The Authorship of the Pastoral Epistles

Within the world of New Testament scholarship generally, the idea that the Pastoral Epistles (1 & 2 Timothy, Titus) were written by the Apostle Paul is generally rejected.

New Testament scholar I.H. Marshall has discussed this from an evangelical perspective, suggesting that these letters may contain, in substance, the work of someone writing after Paul’s death, but in a Pauline tradition, without any intention to deceive.  “These are the things that I think Paul would have written if he were still alive.”  Marshall suggests that this theory, as he presents it, is consistent with an evangelical doctrine of inspiration.  He points out that a weakness in popular statements of the doctrine is to tie the Holy Spirit’s work to the exact moment of writing.

I realise that some of the arguments are rather technical, having to do with details of language and style.  But in so far as I am able to judge, I don’t find Prof Marshall’s case very convincing (see my recent post on Pseudonymity).  But I’m happy to present it as faithfully as I can.  What follows is a summary.

Pseudonymity

The issue is of a writing seeming to bear a claim to have been written by a given author but commonly understood to have been written by someone else.  This practise was not uncommon in antiquity.  An apocalyptic writing, for example, might bear the name of some great individual from the past, such as Moses.  It is not known if the original readers of such a writing would have taken is as having come from the hand of the stated author.  Such pseudonymity occurred in Greek, Roman, Jewish and Christian writings.

History of the Old Testament Canon

The following is based on an entry by R.T. Beckwith in the New Dictionary of Biblical Theology.

The biblical canon is not a list of literary masterpieces, but of authoritative writings.  Their authority is derived, not from their antiquity, but from the fact that they were believed to be divinely inspired.  With regard to the Old Testament scriptures, this belief was expressed at several points in the Old Testament, became a settled conviction in the intertestamental period, and is everywhere assumed in the New Testament.

Who Wrote the Bible?

This blog is nothing if not up-to-date.  So, here’s a link to a piece by David Field in which he offers some trenchant comments on a Channel 4 offering on Christmas Day 2004.

The programme presenter (Dr. Robert Beckford) trotted out many of the usual cliches about the formation of the Bible.  Here’s one:-

Canon formation is all about a group of rich and powerful people putting texts together and deciding who they want to include in orthodoxy and who they want to exclude.  [It was] the work of men rather than the work of God.  [Beckford is clearly worried that] something wonderful might have been lost in what was essentially censorship.

The Myth of Christian Origins 3

The myth popularised by Dan Brown and others is that Jesus was just a good man who went around inspiring others to be good people.  The canonical Gospels suppressed these very human characteristics, in order to present Jesus as divine.

The Myth of Christian Origins 2

So, was there a multitude of ancient documents relating to Jesus, the majority of which were suppressed?

There is no point in looking (as some popular writers suppose we can) at the Dead Sea Scrolls.  They are Jewish documents, and have little or nothing to do with Jesus.  But, at about the same time that they were discovered, the Nag Hammadi documents came to light.  These include the well-known Gospel of Thomas.  Are the Nag Hammadi documents the earliest Christian writings, perhaps taking us right back to to Jesus himself?  In a word – no.  The Nag Hammadi documents represent a form of Gnostic literature, and date from the late 2nd century at the earliest.  They represent dependence on, and a theological departure from, the canonical literature.

The Myth of Christian Origins 1

Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is well past its sell-by date now.  But it has given wings to a fanciful myth about Christian origins which had being crawling around in the academic world in the US and elsewhere but has now, thanks to Brown’s book, nested in the public consciousness.

What is this myth?  The redoubtable New Testament scholar N.T. Wright, in the course of a lecture given in 2005 which exposes the sillinesses of the above-mentioned book, outlines the five elements of the Myth of Christian Origins:-

The Canon of Scripture 4 – Recent Critiques

During the past 100 years, many ancient texts have been unearthed that not only shed much light on early Christianity, but also raise the question of why some texts were recognised as authoritative while others were forgotten.

Objections include:-

1.  Some of these recently-discovered texts relate to alternative gospel accounts.  Why insist that only the four canonical Gospels are right and all the others are wrong?

The Canon of Scripture 3 – New Testament

Within two decades of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, Paul was writings letters to various churches and individuals.  These would have been valued by the recipients, and indeed some of them were clearly intended to be circulated more widely.  The life and teachings of Jesus were also treasured: although the first gospels were not produced until the AD 60s, by oral and written records would have been in wide circulation before that.

The Canon of Scripture 2 – Apocrypha

The books of the Apocrypha have never been considered a part of Hebrew Scripture.  However, they do appear alongside the Septuagint (Greek translation of the Old Testament) and continue to included in many Bibles today.  Although certain sections of the church have regarded these books as canonical, there are several reasons for not doing so:-

1. They were never viewed as Scripture by Israel
2. They were not viewed as Scripture by the early Christian church
3. They were expressly declared to be deutero-canonical by a number of Church Fathers, including Athanasius, Jerome, Epphanius and Cyril.

Based on New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics, art. Canon of Scripture

The Canon of Scripture 1 – Old Testament

The term canon (‘rule’, ‘norm’) has been used since the 4th cent. AD to describe the recognised list of books of the Old and New Testaments.