Pauline authorship

Faith & Science Conversation
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Precisely right. i especially agree and resonate with the part i boldfaced/ underlined, as that is exactly the purpose and how it is done today in the military, both in formal written orders and in informal email… I regularly correspond with individuals as individuals, and write to them just as i would a personal correspondence, but will often include others in the “cc:” line so that the cc: recipients will be quite aware of what i told/authorized/directed/approved the primary recipient to do, so that all parties will know that the primarily receipient is proceeding with my knowledge/authorization/approval/direction. And yes, i sometimes include certain details or clarifications in such “personal correspondence” that is strictly for the benefit of those in the “cc:” line, that i’d never include if it were a private correspondence to the individual. i think it more than obvious that is what is going on there

And @Vinnie 's protestations notwithstanding, if Paul was actually in fact writing primarily to the individual to whom the letter was addressed, to a close friend and professional colleague, then of course (contra Perrin et al) no thoughtful observer would expect Paul to use the “dramatic arguments, emotional outbursts, and the introduction of real or imaginary opponents and partners in dialogue”, rather than the “quiet meditative style”, even if he had hoped/intended/expected the letter to also (secondarily) be read by or to the entire congregation.

(In fact it just occured to me… if Paul was writing to Timothy, but with the secondary audience in view as per Fee’s analysis in order to bolster Timothy’s authority… then writing to Timothy with dramatic arguments, emotional outbursts and as an opponent in dialogue would have undermined his very purpose… as it would have appeared to the congregation that Timothy was getting what we call in the military a “dressing-down” from Paul, or cast Timothy as having an adversarial relationship with Paul in front of Timothy’s own congregation… this would have undermined Timothy’s authority in front of his own church, not bolstered it!)

Point is, if he did have that secondary audience in mind, then it makes perfect sense why Paul would still feel the need to offer some explanations, defenses, rational argumentation, or apparently unnecessary clarifications, even while the work as a whole is more characterized by the “quiet meditative style” that one would expect when writing to a friend and colleague.

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And this is a textbook case of name-calling and ad hominem attacks. Yes, evangelical apologetics will have an element of confirmation bias, but so too will ex-evangelical anti-apologetics by people with some kind of chip on their shoulder about their evangelical upbringing. I think we ought to take a step back from the rhetoric and name calling and just focus on the actual substance of the respective arguments.

No, it’s a possible explanation, and a perfectly reasonable one at that if you ask me. If you want to dispute it then by all means feel free to explain why you don’t consider it to be reasonable.

And of course you’re going to get “hypothetical what ifs of which there are endless possibilities and any chance of finding truth slips into obscurity.” But sometimes we just need to accept that there are some things that we don’t know, as to claim certitude when endless plausible possibilities do exist is simply not warranted. This being the case, we can only go on the balance of probabilities, and as far as I can see, the balance of probabilities indicate that, at the very least, there is nowhere near enough evidence to rule out the possibility that the Pastorals were, in fact, written by Paul as they claim to be.

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precisely right… after all, I need to be carefully myself as I am essentially claiming the equal and opposite… pointing out the erroneous critical claims about the Pastorals and claiming, essentially, “This is a textbook case of what’s wrong with critical apologetics. Imagine just about anything to preserve the critical narrative.” But i hope i am primarily engaging with actual arguments, and demonstrating that their method is faulty, rather than simply asserting that those who disagree are motivated by such-and-such agenda, or simply asserting that they are blinded due to their commitment to a certain narrative,

Granted, i do in fact think they are indeed blinded due to a commitment to said narratives… but the burden rests on me to demonstrate this rationally, rather than just baldly asserting such.

i think what you are describing here is that particular style of ad homonem that Lewis coined as “Bulverism”…

you must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it Bulverism.

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This thread seems to have morphed from fictive authorship to fictive recipients. It started with how writing in someone’s name or imitating someone’s style is serious because it means false statements were made (e.g. “I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand”). Now we have Paul seemingly writing a personal letter to a close associate, but his true audience includes the churches who need to hear how Paul’s authority backs that associate. If Paul wrote 1–2 Timothy, it appears that much of them is designed to be overheard: he writes to Timothy what Timothy would not need to be told in order that others will hear him saying it to Timothy. This also seems to have a hint of falseness to it.

