Posted by jimB on 6/12/2009, 2:09 pm, in reply to "Epistle to the Romans by W. C. Van Manen"
68.164.10.22
Ray,
I think Sanders, Borg and Wright are the authorities on this subject. As I indicated above, I have not read enough of their work on the area to have much of an opinion. Wright seems to be saying in the passage you found that modern scholarship suggests 'ch. 2' is sourced aside from the main body of the letter.
Icannot defend the view -- I don't know enough.
In general, there are two views of attribution where early documents are concerned. One we might call the 'face value' approach. So for instance when I Timothy says it is from Paul, it is.
The second approach is to look at the language, time, and customs and the historical process of documents. Wright calls that 'critical realism' and I will use that term here. There is a subset of that we might call "German linguistic study."
The results are sharply different. No serious scholar thinks Paul wrote either epistle to Timothy. In fact it is more likely that Timothy wrote them. A common attribution method of the day was to attribute your reflections to your teacher. Cf. Plato who attributed to Socrates what he wrote.
But please keep in mind I am not proposing that Paul did not write all or part of Romans. Rather I was merely noting that some very good scholars seem to think that. It is my general approach to think that Sanders and Wright trump tradition and if Borg agrees then tradition is simply wrong. That for instance says that Ephesians is not Pauline but rather derivative as are both Timothy documents.
Note that I did not say that Ephesians is unimportant. Only that it is probably not Pauline. The impact that has on its value is another matter entire. After all the early church thought it was worth preserving.
FWIW
jimB
Message Thread:
« Back to thread