Forged (13 page)

Here again there is a broad scholarly consensus. There are thirteen letters that claim to have been written by Paul in the New Testament, nearly half of the New Testament books. But six of these
were probably not written by Paul. Scholars have called these six the “deutero-Pauline” letters, meaning that they have a “secondary” standing in the corpus of Paul's writings.

Virtually all scholars agree that seven of the Pauline letters are authentic: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. These seven cohere well together and appear stylistically, theologically, and in most every other way to be by the same person. They all claim to be written by Paul. There is scarce reason to doubt that they actually were written by Paul.

The other six differ in significant ways from this core group of seven. Three of them—1 and 2 Timothy and Titus—are so much alike that most scholars are convinced that they were written by the same person. The other three are usually assigned to three different authors. There is greatest scholarly agreement about the first group of three, and so I begin by discussing why scholars have long considered them to be forgeries.

T
HE
P
ASTORAL
L
ETTERS
: 1
AND
2 T
IMOTHY AND
T
ITUS

The letters of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus have been grouped together and called the “Pastoral epistles” since the eighteenth century. The name derives from the subject matter; the author, who claims to be Paul, is allegedly writing to church leaders, his companions Timothy and Titus, to instruct them on their pastoral or ministerial duties in their respective churches. The three letters have many striking similarities to one another, as I show in a moment; but they are also three distinct letters with, probably, three distinct purposes, just as the authentic letters of Paul each has a distinct purpose. Before showing why most scholars consider them to be written by someone other than Paul, I should give a brief summary of each letter.

Summary of the Letters

First Timothy claims to be a letter from Paul to his junior colleague Timothy, whom he has left behind to be the leader of the church in the city of Ephesus. In the letter “Paul” gives Timothy instructions pertaining to how to run and organize the church. He is to oppose groups of false teachers who propound wild theories involving “myths and genealogies” and who promote a kind of rigorous ascetic activity as a spiritual exercise, in which, for example, marriage is forbidden and certain strict dietary restrictions must be observed. He is to make sure that only the right kind of person is appointed to the church offices of bishop and deacon. In particular, the offices are to be occupied only by men who are married, are not recent converts, and live upright lives. Most of the letter provides instruction on how Christians are to conduct themselves and interact with one another, for example, how to pray, how to behave toward the elderly and widows, and how to relate to material wealth.

Among the sundry problems addressed by the author of 1 Timothy is the role of women in the church. In a strident passage the author indicates that women are to be submissive and not to exercise any authority over a man, for example, through teaching. They, instead, are “to keep silent.” This, for the author, is how things simply ought to be, as seen from the very beginning in the Garden of Eden, when the first man, Adam, was deceived by his wife, Eve, and ate the forbidden fruit. It was all the woman's fault. But she, the woman, can still be saved, assures the author, by “bearing children” (2:11–15). In other words, women are to be silent, submissive, and pregnant.

Even though 2 Timothy is addressed to the same person, it is written to a different situation. In this case Paul is allegedly writing from prison in Rome (we're never told where 1 Timothy was written); he has been put on trial and is expecting a second trial soon in which he will be condemned to death. He writes Timothy to encourage him in his ongoing pastoral duties and his rooting out of the false teachers who have infiltrated the church. “Paul” expresses a good deal of love
and concern for Timothy in this letter; it is far and away the most personalized of the Pastorals. And he hopes that Timothy will be able to join him in Rome soon, bringing some of his personal possessions.

The book of Titus sounds very much like the book of 1 Timothy, almost as if it is a
Reader's Digest
version of the longer letter. But it is addressed by Paul to Titus, a different companion, who is allegedly the pastor of the church on the island of Crete. Paul writes to have his representative correct those who are delivering false teachings, which again involve “genealogies” and “mythologies.” He also gives instructions to various groups within the church: older men, older women, younger women, younger men, and slaves.

The First Scholarly Suspicions About the Letters

These three letters are particularly significant for our discussion, because they were the first books of Paul that, in the history of modern scholarship, were extensively argued to be forgeries. The big moment came in 1807 with the publication of a letter by the German scholar Friedrich Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher was one of the most important Christian theologians of the nineteenth century. He was famous for defending the Christian faith against its “cultured despisers” and for developing distinct theological views that influenced theologians well into the twentieth century. There are still scholars today who specialize in studying the works and teaching of Schleiermacher. Among his many writings is an open letter sent to a pastor in 1807 in which he tried to demonstrate that 1 Timothy was not written by Paul.

Schleiermacher argued that 1 Timothy used words and developed ideas that were at odds with those in the other letters of Paul, including 2 Timothy and Titus. Moreover the false teachings attacked in the letter do not sound like anything we know about from Paul's day. Instead, they sound like heresies of the second century generally called “Gnostic.”

Like Marcion, Gnostic Christians maintained that this world is not the creation of the one true God. But unlike Marcion, Gnostics
did not believe there were just two Gods. They maintained that there were many divine beings in the divine realm that had all come into existence at some point in eternity past, and that this world was created when one of the divine beings fell from the divine realm and came to be entrapped in this miserable world of matter.
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The Gnostic religions taught that some of us have a spark of the divine trapped in our bodies. Salvation will come to the spark only when it learns the truth of where it came from and who it really is. In other words, the inner element of the divine within us needs to acquire the true and secret “knowledge” that can set it free. In Greek, the word for “knowledge” is
gnosis,
and so this kind of religion is called Gnosticism. According to Gnostic Christians, Christ brings salvation by providing the secret knowledge, not, for example, by dying on the cross. And since the goal of salvation was to escape the trappings of the human body, many Gnostics were rigidly ascetic, urging their followers to treat the body severely, for example, in what was eaten and in avoiding the pleasures of sex.