Philemon provides a nice contrast: Paul is primarily writing to Philemon, but with the knowledge that the entire church is listening. His greeting acknowledges both audiences – it’s like a To and a Cc. But in 1–2 Timothy, the only acknowledged audience is Timothy. Is it wrong for Paul to write for a wider audience than he acknowledges? Can he use the Bcc field? Are we okay with some fictive elements and pretense in how Paul and other authors compose their letters? Can they use common rhetorical techniques, even when they could be taken as less than perfectly honest? Can God speak through this style of writing too?

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yes, my words that i absolutely stand by. and a point that, humbly, i fear you are missing the import of… to clarify further, and especially to clarify where the burden of proof lies with respect to this on this topic, i should explain in detail, as you seem to think the burden of proof rests on the apologists using the “different audiences” as a “defense.”

No, it is not as if apologists are “trying to explain the differences” by appealing to some ad hoc, unnatural, or contrived explanation, as if they were lamenting “oh, no, critical scholars observed these differences in vocabulary in the style between the pastorals and other Pauline epistles! how do we maintain our allegiance to the status quo now?? how are we going to explain that problem away?? how about… um… different audiences!! yeah, that’ll stick!”

No, no, no, a thousand times no. It is glaringly obvious, blatantly overt, crystal clear, absolutely commonplace, universal human experience, ubiquitous, beyond dispute or discussion, conspicuous, self-evident, and the most common of common sense observations that people write differently to a large, lay and untrained, potentially adversarial audience s than they do to individuals who are close personal friends and professional colleagues.

DIFFERENCES IN STYLE AND VOCABULARY, GIVEN THOSE DIFFERENT AUDIENCES, ARE WHAT ANY THINKING OBSERVER WOULD EXPECT TO FIND BETWEEN SUCH TEXTS.

Differences in style and vocabulary between letters written to those different audiences are expected, anticipated, predicted, ubiquitous, normal, and consistent with all universal human experience. what would be conspicuous is if the style and vocabulary were near identical given such different audiences. The “tone” and subject matter of Philemon is quite different than that of Galatians, is it not? Just like any thinking person would expect.

So when critical scholars suggest (for reasons i still cannot fathom) that - in this one case probably unique in the entire history of the civilization - that differences in style when writing to such very different recipients are not expected, anticipated, and what is normal to expect (different than any other case in the entire history of the world), and thus different styles to different audiences in this one unique case throughout civilization actually betray pseudopigraphy…

then the burden of proof lies on the critical scholars to show specifically why this is true in this one unique case. But as it stands, “apologists” are not defending anything on this particular point…they are limiting themselves to pointing out the very, very obvious.

Otherwise, i return to observing that we should equally claim that Tolkien could not be credited for writing The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, and Silmarillion, given the very significant differences in tone, vocabulary, style, and the like between all three. The apologetic “explanation” that he was writing with different audiences in mind (The Hobbit for children, Lord of the Rings for adults, and Silmarillion for… himself?) is after all only an ad hoc tool for Tolkien apologists who want to maintain the status quo or the Tolkien legend, when differences in style, tone, vocabulary, sentence length, clarity, reading difficulty, narration style, and dialogue style all clearly show that three different authors were involved in these three works.

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And when I, very similarly, write to a junior military member things that said military member would not need to be told by me in order to be sure that others will read/witness me saying it to that member… as I regularly do… would you equally suggest it has a hint of falseness to it?

And for an obviously different and near-opposite reason. Anything Paul wrote to Timothy for the church to overhear was to help influence the church to align itself to Paul’s purpose. What Paul wrote to Philemon for the church to overhear was to help influence Philemon to align himself with Paul’s purpose.

The only acknowledged audience at the beginning of the epistle is Timothy; at the end the larger intended audience is directly acknowledged.

But he did acknowledge it, just not with the same level as he did in Philemon’s case. Fictive? Pretense? I don’t follow where you’re getting that. There are plenty of nuances we use naturally that don’t garner such an accusation.

Even this very reply to you - I am honestly writing to you, and only you, in my purpose and response and only engaging your earlier post. But in my mind, of course I am weighing how others would perceive my thoughts. Do I need to explicitly acknowledge that the “peanut gallery” is also in my calculus when I choose my words to be free of an accusation of pretense?

Or, honestly, I generally try to be gentle and circumspect in my words; but in all honesty, just about any time I type anything on this page, it is part of the calculus in my mind to make sure that the moderators would approve of what I say and I won’t get chided (or banned) by them. they are indeed part of the audience. But I don’t acknowledge that in every post. Am I guilty of being fictive? using pretense? I have to explicitly acknowledge that @jpm and how he might think of my writing here actually passed through my conscience mind in order to be free of the accusation of being deceptive?

