Paul: The Lost Epistles
Robert M. Price
illustrated by
Lenny Blottin
Copyright 2011 Robert M. Price,
All rights reserved.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0425-7
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Dedicated to Robert Schwartz,
Fellow Mississippian!
Blame him!
Introduction
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