Schleiermacher argued that the “myths and genealogies” opposed in 1 Timothy sound like the mythologies propounded by these later, second-century Gnostics. In connection with the other problems of the book, such as the non-Pauline vocabulary, this shows that it was a later production, forged in the name of Paul. Soon after Schleiermacher wrote his open letter-essay, other scholars came forward arguing not only that he was right about 1 Timothy, but also that the other two pastoral letters were written by the same person. All three were forged.

Current Scholarship: Are the Letters Forged?

An incredible amount of scholarship has been devoted to the pastoral letters just in the past thirty or forty years, two centuries removed from Schleiermacher. Much of it is tedious to normal human beings, but fascinating to those of us who are abnormal scholars. I can't summarize it all here. Instead, I simply give a few reasons for
thinking that all three letters were written by the same person, and that this person was not Paul.
¹⁰

I should admit at the outset that some recent scholars have argued strenuously that 2 Timothy is so different from the other books that it should be considered separately, as by a different author from the others, possibly Paul himself.
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For about a year or so before I started writing this book, I myself began to be increasingly inclined to take this view. But then I did some further serious research on the matter and am now thoroughly persuaded that whoever wrote 1 Timothy must have written 2 Timothy. The reason is that they share way too many verbal connections and similarities for these to be accidental. Just consider how they begin:

They are virtually the same. And even more important, there is no other letter of Paul that begins this way. Either these are by the same author, or one author is copying the writing of another. But there are reasons for thinking it is not the work of a copyist. For one thing, there are tons of verbal agreements of a similar sort. Both letters have words and phrases in common not found in any of the other letters attributed to Paul: the “promise of life” “with a pure conscience” “from a pure heart” “guard the deposit (of faith)” Paul is an “apostle, herald, and teacher.” And on and on and on. What is striking is not only that these phrases and many others like them are found in these two letters, but that they are found
only
in these two letters.

That's why one of the letters isn't being written by a copyist using the other as his model. To do so would have required the copyist not only to know which words and phrases were important in the first letter, but also which of these words and phrases were, simultane
ously, ones that Paul himself never used. I suppose it is theoretically possible that a very astute student of Paul in the first century read through all of Paul's letters, made a list of words that occurred in them, then read 1 Timothy, made a list of important words there, compared the two lists, and decided to write another letter to Timothy using lots of words and phrases that occurred in the second list, but not the first. But it really stretches the imagination. It is much easier to believe that whoever wrote the one letter had his favorite terms and used them in the other letter as well. It's just that those terms were not terms used by Paul.
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That is one of the reasons scholars from the nineteenth century on have been convinced that Paul did not write the letters. The vocabulary and the writing style are very different from those of the other Pauline letters. In 1921 the British scholar A. N. Harrison wrote an important study of the pastoral letters in which he gave numerous statistics about the word usage in these writings. One of his most cited set of numbers is that there are 848 different words used in the pastoral letters. Of that number 306—over one-third of them!—do not occur in any of the other Pauline letters of the New Testament. That's an inordinately high number; especially given the fact that about two-thirds of these 306 words are used by Christian authors living in the second century. That suggests that this author is using a vocabulary that was becoming more common after the days of Paul, and that he too therefore lived after Paul.
¹³

A number of scholars have called Harrison's use of statistics into question, since, as we all know, you can make statistics say just about anything you want them to say. But the arguments over word usage have gotten increasingly refined over the ninety years since he wrote, and in almost every study done, it is clear that the word usage of the Pastorals is different from that in Paul's other letters.
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At the same time, probably not too much stock should be placed in mere numbers. Everyone, after all, uses different words on different occasions, and most of us have a much richer stock of vocabulary than shows up in any given letter or set of letters we write.

The problem is that a large number of factors all seem to point in the same direction, showing that this author is not Paul. For one thing, sometimes this author uses the same words as Paul, but means something different by them. The term “faith” was of supreme importance to Paul. In books such as Romans and Galatians faith refers to the trust a person has in Christ to bring about salvation through his death. In other words, the term describes a
relationship
with another; faith is trust “in” Christ. The author of the Pastorals also uses the term “faith.” But here it is not about a relationship with Christ; faith now means the body of teaching that makes up the Christian religion. That is “the faith” (see Titus 1:13). Same word, different meaning. So too with other key terms, such as “righteousness.”

Even more significant, some ideas and concepts in the pastoral letters stand at odds with what you find in the letters that Paul certainly wrote. For example, we have seen that Paul was highly concerned with arguing that performing the “works of the law” could not contribute to one's right standing before God. It was not the Jewish law that could bring salvation, but the death and resurrection of Jesus. When Paul talks about “works,” that is what he means: doing the things that the Jewish law requires, such as getting circumcised, keeping kosher, and observing the Sabbath. In the Pastorals, however, the Jewish law is no longer even an issue, and the author speaks of works as “good works,” that is, doing good deeds for other people. The term occurs this way six times in 1 Timothy alone. This author is concerned to show that by being a morally good person you cannot earn your salvation. That may be true, but it is a completely different idea from Paul's; Paul was concerned about whether you kept the Jewish law as a means to salvation (you should not), not if you did good deeds for it.