What if my purpose was more intentional? What if I added some information in my post to you that, while relevant, wasn’t really written because I thought it would benefit you, but I was actually adding it because I was anticipating an objection that @Vinnie might add, or I wanted to add a thought that @jammycakes may appreciate, or the like. Do I need to make that explicit to avoid the accusation of being fictive? Is that “less than being perfectly honest?”

Humbly, and respectfully, I think the suggestion that writing with the larger audience in mind as being fictive or exercising deceitful pretense is absurd. especially considering that Paul directly acknowledges the larger audience in the last words of each of the Pastorals.

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Learning a lot from you guys. Of course, with a lot of Paul’s (or those writing under his influence) writings, I always wonder if he himself considered his words inspired anymore than say, N.T. Wright considers his writing inspired. Probably not. Which is not to say that God did not preserve those words he wished us to have, and the rest were lost to history. I guess my question is why we consider the New Testiment scripture on the same level as what Jesus considered scripture? I suppose it bugs me most considering Paul’s writings concerning household rules, gender issues, slavery and such, just to try to keep it on track concerning Paul.

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I take comfort in knowing Jesus had no shame in correcting his sacred scripture on divorce. He flatly disallowed what any literalist must believe God regulated and condoned in Deuteronomy. Α common practice taken for granted by many for centuries. The OT comments on and corrects itself in other spots and Jewish rabbis were well versed in using scripture against itself. Jesus himself did the same here. He rejected Deuteronomy on the basis of creation. Not only that, but he suggests that a person who faithfully and dutifully followed the Torah in divorcing his wife and marrying another is actually committing adultery! Following the Torah here becomes a violation of the Decalogue (a capital offense)!

The OT (canon probably not fully set at the time) was His sacred scripture but he didn’t take it as the divine, immutable Word of God in the modern literal sense. If that is so, why on earth would we treat the household codes in Paul any differently? I have been more drawn to questions of hermeneutics lately. This discussion on Paul is of no interest to me. I’d much rather discuss “what now” if Paul was forged. How do we deal with this issue? What theological fabric softener can we offer? How do we explain this to a non-Christian? Unfortunately, we can’t get past whether or not there is an elephant in the room to trying to explain why it is there.

Vinnie

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I dug this one up from the dustbin:

From Liefeld’s commentary on 1 Timothy:

“Theologically it may be significant to observe that the Holy Spirit could have led Paul to use an imperative construction that might be interpreted as binding the church to follow that practice for all time, but instead led Paul to use a construction that describes his practice without making it permanently binding.”

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No, and likewise I doubt you would accuse Tolkien of the same falseness for feigning that Bilbo wrote some of his works as you have for someone writing in Paul’s voice. But in both cases, we’re taking contemporary examples that don’t exactly correspond to what’s going on in the New Testament.

In both NT cases, the perception of falseness has much to do with the reader’s expectations. If we expect that Paul is only speaking to his named recipient, some phrases do ring false. If we expect that a letter is a forgery (as opposed to written in someone’s name or voice as a stylistic decision), then the statements that only Paul could say are lies.

Another problem is that claims of forgery assume a single hand in the production of a letter, yet often it’s not so simple. Hebrews, for instance, nowhere clearly claims Pauline authorship, yet it gained a place in our canon due to being exclusively distributed within the Pauline binder. We have no early copies of Hebrews outside of a Pauline corpus. Similarly, 2 Isaiah doesn’t internally claim to be written by Isaiah or even in his lifetime, but we have it because it was distributed as part of Isaiah’s writings. Here, the hand that suggested a false author was probably not the hand that wrote the words. Without being tucked in someone else’s writings, both works may have died in obscurity. It may be that God’s providence took what was intended to deceive and used it to instruct many lives.

We don’t know the intentions of the author of 2 Timothy, if not Paul. Were they writing in Paul’s voice, much as a pastor today might choose to write another letter to a church in the voice of the Revelation to John? If so, it’s only when the document got ported from its original context and placed within the Pauline corpus that anything deceptive happened, and even then it may have been an honest mistake – the scribe may have thought it was indeed Paul’s, just as with Hebrews. Or, it could have been less honest, perhaps even with scribes adding statements that deepen the claim to be by Paul. We can’t assume only one hand left fingerprints on the text, and every biblical text we have has passed through hands not entirely clean of bad motives.

