the same simple heading scribes gave it centuries ago. That heading names only the church or person it was addressed to: the Romans, the Corinthians, the Galatians, the Philippians, and on down the list.