Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Rarely Asked Questions about why these Letters of Paul Are in the Canon By Bart Ehrman now that the semester is over and well, I'm retired from teaching, I'm able to start in seriously on doing research for my next book project on how we Got the Canon of the New Testament.
[00:00:20] There are 27 books in the canon. Why these 27 in particular?
[00:00:25] Why were others excluded or other gospels, other Acts, epistles, apocalypses, and so on? Who decided on what grounds, and when?
[00:00:35] I've blogged about the book in recent months, back when I thought I'd be able to do some serious research in it during the fall semester. Well, I will if you're interested. There are two posts my next book, Creating the How We Got the Canon in the New Testament and my first scholarly encounter with the Canon of the New Testament.
[00:00:55] Here I can explain how I'm starting to approach the issue There are tons of books about the formation of the canon that are almost entirely focused on the issues of names and dates.
[00:01:06] Based on our surviving evidence. Which books were considered Scripture, when, and by whom?
[00:01:11] These are absolutely vital questions, but the reality is that if you read four or five of these books, you get to a point where you're not going to learn a whole lot more when you get to the 6th or the 7th.
[00:01:22] Most of the data are out there and available to anyone who's interested, so I won't be focusing just on that kind of thing, though of course it will be part of what I do.
[00:01:32] But unlike most other authors on the topic, I'm far more interested in the questions, the issues, discussions, arguments, and debates in the early church about whether or why one book or another should be considered Scripture.
[00:01:46] These issues have not, oddly enough, been satisfactorily explained, mainly because most of the books written on the topic since they started appearing at the end of the 18th century are either meant to assure believing Christians that they absolutely have the right books, and that in the end there was not much significant debate on the matter, as if it was more or less a foregone conclusion.
[00:02:07] Or to give these data themselves. Clement of Alexandria considered these books canonical, or Origen considered those, Athanasius listed these, or this or that manuscript gives those, etc. And again, this is all vital information.
[00:02:21] But I wanted to dig into the arguments for one book or another, and since this approach is not taken nearly as much, I have a lot of questions that are not often asked. And when they are asked, they are not often deeply probed.
[00:02:36] As an example of many, there are 13 letters in the New Testament that claim to be written by Paul and one other book, the 14th Hebrews, that was included by church leaders who eventually came to think that Paul wrote it. It's anonymous. Of these, scholars are reasonably sure that Paul wrote 7.
[00:02:57] I have no trouble understanding why forgeries in Paul's name made it into the New Testament.
[00:03:02] That would include Ephesians, Colossians, second Thessalonians, first and second Timothy, and Titus, though I'll have to explain to readers who find it puzzling.
[00:03:12] For me, it's not puzzling, because having studied ancient forgery for so long, I know full well that inauthentic books in the ancient world were considered authentic in all sorts of circles Greek, Roman, Jewish or Christian. And they were not identified as forged until the modern period.
[00:03:30] Why not Paul? That will take a lot of explaining, but it's not one of my questions just now. Here are two of my questions.
[00:03:38] This one is a bit quizzical rather than may seem completely serious, but it involves an oddity.
[00:03:44] In the book of Revelation, Christ dictates seven letters to the seven churches of Asia Minor. Moreover, we have seven letters by the early church, Father Ignatius. In addition, in the New Testament there are seven Catholic epistles.
[00:03:59] That's James, first and second, Peter first and second and third, John and Jude.
[00:04:06] And we have seven authentic Pauline letters.
[00:04:10] If we add the pseudepigraphic Pauline writings and Hebrews, then we have 14. That is twice seven.
[00:04:17] Seven is the perfect number. So what's that all about?
[00:04:20] My guess, it's about coincidence. But it's a bit odd.
[00:04:25] The next question is more serious, and I'm really surprised people don't talk about it more, or indeed at all.
[00:04:32] Scholars often ask whether, say, the author of Mark was influenced by the letters of Paul, or whether Matthew was reacting against the letters of Paul, or whether the author of Acts, whose hero clearly is Paul, new Paul's letters, and so on.
[00:04:47] Nearly every scholar who asks the question has in mind did this author know or was he influenced by the seven authentic letters? It's a fair question, but why should we think that Mark or Matthew or Luke, if they were familiar with Paul's writings, were familiar with these particular seven letters?
[00:05:06] They wouldn't have known that these seven were going to be considered scripture over a century later.
[00:05:11] Couldn't they have known other writings of Paul instead?
[00:05:15] In fact, how many letters did Paul write? And why does no one ask? Well, virtually no one.
[00:05:22] Paul converted probably around 33 or 34 CE. He immediately started establishing churches, and so far as we know, he did so until he died. About the year 64.
[00:05:34] So he was establishing churches for 30 years.
[00:05:38] And we know that he wrote letters to the churches to greet them, to remind them of their time together, to rejoice with them in their faith, to warn them against persecution, and especially to help them deal with problems of what to believe, how to behave, and how to function together as a community.
[00:05:53] We have seven of these letters.
[00:05:56] In them, Paul mentions all the letters that went back and forth between him and the community. For example 1 Corinthians 5, 9.
[00:06:03] So there were definitely more.
[00:06:06] Moreover, one of the surviving ones, Philippians, appears to be made up of two letters that have been spliced together, and another two Corinthians is at least two. And possibly this is my view, up to five letters combined into one. Let's call it the Corinthian greatest Hits.
[00:06:23] All of these letters were sent within months of one another.
[00:06:27] If that's the case, we have 12 complete or partial letters.
[00:06:32] But how many did he write?
[00:06:34] It doesn't seem presumptuous to think that Paul wrote to each of his churches to check up on them. So how many churches were there and how many letters?
[00:06:42] Let's say that Paul was connected with some 30 churches over the course of his 30 year ministry. To make it simple, let's say that with each passing year he either founded a church or he came to know of a church such as Antioch or Jerusalem or Colossi that he had not himself established.
[00:07:00] And let's say that Paul wrote to each church he knew just once a year.
[00:07:04] I'd assume it was more than that, given the flurry of letters back and forth with Corinth and to some extent, Philippi, but let's just say one letter each year to each church.
[00:07:14] Someone on the blog needs to help me with the maths. There's a formula for this that I learned in ninth grade maths, but that was 51 years ago.
[00:07:22] Year one, he writes one letter. Year two, he writes two letters. So now he's written a total of three. Year three, he writes three for a total of six. And in year 30, he writes 30.
[00:07:34] So how many total letters is it that Paul has written?
[00:07:39] And if you write two a year, how many?
[00:07:42] We are talking many hundreds, maybe thousands of letters. And how many do we have?
[00:07:47] And why these seven? Are these the only seven that mattered?
[00:07:52] And how did they get but not others get collected and chosen?
[00:07:58] There are lots of theories about the collection of Paul's letters, but none of them seems to take into account this problem. I'd like to figure it out as I'd like to figure out lots of other things about Paul's letters, Acts, the Gospels, Revelation, and the many, many books that didn't get into the canon, even though some Christian groups and leaders consider them scripture.
[00:08:19] Some of these books we have, others we have that probably never had much chance, and tons of others that we don't have and or don't even know about.
[00:08:29] So this is my opening gambit. I'll be talking a lot more about this. The blog's going to get canonized, but don't fret. I'll be talking about a lot of other things too.