There’s a plural “you” in a stock phrase, “Grace be with you.” That’s a bit short of acknowledging a larger audience. If someone writes me a letter that includes, “hope you’re all doing well,” it’s not necessarily a signal I should read it to my whole family.

But on the larger point I of course agree that the letter (as we have it) is intended for a large audience, and we shouldn’t consider it fraudulent because that audience is not listed as its recipient. I’m not arguing that we should call everything a lie – I’m suggesting we give the authors more leeway. In other words, grace be with them.

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Good question, and probably impossible to give a definitive answer… but personally, I can’t imagine N.T. Wright ever concluding a sermon saying, “The message that was just preached by me is not man’s… I did not receive it from any man nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ…”, or ever introduced himself as “Bishop of Durham, not by men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ…”

I think it is safe to say that Paul certainly felt his teaching authoritative, and apostolic, and came with authority directly from Jesus, and that he put himself on a level that was different than any Pastor ought dare do so today. So I’d suggest that he did indeed hold his words to be more “inspired” (depending on exactly what is meant by that) than I would trust Wright would ever dare to do.

That said, it is often recognized that Peter (or the author of the Petrine epistle, at least), categorized Paul’s writing as “Scripture”, at least that is how the terminologty employed is often understood.

Additionally, Paul quoted Luke (it is presumed) and gave it the similar term “scripture” in one sentence alongside a quote from the canonical OT, so there may well have been some nascent understanding that even contemporary writings were being recognized as having the similar inspired status accorded to the OT canon. Whether he believed that about his own writings at the time of writing them (or even later in his life)… that is an interesting question.

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:roll_eyes:
Marshall, I deeply appreciate so much depth of insight you bring, but if I may be so bold (and risk the moderator’s chiding me for being rude)… some of your comparisons dumbfound me. Unless I am missing some subtle sarcasm, you appear to be offering this as if it is a legitimate comparison, but you must recognize that to make this comparison is, forgive my bluntness, beyond ridiculously absurd.

Tolkien is writing a fantasy fictional book that NO ONE (above age 5?) could confuse for reality or history, that is impossible not to recognize is pure fiction; and for patently obvious literary/narrative purposes, frames the book as having been written by one of the characters therein. And to my knowledge, every edition of the book carries Tolkien’s name as the author.
No sane, mentally functioning individual will be “deceived” into believing that Bilbo actually wrote LOTR; nor will any sane, mentally functioning individual take offense at Tolkien for being “deceptive” on this point.

Compare that to the claim of forgery that Kathryn Lindskoog raised against C.S. Lewis’s unfinished story, ‘The Dark Tower’… she strongly claimed in numerous published writings that either Walter Hooper or some other unknown person had actually written the work and attempted to make it sound like Lewis (“writing in Lewis’s voice”), and tried to pass off this forgery as a genuine work of Lewis. Lindskoog, and those who were convinced by her arguments, were indeed quite furious with Hooper because of this supposed work of forgery. They believed that Hooper had attempted to deceive. Because, had she been correct (which it turns out she was not), people would have been quite right to have been deeply offended by Hooper for deceiving them into believing what was actual a blatant and unadulterated lie.

Please, please tell me that you can see the difference between these two situations, and why they are in no way comparable?

Put another way…

  • If for all this time I actually had believed that Lewis wrote “The Dark Tower” when it was really Walter Hooper who had forged the work, then I would be rightly indignant, angry, and offended that he had pulled off such a scam and deceived me and countless others into believing a blatant lie.

Similarly…

  • If for all this time I actually had believed that Paul wrote the Pastorals, when it was really some unknown forger in the 2nd century who had forged the work, then I would also, similarly, be rightly indignant, angry, and offended that he had pulled off such a scam and deceived me and countless others into believing a blatant lie.

but not similar is this…

  • If for all this time I actually had believed that Bilbo Baggins wrote “The Lord of the Rings”…

then I’m a complete and total idiot.

Please tell me you see the difference here?

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Not subtle sarcasm, but you do appear to have missed my next sentence: “But in both cases, we’re taking contemporary examples that don’t exactly correspond to what’s going on in the New Testament.”

I was raising a purposely flawed modern example to show that inexact modern examples don’t get us very far. I had hoped to move us away from using modern analogies to determine historical plausibility, and that’s why the rest of my post looked more directly at the issue. As such, a response that only responds to that first sentence is the opposite of what I hoped for. I’m sorry that analogy was such a distraction.

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The thing about flawed modern examples is that, much as they don’t get us very far, they’re a lot more likely to get us somewhere than analogous ancient examples, simply because they’re so much nearer in time and so based on data that is so much more abundant and more verifiable. So if modern examples are flawed and don’t get us very far, how do we expect similar criticisms of ancient texts to even get off the starting block?

This article made me burst out laughing when I first read it. It’s written by a poet who wasn’t able to answer some standardised test questions on a school exam paper about her own poems:

My final reflection is this : any test that questions the motivations of the author without asking the author is a big baloney sandwich. Mostly test makers do this to dead people who can’t protest. But I’m not dead.

I protest.

Or, as CS Lewis said:

They ask me to believe they can read between the lines of the old texts; the evidence is their obvious inability to read (in any sense worth discussing) the lines themselves.

Then there’s this:

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Fair enough, and appreciated, my sincere apologies for misunderstanding.

I did not miss the next sentence, but certainly missed your intent. i still am missing it, i’m afraid, and don’t see the purpose of said analogy. you picked an “analogy”, that is about as not-analogous as i could imagine.

So yes, using a dreadful and non-analogous modern analogy will demonstrate quite well that dreadful, non-analogous modern analogies don’t get us very far. here, so far we can agree.

But i would demur in that i find that good modern analogies are indeed quite helpful, instructive, and useful for helping make sense of historic phenomena, so long as the relevant differences in culture, values, etc., are factored in. if i wouldn’t call a contemporary person a liar for doing something near-identical in a modern context, what business do i have calling someone a liar in the ancient world if they did the near-identical thing? without a very good and solid explanation? ._ At the same time, if in our culture we would recognize something as a blatant lie, i would want some kind of pretty clear demonstration of the specific different cultural value at work if someone claims that the near-identical behavior would not be considered a lie in antiquity.

And since i brought it up in the previous post… i would put forward that the (modern) analogy of Ms. Lindskoog’s claim about Dark Tower being a forgery is in fact, a very, very good analogy on lots of levels.

Firstly, granting her (discredited) claim about forgery for the sake of the argument… we might notice Lindskoog didn’t thank or honor Walter Hooper as undertaking some noble effort to write something in the “spirit” of Lewis, and having put Lewis’s name to the work as an homage or mark of honoring his tutor; or defend hooper on the basis that he was simply comtinuing to write in the “school” of Lewis, or give Walter Hooper’s actions a nice, sterile, scholarly sounding description like, “he was simply writing a pseudopigraphal work” ( all the bizarre explanations or descriptions that try to make forgery sound nice and sweet when applied to biblical texts)… no, she called it what she thought it was: an atrocious lie and ornate deception foisted in the public for nefarious purposes.

Now, by analogy… if that is how a devotee of a widely influential religious teacher would act today upon discovering that a worked purported to be by that teacher was discovered to be a forgery… then there is good reason to think that the same would be true in the ancient world, unless good evidence can be presented that the culture, values, standards, or the like were different enough that the analogy is therefore invalid. i am genuinely open to having such evidence, but have never seen anything remotely convincing.

Secondly, i find it highly instructive that Ms. Lindskoog came to her conclusions about Dark Tower being forged by using the near identical methods used by critical scholars who conclude that Pastorals were not by Paul. unexpected phraseology not used elsewhere in the Lewis corpus, absence of typical themes, darker tone, change of vocabulary, certain themes that “real” Lewis would never have used, etc. in fact, prompted by the claims of forgery, Dark Tower was subjected to the very same computer analytic methods as have been used on the pastorals, and in both cases, as i recall, the result suggested forgery. and not mention, she also used arguments about provenence, lateness in arising in the “canon”, unfamiliarity of the work by most of his contemporaries and those who would have known about it…etc.,etc.,

and all those methods were shown wanting. It was confirmed that Lewis indeed wrote the Dark Tower, and hence, what confidence should we similarly place in those same methods when used against the pastorals. if those methods fail when we’re examining a work in the same native language and contemporary culture, we are going to trust them working across centuries and languages and radically different cultures?!

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Genius, and quite apposite. this sounds exactly like the experience lewis was referencing in the article i keep quoting… where people were making claims about his own work that were just completely wrong. if you haven’t read the entire article i’d commend it most highly. here’s part of the section that is so similar to the experience of the poet you noted:

this sort of criticism attempts to reconstruct the genesis of the texts it studies; what vanished documents each author used, when and where he wrote, with what purposes, under what influences… This is done with immense erudition and great ingenuity. And at first sight it is very convincing…What forearms me against all these Reconstructions is the fact that I have seen it all from the other end of the stick. I have watched reviewers reconstructing the genesis of my own books in just this way…
Only the other week a reviewer said that a fairy tale by my friend Roger Lancelyn Green was influenced by fairy tales of mine. Nothing could be more probable. I have an imaginary country with a beneficent lion in it: Green, one with a beneficent tiger. Green and I can be proved to read one another’s works; to be indeed in various ways closely associated. The case for an affiliation is far stronger than many which we accept as conclusive when dead authors are concerned. But it’s all untrue nevertheless. I know the genesis of that Tiger and that Lion and they are quite independent…
The ‘assured results of modern scholarship’, as to the way in which an old book was written, are ‘assured’, we may conclude, only because the men who knew the facts are dead and can’t blow the gaff.

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Modern examples are great for explaining an argument or making its steps easier to follow. They’re problematic when they are the argument, though. It’s like those who only want to talk about tornadoes in junkyards or shared code modules, not the historical transitions such analogies apparently disprove.

We should have a lot of humility about what we can know, but that applies whether we’re claiming Paul wrote something or Paul didn’t. Resting on modern examples can undermine that humility, since they hide what little we know of the historical situation by shifting to our familiar and well-known world.

Early in this thread it was claimed that the stakes are high for determining if Paul wrote some letters, since if he didn’t, the author was an outright liar. That works when viewed through a modern lens (like the example @Daniel_Fisher gave of someone suggesting The Dark Tower was a Lewis forgery by Walter Hooper). But in an ancient context it’s more murky. There were certainly forgeries. But it was also common to write in someone else’s voice. Modern rules of attribution did not exist (which doesn’t mean there were no rules).

And further, texts had complex lives after they were written. Without the printing press, each copy was basically an edition, possibly containing additions, subtractions and changes both intended and accidental, typically minor but sometimes major. As Hebrews shows, a text that doesn’t claim to be by anyone particular can have that claim made for it by whose writings it is bound within. It’s quite possible for something written in another’s voice with no intent to deceive to get stripped of its context and given another that does deceive – even with nobody being dishonest.

So we can’t assume that if someone other than Paul wrote 2 Timothy, it’s a forgery. There are other options, and we lack enough information to decide between them. And given that, perhaps the stakes don’t need to be so high. We can admit that for some texts we don’t know for sure, yet continue to receive them as Scripture.

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the other options being, what, exactly?

even though i disagree, i can acknowledge other options if someone other than James wrote James, or Jude, or John’s epistles, and other similar examples, as the attribution is nothing but the name at the beginning, if that. if some disciple of John wrote 1 John or the like, and was just being metaphorical by speaking of “our hands have touched”, i can grant that as a hypothetical possibility.

All the little personal details in 2 Timothy especially mitigate against someone simply making an attribution… writing in someone’s name, accidental false attribution, putting paul’s name as an homage, or the like. they either suggest this was indeed a more personal letter from Paul, or someone went out of their way to intentionally deceive the readers into believing i was written by Paul. much as i disagree with Bart Ehrman, i do actually agree with him on this point:

one point sometimes raised is that there is so much personal information in 2 Timothy, it is hard to see how it could be forged. Why, for example, would a forger tell his alleged reader (who was not actually his reader!) to be sure to bring his cloak to him when he comes and also the books he left behind (2 Tim. 4:13)? This objection has been convincingly answered by one of the great scholars of ancient forgery, Norbert Brox, who gives compelling evidence that this kind of “verisimilitude” (as I called it in Chapter 1) is typical for forgeries. Making the letter sound “homey” removes the suspicion that it’s forged. The personal notices in 2 Timothy (there are fewer in Titus and fewer still in 1 Timothy) serve, then, to convince readers that this really is written by Paul, even though it is not."

Given all the biogrraphical details, homey personal items, and the like, this isn’t simply writing “in someone’s name or voice as a stylistic decision”.

i only see two logical possibilities… this was by Paul, or by someone else who included all those specific historical and biographical tidbits intentionally to deceive the reader into falsely believing it really was by Paul.

I appreciated James’s succinct sentiment…

but i’m willing to learn, as always… what are these other options you speak of?

Additionally…

I find this plea for humility, and willingness to be very generous and slow before suggesting that there is actual deceit involved, to be rather ironic, given that you were rather quick to impute “a hint of falsehood” merely if an author wrote to an individual with a secondary audience in his mind without making such purpose verily explicit.

and finally, speaking about irony…

would it be too discourteous or disingenuous if i suggested that perhaps we should “move us away from using modern analogies to determine historical plausibility?”

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Modern examples are not the argument itself; rather, they are a reference point—a yardstick—against which the argument can be measured. @Vinnie keeps talking about the need for steel manning: this is an example of steel manning in action. You take someone’s argument, consider a stronger form of it, and then show that the stronger form doesn’t work.

Tornadoes in junkyards are not really a valid analogy. The tornado in a junkyard argument has a very specific problem: it purports to be debunking evolution but in reality it is debunking a garbled misunderstanding of it that is not what the theory of evolution actually says. That is not what is going on here.

Yes I appreciate that. Writing in someone else’s voice is common even today. Ghost writing is very much a thing, for example. But what differentiates legitimate writing in someone else’s voice from fraud is that the legitimate stuff is done with the other person’s knowledge and endorsement, or at the very least with the knowledge and endorsement of their heirs if they are no longer with us. (The “Enid Blyton for Grown-Ups” series is an example.) Fraud, on the other hand, is trying to pass one’s own writings off as having that endorsement when in actual fact they do not. As I said, it means conscious and deliberate deception, and not just following cultural norms that are unfamiliar to us.

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That is a good thought…. Another (modern) analogy just occurred to me…. When I hear the idea of someone writing “in the spirit of Paul” or “the voice of Paul “ or in the school of Paul contributing to his teaching, in a manner that is claimed would not have appeared deceptive or problematic in antiquity….

This book just came into my head as something analogous in that category:

After Douglas Adam’s untimely death, this author continued the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, to my understanding attempting to further the same plot and even attempting to emulate Adams’ rather inimitable style. This is an honorific attempt (endorsed by Adams’ widow, I believe) to contribute to the “Adams/Hitchhiker’s” Corpus in a way that wasn’t intending deception. Even the cover of the book notes Adams name in a way that someone could conceivably be confused into thinking that this was a work by Adams (the cover states, “Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Part six of three”, after all).

But this would be radically different if Colfer had claimed to have “discovered” this manuscript on his computer because of previous correspondence with Adams, and this manuscript had presented to the public with a foreword or acknowledgement page purportedly (and falsely) written by Adams explaining the background for why he (Adams) had wanted to write one more book in the series, and explaining some (false and invented) context of when and where he wrote it, etc., that would be a very, very different story, no?

Again, to me the contrast could not be more clear - I don’t take issue with the concept of accidental or unintentional false attribution, or attribution for honorific purposes, of cultural norms that approved of such writing in another’s voice, or contributing new work that fit within the style and philosophy of the master, etc. As I noted far above, I believe that is believed even by many evangelical authors to be the case in many parts of Scripture - Some of the prophets, nothing is lost (and no deception would be detected) if the book wasn’t actually penned by that prophet but by one of his students… Some of David’s Psalms, those of Asaph, Solomon’s Proverbs, song of Solomon, or “continuation” works such as if a disciple or successor finished the last chapters of Deuteronomy, etc., etc.

Again, to import the modern analogy, this kind of thing is also common in government/military work - It is very common for me to read correspondence “from” the commanding officer, or an Admiral, that I know good and well he didn’t write. Sometimes he only signed it. Sometimes someone in his staff signed it. Because of our own cultural norms, this is usually indicated by a small notation that says, “By Direction”; but an error might leave that line out, and I don’t impute deception.

Or, for instance, how much correspondence has President Biden’s signature on it that he never saw. When I was in third grade I was amazed that our class received a letter signed by President Reagan himself. I was really stunned to think of how valuable out class must have been for the President to take time to sign it… But there was no deception involved.

But granting the most divergent cultural norms and practice, and granting the most recognized and broad instances where even in our culture don’t take “pseudopigraphy” as intending deceit…

If Paul didn’t actually write it, I still can’t see anything but deceit in such words as:

I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand. This is the sign of genuineness in every letter of mine; it is the way I write.